(empo-utoobd) Will Twitter evolve like YouTube?

Dave Winer wrote a post that got me thinking. In the process of commenting on Twitter's latest tweaks to its business model, and its potential effects on developers and users, Winer said the following:

Twitter is gradually encroaching on the roles of its developers, publishers, even plain old users. Where does this end? My prediction: It ends with us all being couch potatoes. Watching the Britney Spears Channel or the Barack Obama Channel or the Comcast Cares Channel, and going elsewhere for the free-for-all that Twitter used to be.

This got me to thinking about the difference between media creators and media consumers. Winer clearly believes that Twitter is moving from serving the former to serving the latter.

It's instructive to look at the evolution of another popular service, YouTube. Back in November 2005, USA Today ran a story entitled Video websites pop up, invite postings. The article talked about a number of services that were trying to become video versions of Flickr.

"People have a lot of different experiences out there, and they want to share them," says Chad Hurley, who started YouTube in Palo Alto, Calif., with two friends, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. "That's what we're about. We're the ultimate reality TV, giving you a glimpse into other people's lives."

And while Google actually checked out videos before they were posted, the other sites didn't.

The free sites have policies against pornography and copyrighted material. But since they don't screen clips, they still end up with video some might find objectionable. YouTube and Vimeo have a lot of what Lodwick calls "amateur strip-tease." Other clips feature people lip-synching songs in their own music videos, using copyrighted material.

That was 2005. Where are we in 2010? Well, Google acquired YouTube, of course, but the entire emphasis of YouTube has also changed. The first two paragraphs of YouTube's May 24, 2010 blog post indicate the new direction:

Tonight, at 9.30 p.m. ET, we’re teaming up with (RED) to premiere the documentary “The Lazarus Effect” on the Join(RED) YouTube Channel.

The half-hour documentary, directed by Lance Bangs and executive produced by Spike Jonze, captures a series of powerful testimonials from HIV positive patients. Many of these stories seem like miracles, but they aren’t. They’re made possible through access to two pills a day -- two pills that cost just 40 cents.

If you had gone to a YouTube contributor in November 2005 and asked to speak with his/her executive producer, the contributor probably would have mooned you.

But that's just part of it. If you read my Empoprise-MU music blog, then you probably saw my March 1 post about VEVO, the new YouTube destination for music videos.

Sure, YouTube allows you (well, not me) to upload your own videos, but they don't matter. The real money is in the professional content, the agreements with the content providers, etc. Let's face it - if you can get 60 million people to watch a music video, aren't you going to pay more attention to them than to BrotherSister?



(Oh, and to any personal friends who are reading this - this show was in Adelaide, not Alabama. I was sorely disappointed.)

Back to Twitter. We're already seeing this type of transition now, in which Oprah and other celebrities are issuing promotional tweets, and Guy Kawasaki and others are hiring people to write tweets for them. And it seems that just about every advertisement includes the words "Follow us on Facebook and Twitter." In a sense, Winer's era of the Britney channel and the Comcast Cares channel is already here. And now Twitter is moving toward a two-tiered service, just like YouTube, where certain basic services will be provided to everyone, but only the major content creators will get special attention.

(empo-tymshft) That's sorta big

I'm sure that any of us over the age of 8 has noticed how rapid technological changes can be.

The first personal computer that I ever owned was a Macintosh Plus, which was a wonderful computer that provided a wealth of functionality. And storage - boy, it had storage. My Macintosh Plus happened to have a hard disk with TWENTY MEGABYTES of storage. I wasn't limited to floppy disk storage - I had TWENTY MEGABYTES of disk space to play with.

Back then, if you had said "terabyte" to me, I would have looked at you with a look of utter confusion. But as time went on, I eventually had to learn what a gigabyte was, and then I had to learn what a terabyte was.

In fact, a few years after I bought that Macintosh Plus, the whole world had to learn what a zettabyte and a yottabyte were. You see, in 1991, an official proposal was adopted that defined the zetta- and yotta- prefixes, which represent 10 to the 21st power, and 10 to the 24th power, respectively.

Now I haven't had to refer to a yotta-anything yet, but eventually that time will come.

And while for some people, yotta might seem like a lotta, for others yotta is notta enough. Take jimvb:

For the first time this week, I saw yotta- actually being used. The sun puts out 380 yottawatts of power, says Nearest Star, by Leon Golub and Jay M. Pasachoff, page 12.

So what's jimvb going to do when he runs into a thousand yottas of something. Jimvb had an idea:

I can see how these endings were derived. zetta is z + -etta, which is an alteration of septi-, meaning 7, as 21 is 7 groups of three. yotta is y + -otta, an alteration of octo-, meaning 8. The pattern here is that we go backwards from the beginning of the alphabet, starting with z and y, and we follow it up with an alteration of the Greek or Latin for the next number. According to this pattern, the next ending should be xona-, since x comes before y in the alphabet, and 9 is noni- in Latin.

So jimvb, without the official blessing of The Powers That Be, began coming up with some new prefixes. In addition to xona for 10 to the 27th power, he came up with weka (10 to the 30th) and a number of other prefixes, all the way up to luma (10 to the 63rd power).

But buried in jimvb's list is a prefix that is bound to cause a bit of confusion. You see, after xona, weka, vunda, uda, and treda, jimvb specified sorta as the prefix for 10 to the 42nd power.

Yes, sorta.

What happens when we say that Elvis Presley weighed a sortagram?

Or that you want to get a sortameter away from your significant other?

Or that your portable music device uses a sortawatt of power?

But I guess it could be worse, if you decided to consume some pepta bismol tablets. (Pepta is 10 to the 51st power. That's a lot of pink powder.)

