We have been  reading postings and briefings on all sorts of touch pads and e-Reader recently, be it the Amazon Kindle or much disputed Apple’s iPad. But apart from usability and innovation involved in developing the product one feature that inspired me to write this post is  its long term affect on existing Carbon Di Oxide emissions when adopted and accepted globally.

I still wonder if in a hypothetical scenario when every book and publication is digitized into an e-book and every reader only uses his gadgets to read the digital content instead of having a printed version on a paper. Will this be a much Greener situation to one we have right now? There are  views and opinions prevalent in media which are more of equivocal nature. E-readers aren’t typically marketed as environmentally sound, but their environmental impact is now becoming a topic of discussion and research.

Point of Views : Expert’s View on e-Readers

At least Don Carli doesn’t thinks so, according to him e-Readers aren’t Greener than print (which is a common view held by consumers who don’t know the backstory of evolution of an e-Reader ). Actually few days back I had an opportunity to read an interview with Don Carli on News Media Innovation, Convergence and Sustainability.

As far as print media is concerned it could do a better job of managing the sustainability of its supply chains and waste streams, but it’s a misguided notion to assume that digital media is categorically greener. Computers, eReaders and cell phones all have a cost of operation, cost of manufacturing and cost of disposal. When Compared directly to the book, a Kindle produces 168 kilograms of carbon dioxide compared to 7.46 kilograms for a book.

Making a computer typically requires the mining and refining of dozens of minerals and metals including gold, silver and palladium as well as extensive use of plastics and hydrocarbon solvents. To function, digital devices require a constant flow of electrons that predominately come from the combustion of coal, and at the end of their all-too-short useful lives electronics have become the single largest stream of toxic waste created by man. Until recently there was little if any voluntary disclosure of the lifecycle “backstory” of digital media.

Point of Views : CleanTech Research based on Scientific Evidences.

Another interesting survey report from CleanTech Group which published the report based on life cycle analysis of a Kindle e-Reader. The research and media company drew on existing studies to do a lifecycle analysis and found that the carbon emissions from electronic books are far lower than traditional book publishing.

As reported  in the analysis, “The roughly 168 kg of CO2 produced throughout the Kindle’s lifecycle is a clear winner against the potential savings: 1,074 kg of CO2 if replacing three books a month for four years; and up to 26,098 kg of CO2 when used to the fullest capacity of the Kindle DX. Less-frequent readers attracted by decreasing prices still can break even at 22.5 books over the life of the device,”.

Finding a conclusion to this article seems difficult:

eReaders are capturing media attention and there appears to be significant latent demand for gadgets that can replace printed media, but mainstream adoption still remains years away. E-reader device sales and eReader content revenues are still rounding error in relation to print media revenues. In a survey of attendees at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair 40% predicted digital book content sales would overtake traditional printed book sales by 2018, but over 30% said digital content would never surpass traditional books sales, and 66% said they expect traditional books to dominate the market for the next decade.

With universities like Princeton and six others already testing the technology in a pilot, I hope e-Readers will make their way to schools and workplaces  replacing traditional paper books. Ultimately, it comes down to how an e-reader is used. If a person continues to buy books and print periodicals and doesn’t recycle the product, the environmental impact could potentially be negative.

The following is a draft I wrote prior to the announcement of the iPad, but which I didn’t publish because it was a series of hypotheses based on an as yet non-existing product. It’s a series of thoughts on how an interface of a touchscreen larger than an iPhone might look like. It is inspired by both my experiences with Macs and since recently with an iPod Touch. Here goes.

