The Apple world is full of fun speculation. Apple fans expect innovative new products. So let me introduce you to iChart! Apple’s upcoming killer Enterprise product.

iChart is a flip chart on steroids. It borrows the best from the past, building on the lowly paper flip chart and the easy sharing built into Electronic Whiteboards. It redefine the future of presentations. iChart breaks the monotony of the PowerPoint / Keynote presentations with live customized notations (by the presenter), audience participation, and simply pinch and zoom sorting. Finally, the flexibility of transparencies again. And yet so much more….. Airplay, video conferencing, and dual or multiscreen presentation possibilities. iChart is the future for any boardroom presentation, training room discussion; presenting the data in a format more adaptive and free flowing, enabling the presenter to work the displays in  a multi-modal fashion. Like brainstorming? Like post-its? Like enabling an audience? Let them scribble post-it notes on their iPhone or iPad and see them magically appear.

I’m not quite sure why I woke up with this idea, or if it has been suggested before. I know I’d read something about Airplay and multiplayer gaming coming to the next generation AppleTV (still speculation really out there). There’s also plenty of speculation written about whether or not Apple will enter the living room with large displays. For me…. iChart…. a huge flip chart sized display provides a perfect example of something that really uses the big screen in a new way and like the iPad which enable more personal and intimate “sales” exchanges (vs a laptop example in a doctors office) this enables a more creative conversational style around a large screen device. Perhaps a flip chart is too small. Yet I can see ad agency execs carrying it as part of a portfolio case. Importantly, iChart would take the iPad, iPhone further into the Enterprise environment. They would be great at conferences.

So would you want an iChart in your business? How would you use it?

Will iChart kill other telepresence / video conferencing products with it’s FaceTime built in? What might it mean for networked meetings? What special apps could it be loaded with? How might these be used in store? For promotions?

What would the real screen specs be? How much would it weigh? How low could the cost be? It appears the real cost will be in the screen?

The keynote presentation to kick of the second day of eComm. Relevant Voice Platforms  -  Kelly Fitzsimmons, HarQen. Words generally paraphrased below. Presentation was much better than my notes! Clearly need her product!

“Text provides the IQ but misses the EQ”

Voice is really important. How many of you are on top of your communications? Are you in conference call hell? We have a situation with the network. The network is no longer trusted. A lot of send, and not a lot of acknowledgement. We insert more and more emoticons into our text.  And we are broadcasting more and more. Desperate for acknowledgement. Today, Unified Communications is really a euphemism for a DDOS attack. We are communicating more than we ever have and understanding less and less as the acknowledment isn’t there.

Today communications start out with a text… finally you end up on the phone. We talk when conversations get complex or confused. Yet today, our most efficient mode of communication fails us again and again. Voice is a connection device that has a richness to it that you can never replicated in text.

We expect our voice conversations to be memorized. By contrast we do lots with text…. but none of the richness. Voice as a modality has that emotional quotient embedded into it. What happens when we lose voice? Example… end of call we keep our notes and lose our memories of the call. Every day we ask people to memorize conversations and there is no way to go back to them. Had thirty thousand years to think about the iconography of text — the future demands that we get more efficient communications.

Example Call center. Today great job on collecting the data. Can even go into live calls and look at the analytics. Example Script X is failing. So we can see the percentage failing,  That tells you the what but not the why. So as soon as you can go in and check what people are saying you can soon find out that certain agents are off script. Should you through it out or not. What is the problem? Etc.

Why are their barriers to voice being adopted like text? The technology to make relevant voice platforms available exists. We can organize data in a way that you can easily find the data again. IT is not an AI problem rather a behavioral problem. What conversations could be if they were navigatable if they were prioritized and easily accessible?

Where are the economics and incentives in this? You need them both micro and macro.  Conference call hell references! Plenty of pain – we all want it different. We play angry birds and think bad thoughts. What is the incentive for change/ Macro. Telecom! It will emerge in a very different form. All the OTT players may well change the game. For the OTT’s it is just another data time. Voice is the Golden Goose for telecom. Minutes aren’t down although revenue ARPU is. Nothing is making up the difference. What will people pay for?

Voice is programmable media. (Definitely, not enough thought generally about this.) You can have programmable experiences even on a dumb phone. A voice platform can bring them as an audience back in. This also has to be multi-lingual. It is the future of commerce and the infrastructure is already there… (talking about wireline right now as it is stable, delivers voice and this can lead to a whole new way to communicate.

It’s not a new thought. The voice interface and gui dreams go way back to 1987 and examples like Apples Knowledge Navigator. See the video. You will see the use of voice related search and commands. It was a dream over twenty years ago.

It’s not simply Harqen we are one of many in this space that are going to be part of seeing it happen. I will leave you with the idea that VOICE REALLY MATTERS.

Lee is asking questions about how she will split the voice up. You can create and track and understand natural start and stop points. Example re job interview. Just the process of shifting the medium changes the reaction and how people react to it.

How do you reference the specific part of a call. Today what we are relying on is people We are getting used to SMS, texting and chat during meetings. That part that exists outside will no longer be siloed but notes become nested and then underneath…. you are editing the audio based on the behavior. See the Symposia launch later today.

Comment - Great presentation (best at eComm so far), nice introduction to thinking about voice and making voice more efficient and powerful as part of the communications vehicles we use. Will we continue to be more and more text dominated or can we harness voice to become a more powerful element in progressing and moving forward. Kelly says – Voice Matters! Yes it really does.

I’ve written a few posts on the user implications of the iPad and changes to behavior that I’ve observed. You can find these here.

Imagine my delight to find the BMWMOA International Rally had WiFi everywhere! It was excellent, consistent and delivered at high speed. Despite there being 6109 attendees there wasn’t the pressure on the network that you get at a geek fest, the interest was more in bikes, chat, and a beer or two. Still as usual I was keeping my eye open for technology – particularly iPads which beat netbooks and carrying laptops on a bike any day. There were plenty of iPhones around too in this crowd. Now this biker crowd definitely skews older – it’s quite possible the average age was over 60 there. And I know the average age of BMW riders is north of 50.

I had placed my tent down to get a shady tree early in the week. By the time I returned on Thursday my choice spot was very crowded and bikers from all over had moved in. I went to the Rally knowing no-one and was pleased to find myself in the midst of a very eclectic group. Yet in my business I’m always looking for a few insights or reminders about how the world is changing and how people are having difficulty with it. So this post is really a short story about one of my campmates a retired lawyer from Texas who’s been coming to these Rallies for quite a few years. This is less about his stories and more about my observations. If you read this my friend I trust you see how much I enjoyed sharing with you.

My buddy had one of the latest Sprint phones an HTC Evo I think… or Samsung. It was an Android phone. He also had an iPad which first got us talking about them. I also know that I changed his world talking and sharing with him what he could do with both of these tools. After we talked they were more magical and valuable to him. And the world changed slightly.

Let’s step back. He’s retired and it was his daughter that really wanted the iPad. I suspect she conned him into buying one for him too. Perhaps he thought it a good idea for the trip this year. It wasn’t the type of conversation where I could dwell too deeply on these issues. His daughter had set it up for him. His grandkids had put a couple of games on it. It didn’t have more than one and a half screens worth of apps downloaded. The iPad was doing what he thought it could do at this point and not really showing him what it could do.