When will Microsoft give birth to Natal?

I've been deficient in mentioning natural user interface stuff in this blog lately, but the industry does not appear to have suffered from my neglect of the topic. In fact, Paul O'Flaherty is reporting that Spike TV will be broadcasting Microsoft's Project Natal announcement on June 14, followed by a special on MTV on June 15.

Of course, an announcement is only an announcement, and Microsoft has been known to announce something well in advance of its availability. So when will we be able to get our hands on Natal stuff? ReadWriteWeb reports that the launch will occur in October:

During an interview on Saudi television with Marketing Manager E&D Microsoft Saudi, Syed Bilal Tariq. He mentions that Project Natal is launching worldwide around Oct 2010 and that more information is coming out during E3 2010.

Or maybe not:

A Microsoft rep told G4 that the purported marketing manager isn't actually directly employed by Microsoft, although the company did not deny the rumored October launch window. "Syed Bilal Tariq is not a [Microsoft] employee. He is a vendor employed through a third-party company on behalf of the Microsoft subsidiary in Saudi Arabia," said a Microsoft rep.

Rumors that Syed Bilal Tariq is not a real person, but is merely a computer-generated illusion with remarkable movement capabilities, have not been confirmed.

Could an Oprah-like effect influence Facebook?

My post from last Saturday, Should Facebook Go Freemium?, is an obviously play on words on Jake Kuramoto's preceding post, Facebook Should Go Freemium. In the conversation that ensued regarding my post, I ended up repeating something that Jake said in his original post. This is what he said. This is what Jake Kuramoto said.

Facebook is too mainstream now for it to matter that Leo Laporte deleted his account, and Jason Calacanis threatened to do so. If Lady Gaga quit, that might make a ripple.

So why do so many people care what Lady Gaga does or does not do with Facebook, or what Oprah or Ashton do or do not do with Twitter?

The secret is in how we refer to them.

Even when writing to a tech audience, Jake and I understand that there may be some confusion if we were to simply refer to "Leo" or "Jason." Now perhaps Jake could refer to "Larry" in his blog and the majority of his readers would know who he was talking about. But in most cases, you can't refer to a tech superhero, even someone as big as the chairman of Apple, by his or her first name.

But Oprah, Ashton, Gaga - that's a different story. We have emotional connections with these people. Their acting or singing or talking has entertained us. Now I'll admit that the three examples that I gave have unusually distinctive names, but there are celebrities with much more common names - Arnold comes to mind - and we still know who is being discussed.

Now I happen to find Leo entertaining, and if I'm driving around on the weekend I'll tune him in if there isn't a game going on. But Leo, for all his entertainment value, is only entertaining to a very small segment of the audience. Don't believe me? Take a look at this YouTube video, which has had over 600,000 views.



Now take a look at this video, by some woman named Britney, that has been viewed by 100 times as many people - over 60 million views.



Or use Facebook itself to compare the two. Leo Laporte is liked by almost 200 people. Britney Spears is liked by almost 3 million.

So who is the average Facebook user going to listen to?

And if Leo Laporte were a better dancer, would more people listen to him? Nah....

(insert brief pause here)

Of course, this all begs the question of how a true celebrity would use Facebook, so I checked the official Facebook page for the Oprah Winfrey show.

Now Winfrey has been known to address specific topics, and to mobilize her mass audience in support of certain causes. In fact, at the time that I visited the show page, there was a special tab devoted to National No Phone Zone Day on April 30 - an attempt to end distracted driving by people using cellphones in cars.

But what does Oprah say about Facebook and privacy?

Not a peep.

(The oprah.com privacy policy is here, by the way.)

Poll: 100% Think the Internet Evolution Facebook Poll is a Crock

Within certain circles, the major topic of conversation is Facebook's privacy changes, and news that this person or that person is leaving Facebook as a result. This is truly a hot topic within certain circles, but will it have any true effect on Facebook?

I was musing about this when I saw the following headline:

Poll: 36% Say They're Done With Facebook

Now if this poll was conducted with a representative sample of the population, it would truly spell disaster for Facebook. So I figured I'd better click through to the article and read it.

Once you get past the headline, you find out that the poll was a poll of Internet Evolution readers. To be more precise, nearly 150 Internet Evolution readers. And Nicole Ferraro admits that the poll is decidedly unscientific.

So why are Internet Evolution readers so negative about Facebook? Let's start with the question that was asked:

When will you deactivate your Facebook account?

Now I'm not a professional pollster, but I suspect that this question might violate a standard or two that are used by professional pollsters. So I'm going to conduct a poll of the authors of the Empoprise-BI blog. The question:

How badly formulated was Internet Evolution's poll question on Facebook deactivation?

100% of all respondents chose the option "It blew major massive monkey chunks."

Enough levity. Ferraro arrived at the 36% figure by adding up the responses "I already deactivated it," "Within the year," and "Within the month." The "Within the year" group is the largest group, with over 20% of the total responses. Clearly within this circle, people are thinking about making a move.

Ferraro did some other research, and the only other significant data point that she could find was one cited in Inside Facebook, which noted:

For example, the search term “how do” on leading search engine Google now shows the algorithmically-determined phrase “how do i delete my facebook account.” Sites that provide answers to that question are seeing lots of new traffic.

(Note to self: join bandwagon and write "How to delete Facebook account" post.)

Ferraro also notes that the wonderful guardian of our country's business, the United States Congress, is also getting into the act. Yes, when the U.S. Congress isn't investigating baseball players on steroids, they're weighing in on a private firm's privacy policy. Senator Chuck Schumer is urging people to post this as their Facebook status:

Facebook should stop sharing my personal info with outside companies without my permission. If you agree, set this as your status today and join this group: http://bit.ly/d1ZB6h

The bit.ly link resolves to http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=114387775262356, which is a Facebook group called "Petition: Facebook, respect my privacy!" that was started by MoveOn.org and has over 100,000 members.

