Just as Francois Steyn cut through the opposition (the USA, home of Microsoft) over the weekend during the Rugby World Cup so the the developers of software are cutting through traditional business models. The traditional business model develops a package, freezes it on CDs and sells it like a commodity to users. Then they take another few years to develop the next version, all the while adding additional exemplars, templates, help files and security updates in the interim.
Contrast this with a business model such as Buzz developed by an 11-person start-up called Virtual Ubiquity. They have just been acquired by Adobe the Acrobat/PDF people who offer a range of other application as well.
What’s the unique selling proposition? Well, by having a word processor available as a service on the web every time you access it, it is the most up-to-date versions.
All this, of course pre-supposes that you have the band width to make use of such applications. That’s of course a political issue in this country.
After along absence! – this marks a bit of a come back
Categories: Web 2.0 · software as a service
The traditional economy is a bit like the hit parade – no. 1 on the hit parade is has the biggest sales.
The result is that the most profitable products tend to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
The internet created a new business model termed the long tail . The key idea here is that because of the reach of the internet products which may have a low initial sales volume (“on the outside looking in”) may turn into long-term sellers and yield profits far in excess of the top record in the hit parade.
The long tail is the subject of a couple of books by Chris Anderson The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More & The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. His proposition is that the digital world has created products that cannot be sold in brick and mortar stores.
An oft quoted example is the book Touching the Void, which initially didn’t do well, but increased it sales after another book, Into Thin Air, was published. Amazon and other booksellers create links that list other books under the heading “customers who bought this boook, also bought:” This brought it back to the notice of readers.
Virtual bookshops can do this becasue they don’t have to carry stock.
But the real message seems to be that niche products can become very profitable – if one can find ways of bringing them to the notice of the likely market.
Categories: business opportunities · long tail
Crammed into one of the omnibus posts earlier this month is the mention of tags. Tags are a way of organising your knowledge so you can find it later.
If you hover your mouse over an item you sometimes get a little box telling you what’s underneath. Or if you search for something you use a keyword to try and retrieve relevant information. This is the magic of tags.
One of the more interesting websites /blogs that I subscribe too is Informl learning by Jay Cross. Here he discusses tags an a couple of other useful topics.
On another day I’ll chat about informal learning.
Categories: bookmarks · folksonomie · tags
South Africans display a curious reluctance to adopt new technology.
I was discussing a project plan today with a client who uses my services in social and economic development projects. I suggested that we look at using the Google Groups type of approach to publish and develop the documents. She said, “We’ve tried it before but it didn’t work very well. We couldn’t get people to make changes to the documents.”
Since this is echoes my own experience with this group I started to wonder why this is. When we discussed it further she said, “I think people are too scared to expose themselves.”
I agreed with her in a general sense – I’m certainly not going to expose myself, but does that also mean electronically too? Do we really suffer such from a lack of confidence? Why is it that no one wants to pick up the conversation? How many of you have had the urge to start a blog?
Categories: South Africans · Uptake new technology · exposing yourself
I was involved today in a bitter altercation – it all revolved around what was said. At the end it became apparent that the disputing parties had different versions of the document and that the source of the dispute lay in the differences between the versions they were using.
On-line collaboration in the production of documents is available for free. Google provides it (if you can get access and some of our members do struggle to be recognised as group members) but there are also other service providers who off the same sort of facility,
eg http://www.4shared.com/share_document.jsp.
But I am sticking with what I have developed a feel for – Google.
I set up a Google group, entered all the key persons and their email address and uploaded the latest versions of all the documents which are under discussion. As I open a new version of the document I upload it to the Google group website. I then send an e-mail to the recipients to inform them of the update.
Now if someone wants the latest version of the document they know where to find it. But I must confess – the degree of scepticism to this process is marked. South African people don’t really believe in it.
But once you’ve set up this facility you can also link to Google Calendar and publish the dates of the next meetings. You can also set it up to set up to send reminder emails before the meeting. I haven’t resorted to that yet but it is something to remember.
Having a group doesn’t mean that the documents are open to all – you can set permissions so that you as moderator can approve all applications to join the group, or you can control group membership by basing it on invitations that you have sent out.
Categories: calendar · sharing · version control
I was quite shaken today – I was introduced to someone at a function, who said, “Yes, yes, I know who you are I’ve got a lot of good information from your website.”
I’ll be the first one to confess that maintaining your website is a lot of work, like maintaining a garden in a wet summer.
Much of my work is in the public domain, so it is quite safe to upload mateiral for the general public to see. I get occassional enquiries or follwo-ups to particular issues.
This week I also received an invitation to lodge my profile on an international website for waste-management and environmental consultants. This is not my area of expertise but because my company developed a series of envionmental and waste-management qualifications on the NQF and kept everyone updated through my swebsite, so spider or bot registered us as ‘experts’.
