Open or Die: The Value Of Robust Ecosystems

From a philosophical place sometimes it's hard beat how Google approaches product development. Let's take Android as a great example. For those of you unfamiliar, "Android...[is] the first complete, open, and free mobile platform."

Why is this so significant? As I discussed in a post long ago "Closed Ecosystems Die, Shouldn't Someone Let The Cell Phone Companies Know?", most mobile companies and handset providers have created closed ecosystems. Breaking in a new product such as Android in such a tightly controlled environment seems somewhat doomed to fail unless of course, you go in the opposite direction.

In Androids own words, "The concept is simple: leverage Google's expertise in infrastructure, search and relevance to connect users with content created by developers" which will be released in the Beta Android Marketplace...for what they are calling a user driven content distribution system.

Will Android and Android driven handsets be able to compete? The value of robust ecosystems and connecting with the developer community particularly in the difficult mobile market place will absolutely blow the doors wide open. Already hand sets with more robust browsers like the iPhone and the Bold are changing the way that people extend their desktop experiences to the mobile work force and economy.

And what will happen to the mainstream players who have up to now kept their ecosystems closed? Open or die will soon become the motto and that's not just what i believe. That's just an ecological fact.

The Scarcity Marketing Ploy Is Soooooo 2007

Brad Feld complains about the whole concept of 'Private Beta'. He's done with it because in part it really means to him:

""we are early and buggy and can't handle your scale, but we want you to try us anyway when we are ready for you." I've grown to hate this as it's really an alpha."

I tend to agree with him but for me what i hate the most about private beta? The fact that ever since Google launched Gmail, private beta has been synonymous with attempting to create the notion of scarcity. We are so cool that everyone wants to get into our beta.

But more and more I'm seeing that strategy failing, flopping and being downright rejected by the community. Private Beta is boring and as we develop closer ties to our weakest links, we want to be able to ensure not only the cool tech kids get to play, but everyone gets to.

So down with scarcity marketing and up with getting it right in Alpha so you can stop pretending and just let everyone in!

Networks Are Beautiful

I can't recall how I got here, but from visualcomplexity, "Skyrails is a Social Network and Graph Visualization System with a built-in programming language."



It's simply beautiful. It would be amazing to consider how we could build logic behind this and program it with client data and other behavioural marketing information to model how customers connect their social shopping patterns and/or social graphs....

Adaptive Blue Smart Link Test

I'm testing how Adaptive Blue's smart links work. Apparently, now that i have inserted the smart link into my site, once i talk about something that then links to their partners sites, a smart link will be automagically inserted.

So i'll create a link to Grant McCracken's new book which I want to buy called Flock and Flow and apparently then a smart link will be created.

Let me know what you think!

(of both the book and smartlinks)

Finally A Valid Reason For Women Not Running Software Companies

According to Anil Dash, "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

In his words:

"Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?"

First rational reason I've heard for men running software companies. We’ll just categorize this under the 'sad but true' banner.

;-)

update: Anil made a clarification in the comments - and just to be clear, my posting was more a tongue in cheek one over previous debates for women as valid technology entrepreneurs - Anil has often been a big supporter in fact of more women in technology - here's a link to a previous posting where I quoted him on his posting, Boys Clubs Are For Losers

Mango Map Has Launched

My brother has officially launched his companies new product Mangomap.

According to the site:

"Mango is a fully featured turnkey Internet GIS system. Our rich user friendly interface has been designed to allow you to share your geospatial and related data sets with non-expert users via a powerful and highly secure yet simplistic web browser interface."

Jeff had a really successful launch at a recent mapping conference with people particularly feeling their user experience was leaps ahead of their competition.

So now you know, if you need a Internet based GIS system, you know where to go. And feel free to tell him his sister sent you (I'm still working on getting myself a free Garmin handheld)..

New Favorite Cartoonist

Having had many debates with "consultant" types who have never had the pleasure to actually WORK in corporations (and no, doing brainstorming sessions with them doesn't count), i found this cartoon very funny. Geek And Poke, my new favorite cartoon blogger.

New Feature Idea

Ok it's really an old feature idea but can someone do this soon please? A 'printer-friendly' button on all blogs.

More and more blogs are being used for news and research (by the way i must owe Zoli at least a few thousand dollars for great quotes and insights just made for keynote/powerpoint) the ability to print without having a ream of paper attempting to print out side columns and pages of comments would be very helpful and good for trees.

Blogger product development? Anyone? Help?

Innovation Nation

Report on business (and CBC and the Star etc etc.) are talking about a new report that gives Canada what is tantamount to a failing grade in innovation:

"This country is doing dismally in the critically important area of innovation," writes the board's president, Anne Golden. "And the implications of that failure ... show up in the absence of creative policy and investment decisions across all the other domains."

