But unlike most open innovation platforms, Riley explains, the community members each use their diverse expertise to collaborate to create more actionable, well-rounded ideas; and each member is compensated for their participation based on how much they contributed, and how much influence those contributions had.

Crowdsourcing, open innovation, and co-creation are hot topics today, and Napkin Labs was even featured in a story for The New York Times about the benefits of tapping the wisdom of the crowd. So sit back and enjoy this podcast as Riley provides a deeper understanding of how Napkin Labs’ model of open innovation is able to generate community interaction and innovative ideas.

Production Credits
Tom Parish, Host and Executive Producer
copyright (c) by Tom Parish 2010

To support her conclusions, Sherry Lowry has been formally collecting “evidence” since 2008, partly through observation and then through interviews, to identify more than 40 specific elements, behaviors, mind-sets, and demonstrated actions of people across five generations, who are, in effect – ageless. She believes we already have a group she says are “Generation Savvy” amongst us, operating seamlessly and successfully within every generation. These people are called Vision Enactors.

Bio: Sherry Lowry, Business Mentor and Collaboration Coach

Building on the experiences of founding and developing 7 businesses within 7 different industries, the largest of which included 20,000 clients throughout North America, her current focus is on serving our most effective small to mid-sized organizational future-leaders, and identifying and documenting their qualities and behaviors.

She believes these are our vision enactors, both now and throughout all times in the past, across all generations, within all cultures, communities and families. They know what works, wherein talent resides, how to connect it to purposeful endeavor, and they are willing to run interference for those they help shepherd, be their primary encouragers or, if necessary, skillfully create and facilitate alternatives with them.

Her primary client base now and for the past seventeen years consists of company and organizational founders and decision-makers who are implementing and adopting positive changes and who control the budgets to execute these changes.

Never having had a client who needed a stronger weakness has led her to consistently focus on supporting companies to identify true and renewing strengths of their people, building upon and expanding upon those, and developing strategies to delegate or partner-up and collaborate on all else.

Part of her future will include building a virtual and live community for the creation of alliances and collaborations between these “glue and fabric” people who are the early adopters and so often the catalysts, creators and facilitators of our emerging work cultures of effectiveness.

For more about Sherry Lowry visit www.SherryLowry.com

Click to Download Audio

This video podcast example works with an iPad, meaning it’s HTML 5 compatible. I’ll be updating all the interviews on the BMC Podcast show and the Enterpriseleadership.org show to work on iPhones and iPads soon. Twistage.com is the video management hosting service and (this is a plug) those guys rock when it comes to serious support for custom video management projects.

If you have any questions, let me know.

Tom

Polymath

The New Polymath is an enterprise that excels in multiple technologies—infotech, cleantech, healthtech, and other techs—and leverages multiple talent pools to create new medicine, new energy and new algorithms.

Author Vinnie Mirchandani shares his varied experience as a technology adviser and market watcher to explain in business language the diversity of today’s technology palette and to profile a wide range of innovations at:

• Large multinationals, such as GE and BP
• Fast-growing, midsized companies, like Cognizant and salesforce.com
• The cleantech industry in China, on farms in Ireland, and along the back roads of Rwanda

Click to Download

This book categorizes eleven “building blocks” for the New Polymath to leverage in its R-E-N-A-I-S-S-A-N-C-E framework, including next-generation analytics, cloud computing, sustainability and social networks. The author profiles more than a hundred innovators and demonstrates how they use these building blocks to solve both their individual, day-to-day issues and the “Grand Challenges” the world faces.

Brimming with examples from a variety of industries, countries and business processes, the book will inspire you to groom your own New Polymath tools, processes and ecosystem of innovation ideas.

Tom Parish asks Vinnie the following questions in this interview:

1. After reading your book, I’m impressed with the approach you’ve taken. It’s not simply a book of case studies with observations about what’s common and what’s not. You’ve dug deeper into a trend emerging that’s people-oriented. In particular, it’s an acknowledgment that many multi-talented people who don’t fit into typical résumé profiles are solving big problems. I’ll have to say I have a feeling of hope from reading your book. So for the audience, what is a Polymath and a Polymath company?

2. Give us a couple of examples of a Polymath company.

3. Why is this important to know now?

4. I like the title of Chapter 1: The New Polymath: In an Age of Wicked Problems and Technology Abundance. Talk more about why this was an important way to begin your book.

5. I noticed you make reference to the ‘grand challenges’ throughout the book. Why?

6. Chapter 17: What is the tie-in to The New Polymath (and Polymath Companies) with communities, crowds, contracts and collaboration? What is the relationship between the Polymath and Clouds: Technology as a Service? There was no specific mention of it in the chapter.

7. Let’s talk about grooming your own Polymath – what are the steps for doing that?

8. I was particularly struck by your epilogue, The Beginner’s Mind, because I’ve studied Aikido for years and that’s its underpinning philosophy, which hasn’t been all that popular in traditional business. Do you think this could be the fundamental characteristic of the Polymath and Polymath Companies that will be emerging in the new economy? If so, why?

Resources

The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-technology Innovations, by Vinnie Mirchandani

Production Credits
Tom Parish, Host and Executive Producer

As background: A smart grid delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers using two-way digital technology to control appliances at consumers’ homes to save energy, reduce cost and increase reliability and transparency. It overlays the electricity distribution grid with an information and net metering system. See this link in Wikipedia for more info on smart grid technology explanations and promises.

All very cool stuff but will it really be the electric utilities which usher in this new era of consumer-oriented, two-way, digital technology to save energy with our appliances at home, for example? To share stored energy in our electric or hybrid cars for others who need it when we don’t?

Answer – naw, not likely. For the last 60+ years electric utility companies have been about delivering and maintaining an electric network that only they control. It’s worked well, but ….

Take, for example, the 1993 AT&T commercial that I bet you’ll remember well if you’re over 35.

We all had the impression that AT&T, this huge legacy infrasructure-type communications company, would be the one creating and bringing all these new amazing technology innovations directly to consumers, even some that would help them control their electricity use.

Watch the commerical. Did AT&T do these things … or was it other, smaller companies which actually created the technologies, some that did not even exist back then? Should we wait for the electric utility companies, whose goal in life is to generate stable electricity without fail (as opposed to being innovative), to create the technologies? My guess (and Len’s) is that smart-grid technology for consumers is going to come about with a great deal of innovation and entrepreneurism, and it will come from totally outside the electric utility companies in the USA.

And that’s fine, really, as long as it happens. I believe we’re way behind the curve on what can be done to use energy more efficiently, and it’s the consumers who can interrupt the legacy control of the utility companies. I’m curious what you think.

Tom

Just a few short years ago, if a company was going to leap forward competitively, they had a single focus of putting PCs on everyone’s desks. Not long after that, they needed to have everyone on the Internet, and eventually, of course, everyone needed broadband.  These days, practically every business—small, medium or large—provides these kinds of resources to employees. In fact, now that almost everyone has in the palm of their hand what was once solely on their desktop, what are ‘we’ as a collection of societies in this world going to do with all this capability?

What will inspire new business opportunities and new, more competitive products? I think we’re just back to what counts: ’It’s all about your people’ and how management views the talents of people in their business and cultivates new ways to be creative and innovative.

I’m echoing what Richard Florida has been saying in his books The Creative Class and The Great Reset. His point being that we must put our minds to cultivating innovative skills and creativity with people both inside and outside our company—globally.  There are no boundaries for innovation, and you’re not going to lasso all the talent into your own company and keep it there.

Open Innovation was the inspiration for the following podcasts (see links below) which I produced on EnterpriseLeadership.org. Sponsorship for the show has been cut so we’re not able to keep this series going. However, these interviews over the period of a year were the most exciting and most thought-provoking I’ve done, so I want to be sure everyone I come in contact with gets an opportunity to hear these people talk. I want listeners to come away as inspired and motivated as I did. These interviews were sponsored through the generosity of BMC Software.

Dr. Joel West, Academician and Author, Talks about the Open Innovation Paradigm for Technology Development In this podcast, Dr. West explores what powers the concept of open innovation and how it differs from traditional innovation efforts, such as research and development.

