(empo-plaaybizz) Some more ideas for badges

JR Raphael at eSarcasm was somewhat disturbed by Apple's policies regarding which applications it will and will not allow in its App Store, but was somewhat inspired by Jobs' response.

Jobs has a new mantra in the never-ending debate over Apple’s App Store censorship: If you want porn, go to Android. The concept first came up during the company’s iPhone 4 event, when Jobs answered a reporter’s question about why Apple doesn’t allow unsigned apps onto its devices.

“There’s a porn store for Android,” he said. “You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go, so we’re not going to go there.”

(It’s true: You can download porn. You can also download unspeakably immoral things like satirical political cartoons, photos of girls in bikinis, and — gasp! — apps that contain competitors’ names in their titles.)

The Android-is-porn notion came up again this week, when Jobs reportedly answered a user’s e-mail about Apple’s ongoing censorship of not-even-remotely-X-rated applications. His response:

“We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy [an] Android phone.”

The inspiration? JR hit upon a way for people to declare their opposition to Apple's App Store policies.

The solution? The "Android Porn Badge," downloadable from the eSarcasm post. T-shirts and other goodies also available from eSarcasm's CafePress store. Apparently eSarcasm didn't get the memo that making money off of blogging is evil, but that making money as a consultant and telling people that they shouldn't make money off of blogging is perfectly fine.

But I digress.

Which means, of course, that I need to give myself the "I Can't Keep On Topic" badge.

Why? Because badges are really really like kewl and stuff. How do I know that they're kewl? Because Steven Hodson has already commented on how ridiculous the whole badge thing it.

What are we all, a bunch of boy or girl scouts looking to elevate our status based on some virtual badge?

Really, if your only solution to try and convince people (and VCs as well as some sucker company) that your product is worth coming back to because of some stupid badge then I would suggest that you deadpool yourself and get a real job.

(See my prior comments on Hodson's post. But again I digress, which means that I am entitled to the message YOU HAVE DIGRESSED 2X IN ONE POST!)

But despite Hodson's objections, I think that we need more silly badges, either based upon true physical locations (such as a Starbucks) or on virtual locations (such as an App Store).

Of course, I want to start with the badges that I can easily earn, based upon my usual habits. Because I have no graphic capabilities, my suggestions are text only. You'll have you use your imagination to visualize what these badges would look like.

• MUSIC AD NAUSEUM: You listened to the same song 10 times in a row!


• BIZ-SNORE: You fell asleep in a company meeting!


• STARFLEET REPETITION: You just raided a crystal mine 10 times in a row!

But, as any self-proclaimed social media expert will gladly tell you, badges need to be inclusive and optimizing and whatever other buzz words need to be stated (or misstated). So I also need to consider the badges that I'm not qualified to earn:

• EYJAFJALLAJOKULL 10: You've been stuck in an airport for 10 days because of the Iceland volcano!


• FISTVERGNUGEN 10: You've been hit for the 10th time by some stupid Volkswagen spotter!


• QUESTION SEO: You've received your first Twitter DM from an SEO expert...and you can't find the person in a search engine!


• AIR FORCE ONE: You're the President of the United States! (This is a hard badge to get.)


• BABY ON BOARD: Hey, the signs jumped the shark in the last millennium; time for the badges!


• LARRY'S KIDS: Your company was acquired by Oracle!


• METABADGER BADGER BADGER: Your badge collection is growing like mushrooms in a hothouse, and is snaking around all over the place!

Which naturally leads to

• ALL YOUR BADGES ARE BELONG TO US. Really.

Murphy's Law of Spelling - the most critical word will be misspelled

I've previously told my "qualtiy" story, and now I have another one to tell about myself. I had written some text for a proposal, and I needed to email it to some people for review. Before the email left my computer, the system automatically initiated a spell check. It was a good thing that it did this, because I misspelled a word.

The original version of my email included "identfication."

When you consider the industry in which I work, that is NOT a word that you want to misspell.

Luckily, I caught this error before anyone else saw it. I didn't catch my "qualtiy" error, however. If you haven't heard this story, check this July 2009 post which includes it. The title of this old post was "On Acuracy and Misteaks."

And yes, I found this example:

More evidence on the importance of service

On Monday, I belatedly read an article from Bob Evans of InformationWeek entitled "Global CIO: Oracle, SAP, And The End Of Enterprise Software Companies." Evans' main point is that companies such as Oracle and SAP are no longer purely software companies, but also include service as an ever-increasing component in their offering.

In its last four quarters, Oracle has reported total revenue of $24.18 billion. Yet less than one-third of that revenue comes from the sale of new software, or what Oracle calls "new software licenses": $7.143 billion, or 29.5%. The remaining $17 billion in Oracle revenue for the last four quarters came from two categories: "software-license updates and product support" (also known as 22% annual maintenance fees) brought in $12.71 billion, or 52.6% of total revenue; and Oracle's services/consulting business brought in $3.86 billion, or 16% of the total.

So that's about 30% from software, and about 70% from services. With that mix, shouldn't Oracle be called a services company?

Then there's SAP, whose numbers tell a very similar story. In SAP's last four quarters—which match up with calendar 2009--it posted total revenue of $14.481 billion, with "software revenues" contributing $3.5 billion, or 24.4%. Conversely, what SAP calls "software and software-related service revenues" more than tripled that software figure, coming in at about $11.1 billion.

And if you need any more evidence about the importance of service, check this BusinessWeek/Bloomberg post which notes why IBM's stock price just fell.

Services signings, which account for more than half of total sales, fell about 2 percent to $12.3 billion in the first quarter, IBM, the world’s largest computer-services provider, said yesterday. New contracts for application-management, which help clients maintain and develop software, slid 23 percent.

The stock declined as much as 3 percent -- the most since Jan. 20, the day after its fourth-quarter earnings report.

My question - if service is so important, then why did my wife and I have poor customer service results over the last two weeks? Ironically, we were contacting two different divisions of the same company - I won't reveal the company's name, but its initials are LG. My experience was just of the usual "meaningless customer support response" variety, but in my wife's case, the service "experience" was so bad that she will never buy that product from that company again.

P.S. This is not necessarily a case of outsourcing = bad. It is possible to provide excellent customer service via outsourcing, just as it is possible to provide crappy customer service via your own employees.

But if services are an important part of your revenue, shouldn't services support be an important part of your costs?

Are our institutions reflective of the diverse nature of U.S. culture? Or do you want to know?

Within the next few months, Barack Obama will nominate someone to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, and this person's name will be submitted to the Senate for confirmation. As part of this process, Obama and the Senate have the ability to right a possible wrong, and make sure that an important segment of our society is represented on the highest court in the land.

Outside the Beltway links to an NPR article that champions the cause of this disenfranchised group.

With U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens talking openly about retirement, attention has focused on the "who" — as in who is on President Obama's short list of potential nominees. But almost nobody has noticed that when Justice Stevens retires, it is entirely possible that there will be no Protestant justices on the court for the first time ever.

Then again, James Joyner of Outside the Beltway isn't too bent out of shape about this:

I don’t happen to care one way or the other. It’s not like the Court has ever been demographically representative. Why, 100 percent of them are lawyers!

And it's also valid to note that the religious views of people are often considered off-topic in any type of organizational discussion. The next time you see a list of the most influential businesspeople, see if the religious affiliations of those people are listed. They probably won't be.

In a sense, this is unfortunate, because it leads to situations in which businesses and business leaders are analyzed by people wearing blindfolds. Take this example:

The field of business ethics has not paid sufficient attention to the questions of why a person would want to be ethical.(1) Much of the business ethics literature assumes people's interest in being ethical and consequently addresses the appropriate thought experiments to determine moral behavior.(2) Unfortunately, without examining why a person would be interested in being ethical, business ethics is truly academic, particularly since there are limits to justifying ethical behavior in terms of economic profitability.

The author, Timothy L. Fort, notes that a discussion of religious views can be "incendiary," and provides an example:

Several years ago, a recently retired, evangelical Christian corporate chief executive officer left my business school ethics class in near revolt by advocating a response to a hypothetical drug testing policy based on the Biblical prescription to "love thy neighbor." This businessperson gave an impressive, impromptu recitation of a series of Biblical passages to show why he, as a sincere Christian, should care deeply for his employees and in doing so should implement a drug testing policy almost identical to the one that the students had separately designed after extensive debate about balancing individual privacy concerns against a business's rights. Despite the CEO's indistinguishable position, the students, who represented all of the major world religions, deemed him a "bigot" who had "shoved religion down our throats."

