deal architect

Looking forward to HP Discover

I like to go to a couple of new events (to me) each year. Next week’s Discover is one this year for several reasons:

a) HP is as close to a industry composite company (ok, a term I like – Polymath) as there is – it’s a chance to catch up on trends in hardware, software and services.  Cloud, Big Data, Storage, Data Center…

b) HP Labs is making its first appearance at a Discover. Be nice to get some innovation posts for New Florence.  

c) Catch up on keynotes from Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks and Chris Anderson of Wired. DreamWorks is also arranging a pre-screening of Madagascar 3. All should be good fodder for New Florence (though there is a no-spoiler embargo on the movie till it is out next Friday)

d) Hear directly from CEO Meg Whitman and many of her direct reports. Let’s face it – on any given day, you can hear 100 different rumors about the company. On most days, 99 and on some days, all 100 of them are unfounded.

e) Kick off summer travel for both my kids with a start in Las Vegas.

Celebrating Makers

Yesterday at AllThingsD, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple said

I want to build great products, I want to build great products. If we do that, the other things follow. Companies are confused and think their goal is revenue, or certain profit, or a stock price.  Those things you can’t focus on and make better.  You have to focus on the things that lead to those.

This morning, Aaron Sorkin, the famous screenwriter of The Social Network and working on an adaptation of Walt Isaacson’s Steve Jobs said

"I try to write what I'd like and what I think my friends would like, and then keep my fingers crossed and hope I can make a living."

It is so nice to see this focus on making high-quality stuff! 

In that vein, I loved this recent BusinessWeek gallery on forgotten inventors including Eugene Polley who invented the wireless remote.

And I love that BestBuy has brought back its SuperBowl ad which celebrates mobile innovators.

Here’s to the product dreamers and engineers!

IT at the crossroads

Larry Dignan at ZDNet summarizes a nugget from a Forrester analysis of Business/IT perspectives

Sure there’s collaboration between the business and IT on back office (46 percent said there was cooperation), but sales and marketing, R&D and product engineering lagged big time. Thirty three percent of sales and marketing execs said IT collaborates with them and 28 percent of R&D and product engineering considered corporate IT a partner. In other words, the stuff attached to revenue sees corporate IT as a barrier.

In some ways, it’s even more dismal.

In the research for my new book, several different companies told me even as they were developing “smart” products and services (i.e. with technology embedded in their product) they were doing it “around” IT.

Some of the comments I heard

• If we involve IT, it will turn into a 4 year, $ 50 million project
• If we turn to IT, they will just call in IBM or Accenture. Sorry, we are a 100 year old company – how would they ever know our products and customers better than we do?
• If we turn to IT, we will not just risk project failure. It could hurt our brand or lead to product liability.
• We find our R&D tax credit  accounting is cleaner if we keep such projects under product engineering, not IT

When it comes to Marketing, it is just as bad even as technology in the form of social media and Big Data around point of sale and customer metrics explodes. Gartner believes by 2017, the Chief Marketing Officer will spend more on technology than the CIO.

The CIO in many companies continues to be focused on the back office and infrastructure even as technology finally allows to focus on revenue and growth.

Here’s the irony. 85% of 90% of the CIO’s budget is now with IT and telecom vendors. Many of these vendors will confidently talk about how they are well positioned to sell to the business executive. Maybe they are, but they are not well positioned to explain away they are not part of today’s IT . A big part.

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

Technology of the Avengers

Coinstar’s vending machines of the future

The New Yorker Innovators Issue

Cleaning up the Tantalum supply chain

Solar Cells on Clothes and Paper

A week of “Green”

Danger to the left, danger to the right

My friend Brian Sommer pointed me an Inc. article about the growing threat from copycat companies.

About a  decade ago, when he and I had a startup, our instincts taught us to be wary of larger, better funded companies as threats to our IP. We were wary but of course could not match legal fees that came with deeper pockets. Nowadays, the threat is also from much smaller, nimbler companies and pirates of every type.

Which is why companies like Apple have become super-secretive and do “big-bang” global launches so copycat products don’t take advantage of a regional window of opportunity. 

Funnily, it has also affected my writing philosophy.

As a blogger, I like as much transparency as possible but as a book writer, especially when it comes to longer case studies, I often find myself being protective of the companies I am writing about. In a couple of cases I have asked them “you sure you want to share this detail?”. 

If you talk to journalists who have been “embedded” into military teams in hostile situations you realize it is a complicated balancing of exclusive front-line reporting and self-censorship. To some extent, I feel that same responsibility in this new world of IP battles.

You call that innovation?

The WSJ says the term "innovation" has begun to lose meaning. On many weekends, I would agree and cite my post Double Talk accounting - lots of talk and not enough results showing innovation at at some companies.

But this weekend, I got many kudos about my GigaOm column Traversing the Valley - which looks at plenty of unheralded innovation in Corporate America and in Silicon Valley. 

