On contextual interviewing (Ryma May 27 webinar)

Before I talk about the webinar, perhaps I should explain contextual interviewing:

The primary purpose of Contextual Interviewing is to understand the “job(s) that need to be done”, or the problems that need to be solved by your business model, service or product. You need to uncover your Most Important Customer’s unmet needs.

This can be critical, because some (all?) statements of requirements do not necessarily reflect the true requirements. The written requirements may have been written by a consultant, or they may have been written by only one part of the organization, or they may make too many assumptions and thus leave important things unsaid.

On to the webinar:

Ryma's May 27th webinar will be presented by Dick Lee and Blake Bogrett. Together they will drill down into one of the details reviewed in the "Blue Ocean Strategy" webinar presented May 13 of this year. They will explain why Contextual Interviewing is the single most important task you carry out in developing new software, a new product or service. The success of all other steps hinges solely on getting this one right.

They point out why marketing groups don't typically have the core competencies to do this. They'll show where Contextual Interviewing fits in the Value Innovation Process, and how the approach to Focus Groups has changed over time.

Dick and Blake will review the process for setting up the interview team, defining team member roles and responsibilities, selecting the lead interviewer (select a person with a low KAI Index and you're dead on arrival), picking the format that works best for the project and interviewees, the do's and don'ts, the golden rules, capturing the outputs, winning interviewee "buy-in" for the next two interviews, addressing how we transition from interview outputs into Elements of Performance in a Value Curve with Metrics, and more.

One of the Golden Rules: Do NOT outsource this to a third party. Having a third party help you is fine, but your team must be there to hear, understand, and react to, The Nuggets!

Go to the page to find the "Register for this webinar" control.

FriendFeed commenters, check your email...then check your settings!

Earlier today I wrote a post that pointed out three imperfections of FriendFeed. For purposes of this post, I'll concentrate on only a small portion of that post.

As for Twitter making changes on a whim, many notice that FriendFeed does the same thing also. Now I'm not of the school that believes that all of the changes in FriendFeed's latest beta had to be submitted to a vote of the users, but you have to acknowledge that FriendFeed entered the beta period, rarely communicated what was in the beta, didn't give advance notice of new features that would be in the beta, and didn't give advance notice of the time when the beta would be turned off and the new features would become standard in FriendFeed.

guruvan (Rob Nelson) took the time to respond to every one of my points. Here's how he responded to the point above:

FriendFeed gives [plenty] of advance notice to planned maintenance, changes and so on. You have to actually pay attention. Nobody can say that they didn't warn their users that the beta would take over. It ran for nearly a month, iwth a huge percentage of the most active FriendFeeders using it and talking about it. FriendFeed's staff regularly communicates with users, and was out actively helping people during the beta period, and was out In Full Force when the beta went live - it was an "all-hands-on-deck" roll-out for them. I saw FriendFeed staff everywhere on FriendFeed for that. When was the last time you saw a Twitter employee publicly (or privately) answer a question? Do you know how long it takes to get a support request answered on Twitter? More than months. Every single one of my support requests on FriendFeed have been answered personally by one of their staff.

I didn't read Nelson's response until this evening, and I thought he brought up some fair points. (I plan to try f2p when I get a chance.)

But then I saw an item from Susan A. Kitchens.

Did FriendFeed just do something different? I'm now getting emailed contents of FF posts or something.

That was the second comment of this type that I had seen this evening, so I went to check my email. Sure enough, I had several emails from the Empoprise-BI group, and one from my Natural User Interface group.

In the process of poking around to figure out what had happened (it turns out this was a bug), I discovered something else, as Tudor Bosman noted in FriendFeed Feedback:

We pushed a change to send email by default whenever somebody comments on your entries. You may turn this off from the notification settings page: http://friendfeed.com/settings/notifications

In essence, there was both a bug and a feature...and Susan was experiencing both of them.

Time to email tech support; they were helpful the last time around. I got emailed both your comments to this post.

Let's ignore the bug for the moment. Bugs happen. Let's go back to Tudor's explanation of the new feature, in the FriendFeed Feedback thread:

Note that we're only doing this for people who haven't already set their email notifications (if you went to the notification settings page and clicked "Save changes", we'll continue to obey your settings as you saved them)

This change was primarily aimed at users who don't check FriendFeed every day, who would like to know when somebody has taken the time to comment on their posts. I'm sorry if this is causing a huge volume of email for you active folks :)

Leather Donut captured my thoughts exactly:

Some heads up would have been nice.