Tom DeGarmo, a principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Makes a Case for Open Innovation in Economic Downturn DeGarmo provides insight from his research experience with open innovation, gives examples of open innovation communities, and gives CIOs and CTOs several takeways for using technology to carry out open innovation initiatives.

Steve Shapiro, InnoCentive’s vice president of Strategic Consulting, Talks about Using Open Innovation to Solve Tough Problems Shapiro explains the reasons for using open innovation to solve tough problems, InnoCentive’s business model for generating revenue, some of InnoCentive’s most successful challenges, the benefits of using InnoCentive, and the challenges the company faces in this economy.

How CIOs Can Reshape Their Company’s Business Model: C.K. Prahalad, Best-selling Author and Academic Prahalad provides specific examples of how senior IT executives can address new business opportunities for their companies, how new technology initiatives can drive business opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid, why companies should embrace the concept of open innovation, and what the CIO role will be like 10 years from now.

Dr. David Tennenhouse, partner at New Venture Partners, Talks about Different Approaches to Open Innovation In this podcast, Tennenhouse talks about the need for companies to turn to open innovation, the way open collaboration enhanced open innovation at Intel and other organizations, the emergence of innovation that venture capital firms are seeing, and the takeaways CIOs need to be aware of if they want to promote innovation and open innovation.

Former Air Products Research Executive Talks about Establishing Successful Corporate Innovation Programs Why are some major companies good at driving corporate innovation in technology? For some answers, Enterpriseleadership.org turned to Dr. Ron Pierantozzi, who built his entire career on driving corporate innovation in a technology-related company and doing research in this area.

Harvard Business Professor Talks about Technology Investments, Especially Enterprise 2.0 After Andrew McAfee became a proponent of Web 2.0 tools, which he calls Enterprise 2.0, he developed a technology paradigm that companies can use to buy or build digital platforms for enabling their employees and other constitutents to collaborate more freely.

Symantec CEO Talks about Building a First-Rate Security Company During John Thompson’s decade as CEO of Symantec, a $6 billion enterprise security company, he transformed the company from a consumer-based software publisher to a leader in Internet security, data protection and storage management.

Owens Corning CIO Talks about Steering a Steady Technology Strategy through Bankruptcy and Beyond “Our focus is productivity, taking cost out and enabling ease of business to our customers. We want to provide an environment for our businesses and our innovation folks to engage in open innovation. This concept will enable us not only to drive product innovation internally, but externally as well.”

Photography from www.jaipurfoot.org/07_donations_help.asp

For even more insights, consider reading Vinnie Mirchandani’s The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations. I plan to interview him in the future.

Tom

Here is the background on topics we covered:

DeGarmo, a principal in PricewaterhouseCoopers advisory practice, talks about why companies must practice open innovation, especially in this economic downturn.

What do the Apple iPhone and Linux have in common? They are both products of some form of open innovation. Linux came about through the collaborative efforts of the thousands of developers who participate in the open source community. Applications for the iPhone mushroomed when Apple made the phone’s platform available to application developers. Other companies, such as Google and Microsoft, have followed in Apple’s open innovation footsteps.

DeGarmo was first exposed to open innovation when he worked at Bell Laboratories, AT&T’s research arm, back in the 1980s. He says that Bell Laboratories’ culture thrived on sharing experiences, ideas and research for the sake of research. He says, “We took the best of what we learned and applied it to problems outside of the lab.”

With traditional innovation, or what DeGarmo calls closed innovation, companies have ownership over their assets and their intellectual property. They look at how they can leverage their employees’ expertise to solve problems. “This type of innovation can be somewhat limiting and very constraining. In a down economy, companies need to explore every avenue for innovation.”

Companies which practice open innovation, on the other hand, look outside for smart problem-solvers. “Some of these people might have already solved your company’s particular problem, might have people working on your particular problem, or might have people with insight to share. You might find people who are working on totally unrelated problems. If you apply these problems to your situation, you might solve your problem.  If you are open enough, you can take advantage of what the world has to offer.”

In this on-going series of innovation podcasts, DeGarmo provides insight from his research experience with open innovation, gives examples of open innovation communities, and gives CIOs and CTOs several takeways for using technology to carry out open innovation initiatives.

—

Note: The image for this blog article is from http://open-tube.com/

© 2010 Tom Parish Inc. All rights reserved.

I’m finishing up Richard Florida’s The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, and it’s the first book I’ve read on my iPad using iBook. I think I’m getting into reading the electronic versions of books. Love the way iBook remembers where you left off, along with all your personal highlighting (with different colors!). I downloaded Kindle and bought a different book to experience their reader. Anyway, I’ve always appreciated the insights Richard Florida continues to bring  forward around the idea of a new creative class emerging in this economy. His latest book provided more about this concept from a historical perspective and a quick look forward on what may occur soon.

Just ordered The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations by Vinnie Mirchandani, and it should arrive tomorrow.

I called the local Barnes & Noble and they said it was not available locally. Go figure. Another last sale. Said they could order it for me, and I said, well, no thanks, I can do it and it will be delivered to my doorstep. The other odd thing was The New Polymath is not available in an electronic version. That seems so strange considering the book is about things like cloud computing and new services becoming available online. But no electronic version is available on the Kindle or the iBook. I guess it’s just something the publisher is in control of, and they want to sell all the paper versions first. Who’s to know.

Regardless I’m looking forward to reading the book. Many of the topics discussed include technologies and new styles of innovation that I’ve been hearing about in the interviews I do at www.EnterpriseLeadership.org and the BMC Podcast show.

Tom

This is an example of taking an audio interview and turning it into a video with text panels to help emphasize various points made by the speaker. In this podcast I interview the Vice President at Endeavour, who is an active writer and analyst. He makes some insightful points, especially toward the end where he talks about ‘what’s next’ in the way of trends in mobility technology. Hint – think about having TV apps that work with the same data as your smartphone apps so you can share and see the same information on your TV – in particular for health purposes.

You may want to read Avinash Birnale’s related blog post “Is Mobile becoming the disruptive force in Cloud Computing?”

Tom

“A Guide to Determine the Right Smart Mobile Platform(s) for Your Enterprise Strategy” is a useful article to get yourself oriented with the basic issues and tradeoffs you’ll be facing.  You’ll also want to consider “Native Mobile App or Mobile Web App?” for the native versus browser tradeoffs.

If you were around in the late 1980s, you’ll recall something strangely similar to these dilemmas and tradeoffs where devices have very little compatibility between them. We had a new device then, called the PC – the personal computer. You probably remember the different versions of DOS and what a pain it was to get anything to run well, much less move the software you bought to another machine. Different versions of the same software, like word processing and spreadsheet programs, had to be recoded for the different PC manufacturers. I remember staring at software boxes, wondering if the software I wanted would run on my particular PC or not. What a pain.

Have patience. In time the mobile market will mature and there will be some convergence in the platforms. However, for now you need to carefully review the tradeoffs and look for people who have been down this path before. I know from developing that one iPhone app for BMC Software that the design process for an iPhone is very different than for desktop computers, and I needed more help than I was willing to admit at first.

If you find any other great sources for solutions to these challenges, let me know.

Tom

(Disclosure: Tom Parish Inc. has a business relationship with Techendeavour.com, who wrote the articles mentioned here. Other business affiliations include Twistage.com for video platform management and BMC Software.)

© 2010 Tom Parish Inc. All rights reserved.

This is the first nuts-and-bolts blog posting I have seen that gives practical insights as to what is possible with the new SDK from Apple. The iPhone 4.0 SDK (software development kit) promises the ability to do multitasking and customizable desktop displays and other goodies. However, under the hood are quite a new APIs (application program interfaces) that provide data protection for third-party apps, core telephone capabilities, access to calendar events, the ability to compose and send a SMS message from a third-party app (nice), and location notification.

This last one, location notification, gives a user the ability to schedule notification of an event based on their current location. Remember, the new 4.0 (OS) operation system give you the ability to have multiple applications running. This location notification will be delivered to an app whether the app is running or not. Once the notification is scheduled, the system will manage this notification without your needing to go over the Internet to access a server.  I’m think this might be useful to remind me to do certain things when I get home after being gone all day. The iPhone will recognize I’m getting near the house, and up will pop a notification to remember to pay a bill that night. You get the idea.