Note that even though the students agreed with the policy advocated by the retired CEO, that agreement didn't matter because of how the CEO derived the policy.

And I'll admit that I'd probably do the same thing. What if I heard a politician who advocated a view with which I passionately agreed, but then the politician went on to say that these would be the very views that L. Ron Hubbard would advocate if Hubbard were still on this planet? I'd probably get a queasy feeling in my stomach also.

So the next time you hear someone vigorously advocating complete transparency, see exactly how transparent the advocate wants people to be.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, ex-United Methodist, ex-Gospel Outreach. Oh, and throw Young Life in there too.

Now this is funny (Rozansky ripped off)

Remember my earlier post about how a real estate blog had posted something that referred to a previous post of mine?

Or, more specifically, how the Los Angeles Pulse on Real Estate posted something with the title "Empoprise-BI: (empo-tuulwey) Auto-real estate listings, like auto ..."

Well, I just ran across a post in something called "Crazy Greco" with the title "The Los Angeles Pulse on Real Estate | Empoprise-BI: (empo-tuulwey ..." that links back to the Los Angeles Pulse on Real Estate post.

Quite literally, what goes around comes around.

For @dmarren - an intro to criminal and corporate gender, and the Penner/Daniels question

I don't know if you saw last Friday's post in my Empoprise-MU music blog, and even if you did, I don't know if you saw the postscript that I added to the post a few hours later. That postscript included some advice from Chris Brogan, which directed me to his post on monitoring mentions of yourself.

In my case, I am not only monitoring information about myself, but I am also using the tools to monitor my industry, including mentions of the company that employs me. Which led me to this tweet from @dmarren:

Morphotrak form question #21: Gender; Male, Female, Both...

Now I couldn't determine the context of the tweet, or even where @dmarren is located, so I don't know if this was an employment application, or some other type of form.

But I'm not surprised at the question - not because of something specific about MorphoTrak, but because of some things going on in society.

In a reply tweet, I noted one of these items - the nature of booking criminals. Whenever a suspect is booked, you don't only get the suspect's fingerprints, but you also get a lot of other information about the suspect. Of course, the suspect may lie, but that's why biometric companies are in business.

When submitting fingerprints and related text material to the FBI, the governing document is the Electronic Biometric Transmission Specification, which can be found here. And when you report the sex of the suspect, you are governed by the standard responses for field 2.024. And this is what the FBI says about field 2.024 (as of EBTS v9.0):

SEX 2.024 – Sex. This field is used to report the gender of the subject. The entry is a single character selected from the following table.
If Following Condition Exists Enter Code

Subject‘s gender reported as female F
Occupation or charge indicated "Male Impersonator" G
Subject‘s gender reported as male M
Occupation or charge indicated "Female Impersonator" or transvestite N
Male name, no gender given Y
Female name, no gender given Z
Unknown gender X

Now this only applies to submissions to the FBI. State submissions, or submissions in other countries, may use different criteria to denote sex. However, in most countries, the days in which criminals were either male or female have ended. Take the United Kingdom, for instance.

Thus my tweet to @dmarren regarding how criminal sexes are classified. But as we all know, such classifications are not limited to the criminal world - it also involves dealing with employees and suppliers. Before I was employed by MorphoTrak, I was employed by Motorola, and Motorola is very clear on its desire for a diverse employee base and diverse suppliers. Regarding the former, Motorola has set up numerous diversity councils, including a "Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Business Council" in the United States.

(As an aside, I've always wondered how the gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders all feel about being lumped together. Creating the group of non-heterosexuals sounds kind of like creating the group of non-Americans, in which there's only one thing that unites this...um...diverse group.)

Now, regardless of one's personal feelings on the matter, it's worth noting that many governments and many companies now recognize recognize transgendereds as a separate sexual category.

So don't be surprised at the questions that you may see on forms.

And regardless of one's feelings on the matter, the sad end of Mike Penner is indeed sad.

November 29, 2009|By Keith Thursby

Mike Penner, a longtime Los Angeles Times sportswriter who made headlines in 2007 when he announced that he was transsexual, has died. He was 52....

In April 2007, Penner surprised colleagues and readers with an essay in The Times' Sports section announcing that he was "a transsexual sportswriter."...

Writing as Christine Daniels, Penner started a column for the paper's website in May 2007 called Day in L.A. and a blog about the transition, then in July began writing for the paper again.

He returned to using the Mike Penner byline in October 2008.

Why? An in-depth story by Christopher Goffard details what happened after Christine Daniels went public, beginning with Daniels' appearance at the unveiling of David Beckham:

Paul Oberjuerge, then a sports columnist for the San Bernardino Sun, was in the crowd. "I hate to be judgmental about these things, but Christine is not an attractive woman," he wrote on his blog, noting that Daniels had a prominent Adam's apple and stood more than 6 feet tall in wobbly heels. "It seemed almost as if we're all going along with someone's dress-up role playing. . . . "

And Daniels didn't feel accepted by the transsexual community either:

As the year wore on, Daniels grew estranged from the Los Angeles transsexual community, complaining that she had become a fundraising tool. At one gathering, she spoke of how supportive the Los Angeles Times had been, only to be confronted by someone who insisted that this didn't reflect the experience of most transsexuals.

"She didn't know who to trust in the community," Sandeen said, "because all these people were willing to use her."

After this and other episodes, there was a change.

One transgender friend, Sara Hayward, heard an eerie shifting in Daniels' speech during a conversation in early March. Now and then, Daniels' soft, steady voice would give way abruptly to Penner's voice, deep and cracking. "It was two voices coming out of the same person," Hayward said....

Daniels stopped taking hormones and began getting rid of the physical trappings of Christine, LaCoe said, giving the jewelry and shoe collection to friends, donating the wigs, carting the clothes to Goodwill. In a matter of months, the whole identity had been banished.

But the reversion to Mike Penner did not settle the situation either. On the evening of November 27, Penner was found dead in his car.

And death did not settle the situation either.

At the family memorial service at Forest Lawn in Cypress, mourners were screened to keep out reporters who might write about it.

A second memorial service, open to anyone, was held weeks later at Metropolitan Community Church Los Angeles. The pastor made it clear, as did the picture on the program, that they were saying goodbye not to Mike Penner but to Christine Daniels.

So now we all understand how questions such as form question 21 originate.

David Rozansky demonstrates reason 1037 why our search tools are really really bad

The acclaimed online publication called The Los Angeles Pulse on Real Estate saw fit to reprint a portion of a recent post of mine. Note that I am not listed as the author; instead, David Rozansky is listed.



But at least Mr. Rozansky was kind enough to link to the original post.

But the interesting part of this is WHY Mr. Rozansky chose to write - I mean reprint - this particular post. Why would Rozansky put something about Guin, Alabama in a Los Angeles blog? Because of a single sentence:

Let’s just say that the Guin real estate market is not like the Los Angeles real estate market.

And that's the only Los Angeles content in the post.

I wonder how the massive readership of The Los Angeles Pulse on Real Estate will react to mentions of the town of Guin. Or maybe they'll just think it's a new trendy bar or something.

The lesson to be learned is that our current search parameters, which often just key in on a single word, are often terrible failures. For example, what if I were to go completely off topic and talk about Lady Gaga or the British parliamentary elections or something? (Hmm...how many acclaimed blogs will now pick up on THIS post?)

(empo-tuulwey) Auto-real estate listings, like auto-tune, still have an artificial feel

The pitch sounds promising.

Real Estate Solutions
Cevado offers complete solutions for website development

Your website gives your potential clients an immediate first impression of you. And you want that impression to be feelings of quality, trustworthiness, and professionalism. Don't settle for a cheap sub par website that clients never come back to. Ensure that your clients visit again and again with a Cevado website.

Well, let me show you my first encounter with a Cevado creation. This isn't a website per se, but a YouTube video for a home for sale in Guin, Alabama.



And yes, it is possible to buy three-bedroom two-bath homes for less than $65,000. Let's just say that the Guin real estate market is not like the Los Angeles real estate market.

