Watch the webinar outlining the uses of NFC and check out this video by our friends at Endeavour.

NFC Application Demo by Endeavour from mobilitycompany on Vimeo.

An excellent blog article on the Endeavour website, summarizes NFC as: “a short-range wireless RFID technology that makes use of interacting electromagnetic radio fields instead of typical direct radio transmissions used by technologies such as Bluetooth. It is being predicted that gradually this technology will transform our mobile phones into a wallet loaded with payment cards from multiple sources including credit cards, health cards, loyalty cards and many more. As compared to its prior technologies such as RFID and Bluetooth, NFC is considered to be more intuitive, versatile and security ready, both with respect to technology”

My webinar outlines the uses, challenges and expectations for NFC in the future, and more importantly how a wide variety of businesses can benefit from implementing this technology.

For more information on NFC uses, check out these two great Endeavour articles: NFC, the buzzword everywhere, but what is all the hype about! and NFC based applications making everyday life easier.

And please enjoy the watching the webinar.

Insider’s Insight into NFC ( Near Field Communication ) from mobilitycompany on Vimeo.

Our striking new cards are unique and different.  They feature our cardinal logo printed on a square, black card. On the back, note our QR code that, with the help of a smartphone, will take you directly to this website.

The cards were the creation of design genius Justin Dill, who worked closely with us to produce a card that is informative, artistic and memorable.

Tom

Austin is buzzing with festivals featuring everything from art to live music to delectable fare. Recently, Laughing Cardinal Productions created a video for Art Seen Alliance for their Art Outside festival going on the second weekend of October.

Check out the Art Outside Video:

Click here to see more projects Laughing Cardinal Productions is working on.

Laughing Cardinal Productions, the branch of Tom Parish Inc. dedicated to producing quality videos, has officially launched its website. Click to explore our videos, blogs, latest projects, and just what makes Laughing Cardinal a unique, eccentric and creative production company.

Check often for the latest news and to see what we’re doing and how your business can benefit from a Laughing Cardinal video.

Let’s begin this week’s headlines recap with the news of Foursquare teaming with American Express on cash-back deals.

Here’s how it works: Users will need to link together their Foursquare and credit card accounts. When you check in to an establishment and pay with American Express, a discount will appear on your monthly bill. Read more about this at PCWorld.

Here is an article that gets us back to a central theme at The Appconomy – “The App Economy – Who Is Really Making Money?” Several points raised by this article are obvious:

• Apple is making a great deal of money
• Google is struggling with a consistent billing platform for paid apps
• Mobile ad networks and exchanges are doing well, but…
• The average app developer isn’t thriving, given the ‘needle in a haystack’ problem resulting from a plethora of apps

The article goes on to say RIM’s efforts seem pretty stale and Microsoft Mobile has yet to find true resonance with consumers. I found this article quite revealing, so I encourage you to give it a thorough read.

As a newsworthy side note, it seems RIM’s VP of Digital Marketing defected to Samsung. More on this at MobileBeat.

Bet you didn’t know this tidbit: Twitter’s own iPhone app uses twice the data of TweetDeck. Isn’t that interesting…?  More details at TechCrunch.

If you haven’t yet heard, Cisco is about to release their entry into the tablet marketplace. It’s called “Cius,” it’s running the Intel Atom processor and the Android OS, and it ships in July. Cisco is bundling virtual desktop features so you can use VMWare and Citrix to run a Windows virtual desktop. I can see this option being helpful to enterprise users.

If you’re a fan of Forrester Research (I am), then you will want to catch their webinar on June 23. “What Retailers Need to Know When Selecting and Implementing an Mcommerce Offering” is an hour long, and it’s free. You can sign up directly here.

I’m going to end this week with an article from eSecurityPlanet.com on “How to Secure Mobile Devices.” We should all give this some thought, considering the details of our personal lives that now reside in our smart phones. Some of us might be carrying critical enterprise information, or even important tidbits like other people’s Social Security numbers.

I imagine each of us worries at times about what could happen if our phone fell into the hands of others who want to use it for their own gain. Give this article a read and familiarize yourself with the security options of the phone you’re using–then use them!

That’s all for this week. See you again next Friday.

Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

So how exactly can mobility transform the customer experience and how do you make this really work for your business?  You’ll find some important perspectives in a Vodafone article that references GSMA research showing how smartphone users spend more time with their apps and messaging than they do on calls and web browsing.

The punch line?  Don’t think of your app as the “call to action” landing page that a marketing splash page delivers; instead, invest the resources to learn about users’ behaviors, making sure that you’ve pulled IT and other parties into the process so they can help interconnect mobile apps with existing business intelligence processes.

For those of you following Google Chromebook progress, you might take a look how Apple’s OS X Lion features could give the Chromebook products a tough competitor.  This is going to be an interesting summer as we see Samsung and Acer being the first out of the gate with their Chromebooks.

How about we line up Apple, Google, RIM, Nokia, Palm, and Microsoft and create a graphical look comparing how each is doing in the market place.  This App-o-graphic provide some very relevant notes that developers and business development managers will want to scan, in addition to the clever, graphical comparison.

And, while we are on infographics, here’s another from last week that vividly shows mobility trends in the enterprise and the explosion of users and applications.

Speaking of apps, here is a look at the “Best iPad Appsfor IT Administrators.” Being a IT guy myself, I just have to toss in the most useful app I have for home and client work: SNAP.  This is a useful security tool that automatically sweeps a local network to find devices and identify them by manufacturer and name information. Whenever I’m debugging a problem on a wifi network I have it with me on my iPhone.

I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions the growing awareness by many enterprise managers, seeing the need to have their own app store for mobile devices. There is a good article on this topic that talks about new trends emerging around federal application stores.

Are you curious how tablets and smartphones are being adopted by the global mobile workforce? You can get lots of graphics and data on this trend at Marketingcharts.com, including information like how many use tablets at work, how often they check their smartphones during downtime, how likely Gen X is to check their smartphone during the day and so forth.

Finally, learn more from the speakers at a recent Search Marketing Expo about the interactions among traditional, mobile, and social marketing methods. There is no ‘single’ solution anymore, like the old days of simply making your website more visible. These days, you want to consider a more integrated approach.

That’s it for another week.

Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

May 2011 might seem a tad early to begin predicting 2012 mobile application trends but Gartner Group believes they have pinpointed the top ten mobile apps for this time next year. Check out this list and see if you agree:

1. Money Transfer
2. Location-Based Services
3. Mobile Search
4. Mobile Browsing
5. Mobile Health Monitoring
6. Mobile Payment
7. Near Field Communication Services
8. Mobile Advertising
9. Mobile Instant Messaging
10. Mobile Music

My sense is they are pretty close on their thinking, but given Gartner’s corporate-heavy crowd, I wonder how much this list varies with users that have enterprise-provisioned phones, who aren’t (officially) allowed to use them for personal apps and activities?

If this sounds interesting, then visit the article Three Mobility Trends that Change Your Business by Maribel Lopez; it will broaden your understanding of the tidal wave of changes sweeping through the business sector this year.  What is your mobile strategy looking like now? Time to be considering it, regardless of the size of your business.

Remember all of the not-so-flattering news about RIM’s PlayBook last week? Well, here is a new piece of the puzzle in their new mobile strategy that makes a lot of sense. Quoting from FireceMobileIT:

According to Chris Smith, RIM’s senior director of the BlackBerry developer platform, RIM’s Androidplayer will simulate an Android 2.3 smart phone and will enable Android apps to access the phone’s sensors, multimedia pieces and native file system.

In addition, RIM may upgrade the Android player after its launch in the summer to support Android tablet apps, but the move will depend on whether Google makes the Honeycomb OS for tablets open source, RIM representatives said.

There is a rumor that RIM’s Playbook 2 will have an iPad-sized screen. Looks like RIM is hard at work establishing itself as a contender to be reckoned with in the tablet market in 2011.

And, finally, speaking of Apple, here’s an article with a handy list of Five Document Collaboration Tools for the iPad.  Now go collaborate with your brothers and sisters to get your mom something nice for Mother’s Day weekend!

See you next week!

-Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

scoop.it

One of the key issues with adopting the iPad in the enterprise is security. Are the iPad’s security features robust enough? Kurt Marko from InformationWeek talks about this in his article “How secure is iPad?”