Shetty’s article also has a section called ‘Improvements Towards Making iPhone Enterprise-Friendly’.  By the way, if you’re just catching up on the OS 4 updates, you’ll want to check out the high-level review at Apple first.

Mobile Device Management:

Deploying and managing enterprise applications will be lot easier with iPhone OS 4. New Mobile Device Management APIs can be integrated with third-party solutions to wirelessly configure and update settings, monitor compliance with corporate policies, and even wipe or lock managed iPhone devices.

Seems like this feature was not provided in the current Beta release. See the release note “Mobile Me” section (will need Apple Developer login for access).

Wireless App Distribution:

iPhone OS 4 enables enterprises to securely host and wirelessly distribute in-house apps to employees over Wi-Fi and 3G. Apps can be updated without requiring users to connect to their computers.

SSL VPN Supports:

SSL VPN support in iPhone OS 4 gives users another way to securely access enterprise resources. These new protocols can even be leveraged to connect seamlessly to a corporate network via VPN on Demand. Forthcoming apps from Juniper and Cisco will support SSL VPN on iPhone.

Multitasking:

With the multitasking support for the new OS release, iPhone apps can do a few of the processes from the background but not all. Application can finish the current task before going to suspended states, giving the expiry time period. Local Notification is an advantage of background process.

For those wanting to delve into strategies for enterprise mobility, another excellent article does a deep dive on “Native Mobile Apps versus Mobile Web Apps” where Avinash Birnale discusses the tradeoffs between these two approaches. The article saved me a great deal of time having to find this out myself on a recent project. Recommended reading if you are just getting on a broad-based enterprise mobility strategy.

[Disclosure: I currently maintain a business relationship with Techendeavour.com. These comments are based upon the quality of the material - and not on how I obtained it. Video hosting for this website is provided by Twistage.com.]

© 2010 Tom Parish Inc. All rights reserved.

Though the majority of the interviews are audio, listeners have expressed a growing interest (no surprise) for these to be in both video and audio. In the B2B world, experts in IT technology reside all over the globe, and the only reasonable way to capture their interviews is to use Skype.  I’ve completed a lot  of testing on how to capture thought leadership-style interviews from remotely located experts. These days you can’t send a video crew out, even if you work in an enterprise.

This last year I’ve experimented extensively with Skype and iChat video webcam recording for the remote caller. I typically use a local camera in the studio for my side of the video. It’s extra work but worth the trouble.  I’ve also asked some people who were up for it to use their video camera and send me the files via DVD later (or FTP).

So as background, I use a Sony EX1 camera in the studio and convert both the camera’s video and the Skype video to Apple ProRes 422 so I can easily edit my video and the interviewee’s, despite the original files’ being from different video hardware. I’ll use the 720P setting at 30 fps.  The conversion to Apple ProRes is an extra step, but it’s just the best way to do this for maximum quality and to simplify the editing process when you have video that is encoded from such entirely different sources.

As you can imagine I have no control over the mic that the interviewee is using.  With Skype and iChat, the built-in laptop mic or headset is what you get and it turns out the quality is surprising good – better than a phone line. I just have to watch the levels and be careful how the headset mic is placed so there is not too much ‘splat’ noise coming from the interviewee’s microphone circuit being overloaded.  On my end, I’ll either use a Sennheiser wireless mic directly into the Sony EX1 (preferred approach) or the Sennheiser shotgun mic into the Sony EX1. I’ll always record an audio track of my side with Skype as a kind of sync track and backup if something goes wrong.

On a couple of a video podcasts I’ve used a USB headset for the audio on my side and it’s been ok – but not nearly as clean and clear as the higher-quality Sennheiser mics.

To see all the videos produced with the approaches mentioned here, visit  http://www.TomParish.com/media

The topic of this particular podcast is “Enterprise Mobility Trends and Applications with Dan Turchin” and we used Skype. I only had video being recorded for his side – ‘only’ to maximize quality. To record Skype calls, I use a software package from  http://ecamm.com/ which has worked flawlessly for dozens of calls. Recommended.

In 2009 I read two surveys that showed in detail that most viewers dropped off from watching videos after 2+ minutes. Earlier this year I did an informal survey of all my video podcasts, which tend to run as long as my audio interviews (10-20 minutes), and I looked at my clients’ videos, too, which run 3-10 minutes in length. What I saw in the engagement metrics at Twistage.com (a hosting company I admire, respect and use) showed clearly that I’d lost half my audience after 2 minutes of the video podcast, and by 10 minutes only 10% of the viewers were left. Same results happened to my clients. However, based on feedback from listeners, the audio versions are getting listened to the entire time.

Part of the deal here is two heads talking (interview style) doesn’t offer the eye a lot to look at. Clearly an audio version gives you all you need.  However, people seem more and more interested in video versions of long conversations, but getting them ‘into’ the meat of the conversation takes some extra effort. A short version can do this along with front-loading the longer interview with a ‘call out’ or ‘hot point’ that is pulled from the conversation to keep people hanging on for more. But I digress ….

There was one exception around length, especially with B2B content: Any time a video had well-defined ‘how to’ steps in it, the viewers stayed on for the entire video, almost without regard for length. But that’s been the case even for audio podcasts. If the content is compelling and impacts what you do in your job or at home, you’re going to listen and get the scoop for yourself. That’s a key message I’ve used for years in my podcasting with clients. Now that there’s greater emphasis on video, what is the best strategy for including video podcasts in a lead-generation process?

First, why 2-3 minutes for videos? My thinking is we’re all subconsciously programmed in some way for that amount of time. Music singles (remember 45 rpm records?) were rarely longer than 3 minutes. More relevant, I think, is the length of movie trailers, which are almost always less than 2.5 minutes – really, check for yourself. They are carefully crafted to draw you into the movie (some better than others) within that 2.5-minute limit. Sometimes you’ll see a movie trailer that is 1-1.5 minutes, and so often you feel kinda cheated. It was not long enough to give you a good feel for the plot. Like with my 45s, songs that were short made me feel a bit short-changed because I had to pay for those records, and they broke if I wasn’t careful, and they scratched easily. But those were the old days …

So the lesson here is take the “how to” approach and create a 1- to 3-minute introduction as your lead generation to draw people in and get the most interested to follow you back to your site for the longer version and maybe an accompanying white paper or other related resources on your site.

We’re all familiar with YouTube, and the average video length of the most popular ones, if I recall, is less than 3 minutes. Likely the best way to use video for a website that has really valuable long-form content (interviews) is to focus on keeping the interview fairly tightly edited and less than 10 minutes. Then create a 1- to 2-minute YouTube short version to capture people’s attention and bring them back to your website. The reason for this is YouTube allows you to insert a lot of keywords into your description and tags, and YouTube videos rank well (meaning, very visible) in Google searches. Reminds me of the old days of SEO when you focused on putting lots of tags on web pages to improve ranking. Now people put those tags on videos. But remember, you want to drive people back to your website for your lead-generation purposes. So put the longer version of the interview there, where you can include a sign-up form for viewers to get more information, or to see the entire interview for free.

Tom

Graphically and in a pleasing manner, it quickly gives you, the reader, some insight around what articles on the website are “Most Commented”. You get a quick feel for what’s popular, and the way they’ve done it is just, well, pleasing, interesting, colorful but not distracting.

Good to see some effort being made to both help and entice readers into reading more on a website by making the text itself more appealing. It’s encouraging to see elements of web design that are about visualizing data to help the reader (and keep them more engaged), instead of eye candy for the sake of ‘coolness’.

Hope we see more of this.

Tom

Multitasking Support

True Enterprise Support

Local Push Notifications

New Addition – Game Center

After iBook, now iAd!

Avinash covers some good news and the not-so-good news. For example, the new OS4 upgrade will not be coming to the older iTouch and first-generation iPhones. The second-generation iPhones will get an upgrade, but no multitasking. The 3Gs will have the full upgrade (lucky me).

The iPad will get the OS4 upgrade this fall. I’m somewhat bummed about that as I’m looking forward to these new capabilities in the iPad, which I’m using more and more each day.

Avinash downloaded the SDK and BETA firmware upgrade where he observed some crashes and one instance of things freezing up. Well, we all know how it goes. It’s going to take some time to sort out some of the bugs before  fully testing and then delivering apps with  this rich new array of APIs.