So naturally I asked him what he was using it for… and we began talking about his backroads route going back to Texas. We found ourselves talking about using google maps app versus google maps in safari to find routes. (iPad tends to push you back to the app). Soon I was showing him my iPad and how I’d used DropBox to drop my route maps from my Mac onto and then save them for offline use on my IPad. But we had a more immediate need. He needed maps and screens for tomorrow…. when he wouldn’t have cell coverage (more on that later) as his like mine is WiFi only. FIRST SIMPLE trick. Take a picture of the screen. Both buttons simultaneous click. So he soon had his photo file filling with maps/screenshots of directions. He was delighted and and I’m sure he never looked at the paper maps he had on the way home. The satellite view convinced us that a few roads also weren’t right for his 1200RT.

Of course this exercise took us into comparing iPads. He looked at mine with its pages of news apps. Within moments I’d got him downloading apps for WSJ, NYTimes Bloomberg etc. I can’t say how thrilled he was with this discovery. I made sure he downloaded them. We did search I then show him categories and how to find free apps etc. He was just delighted to get a daily fix opportunity for the Drudge Report. Oh well….

Then this took us to mobiles. He’d said perhaps you can help me with this… I then learned he had an unlimited data plan on Sprint with an Android handset. I started looking for the data modem on it. I was telling him it is only finding the app or it is already installed and you can use this as a wifi hotspot to provide all the connectivity he could need for his iPad almost anywhere. Unfortunately, that’s one I didn’t solve but again I know he will call sprint or check around / go into their store to find out how to use it as a hotspot.

We spent about an hour on this. Both of us I’m sure were highly animated. I had a blast. I also learned he’d paid for a $99 course at the Apple store. Basically as many help visits / tuition as he wanted. I’m not sure he’d been yet. Yet I’d been showing him ABC TV, NetFlix etc. He hadn’t been aware of the streaming capability. He didn’t have iBooks installed and I then helped him add Kindle too and talked about the differences. Another “bingo” moment. I challenged him to a racing game…. it’s about that time that the other guys told us to turn them off. I think there was some tech envy creeping in – although my other campers were still being slowing pushed into the tech world.

While nice to know that one iPad user now thinks his iPad is many times more valuable and I think well certainly hope I’ve made him more curious about it and willing to explore, the whole experience was one big red flag. Tech Geek world continues to make too many assumptions. We may think the iPad is an easy to use product or that the latest Android in your hands is going to get all the various options explored. The fact is few people either have the curiosity, or the understanding to know that it should do something. These products are magical when you are curious….. otherwise they are just a dumb purchase that isn’t leveraged to the max.

Some Observations.

• Granddad is / can adapt to the iPad very rapidly. However, he’s probably going to like “print” – news more than “music” (and may have never had an iPod). He’s probably also splurge on games for grandkids when he understands how to add them.
• The iPad doesn’t / fails to create a “magic” moment out of the box for users like my friend above. That’s because they see it as a PC which for them is just email… or not much more.
• There’s a collection of Magical Products – that could make a difference. However because they are only found in the APP store we can’t assume they will ever be found. In fact the iPad store organization is terrible for helping with this problem. There’s not even a first time visitor or user set of suggestions.
• Steve Jobs for all the great marketing he is attributed with is blowing the educational opportunity with every iPad and for that matter iPhone and iPod Touch sold. The suggestions I provided, the mini-tutorials may seem so obvious that you think you can skip them. You can’t. These should be installed on the device when it ships. The idea that there is no “HELP” effectively is a mistake.
• There’s no reminder of why it is “magical” out of the box. PC manufacturers junked up their PC’s with unwanted software for years. I don’t want to see that on the iPad. Yet a few videos… the how you do this and that – take a screen shot…. explore books, etc.
• Even WiFi and Using HotSpots can add some understanding of utility. Here’s a guy that has a hotspot in his phone and he doesn’t know it. If he knew it… the iPad just became more valuable.

My reflections above lead me to believe that Apple doesn’t really have a good grasp on these new iPad users. Yes it is early days. However, the Geeks are giving them to everyone. Christmas will see huge numbers sold. My belief and the proof point really is we all want our elders to stay current, we want to keep them going, keep them curious and we’re willing to give them expensive gifts from time to time. If the choice for many is… do I give my daughter one or my father…. I think I’ll hear I can share the one at home (although the device is more personal than I expected it to be) and give one to my Dad first.

The out of the box experience is lacking. An iPod Touch may hit the market with YouTube and Music, an iPad doesn’t. It needs TV on it… more Books, some Newspapers and magazines. And most important it needs to make the APP store really accessible. Right now it confronts people with “Ah I will be paying” and potentially all the concerns this target has with online shopping. It’s a danger zone rather than a learning and pleasure zone. It’s probably a shame it is known as a store rather than a “Zone” or a “Mall”. A “Zone” would really help with things like free, learning, hints, geniusbar, and then all the other things that could be brought in. Eg social element, meetup places etc. I’m sure that it is coming yet it’s coming too slow.

Smart Phones – similar problems. I tried to find the hotspot capabilities and couldn’t.  I couldn’t find the store in two minutes to see where to go and look for it. Everything about the Android remains more complex than the iPhone from what I’ve seen with each test I’ve used and tried. The message still isn’t getting through. Dumb it down. Dumb it down. Actually make it easy to use. I believe the mobile carriers aren’t making “hotspotting” with your mobile easy enough. Now that data seems to be charged for charging extra for this option like AT&T is obviously just what it is. A rip-off.

This post is the result of a collaborative conversation. Jon Husband and I were catching up on Skype discussing where KM / HR /  enterprise learning / web2.o themes are going. I captured some of our thoughts in rough notes and  then tried to grow them. I passed back my draft to Jon who edited and added some clarity. Today blogging this my first question is too soft. It is not just looking for new conversations, what I care about is whether or not you will embrace change and have a real conversation around it. That’s something we are both effective at helping people with.

The New Conversation – Exponential Flows

Are you looking for the new conversation? The conversation you are supposed to be having or perhaps aiming to turn into gold?

How we enter into conversations is fundamentally changing. So is our role in holding them and using them. You sort of know it and yet you want the proof points too, because as often as not the “conversations” you and others may be having on the Web (the Web2.0 conversation) are too ad-hoc.

We might say it’s broken. It’s too focused on collaboration as the new work while organizations are just bogged down in meetings. Is your organization truly agile? Flexible? Connected? How are you addressing the change in processes required to succeed?

Consider these general trends:

• more information is available “in the flow”
• it can be easily searched and retention may not be the key
• change when networked effectively is not linear rather exponential
• we talk about “learning faster”, and “failing faster” in order to learn better and more quickly
• developer communities are much more agile than the enterprises they support
• we live in the flow in an activity stream and control or have access to more data personally

Enterprise conversations are at an inflection point – or closing in on one. Whereas previously “info was power” increasingly the outsourcing, the API’s, “standards” mean reduced leverage from internal information silos. Competitive advantage now comes from harnessing the value of community info. IE how connected is the organization. More importantly … how connected is each employee both internally and externally.