At this point (a little after 10:30 pm), I don't know if this settings change is widely known. Some people are going to be mighty surprised when they check their email Wednesday morning, then find out that FriendFeed changed a setting behind their backs so that they'd know about incoming comments.

To those people, I guess we should just say "You have to actually pay attention."

When did Polaroid become unbelievably retro?

Polaroid Land Camera 1000 by Juan Baeza used under a Creative Commons License

The years creep by and you don't realize it.

When I was a kid in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Polaroid was a leader in personal camera technology. Unlike its competitors, Polaroid promised a real-time picture experience in which you could literally see a picture forming before your eyes, just moments after the picture had been taken. OK, maybe a Polaroid picture wasn't of sufficient quality to be used in a newspaper or a book, but the real-time results were pretty impressive at that time.

But time passed, cameras became digital, and Polaroid itself faded away - or, more accurately, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001. And again in 2008.

But the New York Times reports that some retro Europeans are trying to resurrect the technology:

They want to recast an outdated production process in an abandoned Polaroid factory for an age that has fallen for digital pictures because they think people still have room in their hearts for retro photography that eschews airbrushing or Photoshop.

“This project is about building a very interesting business to last for at least another decade,” said Florian Kaps, the Austrian entrepreneur behind the effort. “It is about the importance of analog aspects in a more and more digital world.”

Ah, analog love. You hear about the same thing from people who love vinyl records, believing that they offer a better sound than today's digital CDs or files.

That's not a director, that's a director

I recently used this picture in a post in my Empoprise-NTN blog:



Spielberg @ Director's Chair by Fantax (Farhan) used under a Creative Commons License

At first I thought that this was taken at a place called "Director's Chair," but I subsequently deduced via the Flickr tags that it was actually taken at Madame Tussad's Wax Museum in New York City.

Kerri visited the museum in December 2005:

[T]he wax people majorly creeped me out. But still, I took pictures with Donald Trump, Yoko Ono, the Pope, Helen Keller, James Dean, The Beatles, the Spice Girls, and... I can't remember them all. But man that was fun. And my favorite picture of myself was when I was in the director's chair next to Steven Spielberg and wearing Stacy's beret. And I took a picture of Janis Joplin for Mike... since the entire world knows how obsessed he is with her. And then I turned the corner and there was Al Roker. And, of course, I took a picture for Charlie, who has since informed me that he's naming his turtle that.

This sounds like Steve Allen's old show "Meeting of Minds." Imagine the discussions that Helen Keller, James Dean, and Al Roker have after the visitors have gone home.

"A turtle?"

Robert Half makes lemonade with the (slightly) older set

I Know You're Going to be Pleased With These Numbers by foundphotoslj used under a Creative Commons License

I would think that a recession would benefit temporary agencies, since companies might jettison permanent employees and use temps to fill the gaps. But my thinking is wrong - according to BusinessWeek, sales at Robert Half plunged by one-third in the first quarter, probably because the recession is so bad that companies can't even afford to hire temps. (In addition, there would be huge public relations problems and possible legal problems if a company switched from a permanent to a temporary work force.)

But the BusinessWeek article further notes that Robert Half is positioning itself for the recovery, using a newly-available asset - temp workers with extensive experience who are now available because of the recession. Once business picks up, Robert Half hopes to clean up.

An influx of highly skilled temps could benefit RHI in several ways. Such workers are more profitable than younger employees because companies are willing to pay more to get them. (RHI pays its employees an hourly rate and charges clients a premium, with gross margins averaging 35% to 37%.) The broader range of experience among new temps also helps RHI to move beyond its core business of accounting and finance jobs, to expand its reach in areas such as technology, law, and marketing. Utilities, banks and mortgage companies also want to hire temps with experience in regulation and restructuring. And, Messmer adds, "a highly skilled temp has the added benefit of being able to train the company's permanent staff."

More here.

Jonathan Lee Riches probably won't be drinking Irish beer any time soon

I had nearly forgotten about Jonathan Lee Riches. Back in August 2007 I noted that South Carolina inmate Jonathan Lee Riches was suing Michael Vick, alleging that Vick stole Riches' pit bulls. The dollar amount of the lawsuit? $63 billion.

In that same post, I linked to an article detailing another of Riches' lawsuits - one in which he not only sued George W. Bush, but also www.google.com, Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party, Three Mile Island, Tsunami victims, Meals on Wheels, Various Buddhist monks, and a few dozen others.

I subsequently detailed the activities that landed him in prison, and various other things, many of which were documented in a blog called Dreadnaught. I then forgot about the guy.