Avinash also mentioned something I did not know:

“I did the firmware upgrade on my iPod Touch (2G). It has a nice home screen, enhanced folder feature on the menu icons and nice iPod features to create my own playlist, folder view of the playlist! I like it ”

He has a follow-up article where he talks more about additional technical aspects of the OS4 upgrades from a developer’s perspective. This is where I think things get more interesting. It’s the developers that work with these tools on a daily basis and really know what’s possible with enterprise mobility. It gets complicated fast when you work in the enterprise arena where apps have to be ported to multiple smartphones, and services are being accessed from a combination of public and private  clouds. It’s important to step back and ask myself what am I wanting to accomplish and will it be perceived as a benefit to the business. Helps to work with people who have done this before too.

Reminds me of when I was a kid and the skate arena guy would say, “OK, it is guys and girls. Now pick a partner for this tune.” Yeah … pick your partner but make sure they can stand up without falling. That skating arena was tricky.

OK, back to work.

Tom

(26:31)

In this podcast, Dr. David Tennenhouse, a partner at New Venture Partners, a venture capital firm focused on corporate spinoffs, talks about different approaches to open innovation. New Venture Partners practices what Tennenhouse calls inside-outside open innovation.

Partners and other staff members at New Venture Partners, a venture capital firm with about $700 million under management, do not spend their time slogging over business plans looking for the next Amazon.com or Google.com. Instead, New Venture Partners works with global companies to spin off prospective new product ventures residing in research labs and business units. To date, the firm has invested in more than 50 spinoff ventures from companies such as British Telecom, Philips Electronics, and Freescale Semiconductor. A spinoff from Lucent, New Venture Partners became a stand-alone venture capital firm in 1997. The firm has its roots in Bell Labs, where it incubated new projects and then created new ventures from them.

David Tennenhouse, a partner at New Venture Partners, calls his firm’s approach to investing an inside-outside form of open innovation. He says, “The companies we work with practice open innovation in two ways. First, they have an inside component where they input knowledge into the company. Second, they use an inside-outside component to use external vehicles, such as venture capital firms, to create spinoff ventures. Open collaboration becomes the way we work together to amplify the dissemination of a company’s internal research and to enable it to influence the surrounding ecosystem.”

Tennenhouse has had much hands-on experience practicing inside-outside open innovation. He was previously a director of research at Intel. He says, “Many of Intel’s corporate research projects made a successful transition to existing business units. Some projects created new business units, which is the gold standard for a research director. Many projects, however, did not have a natural home within the company. That situation allowed me to undertake the mission to spinoff the project or engage in inside-outside open innovation. The job included taking the benefits of the company’s learning about the prospective product and influencing the ecosystem around us. The difficulty was to do this while knowing we were not going to make and market the product.”

In this podcast, Tennenhouse talks about the need for companies to turn to open innovation, the way open collaboration enhanced open innovation at Intel and other organizations, the emergence of innovation that venture capital firms are seeing, and the takeaways CIOs need to be aware of it they want to promote innovation and open innovation.

Bio
Dr. David Tennenhouse is a partner in New Venture Partners. He joined the firm from Amazon.com where he was vice president of platform strategy and chief executive officer of its A9.com subsidiary. Before Amazon/Z9, Tennenhouse was director of research at Intel Corporation. He also worked as a chief scientist at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency.

Tennenhouse is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and a Fellow of the IEEE. He is also an advisor to Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and to the Mechanical Engineering Department at UC Berkeley. Tennenhouse holds a B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto and obtained his Ph.D. at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge.

Resources
Verizon Leads 4G Investment Group, The New York Times
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/verizon-launches-13-billion-4g-investment-group/

New Venture Partners Looks to Find the Next Big Thing, Fox Business
http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/innovation/new-venture-partners-looks-start-ups-corporations/

Innovation in Stormy Markets, National Venture Capital Association
http://nvcatoday.nvca.org/index.php/current-issue/112-innovation-in-stormy-markets.html

CTOs Embrace Open Innovation, Computerworld
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/127254/ctos_embrace_open_innovation?fp=16&fpid=0

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

The folks at Techendeavour.com who developed the iPhone app for the Austin American-Stateman have just released an iPhone mobile version of The Onion. I’m playing with it now. I’m one of those folks who picks up The Onion when I’m out and about and have time to kill, but rarely to read it regularly. After downloading the iPhone app today I started realizing how handy it will be to bring it up and get a chuckle or two during the day.  Their humor seems to lighten the load on my brain, and I find myself laughing out loud.

I spent about 30 minutes with the app and it’s snappy. Any app that is slow in loading and updating can be frustrating. I noticed that Techendeavour engineered the Austin American-Statesman‘s app to be lightening fast, and they’ve done the same for the Onion app. That kind of user experience keeps you coming back. They also did a nice job of incorporating a way to save and share content easily, along with sending a bug report or feature request or advertising inquiry right from the app − smart move. I’m not sure if an iPad version is in the works but it would be a nice next step. I’ll have to check on that.

So treat yourself. Get one for an iPhone nearby and see what you find that makes you chuckle.

Tom

I’m not sure this is a fight as he indicates at the end of his manifesto. However, I do believe this is the dawning of a new lifestyle and the core of the new economy. I’m including his post in its entirety for others to read and see how it fits for them.

Tom (aka a member of the creative class or digital creatives, as we say at SXSW each year)
—-

The Creative Class Manifesto
We are the creative class. We breathe change. We move fast. We will change the world!

We are web designers, bloggers, SEO experts, interactive experientialists, flashers, refined political critics, social media experts, geeks, artists, account executives, storytellers, managers, strategists, polymaths.

This is the awakening of the Renaissance.

It is 1402 once again. Druker is the new Petrarca. Tom Peters is Dante, and Seth Godin the young Giotto. Google is our printing press and Page+Bryn = Gutenberg. Let me be your Machiavelli.

The revolution is approaching. The creative wars are beginning.

Polymaths of all countries, unite!

THIS IS OUR MANIFESTO

1. We are creators. We create everywhere and anything.

2. We buy what we sell. Always. This is our mantra. We create ingenious yogurt products and the campaigns to sell them. We create ingenious running-shoes stores, and the funky videos to make ourselves relate with billionaire multinational brands.

3. We create and consume random content. This is our inspiration. This is our world-changing idea: The freedom to consume and produce random stuff for free.

4. We all understand that the planet needs our help and that we should stop using plastic grocery bags. The images of dolphins caught in plastic beercan polymer chains break our hearts. Video repeats of baby polar bears slowly drifting at sea on tiny melting glaciers haunt our dreams.

5. We are outraged by all inequalities, especially when governments we elect decide to tax us more in order to pay for errors of previous governments that we have also gloriously elected.

6. Our creativity builds or breaks cities. We are not a demographic. We are a way of life.

7. We hate hypocrites and our high capacity of critical thinking allows us to detect the true conspiracies versus the fake ones.

8. We can do everything we put our minds to! Our tweets are wise and our posts rejoiceful.

9. We feed on liberty! A LOT.

10. We move fast, we are agile and profound. We strive on getting-things-done theories; we love quick wins and fast solutions.

11. We always get something done!

12. We are open-minded. Everything is acceptable as long as it is spoken in a soft but determined voice.

13. We like to laugh. All those crazy vids of cats dancing and playing pianos crack us up. All the time.

14. We are the real thing! We are right because we care!

15. We will change the world! For sure!

16. We are dead serious. What thou avoidest suffering thyself, seek not to impose on others!

17. Carpe diem!!

Spread the word! This is your fight!

But what will using the iPad reveal to us about its potential?

Will we be disappointed as the tidal wave of yammering critics blog away at what the iPad doesn’t do? I’m curious to find what gets revealed from people in business looking for competitive edges. We’ve been down this road before with Apple products, so I’m staying with an open, curious mind. We’ll see soon enough. Will the 4.0 release of the OS finally offer the much-requested multi-tasking? I predict that this summer. Will there be competitors? Of course. It’s no mystery that Apple is looking over their shoulder at Google, and Microsoft will be a player at some point. You may want to keep your eye on the new JooJoo Tablet that is expected to ship March 29th. Still, the issue is: How do you leverage these devices to grow your business or create income?

