deal architect

Google Maps: Not Close. No Cigar.

So I am excited to see Google introduce a "GPS-less" Maps and navigation application. It looks up cell tower information from your device against a database on its servers and gives you your approximate location. Approximate up to 3 miles.

But start driving and the cell tower spots on your device jump around - and so do the map grids. While you have no trails to show streets where you are, have been or are going. Disconcerting.

And you have scenarios like on left - click to enlarge. (I plotted on Google Maps on the web the data that the mobile maps was showing on my PDA) The neighborhood I am driving through shows with the green push points. The cell tower is represented by the pink ones. As the crow flies about .8 mile - the pink line. Actual driving distance   = 5 miles. I had 2 push pins for the start since there was a short distance from start to street, and 2 for the the cell tower since it is actually a bit out in the water.

So how useful is location information off by that much? Clearly, the fix would be more accurate in a downtown location with lots of cell towers in close proximity. Especially places with tall buildings where GPS signal acquisition can be a problem. But if you use it while driving through downtown the cell spots will jump around even more frequently.

So, I turned on my bluetooth GPS. And Google maps worked well with that. Not its fault, but the network slowness in some grids I was already out of range of that grid before the painting finished. Location Search worked well, and so did written directions. But directions superimposed on the map froze the grid and you had to manually move to the next grid. On a street where traffic was crawling, I tried the traffic update feature. It showed traffic status on a nearby highway, but not on the street I was at.  And there are no nice voices to remind you to turn in  a quarter mile - or to scold you when you  do not.  So, overall,  not much better than my experience with Microsoft Streets and Maps. OK, the fact that you do not need to download maps on to your storage card is a big advantage. Till the network crawls.

One  potentially nice use of Google Maps is it is supposed to work in 20+ countries without having to  carry around a bunch of maps for those countries on storage cards. But...in about a 30 minute, 15 mile drive today the PDA must have downloaded over 1 meg worth of map data. At AT&T roaming data pricing overseas that could turn nasty quickly.

So I am going to stick with my Odyssey maps for a while. And avoid driving overseas. In the meantime, don't take a GPS like a Garmin or TomTom off your holiday shopping list. Google Maps will need a few more iterations before it gets there as a navigation app..

The "Dumbing Down" of Innovation

So I get excited to see an IBM sponsored publication titled "Innovations" from the good folks who also publish Baseline and CIO Insight among other magazines. Fodder for the New Florence innovation blog, I think.

I drill into an article about "Top 10 projects for 2007". But it lists Financial Reporting, Server Upgrades, Disaster Planning/Recovery, CRM. I double check to make sure the list is not from 1997. I hope to find some exciting new data mining for financial forensics or some neat mobile sales tool. Nope.

Then I see a long article on security - along with compliance, often a killer of innovation projects. But I at least expect to see innovations in security given amazing innovation the bad guys are showing in compromising security and data privacy. But I see lots of references to SOX, and September 11.

A search of the whole issue does not show a single mention of "wiki", "virtualization", "telepresence", "SaaS", "autonomic" ,"biometrics", "telemetry" anywhere  - some of the hottest concepts in IT today.

I am not picking on the magazine. They do not dream stuff up. It reflects what the market is doing - and it seems like mundane, low-payback projects are being spray painted as innovation. Kinda like the phenomenon of "greenwashing"  - "inaccurate, inappropriate  or unsubstantiated" environmental marketing claims.

To me, it is demeaning to CIOs who are truly delivering innovation MAGIC to put such IT projects/initiatives in the same bucket.

The Real Deal: Joe Vales on Daughter as Business Partner

This continues a series of guest columns from practitioners and bloggers I respect. The category - The Real Deal describes them well.

Joe Vales does the mirror opposite of what I do. I help buying organizations through the sourcing process. Joe helps outsourcing vendors strategize on how best to win such business.

He and his team are frequently brought in at the last second to shape the service provider's winning solution and proposal.  Some consider him the Marketing Guru of the BPO market ... others describe him as the Red Adair, fire fighter supreme of the industry. We share a common heritage - PwC. And mutual respect. Magnified on my side by what you read below.

He writes below about his joy of having his daughter work with him at his firm. This column is longer than other guest columns...but a proud father does not deserve to be edited.

"I remember when my daughter Kerry Ann was 12 years old, I took her to work with me for “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” and within minutes of setting down her Barbie bag she was already offering her suggestions for how to spice up my latest project.  She insisted that I listen to her very wise "12 yrs of life experience" in pointing out what I could improve upon. (I should note that increasing the amount of trips to the toy store was also high up on her list of improvements that I should make as well) Kerry Ann has never been shy about offering her opinion, but I was intrigued by her real desire to take my project to the next level. In the end it may have been my own years of experience in the industry that got us through the project, but that moment was the very first sign that maybe one day we would make a good team.

When Kerry Ann grew into an adult I watched her take that same passion for improving things into writing. Long before I asked her to get involved in any project with me she was writing and editing white papers, articles, essays, resumes and anything she could get her hands on. In addition, she was producing pieces for various media outlets and succeeding in complex projects due to her attention to detail and keen writing ability. When one of my writers was unavailable to work on a due-diligence project for an investment bank, I seized the opportunity to bring Kerry Ann into my team. At the time her schedule was a little tight but she agreed to try it with me. She participated in all the interviews and incorporated the key findings into our final report.  The project couldn't have turned out better and I quickly began to move more and more projects her way never ceasing to be surprised by the results.

Now she is an official member of my team and I couldn't be happier with the way it has turned out. There are hard days with long hours, projects that increase in complexity and surprises at almost every turn, but she maintains that same passion for improvement that she exhibited as a 12 year old and it gives me the extra boost I need sometimes to power through. We have had to learn how to better define where the line between family time and work time is but it is worth it.