Each day we own … and are associated with … more of the information around us. As our lives become more digital that “search” about us (Example Specify) demonstrates the augmented power of the individual to be both part of and apart from a conversation. Today it is harder and harder to push things at me; I pull all the good stuff and some of the best stuff I may share or pass on. And while those “things” may seem without context the emerging people aggregators can make sense out of it.

Many employees are sharing stuff outside of the workplace all the time. For the most part the organization has no way to judge if this learning is relevant or even how it can use it. Why ? Because our lives are not really part of the organizations and we separate our behavior for our jobs. Do you have a life that is outside your job? In a more transparent work world we must increasingly be prepared to connect our personal world and our work world. I think we’ll benefit and so will the communities in which we work.

This boundary and managing the “what we do”  is the key reason the enterprise is stuck in thinking about information assets, and silos rather than how does the organization learn and help people prosper. For example, people such as those in developer communities are adapting more rapidly to change and are more agile in their actions. We can only expect this trend to accelerate. Another example is the way traffic monitoring systems are changing, or being changed. Today we have proof that a few mobile phones can actually process the location of traffic jams more accurately than the traditional helicopter in the sky, or more recently the webcam on the pole. Yet few organizations go would let go to this extent.

The answer is to let go and embrace the employees, and the community and encourage them to bring more in.

There’s plenty of good example of organizations that really get the purpose of the “suggestions” box. Yet if the box has a definition around it… eg boxed then how many suggestions are being missed. That’s the downside of restricting the flow of information into the organization. That’s the downside for not turning the organization outwards. Organizations are so focused on “push” that they fail to work the “pull” effectively.

Concurrently organizations must think less about “flow” and more about “acceleration”. Being in the flow isn’t enough. An organization’s effectiveness and ability to survive will be embedded in exponential escalation and network effects.  Knowledge has always flowed between individuals and within groups. However, for the most part individuals have no interest in hoarding that information. Neither do small businesses. They were never able to spend the money or capture the information to leverage “information and data” to make money. However, they built relationships better than their large compatriots. They thought about the conversations they had, and they listened. That’s something that most major enterprises don’t know how to do.

The Microsoft Kin debacle is a great example of how not to listen. If you ask me the research must have sucked, the business model re pricing didn’t hold up etc. The biggest failure was not listening, and a culture that seemingly was incapable of asking sensible questions. Microsoft had ever chance in the world not to miss this opportunity and blew it. Microsoft is also structured around old principles.

Conversation brings questions. Plenty of organizations know how to talk or is that strut their mumbo jumbo. They have PR and marketing experts now falling over themselves to provide that “social” connection and leverage. If it happens at a personal level it may work.

The crux is the information is increasingly moving to being outside the organization. Many organizations are going to be hollowed out by this effect. Just think about an organization that has no information assets, but still makes or provides something. What does it need? It certainly needs suppliers. It needs a way to estimate demand or make to order. It also needs to pay the employees. Does it need a huge marketing department in a world which can aggregate profile and demand with a simple / complex search? What will sales look like? Will it be a developer community? Or is that a user community?

In a restaurant where people go to dine (for example) the Chef has recipes. Most recipes, and how to execute them, are contained in their head. Yet perhaps tomorrow the menu should be based on who’s coming to dinner. So if you are a restaurant competing for business perhaps Yelp is going to help you with your menu?

So if you are the “new” organization looking to start a “new” conversation that will take you forward – where to start?

Don’t start with systems, and processes. Reject the idea that you are going to roll in new collaborative software. Start instead with a message. Start by listening… listening harder. In fact, that may be the first social step to getting beyond the structural impediments that lie in your way. When you listen really hard you open yourself up to new conversations. Those tend to be the ones that create real value. They are also the equivalent to learning on the job, and increasingly learning in real-time becomes the core of the work.

Think exponential. We tend to think straight line. In fact the accounting and budget departments don’t like the hockey stick estimates. Marketers always want to go viral too. That’s the same sort of exponential thinking. Yet that’s what we need. Good ideas, like a great story, are infectious, shareable, and seeded with a passion.

Empower people. Think about values and principles. It’s better to run on those than to run an organization on rules. Strengthen core values and look to build the conversation around them. Build conversations that revolve around flow, acceleration, agility, and change.

Only then will you be on the way to a new conversation. For Enterprise2.0 is stuck today in “social business”, web2.0, and resorting to outside suppliers and vendors with solutions for yesterdays problem.

When work moves beyond the boundary it becomes more social. When the organizational values are more broadly adopted by a community then engaging becomes more compelling. We’ve seen this in traditional brands and no matter how hard they try we will never see it effectively done by companies that are protected by regulation (example AT&T, Verizon, Comcast).

Companies like FedEx and UPS have harnessed information that helps delivery and tracking. They facilitate relationships between buyers and sellers. I’d suggest that more companies should think like that.


The phrase ‘thought leadership’ has some appeal to me. So today, I was reading an insightful post by Jim McGee, which led to some reflections and a gut reaction on why ‘thought leadership’ is finished as a marketing, management or PR label. [image to the left, from here].

Jim McGee writes that Thought Leadership risks becoming an empty marketing phrase just when it is becoming essential to longer term success. He concludes that organizations need to rely on a steady stream of new ideas, and need a foundation of explicit reflection to continuously build and test mini-theories on how their actions lead to outcomes.

McGee’s Musings : Rethinking thought leadership as an operating principle

Payoff to knowledge workers and their organizations

Treating thought leadership as a marketing responsibility does create organizational value, but at a significant cost in terms of effort and disruption within the organization.

On the other hand, treating thought leadership as an operating principle better aligns the demands on those core contributors. Now, rich, high quality input to thought leadership efforts are relevant components of ongoing work. Moreover, this approach enhances individual and organizational learning as a primary goal; thought leadership becomes a valuable side effect of doing work, instead of being an onerous additional requirement.

Professionals grow and develop through reflective practice. They build and test mini-theories of how their actions lead to outcomes. In a simpler world, that reflection was built on the slow accretion of experience. In today’s world, it is more effective to build on a foundation of explicit reflection.

My own two cents: In a world of rapid change, instant real-time updates and network effects, managing or marketing ‘thought leadership’ seldom puts runs on the board. It is only when the organization becomes more collaborative, more effective at asking better questions and more agile at interpretation and at finding direction that organizational performance begins to improve. That appears consistent with Jim.

What Jim doesn’t stress enough is that many organizations have hired agencies and consultants for “thought leadership” rather than for “learning faster”. These are often different skill sets. This also runs the risk of alienating the very employees that should be empowered to learn on the job. Jim identifies the opportunity as at the “edges of current practice”. I’d agree. However, for thought leadership as a caption to remain relevant, the focus must turn towards ‘upstream conversations’. We can’t predict the future, and ‘thought leadership’ is unfortunately stuck in today as a case study or as a guess about tomorrow in the not-yet executed mode. Upstream conversations, on the other hand, enable an organization to follow pathways to improved reflection, and to the capture of new, better and more agile questions, ideas and solutions. [Image Credit]

In fact I’d argue that the real health of an organization and its leadership and strategy is anchored in the quality of the conversations it has. If an organization really wants long term ‘thought leadership’ which works as both a hiring platform and a customer / relationship / partnering strategy, then it’s best to look at more immersive approaches. That’s perhaps why marketing so often had the lead and various research approaches remain key. However failing to engage with upstream technical / technology advances, or changing standards, regulatory etc, any position the company had could be frittered away.