I’m kicking off a series of articles on where the iPad (or tablet computing in general) will be adopted for use in business. I’m curious about what smart-phone developers think because they are so close to the development process; they fully grasp what is possible but is not visible yet to the rest of us. They build applications for businesses and therefore see what’s working and what’s not. A recent post from the InstaPaper developer illustrates my point around design trade-offs.

I have asked my Techendeavour.com contacts who helped me develop the BMC Today iPhone app for BMC Software to chime in with their thoughts. Their experience in developing mobile apps cuts across a wide range of smart-phone vendors, and they have the added capability of employing a number of very bright developers who understand the IT backend issues. To more fully grasp the breadth of business applications they have already handled, see a rather impressive list of case studies here.  

Let’s see what they think:

“iPad for sure is a consumer device and is expected to have a minimal impact on the enterprise in the short run. However, given the fact that higher up in the enterprise the executives prefer to have a device which allows them to switch between their personal interests and work at any time, it will surely find its way in the enterprise. At first, we might observe the employees buying them on their own, with their own money, and then slowly linking them up with the backend. In this sense, Apple has also done a good job by ensuring that the existing applications which are developed for iPhone can be easily supported on the iPad as well.” − Rahul Aggarwal, Co-founder, Endeavour Software Technologies

I’ve seen that happen with the iTouch, for example. I produce audio and video podcasts each month for the Enterprise IT space. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of executives who sent me notes or spoke with me on the phone, saying they listen to the shows on their iTouch. But as we all know, the iTouch has very limited screen size. More importantly, if you’ve ever worked with an enterprise, you know that the only way new projects become successful is if upper management is visibly supporting the effort. So maybe we should gift our favorite executives with iPads. Well … that’s another topic.

The following quote from Avinash Misra speaks to the issue of the small screen’s constraining the visual narrative (think user experience) on an iPhone/iTouch device versus iPad.

“iPad has a rather Dickensian position: It changes nothing and it changes everything. For content producers, everything. It promises to strengthen the fractured visual narrative – so weakened by the constraints of limited form factors – and thus the narrative will enjoy a renaissance of sorts in that now it can be integrated. For application developers, nothing. The challenges of monetization, development, promotion are exactly the same. Yet the most interesting opportunity is for the enterprise − a new ‘segway-like’ opportunity.” − Avinash Misra, CEO, Endeavour

And what discussion of the iPad would be complete without a prediction around traditional print and media companies’ having a new opportunity to generate revenue?

“The iPad evolution can take several forms. I expect it to become the publishing platform for digital content, and I expect media companies to make the fast leap onto getting paid subscriptions. I also think Apple is going after the Amazon Kindle and B&N Nook to ensure we get the next generation of ebook readers to offer paid subscription for books, newspapers. I expect it to be a consumer device before it becomes an enterprise device. I also think you will see accessories built that will help the iPad connect to the home, whether to an entertainment system, home pictures or video. Adoption in the enterprise will come as a second wave, when more applications that use the iPad instead of a netbook are seen.” − Jayaraman Raghuraman, Vice President, Endeavour

There is already a lot of conversation and predictions about media companies either hoping or dismissing that iPad will be the next revolution for them. Let’s keep our eye on the more nuanced uses of the iPad and tablets and see where businesses find opportunities that give them that competitive edge. This is what you want to see revealed in the next few months. What an exciting trend to be watching.

This post from www.TomParish.com

The thing I admire about CISCO is their drive to stay ahead of the Internet technology curve and their focus on people. You can tell this from the interviews. So if you want to hear more, please visit these two pages where a link is provided for the audio podcast.

1. From Networking to Social Media the Cisco Way: Marie Hattar, Cisco VP

2. Using Technology in Innovative Ways: Norman Jacknis, Former CIO of Westchester County, NY

March 12th is right around the corner for those of us going to SXSW2010. It appears to be even larger then it was last year so now is the time to get organized else I’ll feel overwhelmed with choice. I’m thinking about how to best organize my panel selections and backup panel selections and meeting times with so many friends coming into town. Oh and the parties … my goodness so much to do at SXSW this year.

I noticed Friday is completely packed with panels – good ones. It used to be SXSW really didn’t get going until Saturday morning so clearly the conference has grown again this year.   My plan is to get over to the Austin Conference center Thursday afternoon (after 3pm) to get my badge and swag early. You do not want to attempt that on Friday with the crowds of people pushing in to get registered. To be fair SXSW has the registration down pretty well but it can seem a like a zoo for a while especially when you’re feeling anxious to get to you first panels on Friday morning (versus waiting in line for your badge).

By the way, if you have an iPhone be sure to download the SXSW app because it’s going to save you a lot of time while moving around the conference looking for panels and people. I think they finally managed to get the online calendar for SXSW done in a what that is not so confusing. This one is easy, fast and flexible to use and very informative.

I’ve received a number of requests to have conversations with old and to new friends. This is the most exciting part of SXSW I think – just networking like crazy with so many like minded people. Here is how you can either follow or communicate with me.

Twitter – tparish
Foursquare member
email tom.parish AT gmail.com
Skype tparish
www.TomParish.com
Cell and SMS 512-497-5046

See you there!
Tom

These are the kinds of projects you just love to get. I did the soundtrack on this. The music is pretty dramatic but it fits.

Apparently Steve Jobs is more excited about this event today then he’s been in years. Well we should expect excitement and some razzle dazzle hype but surely something more is brewing here that is more than announcing new hardware. Could it be the new we’re on the edge of a new economy around buying and ‘experiencing’ information?

I don’t think Steve Job’s excitement is based solely one on a big staged reveal of the table as happened for the iPhone in 2007. He held it up and received ooohs and aaahs cause nobody had created something like that before. For a while it didn’t really need apps as it was so novel and heck Apple wasn’t known for being a cell phone company at the time. That was an exciting change.

Well the tablet isn’t that novel – really.  Apple’s version will be unique – as always and become a very desirable device to own. But here’s is what is more likely going to occur.

What Jobs is excited about is what will happen as a result of the Tablet becoming popular (and copied widely no doubt). What’s going to happen is a rebirth of the publishing industry.  Parallel to this product announcement will be the relationships Apple has forged with so many news, media and educational publishers.   The New York Times for example said next year they will be charging for their content. Rupert Murdoch and his publishing industry has been saying for some time he’ll be charging for content on the web for his newspapers. See this interview of him where he talks about ‘paywalls’. It’s worth watching – all of it. All digital – all media – all now available for free or for pay. For pay though will bring greater personalized interaction with the media you buy.

MacGraw Hill will move text books to the Tablet and add more intelligent interactions in the text books over time – greater value. What’s about to happen I think is harmonic fusion of a number of trends – truly portable hardware that runs amazing applications easily like adding apps to your iPhone. And the addition of intelligent presentation of information on tablets that are easy to carry and share – like newspapers and books. Now you can search media, combine it, share it and have fun with media information.  Newspapers you throw away or put at the bottom of you bird’s cage. Tablet’s with personalized media you use, share and refine because you enjoy the experience.

Now you’ll be adding highly personalized information sources and these sources will have added value along by providing a smart application to give you your own unique cut on the news paper or whatever sources and topics you’re monitoring.  Applications that give you a highly pesonalized experience of engage with media like you do with iTunes only more – a whole lot more and not just with Apple but with many many many publishers.

If you notice in the Apple Store more and more apps are charging for the apps.  These sources can be easily updated, expanded and augmented because there is no printing. What you’re getting paid for is the information (or think curriculum) that they have crafted into digital form versus printed form. We’re coming close to the age of digital information that includes free and pay. Now we have devices that are always on, always updating and intelligent enough to personalize to your needs and this is the DNA of the new economy.

Always on always updating provides an information provider with the ability to charge for the added value being provided by constantly improving application and high topic specific ‘things you want to know’ tailored exactly to your wishes. A person who owns an iPhone over time starts using and buying the free then the for pay versions of a dozen or more apps. I have roughly 30 but you know me. We’ll see this happen with the Tablet as the apps can be shared and the tablet version will have greater sophistication with a larger screen and more powerful processor. Think about the apps you have and how they work versus two years ago – there is a lot of sophistication in them and this is only the beginning.