“We have come across your name and contact details through the internet. For our project-related international consultancy work, we are presently looking for qualified experts to support our project teams. According to CDM’s core business, we are particularly searching for experts with experience in the areas of waste, water & sanitation, infrastructure, transport and geotechnical engineering. In case you are interested in a future co-operation with CDM, we would like to kindly ask you to send us your most recent CV (if possible in English language) to the following e-mail address…”
The company identifies itself, is incorporated in Germany and has quite a website of its won. So the request seems legitimate enough – not that I’m replying.
The one lesson I have leanred is that you must have content on your website, not just a page that is really an ad. You have to provide some sort of value-add.
This seems to be a mantra of Web 2.0 – give and yu shall recieve.
Categories: Web 2.0 · content · web presence · websites
One of the most powerful learning experiences I had in the early 1980s was a book called A Twist of the Wrist – The Motorcycle Racers Handbook. What it did was take you off the pages of the book onto the saddle of the motorcycle.
The measure of its success was on a late June Saturday during the final race of the day. I was headed up the main straight at 150 odd km per hour. The sun was setting and as I reached the end of the the straight I realised that the track was in total darkness, while my visor was filled with light. I had to switch off my eyes and let the nerves in my hands feel where the front wheel was tracking, let my knee tell me where I was in relation to the edge of the track and my bum gauge how much traction the back wheel had.
I made it around the corner barely a whisper off my normal racing times. By the time I came around for the next lap the sun had sucnk below the hill and my head and the bike were in the same shadow.
What the book at taught me was to evaluate all my senses and programme them to respond to the challenges of the tarmac and the physics of riding a bike (or car). Even today as I came down the N3 and took the off-ramp to the N12/R24 I went through a sequence that the book had allowed me to concretise. I allowed the car drift wide on the negative camber of the outside lane, there where there are always skid marks and tracks leading of the the freeway to attest to the drivers that got it wrong. I let it drift to the edge of the tarmac to a point where there is a slight indentation in the tarmac. As the car got to the edge of the dip and starts to rise – this allows it to turn in and you regain control and can continue at the same speed you were travelling at. If you were to panic and lift off at that point you would ride over the edge and keep on going until you hit the grass.
When I read the Cluetrain Manifesto I had the same sense of being reprogrammed, of having a new operating paradigm. As the twist of the wrist forces you to engae with leanring the art of managing a motorcycle, so the Cluetrain forces you to rething you notion of how knowledge is generated and shared. As we learned with Karen and AI. You can hear the lecture but until you do it it makes little sense. So with Web 2.o, unless we participate in the the process it has little value.
Categories: learning · motorcycles · paradigms
Tags are used to enable you to find content on the rapidly expanding World Wide Web. You can use multiple tags to assist you to locate content, whether a blog, photo or video. Organising information in this way is not generally done using a formal knowledge classification system (eg Dewey) – it’s directed by a user or body of users. This results in a folksonomie.
Collections of tags are informally maintained by some websites. One of the most popular is technorati .
Interesting websites are alos increasingly being saved in other spaces for sharing – like publishing your ‘Favourites’ or ‘Bookmarks’. A well-known site is del.icio.us
Categories: bookmarks · folksonomie · tags
The delicate shift from Web 1.0 to Web2.0 seems to be that of being the recipient of information from others to tbeing the creator of information and knowledge in a variety of ways.
What is the difference between 1.0 and 2.0? One of the theorists is Tim O’Reilly.
Want to share your video and audio pod-casts, go to Youtube. Want to share your photos go to Flikr. For the ultimate, want to create another life then go to Second Life. This is a web site where you can create and new world, digitally and on-line. <What is it? and a review.>
Further ways of moving from the real world to a virtual world include online meetings & conferences.
Categories: Conversations · groups · online conferences · online meetings
When we say internet these days we think of the world wide web. But the internet is actually the backbone of the the web and there are other protocols and programmes which operate over this back bone. Some of the earliest manifestations of the internet were bulletin boards and Usenet. Othere services that use the internet backbone are e-mail, Gopher and FTP amongst others and to search for information (files) there was Archie, Veronica and Jughead long before Google.
Bulletin boards and e-mail were the initial applications which started web-based conversations. Usenet, in particular, grew and formed the basis of today’s on-line forums and communities – spaces where people engaged with each other, with particular topics (academic as well as general interest) and sometimes interpersonal warfare. That spawned chatrooms and the spillover to the cell phone industry n applications such as the (infamous?) MiXiT.
Our GoogleGroups address is actually an on-line forum, so we are already making use of the technology.
So how can we engage clients in such discussions, providing answers etc.?
Could one use this process as a way of training people?
On Thursday I’ll vist a couple of on-line communities to show the range of the discussions that occur there.
Categories: Web 2.0 · groups · on-line forums