[EDITED NEXT PARAGRAPH]

Then the Inquisitr reported that the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's most litigious man.

You can guess what Riches did next. Although he's apparently been moved from South Carolina to Kentucky, the next chapter occurs in the state of Washington:

Jonathan Lee Riches, aka Irving Picard, filed his latest legal fight this week in the Richland office of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, although he is incarcerated in the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Ky.

Riches alleges that Guinness is planning to print false information about the number of lawsuits he has filed, which he says is more than 4,000 worldwide. And he objects to the names Guinness intends to call him, including: “The litigator crusader,” the “duke of lawsuits,” “Johnny Sue-nami,” “Sue-per-man” and the “Patrick Ewing of suing.”

I haven't been able to ascertain whether there are any other defendants in this particular suit. Bono? Bob Geldof?

Three reasons you need to stay far away from FriendFeed - a contrarian view

Kool-Aid by Brent Gilliard (entozoa) used under a Creative Commons License

This morning, Hutch Carpenter wrote a post entitled Three Reasons You Need to Be on FriendFeed *Now*. A truly evangelistic post, Carpenter points out the benefits of FriendFeed to people who have never heard of the service, and have never tried it. As a confirmed FriendFeed fanboy, I agree with his reasons. However, not every service is for everyone, and if you think of the people who are critical of new media darling Twitter, those same people would REALLY hate FriendFeed. So I decided to adopt the contrarian view and come up with three reasons why you SHOULDN'T join FriendFeed.

#1: No one is on FriendFeed

If your goal is to have conversations with many people of diverse backgrounds, then FriendFeed is one of the last places that you'd want to go. Certainly if you're in FriendFeed and are conversing with a couple of hundred friends, it seems that everyone in the world is on FriendFeed. But take a step outside of FriendFeed and you'll find that most people aren't there. Now there are certainly a lot of people on Facebook, and there are a growing number of people on Twitter. Unless you want to join every service out there, I'd suggest that you concentrate on services that actually have tens or hundreds of millions of users, rather than the small fry.

#2: FriendFeed the company has all of the bad features of Twitter the company

There have been some vocal complaints about Twitter over the past few years. Twitter does not offer rock-solid availability. Twitter changes things on a whim and doesn't consult its users. There are huge problems with Twitter's API. Twitter has no monetization plan. If you look closely, however, FriendFeed has many of the same issues.

OK, FriendFeed doesn't have nearly as many downtime problems as Twitter, but when you lose all communication with your data for a few hours...well, let's not rely on FriendFeed to be there whenever you need it. And perhaps FriendFeed doesn't need the uptime of a computer aided dispatch system, but the fact remains that FriendFeed DOES have the occasional failure. And would FriendFeed maintain its fairly good uptime record if it had 10 million or 20 million users?

As for Twitter making changes on a whim, many notice that FriendFeed does the same thing also. Now I'm not of the school that believes that all of the changes in FriendFeed's latest beta had to be submitted to a vote of the users, but you have to acknowledge that FriendFeed entered the beta period, rarely communicated what was in the beta, didn't give advance notice of new features that would be in the beta, and didn't give advance notice of the time when the beta would be turned off and the new features would become standard in FriendFeed.

Which brings us to the API. I happen to be a user of fftogo, an application that allows FriendFeed access from older-model mobile phones. The application was written by Benjamin Golub, someone who was so talented that FriendFeed ended up hiring him themselves. As I mentioned previously, FriendFeed itself has recently undergone a major upgrade, but fftogo has not. Why not? Because the API itself has not been revised, and no date has been offered for completion of this task.

I've saved the biggest issue for last. Many people, myself included, have been critical of Twitter's delay in announcing its monetization strategy. I have maintained that a monetization strategy needs to be addressed quickly, since monetization affects many other issues. A Twitter subscription service, for example, would dictate lower traffic than a free-to-use Twitter service funded by advertisements. Yet while people have been complaining up and down about Twitter's failure to monetize itself, there has been a strange silence about FriendFeed's monetization plans, if any. Are they going to wait a few years before they hire a product manager to figure a monetization strategy out?

In short, those who have been critical of Twitter's failings as a company should note that FriendFeed suffers from many of the same defects.

#3: FriendFeed is not suited to the mobile future of communications.

I've hypothesized for years that true revolutions in computing will occur when we truly take advantage of computing devices that we can carry around, or wear, or even implant. When I learned BASIC programming in the early 1970s, I had to go to a computer. By the late 1990s, I ran into circumstances in which I could carry a computer with me. By 2006, I could compute without carrying a computer, namely by carrying a phone around with an operating system (in my case, Windows Mobile), a web browser (in my case...never mind), and some web sites that were adapted to this environment.