What’s leading up to this new economy are the very low prices of iPhone (or any smart phone) applications – it’s sorta like a ring tone only it’s an app now – same prices.  A low wall to get over. Often free at first. So like the iPhone with library of apps the Tablet will have similar apps (that you get free and you buy) that provide greater benefit with larger screens. These unique apps will provide a compelling way to digest information or any type of media (versus only music or only movies). We will be willing to pay for these apps and these information sources and this unique ‘experience’ of interacting and sharing any kind of media – this is part of the revel for the new economy of 2010. This is why Steve is brimming with enthusiasm and this is the beginning of a new economy that values experience with information versus simply delivering information.

Audio only version of interview – download link.

In this podcast from EnterpriseLeadership.org Vid Byanna, executive director of Accenture’s internal IT infrastructure, talks about his company’s collaborative computing, and cloud computing initiatives. Each day the 177,000 employees at Accenture, a $19 billion global IT services company, must communicate effectively with 1,000s of customers in more than 120 countries. In fact, Accenture executives often find themselves looking for internal experts who can support specific customer engagements.

The traditional process has involved emailing one’s network of colleagues to help with the search. Now these executives can use Accenture People, an internal version of LinkedIn, to search the company’s global network of employees. Accenture People comprises Accenture Collaboration 2.0, a global set of technology initiatives to improve knowledge sharing, enhance communication, and allow for dynamic collaboration within the organization.

Technologies in this collaboration platform include social networking applications, greater search functionality, telepresence, and unified communications. Vid Byanna, the executive director for Accenture’s internal IT infrastructure capabilitities and Web 3.0 initiatives, says that Accenture Collaboration 2.0 allows employees quickly to get access to the information from experts who can help resolve an issue, or kick start things that deliver value to customers better than through traditional methods. For example, 30 minutes after looking in Accenture People, an employee was holding a telepresence session with an Accenture expert on digital media communications.”

Some rather amazing news has been released about Apple’s intentions to put iTunes into their own cloud infrastructure. The TechCrunch article below talks about the impact on their bottom line as they increase sales of music and, of course, make it significantly easier for us users to access our iTunes library like we access our gmail or Google Docs – easily from any computer anytime. Means we don’t have to keep it all locally and remember to back it up.

At the very bottom of this TechCrunch article you see what Apple is doing in leveraging API access through their cloud to third parties like Pandora. Pandora and others like them essentially become sales outlets for people who listen to music and want to buy a copy. Pandora is all about sharing in a social space. Nice.

Not mentioned in this article is the following …The Apple Tablet is coming soon (most likely) and this is going to be interesting to watch from both a product launch perspective as everyone has been yammering about and from a social change perspective. Yes there is a point to this. Hang on.

Here’s what I know from years of experience: Tablet devices will always have limited memory locally because they rely on memory stored over the Internet. And more obvious a point is why keep multiple copies of your iTunes library on different machines when you can simply access your Library in the cloud from any computer? In particular, devices like a Tablet are designed to depend on the ’net for everything. They’re an extension of the always-connected, on-demand world we’re making possible with these new enterprise cloud infrastructures. It’s the basis of the new economy (more on that later).

Eliminating large amounts of local memory on the device gives the hardware manufacturer the ability to design devices with a different emphasis. Memory is typically one of the most expensive pieces of any system, next to the CPU and the display. If you can significantly reduce the cost (and maintenance) of large local memory devices, then you can allocate more of the design budget toward improving the user interface or spending more on a faster CPU or more advanced display technology.

Typical PC-based netbooks focus on a product strategy of lowest price points. If you can build a tablet computer with very little memory, you can sell the thing for less. Period. However, Apple takes a leap and says they’ll invest that leftover budget money into making the device work differently – really differently – while still fitting nicely in their product line.

Over the next 3-5 years the new electronic mobile product space is simply going to be amazing with these new design trade-offs. We just can’t fully see how radically different everything is going to be as we backfill so many business environments with social business strategies and IT infrastructures in the clouds, all interconnecting in ways we’ve never imagined possible. Think about things – consider video production or architectural design packages that are currently run as huge desktop-based applications, islands unto to themselves. They have no interconnection with accounting, project management or marketing and so forth. This will all change as application developers see how to interconnect these applications in the clouds to create a graceful pipeline of data exchanged between applications across different departments of a business.  Now sharing information about a project is easier by a long shot. Making views of it touchable on a Tablet – easy enough now as the data accessible regardless of the device.

This sharing of information and personal sharing of hardware is the new direction for 2010. Software vendors from different systems never had a common, proven way to achieve this, much less a financial reason to do so. Now vendors will have both in thousands of business environments around the world. This kind of global change has never occured before – both a technical and social wave at once.

Think of it like this, we’ve been catering to the ME generation, and this is the move to the new WE generation. Why do you think the Nintendo Wii box has been so popular lately in a family/friends home environment? It’s a game you share. More to come with this trend.  Wait until you hook up Wii’s in the clouds with other families … or you place with others on Guitar Hero or maybe both games could interact with each other. See where this is going?

2010 is going to be quite an interesting decade of developments that impacts each of us as well as the ‘all’ of us.

(picture from dynamicbusiness.com)

Tom

I’m personally excited to tell you about an iPhone app called BMC Today that you can download now.

To create this app I had the honor of being involved throughout the entire development process with Techendeavour. They are both technically competent at building mobile apps for a variety of smart-phone platforms and an extremely kind and fun group of people to work with.  Special thanks to BMC Software for making this project possible and being willing to test the waters with this initial idea of making BMC news and technical media available in a mobile format.

The BMC Today mobile app is currently an Apple iPhone/iTouch application created to make it simple to monitor and filter BMC Software news, blogs, podcasts, videos and Thought Leadership white papers to the mobile user. This includes podcast and articles from the BMC-sponsored site at EnterpriseLeadership.org, where you’ll find some 500 interviews with CIOs, CTOs and CEOs of enterprises. You can follow 10 very active bloggers at BMC as they talk about a variety of enterprise- and IT-related topics.  The BMC Today app makes it easy to grab some interesting content on the go and listen to it later.

This application is intended for IT professionals, enterprise executives, BMC employees and partners, customers, stockholders, and students interested in products and services of BMC Software.

My most favorite feature in the app is the ability to create your own tags to filter the content so you see only what you’re interested in, topic-wise.  You can also share what you’re reading with your own social circle of friends via email, Twitter and Facebook.

An extensive FAQ page and a dedicated BMC Community group for the app provide help and a way to give feedback so we can make the app better.

Let me know your thoughts and what else you’d like to see the app do to make it more useful for you.

Tom

Assuming this upcoming Apple event January 27th is actually about the so-called (mythical) Apple Tablet, then yes, I have a sense we may feel disappointment. Why? Partly because there is so much wild speculation and expectation surrounding this charming yet mythical new device. I remember seeing devices like this at Disney World where there was a display of the future home. People sitting around with some kind of thin electronic tablet being entertained in some way. Talk is cheap, mockups are easy. Creating a real product that does things we’ve never done before − well that’s the kind of legendary design work Apple is known for and so often the source of unbridled speculation.

Surely some things seem possible at this point if you connect the dots. Apple is interested in being a catalyst for other companies to publish e-books and e-magazines, and in doing so make their Tablet the next iPod of print media, as it did with traditional audio media. Reading a lot of content on an iPhone is an act of faith, and carrying around a laptop all over the house just becomes weirdly impractical. Yes, we all do it, but it’s not ideal. I have chargers scattered around the home as a result. Devices like the Amazon Kindle are portable with long battery life, but who wants a black and white e-reader only? Hence, all the excitement about Apple’s mythical tablet device which would be more fun, have video, utilize touch-gesturing controls and capitalize on Apple’s ability to get big companies with lots of existing content to feed content into it. We’re hearing hints of this starting to emerge all over the news prior to the launch.  I want more than a dedicated e-book reader and a larger screen than an iPhone’s to read news, browse the Internet and enjoy video.  I have no issue with audio, as Apple has the user interface designed to our liking.

