Archive for the 'Innovation' Category

Your competitive advantage

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 2-September-2008
in Business Excellence and Innovation
. Comments
:en:Seth GodinImage via Wikipedia

Another brilliant gem from Seth Godin:

People are fickle, but we’re generally rational. When someone makes a choice (hiring, firing, choosing a vendor, buying a soda) they’re using some sort of internal logic and reasoning to support that choice.

As a marketer, you win when they choose you.

So, why choose you?

The answer to that question is your competitive advantage. What makes it likely that more than a few rational people will consider their options and choose you or your company or your organization?

Truth: It’s rarely a computerized cost/benefit analysis. Instead, it’s a human choice.

Competitive advantage is similar to a concept we Product Managers call “Distinctive Competence” and it is a fundamental building block of any business. Those who don’t define it (early), wander aimlessly in search of customers, revenue and success.

, ,

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Sphere: Related Content

Randy Pausch, author of The Last Lecture, has died.

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 25-July-2008
in Innovation and Misc
. Comments

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor whose final lecture inspired millions, has died of pancreatic cancer. Dr. Pausch, 47, who turned the lecture into a book, said that no one would have been interested in his words of wisdom were he not a man in his 40s with a terminal illness.

For any of you that missed Dr. Pausch’s Last Lecture, here it is:

YouTube Preview Image

More about Dr. Pausch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch

read more | digg story

Sphere: Related Content

Gin, Television and Social Surplus

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 29-April-2008
in Innovation and Media
. Comments

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has posted on what he calls the “social surplus” or the time we gain by participating in the culture versus just sitting back and watching it pass by pursuing activities like watching TV.

Clay specifically cites TV, and singles outs sitcoms, as a sort of glue holding society together as we transitioned from the Industrial Revolution to post WWII society with higher GDP per capita, better life expectancy and more free time. Now imagine if all that time spent watching TV could be put to use and benefit of society–the social surplus.

Shirkey’s back of the napkin stats are compelling

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.

That is huge. Think of it another way,

this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

Time to turn off the TV and start participating…

Sphere: Related Content

Hello, gorgeous! Meet the laptop you’ll use in 2015

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 26-March-2008
in Apple, Computers, Innovation and Microsoft
. Comments

I found a very interesting Computerworld article:

A lot has changed in the 20 years since the first laptop computers appeared, including gigahertz processors, color screens, optical drives and wireless data. However, one thing that has stubbornly stayed the same is the conventional clamshell format with its hinged display lid that opens to reveal a mechanical keyboard.

That’s about to change. The rules of notebook design and the components that go inside are being rewritten to make the road a better place to work and play.

The CPU’s front-side bus will likely disappear by 2015. The bus acts like a traffic cop, sending data to the different parts of the system at a slower speed than the computational core. In its place will be an integrated controller that makes this distribution of data much more efficient by operating faster.

Currently, adding 64GB of solid state capacity to a notebook’s hard drive runs an extra $1,000. By 2015, the typical mainstream notebook could be outfitted with a 2TB hard disk drive, which should be plenty of room for even the biggest data hog, the experts speculated. For smaller and lighter machines, look to having something like 250GB of flash memory at your disposal, but it will likely come at a small premium.

read more | digg story

Sphere: Related Content

DRM, Digital Content, and the Consumer Experience: Lessons Learned From The Music Industry

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 26-March-2008
in Apple, Content, DRM and Innovation
. Comments

Sphere: Related Content

12 Learnings From My First Turn As Startup CEO

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 5-March-2008
in Innovation
. Comments

Jason Goldberg, founder and former CEO of Jobster (now vice-chairman) has put together one of the best lists of learnings I have ever seen on leading a startup. It is well organized, thoughtful, and clearly is borne out of experience–the kind you get by making mistakes, learning and moving on.

Although, I wouldn’t exclude any of them, here are a couple of my favorites:

  • The CEO’s job is to create value.
  • Technology companies are all about the product. Getting the product right is critical before aggressively going to market.
  • the rapid iteration model (ship early, learn from usage, adjust) works well for consumer services but works not as well for B2B services. Consumers will let you learn with them over time. Paying business customers, however, have less patience for your learning on their dime.
  • You must get close to your users and customers and live their personas.
  • Hire people who are passionate about the specific problems you are trying to solve.
  • The value of your company is directly related to your capital efficiency. Spend every dollar like it is equity. Preserve cash! Preserve cash! Preserve cash!
  • Have fun.

You can read the full post here.

Sphere: Related Content

The trouble with Steve Jobs

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 5-March-2008
in Business Excellence and Innovation
. Comments

A friend of mine pointed me to an interesting article about the personality traits/flaws of Steve Jobs and the impact, both real and imagined on the stockholders of Apple (for purposes of disclosure, I am a stockholder). The article is worth reading and raises several issues germane to the issue of disclosure to shareholders. The core issue is summarized in the prologue:

Jobs likes to make his own rules, whether the topic is computers, stock options, or even pancreatic cancer. The same traits that make him a great CEO drive him to put his company, and his investors, at risk.