Now I can use FriendFeed (via fftogo), LinkedIn, Google Reader, last.fm, Facebook, MySpace, and a host of other sites via this mobile phone, but all of the applications are crippled in some way. Google Reader won't let me share with notes. last.fm won't play music. Facebook won't let me play Kidnap.

Now I'll grant that there are other phones that have more capability, which is fine if you want to lock yourself into a proprietary operating system in which the hardware/software vendor has final say over the applications that you can use. (That's a whole other "three reasons" post.)

The most powerful applications of the future, however, will have a minimal footprint and an extremely clean user interface, allowing you to easily do things from a smartphone, or from a not-so-smart phone, or perhaps from a Bluetooth earpiece. Or a Coke machine.

Of the major applications out there today, Twitter comes the closest to offering this type of simplicity. Yes, I can use FriendFeed or Facebook in a crippled mode from anywhere, but Twitter can truly be used from anywhere, or by almost anything. When was the last time that you heard of a Coke machine providing updates to Facebook or FriendFeed? I thought so.

So when we have the next revolution of computing, FriendFeed and its inherent complexities will be left behind.

Wrap-Up

I hope that you read my statement at the beginning of this post.

As a confirmed FriendFeed fanboy, I agree with his reasons.

Regarding Hutch's three reasons to join FriendFeed now, the most important one to me is the tracking feature. I myself have set up various groups and saved filters to find items of interest to me. The personal content database is nice also.

However, we have to guard against the tendency to assume that FriendFeed, or whatever other service we currently love, is perfect. And even if it is perfect, it may not be perfect for everyone. And if someone decides that FriendFeed is not for them, that doesn't mean that they're bottom-dwelling pond scum.

P.S. For what it's worth, I first heard about Carpenter's post in a Louis Gray Facebook entry.

Why Samuel Alito can't wait for Sonia Sotomayor to join the U.S. Supreme Court

It turns out that there's a pecking order to everything, including the U.S. Supreme Court:

Famously, on the Supreme Court of the United States, the most junior Associate Justice (currently Justice Samuel Alito), has the task of answering the door when the Justices are in private conference.

Wikipedia expands on "Junior's" duties:

The most junior Associate Justice in these conferences is tasked with any menial labor the Justices may require as they convene alone, such as answering the door of their conference room, serving coffee, and transmitting the orders of the court to the court's clerk.

There was some talk (see page 105) about changing this tradition when Sandra Day O'Connor became "Junior," since some were worried about the appearance of the lone woman on the Court serving as a secretary. However, the preceding "Junior," John Paul Stevens, felt that tradition should continue. And it has, ever since.

Breaking up the boards?

One of the major criticisms of public corporations over the last few years is the assertion that the Boards of Directors of these corporations aren't doing their job. Instead of truly overseeing the company management teams, critics assert that these boards are simply rubber-stamping whatever management wants, paying inordinately large bonuses for good performance and even larger bonuses for poor performance. The fact that the manager is often also the Chairman of the Board doesn't help matters much.

Several changes have been proposed to board governance, but this idea was floated last week:



The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed rules on Wednesday that would make it possible for a company’s shareholders to elect a limited number of independent directors....

The proposal would permit large shareholders — typically institutional investors like pension funds or hedge funds — or alliances of shareholders to nominate as many as a quarter of the directors. For the largest public companies, the proposal would require approval by 1 percent of the shareholders for a dissident slate to be nominated. For smaller companies, it would be either 3 percent or 5 percent, depending on the size of the business.

Personally, I would rather have something like this than a flat limit on executive pay, as has also been proposed. If there is a true business rationale (rather than insular groupthink) that justifies paying someone $100 million, then go ahead and do it.

Press on - in addition to accuracy, are bloggers obliged to put their posts in context?

Over the last week I've run across two incidents that have something to do with the press. I'm not at liberty to talk about either of them, other than to say that in the first case, someone felt misquoted in the press, and the second case, the person was accurately quoted in the press, but a third party who read the article didn't really understand what was being said.

So what does this mean to those of us who write? Obviously it helps if we quote things accurately, and I've made efforts to correct a blog post when I misrepresented someone. But are we also obliged to put our writings in context? If I do so, does that damage any chance that I have to be succinct? (Not that I'm succinct anyway.)

Your thoughts?