But I was really put off by the pacing of the synthetic voice that was used in the video. There are better automated voices out there.

The main site itself was better and did look professional. Well, it was better until I tried to go from http://www.walkercountyidx.com/listing.php?site_id=90&mls=10-247 to what I assumed was the home page, http://www.walkercountyidx.com/.



The proper home page, as it turns out, is http://www.byarsrealty.com/index.php?page_id=1. But it took a bit of search to find it.

Nevertheless, while I may quibble here and there, Cevado is certainly working on putting together a good package for real estate professionals. And that business needs all the help it can get these days.

(empo-tuulwey) We're so worried about the informal processes; what about the formal ones?

Michael Schrage's post The Delicate Art of Unauthorized Innovation begins with the following quote:

Better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission.

Now whenever I see that quote I think of Devo's battle with the estate of Jimi Hendrix, but that is a topic best addressed in my music blog. (As I already have, back in 2008.)

But let's get back to business here. This is what Michael Schrage says:

The ability of individuals and small groups to steal time and "bootleg" a project has become notably more difficult. Not unlike Mad Men's three martini lunches, under-the-radar gray market innovation has become a virtual anachronism. Some corporate counsels might even argue that it's effectively illegal: organizations should only invest corporate monies on explicitly authorized efforts. Anything else is cheating and theft.

But what of the Googles and 3Ms and Hewlett Packards of the world who have institutionalized creativity? Well, for one, the list of companies that have done that is rather short. Second, there has been...um...climate change.

...auditors and controllers have little tolerance for slush funds and discretionary spends....Intrapreneurs who surreptitiously yet successfully cross the boss now typically end up as external entrepreneurs instead of internal legends. Shrinking gray market and bootlegged projects appear to be unintended but understandable consequence of difficult times, and demand regulation and digital visibility. Since these give firms more opportunity to see what their employees are doing, it's harder to conceal unauthorized projects. Further, it becomes more difficult for line managers with gifted subordinates to get away with squirreling a few extra dollars for let's-give-it-a-shot new product development. The out-of-sight, off-in-a-corner alpha test is not just a dying breed — it's being euthanized.

Think about it from the investor's perspective. Let's say that you have $100 million that you want to throw at Twitter. Before you invest your money, you would want some level of disclosure regarding Twitter's plans. ALL OF their plans. Investors are results-oriented, goal-oriented, and possibly even process-oriented, and they might not react well if Ev of Biz told them that Employee X "spends Mondays and Tuesdays on the beach and dreams about stuff."

Take it further. Let's say that you are throwing money at both Twitter and Foursquare, and you subsequently find out exactly WHAT Twitter Employee X is dreaming about. If she's working out a way to provide rewards to Twitter users based upon the location from which they tweet...well, isn't that something that an investor such as you ought to know about?

More critical, however, is when an investor finds out that he or she is funding really really stupid stuff. Like the Apple investor who may have discovered that Apple was working on a computer that was named after a girl and that wasn't compatible with the Apple II at all. When that little experiment tanked, the investor may have wanted to insist that Apple never do anything like that again.

And to be fair, most hare-brained ideas usually do fail. For every Macintosh and Post-It Note success, there are probably hundreds or thousands of failures, and the investing odds usually dictate that doing stupid stuff does not provide a good average rate of return.

But back to Schrage:

Simply because something isn't unreasonable, however, doesn't make it a wise choice or a good investment. Informal innovation, bootlegging, and gray market intrapreneurship are essential to a healthily diversified innovation portfolio. Persistent pincering of informal innovation and gray market initiatives has provoked quiet revolts deep down in several organizations I know. People are rebelling against the strictures and constraints of formal innovation budgets and reviews. They want to be nimbler and more agile than the organization allows.

The way I read it - if you're cutting off your informal processes because they yield stupid results, shouldn't you also be cutting off your formal processes because they also yield stupid results?

Back in my Motorola days, I worked on a green belt project, literally spending a couple of years on it. (Not continuously.) Finally we got to a point where we had gone through the processes, come up with alternatives, decided upon solutions, and then calculated the potential cost savings. In the end, the potential cost savings didn't justify the project.

Now I'll grant that Motorola, which has been known to be process-heavy for years, is probably as much of an anomaly as Google. But just because idea A has been through a much more rigorous process than idea B does not in and of itself guarantee that idea A will yield a more positive result.

Wade Elliott and the importance of organization - are you on the bus?

I'm currently watching the Hull-Burnley game, and the commentators mentioned a story that I had not heard before, but which is presumably familiar to many soccer - I mean football - fans.

Today's game (10 April 2010) may help to decide whether Burnley is relegated from the English Premier League down to the Championship, but things were much different a year ago, when Burnley moved up TO the Premier League. Burnley got their ticket up via a game at Wembley Stadium against Sheffield United, and the hero of that game was Wade Elliott, who scored the winning goal that assured Burnley a place in the Premiership, and greatly increased revenue for the 2009-2010 season.

What's notable, however, is what happened just after the game ended. Here's what Chris Wheeler said a few months after the event:

Stumbling around a deserted Wembley Stadium in May looking for the players’ exit, Wade Elliott was about to discover that even a £60m ticket cannot guarantee you a seat on Burnley’s team bus.

‘They’d left me behind and taken all my gear so I didn’t have my wallet, my phone, anything,’ recalls Elliott, who had made the mistake of wandering across to the executive boxes after the Championship Play-off final in May to toast his winning goal with family and friends.

‘I think the lads were too busy having a disco on the bus. I had to scab a tenner off the guy who does the radio for BBC Lancashire to get the Tube back to the team hotel. I still owe the geezer.’

Yes, that's right - Elliott scored the winning goal in an important game for Burnley, and no one thought to make sure that he was on the bus.

Or perhaps some would blame Elliott for the mishap, since he put family before team. But even if that is the case, you'd think that someone on the team would have gone to congratulate Elliott...and then noticed that he wasn't there.

Organization is key in any sporting event, as this behind the scenes picture attests:

In many ways, hosting the NCAA D-II Central Regional men’s basketball tournament is second nature to Minnesota State athletic director Kevin Buisman.

He’s organized large-scale, high-profile tournaments a number of times before and this weekend’s affair is not much different. But while Buisman has the experience, a lot of details need to be taken care of before opening tipoff Saturday afternoon. It takes a number of qualified individuals to handle those details.

“This is not a one-person undertaking,” Buisman said this week. “It requires a lot of dedicated people to pull something like this off.

“We want the visiting teams and fans to leave town saying: ‘Hey, this was a well-run tournament. We had a real nice time in Mankato.’ If they’re not saying that, we haven’t done our jobs as well as we should have.”...

Among the big details that need to be taken care of finding hotel rooms for all the visitors. Buisman says he’s in constant contact with the Greater Mankato Convention and Visitors Bureau whenever he needs to line up lodging....

Among the other, smaller details, are lining up tournament hosts for each team, making sure ushers are available, hiring referees, putting together a tournament program, and much more. Numerous meetings take place to make sure the specifics are being handled.

You see the same type of organization in business, or even at the elementary school level. Let's say a class is taking a field trip, and, um, they take a bus to the field trip. There's usually someone - perhaps a teacher, perhaps the bus driver - who is responsible for counting the number of people on the bus and making sure it's the right count. Elementary school kids, you see, can't scab a tenner off a radio guy.

This just goes to show that you have to pay attention to detail - or if you're not paying attention to detail, that someone else is.

Breaking news from Kevin Fox - Twitter acquires and renames Tweetie

Announced on FriendFeed during the ffundercats podcast, Kevin Fox linked to this announcement from Twitter. Here's an excerpt:

We're thrilled to announce that we've entered into an agreement with Atebits (aka Loren Brichter) to acquire Tweetie, a leading iPhone Twitter client. Tweetie will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and made free (currently $2.99) in the iTunes AppStore in the coming weeks.

The only Twitter client that I use is Slandr, so I'm not sure what the effect of this will be. Quite frankly, I'm just reacting to a Louis Gray comment on the podcast. Better minds will analyze this further.

Gaming your health - are the benefits only short-term?

There's been a lot of talk about gaming and social applications. As you know, I've been following what the Oracle AppsLab has said about the topic, and Louis Gray posted something on the topic not too long ago. Now Wired has entered into the fray.

