Building the Product Management Community

For the last 2 years I've been organising ProductCampLondon and ProductTank in order to build the product management community in London and the UK. In that time we've grown from the first small events to sell outs every time. We've also expanded ProductTank to other cities holding them in Manchester, UK; New York City, USA; and Austin, Texas.

To knit the community together we created the blog MindTheProduct.com to be a place where product managers can share and read about product management in between the events. The feedback on the blog has been great and has proved very useful in surfacing knowledge and lessons learned stuck in people's heads.

The product management community is growing and maturing rapidly certainly in London and with this growth has come the need for a flagship event that brings great product managers together from around the world to share, discuss and learn from each other. There has long been conferences for developers, UX and designers and entrepreneurs, but nothing on the practice of product management.

Seeing the problem we did what all good product managers do, came up with a solution and implemented it. That solution being a 1-day event on the business of product management - MindTheProduct 2012. The tickets are on sale now (early birds are all gone sorry).

We hope to see you there!
 

Anthropological perspective on Trust

Image by Dave Duarte via Flickr

I ran across this interesting article written for the New York Times in 2007 that discusses social networks from the perspective of anthropology of tribal cultures. I won't go over the whole article, instead I want to highlight an interesting paragraph.

“In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.”

In two previous posts, I talked about trust & measures of trust. The identity talked about in the quote, forms you standing within the tribe. It is derived from what the community thinks of you. PeerIndex is building a way to project that identity at a much lower cost.

"As intriguing as these parallels may be, they only stretch so far. There are big differences between real oral cultures and the virtual kind. In tribal societies, forging social bonds is a matter of survival; on the Internet, far less so."

I disagree with this conclusion, for the simple reason as more and more of our life is online in various virtual tribes, the social bonds formed online will become as important to survival as social bonds formed in the flesh. Granted we are not there yet, I foresee that PeerIndex (and similar services) will become fundamental to building the social bonds that allow you to survive in the 21st century.

Building Trust: Measures and Cost

(ed: this is a cross post from the PeerIndex blog)

There is extensive buzz around influence and more recently (examples here and here). As Head of Products at PeerIndex, I've spent a lot of time understanding and learning about these areas in the context of wider society.

What became clear early was that the key to understanding was to understand trust and its role in society and markets. From the perspective of trust, reputation is the trust that builds from interaction within a community. Influence is an outcome of having trust of people within a community.

In this series I'll explore why trust is of fundamental importance to society and markets and the way trust is built and measured.

The first post in this series looks at why trust is so important.

The second post in this series looks at measuring trust, its cost and why the cost is key for determining what connections can exist.

Building Trust: Measures and Cost

In small scale communities and markets trust is built overtime by interaction between the participants. Building trust takes time and resources as we need to continually maintain the trust through grooming [Dunbar, 1993]. At these small scales participants can devote the time and resources to this endeavour as the payoffs out weight the cost. In other words the value of the connections outweighs the cost of building trust (I'll refer to this from now on as the cost of trust). The most poignant example of this was the rise of language and the subsequent jump in size of human groupings [Dunbar, 1993]. Language saw the cost of trust fall allowing larger groupings to arise.

The cost of trust determines what connections are possible. A high cost of trust limits what markets can function as the cost exceeds the value of the connections. Cost of trust forms part of the cost of transactions that determine structure of markets and entities operating within those markets [Coase, 1937]. As the cost of trust rises there is a shift from purely market orientated economy to one that is characterised by firms.

The 2008 Financial Crisis illustrates the power of the cost of trust. Investors relied on ratings as a measure of trust in the securities where a good risk. When investors lost trust in those ratings as the mortgages went sour, those cost of trust needed for a transaction skyrocketted. Now investors would need to do time and resource consuming due dilligence on every security they wish to purchase. The potential value of that would come from owning the security paled in comparison to the cost of trust and the markets froze as investors were no longer willing to purchase the securities.

To reduce the cost of trust, we've developed various measures to indicate trust. These measures include items such as:

• degrees and certificates from accredited training institutions,
• chartered status from professional societies,
• contracts,
• 3rd party ratings for items (such as bond ratings), and
• trademarks.

Many of these measures are indicators of trust in expertise or provenance. Some of these are trust measures for goods and services and others for people. These types of measures reduce the cost of trust by allowing people and products to "inherit" the trust of provider. As this is spread across multiple people and products the marginal cost falls.

These trust measures form part of the most important measure of trust: reputation. Reputation is essentially the sum of all the trust that a community has in someone or an organisation. It arises out of interactions within a community [Bischke, 2011]. Reputation reduces the cost of trust by allowing you to use other's people trust in someone. It essentially amortises the cost of trust across multiple interactions over time. Reputation is rooted in community and cannot exist outside of community. Reputation is provided to someone by the community and can very easily taken away by the community.

Reputation started as word of mouth, "should I trust her?". This works in smaller communities but it has scale problems as it is invariably tied to human limitations. To overcome this reputation has evolved to include other measures of trust such as degrees, chartered status, memberships of organisations etc. Indeed reputation is now a graph of various measures that indicate trust at both a global (overall) and local (by context e.g. is this person a good plumber?) [Bischke, 2011].

What is exciting now is that we are reaching the point where building comprehensive reputation graphs is both scalable and falling in cost. With this comes falling cost of trust enabling new connections and new markets.