A couple of thoughts I had last night (written on 13.01.2010) about interfaces, the current state of development for the iPhone OS, how Apple could build a hybrid of Mac and iPhone OS, and how the company could build multi-tasking into its rumoured tablet. My thought were the following:

a. A new category: I don’t think the iTablet, if it exists, will be either a Mac or an iPhone. My super-superficial reason: it doesn’t fit in the Mac line-up depicted on the online Apple Store (see pic), but a more underlying reason is that I don’t see space for it in either a Mac-category or a Mobile phone/media player category. Which is not to say that it won’t do either well, but I think it will more fall into the class of Netbooks, though of course with the purpose of bombing those low-tech, low-innovation devices out of the water… just like Apple did with MP3 players and with Phones. Note from today: as it turns out, the iPad is depicted below the iPod, iPhone, and Mac lines, but time will tell where it will be once it’s on sale.

b. The Keyboard: I think that any 10″ screen will demand more connectivity to secondary (Apple) devices than the iPhone allows for. That means, an external keyboard and mouse, which transforms the tablet into a desktop. I have less complaints about the software-keyboard now, after working with a Touch for a while, but I still don’t see it as an alternative for longer texts, which a larger screen would warrant. Some months ago, I made a stupid mock-up of the iPhone + a keyboard (see pic), which is how I envision it looking (only better).

c. The App Store: 3 Billion Apps downloaded, Apple just reported, which also suggests a kind of lock-in. For better or worse, developers have accepted the App-store and I think it works for several reasons for both, namely more protection from pirates, more predictability for developers when developing for the black hole that is Apple, and more control by Apple, which is what Apple likes, not to mention new income streams for both. I think the App Store will continue to exist and will present new challenges when talking about a larger screen. Note from today: I don’t believe that what we will get to see in less than two months will be that what people were playing around with after the Apple keynote. iPhone apps inflated to a larger screen, come on?

d: The User Interface: I’ve written previously about Quick Look in Snow Leopard and how I also dug its slight innovation in terms of in-icon playing of media. Previously, OS X also introduced Dashboard into Tiger (I believe), whose interface, on the surface at least, resembles the iPhone. My view is that Apple will give developers the option to just keep the same resolution apps as they have offered before, though not exclusively of course. But imagine “Quick Looking” an app and still having it run inside its “Icon,” while the user does something else. For the rest, I of course think that full-screen Apps will exist, which is where Dashboard comes in, or at least a type of Dashboard. (Note: that was wrong. More below.)

e. Integration with the Mac: One of the most underused interfaces, at least on my Mac, is Dashboard, which allows people to have continuously open widgets on anything from news, to games, to radio, to system monitoring. It’s useful for those purposes, but not really something i spend more than a few minutes at a time with. Yet the first thing that came to mind when thinking of a “Tablet,” using both iPhone and Mac interface components, was Dashboard. It creates a new layer on top of a traditional desktop, allowing for user-input and information display. When I envision someone running the apps that would work on the “iTablet” also, I think of it either being that you open up a new layer on your Mac and run the very same apps on it through something like a Dashboard-like interface. Or, and the simplest solution is usually the best, through having the Tablet sync through iTunes with regular applications on the Mac.

Note from today: well, obviously this was wrong, but there have been several theories aired of having a type of Dashboard on the iPad for apps like calculator and weather, which don’t at all make sense to run in single focus on a larger screen than the iPhone.

Further thoughts from today: I do think that we will see a new OS update for both the iPhone and iPad before the release of the iPad. This will address the concerns that people have about it just being a larger iPod Touch. For the rest, to me the only downside to this device is the lack of a front-facing camera for video-calling, and some minor things. And I also think it’s the perfect “parent device!” What the Wii was to gaming, the iPad is to computing, addressing a very very blue ocean.

As previously stated, I’m still in line to get one this year, though only after trying one first.

Vincent

As I argued in the comments in Vincent’s post about FarmVille, FarmVille is a role playing game (RPG). And pretty bad one at that. Like most RPGs, you don’t actually need any skills or develop any skill playing it yourself as your success is solely dependent on the amount of time you sink into it. You can get pretty good at FreeCell, but no matter how much time you spend in FarmVille, you won’t get “better” in it. But what most RPGs have at least is a story – even if most these days have left the ending pretty open. Contrast this to FarmVille which isn’t trying to tell you any story. In this sense it resembles a simulation, but that genre is usually characterized by depth and strategy which are nowhere to be seen in FarmVille, unlike, say, in SimFarm from 1993.