(An aside: remember when the term "Wired" was supposed to be futuristic? Now it's antiquated.)

Anyway, Wired started its article by referring to a twentieth-century craze.

In the mid 1990s, a craze swept Japan and crested its way onto American shores: Kids were going crazy for the Tamagotchi, an egg-shaped digital pet. Every few hours, users would press a couple buttons to feed their Tamagotchi, play with it, or clean it up. The game was simple, but intensely rewarding. Users cried when their Tamagotchis got sick or died; they were elated when they were able to raise a healthy, happy pet. More than 70 million have been sold.

It then stated:

The genius of the device was that it was both simple and rewarding...

OK, simplicity and incentive - what about purpose? But I digress. Wired talks about new applications:

New health-monitoring tools let us pay close attention to our state of being, how much exercise we’re getting, how much sleep we’re getting — and they make it easy to set a goal and improve ourselves. In other words, they turn our health into something of a game. And the reward is better health and a better life.

Wired then discusses four such devices: Fitbit, Zeo Personal Sleep Coach, BodyMedia FIT, and PHILIPS DirectLife.

However, I didn't see any evidence that any of these devices had a community, as social media people understand the term. Here's what Philips says:

Achieving results in any improvement program can be lonely.

With DirectLife, you are never alone. We provide regular updates on your progress and motivational tips. Depending on your progress in the program and your membership plan, a personal coach may be available for all your questions.

Now obviously there are communities that are devoted to improving health, both of the 2.0 sort and of the more traditional sort (Weight Watchers meetings come to mind). And frankly, even the traditional places have their "badges" of sorts. But note this cautionary message from 2008:

I think it is great to use incentives to help people in obtaining a goal but my concern with offering someone a monetary prize, a computer or any other enticing device is if this will only be a short term solution.

Specifically:

The other day I happened to be in particular job site where the human resources director told me that they were going to hold a "biggest loser" contest. She said that it was really successful in the past. I proceeded to ask her how did the "biggest loser" make out and she stated that he has gained all his weight back, but that he is anxious to try again since this year they will be giving away an MP3 player. Last year he won $150 and spent it right away so he prefers a prize instead of money.

Ignoring whether or not the incentive was proper, or the incentivized behavior was proper (would a race to lose weight really be the best solution?), this episode does point out that while we may have temporary joy in winning badges, this is more of a short-term joy than a long-term one. Perhaps this is the nature of gaming itself, but it's something to think about. Will the mayor of Store X even bother to patronize the store one year later, or ten years later?

And this does point out something else - it's possible for even boring married people to get involved in these gaming activities. (And compared to me, Louis Gray is a regular party animal - if nothing else, he goes to more events than I do.)

Misleading message in Verizon LG env3-land

Remember when I left the rotary club? At the time, I said the following about my next phone:

...as I advance to a 2010 phone (note: I won't be getting an iPhone, and probably won't even be getting a top-level smartphone at all)...

My statement proved to be correct. I couldn't justify the expense of a smartphone service plan, so I ended up getting a not-so-smart phone with basic Internet access My Internet access plan is capped at 25 MB per month, which pretty much means that I'm not surfing from my phone continuously.

Which probably doesn't make Verizon happy.

You see, as I previously noted (although I didn't name the provider by name), Verizon's sole purpose in life is to have me use as much bandwidth as possible so that I'll move up to their unlimited data plan from the 25 MB plan that I currently have. They want me to check my email via my phone - and considering the amount of mail that I get on my Empoprises Gmail account alone, that could use up bandwidth fairly quickly. And if you're not using up bandwidth, you're using up app fees and other fees.

So anyways, I wanted to put my music onto my phone. I got a microSD card as an Easter present, the microSD card is compatible with my LG env3 phone (no, I didn't get a Motorola phone), and the card was begging for music.

Obviously, if you check the Verizon documentation for the env3, Verizon has a way to fill my musical needs.

Each time you buy a song directly from your phone, you also get a high-quality version at no additional charge. Rhapsody Software lets you pick up your duplicate tracks, manage all the music on your Verizon Wireless phone, and shop for MP3s.

And the unlimited access plan is only $14.99 per month!

Uh, no thanks. I have music files sitting on several computers, and I just want to copy THOSE FILES to my phone.

The only problem is, when I connected my phone to the computer via the USB cable, the computer wouldn't recognize the phone.

Obviously a driver is what is needed, and if you go to http://www.lg.com/us/mobile-phones/LG-VX9200-Blue.jsp and click on "Resources," you will find a link under "Downloads" entitled USB Cable Driver. (Note that this link goes to version 4.9.4, so if you're reading this blog post 100 years from now, there may be a newer driver.)

I downloaded the exe file, started the InstallShield process...and got a component transfer error. (Specifically, one that said "The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.") I started searching, and found some tips that suggested that InstallShield may be the problem:

This issue occurs if either of the following conditions is true:

* The InstallShield installation is incomplete.
* The InstallShield installation data is corrupted.

To resolve this problem, follow these steps:

1. In Windows Explorer or in My Computer, open the following folder:
Drive\Program Files\Common Files\InstallShield\Professional
2. Rename the Professional folder. Or, delete this folder. When you do this, InstallShield will not use the corrupted data in this folder.
3. Install Groove again.

I didn't have a "Professional" folder, but I did have an "Engine" folder, so I renamed it...and ran into the same component transfer error.

Needless to say, other hints regarding getting a new CD didn't help, since the file was on my hard drive. (I did try copying to a CD, but no change.)

But then I ran across another message that offered a possible solution:

The problem was found. The person installing our product did not have local
admin rights to their machine. Once this authority was given, the install
worked correctly.

This error message is very misleading, however.

This appeared to offer a solution, since I happened to be on a computer for which I didn't have local administrator rights. I went to another computer, successfully downloaded the driver, and successfully copied my own music to my own phone via Windows Media Player.

At this point I just did a test run of 14 songs, but since I have an 8 GB microSD card, I could transfer many more songs to my phone.

All without paying Verizon 15 bucks a month.

Now perhaps my title itself is misleading, since neither LG nor Verizon were probably responsible for the misleading nature of the message; that could probably be pinned on Microsoft. However, Verizon didn't exactly provide complete documentation regarding how to copy your own music to your own phone, nor did they provide a direct link to the driver download, instead preferring that you download Verizon software that happened to include the driver.

But all's well that ends well, and now I can listen to "Destroy Everything You Touch," "The Girl and the Robot," "Sweet Sixteen," and 11 other songs anywhere I want. (But I can't scrobble them.)

Misusing Kuramoto's Equation to Develop Social Engineering Strategies for Identity Theft

I say this several times throughout this post, but I'll emphasize it here: don't try this at home.

Identity theft is on the rise, and social engineering tactics are being used to promote it. If you're unfamiliar with the term, "social engineering" is not a variant on social media (or perhaps it is). Here's how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security defines the term "social engineering":

In a social engineering attack, an attacker uses human interaction (social skills) to obtain or compromise information about an organization or its computer systems. An attacker may seem unassuming and respectable, possibly claiming to be a new employee, repair person, or researcher and even offering credentials to support that identity. However, by asking questions, he or she may be able to piece together enough information to infiltrate an organization's network. If an attacker is not able to gather enough information from one source, he or she may contact another source within the same organization and rely on the information from the first source to add to his or her credibility.

Note that you can have the best technical security solutions out there, but they can be easily defeated by the human part of the security solution. If someone claiming to be your boss' boss tells you to give him or her the password RIGHT NOW or you will be fired, there are some people who will obey the command.

So if you want to engage in identity theft (needless to say, I do not advocate this), how are you able to identify a good strategy?

My answer for this is based upon a misapplication of something I read in a March AppsLab post. In that post, Jake Kuramoto was musing about what could make a game application, or a regular application, or something else attractive. He postulated a formula:

Take simplicity + purpose + incentive and you’re on to something.

When you lose a balance among them or take one as implied, you begin to expect too much from people.

Try it yourself. In my head, I visualize it as an equilateral triangle, which makes the effect of changing the length of one side obvious.

For example:

Work is mostly simple + purpose + incentive, but if one goes the wrong way, you’ll have to balance by increasing one or both of the others.