Bibliography

• Dunbar, R.I.M. (1993) Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (4): 681-735.
• Coase, R. (1937) "The Nature of the Firm", Economica 386–405
• Bacharach, M. & Gambetta, D. (2001) “Trust in signs”. In K. Cook (ed.) Trust and Society, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 148–184
• Bischke, J. (2011) "Reputation Graph: One of the Web’s largest opportunities"
• Bischke, J. (2011) "Reputation Graph vs. PeopleRank"

Importance of Trust

(ed: This is a cross post from the PeerIndex blog)

There is extensive buzz around influence and more recently reputation (examples here and here). As Head of Products at PeerIndex, I've spent a lot of time understanding and learning about these areas in the context of wider society.

What became clear early was that the key to understanding was to understand trust and its role in society and markets. From the perspective of trust, reputation is the trust that builds from interaction within a community. Influence is an outcome of having trust of people within a community.

In this series I'll explore why trust is of fundamental importance to society and markets and the way trust is built and measured.

The first post in this series looks at why trust is so important.

Importance of Trust

As Kenneth Arrow noted "virtually all commercial transactions and social interactions embody some form of trust". How important though is that trust to the interactions and transactions? The 2008 Financial Crisis provides a timely reminder of the importance of trust. As supposedly trust worthy (according to the ratings) investments went sour, investors lost complete trust in the market and were no longer willing to supply their cash to other participants, freezing the market. As soon as participants stopped trusting each other the markets froze overnight.

Why is trust fundamental to society? Trust enables us to rely on someone else. By relying on someone else we are able to do more than we would otherwise be able to. Trust allows us to overcome physical limitations of time and resources [Beckert, 2005]. If I can't trust others, I end up having to do everything required to live myself: food, shelter, tools, clothing. Leaving no time for anything else. No trust condems you to a subsitance life. To live in more complex societies you need trust, this way members of the society can specialize and share or trade to get the things they need [Beckert, 2005].

Trust is the result of human behaviour. It takes time and resources to build trust. On the scale of a hamlet or small village, this is not unreasonable. You will see each other everyday in which you can do the grooming necessary to build trust [Dunbar, 1993]. As the size of communities scale beyond the small village, you don't have the time nor the resources necessary to build trust between all the members. The cost of building and maintaining trust exceeds the value of the connections the trust would otherwise enable.

To overcome this limitation, we've created various measures or signals of trust [Gambetta, 2001]. These measures or signals of trust become proxies to our own efforts. These measures of trust allow us to overcome the physical constraints and create new connections.

The second part of this series will go into more detail about measures of trust, the cost of building trust and the value of reducing the cost of trust.

Bibliography

• Dunbar, R.I.M. (1993) Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (4): 681-735.
• Bacharach, M. & Gambetta, D. (2001) “Trust in signs”. In K. Cook (ed.) Trust and Society, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 148–184
• Beckert, J. (2005) "Trust and the Performative Construction of Markets", Max Planck Institute for Study of Societies (PDF)

Twitter Spammers Evolved

I received a spam tweet this morning in response to one about Amazon. Out of curiosity I had a look at the account and found an evolution in the spammer toolbox on Twitter. The account is KalilaHirata152, which I've reported as spam.

What this spammer is doing is that it triggers a tweet with a URL on keyword but to make it look less spammy, also creates tweets that consist solely of quotes from books. These quote tweets are interspaced within the feed with a ratio of about 1 book quote to every 1.5 url tweets.

While obvious to humans the slight variation in tweets is enough to get past many simple spam filters. The ongoing arms race against spammers continues apace.

Notes on Hadoop and Elastic MapReduce

We've been busily integrating Hadoop into our distributed processing architecture at PeerIndex. Here is a list of some items that I've run across that made the whole process easier.

1. Do some training (seriously). Hadoop and MapReduce isn't grandfathers programming and many of the ideas & principles you would otherwise use don't suit MapReduce/Hadoop. Those coming from large-scale scientific data background will have a head start. Cloudera has some great training vids available on their site and also offer a training course which I attended and found good.
2. Use a local version to test. I found Karamsphere to be very useful for testing the scripts written and working out the bugs. The Cloudera has a virtual machine that is very, very useful for doing Pig and Hive testing.
3. Streaming jobs are your friend. Using streaming jobs is a great way to get Hadoop based processing of the ground.
   
4. Follow these pointers from Pete Warden. Increase allocated memory size (particularly if using PHP via ini_set), use the -jobconf stream.recordreader.compression=gzip etc
5. Delete outputs. MapReduce jobs will fail if you don't delete the output directory from a previous run. This one will get you into trouble all the time.

Renewable Energy Target A Negawatts Market

Image via Wikipedia

The failure of Copenhagen along with the sheer complexity of ETS (one which is going probably do more for financial institutions than the real economy) requires stepping back to re-consider how to achieve the aims of reducing CO2 emissions. In the post "The Fallacy of the Carbon Market" I made the point that market-based reduction methods don't have to be carbon based.

Here I want to look at using a negawatt based market to reduce energy demand. Markets consist of supply and demand. The supply of negawatts is easy - it is all the effiecency changes that can be done (insulation, improved appliances etc.). The sticking point is demand. How to create demand for negawatts?

The renewable energy targets provide the mechanism for creating demand, by allowing negawatts to count towards those targets, power companies can choose to use negawatts rather than other forms of renewable energy to meet their obligations.