And I also tallied my monthly posts on New Florence.  Through May it is up to 260 posts for the year. That's more than all the posts in the first 2 full years of the blog. Honestly, that blog feels like an endless field of sunflowers you would see if you have driven through Tuscany

So, if anything, we need to be calling out the companies which brag about innovation while still largely selling old products and sticking to older business models and older channels and partners. 

But let's not malign the term and say it is not happening at all. There's Tuscany and then there are plenty of barren deserts and tundra.

Photo Credit

More New Florence

on the innovation blog

Nokia in the Valley

The Internet Minute

Foods your grandma would not recognize

Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm

VPNs and Repressive Regimes

Memorial Day: Metrics and Memories

Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial start of summer in the US, and for many of us that is beer, bbq, baseball and books. The last two in particular made me think of metrics last week.

Sam Fuld, an injured Tampa Bay Ray, joined the commentators during a game to talk about Sabermetrics. If you have read the book Moneyball or seen the movie or are a reasonably aware baseball fan you know there has been a movement going on for three decades to measure player performance on a new set of metrics like BAPIP and DIPS.  And we have ended up with a body of Sabermetrics – as in SABR (Society for American Baseball Research).

Over on his blog, Seth Godin made me think of book metrics. In the last decade, there have been so many new stats contributed by Amazon and the advent of eBooks. Then there are so many secondary stats. Number of tweets on my GigaOm column about my new book. Number of views on a SlideShare presentation summarizing my book themes. Number of views on YouTube on my talks on the book etc etc. All those expand an audience at least aware of a book’s presence so are arguably important metrics to track in a world where publishers are not marketing much and more authors are self-publishing.

It’s not surprising in a world with all kinds of stats  (with 2430 major league baseball games a year and 300 to 400 trackable events a game, the stats pile up quickly) and powerful analytical abilities available to all (did you know each Excel 2007 spreadsheet has over 16 million cells and we call that “small data”?), that we are so comfortable with metrics.

Memorial Day itself is more about memories than metrics. And often on this day, I will crack open a James Michener. Michener to me is all about heroes and memories from wars in the S. Pacific, Texas and elsewhere.

Michener’s travels often take me to the WorldCat site. It shows me libraries around the world that carry my books. i have no idea how they get the copies (hopefully via donations) but it allows me to fantasize about who reads them in Parramatta, Australia or Wetherby, UK. On this day, I hope I am making some veteran’s day a bit more interesting. 

More Innovation

on the New Florence blog

Technology and the SuperShuttle

“Productivity”apps

Silicon Berlin

Lowes: The “Inception” store?

The Innocence Project

Amazon Prime keeps evolving

The Events Supply Chain

I had a fascinating briefing with Scott Schenker, VP of Global Events last week as he walked me through some of the elaborate planning that goes into a massive event like SapphireNow. He talked nuances like “optimizing the linear frontage of partner booths facing the SAP campus on the floor”. He talked about special cooling/heating needs of the band, Van Halen. He discussed the “social ambassadors” SAP assigned to blanket the event on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube and how they had started their coverage a month prior. He talked about how SAP planned to use the event’s content with its global salesforce for months afterwards.

In my new book, I profiled how the Chicago marketing firm EA helped Boeing with the launch of its new 747-8 model 

EA concealed the plane with a massive 61-by-225-foot kabuki (a massive fabric panel that is quickly dropped to reveal something behind it) drape, which was lit with the “Incredible, Again” logo and color scheme. Multiple stages in front of the drape provided elevated spaces for the speakers and performers to address the 10,000-person crowd

And last week I also  had a chance to observe how people differently “consume” that content at events. Brian Sommer, seating next to me at SuiteWorld took pictures with his digital camera of every keynote slide he found particularly interesting. (He generously allowed me to use a couple in one of my posts). Dennis Howlett and Jon Reed must have videotaped anybody with a pulse at SapphireNow.Ray Wang likes the number of his tweets  from events to compete with his frequent flyer miles to travel to them. Frank Scavo likes to sit down with customers and walk the partner booths. Paul Greenberg makes time for fellow bloggers – I enjoyed an hour at the bar with him and we talked baseball, travel and of course, a bit of technology.  

To me, an event is well worth it, if I can get a couple of posts for this blog, 4-5 innovation posts for New Florence inspired by the travel to, the city of the event, the partners at the event, interesting speakers at the event. Events which make a big impact often show up in my books. The Ignite event in Toronto and CES in Las Vegas are prominent in the first few pages of my new book.

Of course, executives like Schenker don’t plan giant events for us observers. 97% of the audience is customers, prospects, partners and employees. Some come to learn, some come to be entertained, some come to do a gut check on the vendor. 

You get the idea, though – how events get produced and consumed keeps getting more and more sophisticated.  There are “experiential” marketing firms, experts like Schenker, d schools which focus on events design, hospitality and travel planners. It is a fascinating business.