Facebook used to be simple, but as it’s become increasingly complex, they have relied on increases in the other areas, i.e. stronger incentive and purpose. You first joined to be connected to people, and that purpose only gets stronger as more people join. Plus, you’ve been posting photos and adding social artifacts for so long that quitting becomes a big disincentive.

Can this equation be misapplied to social engineering/identity theft strategies? Read this crime report, and note the date of the crime - right before U.S. Census reports were due, an event that has been talked about constantly.

On Saturday, March 27, 2010 at approximately 1330 hours an unknown white male adult made contact with the victim at her residence. The subject identified himself as an employee with the United States Census Bureau and wore the appropriate identification cards around his neck.

The subject asked the victim personal questions such as her name, date of birth and social security number. The subject told the victim that she was required by Title 12 of the federal government to provide him with that information and that it was against the law to refuse to provide such information.

The subject left her a census form and questionnare to fill out, however, did not give her instructions as to what she should do with the form. The victim contacted the census bureau and was told that the form she was given was a fictitious document.

Census officials say the census forms do not ask for any personal identifying information, such as social security numbers or bank account information, and that a census form will never ask for a signature.

Let's put this into Kuramoto's Equation. The strategy is certainly simple - the "census worker" shows up at your door and makes the whole process easy. The purpose - to complete the census - is obvious. And there is a clear incentive - if you cooperate with the "census worker," then you will be complying with the so-called Title 12 legal requirements.

Lather, rinse, and repeat:

If the low-level employee provides the password so that the executive can read his/her email, then the low-level employee gets to keep his/her job.

If you provide your bank account information and a small payment to the brother in law of the deceased Minister of Finance in a remote African country, then you will receive millions of dollars.

Obviously these examples are very different from the "if you check in to this location and tell your friends where you are, then you'll get a free mocha" example to which Kuramoto's Equation was originally applied. But by understanding how the bad people operate, we are better equipped to scrutinize a seemingly plausible story that promises incentives in return for a simple favor.

As to the question of whether social media itself is just a big social engineering experiment, we'll leave that question for another day. Although you may want to see this relevant post that casts "social engineering" in a positive light.

P.S. If you are interested in the POSITIVE uses of the simplicity + purpose + incentive equation, I strongly encourage you to visit Jake Kuramoto's post.

When old is new

Have you ever run to your friends and associates to proclaim your discovery of something new, only to discover that your friends and associates have already known about this "new" thing for a long time?

On March 23, Valley Record published an article with the title "So long, ink: North Bend police use fingerprinting of the future." The article discussed live-scan technology - a technology that has been around for two decades now.

So why is live scan a new thing in North Bend? Because of cost. While national governments and state agencies have ready access to funds to pay for live scan devices, it's much more difficult for small local agencies to raise the funds to pay for a machine.

But the fact that North Bend is seemingly joining the live scan world at a relatively late time does not detract from the importance of their joining in the first place.

This is something that we need to remember, especially if we tend toward the early adopter mentality. There is sometimes a tendency to pooh-pooh the late adopters, or even to complain that the late adopters have effectively ruined Twitter/FriendFeed/Facebook/Friendster/CompuServe/whatever. But no matter how soon or how late you join a service, the important thing is that you joined the service, and can now enjoy the benefits of it.

Which is why I regard Shawn Zehnder Lea's tweet about me in a positive light.

@empoprises: "Love the chorus" (Awww. His first blip!) ;) ♫ http://blip.fm/~nqotb

If you don't self-promote, are you truly hurt?

I'm sure that any self-proclaimed "SEO expert" will loudly declare that businesses have to engage in conversation. Why should businesses engage in conversation? Because if you don't talk about yourself, someone else will talk about you.

I've previously mentioned (based on a prior post from Will Campbell) that Broguiere's doesn't seem to be suffering, despite its lack of a web presence. And I don't think that Yogurtime is losing out on the mindshare war, despite my observations.

Now one could argue that the conversation could be dominated by the negative people. Take a look at Twittercism's recommendation:

1. Go to Twitter search.
2. Enter your company name, followed by the word ‘sucks’

So I tried it.



OK, Twittercism DID note that this technique works better for an established brand.

But let's say your company DOES suck, and you listen to the SEO experts and engage and communicate. That's good, right? Of course not.

People on twitter HATE outright sales pitches, and there’s no faster way to drain your follower list and give yourself a bad reputation than by trying to use twitter for a hard sell.

But even if you do everything right, and engage and communicate and act bidirectionally and all that stuff, remember one thing. In most cases, even if every one of your employees is engaging and communicating, you still have more customers than employees, so all or your social media engaging and communicating could potentially be drowned out by all of the stuff that everyone else says.

Let's say that Yogurtime (the United States version, not the Hong Kong version) finally decides to set up its own website, and maybe its own Twitter account, and perhaps a blip.fm account for all I know. Even after establishing such a web presence, Yogurtime will be competing with a number of outside entities:

Foursquare

Google Maps

Redding.com

UplandDirect.info

Yelp

Yellow pages services from AOL, YP Mobile, and everyone else on the planet

Now certainly it helps to have your voice in the mix, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you can control the conversation. It's not like a business can affect all of these outside entities and tell them what they can or cannot say.

Not even in Europe.

Does visibility matter? (A visit to the Broguiere's website, and more on Yogurtime)

After running across some Broguiere's milk at the farm store at Cal Poly Pomona, I began wondering about other locations that carried this Los Angeles-area milk. I knew that my local Vons had it, but didn't know of any other places.

Easy enough, I figured, and began searching for Broguiere's web site.

After seeing Yelp reviews and other ratings, I ran across this Metblogs post, raving about the wonders of Broguiere's, that concluded as follows:

And yes: it is the one company left on the planet that does not have a web site. None.

That Metblogs post was written in December 2008, and over a year later the situation hasn't changed.

Amazingly enough, the IRL visits to Broguiere's are a little tough also. From the same Metblogs post:

But talk about an unassuming establishment. Hell, upon arrival we drove right by it because instead of signage trumpeting Broguiere’s, the marquee read Montebello Sanitary Dairy and stood over what was little more than a drive-through store in the midst of vast tracts of an agridustrial landscape.

But it doesn't matter. In the aforementioned Yelp review the AVERAGE score for Broguiere's milk products is 5 stars out of 5 stars, and NONE of the 75 reviewers have given Broguiere's a lower rating than 4.

After my experience with Yogurtime (remember my post Yogurtime in Upland California - this blog post is THE information source?) - more on that in a minute - I figured I'd check and see if Broguiere's has caught on with the Foursquare crowd. Apparently, it hasn't.

Incidentally, the last time that I was at Yogurtime in Upland, I mentioned to the woman behind the counter that they were on Foursquare, and that I was the mayor of Yogurtime. This was not significant to her.

The moral of the story? It is possible to have a well-respected product, even if you don't do all the social media SEO publicity junk. But it had better be an outstanding product.

If you want to reach the world, you need a ton of tools to do so

Years and years ago, someone started a small organization in New York. After a couple of business re-locations and a change in leadership necessitated by the death of the founder, the organization became well-established in its new headquarters. From there, it launched an expansion, first throughout the United States, then worldwide.

And while I'm talking about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the comments I'm about to share apply equally to any organization, non-profit or profit-seeking, that wants to play on the worldwide stage.

The LDS Church has appointed a new Social Media Architect, and it happens to have appointed Jesse Stay - Jesse's the guy who literally (co-)wrote the book on Facebook, and who also created the SocialToo service. Stay is obviously familiar with a number of social media tools, and in this post he happened to mention some of the tools that he will use in his new job:

I will get to not only use Facebook and Twitter to help others benefit society, but on a global scale I’ll get to use Orkut, Hi5, Bebo, and other global networks, and find ways to deeply integrate these technologies into the work the Church is doing, on a global scale and to a mass audience.

Now let's say that you're getting ready to launch a campaign for your business. Perhaps you'll think about using Facebook, or using Twitter, or using MySpace. But how many of us include Orkut, Hi5, and Bebo in our social media communication plans?

If we want to reach a worldwide audience, we need to look at these other tools. For example, let's say that you want to reach people in Brazil. Are you going to use Facebook? Think again:

Orkut is very much a cultural phenomenon in Brazil. Although Brazilians had experience with other social networking sites (Fotolog, for example, was very popular among young Brazilians in 2003 and 2004, before Orkut appeared), Orkut caused a revolution in Internet access in Brazil. As Orkut grew quickly in Brazil starting in 2004, it became synonymous with the Internet. Being on the Internet meant being on Orkut....