Negawatts would be created by doing an audit of end user (household, office, factory etc) to benchmark the energy consumption. The purchaser then pays for improvements (adding insulation, triple glazing the windows, more efficient HVAC etc). The difference in energy consumption after the improvements are installed is benchmarked. The amount of negawatts is the difference between the before and after benchmarks. These negawatts would count to the power companies renewable energy target for 1 to 5 years.

The advantages of this approach are:

• Much simpler measurment, audit and verficiation
• Doesn't impose large scale price increases on end-users
  
• Increases productivity of the economy generally
• Frees up end-user cash for other users

Negawatts address the simple physics problem that we can't build enough renewable energy sources in the time required in order to effectively replace enough carbon based energy production. A sustainable negawatt market will drive the development of new efficiency measures and devices leading to situation that energy demand falls as our ability to generate substantial energy from renewable sources increases. We are addressing the problem from both a supply and demand side, achieving a better overall solution.

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iPad - The Freedom Device

Image by Tom Raftery via Flickr

The discussion around the iPad has missed what I see as a vital use case. One that is becoming increasingly relevant in many countries around the world. Previously, I had written about a device that could provide unblocked accessed to the internet and outside world. The iPad is that device.

Coupled with portable satellite broadband basestation and some mesh networking software, a million iPads would make for a very difficult internet access method for oppresive regimes to block.

The Fallacy of the Carbon Market

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The noise surrounding Copenhagen is deafening. Hidden within the noise and light are several elephant sized questions that everyone seems to be ignoring. Firstly, is carbon pricing really an effective market? Secondly, can a market based solution be found that doesn't involve pricing carbon? My answers to those questions are no and yes respectively.

Carbon trading is unlikely to be a very good market. Not only is it hard to monitor, verify and account; the very difficulties in in monitoring, verification and accounting leave the market wide open to gaming and manipulation. It is quite possible that it will cost more to run a carbon market with less improvement in emmissions than to spend the money on direct measures to improve emissions.

So are there other market-based solutions that are as effective if not more effective than carbon trading? Almost certainly. The whole conversation around climate change has become so tunneled vision on carbon trading that other market based solutions are ignored. Lets step back from the particulars of carbon trading to look at what is being trying to accomplish.

The idea is to use price signals to encourage changes in participant behaviour and resource allocation. In the case of climate change it is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the price of carbon as the signalling mechanism. Why carbon price was alighted on one can only speculate(special interest groups such as investment banks looking for the next CDO scam comes to mind and green zealots with a messiah complex) but in reality it can be any pricing (or more than one pricing) signal as long as it accomplishes the goal. All that is required is a pricing signal that change the way energy is generated and used.

A fallacy of the debate is that regulatory regimes are inherently, non-market based. That is untrue. If the regulatory regime specifies the mechanisms of reduction then it isn't market-based. But if the regulatory regime specifies the end goal and then leaves it up to the market to produce the most effective solution, that is a market-based solution. Before rushing to say that isn't true bear in mind that is exactly what the carbon trading market is, a regulatory regime that specifies an end goal and leaves it up to market participants to allocate the resources to produce the reduction desired.

A carbon market is one of many possible markets that will produce the goal of changing the way energy is generated and used. Nor is there anything to say it is the most effective regime and I am coming to the conclusion that a carbon market is probably the worst possible market to achieve this goal. The carbon market strays into specifying the mechanism rather than the goal.

An alternative market would be based on a regime that specifies work per unit energy input requirement, or efficiency. A set time points the efficiency requirement would increase contiuning to drive changes in energy production and consumption.

There are several benefits to this market:

1. it is simpler for people to understand - energy and its use is far more concrete than an invisible gas
2. measuring & accounting for efficiency is far, far easier than measuring & accounting for emissions
3. its harder to outsource consumption and generation in an efficiency focus regime
4. the measure efficiency can be tailored to different industry sectors but still tied back to an overall measure
5. it is harder for free-riders to prosper as each industry has their own targets
6. and doesn't fall afoul of the rather significant problem that the physics of converting to a carbon free economy don't stack up

Technically this type of market is viable but is it politically viable? From my persepctive it is. It is easier to explain to sceptical citizens, targets are based on improvements rather than reductions and allows various players to choose the mechanisms that suit them best. Using efficiency targets becomes globally homogeneous avoiding the brutal and almost politically impossible task assigning blame and reductions according to blame. Nor does it require everyone to sign-up initially. As efficiency is measured at point of consumption, if a large proportion of global consumption uses efficiency targets, suppliers and producers will need to adapt to meet those targets in essence becoming part of the solution should those producers and suppliers wish to trade with that market.

There are other possible market-based solutions as well. We would do ourselves and the world a favour to not tunnel vision on carbon markets but to pick the best market-based solution that produces the desired behaviour of changing energy production and consumption.

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What can be done about North Korea and the Bomb?

North Korea undertook their second nuclear explosion and is firing off missiles that is more reminisce of someone trying compensate for a small dick. The UN Security Council will probably pass a resolution that by and large will do nothing. China will keep propping up the regime for both political and strategic reasons, South Korea is limited by what it wants to do and Japan will probably make the strongest moves to "punish" North Korea by beefing up missile defences.