Truthfully, I too have my hopes and desires for this mythical tablet because I’m thinking of it as a device for sharing content (print, audio, video, Internet sites) more seamlessly from desktop to laptop to iPhone to my theater room, and with others around me. But I can see, regardless of how amazing the device may be,  it’s going to fall short of all the hyperbole that bloggers seem to endlessly write about, and likely mine too. There will be disappointment.

Reminds me of when I was a kid, thinking about my birthday. Once it came and it was over, the feeling afterward wasn’t nearly as fun as the build-up, and the presents, though nice, just didn’t match my hopes. We’ll have this letdown too. There will be things we want it to do that will just not occur. As much as I love Apple, I’m sure there will be some weird thing they do that you just go ‘ huh, what the heck?’ Like the first iPhone with that absolutely stupid decision to use a non-standard headphone adapter. Remember? You couldn’t use your headphones with it. Bet you forgot about that. There is always something.

The deal is Apple does so much right, you forget about those little design clunkers. I’m sure there will be a few here.  On the dreamy side of things, the final design of this mythical device will not do things we hope it might. For example, give you the ability to sit in your living room and have the tablet work seamlessly with your TV in some fashion (assuming there is some kind of wireless base station for it).  I want the tablet to be a kind of handheld wireless window(s) on the the Internet which acts like an AppleTV, only you can pull whatever kind of content you want from the Internet using your fingers and have it play on the TV, and also be a kind of remote control for the TV.  Or better, have two or three of your friends in the same room, each with a tablet, and be able to switch back and forth between you as you easily place movies and websites on the TV while talking about the media. Now we are talking real power of collaboration and some real fun. Reminds me of the days you took pictures and came home and passed around those things called prints. Remember how easy that was? Why can’t it be that easy with a computer?  What a hassle it is in a conference room to hook up your laptop, get it going, bring up a browser, get the video to play, make the Internet work. And don’t even TRY to share content with others in the room. If you could seamlessly share whatever is on your screens from one person to the next on a single projector, then you could actually have a real multimedia collaboration process. And be able to pass the content around from device to device, like you passed around printed pictures and write notes on the the back.

Likely this kind of capability isn’t going to happen. But what will occur is something close, I predict (well, OK, I’m wishing). Let’s face it, the only practical thing that will occur January 27th is Apple will announce a new version of the iPhone OS – version 4.0. They need to do this to blunt the advancement of Google DNA phones that are slowly gaining in popularity and capability. And Google is Apple’s only real threat now, not Nokia, which has sadly fallen back to the worst trick in the book when you get behind your competitor: sue the competition. Clearly a sign of problems for them. Blackberry is so set in their approach that I don’t seem them affecting the growing popularity of iPhone popularity anytime soon.  But Google has nothing to lose, everything to gain and a willingness to fail until they get it right − with multiple versions from different companies. It’s tough going against that kind of competition.

What I see happening is Steve Jobs coming out to talk about the 4.0 iPhone OS update planned, though we will not get to use it for a couple more months, I assume. Lots of goodies there, including sharing of content more seamlessly with your macbooks and desktops is what I’m hoping for. A more seamless connection would be nice so you’re not always going through iTunes and a host of little iPhone app vendors to reach inside the iPhone. Maybe so, maybe not, we’ll see. More likely, iPhone OS 4.0 will have a lot of more control over how you use contacts as the center of your universe and a better form of multitasking for at least the 3Gs and whatever is the next iPhone. Whatever we’re seeing on competing smart phones will likely quickly be available on iPhones and possibly more. Though that niggling issue of real multitasking of applications on the iPhone is not likely to happen until the next generation. But on the mythical tablet, well, that could be reality for now until the next-generation iPhone.

So this iPhone OS 4.0 update will be the basis of the new Tablet. So why have a tablet if it’s just a big iPhone? Well, if there is a seamless, wireless, screen-type sharing connection of content across your desktop and your Tablet, then you would have a better reason to have both. If there was a way to run multiple applications at the same time with multiple windows on the tablet − that would get my attention, and transfer calls possibly between the devices.  There is the opportunity to have some real synergy if the content-sharing idea I’m talking about was possible. You can just swipe and move any kind of Internet content between the devices without retyping URLs to see the same thing. Have you used the Magic Mouse? Use one for about 15 minutes and you just can’t keep your hands off it. A lovely device that just works so well with your fingers. Imagine having one that allows a finger swipe to move content easily between your tablet and your desktop. Now imagine having your Tablet and saying, “Wow, I want to work more with this content,” and with a few swipes of your finger(s) it just slides back over to your desktop (or laptop). Likely this is what iLife 2010 and or iWork 2010 might make possible (for now).

Add in the ability use a bluetooth keyboard and voice commands and a webcam and I could see owning this mythical tablet.  But just being a jumbo iPhone that runs the same apps only bigger − I don’t think so.

Likely Jobs will get a great deal of attention from the Apple crowd during the introduction of the Tablet, and I’m hoping to see some of these things in my overly excited state of expectation. These are the kinds of product features that make sense to me and create a unique synergy between all your Apple products and, if Apple does it right, with Windows PCs too. And these are the kinds of features you buy Apple products for and give the competition heartache.

Or maybe we’ll all be heartbroken when the reality of what is shown somehow doesn’t actually match up with our expectations. We’ll see soon enough.

What do you think?
Tom

image by Adam Benton www.kromekat.com
Commissioned by MacLife magazine.

Enterpriseleadership.org is a thought-leadership forum to help Global Fortune 1000 C-level executives improve their business impact of  information technology in delivering products and services to customers and other constituencies; enhancing improved business processes, and enabling of individual productivity and group productivity. The audience also includes IT executives from government agencies, healthcare organizations, large not-for-profits, and academic institutions.

Happy Holidays
Tom

Let’s have some fun. For just a moment stop and think about what you’re doing differently online now versus last year. What software, what device where and how you’re using the Internet. Email me or leave a comment below.

What’s different?
Tom

I still post of course nearly the same things at http://twitter.com/tparish. Clearly I need to spruce up the fan page but for now it’s there and functional and thankfully quite a few people have already signed up. As always let me know if you have any feedback. Tom

I am separating out my personal from business activity streams for Tom Parish (personal) and Tom Parish Inc. (business).

Become a FAN!

Tom

Syliva and Steve Crossland – Crossland Realty Team

Peter MacKenzie – Film Director – www.DoonbytheMovie.com

Cydney Raisch at SpeakTech.com

Look interesting! They are and they impact the impression you make on your web traffic and that means more calls and emails from the lead generation efforts you have in place driving traffic to your website. Call us 512-782-4814 – let’s talk.

If you think about it, the complexities of building out modern data center infrastructure (locally and inside the Google Cloud) necessitates really watching and learning from the data traffic patterns across a field of Wave servers. There is a great deal of complex data being exchanged in real time as it interconnects with so many parts of the Internet to interact with your Wave(s). This isn’t just simple text like the old bulletin board days, it’s rich media. It’s multimedia in every thread of conversation. I imagine Google needs time to model this this opaque wad of machine to machine, machine to person and person to machine exchange and scale it – again in real time.  We’re talking hundreds of thousands of users scaling to tens of millions. How does one do something like this gracefully and quickly? You don’t.Let’s step back to set the stage.

Some differences between Gmail and Google Wave to consider is that once you’re done with an email conversation you don’t go back for updates. In fact you can’t really use email for much back and forth discussion on issues. It’s cumbersome.

In email, conversation threads remain pretty static as a result after a few back and forth cycles. On occasion, someone responds to something said but that results in adding an entire copy of the conversation thread plus his remarks. There is no interaction of the data ‘in’ the email. It’s static, fixed.  You can’t reach into an email string and cause the text or numbers to be updated or commented on. You can’t have a program reach into your mail file to update a calculation so the next time you view it the numbers are updated. You cannot for example update an object inside an email that has already been received.

In Google Wave you could have dozens of conversations going on different topics. When you come back they are all updated and ready for your quick review. This includes updates to objects like graphs, polls, widgets and so forth embedded in the thread of conversions in a Wave. They are constantly updating or at least there is the potential for that. In reality too much updating can feel like you’re overloaded but this issue is temporary. Most users of Wave tend to jump in and treat it like a CB Radio or as I said like the old bulletin-board days. As that settles and people get more familiar with the art of engagement in Waves so will the perception of it’s use.

