Month: July 2005

Discovering Work Life Balance

Brad Feld has an excellent post with ideas for all of us:

As I discovered what balance meant to me, the rules evolved into a set of habits which among others include (1) Spend Time Away, (2) Life Dinner, (3) Segment Space, (4) Be Present, and (5) Meditate. Following are examples of each:

* Spend Time Away: Amy and I take a week long vacation each quarter (which we fondly refer to as Qx Vacation depending on which quarter of the year it is) where we completely disappear. No cell phone, no email, no computer, no conference calls – my assistant knows how to find me in case of an emergency; otherwise Im completely unavailable for the week.
* Life Dinner: We have a standing date on the first day of every month that we call life dinner. Occasionally well invite friends; often we have dinner alone. We have a ritual where we give each other a gift ranging in value from nominal / silly (a fart machine) to expensive / romantic (jewelry). We spend the evening talking about the previous month and about the month to come, grounding ourselves in our current reality.
* Segment Space: We have two homes one in the mountains of Boulder, Colorado and one in the small town of Homer, Alaska. Both have nice office areas which are clearly separated from the rest of the house. We only have telephones in the offices and, by some delightful fluke of nature, our cell phones dont work in our Boulder house. We treat our houses as a retreat from the world and, while we do plenty of working at home, where we do this is separate and distinct from the rest of the house.
* Be Present: One of Amys lines to me is Brad be a person. This is a signal to me that Im not present in the moment, that something is troubling me, or simply that Im tired. Whenever Im not present, it only takes a short phrase to pull me back from wherever Ive drifted off to.
* Meditate: I use the word meditate metaphorically everyone should meditate their own way. Four years ago I became a marathoner the 6 to 10 hours a week I run is my current form of meditation. Im also a voracious reader and the 10 hours a week I read extends my meditation time. Do whatever you want, but spend some of your time on yourself.

The habits have created a structure for my life that not only encourages but reinforces a healthy work life balance. My work which used to overwhelm everything else I did is still a central part of my life. However, it is no longer my singular focus, nor is it the most important thing to me anymore. The balance that Ive discovered has helped me understand the value of other things, which has made my work and more importantly my life – much more rewarding.

Hagel on Brands

John Hagel writes:

We have witnessed a broad-based shift in brand power from product brands to retailer brands. Retailers like Wal-Mart, Tesco, Best Buy, Home Depot, Nordstroms and CompUSA have been steadily amassing brand power at the expense of more traditional product brands. Whats going on here?

Whats happening is that brand power is shifting with relative scarcity. In the first half of the 20th century, consistently high quality products were relatively scarce. Product brands prevailed. Over time, more and more products entered the market and shelf space became the scarce good. Power shifted to retailer brands.

Were now on the cusp of another major shift in brand power, driven in part by the growing role of the Internet as a shopping platform…As shelf space constraints evaporate, what becomes the scarce good?

It is something that is becoming ever more valuable our attention.

Also read Chris Anderson’s views.

Huawei in US

WSJ writes about the challenges faced by Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei as it tries to penetrate the US market:

With little experience in marketing, Huawei has struggled to build brand recognition in the U.S. It confused customers by using a new name for its U.S. business. With the headquarters in Shenzhen, China, hesitant to delegate, local executives have trouble adapting to the local culture. The company has been dogged by suspicions of cutting corners on intellectual-property rights, and alienated some job applicants by pumping them for detailed technical information. Huawei’s successful formula winning business in other countries with low prices hasn’t worked as well in a U.S. market marked by long-term ties between phone companies and their equipment suppliers.

The company’s setbacks in the U.S. contrast with its recent progress elsewhere outside China. From the Middle East to Latin America and, more recently, Europe, Huawei has taken business from global giants such as Germany’s Siemens AG and France’s Alcatel SA. Of the 19 licenses issued around the world last year for high-end wireless networks known as “third generation,” Huawei was involved in building 14 of them, according to BDA China Ltd., a Beijing-based research firm. BT Group PLC, the large British telecom company, recently gave Huawei an important stamp of approval, awarding the Chinese vendor part of a $19 billion project.

Web’s Who, What, When, Where, Why

Ross Mayfield writes:

We spent 1995-2000 trying to figure out the What of the net. What are we building and how do we make the mooh-la.

We spent 2000-2005 figuring out the Who. The Who really tripped us out — all that data, about me, connected to others, privacy invasions and a lot of yadda yadda.

From 2005 to 2010 we will be trying to comprehend the Where. Every new mobile device will transmit coordinates, every location device will be sensor aware. If you thought the public would freak out about the public knowing who they are — imagine the social awkwardness of where you are. Yeah, much of it is mundane. Home. Cubicle. Home. But you won’t be able to get off the grid. Anywhere.

From 2010 to 2015, Where will compound When. But about then Neuroceuticals kick in and we are so productive and have augmented memory to the point where real timeshifting occurs.

After 2015 Why is the big question.

Salesforce’s Multiforce

News.com writes about Salesforce.com’s new strategy – letting customers build their own systems.

Multiforce is also aimed at giving independent software vendors an opportunity to create products that expand the capabilities of Salesforce’s existing tools. Using the development platform, customers and ISVs are promised the ability to create new systems in the form of so-called Web services that blend seamlessly with Salesforce.com’s user interface and draw on data housed in the company’s CRM tools.