Peter Hatcher puts forward what he thinks will make the regime pay attention to the international community. In effect it is having China, South Korea and Japan cut off cashflow to the regime. Sensible, but I am not convinced that any of those countries will do what is necessary particular as it doesn't meet their strategic aims.

Short of military action is there anything that can be done? It is a question that I've been pondering over the last week or so. Nothing leaps out as a great solution but a remembered article from years back about how information is probably the best weapon against the regime stirs.

The idea (as I remember it) was to air drop self-contained internet access devices that would provide the populace with access to the outside world that wasn't controlled by the regime. As much as the idea seems fanciful, I think a variant on it is something to consider.

In the variant, use OLPC-like laptops with windy handles for powering the device. The devices will need to include a verbal interface so that people who are illiterate can use it. The main issue is how to provide outside access? One potential way is to include a satellite access device that also acts as a wireless access point. Bearing in mind that as OLPC laptops can create mesh networks large numbers of the hubs would not be needed. Indeed, additional access could be provided by wireless connections beamed in from South Korea and naval ships.

The aim of internet access devices is to break the strangle hold on information that the regime has. That opens the door to working around the regime to provide food, water and power. In effect the internet access devices (remembering they can be used to share information and coordinate activity within North Korea as well) allows new centres of power to form and for the people to negate the advantages the regime has.

Would it work? I don't know and I don't think anyone really does. Anthropologists and psychologists can give you an estimate of potential effects it would have but until it is tried we won't know. So should it be done? I think it should be seriously be considered. At the very least it would be another potential noose to tighten around the regime's neck.

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Drapers Prublic - Is it Enough?

News today of Tim Draper is funding a private market exchange that will allow startups and investors to sell shares in pre-public companies. There are caveats to what companies can list (e.g. they have to have yearly revenue of $20m) but this is a welcome addition to the morbid exit side.

This and other similar secondary markets are a welcome addition to business world. These markets don't address a more fundamental problem that many startups need funding but the exit reliant VC model doesn't work for them.

There are many (if not most startups) which are never going to be able to exit at a multiple that is effective for VCs. However, they are otherwise very viable companies that will generate healthy revenues and have fat margins. Providing startup capital to these companies is a problem that needs to be solved. This will then allow VCs to focus on funding companies that can exit and benefit from the VC model.

In a Let a 1000 Flowers Bloom, I've proposed income-contingent loans but that is only the start. To effectively fund these companies what is needed is a model where the investor(s) provide the capital and receive warrants or preferred equity that after 3 years requires a dividend to be paid for 5 years before converting to ordinary equity.

Later on in the life of the business the prublic model may become worthwhile in allowing the initial investor to sell off their share and allow others (founders and employees) to cash in some of their shares as well.

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Making the Economy Robust To Black Swans

Image via Wikipedia

In a recent twitter conversation about managing chaotic systems by pushing the system to linear instead of non-linear responses to shocks.

Which does lead to the question can you have linear response to shocks in a non-linear system? Short answer is yes. Even in non-linear system there is a portion of response that is linear, with the response becoming non-linear with further driving.

In effect you structure the system (with dampeners etc) based on the potential response of the system to the shock. This method doesn’t plan based on a probability of an event occurring rather based on what would happen to the system should the shock occur. The aim isn’t to prevent shocks rather control how the system (in this case the economy) reacts to shocks.

Economic systems respond to shocks in 2 ways by destroying demand and freezing of money (or credit). Unfortunately, the responses are coupled and one will cause the other which in turns feeds back in. The key is to keep either from precipitating the other.

The money freeze occurs as the system tries to workout where the risk is. An event has occurred (such as a failing institution) that has demonstrated that the risk in the system is not understood. Money stops flowing as everyone aims to identify where and who has the risk.

To dampen this response:

• Ensure all financial transactions are transparent. This involves using marketplaces and exchanges and avoiding all trading in financial instruments over the counter.
• Reduce the amount of risk that is in question by structuring the economy so financial institutions can never large.

The demand destruction is as it’s name suggest the removal of demand from the system. An event has occurred such as the explosion in price of a key input over a very short time (such as the oil shock of the 1970s) that creates a situation of mass layoffs reducing the demand within the economy.
To dampen this response:

• Provide a system that allows private demand to be replaced quickly by public demand (i.e. infrastructure building)
• Reduce the loss of demand by income smoothing that avoids people suddenly reducing spending drastically as they are laid off

It is reasonable to point out these dampeners are already in place. Yes to extent they are but it is ad hoc and not very effective as currently done. Take for example the demand replacement. Many countries have proposed infrastructure programs. However, these don’t get underway (the building aspect) for a period of years. The demand needs to be replaced immediately not in 2 years time when private demand will be increasing. Instead, projects that create public demand need to be maintained at a point that allows them to be instigated within 3 months.

While unemployment benefits go towards smoothing income, it still results in a massive reduction in demand as unemployment benefits a pegged at subsistence level. To smooth income properly, a program of income-contingent loans for redundancies and training are needed that avoid the drastic reduction in for a period of 6 to 18 months.

Focusing on system response to shocks instead of trying to model the probability of shocks moves us away from the realm of make-believe that is probability forecasting to focusing on making the economy more robust and able to handle Nassim Taleb's Black Swan events.