Of course, if you've deactivated your Facebook account, you can't join. And if the group has set up its preferred privacy controls, you can't see it.

Oops...

(empo-plaaybizz) Why you need gamers in your corporate environment

I had encountered something at work that involved network latency, so I did some online research to understand latency better. In the course of my research, I checked Wikipedia's definition of lag. The Wikipedia article included an introduction, then an overview...then a discussion of "Lag in Multiplayer Gaming."

I continued my research, and then ran across a thread on an Australian message board with a detailed discussion of problems in accessing World of Warcraft. The discussion included pings, reports of disconnections, and dozens upon dozens of traceroutes. The thread was active for several weeks in March and April 2009.

Why is it easier for me to find network latency write-ups for consumer applications, than it is to find write-ups for business applications?

Perhaps it's because business applications tend to be confidential. (You may have noticed that I refrained from saying WHY I was researching network latency.) While your average World of Warcraft player has no problem posting a traceroute, I seriously doubt that Alex Payne will be publishing traceroutes that involve his new employer.

It's undeniably true that a number of technical issues, from network latency to interface design, have benefited from major contributions of people who play games.

So maybe corporations need to seek people who are interesting in various types of games, since they will have a perspective that can be applied to business issues. Interestingly enough, AMD has a game forum that is devoted to the topic, and presumably gets a lot of intelligence from the forum members that can be applied to improving AMD products. Look at this question:

Im looking to overclock my processor (athlon II X2 240) but it is not supported in my bios (american megatrends). i have a compaq cq5320f with a m2n68-la (narra6) mobo, gigabyte radeon hd 4350 graphics card, nvidia mcp610 chipset.

Can i flash my bios or is there software to download to help with this. please help!!!!

I would hope that processor manufacturers and BIOS manufacturers were following that thread.

So you can argue that companies need to seek out gaming employees and gaming customers to advance their products. Then again, an argument can be made that our technical knowledge is also advanced by pornography, and I don't know that corporations want to actively seek out pornography consumers...

P.S. For a broader view of gaming and the enterprise, see Why Gaming is the Future of Everything.

Should Facebook Go Freemium?

I haven't weighed in on all the Facebook privacy brouhaha, primarily because (a) better minds than I have weighed in on it already (I particularly recommend Steven Hodson's post that differentiates between privacy and control of your data), and (b) I didn't have anything to contribute.

Well, I have contributed one thing to the conversation so far. I think that Facebook's negative press has reached a point where, instead of using the common "blame Scoble" epithet, it's time to "blame Facebook" for everything. @fbihop has already started:

Facebook hit on your sister. #FBfacts

But then I ran across a proposal from Jake Kuramoto. After noting that Facebook will not truly be affected by the actions of Leo Laporte or Jason Calacanis or whoever, Kuramoto suggested the following:

Flickr makes you pay to store photos beyond a certain number. Facebook doesn’t, and they are the largest online photo sharing site by a very large margin.

Worried about privacy changes? Don’t be a sour puss and delete your account, pay to keep it private.

But will a good idea make money? To analyze this, I've taken a look at a company that's been around for a while - AOL.

You remember AOL - well, some of you remember AOL. AOL was a huge moneymaker back in the day, that was best known as a provider of a place where you could store - and control - your content. Of course, to get to that content, you had to get to it, so AOL sold subscriptions that let you use your modem to dial in to a special phone number to access your AOL content.

Needless to say, the business landscape has dramatically changed since then, and the Internet service providers are now separate from the content providers.

So how does AOL make money today?

According to its most recent quarterly report, AOL income comes from the following sources:

Advertising revenue: $354.3 million in 2010 Q1
Subscription revenue: $282.7 million
Other revenue: $27.3 million

So today, AOL gets the majority of its revenue from advertising. Well, Facebook certainly knows about the advertising business (on Friday, I finally got around to disliking the myriad of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" advertisements that kept on showing up).

And as for that subscription revenue, it appears to be drying up:

Once best known as an Internet access provider, AOL is attempting to wean itself from the access business, streamline operations and develop a media business based on Internet advertising and services.

Still, it remains highly dependent on its subscribers as a captive audience.

The company said its steep decline in search queries, for example, was partly the result of a 26% decline in subscribers compared with the period last year. Paying subscribers tend to search more frequently than "nonpaying visitors" to its properties, according to AOL.

Overall, AOL's subscription revenue dropped by 28% to $282.7 million.

But AOL doesn't solely depend upon subscribers and advertising. Although the revenue seems to be pretty low at the moment, AOL does offer a variety of products for sale, most if not all of which are offered as a 30 day free trial. Internet security, a PC optimizer, various utilities - you can buy them all from AOL.

So perhaps Facebook could sell a higher-tiered level of Facebook service to its customers. The question is, how many of its hundreds of millions of customers would pay for the service? And if they did, how many of the hundreds of millions of customers would regard it as another example of the "Facebook will charge you" hoaxes from December 2009 and February 2010?

Now I'll admit that I only looked at AOL. Perhaps there are other businesses that more closely parallel the freemium model that Kuramoto mused about. If you know of a business that has successfully (or unsuccessfully) adopted a multi-tier model, share your thoughts in the comments.

(empo-plaaybizz) We don't like it, but we'll pay for it

Remember my post The Farmville Sociopaths? This was my post that was dedicated to an analysis of A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz's speech-turned-essay which looked at the popular Facebook game Farmville - both the things that motivated people to play Farmville, and Liszkiewicz's views on how these activities contribute to society at large. (If you haven't read the article, Liszkiewicz's answer is "They don't.")