TWiT vs Twitter, and Apple vs Apple? Leo Laporte may be studying computer history

The Inquisitr's Steven Hodson has noted that Twitter's potential move toward a television reality show may have some unintended consequences:

Now as inane and stupid as I might personally find this whole idea of Twitter crossing over into an equally stupid and mind-numbing reality TV format there may actually be a legal battle brewing if they actually try to make the jump.

The reason I say that is Leo Laporte, the man behind TWiT (This Week in Technology), is asking folks on Friendfeed if this is the point where Twitter finally crosses the boundary into his trademarked area as far as naming is concerned....

That FriendFeed thread is here.



And my contribution to the thread was as follows:

If you haven't done so already, explore the Apple case, both the legal and business issues that Apple Corps encountered. And if you DON'T defend your trademark, what's Plan B? Remember that Twitter (or its future owners) may someday sue YOU.

I was not the first one to mention Apple vs Apple in the thread, primarily because the parallels are so clear. So perhaps it's worthwhile to revisit that case - or, actually, cases. This thing dragged on for a quarter century...so far. Low End Mac has a good summary of the issues, which are divided into three rounds. Here's an excerpt from Round 1:

In 1978, Apple Corps sued Apple Computer for trademark violation. The case went to court (Apple Computer probably looked like a pushover), and the two parties settled in November 1981 with the understanding that Apple would never enter the music industry.

Plus, Apple Corps got a whopping $80,000 - that's $20,000 per Beatle (or, in one case, Beatle widow).

Round 2:

[A new] suit cited the [Mac] Plus, Mac SE, Mac II, Apple IIgs, the Apple CD-SC CD-ROM drive, and Apple's MIDI interface for the IIgs and the Mac. All machines were capable of music playback and creation (except for the Apple CD-SC) and seemed to infract on the original contract. The suit again went to court, and the two parties reached a settlement on October 9, 1991.

Round 3:

In 2000, Apple hired Tony Fadell to market a MP3 player and the music store concept he had created after leaving Phillips. The iPod and iTunes Music Store were released in 2001 and 2002 respectively....

In the eyes of Apple Corps the iTunes Music Store was a clear violation of the 1991 settlement. In September 2003 (25 years after Apple Corps' first suit) Apple Corps sued Apple Computer for breach of contract simultaneously in the US and the UK. Settlement talks fell through after Apple Computer offered Apple Corps $1 million for the right to use the Apple name in the music industry.

The outcome of this case, decided several years later?

The judge found in Apple Computer's favor, since the company was not marketing music, merely delivering it to customers through its network. Apple Corps was required to pay Apple Computer for its legal fees (estimated at £2m) - and Apple Corps promised to appeal the decision.

Apple Computer ultimately paid Apple Corps $26.8 million for the right to use the Apple name in computers and music distribution.

Read the whole story here. The result of all this tussling? We'll see when Round 4 appears.

An accident of circumstance, or why the New York Times didn't break the Watergate story

On August 16, 1972, New York Times reporter Robert M. Smith went out to lunch with Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray. Technically it wasn't a business lunch - Smith was actually quitting the Times to attend Yale Law School - but the conversation was certainly interesting.

Mr. Smith said he sat across the table from Patrick Gray, listening in shock to details about Donald Segretti, who helped run the Nixon campaign’s “dirty tricks” operation, and John Mitchell, who had stepped down as attorney general to run Nixon’s re-election campaign.

“He told me the attorney general was involved in a cover-up,” Mr. Smith said, “and I said, ‘How high does it go? To the president?’ And he sat there and looked at me and he didn’t answer. His answer was in the look.”

Read the rest of the story, including how Smith rushed back to the office, told the story to editor Robert H. Phelps, and left for law school. Phelps soon left for a pre-planned monthlong trip to Alaska, and the story dropped through the cracks. Or, as Phelps (who taped Smith's account) said, "My memory is fuzzy on the crucial point of what I did with the tape."

Neither Phelps nor Smith have spoken about this until recently, in part to protect the confidentiality of the source, Gray.

Now one may surmise that if the Times had broken the story in August 1972, the country would have been spared its "long national nightmare." Or perhaps not - while the Washington Post would report many of these issues in the fall of 1972, even joint publication by both the Times and the Post may not have hastened Nixon's resignation. Even with the Post's reporting, it took nearly two years from the initial Watergate revelations to Nixon's resignation.