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Digital Small Business and the Web

A digital economy is far more than simply having lots of internet start-ups. A digital economy is as much about the use of technology as creating technology. The problem with a lot of the conversation around knowledge and digital economy is this requirement is lost as people focus on creating the next Google.
Just as much needs to be done to have small business taking advantage of technology to improve their business as trying to fund new technology companies. It is important to understand the issue here. To have a truly digital economy, small business has to use technology and particular web technology to their greatest potential.

This covers how a business interacts with their customers, with their suppliers/partners and how they manage information internally. You could split these up but to really make a difference small business needs to integrate via workflows (I elaborate on workflows here) not through insiders and outsiders paradigm.

For example, instead of plumbing company having one booking system used by employees to book appointments and another for website bookings rather use a service like BookingBug that both customers and employees can use to make bookings.

But that is only one step. Let’s look at the whole workflow. Basic plumbing workflow is:

1. appointment is made
2. plumbing task is done
3. payment is made.

A customer comes to the site and books an appointment for a plumber. The BookingBug widget shows appointments that have already been booked either by other users on the site or by staff. They pick an appointment and fill in the details. A plumber is sent the information to their iPhone with the details (with the iPhone representing smartphones). The plumber does the job and fills in an invoice via Freshbooks App on the iPhone. This is sent immediately to the customer who can then choose to pay via the payment application on the plumber’s iPhone.

The invoice details are logged to Xero, the accountancy software, which is then followed up with the payment details when payment is made. Any supplies consumed during the plumbing task are sent to the supply management software which logs the usage and re-orders as required. The details of the job and correspondence with the customer are all logged in 37Signals' Highrise.

By bringing in effective web technology (be it SaaS, mobile applications or whatever) into the workflow the administrative burden is reduced (no one had to copy numbers from one system to another) while improving customer service. It allows the plumber (small business) to focus on the plumbing and not on coordinating moving parts.

All of what I described in the example can be done now. It isn’t something for the future but something for now. The glue that binds them together are APIs. It is APIs that allow the requisite data to move between the various applications and create the seemless workflow.

The key to a digital economy is effective use of technology in small business; something that is sadly lacking in the various grand plans for digital economy from Governments and interest groups.

RSS, Readers and Information Management

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Several posts have looked at RSS Readers and even RSS itself questioning the need for these technologies especially with the growth in the use of Twitter and Facebook to discover news. These posts sing a premature song for the death of RSS and Readers.

RSS is a syndication protocol and is very suitable for syndicating content between applications. RSS readers are not the only use of RSS feeds. I fully expect that RSS will continue to be consumed primarily by applications rather than humans. RSS isn’t going away. It works and it is good enough for what it does.

RSS Readers are a different question. RSS Readers are primarily a way to make RSS feeds human consumable. As Dare pointed out most are based on the existing Email client paradigm. As Dare also points out this isn’t the best information paradigm for consuming large amounts of news. But this doesn’t necessitate the death of RSS Readers.

Twitter et al. are good for discovery, but not consumption. What is being seen here is a failure of filters based on time and space which no longer exist. It harks back to Clay Shirky’s comment about information overload actually being the failure of filters. What twitter et al. provide is a filter. Instead of seeing it as an either/or proposition, these filters need to be integrated into RSS Readers.

What we have is a need to evolve RSS Readers to have effective filters. RSS Readers are actually a misnomer as people focus on RSS rather than on the underlying concept of organising and presenting information. Let’s refer to the “ideal” as Information Management Application (IMA – got to love acronyms!).

IMA does the following:

1. Gathers information (whether from RSS, Twitter, Newswires etc.)
2. Filters and Organises information
3. Presents the resulting information

The problem with existing methods (i.e. RSS Readers) is that they have little to no filtering and organisation. IMAs provide a rich arrangement of filters and organisation methodologies to help manage the information ocean. Like panning for gold, the IMA sieves the information ocean to find the nuggets.

It is step 2 that makes the difference. A majority of the organisation and filtering can actually be done with by grouping related sources together (e.g. rather than have 100 articles about Apple buying Twitter, group all these articles together as one), organising the stack of articles by source (e.g. the act of adding a source to the IMA makes it more important than a source not actively added to the IMA) and then layering over than filtering based on what your social network has read or is pushing.

Add in metrics about how many articles are in a group, how fast the group is growing and how much attention others are paying to the group and suddenly the ocean of news is far more manageable. Add in a touch of human curation and you have the 21st version of the personalised newspaper.

IMAs will come in multiple variants be they desktop based or online. Google has the embryonic version in Google News and Google Reader. Yahoo can also create an IMA as the next evolution of Yahoo News. The field is wide open and like many things no IMA is going to suit everyone.

The Web & Sainsburys

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This post is part of a series on how web technologies and concepts can benefit various organisations, the particular focus being APIs and open data. In this post I will look at supermarkets via Sainsburys.

Sainsburys is the UK’s second largest supermarket chain. Sainsburys wasn’t chosen for any particular reason merely it is representative of supermarkets in general. Before proceeding it is worthwhile considering what a supermarket really is. A supermarket is an organisation that aggregates shoppers by providing the convenience of purchasing a majority of consumables from one place. Larger supermarket companies can also be considered a logistics company specialising in moving groceries from producers to shoppers.
Sainsburys provides a fairly stock standard website and online shopping portal. It is rather difficult to use in my opinion and one of the key reasons that I haven’t bothered to try and shop for groceries online.