Free range animal farming at FarmVille

It is way too easy to categorise FarmVille as a “casual” game, but “casual” doesn’t need to mean games where you can’t lose, games which have zero learning curve and games that don’t offer challenge. A good example of “casual” game that always ends in the player “losing” and (hence?) offers a lot of challenge is Bejeweled. If I remember correctly, Bejeweled was the previous title holder to the biggest casual game ever.

The only challenges are achievements – and now collections. But there’s little, if any, social value in achieving them – unless you count boasting about them on your Facebook wall. And, unfortunately, the game doesn’t have level 13 Pig Warlocks.

There’s some irony that the main reason people play FarmVille, boredom, is also a main reason why people quit it. This boredom kicks in at about level 20 or so, where you start to realize that you have pretty much seen everything the game has to offer. The only thing left is the grind.

There are, of course, shortcuts to simple grinding. You can use farm machinery to do your activities faster, but they consume fuel (that, until recently, you could only refill by real money). Also, spending money allows you to get many benefits before non-paying players. And this is a problem, because many people don’t consider this “fair”. Offering players to pay to save time, however, is pretty crucial from business logic. The trap here is that the players who don’t feel comfortable paying start to feel that the only way to progress in the game is to spend real money.

FarmVille follows the RPG formula that the higher you have leveled, the more effort (= experience points) you need to reach next level. Granted, you have access to new things that might increase your “productivity”, but the mean time between levels is increasing. However, and this is the problem, the reward of leveling up remains pretty much the same. At some point, the perceieved benefit/effort ratio falls short. The trick is that at this point, the player has invested so much into the game that they might be more willing to pay real money to make advancing easier… if the rewards of leveling up are worth it.

The business logic of FarmVille dictates that the more you play, the better player you are for Zynga. It’s the curious logic of taxing your good customers, the discrimination for the information age. This is most evident if you look at how the experience points you get from crops depends on their harvest time. The shorter the harvest time (and so, how many times the player “needs” to play FarmVille), the more experience the player can gain in given time. As you can see, the relationship between these two variables follows an exponential distribution with pretty high correlation.

Harvest time is strongly correlated with experience points you can get in FarmVille

There's not much correlation between profits and harvest time, though.

As an interesting side note, the correlation between Harvest time and profit isn’t nearly as high and there’s a lot of variation. This neatly illustrates how the main metric in the game (from game designer’s perspective) is not profit, but experience points which are tightly tied to player retention. This also means that while there’s a wide variety of different kind of crops, there’s only a handful that makes any sense to use as the rest are strongly dominated. Oh, and the trees and the animals don’t make any sense given how scarce the land is and how much more profitable the crops are. The only reason to have either is for achieving ribbons – or self-expression (which you might have already guessed was pretty low on my priority list).

The other thing in FarmVille is that your game progress is also aided somewhat by the amount of friends you have. Whether these friends help you or not, is not necessasry, as only retaining a certain friend amount gives you benefits. The most important of these is access to larger farms. The social aspects of FarmVille can be divided into self-expression (how one designs one’s farm) and a coordination game of sharing gifts and other “loot”. The game design trick of “free gifts” is pretty clear after the player realizes that he or she needs a bigger farm to accommodate all the gifts. Contrast this “social gaming” to the title-holder of “most anti-social game ever”, World of Warcraft, in which (as far as I’ve understood) it is possible to “complete” the game alone, but playing with others is a key element to enjoy the game. In WoW the higher level players can help out lower level players, but in FarmVille the higher level players can gift some items to lower level players that lower player level players can’t gift. So, for some time the reciprocity logic didn’t really work in gifting, but this was recently fixed by introduction of “Mystery gifts” that are pretty much the only thing that makes sense for lower level players to send to higher level players.