According to data recently released by Ibope/NetRatings...73% of all Brazilian Internet users are also Orkut users. Orkut is also rated as the third most accessed Internet domain in Brazil. Because of numbers like these, some researchers even argue that Orkut played a fundamental role in popularizing the Internet in Brazil.

So if you want to reach Brazilians, the question is not whether you should use Orkut - the question is whether you can afford NOT to use Orkut.

However, when making your social media strategic choices, it helps to have up-to-date information. Let's say you want to send your message to the Philippines. Here's what an August 2009 post would have recommended:

Worldwide ranking clearly shows that Yahoo and Facebook are way above Friendster, which has been struggling at the 80-100 spots, and has been slowly faltering over the past few months. Facebook's been at position 3 and 4 worldwide for the past few months already, while Yahoo's been at a constant No. 2 position all year. So, again in terms of worldwide, Friendster isn't as strong and has been dipping.

But not in the Philippines. Checking the records over the past year, Friendster has remained the No. 2 most visited Web site by Filipinos since the late 2007, and has been unseated only a few times (i.e. YouTube outranking it a couple of times). That's a very strong showing for a social-networking site that's been around for nearly a decade and that hasn't really shown much in terms of change and upgrades.

But the same author, Ignatius Javellana, wrote a follow-up post in December:

With Friendster only recently adapting changes in its new format (a complete site revamp plus the focus on more services targeted towards Filipinos), I'm afraid it was too little too late. Recent Alexa rankings for the Philippines have shown that Facebook has now completely overthrown Friendster as the number one social networking site, even unseating heavyweights such as YouTube and Multiply along the way.

So if I can share a...um...word of wisdom with you, when you craft your worldwide social media strategy, make sure that your information is up-to-date.

Who are the customers of Twitter and Foursquare?

I'd like to throw this idea out to the general population. I've beta tested it with lackluster results, but I'm going ahead anyway.

Obeying the maxim "follow the money," I'm going to state that your customers are the ones who actually pay you. Regardless of who actually uses your product, the true customers are the ones who are actually willing to pony up money to your company. Not that you should ignore the non-paying folks - especially as their behavior influences the paying folks - but you certainly need to be aware of the paying folks, since they're paying your bills.

Over several years and in several blogs, I got verbose about Twitter's monetization plan, or lack thereof. In reality, though, Twitter has had two sets of paying customers over the years - the first being the venture capitalists who invested in the service at the beginning, and the second being Google and Microsoft (Bing) who gave Twitter some actual revenue in the last year.

So now let's look at a newer media darling - Foursquare. On one level, Foursquare activities (and those of Foursquare's competitors) seem rather silly - Steven Hodson wrote a cranky post entitled Say, do they have a badge for “Duh I am such a sucker”? Hodson:

Really, if your only solution to try and convince people (and VCs as well as some sucker company) that your product is worth coming back to because of some stupid badge then I would suggest that you deadpool yourself and get a real job.

Hodson quotes from Alex Wilhelm:

If you turn to a game to make your application sticky, the application itself might not be....If your mayorship was not on the line, would you really check in every time you went to your favorite Starbucks? I bet not.

But do the badges help Foursquare with their REAL customers - namely, the businesses who could potentially pay Foursquare real money? Perhaps, but there's still a challenge to work out the "how." Adam Erlebacher:

Whether it be mayorships, scavenger hunts, coupons, or other marketing or promotional offers, there seem to be a number of ways that Foursquare can begin to experiment with monetization. The problem with most of these monetization schemes is that they’re a little klugey and require too much work for either the user and/or the business.

For example:

Now, consider what happens when a hypothetical FS coupon is redeemed at a small business (not a Best Buy which has sophisticated POS systems). You’re at a packed bar and you show the bartender your coupon for a free beer. The bartender (who is usually not the owner and has less incentive to keep track of these things) will need to somehow process the coupon so that you can’t reuse it. Let’s say there’s a simple code he types into your phone (that’s awkward and slow) or maybe he just swipes a finger across the screen to process it. The problem actually isn’t the processing, it’s that unlike in the supermarket example, there is no third party that will repay the business owner for the coupon. If the bar pays FS directly for each coupon redeemed, the bartender has little incentive to process the coupon. If the bar is paying for each coupon that gets redeemed, a less-than-honest business is not going to process (and pay for) the coupon once it’s already acquired the customer.

Erlebacher's suggestion is for Foursquare to partner with a company such as Blippy who actually tracks purchases. (If you haven't heard of Blippy, Louis Gray provided an introduction in January, and has revisited the service at least twice.)

Regardless of how (or whether) Foursquare figures out a good way to monetize its service, the point is that we as users often have a particular perspective on a service such as Foursquare or Twitter. And while the heads of those companies certainly try to cater to our needs, we need to remember that we are not their first priority - the paying customers are.

And if you don't like that, then find a "pay per tweet" service and sign up for that.

Privacy rights vs. privacy rights - the intersection of photography and facial recognition

[Disclosure: The author is employed in the biometrics industry, and has worked for and worked with several companies that offer facial recognition solutions.]

While the general public is hearing more and more about facial recognition these days, it's actually been around for a while. Briefly, a facial recognition system works by comparing features from a face against features from another face, or from an entire database of faces. And it's those databases that are the subject of discussion.

The first common application of facial recognition was in the criminal arena. In this case, you don't have a choice regarding whether or not you're put in the database - if you're arrested, your facial image (or, in criminal terms, your mugshot) can be captured, stored in the database, and (with certain restrictions) used to solve crimes and identify people. Let's say that I was arrested a few years ago for shoplifting, and then get arrested again one Saturday night. When the officer questions me, I claim that I am Sandra Bullock. For some strange reason the officer does not believe my statement, so the officer takes my picture and searches it against a database of faces, discovering that I am not Sandra Bullock, and that I have been arrested before. Provided that the system is accurate, many (but not all) people agree that this is a legitimate use of facial recognition technology.

Over the last couple of years, new uses for facial recognition have emerged. And these aren't for crooks - these are for friends. In this case, the database is a database of photos that you've collected, in which some of the people in the photos have been identified. Once you've identified a face in one photo, the facial recognition software can then scan the other photos and look for the same face. Here's how Apple pushed its iPhoto product:



Now this isn't just restricted to photos. Either the criminal technology or the "friends" technology can be used to identify real people moving around the planet. If you're terrible with names, then you can just grab an image of the person walking up to you, find out the person's name, his/her Twitter account, and so forth.

This all works...as long as the person is in the database of identified people.

So far, the new applications of facial recognition have all been opt-in, where the person has consented to place his/her information in the database. (Criminals, of course, have no choice in the matter.) But what if...well, I'll let Internet Evolution tell it:

If expanded to include public images from other sources (Websites, blogs, and open social networking information) a very broad system for recognition could be devised.

Civil libertarians see serious privacy implications in such a system. Sociopaths and stalkers might use the technology to pick out victims. Other criminals might scan crowds in expensive neighborhoods, to see who’s not home (and thus whose home may be vulnerable to burglary). Blackmailers might frequent shady areas (bars, brothels, and gambling dens) to capture images and identify potential targets.

This is NOT opt-in. In this case, let's say that someone - I'll choose Sandra Bullock again - is in a public place. If a photographer takes Bullock's picture in a public place, and identifies the image as Bullock, then it is possible to track Sandra Bullock's every move.

One emotional response would be to restrict photography in public places, and state that you cannot take a photo of anyone or anything unless the subject of the photo has consented to this. This, claim some, is the way to guarantee privacy.

And how do you guarantee privacy? You round up the photographers, or at least find out what they're taking pictures of, and why. This way you guarantee privacy.

Or do you?

Despite repeated government and police assurances that it would not be happening any more, ordinary people are still being arrested for taking pictures in the UK, under the pernicious terms of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, and not just in London. This time, a photographer video camera user managed to film the process of his arrest. There particularly ridiculous aspects of this case are firstly that the officer, when challenged on his assertion that this was a terrorism-related offence, changed her charge to that of anti-social behaviour (which isn’t a crime as such, anyway)....