I revisited this article after seeing that Jake Kuramoto has weighed in on the essay, noting that Zynga is capitalizing upon a wonderful business plan, even though anyone who would have heard the business plan just a few years ago would have thought that the Zynga people were out of their minds.

But Jake and I initially glossed over one point that Liszkiewicz made which, in retrospect, is vitally important.

Let's say that I was to decide to go into the software business. I would want to make my software application as insanely great as possible. I'd talk to customers, think about user interfaces, look at the market, and so forth - all in an attempt to design some software that people would WANT to buy.

Chances are I'd fail miserably. I'd probably fail for a variety of reasons, but among them would be the fact that I'd be shooting at the wrong target.

You don't want to design a product that people want to buy.

Let's return to Liszkiewicz:

Farmville is not a good game.

What? The company is making money hand over fist, and it's not a good game? Liszkiewicz provides several reasons for this assertion, among which is the following:

Farmville allows users to spend their in-game profits on decorations, animals, buildings, and even bigger plots of land. So users are rewarded for their work. Of course, people can sidestep the harvesting process entirely by spending real money to purchase in-game items. This is the major source of revenue for Zynga, the company that produces Farmville. Zynga is currently on pace to make over three hundred million dollars in revenue this year, largely off of in-game micro-transactions....Clearly, even people who play Farmville want to avoid playing Farmville.

Now I have never spent money on Farmville, Farm Town, My Town, or whatever...but I have spent money on Starfleet Commander. Why? Because Starfleet Commander allows you to acquire resources in the forms of ore, crystal, and hydrogen, and there are times when you have too much ore and not enough hydrogen, and vice versa. Now Starfleet Commander allows you to try to find other players to exchange your virtual resources, or they can automate the process...for a fee, of course. And in my case, it's much easier to perform the occasional automated transaction, rather than trying to find the person with the right resources, and making sure that both have resources at the correct time (because of the mechanics of Starfleet Commander, my resources are often on "fleetsave" and therefore unavailable).

So note the distinction - people pay money for these games not because they WANT to, but because they HAVE to.

Let's look at another example - tax preparation services. People obviously don't want to pay someone else to do their taxes for them, but feel that they have to do so. Why? First, the tax preparer saves the person a lot of trouble, since the person does not have to prepare his or her own taxes. Second, the tax preparer (assuming a minimum skill level) can help the person avoid some costly mistakes that could result in audits and tax penalties.

Many scams use the same "you have to do this" motivator. Let's say that you get an e-mail that is purportedly from your bank. The e-mail usually includes a threat - if you don't provide your bank with your correct credentials, you will not have access to your money. Those who fall for the scam do so because they feel that they have to protect their money.

Now certainly wants have their place and can serve as motivators (you want to get that money from the brother of the deceased Nigerian government official), but when it comes down to it, needs are more powerful than wants. I could go into a Maslow-ian tangent on this, but as I said before, I've been out of academia for a while.

A misguided cry for freedom (or, guess who agrees with the New Jersey principal?)

Go into any room of techies and casually mention that there's a threat to freedom, and 99% of all techies will man the barricades.

Whoops, I'm a sexist pig. They'll person the barricades.

But sometimes they person the barricades without engaging their brains first. Take the title of this item from Internet Evolution:

School Principal Demands Ban on Social Networks

And Nicole Ferraro begins the actual article as follows.

When I was a kid, the "thing" that was going to destroy my generation was video games. We were all supposed to grow up and kill each other.

Every age has a culprit, and for the current generation of youngsters it's social networking.

Ferraro then talks about Anthony Orsini and his letter to parents, and how wild the letter was.

My main problem with this letter is the excessive use of exclamation points -- way to sound maniacal! I'm glad you're not teaching English!

The thing that stuck in Ferraro's craw was the following statement from Principal Orsini:

Please do the following: sit down with your child (and they are just children still) and tell them that they are not allowed to be a member of any social networking site. Today!

This, naturally, drove Ferraro up a wall...even though she neglected to mention one entity that is entirely in agreement with Orsini's stand.

The social networking sites themselves.

You see, the one important factor that Ferraro buried in her article is that Orsini is the principal of a MIDDLE school. Now, how many middle school students would satisfy the following requirement?

5. You will not use Facebook if you are under 13.

Now I will grant that there are some 8th graders who are 13 years of age or over. But middle schools go all the way down to 6th grade, and if there is a 6th grader who's 13, perhaps the kid should be hitting the books rather than the Farmville anyway.

And Ferraro does agree with Orsini that there are dangers on the Internet; she just disagrees about the approach to take.

The main issue on which the principal and I disagree is that practicing safe social networking is futile. A less hysterical approach would be limiting time kids spend online, having open discussions about the Web's dark side and the negative effects of one's actions online, and making it clear that these students have somewhere to turn if they're being bullied, online or off.

Those of us who are parents realize that as our children get older, we need to give them more and more responsibility, commensurate with their physical and mental age. And things may be different for different kids - some kids may be comfortable watching R rated movies, while others may think that "Everybody Loves Raymond" is a racy, dangerous show. (True story.)

But there are some absolutes - if your contract with MySpace or Facebook or whatever states that you have to be 13 years old, you have to be 13 years old. You don't want to teach your kid the joys of breaking the law.