So, what you are left in a more competitive sense of “social gaming” is the amount of ribbons you have collected, the level you have achieved and how pimped out your farm is. The element of achievements that you can accomplish as a group is zero.

I’m not entirely sure that Facebook is the most fertily grounds for games, as the dominating functionality seems to be “the social” and exploiting one’s userbase. Game mechanics and social dynamics come second. This is why I believe that to experience “true” social gaming, one needs to invest some real money to buy a game. The “free” gaming model seems to denigrate too quickly into nickel-and-diming, see for example what happened with EA’s Battlefield Heroes – where again some of the players didn’t see the real money elements as “fair” after certain point.

The problem with FarmVille, in short, is that the business logic dictates the game design too much. The revenue incentives of Zynga make the game experience worse for the players, who are looking for more than killing time.

OK, time to write a few words about the iPad. In true spirit of fanboyishness I started (and finished) writing this post in bed on my iPod Touch. Let me start by saying that with reservations I want the iPad. Reservations include that like you, I haven’t actually used the device, and that it doesn’t include a front facing camera which is a real shame. Flash… Pah! I really don’t care. Anyone who experienced the professional look, feel and support you get even from a €0.79 game on the Touch or iPhone isn’t going back to freeware flash (read my Farmville review as an example).

I’m not trying to provoke you by being so dismissive of flash, even though I feel a lot of people really really hate how the iPad turned out. I am only writing out of my own current and past context and reserving final judgement until it’s in my hands.

My context is several. I was born into an age when there weren’t any personal computers. As a matter of fact, Apple had only just been conceived when I was born. I grew up without computers, until I got a toy Amiga at 13, and a very buggy 1st PC at 15. It ran DOS mostly and crashed a lot in Windows 3.1. I mention this because people in my generation suffer from a curse. We were forced to learn a zillion crappy commands as teens, which made our parents and family members consider us computer geniusses and not a week goes by when I don’t get at least 1 question about a bug in a computer. Last week, I spent maybe 5 hours trying to get a Wifi card to communicate with an Internet radio, I will have to set up skype VOIP at my parents’ house this year and who knows what else.

My no. 2 reason for getting an iPad? To give it to my parents and save me future headaches (knock on wood).

My no. 1 reason is different. Last December, my MacBook was lost on a train. I’m using an older MacBook from work at the moment and digging this iPod Touch a lot. In many ways I do more on the Touch now. It has its flaws of course, and no it has nothing to do with “openness” or flash. The screen is too small and there are times (less than you would think) where I need a physical keyboard.

So picture my context. I travel a fair amount, I think the MacBook is not always neccessary but the Touch/iPhone is not always enough. The Touch meets my casual gaming needs (serious games, that’s what consoles are built for), it kind of meets my wordprocessing needs (still typing on the Touch …). So why on earth, for that price, wouldn’t I want an iPad?

Truth be told, I was considering getting a sleek MacBook Pro to replace my lost MacBook. But for years, I’ve secretely lusted after a shiny iMac as well, never being able to justify having both a laptop and a desktop. The iPad is not a standalone PC. It needs to be synced with one (every week or so). But it also gives me a chance not not restrict computing to a small 13-15″ screen and buy a “real” computer so that makes sense to me.

In my UNIQUE context, the iPad makes sense. In my less unique context regarding my parents, it makes sense. 2010 is hopefully a year of less computing headaches and more of just getting things done.

the end
Vincent

I do admire Geeks. I have nothing but respect for their work.

Their contribution with open source software to today’s world is unquestionnable. The idea that a bunch of coders came up with such great solutions as Firefox, Linux, Gimp, Eclipse, OpenOffice, JBoss (and all Java Enterprise frameworks) to name a few that I use on an everyday basis, this idea is just amazing.