There were little things that we had to nail down in the beginning like communication. I got caught up in the professionalism of even the smallest of communications with her. Do I sign my memos to her as "Dad" or as "Joe Vales?" Should she refer to me as "Dad" in meetings or as "Joe?" Do I introduce her to clients as my daughter or as a regular team member? How do I get away with boasting about her proudly without receiving a heavy eye roll from her? We have had to cover all of these bases to find a solution that works best for us. I never wanted to make her feel uncomfortable being around a proud dad all the time and at the same time she wanted to earn an equal place at the table. So we had a clear understanding of the need to draw boundaries of how to deal with those issues. There are days where nothing is going right and as a boss you have to line up all your employees and make sure they know they can't walk away from anything until it's done right. Fortunately we both went into this situation with an acute awareness of how the work day in any other place of employment would be. Kerry Ann knew enough to say at the start that she wanted to clock in and clock out and for that time she would be nothing more than a dedicated employee and would operate as such. That clear line has not always been easy to abide by, but it has definitely been our saving grace a lot of days and we are both thankful for it.

The bonus as a father is I get to watch her continually grow and challenge herself with each project we take on. I can’t help but admit too that I love that she gets to see me do what I love every day. I realize that most fathers never get the opportunity to share what they do with their children, so I truly value each day that we have together. Whether it be in the boardroom or the family room it's never easy, but I treasure the experience. "

Joe can be reached at Valesconsulting AT aol.com - for BPO or parenting tips

Capable or Culpable?

Lawsuit against Microsoft Vista over interpretation of the word "capable".

In meantime, MS Word's grammar check advises me the title of this post is fragmented - I should consider revising ...

...wonder if it also coached the Vista team -)

Death to Duet?

At TechEd in Bangalore this week, Vishal Sikka,  SAP's chief technology officer clarified the rationale for the recent Business Objects acquisition.

New York Times: "Typical examples of this class of applications are planning, financial consolidation and evaluating risk, according to Sikka. These applications are targeted at business users rather than at process workers or task workers like clerks and accountants..."

Now wait a minute, is that not what the SAP/Microsoft Duet analytical tools already do? I am not exactly surprised if Duet is taking a back seat, but the speculation was SAP would integrate with newer SaaS versions of Office from Google, Zoho etc.

I hope to see Vishal next week. I am sure he will clarify. May need a few data cubes, though to explain all the permutations of products SAP has in the analytical area.

I know what you did last summer

Fellow EI, Michael Krigsman, a hell of nice guy, is definitely someone who speaks softly, but carries a huge stick. The stick is his ZDNet blog "IT Project Failures".

He innocently walks up to vendors and asks them to provide details of what they did last summer. At Oracle OpenWorld, Karen Tillman of Oracle PR said she was deathly afraid of what Michael would ask Oracle executives. Huge stick! But he is no gossip monger - he wants people to learn from project failures and for the industry to quit repeating them.

Well, he will have a field day with this CIO Insight listing (and even more interesting candidates in the comments) - the Chernobyls and Bhopals of the IT industry!

I should have had a V8!

Judith Hurwitz writes The Oracle Syndrome: Why there are no big bangs

Am I one of the few who hears a big bang from the core melting? The lack of payback from billions customers have paid in maintenance. The lurking fear that one of our industry's biggest players may have lost the art of developing compelling new products and can only "acquire innovation". That aging software is becoming an industry crisis. 

There I go spilling a Pepsi. I should stick to an uncola. Or a V8.

Economics of web content

I appreciate many readers commenting or providing feedback by email on my question last week "Would you pay for my content?".

In the meantime, have seen two extreme sets of views on the economics of web content:

Seth Godin, uber-Marketer, tells his audience "Not only can't I imagine charging for my blog, I'm practically in debt to the people who read it. I ought to pay them, not the other way around. Every time you read something I write here, you're giving me a gift... attention."
Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert on the other hand goes "I have decided to blog less....My book based on the blog posts, STICK TO DRAWING COMICS, MONKEY-BRAIN! got great reviews for content, but angry reactions in people who feel that other people, who didn’t read the content on the Internet, and never will, should not buy the book, to protect the rights of the people who already read it on the Internet, and might want to read it again for free sometime. You win...It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income."

and then this debate on Motley Fool on whether the online WSJ should stick with paid subscriptions or go free"

Anand Chokkavelu thinks Murdoch  is "four times smart" for giving  up maybe $ 200 m in subscription revenues for an advertising potential many times greater
Rich Smith thinks Murdoch is "four times stupid" for wasting a huge brand like the WSJ

So where are we headed? Not sure, probably some middling, muddled model.

But in the meantime, I am fantasizing that Seth takes over the Yankees and pays me for 6 hours of commute and game time - grateful for my attention -)

More Innovation

On the New Renaissance blog

"Open Source" Hardware
Vintage Computers - Eye Candy
In-Building Wireless systems
60 mpg - on a Hummer!
RFID - as a fashion guide!
Marvel Comics Go On-Line
Soon the iPod Nano will look big and clunky
HistoryShots

"Any apps, any device"

"While most Verizon Wireless customers prefer the convenience of full service, the company is listening through today’s announcement to a small but growing number of customers who want another choice without full service." NY Times.

Quite a stunning turnaround for a company which just a few months ago was using every excuse in the book against open access to networks including national security.

While I am excited it moves us another closer to the "iCalls" model, the proof is in the pudding.

Will Verizon's price for openness be a cynical T-Mobile like 600 euro add-on some where in its pricing? Will its wireless network play the same games with occasional users as its long distance business continues to play -  like $ 2.50 a minute to the UK and "cover charges"

Om Malik has even more questions. We will find out over the next few months...