The United States is on holiday, but Africa is all business today

For those who haven't figured this out by now, recently I've been trying to schedule a post in the Empoprise-BI business blog every weekday at 5:00 am Pacific time. I often supplement this with additional posts every day, but I try to cover every weekday with at least a single post, the 5:00 am post. And I have similar schedules on the other blogs.

A great deal of work went into figuring out the times at which these daily posts appear in all of my blogs - basically, I did it all by alphabetical order. Actually there's a method to my madness; since the business day starts around 5:00 am Pacific time, that's a good time for a blog post to appear, I figure.

So anyways, I knew that I would eventually come to a day which would be a holiday in the United States. And that day is today - Memorial Day. Usually readership on this blog is down when people aren't working, so I figured that there would be some kind of hit in today's figures.

But while the United States is vacationing today, the rest of the world isn't. So I figured that I'd publish something from an area very different from the United States. So what about business in Africa? From the "Africa Open For Business" web site:



According to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and the UN trade agency, UNCTAD, Africa offers the highest return on direct foreign investment in the world, far exceeding all other regions. While petroleum products are the driving force behind those returns, other sectors offer impressive growth.

One of the fastest growth areas is telecommunications. From 1999 to 2004, cell phone use in Africa grew at an annual rate of 58%, whereas in Asia, the region with the next highest growth, cell phone use grew at a relatively paltry 35%.

Africa is of increasing strategic interest to the global economy. The continent is expected to soon provide the US with more petroleum than the Middle East. The top supplier of oil to China is Angola. China and India are rapidly increasing their business dealings with Africa. These new power-houses are often beating out American and European firms.

Africa offers a consumer base of more than 900 million people. While more than half of Africa is estimated to live on a dollar or less a day, the other half does not, and they are hungry for products and services.

For more details, go here. And you can order a video for US$179. Yup, Africa's open for business, all right.

Empoprise-BI News - 24 May 2009

Empoprise-BI News

The news letter for Empoprise-BI - An Empoprises vertical information service for business news.

Welcome to Empoprise-BI News

You might have noticed that I've been adding email subscription capability to all of my blogs, including Empoprise-BI. Well, now I can tell you why - because I want to start publishing a newsletter, and this will allow you to receive the newsletter via email.

But wait a minute - this is a blog post!

That's right. Initially I was thinking about setting up a traditional email newsletter.

I started out by looking at the email newsletters that I already receive and seeing what software was being used. Well, David Risley uses Aweber, and Theatre Experience of Southern California uses Constant Contact. While the newsletters are fine, and the services are fine, it turns out that these particular services require money, something which is not readily available at this stage of the growth of Empoprises.

The next step was to check out the free services that were available. I only got as far as checking Bravenet's free service, and I'll admit that I wasn't particularly bowled over by it.

That's about the time that I said to myself, "Self, why not just make them blog posts and have people subscribe to the blog?" While this means that you have to subscribe to the entire blog to get the post, that's actually something that I'd like people to do. I'm using FeedBurner to provide the email subscriptions (yeah, I know). FeedBurner sends an email to you every day that the blog in question (in this case, Empoprise-BI) includes any posts. There could be multiple posts in that daily email, so I'm trying to time things so that on newsletter days, the "Empoprise-BI News" will be the last item posted, and thus the top item in the email.

If you want to subscribe to the email, just go to the Empoprise-BI blog and enter your email address in the "Email subscription" area.



Or you can just subscribe to the RSS feed (the "Subscribe to Empoprise-BI" widget right above the Email subscription widget), or you can come to http://empoprise-bi.blogspot.com/ and read the newsletter on your own. And don't forget the Odiogo podcasts.

Behind the Scenes

I think we've had enough "behind the scenes" stuff this week, haven't we?

Special Features

I think we've had enough "special features" this week, haven't we?

Seriously, I'm thinking about having "Behind the Scenes" and "Special Features" sections where I can talk about my uninformed business philosophies, my Empoprise-BI FriendFeed room, and other exciting topics.

Upcoming

Since I write some of my blog posts well in advance, I already know on Sunday night what some of the posts will be that will appear in the coming week. So you can consider this a teaser regarding my planned blog posts. Needless to say, all plans can go horribly awry, so there's no guarantee that the stories below will actually appear.

Monday is a holiday in the United States, but it's not a holiday in the rest of the world. Therefore, I plan to share a blog post that focuses on African business.

Some people think that corporate boards of directors are part of what ails business today. I plan to talk about a proposal that may, or may not, cure the ailment.

And I'll also talk about Robert Half - actually, I'll talk about all of him.

