Thursday, December 11, 2008
Nike+ Interview
Nike has built in some basic social networking features but has yet to realize the full potential of the platform. With their powerful brand and full line of athletic products they have the ability to be a dominant player in the online fitness space. Currently, the Nike+ site doesn't have many features beyond just tracking runs. I'd love to see them add things like shoe tracking, a gear wishlist, 3rd party race results, etc. These features would let them learn more about me as a customer and drive my purchases through targeted incentives.
Check out this BusinessWeek article and video on Nike+ as well as some commentary from MarketingProfs Daily Fix.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
BU Tech Strategy Presentation
Harrah's Innovation
"The best way to fast-track a promising innovation, he says, is to operate it as an independent venture, separate from the tethers of everyday business processes. That often means running an innovation project on separate IT systems to avoid mingling experimental data with business operations." Tim Stanley, CIO & Chief Innovation Officer
Check out this InformationWeek article on the innovation process at Harrah's.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Mobile Start-Up Presentation
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
2nd Annual Open Web Awards
Update: The 2008 winners have been announced and can be found here. Some of my personal favorites from the list include Gyminee, Evernote, and Doodle. Be sure to check out all the rest of the winners and finalists.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Tech and the financial crisis
Check out this presentation by Mary Meeker from the Web 2.0 Summit. She talks about some of the causes of the financial crisis and the outlook for tech. The video of the presentation is available on TechCrunch.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Ready For Any Weather
It seems that this week everyone is talking about how an economic downturn will effect
Even more important than Rearden's $100 million is a business model with multiple revenue streams and a product that gives companies a platform to capture and reduce their business expenses. In tough economic times the impetus to manage employee spending only gets stronger. The dramatic growth of Rearden's customer and supplier base is a perfect testament to this. Additionally, Rearden's upcoming entry into the consumer market through a partnership with Chase (pdf) will further solidify the company's position as one of the tech companies ready to weather and even thrive in this tough economic climate.
Update 1/30/09: Despite Rearden's war chest and strong customer growth the comapny hasn't been imune to significant layoffs. In November the company had to layoff over 10% of their employees, including the majority of the marketing department, in an effort to reduce costs. Oddly, the compay is now reporting that they are hiring aggressivly including increasing R&D spending by 20%.
Monday, May 19, 2008
An Open Platform for Mobile Application Development
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Yahoo's New Fire Eagle
Tom Coates of Yahoo's Brickhouse announcing Fire Eagle, their new location sharing service. The promise of location based services take one more step forward.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
The Future of Mobile
I sat in on the presentations of the four finalists. For the most part these presentations were high level type consulting reports that advocated moving to a mobile broadband world. It was disappointing to realize that the competition sponsors just weren't ready for an innovative idea like ours. On the upside I'm starting to realize that I'm not alone in feeling this way. Check out this great blog post and discussion from one of my favorite blogs, Telco 2.o. To quote from that post:
Then you have to ask: “Don’t we need a new business model here, in parallel with the 4G technical developments?” The answer is of course, yes, and we explained why to NGMN.org in detail over a year ago on this blog. But, of course, we’ve had a deafening silence from the tecchies about this (“Not
our problem!”).
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Sloan First Round Presentation
Monday, March 17, 2008
BU Tech Strategy Case Competition
The competition goes from March 27 - 29th and you follow the action on the official competition blog. Check back here to see if Sloan was able to pull off a repeat victory.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Pandora at Sloan
One of the most interesting aspects of Tim's talk was his explanation of Pandora as part of the music discovery process. Because Pandora uses over 400 objective criteria to rate each song, the music discovery process is not driven by the latest fad or ratings that trend toward the mean. Pandora spends between 15 - 45 min rating each song. In addition over 70% of their music is not on a major label. For my money Pandora clearly has nailed one piece of music discovery on the internet. Ultimately they still need to dramatically improve the ease of purchase. Tim mentioned that many of their artists are not on iTunes or Amazon.
For the first three weeks of Pandora's life the company attempted a subscription model. When this was a dismal failure they moved to a free service. Currently, Pandora is supported by ads and a revenue sharing agreement with merchants like Amazon.com. Next time you want to buy a CD (or other item), help Pandora out by clicking through their site.
Pandora recently sent me an email with some tips for improving my station:
Want to create a station with a very specific sound? Consider giving a thumbs up to a song only when you like (almost) every aspect of a song, because each thumbs up will add more songs to your station, perhaps in a range that is wider than you had hoped.
Thumbs down has a less dramatic impact than thumbs up – it simply bans that song from that station, so consider using it liberally for any song you don’t like, or for a song that just doesn’t ‘fit’ on that station.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
MIT Sloan Books
My CISR Research Advisor, George Westerman, recently released a new book called IT Risk. One reviewer put it nicely when he said it is the first IT risk book that didn't put him to sleep. George and his CISR colleagues do great work. Please check out his new book.
I am also working as a teaching assistant for Professor Tom Malone. His book, The Future of Work, has some great insights on the organizational changes that are happening due to the reduction in communication costs.
Outsourcing and Innovation
Indeed, most outsourcing SLAs and pricing models deter innovation. Take data center management. It’s the outsourcer’s responsibility to ensure 99.99 percent uptime or provide backup services. “The value add would be when the service provider looks at the environment and says, Now I understand how you support your business and I see that by leveraging this new technology or different hardware, we can improve the quality of the service or your costs,” says Taylor of Fluor, which is on its fourth major outsourcing contract since the mid-1990s. “But you’re paying the vendor X dollars per server so there’s no motivation for them to reduce that number.”
Fluor signed a new contract with IBM last year. “The lesson we learned was that we needed to put a more generic umbrella agreement in place for future innovation,” says Taylor. “There are specific towers of service in the scope of work that are commoditized. But there is also a separate agreement that will enable IBM to provide innovation in all kinds of areas, like virtualization.” The contract includes prenegotiated terms for future innovation around issues of indemnity, risk and intellectual property protection. “If we want to have IBM explore virtual desktops, there’s already a fabric in place. We don’t have to call the lawyers and go through a full negotiation each time,” explains Taylor. “And it’s separate from the rest of the outsourcing, so IBM doesn’t need to get reimbursed through the fees we pay for the commodity activity.” Now Fluor can increase and decrease services from IBM without penalty. “It’s important not to lock yourself in because you don’t get the benefit of innovations that present themselves every day,” Taylor says.
Grand Central Problems
First, in an age where everyone has caller ID on their cell phones or at work, people get very confused when you call them back on a different number. Then the next time they call you they call back the other number and not your Grand Central number. For whatever reason, people just can't deal with the concept of a number with no home (i.e. the Grand Central number).
Second, all of the call routing preferences are based on your phonebook. However, Grand Central's importing tool is very clumsy and does not de dupe.
Finally, as of late Grand Central is unreliable. Now I know this is only a beta product but you just can't mess with people's messages. On Feb 4th Grand Central lost stored contacts and voicemails. Today is Feb 14th and the voicemails still haven't been restored. Unfortunately for me, I'm in the middle of search for a job and I can't listen to any of the messages that were left for me in the last 10 days. Needless to say I'm not very happy about this.