Those that understand the “upstream” opportunities and ramifications and can bring them first to market win. Whether fleshing out a new product or evolution of a current service. The real leadership is in how the organization has the conversation.

No real surprises in this first “report” on iPad usability. Still it is well worth the read. I’ve found and made many of the same observations. They have a 93 page report you can download at the end. There’s some good technical jargon and it certainly supports my general contention that the “publishing” media apps are the most boring. I’ve also been less than impressed by the “navigation” found in iPhone apps. Fact is up-sizing iPhone apps doesn’t work very well. Some of the language does seem harder than necessary yet it’s required to frame the real opportunity the iPad represents. That so many have already embraced it positively merely points to what is to come.

iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Another big difference between iPad and iPhone is that regular websites work reasonably well on the big tablet. In our iPhone usability studies, users strongly prefer using apps to going on the Web. It’s simply too painful to use most websites on the small screen. (Mobile-optimized sites alleviate this issue, but even they usually have worse usability than apps.)

The iPad’s bigger screen offers reasonable usability for regular Web pages. Of course, there’s still the “fat finger” problem common to all touch screens, which makes it hard for users to reliably hit small targets. The iPad has a read–tap asymmetry, where text big enough to be read is too small to touch. Thus, we definitely recommend large touch zones on any Web page hoping to attract many iPad users.

Also, most Web pages offer a rich and overstuffed experience compared to the iPad’s sparse and regulated environment; when an iPad app suddenly launches users onto the Web, the transition can be jarring.

For more than a decade, when we ask users for their first impression of (desktop) websites, the most frequently-used word has been “busy.” In contrast, the first impression of many iPad apps is “beautiful.” The change to a more soothing user experience is certainly welcome, especially for a device that may turn out to be more of a leisure computer than a business computer. Still, beauty shouldn’t come at the cost of being able to actually use the apps to derive real benefits from their features and content.

This is an incredibly important set of points re joining the flow. The quotes below represent JF’s thinking (and I’ve already bookmarked his previous post in Delicious). If you are thinking about “flow” you cannot miss reading the FAQ on FlowPlace.

We operate exactly the same with knowledge. We accumulate knowledge in our inner basement. Knowledge that was first poured in our heads at school (this is the dominant vision of school programs in most cultures). How much of it do we really make publicly available? How much do we freely redistribute? How trained are we to pass it on, naturally, fluidly? These new social media and free economies are so odd in regards to what we learned at school…..

later in the same post..

The evolutionary threshold is that now we can scale up the properties of original collective intelligence (and still benefit from the amazing evolutions of pyramidal collective intelligence). We are now on the verge of inventing the language of flows, so that wealth can flow through us at the right time according to our needs, rather than accumulate in our backyards after a long and exhausting hunt for scarce money.

This new level of complexity requires a new techno-economic infrastructure. Just like the printing press, this is going to create a new culture.

via From owning to flowing.

A nice facilitation example of the role we play in value co-creation and the way Irene Ng puts the question to her students.  How much is “YOU” in the last experience you had?

So I go on the white board and on the right hand side I ask them to give me the outcome of the experience value. I wanted the emotional and functional outcomes so they will say “relaxed”, “feel good”, “got updated on the gossip”, “chilled”, “cosy and warm”. Then on the left hand side of the board, I ask them to give me a list of all the attributes of the cafe. This part is easy. they usually say “music’, “ambience”, “good coffee”, “not crowded”, “good seats”, “good heating”. Between the attributes and the outcomes, I create a blank column and I ask them a simple question – how the hell did ‘ambience” become ‘chilled”? How did “music” become “relaxed”? They usually look puzzled, and do not understand. Until I say – “what if you can’t hear”? would “music” still lead to “relax”? what if you are there to sort out a problem with a girlfriend, would “ambience” still lead to”chilled”?

via Value-based Service Systems: Value Co-creation.

A little piece that is important here and not mentioned is “trust”. Without an element of “trust” you will never have the ambience or the ambient intimacy that really creates a deep seated relationship and experience.

Jon Husband pointed me to “The Moment Social Media Became Serious Business” in HBR. Part of sharing with him my previous post on why #socialbusiness is nothing new. The article and the reading of it provided more clarity for me.

Here’s the deal. #SOCIALBUSINESS  is dead in the water because it is not the problem or the opportunity. I’m going to make a quick case to say I don’t think it is social media either. What organizations should prepare for….

Real-Time Open Delivery

Now what do I mean by that? Let’s look at an example, one economically similar to those referred to in the HBR article(which unfortunately ends up with the idea that social media will change organizations). That in my view simply isn’t a foregone conclusion.

Example: Imagine for a moment that all customer complaints were filed using Twitter. Yes the tweets are delivered in real-time and we call this a social media channel. Yet the real fact is… all complainers make all their complaints public. The tweets are delivered to the organization and it’s competitors in real-time. The organization doesn’t have days or even hours to respond. In fact a day will come when competitors might just nab these customers and fix it for them. In fact we had a similar argument with Phweet… making telephone calls public or as visible as an email cc. It saves time in business just like other newer collaboration tools do.

Where Jon’s pointer helped and a conversation with him added perspective was competitive advantage will only come when an organization knows how to lead and respond to and in a real-time open delivery environment. This is the real focal issue. Yet these are not new drivers — toward transparency, open source, lower costs of communications etc.. are well known. So listening is not going to be the strategy. Neither is putting people through social business training. What matters is whether or not you have a strategy for real-time public information exchanges where the customers are more powerful and they can gather information more rapidly than you can. Concurrently, do you have a strategy where you can turn such public exchanges to competitive advantage. A more hidden example would be what API’s can you provide to your own information assets. API’s in this case aren’t social business.. however it may be smart business.

But by summer, the conversations I was having with senior executives about the use of these new technologies took on a very different tone. Recognition grew that 2.0 technologies could be used to change the way work gets done in fundamental ways. Interest in exploring these new ways of working, of sharing information, of collaborating to enhance productivity and meet business goals, was here.

Advances in our ability to communicate always change the way we live and work — the two are inextricably linked.

a little later in the piece…

But each time our communication capability expands, several predictable things occur: An increase in the scope (distance and speed of reach) and richness of our interactions affects the way we organize, shifts the balance of power, and influences how we get things done.

via The Moment Social Media Became Serious Business – Tammy Erickson – Harvard Business Review.

Fact is… what will give you more power and protection as an individual? Going public with more of your agreements with organizations. Today even the threat of a Tweet can be powerful. Tomorrow everyone will understand the advantage.

Learning Faster not Social Business or a Big Shift

Business is a social construct that is changing. Stowe points to an article by Tom Friedman today. Sometimes we really should think about consultant speak. I’m know I can be guilty of it too. Still using words and reinventing phrases to put a new lens or insight out there isn’t always hopeful. The problem is this isn’t really new. The future for business is not #socialbusiness.