Since my day job involves the translation of customer needs into marketing requirements, I have a vested interest in making sure that my marketing requirements truly reflect customer needs. Contextual interviewing is a tool that can assist in this, so I plan to talk about that.

And I plan to revisit the whole Oracle/Sun deal to see where things stand, including the current status of three shareholder lawsuits that allege that Sun sold out for too low a price.

And, in a piece that is completely unrelated to the stock market, I'll talk about the steel industry. And casinos. In the same post.

And, in my ongoing search for cool stuff, I found a robot that identifies and picks up stuff. Nice.

So expect to see these items, and other items, in the coming week.

Questions or comments?

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or whatever, feel free to leave comments at the bottom of this blog post, or you can contact me via email (empoprises at gmail dot com), Twitter (@empoprises), or FriendFeed (empoprises).

The sad story of Jesús "I just lost 13 pounds" Gorriti - oh, you haven't heard of Jesús Gorriti?

Jesús Gorriti is a user of both Twitter and FriendFeed. Approximately an hour ago, this tweet made it to FriendFeed:

Howdy my friend! I just lost 13 pounds in 15 days. It only costs me $5. Take a look at this...

This was followed by a URL in the .cn domain.

I would have linked to the original tweet, but Gorriti has already deleted it. He does have a couple of followup tweets about the incident, however:

mierda, me han hackeado la twittercuenta ¿cómo?

This tweet basically says, "Gee golly gosh, something has happened to my Twitter account." More or less.

@jotajotaz ya, tenia buena pinta pero me mosquea no saber que ha pasado y si la culpa es mia o de twitter.

"Culpa" means "fault."

As you can guess, the hacking of Gorriti's account has caused widespread outrage all over the tubes, with people demanding that Twitter fix things so that Gorriti would never suffer through this problem again.

Oh, wait a minute...silly unprofessional blogger than I am, it turns out there was no outrage at the hacking of Gorriti's account. I seem to have gotten him confused with Thomas Hawk. When Hawk's account was hacked, it resulted in over three dozen comments in FriendFeed.



Oh, and the #hawkhack also merited an Inquisitr story.

Now spammers have never been accused of smarts, but I do have to grant that this spam may have remained unknown for some time if it weren't for the fact that Thomas Hawk's fairly popular account was hacked.

But while we ponder this latest security breach, we shouldn't only think of @thomashawk or @gorriti, but also @saxon20044 and @sahnah and all of the hundreds of others who were victimized by this hack.

There's crowdsourcing, and there's crowdsourcing

During my last year at Reed College, I wrote an undergraduate thesis in economics that hinged upon the concepts of efficiency and equity. I merrily went about writing my thesis, turned it in, then prepared for the oral defense of my thesis. One of the professors asked me to explain why I chose the definitions of efficiency and equity that I used in my thesis. As it turns out, I hadn't really thought of the "why." I turned to my thesis advisor for support, but my advisor (rightly) noted that the definitions that I chose were up to me. A definite learning experience.

In a May 20 post, I spoke about the concept of crowdsourcing. As part of the post, I referenced two definitions from Jeff Howe:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

In a May 21 post, Rob Diana also spoke about crowdsourcing, asking whether the American Idol television show is truly an example of crowdsourcing. He turned to a Wikipedia definition of crowdsourcing, which included the following two sentences - Diana quoted the second:

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design[1] and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).

Focusing upon the examples given by Wikipedia, Diana said:

This does not sound like voting on a very subjective matter like talent or who makes the better pop star. This sounds more like which solution works best, or what is the common pattern in a large set of data. These are very objective measures.

Diana refers to another Wikipedia entry (this one on "The Wisdom of Crowds") that identifies, among other things, four criteria that separate wise crowds from irrational ones. These four criteria are diversity of opinion, decentralization, independence, and aggregation.

In the case of American Idol, Diana questions whether independence is truly present in American Idol voting, given that (as Diana notes) "[p]eople are highly influenced by the opinions of others around them."

So how does that apply to Sheila Scarborough's request for superior Virginia destinations? In this case, I believe that all four criteria were met. Regarding independence, I did not have contact with any of the other respondents before expressing my opinion, and frankly I don't think I've even heard of any of the other respondents (unless one of them is Steven Perez posting under an assumed name).

But are these four criteria truly necessary for true crowdsourcing to occur? It's all a matter or semantics, but it's worthwhile to note that, at least at first glance, the inventor of the term "crowdsourcing" does not seem to impose any requirement that the crowd itself be wise. While one idealistically hopes that a crowd will be wise, it's not always the case. You can, in Howe's words apply "Open Source principles" and come up with a really crappy product.

