Posted: March 22nd, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Startup, Technology |
Trying an experiment in Product development this coming week. I spoke to my daughter about some ideas surrounding “Social Shopping” over the week to gather what she thought of the idea. Of course, anything to do with shopping will immediately get her attention no matter how crazy the actual Product Idea may be. It is enlightened self interest on her part. With no money, no source of money and little chance of that changing anytime soon, if she needs to hear a pitch and go through the observations of the shopping habits of teenage girls, all she knows is she will be in a shopping environment with someone who has money (me) and who is a sucker for any whim she may have (once again me).
So what is Social Shopping one may ask? Well , I would suspect it is the antithesis of how I shop at least when it is of the bricks and mortar variety. Of course when shopping online like on Amazon I do make liberal use of the Reviews to guide my purchase (or non purchase depending on the gist of the reviews). In the bricks and mortar variety shopping experience which is still the predominant means of shopping, the only thing social about me is making sure no one gets in my way to obtain the article I have already decided to purchase and similarly on the mad dash to the checkout line. Thankfully I am the exception instead of the rule. With the ubiquity of online social networking, the exploding smartphone engagement with all sorts of services tied together including photos, video, search, location services and the penchant to shop of teenage girls regardless of all messaging that they should deal with more outer worldly things, we are poised for the killer app that will tap into all of these forces to magnify the shopping experience so that the romp to “the mall” can take on the force of the virtual romp to the Mall.
What are some of the characteristics of this presumed killer application.
- Doesn’t introduce yet another Social Network but leverages the existing winners in the space, Facebook, Twitter specifically and presumably FourSquare in the Location based services realm
- Doesn’t get in the way of the activity of social shopping so it has to be very easy to use and unobtrusive. Outside of quick checkin or setup.
- A tough one; has to aggressively protect privacy but still maintain flexibility allowing the user to easily define how restrictive or open to make the Social Shopping “event” . With the main demographic being teenage girls, adoption would be impaired if parents caught wind of gaps in privacy that could put their child at risk of the perverts in society.
- Is patterned after Web mashup but optimized for speed. Checkin or definition of shopping event, tying in messages/photos and all forms of communication revolving around that event. Syndication to only the chosen network of
users party to that event whether in person or virtually via the social network.
- Acts like a persistent store of the “event” after the fact. ie The pictures of posing with different outfits
Posted: March 16th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Technology |
Not like Mobile’s wave has just recently hit us. I have had a cell phone since early 1990’s , I believe 1993 to be exact, It was a monster by today’s standard with it’s own case and not a case that would fit in one’s pocket. I forget if it was Verizon Wireless or it’s predecessor that powered the network. The pricing plan was such that you would treat each minute or part thereof as precious.
If I look at the last 17 years of cell phone usage at least in my household, talking on the phone is still one of the main activities but with kids now on my plan, I would say that text messaging has definitely risen to the top as the predominant use. In fact, I had to get the unlimited text/sms plan as not even 1,500 monthly messages was enough to satisfy my oldest child. Though I am tolerant, Mom is not when during dinner night outs he is consistently looking down on his lap where he keeps the phone reviewing and responding to an endless stream of sms messages. AS for me coming from a generation with a different set of social norms I am even more discrete and generally only take the phone out while waiting on a line usually at a Starbucks line or some other pause/waiting moment including yes long Redlights.
Where is this all going and why is 2010 now the year of mobile at least if you read and listen to the intelligentsia from the likes of Techcrunch? Perhaps most notably it’s because according to certain reports the engagement of the web via mobile has or is soon poised to surpass the conventional desktop/laptop engagement via a laptop. The referenced TechCrunch post though positive from mobile’s increase in engagement doesn’t indicate anything like half of engagement coming from mobile but I also believe engagement defined as strictly the consumption of standard browser based web pages is leaving out plenty of the modes of engagement that are optimized for mobile such as email, photo taking and uploading, managing one’s assortment of different calendars, short busts of status information such as twitter, Location services of all sorts from the useful like driving directions to the trite like checking into a business establishment via FourSquare and perhaps becoming a mayor of some random Dunkin Donuts.
As major publishers adapt their websites to provide an experience conducive to viewing and consuming on the small real estate of the typical smartphone screen real estate , more and more of my web consumption will move to the phone. Though I still usually park myself on the desktop to read the nytimes.com site every morning, their iphone application is engineered to making the consumption of news via my phone easy on the eyes and overall quite pleasing.