The article and blog post points to John Hagel whose been doing some research he calls “The “Big Shift”. Tom Friedman uses it as a way to express how he thinks about China. Taking another lens to work out how things make sense or give it credibility. Stowe writes “By creating more relationships — even those based on weak ties — the social business increases its IQ.” He also recognizes it is easy to get too simplistic about the message. I’m also not sure what he mean’s re weak ties in this case and re Tom F “China’s networks” have been studied before – old news. Like lean manufacturing.

Separately, other research has shown that “slow moving” organizations never really catch up (big risky OD projects which shareholders don’t like). You can’t catch those that learn faster easily. However, you can identify those in the organization that both enable and accelerate learning. Unfortunately, the real issue is most organizations don’t put a lot of value on those people, whether or not they use the latest social tools. This meme for a “social business” focus may aim organizational change efforts further in the wrong direction. It may sell some software, it doesn’t deal with how we learn or what the coming issues of real-time flows are.

I’ve split the points Tom made about the BigShift up into points. The reason I’m doing this… is to ask: Why? Why? Why is this important? What we really need to understand is the underlying drivers of change.

We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks —

Yes… we know that the organization was an effective structure for hoarding information and extracting value from it. Effectively high communications and data crunching costs concentrated power in very large organizations. Possible why’s?  Eg Why is this important? What changed? Drill down. Transparency, API’s, open source, outsourcing, personal job security, personal clouds, etc… It is not a given that an organization must be more “socialbusiness” to have advantage. Example Apple.

the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an accelerating pace —

This is not new… it has always been true. Communications and access has really shaped this. But where is the Why? Why does this really seem important? Agile methods? customer power/aggregation? New inventions? Information wants to be free? Few people really know anything. The primary change is around information aggregation. Search limits the need to aggregate and hoard. Hoarding info no longer really works. We move from a CC world to a publish world. That also provides more transparency. So is it visiting with customers more often or seeking deeper understandings and being willing to ask new questions?

into a world in which the focus of value creation is effective participation in knowledge flows, which are constantly being renewed.

This has also always been true. Henry Ford was in the right place at the right time. It once was the biggest Universities, or Defence Department think-tanks. However this statement is too simplistic. Being in “today’s” knowledge flow isn’t necessarily insightful or helpful. Real knowledge has always flowed downstream. So if you want it you must go way upstream. The river may flow faster now yet if you can’t be secretive about it… you may not have an advantage. Thus the importance of alpha users, scientists and many more. From an organizational perspective this takes you outside, it takes you to users, remarkable people, conversation places etc. It requires filters. People will also network first for themselves. Underlying this… business maybe becoming more qualitative. Judgments matter at the leading and bleeding edge. So just so we are clear. Participation in knowledge flows only matters when focused or when we are “open” and listening. If ‘social business” teaches people to “listen better” then it will also grasp the first lesson I’ve always provided about social media. Listen first. Organizations particularly poor ones… are lousy listeners.

“Finding ways to connect with people and institutions possessing new knowledge becomes increasingly important,” says Hagel. “Since there are far more smart people outside any one organization than inside.”

This is why I wrote this piece. This has always been true. Don’t believe this is new. Organizations go to their research co’s, design co’s, suppliers, advertising agencies etc. The larger they are.. the more opportunity they have had. Concurrently in a more competitive world suppliers also are using their own means to find an edge. This is not new. What’s changed is the organization can 1)harness more involvement (although they need training), 2)do more from a desk or anywhere, 3)asynchronous – response times are going to zero and 4)find the emerging stories that will compel their networks to act.  In fact successful organizations spin off their people… churn is also important to the renewal of ideas. Still I don’t think “social business” is about tools. I think it is about leadership and great management. Anyone that says… “we’re getting” or we’re now implementing “social business programs” isn’t teaching their organization to learn faster and that’s what really matters. It also won’t happen in cultures of fear.

And in today’s flat world, you can now access them all.

What I think this means is the cost of communications reduces economic friction. However, at issue is the quality of your knowledge network, not the size of it. Filters matter, content matters. However the type of people you employ may be different. Curiosity matters. Synthesis matters. Trust in your network is key. No trust then none of this will matter. An ear to the ground is only the half of it. Same with one only focused on the future.

Therefore, the more your company or country can connect with relevant and diverse sources to create new knowledge, the more it will thrive. And if you don’t, others will.

I was involved in Michael Porter’s Competitiveness of Nations analysis over 20 years ago. We looked deeply at what created the conditions where a country thrived. From my perspective the best example was NZ Yachting then which has now gone global as part of the America’s Cup.  This last line is too simplistic an argument. It should not be applied to why business should be more social. Business was always social. Business always connected. The business idea is really just a conversation. It’s a construct which many people understand and can tell a story about. It’s the stories that are social. This is the reason that competitive businesses harness tools and approaches that 1) help them learn faster, look upstream, iterate and spread learnings rapidly. It’s why for 20 years I’ve used Scenarios and facilitation programs inside organizations.

Unfortunately, we  also link the idea of social business to Tweets which may be important in sharing the stories and good stories are viral and quick. However, social business is not effective at finding the innovative insights that create value in tomorrow’s world. For that you have to look upstream and yes out of your comfort zone.

And if you don’t, others will.

This is sort of the consultant’s threat line. Ask yourself what programs you can implement that make your organization

• A better listener
• Ask better questions
• Bring more of the outside in
• Make it easier to experiment and fail
• Effectively capture and tell more stories

via Thomas Friedman on John Hagel’s Knowledge Flows – /Message.

Yesterday I was tweaking my blog and generally updating myself with plug-ins and what others are doing with them. When I started blogging back in 2002 I was already thinking about lifestreams. Over the years I’ve blogged about and tried out Linkblogs (before bookmarking / del.icio.us) to both track content I see, help share it, and along with my own content create a searchable knowledge store for me. As a consultant this has been incredibly useful. Nothing credentials your thinking better than what you wrote and shared, sometimes years ago.

Yet that was then… and what is now? What’s happened to Blogging Lifestreams? What happens if we jump ahead a couple of years too?

Questions  on Lifestreams
Have we made progress? What should my cloud look like? Why personal? What content would make it more interesting? Is it easier or more difficult? Is there still a point? Are we better or worse at remembering or harnasing our lifestream?

Progress, Lifestreams and the Blog – has this happened?
Yes, Yes and Yes!!! Yes we’ve continued to wire up the world. Blogging and particularly the status updates / microblog have made participation easier. Blogging or the Blogosphere was open at least in connecting each other up. Trackbacks (remember that!) were a great way of linking posts and retaining your commentary. Links were currency. Comments as always were wonderful, an affirmation that it wasn’t all for nothing. Yet blogging was perhaps a daily ritual for a few. It took time to generate good content. (In fact it still does and there is often a paucity of it).