My reaction is typical of these pieces. The author, Peter Elkind, is a typical investigative journalist who has never sat behind a desk as an executive of a publicly traded company and endured the kind scrutiny he forces on others. He of course, has the advantage of hindsight to assist him as he passes judgment on decisions made by executives with less than perfect information.

It will be interesting to see if Jobs in another case of a celebrity (in this case a celebrity executive) built up by the media only to be torn down. I guess this would be the second time for Jobs.

read more | digg story

Sphere: Related Content

End of the line for Netscape

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 24-February-2008
in Computers, Innovation and Microsoft
. Comments

It is hard to say goodbye. I don’t remember the date, but I still remember the first time I saw or used a web browser exactly. I know it was NCSA Mosaic running on a UNIX box in a computer lab at BYU. Having been an avid Compuserve users (and trying AOL) I do remember thinking, this thing is going to change the world. I wish I had known how. For those of you as nostalgic for cyberculture, here is some more history about Mosaic (from Wikipedia).

Scholars consider Mosaic to be the web browser which led to the Internet boom of the 1990s. Robert Reid underscores this importance stating, “while still an undergraduate, Marc wrote the Mosaic software … that made the web popularly relevant and touched off the revolution” (p.xlii). Reid notes that Andreessen’s team hoped:

to rectify many of the shortcomings of the very primitive prototypes then floating around the Internet. Most significantly, their work transformed the appeal of the Web from niche uses in the technical area to mass-market appeal. In particular, these University of Illinois students made two key changes to the Web browser, which hyper-boosted its appeal: they added graphics to what was otherwise boring text-based software, and, most importantly [sic], they ported the software from so-called Unix computers that are popular only in technical and academic circles, to the Microsoft Windows operating system, which is used on more than 80 percent of the computers in the world, especially personal and commercial computers. (p.xxv).

There is more history of the Netscape browser and the company.

Also, evolt.org has a browser archive with almost every known version of every browser ever released. You must check it out. I think I am going to download Mosaic and try to run it on XP under Parallels on my MacBook Pro (is that legal?).

read more | digg story

Sphere: Related Content

Apple TV Nails It the Second Time Around

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 23-February-2008
in Apple and Innovation
. Comments

Downloading and watching recent movies — in high-definition, from the comfort of your living room — is a stupendous experience. It could become habit-forming (exactly what Apple probably has in mind.)

read more | digg story

Sphere: Related Content

Don’t put a stake in the ground

Published
by
Ryan Petty
on 22-February-2008
in Innovation
. Comments

My friend Kelly Smith over at Curious Office has blogged about a Financial Times article about the need for flexibility in any endeavor, but certainly any Internet related business.  It really is a great article and the FT has some great content, so head on over (free subscription required).

From the FT article:

The quest to develop the internet’s next big thing can be full of unexpected twists and turns. PayPal, the online payments service, started as a way of transmitting payments securely between Palm Pilots. Its founders realised that there was an even bigger opportunity in online payments - and went on to sell the company to Ebay for $1.5bn (£767m).

Flickr, the photo website, grew out of a multiplayer online game being developed by its founders. Game Neverending never saw the light of day, but Flickr went on to be acquired by Yahoo, sparking a wave of interest in “Web 2.0″ sites.

“None of the big internet successes were like that,” he says. “If you want to build a great consumer internet company you have to be willing to try as much as you can, as fast as you can.”

We learned this at Myrio where our business plan changed several times during our early days.  The core idea was video delivery using IP and we knew we had to be disruptive.

We originally wanted to deliver video to enterprise customers, but that appeared to be a crowded market and getting more so each day.  Companies such as Cisco, RealNetworks, Microsoft, Apple and others were all vying to deliver CEO speeches and enterprise training videos over corporate networks.  Dead end for us.  So our model changed.

So we endeavored to stream real-time broadcast TV and VOD over IP (IPTV), and we made it work.  Much to the surprise of some very big companies (we even used their gear which they believed wouldn’t work).

Once we had it working, we knew we couldn’t waltz into a cable company and say, “Hey, we have a better way to do what you are already doing.”  A cable company wouldn’t simply switch to IPTV.   We needed to disrupt what cable companies were doing and we needed allies with networks and subscribers.  So we took our idea to PacBell.   Nada.  Sure they had networks and subscribers, but they lacked a key element.

So our business model changed again, and we found allies with subscribers, capital, and an entrepreneurial spirit in the independent telecommunications companies in rural America.

During all of this, our core remained, but our business plan was flexible and we hired excellent people (see earlier post: When Good Isn’t Good Enough) that could execute against a new idea.  We also utilized small teams of developers which allowed us to pivot quickly to meet the requirements of each market segment.  Again from the article:

[sic] Ooga Labs, a self-funded start-up whose 15 designers and engineers work in two-man teams to develop ideas in parallel. The goal is to churn out as many promising ideas in as short a time as possible.

[sic] “You can shrink the teams down to two people - a designer and an engineer. The smaller you go, the faster it goes.”

Please share your thoughts and ideas.

Sphere: Related Content