For instance, Salesforce has already created a tool that taps into the application programming interface for Google’s street mapping software. The hosted application is designed to let a Salesforce user generate maps to a customer’s offices using data from online CRM systems and Google’s code.

One partner, DreamFactory Software, which makes customization and integration technology for hosted software, is using Multiforce to extend the more basic CRM features built into Salesforce’s offerings.
…
At the heart of Benioff’s new strategy is the idea that companies with deep industry knowledge will have more success creating their own specialized programs than Salesforce could ever put together. Unlike rivals such as Siebel Systems, which already offers six different flavors of its own hosted CRM tools for customers in different vertical industries, Salesforce is betting customers, and more importantly ISVs, will clamor to build their own applications.

China Blogging

South China Morning Post has the story of Bokee, which raised $10 million recently:

It was not until June last year that Mr Fang and his business partner, Wang Junxiu, hired their first employee with the seed capital from Softbank.

In just over a year, the company has expanded to a staff of 210 and is hiring about 50 people a month. Mr Fang is optimistic Bokee can break even by the end of the year, and predicts the site’s registered bloggers will increase from 2 million to 10 million in the same period.

The site boasts big name advertisers such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, but the plan to push the business of blogging into profitability goes beyond the traditional reliance on advertising.

Bokee has also partnered with Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and telecoms giant China Mobile to provide wireless blogging services for a fee. But the revenue generator Mr Fang hopes will make his listing dream a reality is based on the model of Korean blog site Cyworld. A virtual currency pilot program beginning this month will allow Bokee bloggers to charge their readers, with the site taking a 20 per cent fee.

Next-Gen Broadband in US

Broadband Reports has an interview with Dave Burstein:

BBR: What can we really expect in regards to a bell next-gen deployment timeline?

DB: In three to four years – because constructing facilities for millions of people take that long – expect that half of Verizon should have fiber at 15-100 meg, otherwise slow DSL. Half of SBC should have DSL at 10-20Mbps, from existing boxes 2,000-5,000 feet away (FTTN). The rest will be slow DSL and satellite resale. One-tenth of BellSouth customers should have 50Mbps+ service from fiber to the curb. Half of the rest should have 10-30Mbps DSL, often using two lines.
…
which solution do you see as the best of the next-gen options?

DB: Verizon’s fiber is the best stuff out there, especially after they switch to 2.4 gigabit shared GPON in a year. That’s why the smart cablecos are worried. What BellSouth and SBC are doing is essentially matching cable of 2002. By the time they deploy in 2007, cable should be well ahead.

But better technology doesn’t always win. Perhaps SBC, by spending less, will be able to price lower and do ok after all. Nobody really knows, although everyone has an opinion. My opinion is that the best tech is needed, especially in an HD world, and Verizon is making the right choice. But some very smart people have looked me in the eyes and said “the fiber numbers just don’t work. Still costs too much,” and other similar comments.

Contextual Ads

Mark Glaser analyses the offerings from Google and Yahoo:

The first rule of thumb for contextual ads is the opposite of the old local TV news maxim, “If it bleeds, it leads.” In the case of hard news related to war, terrorism, rapes, murders and other unpleasant current events, the best bet could be to remove contextual ads or just run more generic run-of-site ads. Of course, some site publishers have no problem with hawking commemorative Iraqi War playing cards on stories about people dying in the war.

Yahoo’s ContentMatch uses various sensitivity filters for what ads are shown with content — along with human oversight from a staff of more than 100 editorial people. Paul Volen, who is vice president of product marketing for Yahoo Search Marketing, told me that Yahoo’s human oversight is what differentiates his service from Google’s.

“First, we do have a dynamic proprietary algorithm which takes the theme of a page and matches advertising to it,” Volen told me. “We also add a layer of editorial oversight to that. We look at a site and try to understand if there’s content that’s evergreen and won’t change, like index pages that are generic and aren’t updated every day. In those cases, we could have the editorial staff look at them and come up with the best matches. We work with the publishers pretty closely across their site to figure out how we want to attack the relevancy and matching.”

Google doesn’t have an editorial staff for AdSense, but does assign account managers to bigger sites for the premium level of AdSense services — though it is only available for sites above 20 million page views per month. Gokul Rajaram, group product manager for Google AdSense, told me that there are just too many dynamic pages served for humans to watch every ad that’s served up.

RSS as Marketing Tool

Th New York Times writes:

Google, Pheedo, Feedster and Yahoo Search Marketing are all peddling advertising options for R.S.S., an increasingly popular way of having a personal computer automatically retrieve information from the Internet.

For example, R.S.S. users interested in local weather could view forecast updates on their computers without having to visit a particular Web site.

Some big companies, like Verizon, are starting to buy space in the R.S.S. information streams, which are selected anonymously and pulled from Web sites by a PC.

R.S.S. may be getting bigger soon. Microsoft has announced that R.S.S. – the abbreviation stands for Really Simple Syndication – will be integrated into its next Windows operating system. Microsoft’s announcement makes it more likely that R.S.S., used for years only by the tech-savvy, will become more of a mainstream computer tool. R.S.S. was helped last year when Yahoo put it on My Yahoo pages.

R.S.S. is somewhat like TiVo for the Internet. By letting people have content pulled from Web sites and fed to their own computers automatically, they can then store it for later viewing. The growing number of R.S.S. users has some online publishers – they are now the biggest group of suppliers of R.S.S. feeds – starting to worry that R.S.S. could take eyeballs away from their existing advertisements on the Web.