The game changes by providing APIs.

The APIs would provide access to data such as purchasing habits, aggregated demand data (e.g. 2000 tomatoes where purchased today), current stock, current prices, how much carbon/energy used in getting an item to the store. But the APIs shouldn’t merely provide data but also provide access to functionality such as making a payment, placing an order, ordering stock and communicating with the consumer.

The APIs would form the basis of Sainsburys online offerings allowing them to be easily updated and changed to allow new services and applications to arise and fall. The APIs also provide a means by which internal teams can create internal applications without the need to extensive resources. The APIs become a means to allow innovation at the edge of the organisation.

The real power of the APIs comes from allowing 3rd parties to use the APIs. Suddenly startups and entrepreneurs can create new applications that mash Sainsbury data and functionality with other data and functionality creating new value. Sainsburys creates an ecosystem of functionality based around it. The APIs allow Sainsburys to move from being simply a supermarket chain to a shopping platform that blends bricks and mortar with the web.

Many will say that the information is valuable or would provide Sainsburys competitors with an edge. They would be wrong. Information is only valuable when it is useful. Lots of the information contained in Sainsbury only becomes useful when it is unlocked. Take for example my weekly grocery list, while that is locked in Sainsburys it isn’t useful. It has no value, but provide that information to me along with items I can substitute to reduce my grocery bill then there is value, which leads to the second requirement to be useful, which is context. Information is only useful in context with other information.

The competitive edge one is very traditional thinking and it ignores the reality that the competitive advantage accrues to the company that is more open rather than less. The ecosystem allows new resources to be devoted to creating new applications, far more than Sainsburys could muster on their own. The ecosystem creates a positive feedback loop that is hard to disrupt creating advantage. Rather than Sainsburys having to devote resources to picking winners for new applications, the ecosystem does that for them. Those that create value for the ecosystem survives while those that don’t wither away.

Here is a short list of potential applications that become possible with the APIs and open data:

• Review my shopping list
• Subscribe to regular grocery delivery
• Import my shopping list & prices into another app
• Local supplier Dashboard
• Tracking energy and carbon of purchases
• Mobile application for navigating stores
• Mobile application for store management

Let’s consider a few of these in more detail.

Review My Shopping List
The user gets access to all their purchases and the prices they paid. This is then reviewed looking at what could be substituted to bring the price of the weekly shop down. This could be something done by Sainsburys or could be done by 3rd parties. Probably both.

The review My Shopping would more than likely be part of a broader finance and shopping management application, but even on its own would be valuable to many people. Extensions of this basic application is to allow users to see suggested recipes based on what they purchase, start with a set of recipes and build a grocery list and set a budget and build a grocery list based on the budget and standard needs.

Local Supplier Dashboard
The dashboard would in effect allow local suppliers to provide Sainsbury with produce to particular stores using a JIT framework. The dashboard would allow the supplier to enter what they have in stock and then they can bid on meeting the stores needs for the next day.

Suppliers would also get access to information on patterns in demand allowing them to change their own production to match demand better.

Mobile Application for Navigating Stores
Each store is different and their stock availability, to say nothing of location changes all the time. The application would use the APIs to provide accurate and up-to-date location and availability for items within a store and provide directions to the location.

The application can also serve to provide a feedback loop for the store, as it would allow the user to enter information about the quality and similar information for the items.

In The End
The APIs open up a lot of opportunities and create an ecosystem based around Sainsburys. This ecosystem becomes an advantage that is very hard to disrupt. By creating value for their customers and suppliers Sainsburys will be creating value for themselves. Value that is sustainable.

Let a 1000 flowers boom - Using Income-Contigent Loans with Startups

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TechCrunch UK posted an open letter by Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling and Lord Dryson Minster for Science and Innovation about what to do with purported stimulus funds. BVCA wants the money to go to large VC funds whereas Robin Klein wants to see the money channelled to supporting very early stage companies (amounts less than £100k).
Robin’s logic and reasoning is sound and I agree with them. But it is not a good use of the money for two reasons.

Tech (web) Focused
The idea is far too technology (read web) focused. There are lots of opportunities throughout theUK for entrepreneurs to create businesses; many, indeed most, outside the world of the web. Why shouldn’t someone starting a lawn-mowing business have access to early stage funding as a technology developer? Both create value. We in the technology sector tend to be myopic about start-ups, small businesses and entrepreneurs. Richard Branson can hardly be accused of creating a technology business and yet he is by most measures the UK’s most successful entrepreneur.

Yes, technology creates long term value and wealth, but the vast majority of wealth is created by companies outside of the technology sector using technology and not developing it. It is created by a lawn-moving business using twitter to alert their customers that their lawn is done and having a website where clients can go and book a visit using something like BookingBug to provide the functionality. The lawn-mowing business is creating value through better customer service and consequently generates wealth. Would a business angle or early seed stage fund invest in such a company? What about if it is located in the hinterlands of Wales?

Relying on Judgement
The mechanism for distributing funding relies on someone making a judgement call as to what is potentially a good opportunity. The act of making a judgement takes time and as many commentators pointed out in response to the open letter, time is very precious at the early stages of a business. Waiting more than a month for a response is a massive drag on very early stage businesses. They need responses fast.

