deal architect

What color is your conference badge?

Gavin Davidson of NetSuite summarizes a major contrast I will see between SapphireNow in Orlando on Monday and SuiteWorld in San Francisco on Tuesday.

"Normally when you attend a user conference hosted by a major ERP vendor, it’s quite a daunting task. Users, employees and partners are encouraged to wear numerous colored ribbons as an adornment to their conference badge to identify not only the industry vertical within which they operate but which solution(s) they might use or support….With NetSuite, every single user (and we are talking thousands) who attends SuiteWorld will be on the same base version..."

The other big difference is in the show floor and partner flavor. Sapphire is about high-falutin’ concepts and massive SI booths. SuiteWorld is much more grounded with a focus on customer projects and practitioners.  

Another big difference is in the customer base. Sapphire is usually dominated by big multinationals. SuiteWorld is about their subs.  NetSuite has also become the choice of some of the fastest growing and recently public companies like CornerstoneOnDemand, Eloqua, FinancialEngines, Groupon, Jive, Solarwinds,  Splunk and others.

Finally my friends at NetSuite, Mei Li and Mini Peiris, are lethal about feeding us all kinds of rich food. I see a French bistro and a Brazilian Churrascaria on the agenda. Thankfully I am hungrier in the mornings when I go West, so the big difference should be in the Florida and California greens I devour.

BTW – The Dictator comes out Thursday. By then, I should have enough conference ribbons to be at 2% of what his costume boasts in photo above!

The Other Renaissance

I scour plenty of reading material as I look for 500+ innovation posts a year for the New Florence blog.  This week, I was struck by the technology richness in two unexpected sources – Fortune and The New Yorker.

Ok, you could argue these are special, once a year issues – the Fortune 500 issue and the New Yorker Innovators issue. But then explain the 700+ citations in my two books (extracted below for those interested) – numerous blogs, predictable publications like  InformationWeek and Wired, but countless others from the BBC, BusinessWeek, The Christian Science Monitor, USA Today to other mainstream and trade media.

Part of the explanation is technology has seeped into so much of our every day lives that we expect to see more of it in our daily news.  But the other trend for all of us to celebrate is that in all the supposed doom and gloom of media dying a slow death, it is being reborn in many old and new places.

Download NewTechElite Notes

Download New Polymath Notes

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

BAM: Baseball Advanced Media

The Titanic and technology

Street Pothole App

Top 25 Technology Books

Ecofurbished Electronics

A hotel in the heart of VC country

Double-Talk Accounting

A journalist called me a few weeks ago about a vendor we all know. He was puzzled why this vendor's marketing kept talking about their cool new projects – when his research showed him it was a small part of their total revenues. So I helped him estimate the revenues from legacy products, and we quit counting at 70%. Clearly, the new solutions are only a small part of their revenues, but it suited them to paint the company as totally new and innovative.

I was talking to another vendor's executive a few weeks ago, and his brutally honest comment went something on the lines of “we have to talk about cloud, social, mobile to make you analysts feel good”

Both vendors are poster children for why the SEC should require more detailed product reporting, so we can compare Apple's 60+% of revenues from new products to those of other tech vendors who mostly talk about new products.

As I get ready to go to Sapphire next week, I stumbled across this interview David Vellante did with me at last year’s event. The first 20 minutes are about my books (BTW the book was originally titled The Technology Switchhitter, as I describe in the interview. The publisher eventually changed it to The New Technology Elite), then the conversation switches to SAP.

In the SAP section, I comment that I wished SAP would talk more about the realities of today, not just the cloud, mobile, social stuff. That is 90% of their current revenue reality. It will be so also next week, so I hope we hear more than HANA, ByD, Sybase and SuccessFactors.

 

More New Florence

on the innovation blog

A Pharmacy – in your abdomen

Next-gen warship

The TechStars Accelerator

Southwest’s new “Evolve” interior

The “Laugh” Scientist

The fastest growing – and dying - industries

Open Season on China

I picked up Time and BusinessWeek in the mailbox yesterday and they both had unflattering China covers with words like lies and corruption. With our elections and their leadership transition coming up, Chen Guangcheng and Bo Xilai will be household names on both sides of the Pacific this summer. There are some entities – companies like Monsanto, and countries like China - that even the best PR firms cannot help much.

In all that negative talk, I was struck by this comment in the Fareed Zakaria column in Time:   

A party whose history is tied to peasants, workers and soldiers is now the most elitist operation in the world. Its system of promotion favors engineers, economists and management experts over anyone with grassroots political skills. For two decades, China has been run like a company, not a country.

Blame the Chinese leadership for many things, but give them credit for the amazing technocracy that I researched for many parts of my new book

a) Why has Apple, so smart and ruthless in so many ways, put so many of its eggs in the China assembly basket (most components come from Japan, Korea, US etc) ? Largely because its contract manufacturer, Foxconn has delivered time and time, product after product, revised demand forecast after another. If any other outsourcer – IBM, Jabil, Accenture, Indian - is salivating about China’s image problems, this is an opportunity to step up and deliver to those cost, quality, time to market metrics. I highly doubt any of them can come anywhere close.

b) It goes beyond labor these days. BusinessWeek had a column on the growing SUV market in China. As Tony Prophet of HP is quoted in the book:

“We have been in China over two decades, and like other Western companies we could see the spiraling real estate costs, employee absenteeism, stretched infrastructure in the developed East and South.  Starting in 2007 we started to evaluate alternatives like Vietnam and Malaysia. But the more we looked at Western China, the more we also saw the opportunity for the domestic market. If you draw
a circle out 750 miles from Chongqing, you are looking at about 300 million people—which by itself makes it one of the largest PC and other gadget markets in the world. So that is our first focus here in the west of the country—made in China, for China.”

c) It goes way beyond Apple and HP – way beyond them. The country’s regional niches described in my book show its breadth and the global business it has attracted: 

“It could be to Juijang on the southern shores of the Yangtze River with visits to the solar photovoltaic manufacturer Sornid and the helicopter manufacturer Red Eagle. Another trip could be to Qingdao (better known to many in the West as Tsingtao—as in the beer), host to Haier Group, one of  the world’s largest home appliance manufacturers, and GERB, which focuses on vibration control in heavy machinery, equipment, structures, and trackbeds. Perhaps it could be to Xiamen on the southeastern Chinese coast where Dell has a factory for the booming local China market as does Philips Lighting Electronics, which is focused on next gen LED and other lighting. Or it could be to Chengdu in western China, home to Intel assembly and testing facilities, and to Giant, the
largest bicycle manufacturer in the world.”

Time, BusinessWeek and plenty of others are right to point a bunch of challenges for China, but let’s not forget the manufacturing dynamo and massive market the Chinese leadership has built. It ain’t going away no matter what names we call the country.

Wasted PR bullets

My friend and fellow EI Ross Mayfield has had a week which calls for multiple press releases. The company he co-founded, Socialtext has gained a strategic investment by Bedford Funding ($1.4B PE firm) and will integrate with Peoplefluent.  The company he has been guiding for the last year, SlideShare is being acquired by LinkedIn.

In an email exchange I had with him earlier this week, I asked him how SlideShare was going ( I have posted a few of my book presentations on the site) and he replied “watch this space”. I chuckled because I would have respected any embargo he put me under.

In contrast, I know a PR professional who constantly offers me fairly innocuous news under embargo, that I always decline. Recently this person offered me an Infographic. Under embargo. Seriously.

The New Florence blog is running 65% more posts than last year, and has more variety in technology categories and sources than ever before. But…. blog ideas from press releases and PR posts are at an all-time (as a percentage) low.

What gives?

Here’s more disappointing quality of PR I have been getting:

a) quarterly press releases when results are good, but which disappear in disappointing quarters. And where is the innovation in a quarterly earnings announcement?

b) funding announcements with little detail on how the money will be spent. Not that their VCs want them to be that transparent or that there is much innovation in the funding terms or how the money will be used.

c) Product announcements with little detail on customers who have implemented.

d) Announcements of startups which plan to intersect social, mobile, green, Big Data, cloud and other market segments. Jargon compliant!

Here’s what gets my attention

If an enterprise product, a list of at least 10 customers who have implemented it that I can call and talk to. Of course, that means live customers not just beta releases.

If a consumer product, an impressive number (in hundreds of thousands) of early adopters.

Actually, it does not even need to be a brand new product or service. I am always on the lookout for examples of the 12 attributes I catalog in my new book.  If you are innovating on business model, ecosystem, physical presence and channel, global supply chain etc. I would love to hear. Just don’t bury it in a quarterly earnings press release:)

Big Data: of You, You and Me

I read a fascinating article in New Scientist (sub required) which cites several academic projects to profile us based on social network data. These include:

a) Work by Lars Backstrom, a researcher at Facebook, showed he could locate 2/3rd of the site user’s to within 25 miles by identifying where their friends live

b) Adam Sadilek at U. of Rochester has shown that if just nine of a person’s friend’s attach GPS tags to their Tweets, you can pinpoint half of those people to within a 100 meter radius

c) Jennifer Golbeck of U. of Maryland has scored people on psychological traits based on their Tweet language

d) Daniel Garcia=Perez at the Idiap Research Institute in Switzerland has studied personality traits based on mobile call analysis

e) Salvatore Scellato and colleagues at U. of Cambridge have studied social patterns of 300,000 people using Gowalla, a location tracking service

Now, extrapolate this to Big Data sophistication increasingly available to corporate marketers. And add to that the commercial interests of Facebook  and others as they go public to sell personal data they may not have done so far.

And wait – this is just social data.

Prof Mary Cronin, in a guest column in my new book, The New Technology Elite highlights the coming privacy issues with all the smart cars, appliances, medical devices etc. increasingly part of my lives. The book describes smart products and services from over 75 industries.

The major new privacy challenge for this decade is the continuous, automatic, and invisible tracking of individuals by multiple smart devices. In the aggregate, consumer-owned smart products collect and report data at a level of precision and frequency that vastly outstrips the consumer information collected online.

Her recommendation

Rather than waiting for the government to mandate smart product policies, companies would be well served in adopting and disclosing consistent and verifiable guidelines for the permissible use, duration of storage, and data security protection measures taken to protect all of the consumer information that is collected by their connected products.Smartphone, automotive, home entertainment, and other smart product vendors should also disclose the privacy practices of their ecosystem partners who develop applications and peripherals for their products.

And us consumers need to push both companies and lawmakers for stronger privacy and profiling laws and corporate disclosures. If you think email spam and fraud and telemarketing of the last decade were a huge nuisance, you have not seen anything yet.

Next-gen data misuse will affect our home security, pacemakers, cooking and plenty more.

More innovation

On the New Florence blog

The Silicon Valley airline?

The FedEx EV Trial

Mobile First?

Reverse Innovation

Inside Amazon’s Idea Machine