Looking for technology in all the right places

Apologies to Waylon Jennings Johnny Lee for twisting his words from Urban Cowboy, but I have been pleased to see salesforce.com make Canadian acquisitions – Radian6 and now Rypple, the social performance management vendor. In the last couple of years, I have had a chance to (revisit) several Canadian cities, and it has been impressive to see the froth of startups and innovative thinkers (as I wrote after my Toronto visit) beyond the big boy, RIM (the Blackberry company) everyone seems to know about and increasingly have less than positive things to say about.

It’s also nice to see the HR space get attention between Workday’s impressive  funding, SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors and now Salesforce acquisition of Rypple.  The whole people management world is topsy turvy as companies struggle to handle a socially savvy demographic of workers, global talent pools and weaker ties as they leverage contractors, crowds and customer self-service to do tasks previously done by employees.

Looking ahead, and maybe influenced by Steig Larsson’s books and upcoming movie, I have been impressed with the innovation happening  around the Baltic Sea. I feature Estonia’s “tiger leap” in my next book, remarkable after decades of communist stagnation. It is nice to see Google convert an old paper mill into a data center in Finland. Stockholm was named Europe’s Green Capital last year. With the acquisition of SuccessFactors, the small country of Denmark will have even more influence than it did with a co-CEO in the SAP boardroom. Again here, good to see focus shift from the big boy, Nokia, which like RIM has had recent challenges.

From a business process POV, it is good to see a renewed focus on demand forecasting and broadly on business model innovation. Amazon and Nintendo’s repeated supply shortfalls of their devices especially during the holidays and HP’s overshot with its TouchPad, show the volatility of demand companies are increasingly struggling with. More broadly, we are seeing a remarkable array of tech enabled business models – freemium (my friend Jeff Nolan recently wrote about that), as a service, bottom of pyramid etc that many industries are experimenting with and call for new tech solutions.

As Johnny famously sang “Playing a fool’s game, hoping to win”, in love and in technology it helps to not just look on the beaten path…