And, along the way, something changed.

a. Presence and the Buddylist: Once we used IRC channels (some still do), and yahoo, AIM or MSN. Along with e-mail lists there were plenty of private conversations…. the back channel (IRC which became the public channel in many conferences). We learned that online indicators, (online, away, DND etc) weren’t really indicative of status. We still contacted those we were comfortable with. Or sent them a “please add me” on Skype, plus a chat message and suggested we talk. Until Skype, real networks of strangers that weren’t strangers wasn’t really possible. The communcation costs were too expensive. Yet the number of people that met at a conference, that talked on Skype for hours after reading each other’s posts and making comments is not just a legend. It is fact. These are connections that happened “outside” one’s buddylist.

b. Real-Time:
Then things sped up. Twitter turned up. It took a couple of years and all of a sudden people could Tweet or microblog. Potential for posts went up. Two types became important. Those that pointed to interesting content and those that answered questions or made direct comments. Unfortunately, Twitter broke or borked #fixreplies re @messages. Still the obvious was there. Just like many forums moved to blogs, many comments moved to Twitter. No serious blogger blogs without Tweeting today. Even if it is just the titles of their blog posts.

Increasingly it is Twitter Search and lists that turn up content of interest. Twitter is faster than the news about many things. Concurrently Twitter also works effectively on the mobile. It’s easy to Tweet but not blog on a mobile. Even better if there are video or audio elements. Use a great smartphone and one of the good apps and it is easy to photoblog, audioblog, videoblog and more. Unfortunately, all that content is being sent off to other sites. You lose control of it.

We also have “notification services” eg Boxcar or Notifications on the iPhone that enable even more ‘instant’ updates. It’s powerful. These tie back to Twitter or Facebook. Conversations happen in real-time. Opt-in or Opt-out.

I made the point back in 2002 that bloggers could learn faster. Now the world learns faster through Twitter and nobody seems to doubt it. Add in Facebook and it’s confirmed!

c. The Personal Cloud
If you have used Twitter search and followed your name you quickly find that things you may have tweeted disappear. In fact many have lamented the issues with losing pictures on Flickr, or when another photo service closes down. In the meantime the Internet Archives is trying to deal with shortURL’s like bit.ly/xxxx. Twitter is expanding the number of people sharing data exponentially. The question is really two-fold. Does this world scale effectively, or are we better off making a different choice. PKM was all about Personal Knowledge Management.

The Personal Cloud is about more than that. Increasingly you have no control over your data, and often can’t export it. Try searching for it. Really do you think Google will turn up your important tweets with friend x? It won’t. Even Twitter can’t. These things should perhaps have a half-life. Yet put that life under your control. All my Tweets end up back in in my blog. I’ve also increasingly recognized the importance of capturing my pictures, and more. While there are benefits to a SlideShare community or Flickr, or even YouTube if you store your data there it is outside your control.

I increasingly want my Blog to manage my Personal Cloud. I want it to place content where ever I want to share it. In fact it has to become much better at managing the number of signals I want to release and share.

d. Cloud Management and the Mobile
The mobile has won. I will control and update my cloud through my mobile. With a few enhancements all my content can go that way. Whether you use TwittelatorPro, EchofonPro, or Tweetie2, you have the IM and signaling client in the palm of your hand. You also have the location element available to you. Thoughtful blogs are shrinking. Content is being aggregated. The NYTimes, Engadget, Gigaom, The Guardian, and many more are all providing authoritative content that is easy to share. I read it on my iPhone. I tweet it and share. I have the link to the content saved etc. It is now searchable on my blog too.

A singular gesture.

Contrast sharing a post via Twitter and doing the same via GoogleReader. Reader is too hard. By contrast going to a blog and hitting a TweetThis button is easier. The most important sources will be an app in the palm of your hand and what your friends turn up, or what what searches are returning on matters of interest. Add a twitter qualifier to that (eg x RT, not to be missed) and you have more than enough to keep your informed.

Unlike yesterday… conversations that matter lie outside your buddylist or following list. We’ve made the connections with those we read and understand. We keep reading their blogs too. Yet their tweets are more important today. They are the things that keep us in touch. Knowing who my friends talk to is important. Twitter is continuing to bury that.

e. Signaling.
This has become or been a passion of mine. Phweet is my example of how to quickly and with little friction escalate conversations rapidly to voice / video exchanges. Andy Abramson wrote the other day about Visual Communications. When you look at QIK and Ustream it become easy to see the power that exists with video in real-time. We just aren’t good at it yet. When locations / GPS data is included, signals outside the buddylist become more important. Twitter is important as a pipe at least for now.

There are some things I’d like to see.

1. Take the TweetPress idea (can post Twitter related pictures direct to my blog rather than Twitpic) and enable me to host all my Tweet related content. Eg Videos, Audio, Photos, bookmarked content (permanent copy like furl.net used to do) in my WordPress install.
2. Make it easy for me to tie my blog identity to my TwitterID. This is my public persona anyways. Now make it easy to subscribe to both Twitter and RSS/Atom ie the Feed a the same time. When I do… I want to get the capability to capture all content in the feeds I follow and then view with @messages and without @messages etc. with some basic filtering.
3. I’d prefer to do all post to Twitter via my blog using a TwitterApp and TwitterPlug-In integration. However if my blog is capturing all the “content” behind the links then I can capture the tweet and thus bring the two together.
4. Tweetback. Can’t we change the comment format. Eg a Tweet comment and a Tweetback comment. Eg one is just an @message and the second is an @message with URL to the comment body content. There are many ways this @message could be handled. Of course it really requires an oAuth log-in. But that would be fine… I’d again get “readers” like mybloglog that I could display with their mini-profile. Eg give me Tweeters that read my blog. Today I don’t want to leave you a comment. I want to leave you a Tweet. Even better if it is a supertweet which captures the content of the detailed comment back on my blog.
5. Location: GPS / Maps. I need to generate URI’s that contain GPS / location information. I must be able to bring location based data into my blog posts. Eg that location information that is published via Twitter in the Tweet. I must also be able to bring that GPS info into any blog automatically via feeds / feeds aggregation. (if blogs and tweets and bit.ly are tied together perhaps my posts can just aggregate their info and use their GPS data???

Quantity or Quality? Or Availability and Access?
When I founded and began writing Skype Journal I found I needed 3 to 5 posts per day to really drive traffic. At the same time Nick Denton was creating some of his very successful blogs (eg Gawker) and they followed much the same path. It’s still the same… you need a lot of content today to keep readers coming back. Yet many have gathered many followers via Twitter that exceeded anything they ever managed to achieve on a blog. I wrote posts on “Conversational Blogging” and today those conversations are in Twitter. The nice thing is.. they are effectively available to anyone. No need to follow or be followed. Just a simple @message. It’s much tidier than making a phone call and yet just as easy. You know their TwitterID. It is effectively the Social White Pages without phone numbers. In that way Twitter has usurped the trackback too.

Progress?
I posed the question have we made progress. Yes of course and yet it is slower than I’d like it to be (as always). WordPress is definitely my content platform of choice and yet it doesn’t really help me all that much yet in the world that is emerging. In my view WordPress is moving too slowly.

Twitter Apps on mobiles have accelerated the pace of learning. They have also opened up communications and begun to redefine it. I’m increasingly likely to make posts that matter via these Apps. When will TwittilatorPro or another allow me to use the XMLRPC interface to post a “super tweet” to blog and twitter simultaneously?