More problematic is that a person can only make the judgement based on their experience and expertise. Many great opportunities will be bypassed as the judges’ focus on what they know. Now however is a time to fund companies that are moving into new areas and new ways. It is a time to let 1000 flowers bloom. In the end the only real judgement that matters is that of the market. It would be better to create a situation where those companies can be judged by the market rather than a limited individual. The market is crowd-sourced investment decisions.

Proposal
In place of co-investing or creating lots of seed funds, I propose that the UK government create a scheme of income-contingent loans. Under the scheme an entrepreneur can take out a loan that covers his previous salary up to a maximum of £50k to £60k. The loan is paid monthly like salary and is re-paid by the individual (not the company) through the tax system (similar to student loans). Other characteristics of the scheme are:

• The scheme would provide loans for up to 3 people per business in the first year, followed by another 2 new employees in the second year
• The loans are tied to the individual and are re-paid by the individual based on the individuals income
• An individual can only take out a loan under this scheme once every 5 years

An income-contingent loan scheme provides funding irrespective of industry or goods and services. It addresses the funding gap that is a barrier to entry for all entrepreneurs and has a lower administrative burden. The loan scheme can be administrated through the existing Government banks and through an online loan application system which are widely geographically diverse, scalable and most importantly can return a fast decision.

One big objection is the potential for fraud. Nothing involving money is without the potential for fraud and venture funding is not immune (witness Tiger Telematics). By putting the liability to re-pay the loan onto the individual reduces the avenues for fraud using this scheme. The other limitations are also designed to reduce the attractiveness of fraudulent behaviour.

Conclusion
Granted, the loan scheme is unlikely to produce the next Google but I would rather see the loan scheme generate 100,000 businesses all employing an average of 10 people. That would be far more valuable to the UK economy as a whole than 1 Google.

Ideally, you would run both an income-contingent loan scheme and co-invest in early stage investments. However, given the realities the loan scheme is more valuable. The co-investment scheme should follow. By the time the co-investment scheme is up and running many of the first lot of companies that have benefitted from the loan scheme will be ready for their first round of funding.

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Capturing Intention in User Behaviour - Do it Directly

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I had an interesting conversation at OpenCoffee London yesterday around personalisation and recommendations. At they table were several people involved in companies that are in the area of marketing analytics and personalisation and recommendations.

One interesting point raised was that as targeting becomes more and more focused, there is a loss of information that can harm personalisation/recommendation algorithms. There is a point where targeting stops being effective in delivering relevant personalisation and recommendations. I'll return to this later.

Of more note was how capturing attention is difficult, indeed impossible with behavioural tracking. In "Wither Social Networks, Arise Communities" and "Resources vs Answers - Asking a Question of Search" posts I've look at the importance of intent to properly target a user. What came in the conversation yesterday was be direct. Essentially, ask the user what their intent is and stop trying to guess. Allow the user to tell you (the business/software etc.) exactly what their intent is.

The example used was booking flights to Edinburgh. Currently travel sites get you to input the departure, destination and dates. Then give you lots of results which you have to wade through and links to ads for various travel related items in Edinburgh. However, there is no way for the site to tell what links it should show or how to order the results.

If however, the user starts by telling the service "I want flights to Edinburgh for a weekend of fun" suddenly the service has a slew of information that it can use to target the right ads and services and also organise the results. From that simple statement, the system "knows" the following information:

• The flights need to be Friday afternoon/evening and Sunday afternoon/evening
• The purpose is fun so flights need to be cheap/reasonable
• The person will be looking for tourist, entertainment stuff to do

From this new knowledge the system can prioritise flight results and target service suggestions and advertising better to the person's intent. This wouldn't be hard to do. It is a step away from normal form-based UI into NLP but it opens a whole new vista of opportunities.

Open Access Will Make the NBN Work, not Price

Ok this is getting ridiculous. There is lots of commentary going on in the Australian press and from the politicians about the NBN. Most of it inane and demonstrating the commenter's complete lack of understanding about the technology and the issue.

The NBN will provide economic, social and environmental benefits. This fascination and indeed obsession with cost of access is self-defeating. Here is a quick overview of the benefits

• Economic: NBN improves access to SaaS solutions and increases effective collaboration both improving producing and reducing costs. NBN opens up new possibilities for new companies and industries that hadn't existing before. Could anyone have predicted YouTube or Twitter when we were using 56k modems? NBN brings very high speed access to businesses of all sizes rather than just the largest.
  
• Social: NBN, as others pointed out, provides the ability to role out education and health applications right to where people are. Some are already talking about providing free basic access to the poor.
• Environmental: NBN will create a boom in video calling and telepresence cutting down on travel and reducing pollution. The NBN goes a long way to reducing energy intensity of the economy.
  

The NBN is the convergence of communication and data. It will be used for applications ranging from video calling to web access to television and radio to smart metering to health monitoring. To see it only in the light of access misses the larger value of the NBN. Nor is the speed a big issue either. Speed through the fibre is determined by the equipment at either end and not by the cable itself. Should users and the access providers decide they can put in the equipment that supports 1Gbps without much problem. Far more than copper, fibre is future proof.

Have a look at these videos that Microsoft produced as a look into the future of computers. The NBN is the key to enabling this world.







The key to the NBN living up to its promise is how the Government structures it and it is quite possible they will get it wrong. That shouldn't stop us from trying though. Life is a risk and we cannot be afraid of making a mistake.