AT&T is investing $1B in enterprise mobility. They are going to allocate this to mobile and cloud services for business expanding their connected devices program. Caroline Gabriel says this is a “…strategy for emerging devices, in which it aims to connect millions of non-phone gadgets to its 3G and future 4G networks, generating additional data revenues but also the opportunity to create new value added services.”

Hotels.com is giving consumers the ability to search from more than 130,000 hotels to book their travels via iPhone and Android applications. The result – an increase in bookings. Makes sense if you consider nearly everyone that travels has a smartphone and finding a hotel quickly while on the road can be tricky, especially when plans change suddenly.

If you’re like me you’ve been hankering to start using your iPad for presentations but you just haven’t quite made that step. Here is a review of 9 presentation apps for the iPad that might help you over the edge on this one.

It seems like this week retail executives are stepping forward with their opinions about mobility. A Target executive says mobile is the ultimate connector for retail success, yet an Ebay executive as a contrarian perspective saying that iPad consumers are only a small group of upscale and affluent. I’m curious what others think of this. Seems like if you can afford an iPad (and millions are being sold) then you are likely affluent enough to be buying products and services for other purposes – especially online. What do you think?

That’s all for this week. Be sure you check out all the curated news on Enterprise Mobility on a daily basis or subscribe to the RSS feed for consumption on your own ‘mobile device.’

To toot our own horn some this week, Appconomy hosted a Mobile Enterprise Summit in San Francisco. To pique your interest, check out this session from SalesForce.com on “The Age of Vertical Tablets.” This is an intriguing fireside chat between Mike Wolf VP of Research, GigaOMPro, and Sean Whiteley, SVP of Product Marketing, Salesforce.com. There are eight other sessions.

See you next week!

-Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

scoop.it

This week there were a number of articles on how and why you want to be crafting a mobile strategy for your company.  Here is a place to start: “6 Steps for Building a Mobile Strategy” with some background on this trend here: “Enterprise Mobility – It’s real and It’s Happening now.”

Looking into the future as far as 2020 for mobile strategies is clearly a guess at this point given the speed of change, but that’s ok. Here is a slide presentation based on a number of collaborations to provide some thoughtful insights into the future.

If you’re still not convinced a mobility strategy is important let’s look where AT&T is placing a $1B investment in their enterprise mobility infrastructure. If you’re curious about mobility from a marketing perspective then be sure to read Shaheen Kazi’s “Why marketing Programs Should Begin with Mobile.”

Let’s talk about the App Economy for a moment. That’s a fairly new term that I imagine gets people wondering -huh? You’re going to be hearing more about this notion sooner than you think. These two pieces help reveal what this trend is about: “What the App Store Future Means for Developers and Users” and this paper from Bill French iPad CTO – “The App-Centric Enterprise.”

Of personal interest to me are the app trends in the airline industry which is only recently getting on board with testing out various mobile strategies. Even if you don’t use an airline app yet, there are a number of airline travel apps that are big time savers when traveling through airports. My favorite is TRIPIT.

RIM’s Playbook is still receiving some criticism around the lack of apps, problems with batteries, and a sudden recall of a 1,000 tablets. David Pogue of the New York Times gives more on the woes of the Playbook.  That said, the Business Insider reports that 250,000 have been sold since mid-April and 500,000 may sell in the first quarter.

So it’s Friday and the evening is near. Start thinking about what movie you want to stream into your living room and, hey,  let’s order a pizza and not have to mess with dishes.  Pizza Hut is expanding it’s mobile offerings with applications for the iPad and the Android so check those out. Now you don’t have to make a telephone call and worry about understanding the person on the phone who always seems to be in such a hurry while you’re figuring out what kind of toppings everyone wants.

Enjoy your weekend!

-Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

scoop.it

I would imagine everyone is aware that Apple has their annual WWDC event scheduled for June 6.  Word on the street is the headline news will be the official release of Lion, the next  major operating system update for Apple computers.  They are finally moving to a full 64-bit architecture and making better use of multi-core CPUs.

There is a lot of talk about your iTunes music library being available to you from iCloud with a promise for videos and TV shows also becoming available in the future. You can find out more from Mac Rumors over the next few days.  I’m hoping we’ll see a merging of the desktop OS and the mobile OS making them more seamless in the way they work together for sharing information with mobile devices.