Yes, that's correct - photographers have privacy rights also. For every civil libertarian who is defending the right of someone to not have his/her picture taken, there is another civil libertarian who is defending the right of the photographer to take the picture.

Now different laws exist in different jurisdictions - Internet Evolution focuses on United States laws, while notes from the ubiquitous surveillance society focuses on United Kingdom law - but in essence the issue is similar in both countries - whose right to privacy is more important?

How do you scale a business when you're selling yourself?

All big businesses started out as small businesses. That multi-billion dollar corporation that you see initially began in a small shop, or in a garage, or in a dorm room. When the business was small, the owner(s) could run it in a particular way. As the business grew, the owner(s) had to change the way things were done. In fact, in many cases the owners either get someone else to run the bigger company, or the owners leave the company altogether. In recent history, Bill Gates is the only person that I know of who was able to successfully manage both a small startup and a huge corporation.

While it's tough to figure out how to scale a business, it's obviously possible to do so. If you're making computers in a garage, you change your procedures so that employees are making computers in a factory.

But what if the product that you're selling is...yourself?

Chris Brogan:

I built my brand on being accessible. You know me because you know that I care about you, that I care about your projects. This is true. But there’s a huge flaw in how this all works out, in the basic math level....

When Chris figured out the hours that he could/should/does spend in a day, he got 10 hours of email, 3 hours on social media networks, and maybe 2 hours on phone calls, that's 15 hours right there. And he still hasn't gotten any real work done.

Now Brogan isn't the only person who has this problem. Dale Carnegie could only win so many friends and influence so many people on his own. And there are other firms, initially started by individuals, that depend a lot on the personal touch.

The answer for these firms has been to hire people who aren't the same as the founder, but who can provide the personal touch required for the business. Chris Brogan's friend Jon Swanson refers to these people as disciples, which suggests what is required. And perhaps the end product will appear somewhat like today's Dale Carnegie Training. Let's learn about them, shall we?

Founded in 1912, Dale Carnegie Training has evolved from one man's belief in the power of self-improvement to a performance-based training company with offices worldwide....

Dale Carnegie's original body of knowledge has been constantly updated, expanded and refined through nearly a century's worth of real-life business experiences. The 160 Carnegie Managing Directors around the world use their training and consulting services with companies of all sizes in all business segments to increase knowledge and performance. The result of this collective, global experience is an expanding reservoir of business acumen that our clients rely on to drive business results.

Headquartered in Hauppauge, New York, Dale Carnegie Training is represented in all 50 of the United States and over 80 countries. More than 2700 instructors present Dale Carnegie Training programs in more than 25 languages.

And how did the company define a way to institutionalize this? Process:

As part of our ISO 9000:2001 certification and Dale Carnegie Training’s commitment to quality, we measure the effectiveness of our training. In an ongoing global survey on customer satisfaction, 99 percent of Dale Carnegie Training graduates express satisfaction with the training they receive.

The vast majority of Dale Carnegie Training local franchising organizations in the U.S have been accredited by the Accrediting Council for Continuing Education and Training (ACCET). Recognized by the U.S. Department of Education, ACCET is a voluntary group of educational organizations dedicated to promoting the highest standards of continuing education and training.

However, while this allows the company to expand, this does not allow the person Chris Brogan to expand.

The work we’re doing at [New Marketing Labs] is strong. What I’m doing with me overall is a lot more foggy.

If New Marketing Labs continues to grow, Brogan will have to change his role, perhaps taking a step back from some things that he really loves to do today. Or he may decide that he wants to continue in his present role, and go find someone else to run New Marketing Labs. Many company founders end up taking subsidiary roles at their own firms, so that they can continue to tinker or whatever it is that they do.

But whatever happens, I'm pretty sure that Brogan will figure it out.

Bob Maley - when employers and professional organizations collide

On March 3, Eric Chabrow wrote a blog post that quoted Pennsylvania's chief information security officer, Bob Maley, who was on a panel at an RSA security conference:

"We saw thousands of hits on our Department of Transportation driver license exam scheduling site coming out of Russia, the same thing over and over, scheduling driver license exams. It was encrypted traffic, and we were trying to figure out what the heck is going on. Were they trying to test our systems? What exactly were they up to? The answer was, we really didn't know."

But there's one thing that we do know - Bob Maley is no longer the chief information security officer of Pennsylvania. The reason for his dismissal was not disclosed, but presumably it was related to his public disclosure of the security breach.

Many people are professionals in one field or another, and while the have an obligation to their employer, they also have an obligation to their profession. And as Merritt Maxim notes, Maley's disclosure was consistent with his obligations to the security profession:

While Maley's disclosure of a potential breach and vulnerability caused concerns in some circles, public disclosure of vulnerabilities is a central principle behind the design and development of secure systems. And it is an ongoing challenge in infosec to weigh the risk/reward of disclosing a yet-to-be fixed vulnerability. Yes, it might invite more attacks, but it also opens the vulnerability to a global knowledge base of seasoned IT security professionals who can a) Offer input on how to address the vulnerability and b) Verify that their systems are not susceptible to this same vulnerability. There is a reason why cryptographic standards like AES were subjected to a rigorous public review process; such public vetting only helps improve the underlying security.

I hope that organizations will continue to come forward to share their collective IT security experiences without fear of retribution. There is lot to be gained from such discussions.

Certainly much to be gained by society as a whole, but what of Maley's organization in particular? Does Maley have an obligation to protect Pennsylvania state systems from attacks? Could Maley have donned a mask and presented himself as "The Unknown CISO," thereby saving Pennsylvania from possible copycat hackers?

And this doesn't just apply to CIO types. Accountants, lawyers, doctors, and many other professionals have obligations that may clash with what their employers want them to do. Heck, now that I'm a card-carrying member of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals, I may run into such an issue myself some day.

So how do we resolve such conflicts?

(empo-tuulwey) Even the best software tool cannot overcome user cluelessness

It's unavoidable - if someone uses a particular tool to do something bad or stupid, the tool gets blamed. For example, let's say someone uses MySpace to stalk someone else. In the eyes of some people, it's MySpace's fault, and banning MySpace will solve the problem.

I thought of this tendency when I saw a particular email that had been sent to a bunch of people. Now this email certainly didn't involve a criminal act, nor did it technically involve spamming per se (although it was apparently sent to a lot of people who may not have opted in to this particular mailing list). But it had its problems nevertheless, which I'll address at the end of the post.

When I first saw the email, I immediately noticed the unusual From address (identifying information x'ed out):

xxxxbounce@ethreemail.com

Now it's unusual to see someone trying to sell you something who has "bounce" in his email address. The sender's real email address appeared at the end of the message, but any attempt to directly reply to the original message would presumably result in a bounce.

Curious, I investigated ethreemail.com and found this:

What is ethreemail.com?

The ethreemail.com domain is used in conjunction with Direct Mail's email tracking features.

If you have received an email containing a link to the ethreemail.com domain, it means that the sender would like to know which email addresses have clicked links in the message. No private or personal data is collected.

If you have received spam purporting to be from the ethreemail.com domain, please contact abuse@ethreemail.com.

For more information about Direct Mail, please visit the e3 Software website at http://ethreesoftware.com or contact us at e3@ethreesoftware.com.

So this came from a legitimate mailing program from e3 Software. The program, targeted for Mac users, allowing creation of emails for mailing lists, tracking of those emails, and the ability for people to automatically subscribe to lists. If you're a Mac user and are interested in the software itself, check out their website or their Twitter account, @directmailmac.

Now e3 Software bears no responsibility for the way in which people actually use the software. I culd kreate a maling and mispel allmost evry wurd in the maleing, and it wudnt be e3 Software's falt. So they bear no responsibility for the email that I saw, dated March 16.

This March 16 email, which appears to be targeted for people who are members of a particular trade association, talks about the company's services - services which are of interest to trade association members. The email spends a lot of time talking about a particular Request for Proposal (RFP) issued by a government agency, and saying how the company's product can help the recipient reply to the RFP that was issued by that government agency.

Well, as it turns out, I am very familiar with the RFP in question, because I helped my company respond to this RFP. (The fact that our company responded to this RFP is a matter of public record, so data miners aren't getting any new information here.) Our proposal took a lot of work from a lot of people, but we submitted our response before the proposal due date of March 15.