2012: Here Yet? Updating
Then I will be celebrating 10 years of blogging. Actually, blogging will continue to disappear. We know it as publishing already although on a personal basis, signals, updates, shares, pointers, links, messages, replies, are more likely to be what we really do. Lifestreams remain and will be more documented and better maintained than ever. Blogging… well it just got the conversation started. Still does and it is a good POV, funny story, or something current, very personal, or instructive that gets attention.

And yet, here I am 2010 and I’m still wedded to the idea that my blog has real value – even if only to me.

Just for fun…

The Chinese, Greeks, Romans and American Indians all used “smoke” to communicate complex messages. Todayʼs smoke signals may just be Twitter or another micro- blogging service. What implications does this have for mobile communications and escalating the conversation? For sender and receiver? How are our signaling patterns changing?

A new type of signal is emerging…. A callerID paradigm selected and controlled by the user. ConTEXT (SMS or other notification) before the call. Are the conversational rules of escalation changing? These directories and lifestream updates are all things that are emerging outside the Telecom exchange structure (directories, numbers, channels, records). Is the good old telephone number about to be snuffed out? Could a simpleURL replace it? I still think it could.

Daniel Terdiman of Cnet  reports that Jajah will enable Twitter to talk. There’s a few hints in their announcement. There’s also material differences in what the experience is likely to deliver vs Phweet which was launched 15 months ago and remains in PublicAlpha as we never believed in giving free calls away to grow the business. Here are the key announcements. Then my quick assessment of the differences @call vs Phweet and my summary. While this announcement frustrates me at one level, I’m also glad the time is approaching where really innovative solutions can be implemented.

Phone calling coming to Twitter | Geek Gestalt – CNET News

Jajah@call is expected to go into beta Thursday morning that will allow Twitter users to initiate a two-way voice chat with other users by typing “@call @username”–where “username” is someone’s Twitter ID–into any Twitter client.

My Interpretation:
Jajah will search Twitter updates. When it notes an @call @username it will check to see if the Tweeter is registered with Jajah. Then it will check the caller. If both are registered Jajah users and the caller has a balance then the call will be raised.

Phone calling coming to Twitter | Geek Gestalt – CNET News

According to Jajah, an Internet communications provider with tens of millions of users, the service will allow a user to place a call to any other user, so long as the second person follows the first on Twitter and both have Jajah accounts.

This is key. Before any call is made the “receiver” must be following the caller. It’s not clear from this how the call will be routed to the receiver. Unless you know or are certain that you are being followed this call structure will potentially disappoint. Eg I tweet it and the call doesn’t happen. I expect in that case Jajah will send the Tweeter a DM with reason for failure. If the call goes through it may ring a location or device that may or may not reach the receiver.

Key Differences vs Phweet

• There was no need in Phweet to create or have another account. A TwitterID is all that is necessary. Jajah requires a Jajah account. This extra step will cause friction in both setting up calls and gaining traction as a service. (What’s a Phweet?) (Phweet Twitter Integration)
• Phweet is SIP channel agnostic, you can use any SIP account of your choice, and doesn’t restrict you or force you to become a Jajah account holder.
• While @call simplifies and solves two current Twitter problems it fails to provide any context before the call. The Twitter issue is latency in the flow of messaging updates. So under the Jajah scenario users will be getting calls without context or an obvious caller ID. This does overcome the “latency” limitation that exists in the Phweet alpha.
• Phweet guaranteed context before the call and the capability to pass your own (chosen) callerID. In fact the receiver is in charge. They determine whether to accept or decline the call knowing the context and the person that is making the call.This system in the alpha also suffers from latency. (see conversational paradigm)
• As the Jajah receiver must be following the Tweeter. Using @call there is no opportunity to rapidly escalate calls with people outside your current buddylist. At Phweet we believe that rapid escalation to voice calls with “new contacts” will be of prime importance to location based services. (see Phweet Technology)
• The receiver channel is likely present on Jajah solution. By contrast Phweet enables the user to select the call channel before accepting the call and thus maintaining their privacy and low cost calling where ever they are.
• Perhaps Jajah will add a conference capability. Something Phweet provided from the get go. However it is important to have an exchange to manage and share data around an event. In Phweet we use the URL to connect and manage access to the call.
• Phweet also demonstrated how call records can be used / shared in Twitter to escalate to conferences and or to manage response to “persistent” calls. (Phweet Coffee Groups) or ad based solutions we’ve commented on in other places.
• If Jajah would give Phweet a SIP interconnect then we could make both services complementary. We could enable quick and easy calling to tweeters outside one’s follower list without breach of privacy or their need to have an account. We could do this in hours rather than days or months! (see how Phweet works with Gizmo)

Summary:
Some 15 months after Phweet was launched (see what they said then… demand still there) I’m thrilled to see some innovation coming into the Twitter space and similarly on Facebook. I think @call is more of a gimmick than real telephony play. Call limitations (2 minutes) quickly make programs like this and GizmoVoice, PR exercises. Technically, Jajah’s solution is simpler than Phweet (my guess) and still requires “minutes” to make it an interesting business. By contrast Phweet is establishing a contract or “url” for the exchange between the parties. The value added services that can exist around a URL signal the future for telephony.

I believe Phweet remains one of the most interesting solutions in telephony. We have a head start on learning and what we’d do next with mobile social networks and telephony. If you want more details talk to me @stuarthenshall or @mrblog.

Other notes:
To get in on the beta send a message to twitter@jajah.com.

Via Mashable: Make Phone Calls on Twitter With @Call

We’re quite intrigued by the voice-over-Twitter idea, though we do think it could create funky situations where you receive phone calls from Twitterers you don’t really want to talk to. In some instances, this could be a great way to immediately contact someone you need to reach on a pressing matter, but in others, it could turn into a big if not awkward distraction.

We can just envision the uncomfortable greetings now. Hello, I’m so and so, and I follow you on Twitter, my Twitter name is XXXX. Do you want to go out on a date sometime? Or, say for instance, you’re in the middle of a sentence and reach the 2 minute limit and you’re both cut off from each other. One saving grace is that calls can only be made to people who follow you, which means should a particular caller annoy you, you can unfollow them on Twitter to prevent future voice communication.

Twitter/lessallan: (note: could be possible if you both use Jajah and you follow the caller)

Do you want random sales calls from strangers? Quick sign me up! http://www.jajah.com/produc… #sarcasm

JAJAH Gives Voice To Short Messages – JAJAH Blog

For example, if you would like to call @username, tweet: “@call @username ”. Make sure there is a space between the two user names and that no additional text is added to your message. JAJAH will call you and your friend and connect the call.

I’m curious. Are you ready to contribute your mobile to the common good? Would you participate in surveys on an ongoing basis? If we made it easy? Would you join a panel? I’ve been thinking more down this path after my visit to the Amazon.

In the Amazon river basin, Dengue fever kills. Each year, as the floods reside, the mosquitoes breed and epidemics break out. There is no vaccine, and if you are lucky enough to survive you may have lived through 40 days of hell. This year  there was no huge outbreak (factually cases in this region declined from 3500+ to less than 250) and any reports of Dengue were quickly reported and contaminated water treated. See my earlier write-up here. What worked the miracle?