For the NBN to fulfil its promise the following items have to be done:

• The conduit/real estate and fibre should be help in separate companies
• The company sold at the end of the 5 years should only be the fibre layer and assets. The conduit/real estate company needs to remain majority Government owned.
• The legislation has to guarantee Open Access to both the conduits (so other companies can label cabling) and the fibre.
• Fibre should be laid direct to the house. The NBN shouldn't use shared access.
• Access must be symmetric the same upload speed as download speed.

By embedding Open Access to the conduits and the fibre you create an environment where organisations can compete on the fibre but also at the physical layer. The largest barrier to entry remains digging up the ground and laying conduit followed by the fibre.

The Opposition needs to hold the Government to implementing the about principals. They have to work with the Government to split the construction of the NBN into two parts:

• Building the Conduits. This is the stimulus part of the NBN and can begin quickly and should start in the large regional towns before moving to the city
• Laying the fibre and installing the Equipment. This is the key planning stage and in order to avoid prolong delays, can be done will the conduits are being built.

The conduit building can be done by any construction company that can dig a trench, lay piping and install access points. The contracts should be standard and let out to as many of the construction companies as possible. There is no need at all for one company or small group of companies to win the contract to build all the conduits. In terms of speed by letting out contracts to various companies around Australia the construction can go on in parallel in many different locations.

The core issue here is not the price of access. It is Open Access. The Opposition must be holding the Government to providing Open Access not only to the fibre but also to the conduits. Open Access is the key to the NBN working.

Busting Recessions - Income Contingency Loans for Redundancy & Training

I’ve touched on income-contingency loans in previous posts, time to explore them in more detail.

Redundancy

The point of redundancy is to allow businesses to shed staff as necessary without throwing the people onto the garbage heap. The flexibility provided to hire and fire staff is important in keeping an economy resilient and flexible. Society also benefits from redundancy payments as it reduces the fear of not being able to pay bills. As most redundancies occur during recessions it helps to cushion the demand destruction of job losses.
There are two problems with redundancy systems as they currently stand:

1. From the point of view of a person, redundancy payments are not enough to survive on, and
   
2. From the point of view of the company, redundancy payments are a big hit to cashflow.

The Nordic countries use generous welfare system to reconcile the two competing interests but have high taxation as a result.

The same reconciliation of the competing interests can be achieved by using income-contingent loans. When making someone redundant the company takes out a loan from the Government to pay for the redundancy of the person. The loan is then paid back through the taxation system from the profits/income of the business taking out the loan.

Redundancy payments can then become 75-90% of final salary for a period that can last 6 to 1 year without driving businesses into the ground.

Using income contingent loans allows:

• Businesses to lessen the impact on cashflow from redundancy payments
• Individuals get larger payments that reflect their final salary for longer periods
• Redundancy can be provided to all employees instead of just those that have been at the business for a long time
• Bills, rent and mortgage continue to be paid reducing negative flow on effects from redundancy to the wider economy
• Redundancy is guaranteed even if the company eventually goes bust
  

Training & Education

One of the aspects of recession is that there are too many people chasing too few jobs. Income-contingent redundancy helps lengthen the time an individual has to find another job but it isn’t the only way of smoothing things out.
The second method is to provide income-contingent loans to businesses for training employees. The business would take out an income-contingent loan that would pay for the salary and training. A modification is that the loan is jointly held by the individual and the business.

These loans would achieve:

• Improved cashflow for the business as the employee is effectively removed from the payroll
• The person is improving the skills and training so that they are more effective when business picks up
• The business can hold onto good employees that would otherwise have to be made redundant
• Less people are chasing the limited number of jobs
• Bills, rent and mortgage continue to be paid reducing negative flow on effects of redundancy/job losses to the wider economy
• Society benefits from better trained and skilled workforce

Income contingent loans better address the needs of business and employees without trying to jam them all into the same one-size-fits-all. They recognise the benefits of redundancy payments and training doesn’t accrue just to the business or individual or society but to all three in varying amounts.

On the face of it the training loans are better overall but training will not be suitable for all situations or occurrences. Both systems should be implemented to allow flexibility and support the uniqueness of each redundancy situation.

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Aussie Gov re-entering the telco game

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The Rudd Labour Government has announced that rather than tendering building fibre optic broadband network to a private consortium or telco, they are going to do it themselves. At a cost of AU$43bn over 8 years.

The logic sounds nice nice on-going stimulus during a time of economic crisis that is productivity enhancing. Broadly I agree with the sentiment. Broadband is a viable stimulus that will have positive benefits in productivity. The larger the pipe the greater the economic opportunity and productivity.

I have two problems with the announcement though.

1. It does seem like an idealogical policy to get the government back into the telco game - not something that is warranted or needed
2. More importantly the value of the Government involvement is limited

Where the Government should be involved is creating a national conduit system which is open and easy for any company or organisation to run their cables. The largest cost in building a broadband network is digging up the ground and putting in the conduits to carry the cables. By doing this the single biggest barrier to entry into the provision of broadband is removed which will do more to increase competition and improve services than all the regulation and legal proceedings.

Laying their own cable is an unnecessary expense, but given that this is likely to happen then I hope the Government learns the lesson of KPN in The Netherlands that open access to the network benefits not only the consumer, but the owner of the network. Open Access has to be a requirement for the Government network and must be a requirement if the network is ever sold to the private sector.