Setting up Waves of conversation threads reminds me of the old modem dial in bulletin board days. For free you could download a bulletin board software package and get your friends to dial in to it and talk. We didn’t really have open source back then, free was free. Go get it and help us all learn how to use it better.  For the Internet elders this was like The Well which was an amazing collection of conversations managed in San Francisco which was only accessible (originally) via slow telephone modem so text was the only viable thing to exchange in conversation. Of course once a group of people interacting online gets over a certain size it becomes unmanageable. We all experienced this in the early days of mailing lists too. With too many people it becomes disastrous. You bail out. What gets lost is the more nuanced interaction with people on conversations that really means something to you.

Google Wave not only lets you set up your own discussions on your own server and hand select who you want to participate, it also includes the use of multi-media elements inside the pages of conversations. Ok well it will over time.  You can drag in whatever type of media or widget you wish and use it as part of the conversation. This includes the ability to drag in little robots and widgets that ‘do’ things for you automatically online. You have the ability to build a tiny world of connected conversations that have value based on who you’re sharing it with. Very much like you do with personal email only now you have personal Waves where a select group of friends exchange ideas, work on problems, debate issues and so forth. If you think of the new economy as being based on the exchange of knowledge and intellectual property then Google Wave is an tool for making this happen. The Waves platform deftly blends person to person with person to computer (and visa versa). More on this in a later post as I familiarize myself more with what’s possible.

Of course for the moment, the Google Wave servers seems to bog down and the availability of robots and widgets to use inside a Google Wave is limited. But this of course is the purpose of a beta with some regulation over the scaling process. The IT guys have to learn more about the unique aspects of Google Wave servers to implement predictable capacity planning across a cloud of data centers.

Darned exciting times if you ask me. Though oddly, this whole Google Wave thing sure reminds me of the early Lotus Notes server days. Different but somehow similar. We’ll be learning more soon I’m sure.

Tom

–

I wonder if others are seeing what I’m seeing in Google Wave. I am finding Google Wave a perfect tool for writing down ideas and refining them before publishing. I create a Wave, jot down some thoughts then come back to them when I’m ready to expand the notion into a blog post.   I realize I can do this with email and save the draft. I do that in fact at times.  Email seems so overwhelming at times that I just find it refreshing to sit down in a new environment to write. There is the added ability to share a Wave with someone I want to review and feedback on my ideas and that is where Google Wave really shines. Again it’s possible to do that in email but the back and forth sloshing of email replies gets messy to read and frankly just lost in the wash of email that is constantly coming in. There is a robot that will post a Google Wave directly to Posterous and it seems to work well though you can’t go back and edit the Wave and expect the post to be edited. That’s not possible at this time. I’d like the ability to add attachments from the Google Wave into Posterous also. I imagine that’s all coming over time.

I’m curious now what it would be like to develop a video short or documentary using Google Wave with collaborators. Sure seems like it would help make it possible to capture, explore and refine ideas easier with crew. The ability to quickly add one or two people to share your Wave with is part of the joy. Again, this can be done in Google Docs easily enough. There is just something about Google Wave that makes for a more immediate and intimate collaboration process.  I’ll see how this pans out over time as more of my business contacts and friends are on Google Wave and I actually use Waves as part of my social interactions.

This mindmap is a good start for someone wanting to know more about the elements you need to consider before jumping in fully to produce a show.  Although it’s important to be entertaining I sometimes think podcast shows are trying too hard to be funny. For the business to business environment (B2B) the bottom line is tell me something I can use right now in my job. Help me figure out how best to solve this complex problem I’m faced. Let me know how others have approached this set of issues and what they learned. What are the key points I need to have in mind before asking for funding for a project like this.

For the most part this is how I have approached each of the interviews I’ve hosted and produced over the years.  Likewise for the B2C world I believe you’ll follow a similar doctrine – help me be a better person.  Lead me in a direction that is going to improve my life. During each show I wouldn’t mind be entertained but keep an eye on the richness of the content along the way.

We get asked about our process for producing audio and video podcasts.  To do it well it takes time to research topics, schedule interesting people, coordinate with marketing groups,  edit the interview and keep the show moving forward each week with a fresh feel. Here is a general outline of the production flow we use for shows. Of course each show is different. Each has a different industry focus. There are quite a few elements involved in distributing the podcasts to maximize the visibility of the show but that’s another map.

Have a question? Let me know.
Tom

Other news for today, the new EnterpriseLeadership.org website (ELO as we call it) is up. My team moved roughly 200 written interviews and 200 podcasts with show notes to a new platform called Jive/Clearspace.  As with the previous platform I have divided up the content into 7 topics areas:

• Best Practices
• Innovation
• Governance
• IT Management
• ITIL
• Security
• Strategy

The Jive/Clearspace platform is rich with engagement widgets and easy to use. ELO has been around now for 5 years but we haven’t had the right platform to really focus on the social media aspects of conversation and engagement around the topics being discussed in the interviews. Now we can do that.

ELO is sponsored by BMC Software. In case are not familiar with the site please go visit. I am the host and co-producer.

Tom

I’ve sent 4 invitations out in the last hour and none of those people say they ‘see’ the invitation coming through. So more soon.

I just love new major releases like this. I have four more invitations left and I suspect they will go quickly.

More to come.

Tom

Tom

via slideshare.net

An insightful perspective on the uses of social media for story tellers. And you know story telling is really what we all need to be better at to help explain, sell and motivate others to be more in life. I’m always looking for better ways to present ideas and concepts that are new to people wanting to learn. So do share with me what’s working for you. I’m gearing up for more public talks on uses of social media in business so, I’m all ears for new ideas. Always learning. Always teaching what I learn.

Tom

Jeremiah is on the right path here with this post. Large corporate brand sites have more to gain then lose by making user logins transparent (and aggregating conversations) with folks from Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. But as he says this is going to be a difficult path at first to implement. I sure would like have a go at this kind of project soon myself. I can see so much possibility here especially if you extend to mobile access.

Consider this, if you’re a a child of the 60′s you may remember your mom or dad carrying around a huge wallet of credit cards – Montgomery Wards, Sears, Foley’s … each one unique. You could only use the card at the store that issued it. Now we have MasterCard and Visa and other cards that allow anyone to buy anything from any store. It’s more transparent. This is what you want in the social networking world. You’re fine with having an identity on Twitter or Facebook but think how nice it would be to have the option to easily login to any corporate social networking and share that conversation with your Twitter or Facebook social graph. The participating company gets exposure to all of your social graph (for better or for worse). But as Jeremiah says, the vendor loses some element of control. You’re no longer forced into a landing page or dedicated login. Ah trust … hard to build, easy to lose and always takes time.

Now let’s think about this trend. You KNOW Blackberry is not going to be far behind. Though RIM seems to be overly ‘into’ it’s business oriented approach which means they’ve always shunned the idea of media on a mobile device. But they know they have to change. So they will now with this new video pressure from the 3Gs iPhone.

And when that happens, you can imagine the amount of user generated content that is going to show up on B2B niche websites.

Rather exciting really. Apple has made shooting, editing and posting video almost as easy as creating a Tweet. Surely you can see how this is going to create another wave of change.

Tom

We’re speaking today with Len Hause, Internetologist and founder of MashBrain where he consults on Internet marketing and technology strategies. Today we’re talking about the Transformation of the Grid. I’ve known Len since the early 1990′s where we worked in IT at Motorola. Len and I where involved in dozens of Intranet and Internet-based projects during the early days of the enterprise learning how to use the Internet.

There’s been quite a bit of discussion lately about the nation’s electrical grid, from aging components, demand exceeding output, discontinuity from sector to sector to potential for terrorist attacks against it.  So, I thought a conversation with Len would be helpful to get the bigger picture of how the lessons learned in building the Internet could be applied to a new generation power grid for the nation.

1. - How has the the transformation and maturity of the Internet affected other sectors? What analogies can we draw between the Internet and the electrical grid?
2. – What are the driving forces and technologies?
3. – Who are the players?
4. – What are some of the initial changes we will see?
5. – What is the scope of the transformation?
6. -What role will open source, or internet standards-based technologies play?
7. – What new markets will emerge?
8. – What role will Social Media play in this transformation?