Other than a Nokia mobile phone and a little survey software nothing else changed. The same health workers were in the field. The same samples were dispatched to the lab in the city. However this year, each report they made was done on a location aware mobile device which instantly (timely!) forwarded the data to the central processing facility. This eliminated response time – to get data in / re suspected locations, errors in writing and submission, and lost of data in transit. In Manaus a simple little survey program made life easier for data-capture, submission, and response.

Back at INdT (Instituto Nokia de Technologia) I sat down with Andre Erthal who leads the Community Development Group to understand the Data Gathering software and how it all worked. I’d already been impressed with how easy it was to input the survey data in the field. Yet making it all work requires talent and understanding of usability, connectivity, and useful output.  As Andre explained it, he left me wanting access to their software.

Observations of specific areas important to Mobile Data Gathering:

• The survey must work effectively on a mobile phone
• GPS enables results to be mapped accurately
• Each phone has a unique identifier
• Survey updates must be tightly controlled, synchronized.
• Various data-upload options must be provided (particularly for emerging markets)
• Must be easy to prototype questionnaires. The use of a simulator is a bonus.
• Easy for the field group to use and enter data.

As Andre explained, they built the Nokia Data Gathering system in Adobe Flex and all core data is in XML which makes it easy to read and later manipulate. He began by demonstrating how one creates a new survey. The tool was running on a Windows PC (soon to be ported to the web). In practice, survey creation isn’t much different to any online web system. It’s easy to create categories for questions and then use different formats, text, numerical multi-choice etc. In practice there is a minor psychological issue in recognizing you are creating a survey for a mobile. Thus the situational input needs taking into account. There’s also the option to use skip logic functionality. Once the survey is complete you can run it on a simulator.

The tested survey was then uploaded to the distribution server. It was here that a key point was made. Once you have uploaded it you cannot just write over it again. The key is to keep the survey synched across Mobile devices and as they may be offline or some may have already responded, questionnaire changes while a survey is in progress, isn’t a bright idea. Going live may also happen at a time different to “loading the survey” when a device may be  online. Survey results are tied to a phone’s IMEI as the SIM may even change from time to time. Obviously GPS coordinates are provided each time a questionnaire is submitted. More advanced deployment will come with time.

I was impressed by the focus here on Data-Gathering. This is really a technology to empower other organizations and governments to capture real-time location based data. The implications for other services beyond the health care tests done in Manaus, Brazil is restricted by limited distribution of the tools so far. The benefit is the instantaneous capability to see results on a map with a high degree of accuracy. Many organizations that collect data currently on paper can move rapidly to mobile. The benefits include:

• one-time data input at source – no re inputting of data / reduction in input errors / time savings
• accurate location based reporting and instant result mapping
• consistent structured data formats XML
• easy deployment and real-time collection from the field – reduced delay

In Manaus the mobile data teams were using GPRS/data connections to collect the results. Yet the program has been optimized for third world usage where data connections may not be available (GPRS was the cheapest input option in the Manaus area). So surveys may also be submitted via SMS. An SMS submission rather than using HTTP converts the XML data into a binary SMS format and is then sent using multiple SMS messages. When received they are converted back into the XML file. I’d think in some markets this would be much more expensive for data submission. Yet effectively we have SMS almost everywhere.  So the data gathering program provides real opportunities in the most undeveloped markets. If the SMS fails, the data is saved to the memory card which can later be uploaded. There are options for security eg https and it works currently on Nokia devices like the E61 with full keyboard and long battery life.

Of course I also wanted more. Will it upload pictures or video? Can it play product examples? All things that can be built in and I’m assured will be appearing in future versions.

This left me with more questions.

I kept asking…. why can’t I sign up  for a beta? I’m still being difficult about this. I’m not sure I understand what the market model or service model is for this program. Nokia says they are using Open Source tools etc and are planning to release it for non-profit and governmental organizations.

Collecting data is potentially an empowering technology. The benefits exist when software like this can be rolled out rapidly. My suggestions:

• Open it up as a beta take the names and suggested projects. Let users host on their own servers  and simply experiment with it.
• I’d release it under a license that is similar  to WordPress. Eg let me host my own system and if I want run / distribute many questionnaires. If it really is a business then a hosted service is always a possibility.
• I can see this being quickly integrated with a WordPress installation or similar.
• Survey tools really aren’t that difficult. This one will be copied and there are others already out there. I found this to be elegant although I’d want deployment on a broader number of phones.
• I’d also like to wake people up…with a message or notification. This may be a survey or something they have to gather or report on. Eg have latent researchers in the field. Or have the opportunity to interview participants based on where they are.
• How can we learn faster – 1) more questionnaires and different types of problem sets. I like that the focus of this is “data capture” factual data / reporting where speed is enhanced. The interpretation has been left to the organizations gathering the data. That’s smart.

Most importantly this project demonstrates that we have to think about data entry now in terms of mobility, location and real-time. The cost of this enhancement is trending to zero.  There will be huge benefits in the developing world and yet we would be foolish to ignore them locally too. Some examples that make sense:

• Delivery Services: The third world trucking co/group can use this same type of data process to keep track of deliveries at all times. Infrastructure cost almost zero. FexEx in a few mobile phones.
• Agriculture: Can keep track of crops, pests, disease, and provide “notification” “zone services in response to participation.
• Villages / Cities can execute accurate survey assessments and conditions. Locate environmental problems or simply use for census data,
• Emergency Relief: When that next disaster strikes there may be nothing better than ground reports, and estimating how and where supplies are needed etc.

I left a comment on/Message: Project Retweet: When Ultrastructure Becomes Infrastructure a few minutes ago and the more I think about RT’s the more passionate I become. It’s time Twitter developers took a more empowering user role in Twitter innovation

Twitter continues to screw around with defining 140 characters and how we can or cannot have a conversation. Additionally they want to control what we see and in the future how we see it. Unfortunately, most of us only use the pipe rather than the Twitter website. That means large community Twitter Developers have a lot more power than they are using to influence how 140 characters are used and presented.

I’m still waiting for my first Twitter client that auto inserts a . at the beginning of any .@reply so everyone sees it. I’m waiting for the Twitter client that offers the option of a .RT or just redefines it to FT which in the future (given suggested Project ReTweet) will enable me to “|” and continue to add my thoughts to the retweet.  So why can’t I just put this in as a little custom code in my TweetDeck preferences not dissimilar to how I define a date presentation in a WordPress blog?

IMHO Twitter has lost sight of the social intimacy it can bring and is too focused on the stars and becoming the headline outlet. I personally am tiring of Twitters direction. I think a developer like TweetDeck or Twitterfon could enable significant further innovation by enabling the customization of messaging formats and then sharing those via the TweetDeck network. Eg if I use .@replies or FT or perhaps a %Group then all my friends can be offered the same opportunity to adopt those protocols. This would be a big deal and really speed innovation and adoption.

Right now… the individual is effectively powerless. However the developers no longer are. It’s time they started considering more deeply how their users may actually like to tweet and how using their client can add even more value.