deal architect

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

The Bloom Box

Sketch Interpreting Software

MIT Tech Review’s 50 Most Innovative companies

20 Years of Adobe Photoshop

Excerpts from my book, The New Polymath

I have started a series of excerpts from my upcoming book...first set is on the New Florence blog here

Keeping up with the Social Citizen

Altimeter issues a sobering report on how companies cannot keep up with the social customer.

Hey, how about the social citizen? Unfortunately, the 2 scenarios below happen way too often in local government:

• “ Before we invest any more we want to look out in the market, and look at what we have," says David Hill at Marin County, CA about another government ERP project gone bad. Likely write-off of tens of millions.
•  In the meantime, Business Solution includes comments from Brian Solomon of CDCE which goes around with a road show of mobile solutions to various city and county executives: “Many are unaware that there are rugged, handheld computers in smaller, more powerful form factors than were available 5 to 10 years ago”

Hmm..what about keeping up with their customers, the citizens? I asked last year about enhanced 911.  I mean we are talking Unified Communications and Plantronics devices which allow consumers to combine landline, VoIP and mobile calls, but 911 still cannot handle the latter two after all these years? Sure, the telcos get some of the blame, but for pete's sake take some of the moronic ERP money and invest it where citizens can see value.

And take some of the ERP consultant air fare budget and take a team to Estonia. See how a government, communist just a couple of decades ago, is dealing with the savvy, social citizen

More New Florence

on the innovation blog

Cloud Migration

NOAA Tracking of Chilean Tsunami

Flyfire’s floating 3-D display

Compressed Sensing

A step in the right direction

RightNow publicizes key features of its new service contract. Many of the features are new to software world but have been around in outsourcing and telecom world (like AT&T's rollover credits, but bring their own fine print and headaches) as customers push to “variabalize” fixed IT costs.

Good for them.

Their next challenge: make even more of tech industry sales tricks disappear

Steve Jobs: Make room

Something remarkable happened in the Valley last week.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Larry Page of Google, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins (KP), and executives from Walmart, Coca-Cola, FedEx and elsewhere attended a launch party. All kinds of media descended.

And it had nothing to do with an Apple product. In fact, it had to do with a fuel cell – the Bloom Box. That’s stuff only engineers get excited about.

Tweeted Paul Kedrosky

“Spoke to three different non-KP venture guys today, all still in awe at KP's ability to bend media space-time, a la Bloom.”

Welcome to the new decade of technology. And the end of the decade which Steve Jobs kicked off with his comment after introducing the iPod:

"I would rather compete with Sony than compete in another product category with Microsoft”

As we know, in doing so, he began a spectacular reversal of fortunes for his company. Even as corporate doors kept getting slammed for its products, the individual consumer it now focused on could not get enough of them. It is a trend now recognized as “consumerization of technology” which Apple along with Google, amazon, Skype, Garmin, Facebook and others accelerated through the last decade. The end result - powerful technologies in the hands of so many for so little.

The consumerization movement looked even more accented against the backdrop of underachieving innovation from the bigger technology players from IBM to Verizon to SAP. The bigger vendors were the most part trying to innovate via acquisition or innovate via association. Solve environmental issues – why would we do that? But we can sure help you account for it. Oh, and did you know we also have an iPhone app?

Lost in the decade of amazing consumer tech and underwhelming enterprise tech, though has been another unheralded trend where corporations were learning to package 3, 5, 10 strands of technology - infotech, cleantech, healthtech, nanotech, biotech - to create new products and to innovate internal processes. My upcoming book The New Polymath has bunches of examples:

• There’s GE with multiple solutions like its vision of the NetZero Home which brings together a wide array of solar, small wind turbines, batteries, interfaces to emerging utility SmartGrids and next-gen appliances
• There’s BASF using a number of biotech technologies in Berlin and infotech technologies in its greenhouse in Belgium as it analyzes metabolite and phenotype data to find better strains of rice
• There’s the BP CTO office which evaluates predictive analytics to help with maintenance on tankers and drones to monitor thousands of miles of pipeline in remote areas.
• There’s KP which evaluated over 5,000 investment opportunities and has invested in over 50 companies which represent every niche of cleantech. Bloom’s cells are just one small area of KP’s focus.

Talk to these Polymaths about the iPhone and you get a nod of appreciation. But what really impresses them is the fact that Apple coordinated a massive global rollout with carriers such as VimpelCom in Russia, 3 in Hong Kong, Etisalat in Dubai and Telia in Sweden that most of us have never heard of.

Ask them about Facebook and you may get a smirk. Then they will talk admiringly about the scalable technology which supports a community of over 300 million members, which supports over a billion chat messages each day and serves over 1 million photos every second.

The Polymaths like big, honking challenges that technology helps tame.

Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, defined the ethos for the new decade as he wrote to his shareholders last year:

“I believe that a popular, thirty-year notion that the U.S. can evolve from being a technology and manufacturing leader to a service leader is just wrong. “

In a world fraught with all kinds of Grand Challenges, we need these Polymaths. This is their decade. Ugly and complex is cool again.

And don’t be surprised to see it coming from users of technology and obscure new vendors, not vendors we have grown to know and love.