One example of creating a mobile app with greater engagement is to include mobile sharing, written about in this week’s Mashable. People love sharing photographs so give some thought as to how that could help you in your business. Every time a person uses your app, they think of your business.

One of my favorite articles this week is from Mobile Commerce Daily, “The Dirty Little Secret about Mobile Apps“  Why? Because everyone in business is wanting to build an app for their customers and clients to use.  Spoiler alert here – it’s not the number of downloads that gives you success, it’s how often people ‘use’ your app that counts.  So the trick in building an app is focusing on the social aspects of using the app.

How can your customers use the app and interact with other customers about your products and services? Author, Daniel Odio makes a number of other relevant points. Recommended reading if you’re wanting to determine the business value of your investment in a smartphone app.

Are you following the mobile wallet debate with Google’s Wallet announcement? This is a tricky area for success.  Let’s face it, we all give so much personal information to Google already.  Giving Google access to our wallet makes a lot of people nervous.  I’m not hankering to do so myself yet, but I’m watching and learning. See more inPC World at “Google Wallet: The Debate Rages.”

Speaking of Google, do you monitor search hits on your website? Mobile searches are an excellent indicator of your clients’ and prospects’ interest in your business via their smartphones. From the businesses I know, mobile traffic from mobile searches is rising quickly.  Learn more about mobile behavior and search trends from thisMobile Commerce Daily article, “Google Search is Top Site as Total Mobile Traffic Grows to 105M Uniques.”

In addition to mobile searches being on the rise, so is the use of mobile barcodes. Take a look at the trends and best practices to see where marketers are looking to unlock value from their existing media placements and 2-D mobile codes from this article at eMarketer.com.

-Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

scoop.it

Are you still wondering “How Mobile Can Help Business-to-Business Marketers and Retailers?” That’s the title of an article by Lori Colman where she provides the following three data points for you to consider:

• More than half of devices connected to corporate networks will be mobile by 2015.
• Mobile is already the preferred method to accomplish many tasks, especially social media engagement.
• Mobile search is now an $8 billion industry, accounting for 11 percent of total searches.

This is one of those articles worth circulating to your B2B management if they remain skeptical about the medium being relevant to consumer brands alone.

If you’re a fan like I am of these information-packed graphical representations called  “Infographics” then check out this one on the “Mobile Commerce Revolution: Smartphones & Smarter Shoppers.” The information was collected from the team at Microsoft Tag, a bar code scanning app for mobile. Accuracy can vary, but from an overview perspective, it’s a useful indication of trends.

One of the big mobile app development debates of 2011 for enterprise is whether or not HTML5 is going to become the best solution for most, if not all, mobile apps – versus hand crafting native apps for each mobile platform. Phillipee Wintrop takes a stab at this debate in his article, “HTML5 is Not (Yet) a Panacea for Mobile Enterprise Applications.”

Spurred by the news that Financial Times decided to snub Apple by launching a new mobile app that runs entirely out of a web browser, this happened just weeks before Apple began retaining 30 percent of all revenue made by publishers who sell through Apple’s App Store. There is a lot more to the HTML5 issue than merely creating a publishing app. If you’re following the HTML5 app trends, then read both articles for some insight. As a side note, I interviewed James Pearce during SXSW2011 about HTML5 trends.  James covers this topic in greater depth during the podcast so when you have a moment, give it a listen.

Speaking of app development for the enterprise, another trend that is quickly coming on the horizon is the demand for enterprise app stores.  There is a growing need for business service providers and enterprises to come up with their own stores to service a global ecosystem of apps for their enterprise.  Dana Gardner delves into this topic at length in his article, “Rise of Enterprise App Stores Point to the Need for Better Applications Market Place Services.” I highly recommend giving it a read considering it’s astute depth.

Are you considering a Home Depot run to replace your tungsten light bulbs? I for one have been wondering if I could save on my electrical bill this way, but it’s difficult to be sure. Here’s a little app that might wet your whistle – Eco App. It calculates the cost of savings when the light bulbs are replaced. I have yet to try it out, but it sure looks cool!  

Alright, thanks for being with us this week. Be sure to check out the twice daily updates on mobile trends for business here every day or subscribe to the RSS feed for instant updates on your mobile device!