Reinforcing perceptions - how the #nbcsucks and #nbcfail hashtags live on

I just visited my nbcsucks FriendFeed room for the first time in a while. The room, originally created during the 2010 Winter Olympics, was designed to contrast the @nbcolympics Twitter feed against the Twitter feeds of those who thought that NBC's Olympic coverage was less than stellar. The latter were easily identified by searching for use of the Twitter hashtags #nbcfail and #nbcsucks.

I pretty much created the room to track Olympics stuff, and figured that after the Olympics were over, the use of the #nbcfail and #nbcsucks hashtags would pretty much die away. Bob Costas would go back to pontificating about other stuff, and people such as me would lose interest in the hashtags and go back to talking about Foursquare or whatever.

As Jim Bakker would say, I was wrong about #nbcfail and #nbcsucks hashtag use. In my visit to my FriendFeed room, I found that the hashtags were very much alive.

You see, NBC apparently had the rights to televise the 2010 Kentucky Derby, which happens to be another infrequent event that attracts a large casual audience. And apparently NBC, in attempting to cater to this large audience, ended up doing things that alienated the core sports fan. Sound familiar?

Apparently, NBC's idea of televising the Kentucky Derby is to ignore...well, to ignore the horses. Or at least that's what the tweets imply. Jeff May:

remember when the kentucky derby coverage on nbc was just about the race and really well done?? what's this top chief bullshit? #NBCFail

Technically I could address a spelling flame to May, but at least his heart was in the right place. Todd Noonan continues the Top Chef theme:

I raced home to watch the Kentucky Derby and it's Al Roker cooking with two losers from Top Chef in a segment taped yesterday? #NBCFail #fb

And when NBC wasn't showing chefs, they were showing celebs - celebrity people, not celebrity horses. Horse Belle wasn't pleased:

NBC's KDerby coverage = hats, foods, drinks, celebs...hey...what about the horses? #NBCFail #KYDerby

And neither was Heide Kolb:

#KYDerby who cares abt all that celebrity crap, I want 2 see horses & races! #NBCfail

In fact, one person (Alex Brown) became really desperate to see a horse:

cool, commercial break. maybe there will be an advertisment that includes a horse ? #KYDerby

(In case you're wondering how that tweet got into the feed, Jen Baker retweeted it with the hashtag.)

But there is a valid question - was NBC's Kentucky Derby coverage truly bad, or did people approach the broadcast with a preconceived notion that NBC's Kentucky Derby coverage would be bad, and then isolated Top Chef and other episodes to reinforce that belief? Certainly this has happened before, and people have taken subsequent events to reinforce a previous belief. Just ask Dan Quayle or Joe Biden.

And before you blame NBC for all of the ills, note that the Kentucky Derby itself was eager to expand Derby coverage to a new audience.

Carter, who had moved to Roanoke from Louisville, said that to drum up interest, he held a party, borrowed a satellite truck and downloaded a Louisville station's coverage so his colleagues could see what they were missing.

"The ratings there were nothing," Carter recalled. "I think it did 5 or 6 ratings points. Outside of Kentucky and a couple of other horse-racing communities, it does OK, but certainly here, it still has Super Bowl status."

Churchill Downs is looking to improve that status here and nationally by expanding the appeal of the Oaks.

"On Kentucky Oaks Day, we have an on-track crowd that is traditionally around 100,000 people," Rogers said. "How many other sporting events draw 100,000 people, and no one's ever heard of it?"

Last year, the track partnered with Susan G. Komen for the Cure and raised money for breast cancer research. The move drove media coverage and helped the track strike a deal to air the Oaks on the NBC-owned Bravo cable network, Rogers said. That partnership will continue this year with Bravo airing the race from 5 to 6 p.m.

"The Derby is the Derby," Rogers said. "But we want to incorporate all that on to Kentucky Oaks Day as well and have a giant two-day event."

And there was certainly advance notice about the Top Chef participation:

NEW YORK, NY – April 26, 2010 – Bravo celebrates the Kentucky Derby with the second annual “Ladies First: Bravo at the Kentucky Derby” special live from Churchill Downs in Louisville, KY., airing on Friday, April 30 at 5 p.m. ET/PT. This one-hour special, produced by NBC Sports and hosted by Bravo’s Andy Cohen, celebrates the very best in food, fashion and the celebrity experience associated with the 136th running of the Kentucky Oaks. Dina Manzo from ‘The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” and Jeff Lewis and Jenni Pulos from “Flipping Out” join Cohen to celebrate a day for women and to give viewers a history on the fashion and festivities before and after the Oaks race. Isaac Mizrahi, renowned designer and host of Bravo’s “The Fashion Show” will dress “Today” show correspondent Natalie Morales for the festivities, and “Top Chef” stars Michael Voltaggio, Jennifer Carroll and Eli Kirshtein will be cooking from the Infield Club.

However, the press release didn't mention that some of the Friday stuff would be repeated on Saturday.

Then again, when the actual event is only two minutes long, you have to show SOMETHING while you're waiting, I guess. I'm sure that the true sports purists would insist that NBC's coverage only last for two minutes, but where are you going to put the commercials?

How does the mayor position work in FourSquare, revisited

I just checked my Google Analytics for this here Empoprise-BI business blog for 2010, and found that the most popular post during that period, with 8.52% of all pageviews, is a post that I wrote on January 2 with the title "How does the mayor position work in FourSquare?"

The popularity of this post demonstrates my superior writing skills, of course...not. It's merely the fact that I happened upon a trend. OK, the title was pretty good also. Oddly enough (or perhaps not oddly), the Facebook echo of the post is more highly ranked in Google than the original Blogger post.

As it turns out, this is a good time to revisit the topic of mayorships in Foursquare. But first, a recap of what I already wrote. Here is an excerpt:

[A] single visit is not enough to make you the mayor of a new location, For new locations, generally you need to visit the place on two different days before you can become the mayor of the location.