I believe there is still a lot outside of the normal and some would say trite uses of the Mobile device that needs investigation and development. It is something we all carry with us all the time and for those like me that use it as an alarm clock as well, it is on my person or nearby 24 hours a day. It should or at least for some can become the remote of choice for all things that can be monitored or managed via software signals including the home of the future where all gadgets and appliances will be smart at least if smart means a computer chip and set of hardware and software interfaces used for communication and management.
In fact, here is a link to Silicon Alley Insider Post that was published as I was writing that speaks about the evolving trend of the iPhone to become that centralized remote control.
Any smartphone can eventually serve the same purpose I suppose and even less then smartphones. Back in the day it was common to setup AOL Instant Messenger BOTS that could take commands streamed as IMs and respond in kind whether for Movie listings, or anything for that matter. May seem like a low technology angle but you can envision BOTs waiting at our disposal for all sorts of activities. The imagination is the limit.
Posted: March 11th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Startup, Technology |
Foursquare Badges & Mayorship
EDITS on Thursday Evening March 11,2010
Is someone reading my blog?
Starbucks and Foursquare
Been giving serious thought to why I take the trouble to check-in my locations via Foursquare and less often via Gowalla. Well I do have an understanding why centered around the gaming aspect of winning badges, becoming mayor of my own Subway station or frequented Starbucks. But outside of this very basic gaming angle and the pride of being Mayor of an out of the way Dunkin Donuts in Whitestone, Queens , what utility is actually being driven for me?
Over time, and the time may be near, I can imagine the utility to the business establishments and franchises that I visit having access to the stream of information about who ,when and how often folks are frequenting their establishments.To what extent FourSquare aware and engaged folks are representative of the demographic of any particular establishment’s customer base is probably up in the air but at least at the current moment, I doubt they are very representative. Also part of the information is already gleaned from the cash register of course and I don’t know to what extent users of Foursquare or like minded products will allow anything “private” to be divulged to the venues they visit.
Representative or not, as the location service increases in breadth whether through the likes of Foursquare/Gowalla or by other Local sites ie Yelp comes to mind adopting this as a platform feature , over time the collected data will be more then about just the early adopter, wiz-bang type of person.
What will drive mass adoption? I don’t believe that mass adoption will occur until the act of checking in is instrumented to be so easy and automatic that one doesn’t even think about it. Often times I start checking in while waiting on line , say at a Starbucks which is notorious for long lines especially in New York City, and I have still not completed the checkin process by the time I have reached the barrister to place my order. It should be like E-Z Pass , the automated toll collection system spear-headed in New York City for the traffic choked toll lines across all the river crossings. You go through a special lane and the rest is done via transponder on the E-Z Pass side and conceptually the same for the “Checkin” side.
But now I am back to the crux of the question,
what is in it for me?
From a social networking perspective, I am more selective of the “friends” chosen. They represent people I have known personally for some time and in all likelihood interacted with them on a social basis including outside of work. That selectivity can be powerful especially compared to the “whoring” that goes on on Facebook where it appears the concept of Friends is severely deprecated. Foursquare doesn’t put any limitations on the extent of my social graph but the nature of the service makes one more hesitant to just accept anyone as a “friend”.
I imagine the selectivity in growing one’s Foursquare network is not just innate to myself but will be a generally accepted principle. If that turns out to be the case the usefulness of that network will be magnified. In it’s most simple venue based extension, I can learn about or take as recommendations establishments I should try based on my own network’s frequenting of those establishments.
Or better yet, as a business establishment looking to extend my reach I can tap into a customer’s Foursquare network (with their permission of course) to make offers available that would entice potential new customers.
Though I can see lots of potential in the limited network of my Foursquare friends. it is also possible to intersect with a feature that allows things/events to be “pushed” to me depending on what specific locale I happen to be at the moment. A totally made up and unfathomable example, a theater’s ticket sales are lagging as showtime nears at 8pm on Broadway. Why not blast out a last minute appeal to those that may be enticed and in the area with discounts or other inducement to fill the seats that may otherwise go wanting.
Posted: March 7th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Technology, Technology Outsourcing |
I was communicating with an ex Software Engineer report of mine the other day asking how things were going in my old company. Without going into much detail about extraneous things, he volunteered that “most of the work was moving to India” , that he and the rest of the team stateside didn’t have much individual responsibility or work to do but that they were spending most of the time hand-holding the people they were collaborating with in India. He used the ratio 60 to 1 (60 hours to do what he could do in one hour).