-Tom Parish, lead curator – Enterprise Mobility news

scoop.it

If there was ever any doubt concerning the acceleration of mobile apps adoption in today’s society, check out the projected combined revenues from the four major mobile application stores run by Apple Inc., Google Inc.,Nokia Corp. and Research In Motion Ltd.

There is a projected 65.7 percent leap in 2011 to $3.91 billion according to new IHS Screen Digest research. As you might guess, the Apple App Store is projected to dominate with the lion’s share with three-quarters of the total market.  This is from iSuppl Market Research where you can find additional research and news on the mobile market place.

There is a new term emerging – inspirational marketing. Hmm, is this the same as impulse buying for the mobile economy?  Consider: eBay has  partnered with Shazam by sponsoring the latter’s Android app and giving Shazam users unlimited tagging.  Quoting from the article in Mobile Commerce Daily: ”This is the first exclusive app sponsorship deal agreed by eBay anywhere in the world, and the first time Shazam has selected a partner to provide free services to its customers.”

“For example, a consumer in a car hears a song he likes. He ‘Shazams’ it and is served a little ad that says the unlimited tagging is brought to him by eBay. When clicked on, the ad asks consumers to download the eBay Android application and the company can now connect the user with products that can be bought on eBay that have to do with the artist or the song.”

I think we’re at a tipping point in 2011 where companies will move beyond simply publishing an app to partnering with other mobile app companies, thereby increasing interaction with the user.  Makes sense really.  How many apps do you have on your smart phone that never get used?  If those apps served multiple purposes, they could be of greater benefit to you, as a customer, and the app developers.

Moving from phones to bigger screens, have you been considering how the iPad can improve project management activities in your company? You’ll want to check out these 4 iPad apps briefly reviewed at ReadWriteWeb.com.

Likewise, there is nothing like a little real-world experience with new technology. So, if you’re considering an iPad rollout in your enterprise, check out the 5 pieces of wisdom shared by  Florida State College‘s CIO Rob Rennie.

For once, though, the iPad had to share its considerable spotlight with another tech titan, as RIM’s Playbookwas in the news nearly every day this week.

Soon we’ll have a separate website for Laughing Cardinal Productions, located in Austin, Texas. A special announcement with demos is forthcoming to show more color grading and clients’ color-correction projects using calibrated equipment for the highest results.

We’re very excited. Our team at Laughing Cardinal Productions recently contributed their time and expertise to capture some amazing stories of a former foster child and foster care caseworkers with Partners for Children, to help with PFC’s 2011 fundraiser.  The stories explain the need for the programs that PFC offers, and their impact. This video project was directed and shot by Kai Ferguson.  Interviews and audio capture were done by yours truly.  I also did the color correction and grading to help give this video a unique look. For those of you with inquiring minds—it was all shot on a Canon EOS-5D.

Tom

Recently I’ve started to see how history is repeating itself in the Internet world. I found this from Wikipedia:

“Usenet was the initial Internet community and the place for many of the most important public developments in the commercial Internet. It was the place where Tim Berners-Lee announced the launch of the World Wide Web, where Linus Torvalds announced the Linux project, and where Marc Andreessen announced the creation of the Mosaic browser and the introduction of the image tag, which revolutionized the World Wide Web by turning it into a graphical medium.”

Well, doesn’t that sound like what’s happening on Twitter as we’re seeing events reported there BEFORE they show up in the news?  And Bittorent would be the parallel to Alt.Binaries, but I digress.

Just thinking out loud and wondering. In the meantime, read Scoble’s Quora on how he sorts through all the Tweets he receives. And check out his curated Twitter Lists – he’s conveying some very helpful tips.

Tom

Are you plugged into the social networking scene of 2011?  Please join Tom Parish, Kai Salim, Nikki Boudreaux and Donna Lipman to network with other outrageously excited people and learn about the next up and coming wave of marketing.  Enjoy the live music of singer/songwriter Sam Lipman, demonstrations provided by mixologist, Felecia Hershey as well as food by chef Shelley Pogue.  And see, first-hand, an up close and personal demo of the oh-so-hip video business card.  Tweet you’re coming and use this tag –  #connectatx.