And if you stop visiting there, and someone else visits, then it's quite possible that you can lose your mayorship to someone else. That's exactly what happened to me at the Starbucks at Valencia & Imperial in Brea, California. I used to be the mayor there, but as I write this the current mayor is Lauren D.

Now FourSquare's hope is that the game impulse will kick in, and that I'll say to myself, "Hey, I can't let Lauren remain the mayor of that Starbucks! So I'm just going to make a point of visiting that Starbucks in Brea a few times so that I can win the mayorship back!"

Now this benefits FourSquare, and benefits the business as well.

I wrote this back in January, back when I probably had a dozen mayorships or so. Foursquare hadn't really taken off in the Inland Empire yet, but I figured that it would at some point, and that I'd lose some of these mayorships, only retaining a few.

But recently, the unthinkable happened.

I lost the mayorship of the Starbucks at 6th and Mountain. (At present, my mayorships have dwindled down to three.)



However, this is partially my fault. I'd often stop at that Starbucks on my morning commute, but this year I often use a different route for my morning commute, which means that I don't go by that Starbucks as frequently as I once did. This gave Larry H the opening that he needed to claim the mayorship from me.

And, to the delight of Foursquare and Starbucks, the competitive edge kicked in, and I figured I'd get that mayorship back. As it turns out, I had the option to take my old commuting route for a few days, so I began visiting that Starbucks on my way to work, beginning on April 27:

i want mayorship back. @foursquare sees $ @stevenhodson shakes head :) (@ Starbucks Coffee) http://4sq.com/4gwk0m

(The Hodson comment was prompted by his March 22 post "Say, do they have a badge for 'Duh I am such a sucker'?" I previously commented on Hodson's post in my April 21 post.)

Returning to the mayorship contest at Starbucks, I checked in again on April 28, after a failed attempt to visit My Delight Cupcakery (no, I still haven't made it there during their business hours):

so i`m getting iced tea instead (@ Starbucks Coffee) http://4sq.com/4gwk0m

Two visits didn't do it - I still hadn't won the mayorship back. By April 29, I realized that this would be harder than I thought:

i feel like harold stassen, repeatedly running for mayor (@ Starbucks Coffee) http://4sq.com/4gwk0m

(Here's a biography of Harold Stassen, if you've never heard of him. The biography contains the wonderful line "Other Minnesota politicians: Hubert H. Humphrey, Jesse Ventura and Walter Mondale." When will they add Al Franken? Whoops, it looks like I really want to keep that "I Can't Keep on Topic" badge I mentioned earlier.)

At this point, I figured it was time for some research. And when I researched Larry H and his mayorships, I discovered this one:

pennysaver sales office (work)
1520 north mountain avenue
ontario, california 91762

Right way, this told me two things.

First, and most importantly, it told me that Larry H worked in the same shopping center where the Starbucks is located, which means that it is quite possible that Larry stops there every day, before or after selling advertisements for the very popular PennySaver.

The other thing that it told me was that Larry is pretty savvy at Foursquare; my guess is that he added this location himself. This means that he knows his way around Foursquare and definitely has an interest in the service.

By April 30, I had resigned myself to the fact that I probably wasn't getting this mayorship back.

one last? opportunity to win this (@ Starbucks Coffee) http://4sq.com/4gwk0m

So I congratulate Larry H on his hard work; he's earned this mayorship. In fact, he's been really busy in that Starbucks area; not only is he the mayor of the Starbucks and of Pennysaver, but he is also the mayor of Chopsticks House. (Ignore the map, which as of May 1 is VERY inaccurate.) So for Larry, I'd like to propose the Shopping Center Badge, for checking into three different locations within 500 feet of each other.

Or maybe I should make it four locations instead of three. At this rate, Larry will beat me to My Delight Cupcakery.

(empo-plaaybizz) The Farmville Sociopaths?

My empo-plaaybizz series in this blog has looked at the interrelationships between gaming and business. But I haven't taken it a step further to look at the interrelationships between gaming and society.

Enter A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz, whose January 28, 2010 talk at SUNY Buffalo was recorded in at least two places. H/T to Nicole Schulert for alerting me to this Business Insider piece, and to Jake Kuramoto for noting that this also appeared in this Media Commons piece.

Presented as an essay, this was originally given as a talk by Liszkiewicz upon the occasion of the death of Howard Zinn. Now I've been out of academia for almost two decades now, so I'm not used to reading academic stuff. And Liszkiewicz certainly approaches the topic from an academic slant, beginning as follows:

We are citizens of a democracy, and democratic citizenship has always been a difficult skill to master. This is why Aristotle tells us that, in an ideal state, citizens would possess ample leisure time: the education of a citizen depends upon contemplation, deliberation, and training. Citizenship requires cultivation and, as any farmer would tell us, cultivation takes time.

Liszkiewicz chose his words carefully, because, as it turns out, the topic that he wants to address is the Farmville game. Now I never got into Farmville (I have been more involved in its competitor, Farm Town), but I'm certainly in the minority among virtual farmers. Farmville has emerged as the dominant game on Facebook, and because Facebook is itself dominant among social media networks, that's a lot of farming that's going on - and a lot of revenue that's going to Farmville's creator, Zynga.

Past analyses that I've read about Farmville, Farm Town, Foursquare, and the like have concentrated on the business benefits of using game mechanisms. To my knowledge, neither Paul Pedrazzi nor any other business analyst has cited Aristotle in his or her analysis of business gaming.

In the speech-turned-essay, Liszkiewicz explains how Farmville works, and notes that it is not that good of a game (why would people pay real money or invest real time to, in essence, avoid playing the game?). Liszkiewicz also notes how neighbors work, and explains that this is his concern regarding Farmville:

The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.