That ratio in my estimation is a wild exaggeration but it is not totally off in certain respects.
The biggest problem in my experience with productivity of software engineering outsourced to India is in the realm of managing towards overall effectiveness not solely the metric of cost. Of course, outsourcing a high wage activity such as software engineering to a much lower wage rate location will reduce gross engineering costs at least in the short-term. Accomplishing that is as deterministic as anything within the raft of different resourcing options any company has at it’s disposal.
If that metric is the sole determinant of success, the company following this approach will be measuring success or failure on a metric that anyone with a calculator or the most basic business sense can appear to succeed at.
The true measure should be similar to how employee investment Rate of Return is determined stateside or anywhere else in the world. What am I getting in terms of value for my investment? And since in this particular case I am talking about the Web business, how is the time to market impacted in outsourcing these critical activities to bring goods to market?
Software Development is an esoteric craft or at least treated that way by many folks who have decision making or sign off authority for outsourcing this important function. The cost in time and opportunity lost by the Stateside developers having to support in numerous ways
- providing business context
- providing elaboration usually nuanced on product requirements
- reviewing for standard implementations
the effort from India as well as trying to do their job is rarely a point of consideration.
From the aforemetioned one would assume I am against outsourcing to India. The fact is I am not, I have had success with it (and some quite bumpy rides as well) and if done for the right reasons
- abundant supply of of young Software Engineers
- a timezone that coupled with Timezones within the USA can result in a follow the sun iteration (this is not for the faint of heart. It is easier said then done)
- Better context of what works in the India or Asia Pacific Rim if the product is being tailored for that market
- And of course, a positive cost benefit for your efforts
A criterion for Success is to make the India team especially it’s India based management strictly accountable for the efforts of the India based Development staff. That may seem obvious and it is but usually for reasons of expediency a Program manager or a stateside liaison is the point of contact obscuring the true accountable parties for success of an India Development center.
To be continued….
Outsourcing Software Development Part One
Posted: March 1st, 2010 | Author: julio.luis.miyares | Filed under: Cloud Computing, Cloud Map Reduce |
If understanding Data is the true measure and worth of collecting it in the first place, what is now standing in the way at a minimum of the capability to crunch the data using a slew of tools adapted for that purpose? The answer is nothing , well kind of. With the publicly available services in the Cloud such as Amazon’s MapReduce, the inherent capability it there for all but the most uninitiated to make sense of the mountains of data point collected by a typical high volume website.
Of course one can just plugin Google Analytics onto their website and they are good to go with a robust solution that captures, aggregates ,slices and dices and presents pretty reports via a web form about a host of activity on a website. Nevertheless there are always instances where the need to unlock additional understanding inherent in all that data requires some additional processing and some additional tools.
One of the biggest costs for large scale data processing has usually been the need to have an operational infrastructure in place to excise, collate, aggregate and slice the mountains of data that are generated by your typical website or application usually measured in gigabytes and terabytes. Of course all that operational infrastructure is always bound to some strategic and business critical processing leaving precious little horsepower available for for those extraneous random questions that come up on a recurring basis for any business. By the time the request for that question to be answered is queued up and delivered by the typical IT group ,it is highly likely someone more nimble somewhere else has already answered the question and gotten a lead on adapting their business with the answer in hand.
With the wide availability of Cloud Services such as Amazon’s Map Reduce, the timeline to answer the question can be markedly reduced. Admittedly you still need Technologists either in house or outsourced that understand the components of Map Reduce and how to actually leverage it’s power for the needs of the business but the need to wait for precious cycles on the IT’s host complex, partnering Software engineers and Operational Admins to make the environment available with the hosts and necessary software and connectivity to actually run jobs can be short circuited to almost zero time.
You also need the Analysts that can come up with pertinent questions specific to the business they are in and with an understanding of the data elements and relationships between them that are currently captured or can be captured and can help answer specific questions. The technology is not smart enough to do it by itself.
A non technical question , are mature companies with a long standing streak of being in business availing themselves of this form of Cloud services computing? I would not expect them to have the same drive to operate on a shoestring as the majority of startups do but are Cloud services of viewed as an valid option by most IT groups in mature organizations?
Yes, more then a handful of companies outsourced their Development but especially Networking over the course of the past few decades leaving those esoteric functions to entities like MCI that had scale and a knack for staying on top of the evolving technologies shuffling bits around.