"Canadians are complacent and generally unwilling to take risks," the report scolds. "This culture holds Canada back."

Risk adverse is exactly how I would characterize the Canadian environment. In the tech sector there is no question that living in Canada is a detriment. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time and all of them say the same thing – getting funding in Canada is a longer and more difficult process compared to the US or Europe.

Hopefully reports like this will actually get some action going. There are so many great innovators here and its clear that lack of support actually impacts our economy.

Maybe the Government will actually take some steps. I can think of two areas they might want to start with – overhaul IRAP (what a nightmare getting a wee grant there was) and create tax policies that actually encourage greater investments in high risk areas.

Innovation isn't the issue here in Canada. But supporting it is.

We Are The Network

Cross-posted from the official oponia networks blog

So Vanessa starts talking to me about this idea of wanting the Web to be end-to-end. She was going on about nodes (huh?) and how I am not a node (wha?) and then she started to furiously draw a bunch of pictures where the Web was represented in all its glory as something that looked pretty much like this:



I loved her passion but I didn’t know wtf she was talking about. And after about a half an hour of her mad technical genius, I said, yeah but what does that mean?

V: It means you could publish stuff from your laptop without anyone in the middle.

And that’s where it started. Getting rid of the middle man and giving yourself a presence on the Web that was totally and completely your own. In many ways a simple idea, but once you wrap your head around the implications of it, an extraordinarily powerful one as well.

As for the product we created on top of the oponia networks platform?

One of the greatest things for me about the ucaster is how pervasive it has become in my life and how much I love to use it. I love our apps. I love one step publishing and having people from serious programmers to my mother use the same tool. I love how it's as easy to get stuff off the Web as it is to get it on. And I love the fact that if someone doesn’t want to use our homepage app or has their own java app (and even more soon) that they are perfectly welcome to do so.

And my favourite thing? The ucaster isn’t about us. It’s about you.

And that's as it should be.

Happy sharing

Cambodian Atlas To Compete With Google Maps?

Just kidding! But there is a lot of interesting things going on below ground.

To that end, my brother's company Aruna Technology co-located in Cambodia and Laos, has just launched The Atlas of Cambodia by the Royal Danish Embassy.

According to the site, it "has been created to provide civil society, government institutions, Danida’s development partners and the public at large with information on the state of the environment and natural resources in Cambodia and related social and economic issues based on data collected during the programme period from a number of the Danida funded projects."

To get to the actual map itself, click on "link to map" in the top right hand corner.

My brother is also the only authorized distributor for Garmin Cambodia although he has yet to give me any cool toys for free (yes that is a hint Jeff ;-)

update: found a recently published article by the Documentation Centre of Cambodia that Jeffrey has written based on his thesis work at Cornell (the family is always last to know) - “Searching for the Truth,” which has made a welcome contribution to the understanding of the centrally-planned irrigation systems of the Khmer Rouge."

A Demonstration Is Worth A 1000 Pictures

Having people who work all in different locations can often be a bit of a pain. A tool that I bought to show demos of our product for investors has become my new friend for showing the team what i mean when something isn't working right.

ishowu basically takes a QuickTime of your desktop including your mouse clicks that you can send instead of words.

As they say,

"if a picture is worth a thousand words, a demonstration is worth a thousand pictures."

Passionate Users Aren't Created, They're Discovered

Brad Feld had a post back in August where he talked what he called the golden segment. The 19% of your user base that creates the tipping point for your success and in his words

“If you can figure out how to engage these folks, you win.”

Through out the process of our closed alpha test I exchanged ideas and got feedback both positive and negative from a range of people. Through those discussions, it was easy to see what types of people were going to use oponia and why and what types likely weren’t. But it wasn’t until we shut it down that I had the big epiphany. Without even knowing it, I had a sub-segment of people who were using the product all the time and actually missed it once it was gone!

I even got a request from one person to get 6 accounts activated because our product solved a short-term problem that her and a group of co-workers are having.

Needless to say, we are getting her the 6 accounts.

But here is my point. Passionate users aren’t created - they're discovered. It’s making that discovery and subsequently what you choose to do with it that might in the end make all of the difference.

Microsoft To Build Web Version?

Apparently, Microsoft is building an online office suite.

Wow this seems like a horrifying thought to me. I can't even imagine it really. Having recently played around with folder share (which I was TOLD was sooo easy and found completely complicated), I can't even imagine how it would work.

It's really time Microsoft took a strategy of being a leader. Getting some big brains and innovative thinkers to challenge their models and not assume that Google has everything correct. As the stunted launch of Google's apps proved and growing success of companies like Ning that got a luke warm reception from the blogosphere, you never know what will succeed until you launch. The users in the end will decide. Amen to that.

ps. Microsoft, if you give us "show tags" functionally like Word Perfect used to have, I would be most appreciative