After arguing in this vein for some time, Liszkiewicz reaches his conclusion - the conclusion to which I alluded in the title of this post:

Citizens must educate themselves in the use of sociable applications, such as Wikipedia, Skype, and Facebook, and learn how they can better use them to forward their best interests. And we must learn to differentiate sociable applications from sociopathic applications: applications that use people’s sociability to control those people, and to satisfy their owners’ needs.

As cultivated citizens, we are obligated to one another. We care about one another. As Cornel West has said, democracy depends upon demophilia, or love of the people. Unfortunately, sociopathic companies such as Zynga depend upon this love as well. The central task of citizenship is learning how to be good to one another, even when—especially when—it is difficult to understand our own actions. If Howard Zinn had but one lesson to teach us, it is that cultivated citizens must constantly look around and examine what they’re doing, because there is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else’s crop.

Now I've been mulling over this piece for a couple of days - and I can assure you that Jake Kuramoto has been mulling over it also - and, after some thought, I have reached the following conclusion:

Zynga is no more sociopathic than any other company.

Let me provide an example:

In my country, the United States of America, there is a sporting event that is popularly known as "March Madness." To be more specific, it is a college basketball tournament in which the top teams from the top level of colleges/universities compete in a sporting event. This is popularly portrayed as a win-win, since the colleges and universities get revenue, the media gets revenue, the gamblers get revenue, the people get entertainment, and deserving college kids get an education.

But if Liszkiewicz were to turn his laser eye to March Madness, he would NOT perceive it as a win-win. I don't think that SUNY Buffalo is a Division I school, but if it were, Liszkiewicz would not be pleased at the fact that the so-called "student athletes" end up missing nearly a month of classes due to the tournament, and he definitely wouldn't be pleased when some of these same so-called "student athletes" do not return to SUNY Buffalo the following year, having decided to forgo their college educations to turn pro in the NBA.

And what of society? With the possible exception of the Farmville players, much of the rest of the country is occupied in filling out brackets, comparing brackets with one another, possibly entering betting pools based on their brackets, and engaged in other tasks. You want to talk about being obligated to a routine? Try maintaining a bracket for an entire month.

Heck, if you think about it, just about EVERY activity can be considered as sociopathic.

The online Obama supporters that were cited in the article? They're just stooges in the money-making efforts of News Corp (Fox News) and whoever owns NBC at the moment (MSNBC).

People who listened to radio during the Great Depression? Slaves to a routine, clamoring for Ovaltine.

And I won't even touch the whole issue of faculty politics.

So while I will freely admit that Zynga has come up with a formula that makes them money, and can be addictive as crack cocaine, I don't see Zynga as the destroyers of our modern society.

But if Zynga starts targeting its games to the Jerry Springer demographic, I'm moving to Iran.

[PHOTO SOURCE, LICENSE)]

[UPDATE 4/29 11:25 AM - ALSO SEE THIS POST FROM COSTIK, AND BE SURE TO READ THE COMMENTS.]

[UPDATE 4/29 11:30 AM - LISZKIEWICZ HAS BEEN JOINED IN HIS CONDEMNATION BY THE NOTED ACADEMIC JOURNAL CRACKED.COM. H/T BRUNDLEFLY.]

Google-Facebook-Apple haters, here's another proponent of the "closed is wonderful" argument

There is a certain segment of the tech world (and I'll admit that I probably fall into this category) that believes that open is wonderful, closed is bad, and being locked into a single solution is pretty much signing your death warrant.

We freak out when Google becomes so pervasive that you can't escape it.

We freak out when Apple's penchant for secrecy results in the police barging into a house by breaking down a door.

We freak out when Facebook, with its hundreds of millions of users, makes a play to dominate and track all online interactions.

And we yell "open, open," standing on a hill, teaching people to sing in perfect harmony...

...and therein lies the problem. You see, open means a number of things to a number of people, and even when something is standards-compliant, it isn't necessarily plug and play.

(And it's humorous to note that "plug and play" is associated with Microsoft, which was the Axis of Evil for the last tech generation. Now Microsoft is perceived to be more open than, say, Apple. As Vic the Brick would say, "Who knew?")

So even though the word "closed" has negative connotations, it has a lot going for it. Perhaps you can't buy porn for your Apple device, but at least the components of the Apple device generally work well together. You don't have to worry about item A not working with item B. And this lack of worry also leads to cost savings.

Enter Oracle's Charles Phillips, as reported by Bob Evans:

"What CIOs are struggling with right now," said Phillips in an interview Thursday in Manhattan, "is trying to find a way to get the opportunity and ability to manage the entire stack with a single management tool that's predictive about how that stack's going to behave, how the change-management around it is more prescriptive and planned and where they really know how to upgrade and patch the entire stack.

"All the dependencies between these layers—the middleware, database, storage, software, systems—they're all related but unpredictable," Phillips said. "And that's the cycle they're trying to get out of—all that need to constantly provision and manage—it's a huge cost and it's kinda boring and takes lots of people to do it and it's risky."

Note that Oracle has always argued that their components are standards-compliant and play well with others...but that you get better advantages by going to an all-Oracle solution. Phillips emphasized the latter, and Evans took special note of these comments:

"You don't need 18 different vendors and 2,000 configurations to have competition—you've got to limit it some. And I think we've convinced people that makes sense and beyond that we think the whole industry's just moving in that direction. And we can accelerate that by standardizing that entire stack and showing people how it's done..."