Did you catch the problem yet? Re-read the preceding two paragraphs and you'll get it. (Hint: the product offered by the emailer is NOT a time machine.)

In my view, this clearly damaged the credibility of the company who authored the email, but it does not affect my view of e3 Software.

And this holds true in other cases. Except for those cases in which the tool is clearly designed to perform illegal activity (Napster 1.0 comes to mind, although some would even argue that example), the tool provider shouldn't be responsible for how a tool is misused.

Should Google be held liable if I use this Blogger blog to conduct a pyramid scam? Obviously Google holds some responsibility if they are made aware of the illegal activity and don't do anything about it, but where is the dividing line?

Your thoughts?

ODTUG Kaleidoscope is coming up

With the change in my job duties, I have less involvement in Oracle stuff than I did previously, but I'm still on a number of mailing lists. So I received the most recent mailing from the Oracle Development Tools User Group. Who is ODTUG, you may ask. Go ahead, ask. I'll answer:

ODTUG is an independent, not-for-profit global organization providing education, support, advocacy, and networking opportunities for all developers, using a variety of technologies, who work on Oracle Databases.

ODTUG's 20,000+ members design applications, model data, write code, manage application systems, maintain legacy code, and are key to the middle-tier technology in Oracle Fusion.

ODTUG's annual conference, ODTUG Kaleidoscope, is considered the premier conference for developers in the Oracle community.

The mailing itself concerned ODTUG Kaleidoscope, which will be held in Washington, DC between June 27 and July 1.

The part that caught my eye was the list of Oracle ACE Directors and Oracle ACEs that will be attending the conference, and also presenting at the conference. As I type this, the list of presenters includes a number of ACE-types:

Christopher Barbieri, Ranzal & Associates
Gary Crisci, Morgan Stanley
Lewis Cunningham, TUSC
Lonneke Dikmans, Approach Alliance
Paul Dorsey, Dulcian, Inc.
Steven Feuerstein, Quest Software
Dimitri Gielis, Sumneva
Marco Gralike, AMIS Services BV
Roel Hartman, Logica
Lucas Jellema, AMIS
Matjaz B. Juric, SOA Competency Centre, BPELmentor
Peter Koletzke, Quovera
Anjo Kolk, Miracle Benelux
Jonathan Lewis, JL Computer Consultancy
Raj Mattamal, Niantic Systems, LLC
Tracy McMullen, interRel Consulting
Cary Millsap, Method R Corporation
Karen Morton, Agilex Technologies
Chris Muir, SAGE Computing Services
Mauricio Naranjo, One It World Corp.
Anton Nielsen, C2 Consulting
Hajo Normann, HP Enterprise Services
Mark Rittman, Rittman Mead
Edward Roske, interRel Consulting
Guido Schmutz, Trivadis
Glenn Schwartzberg, interRel Consulting
John Scott, Sumneva
Mark Simpson, Griffiths Waite
Scott Spendolini, Sumneva
Ronald van Luttikhuizen, Approach
Sten Vesterli, Scott/Tiger A/S
Torsten Winterberg, OPITZ CONSULTING GmbH

And there will be other ACEs and ACE Directors at the conference - and those that don't make it may be talking about it in the ODTUG forum on oraclecommunity.net, created by Oracle ACE Director Eddie Awad.

Now I don't know all of the ACEs and ACE Directors that are listed, but the ones that I do know testify to the brainpower that will be at this conference. When you can get acknowledged experts to come to your conference, that will just make the experience more worthwhile for everyone.

(empo-tuulwey) (empo-tymshft) The intersection of physical and virtual locations

If you are one of the small minority of people who read this blog, you probably exist in two locational spaces - the physical locational space (Ontario California, the Moscone Center, whatever) and the virtual locational space. In my brain, virtual locations are just as real as physical locations. I traveled to Blogger to write this post. It's partially sourced from something that appeared in my Facebook feed (from Louis Gray's FriendFeed account).

But the real money - literally - appears to be coming from that...um, place where the physical and virtual locational spaces intersect. In the course of a post at Stardust Global Ventures, Ken Camp talked about the intersection of the two. He started with a swipe at Robert Scoble:

We might observe that the greatest use of these tools today so that the Digerati/Twitterati web celebs (@Scobleizer and others in that visibility sphere) share their location so fawning hordes of fans can come touch the robes of the elite. That’s not the only use, but perhaps the biggest and most visible use today. There’s nothing monetizable in those egos, and there is no sustainability.

I'm trying to imagine Robert Scoble in a robe. If he had one, I bet it would be shiny and new.

Of course, what's bad for Robert Scoble is good for Ken Camp. But let's look at what Camp does with the tools:

Sheryl and I use these services extensively to check-in because we’re business and technology leaders in our community, and heavily engaged in the global tech sector. That means friends around the world know when we’ve checked in at Walla Walla Java Hut. For people in our community, they’ll also know that we’re friends of the owners, Brad and Cameo. They know we’re likely to be there chatting for a while and they can stop by to say hi, have coffee, ask a question. In short, we’ve made it easy for colleagues, clients and others to be in touch with us. We use LBS to lower the barrier to access.

No word on what robe Camp wears when the adoring masses approach him to stroke his ego.

But enough of my griping. For Camp, the strength of the tools comes from their ability for people in the virtual world to meetup in the physical world. This, of course, is nothing new - long before Foursquare and Gowalla existed, you had meetup.com. And many years before meetup.com, around 1990 or so, members of the Grotto BBS and other BBS systems would leave their virtual worlds and rendezvous in the physical world to drink cold brown thingies.

Now the technology has allowed advances in the way this is done. Back in 1990, I would have to get on my computer, find out about the event, leave my computer, go to the event, and then go back home to write about it. Such restrictions no longer exist - with laptops and cellphones, we can continue to communicate while at the event itself. In 2007, I could write a picture blog post from the Thirsty Bear during the Oracle OpenWorld blogger meetup. By 2009, Foursquare (via Twitter and FriendFeed) was the communication method of choice.

Of course, the intersection of the physical and virtual worlds is but the first step - the next step is monetization. For more on that, read the rest of Ken Camp's post.

What does McDonald’s get in return? They sell another cup of coffee and a hot apple pie? Wahoo. Why not do something more? Why not partner with one or more location based services and tie free WiFi to a check-in? Why not work a deal that delivers some demographic metadata that tells me this set of 30 customers comes in every week on Thursday? And given LBS profiles, let me know more about them so I can upsell them on a quarter pounder while I’m at it? Or something more?

Do products have to be right the first time?

In the course of a post that described Google's latest iterations to its Buzz product, L.A. Times blogger Don Reisinger stated the following:

It's commendable that Google is updating its service when it receives user complaints. But all these updates make me wonder if the Web giant is really prepared to run a social network. It seems that the bad press just keeps coming for Buzz.

My first thought was that Reisinger was being a little harsh. After all, it isn't that Buzz has had to make a 180 degree turnaround in the way it works - the changes are, in the overall scheme of things, tweaks rather than major rewrites. And those with long memories will remember that today's social networks - Facebook, MySpace, Twitter - are substantially different than they were when they first started.

But Reisinger's statement does raise the question - how much deviation is best between version 1.0 of a product and version 1.1? And what are the reasons for deviation? I can think of two: (1) the developer wanted to add features to version 1.0, but ran out of time; and (2) the users pointed out things that the developer didn't realize.

Unless I'm missing something, Google Buzz's changes fell into the latter category. And apparently Reisinger believes that Google SHOULD have anticipated the firehose and privacy issues that occurred once Google Buzz went out into the wild.

Or perhaps there's a third explanation: (3) the developer wanted to see if the users would tolerate a particular feature set, or if they would reject it.

Hmm...product vs. users. Louis Gray recently gave a presentation on this very topic. I haven't seen the presentation, but I have seen the pre-presentation synopsis:

As users, we for too long have not had much of a voice in the products we are expected to use. We have been dragged through iteration after iteration of beta software, expected to accept poor user interfaces, lost data, incompatibilities and decisions that have been made that benefit the company rather than ourselves. We have seen violations of privacy, we have seen sites that we like abandoned when founders get bored, or when the acquiring company has no interest in supporting the existing community.

More later as I ruminate on this.

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