But regardless of how you define crowdsourcing, Rob Diana's conclusions at the end of his post are still valid:

So, if you are looking to create some great application on the web, and crowdsourcing is how you are going to solve some problem, think about what your crowd should be. Who should be in your crowd? Should it be a bunch of technology-loving early adopters? Maybe, or maybe not. You do not need to go after the largest crowd, just a crowd that is relevant to your problem.

But then again, a caution is in order here. I'll speak more about requirements in a future post, but if you're going to crowdsource (or otherwise solicit) the requirements for a software product, you need to think about the participants. Do you only talk to the purchasing manager who will buy the product? Or do you also talk to the person who will manage the group that will use the product? How about the employees? The IT organization? The customers of the company who will use the product? And what weight should be assigned to each of these groups?

Books are not Kindle-ing just yet

Barnes and Noble Stamford CT 02 by Monica Arellano-Ongpin (maong) used under a Creative Commons License

I'll grant that there are stick-in-the-muds like me who enjoy physical media, but there are a growing number of people who prefer to buy intangible things such as downloads. This is resulting in some changes in various industries that produce tangible stuff, including booksellers. Well, Barnes & Noble may not sell a lot of newspapers, but apparently they're repositioning themselves to sell something:

Barnes & Noble, the book seller, reported a smaller-than-expected quarterly loss and raised its full-year outlook on Thursday, helped by cost-cutting and better-than-expected sales....

The company said it expected a full-year profit of $1.10 to $1.40 a share, up from an earlier forecast of a profit of 95 cents to $1.25.

More here.

Computers as number-crunchers. Oh yeah. (IBM System S)

If nothing else, the Wolfram Alpha discussion/hype has reminded us that computers can be used as computational devices. We've been so focused on avatars and real-time feeds and all of that junk that we (or at least I) sometimes forget that computers can actually be used to compute. But IBM, even though it's recast itself as a service company, hasn't forgotten that fact:

New software from I.B.M. can suck up huge volumes of data from many sources and quickly identify correlations within it. The company says it expects the software to be useful in analyzing finance, health care and even space weather....

I.B.M....spent close to six years working on the software and has just moved to start selling a product based on it called System S....

Most computers, of course, can digest large stores of information if given enough time. But I.B.M. has succeeded in performing very quick analyses on larger hunks of combined data than most companies are used to handling.

More here. Or you can see what IBM says:

The Exploratory Stream Processing Systems team at T.J. Watson Research center conducts research on advanced topics in highly scalable stream processing applications and systems. Most of the research efforts come under the umbrella System S project, which spans several teams at Watson.

As the amount of data available to enterprises and other organizations dramatically increases, more and more companies are looking to turn this data into actionable information and knowledge. Addressing these requirements require systems and applications that enable efficient extraction of knowledge and information from potentially enormous volumes and varieties of continuous data streams. System S provides an execution platform and services for user-developed applications that ingest, filter, analyze, and correlate potentially massive volumes of continuous data streams. It supports the composition of new applications in the form of stream processing graphs that can be created on the fly, mapped to a variety hardware configurations, and adapted as requests come and go, and relative priorities shift. System S is designed to scale from systems that acquire, analyze, interpret, and organize continuous streams on a single processing node, to high performance clusters of hundreds of processing nodes.

Did I forget to mention Memphis?

In the Santa Ana (CA) arts district (I didn't know Santa Ana had an arts district).

Where's Nick Wheeler when you need him? (Swinburne's 5 dimensional data storage)

When I took freshman physics at Reed College, our lectures were delivered by Professor Nicholas Wheeler. Wheeler was a mathematical physicist, and as a result his lectures sometimes verged into the theoretical realm. He was fond of talking about things in 17-dimensional space. This would make me dizzy, and I found myself valuing Professor David Griffiths, who led our smaller sessions (conferences) and who was able to speak to us in a more practical manner.

I didn't become a physicist (that freshman physics course was the last science course that I ever took), and to this day I usually stay within three dimensions, only going to the fifth dimension in a musical sense. So when I saw this item, I was wondering what was going on.

Five-Dimensional Data Storage

A new material could eventually be used to store vast amounts of data on a disc.

Then I found the explanation:

Now researchers have for the first time demonstrated what they call a five-dimensional optical material. It can record data in three spatial dimensions and in response to different wavelengths and polarizations of laser light.

The material is being developed by researchers led by Min Gu, director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics at the Swinburne University of Technology in Victoria, Australia.



More here.