And here's the clincher:

"...people like that 'iPod for the enterprise' analogy"

Yet, in a way, Oracle doesn't completely practice what it preaches. If a multiplicity of configurations and vendors is a bad thing, you would think that Oracle would get in bed with Apple and offer the optimum solution. Yet Oracle's preferred operating system, one on which Oracle products are always released first, is Linux. Yes, Oracle has its own Oracle-branded flavor of Linux, but the Oracle products are available for the Red Hats and SUSEs of the world at the same time.

Now Oracle is available on the Mac, to be sure. In fact, this page, last updated in September 2009 as I write this, trumpets the available of Oracle Database on the Mac...Oracle Database 10g Release 2.

For those who don't follow the Oracle world closely, the release that is available for the Linux folks is Oracle Database *11g* Release 2.

Certainly a lot of this has to do with market demand factors - demand for enterprise databases on the Mac platform might be a "Sony Betamax" kind of deal - but it does go to show that a closed architecture - I mean an intelligently-designed architecture - is not the only key to success.

When Steve Jobs tried to buy a Helocar

It had been a very busy year, and Steve Jobs is a very busy man. But he still had something that he needed to do; it was time to get some new wheels, so Jobs went to his local HeloCar dealership. He didn't have much time to waste.

(And yes, I know that the HeloCar campaign didn't happen on Jobs' watch. But humor me.)

"Can I help you?" asked a smiling, fresh-faced saleswoman - I mean, automotive advisor.

"Yes," replied Steve. "I want your top-of-the-line HeloCar, with a place to put my yogurt and an insanely great CD player.

The automotive advisor smiled again. "I can sell you a HeloCar with food service and music service. Step right this way."

Steve carefully examined the well-designed HeloCar that the automotive advisor showed him. The workmanship was superb, and every element had its place. But when he looked inside, he noticed that there was something missing.

"Where's the cupholder and the CD player?" he asked.

"The HeloCar is an advanced device," replied the smiling automotive advisor. "It does not have a mere cupholder or CD player. Instead, we offer our own food service, HeloFood, and our own music service, HeloTunes."

"But what if I want to play my own CDs?" asked Jobs.

"HeloTunes is a comprehensive music service," replied the automotive advisor, still smiling. "We can provide you with a variety of music styles that are compatible with the design of the HeloCar, all for a price as low at 99 cents per song."

"So can I buy Bob Dylan for my HeloCar?" asked Steve.

The automotive advisor paused. "Bob Dylan is not appropriate for the HeloCar," she replied, slightly tersely. The smile was beginning to fade.

"Dylan not appropriate?" asked Steve. "He was the voice of a generation!"

The smile had definitely left the automotive advisor's face. "HeloTunes offers a number of songs that are compatible with the HeloCar."

"But I'm your customer!" Jobs was visibly angry. "I'd like to put my music on my CD player in my car! After all, I own the car, don't I?"

"Subject to the terms of the automotive license agreement," replied the automotive advisor.

Jobs rolled his eyes, and his neck muscles were visibly tightening under his turtleneck. "Just give me a car which lets me play any music that I want!"

The automotive associate looked at Jobs with an icy stare. "Then perhaps you should go visit the AndroidCar dealer down the street."

Online information sharing? There's not enough of it!

Perhaps this is just a case similar to the one in which people supposedly "misuse" Google to login to Facebook, but perhaps it's truly an opportunity for improvement.

This week, people are falling all over the place and jumping off of buildings and burning their old floppy discs because Facebook apparently now shares your information with every site you visit. This is worrisome, because now the IRS will presumably know that you bought a new car, and they'll wonder where you got the income to do that. And who knows what Osama bin Laden will learn from the music that you scrobble.

We have a mental image of Big Brother - in this case a corporate rather than a governmental Big Brother - working in concert with everyone to plot against us. In truth, however, we are a long way from that. I have often stated that we don't need to worry about the U.S. Federal Government agencies working together to take away our freedoms, because the U.S. Federal Government agencies all hate each other. People from Department X think that people in Department Y are all bozos, and they're not going to share information with those bozos in Department Y because (a) they're all bozos and they'll probably lose the information, and (b) if they don't lose the information, they'll probably claim the credit that should rightfully go to Department X.

The absolute lack of cooperation, even between people in the same department, hits us every day. Let's take Google. They offer a maps service, and they offer a news service. In the ideal world, they'd work together, wouldn't they?

I wanted to know the precise location of this week's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, so I typed "oil spill in Gulf of Mexico" into maps.google.com. This is what I got:



This is not what I wanted. Apparently Google Maps doesn't know what Google News is doing.

An aside - eventually, I found an article that gave me the information that I needed.

THE semisubmersible drilling rig Deepwater Horizon sank in the Gulf of Mexico 130 miles southeast of New Orleans yesterday....

So I went back to Google Maps and typed "130 miles southeast of new orleans, louisiana." Google Maps presented me with a map of Miles Drive in New Orleans. I'm sure it's a nice street, but if there's a huge fire and an oil slick in that neighborhood, I'm not moving there.

Back to searching for current news information in Google Maps. It turns out that in some cases it does work. Back when I appeared online as Ontario Emperor, I would occasionally search Google Maps for "ontario emperor" and fill all sorts of things. Well, I author the regional blog Empoprise-IE, so I thought I'd enter the Google Maps search "empoprise-ie near ontario, california." I got two hits, for Pomona Police Detective Services and the Claremont Police Department, which were related to blog posts that I wrote in Blogger (incidentally, a Google service). (Oddly enough, however, when I tried to go to the permalink of the search results, Google wouldn't recognize it.)

So to those who say that companies are doing too much information sharing, I reply that they're not doing enough information sharing. When Google can't share information with Google, you know there's a problem.

(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.