Door prizes, tasty morsels, music and, best of all,  one lucky networker will win a free video business card!!

Are you game?  Then make sure to dress it up a bit (come on…you can do better than business casual) and please RSVP (or tweet) to reserve your spot now!  Don’t miss this extraordinary opportunity to boost your biz.  Have a question – just send me a note Tom AT tomparish.com

See you there!

Here is an example of a digital video business card with Nikki Boudreaux

Tom

This is something Kai put together here in the studio after shooting the event for WholeFoods. They will of course have their own version. We just wanted to show what’s possible ourselves! See more project examples at Vimeo.

• The ManKind Project – Early Involvement with Cliff Barry
• How Has Shadow Work® Changed
• The Evolution of Shadow Work®
• What Inspires You Now Cliff? – scroll ALL THE WAY DOWN – recently added

The see all the interview questions visit here.

The ManKind Project – Early Involvement with Cliff Barry

How Has Shadow Work® Changed

The Evolution of Shadow Work®

What Inspires You Now?

This is a nine-part video interview series that was captured by me and Donna Lipman at Cliff’s home in Boulder. Three of the questions are in this post. Each week I’ll release the next questions I asked Cliff regarding his Shadow Work® teaching experiences, along with some fairly personal questions about what motivates him personally and spiritually, and the trials of creating powerful transformational coursework for the public.

Your feedback is appreciated. I have put the videos in Youtube so anyone is welcome to repost them on their website or blog.

Also see Question 4 – Question 6 - were Cliff talks about the evolution of Shadow Work and his experiences with the MindKind Project. There are a total of 8 questions so check back for more.

Tom

The Cost of Living is in the works and this is what I ask – Would you be willing to make a pledge to help this movie be created?

Let me tell you why this film is worth supporting.

Imagine you’re a 21-year-old woman facing the realities of the cost of living, such as the power of telling a little lie that can lead to a lot of money. This young woman, on the verge of her dreams but faced with debt, a possible pregnancy, and a boyfriend who is walking the line between life and death, asks herself: Is it worth it?

The Cost of Living is unique because it breaks away from the typical minority tale revolving around a victim’s struggle against a villainous oppressor, which serves to further stereotypes. The Cost of Living presents a story about culture, sexual morality and socio-economic status. It takes the “minority story” and turns it into what it really is, an American tale.

Help us tell the story through the magic ride a beautifully done movie can take you on and the learnings you can gain from such a film.

See the movie teaser, learn more about The Cost of Living and the artists involved, and make your pledge while there, if you wish. We hope you do.

Visit here.

Appreciatively,

Tom

This is the callout:

“One of the things that we provide is the ability to create self-adapting packages through parameterizing all the variables that are different between those environments,” says Jody Hunt.

Every day, all over the world, systems administrators are stuck in conference rooms figuring out what went wrong with the latest deployment of an important application. After a seemingly routine and minor change, the application failed and nobody knows why or seems to be able to fix  it. Someone knocks on the door, and a senior manager walks in and wants to know when they’ll fix the problem. The answer should be, “We’re fixing  it now,” but it rarely is. Is yours among the many organizations that don’t believe it is possible to automatically and correctly deploy the many, fast­-changing components required of a modern, Web­-based, multi­-tier application?

Join us for an interesting discussion with Jody Hunt, Lead Solution Manager for Application Operations at BMC Software, about the nitty-gritty points of application release and the various important ways that release automation can help alleviate points of pain in your organization.

Questions

Well, Jody, we’ve likely all been there… hunkered down in a conference room with other sys admins trying to figure out what went wrong with the  latest deployment of an important application which was, after all, a seemingly routine and minor change.

1. Is it a pipe dream to hope these scenarios can be prevented?
2. What is Application Release Management, in a nutshell?
3. Those seem like simple steps. Everything should just click along smoothly. What gets in the way of that?
4. So why not just throw more people at the problem?
5. How does automation help?
6. What would an ideal automated application release solution look like?
7. Are there some real-world examples of how automation was helpful to application releases?
8. Any final words of wisdom for our listeners?

Resources

• BMC Industry Insight—Automation: The Road out of the Application Release Swamp (pdf)
• Learn more about BMC Application Automation

The audio-only version is here:

Download Audio (25:36)

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.