Back in the day when I was working for In Fusio, a start-up doing video games and services for the mobile phone industry, I had this wonderful opportunity to work with a bunch of the most talented ones. These guys implemented the first over-the-air download system for mobile phones back in the early 2000’s. In 2 and a half years I’ve learnt as much as I would have in ten years in any other company.

What I’ve noticed though, is that geeks are not passionate about products. They are passionate about technology.

Just like old tribes have rites to pass and become a man, one has to harness the technology to get some consideration from a Geek.

Read more »

I have been reading a lot of Scott Berkun lately, including his brilliant Confessions of a Public Speaker (french review available). A must read for any speaker, professional or not, to make sure you transmit clearly your ideas .

However, sometimes you just don’t have a dedicated room, with people ready to offer you 30 minutes of attention. You don’t have the slideware, you don’t have the projector or your laptop.

No. What you have is just a 30 seconds time frame, where you bump into some executive or very important people in the company. And what you want is to take advantage of this opportunity to pitch people into some Enterprise 2.0 basics.

Scott addresses this point in one of his many excellent blog posts : how to pitch idea.

Now let’s see some elevator pitches to 5 key enterprise persona for 2.0 adoption …

Read more »

(attention, long vehicle)

Anand’s article touched an explosive combination of decision+change management+money. It was inspiring indeed, and got me to write down two or three thoughts looking the M&A from inside a house. To write this piece, time popped-up by chance and bad luck in the same time. Nevermind why I found myself out of gas and battery in the beginning of my Friday evening, I really enjoyed my decision to go back to cocooning.

The decision

This is the thing about deciding to do an M&A or change, it’s not wise to be 100% sure about the best direction. (Ok, don’t skip the due diligence). A choice might be considered as good by more people and for a longer time, but if you search too long your competitor will do your A and no M for you. So you have to make it early. For normal people with no 6th sense, this means they have to deal with the effects of their choice both personally and in their team .

Why you take the decision? Probably for financial value creation, technical synergies, or to phase out potential competitors.

How you take it? Depends on the decision model of your company : single minded, organizational, political, garbage can. (insights from Strategor, 4th edition, Dunond 2005)

Once the change is there, I’ve observed two styles of dealing with it and getting others to deal with it.

The behaviors

One is that you explode and overwhelm everybody with excitement yourself included, partying hard on change. People are normally happy before they realize what has hit them. The happy tail is guaranteed to last, varies on the party. Life stats say that happiness from a good home party last about 3 days, from a football final for about a month, from Olympic games about a year.

Another approach is that you go Zen, as if nothing has happened, act naturally etc. This works if with adult-ish organizations because routines are very important for adults, etc.

In both cases you surf slower, either because you focus on partying or because you surf tai-chi style.

To keep surfing fast, Brazilians have thought of Kapoeira (training masked in partying).

Ok, this is people, what about the business?

The money factor

Change+money is a bit more tricky, because it involves more tension and more aggressive effects. Culture of money asks for more traditionalism, thoughtfulness, respect.

Mutual respect :) and money-related expectations makes M&As such showstoppers for internal rhythms and decision making (the case of M&A driven by financial value creation). In my view, if the motivation is pure value creation the results risk being lost in translation. And M&A is a showstopper.

other motivations

If it is value+product synergies, the organizations quickly recover and from change and get productive on the common focus. In that case, the initial slow-down, frames significantly the savoir-faire and prevents chaos. The focus is scaling on innovation and this can happen within a few months. And M&A is an investment on strategy.

Let’s not forget that innovative products carry this identity either because they target niches or if not, they are innovative for a specific period of time, on their way to bannalization. So when the Big Fish frames how you scale on innovation, the Small Fish start changing skin. Shouldn’t it? It is very difficult to see in retrospection, what part of product or service the Small Fish has fit in since identity integration is necessary.

Last, if motivation is gulping competition early the M&A is a showstopper by design.

the project

Beyond initial motivation for the M&A , the time to market and style to market of an M&A-ed innovative stg is very much bound to internal Big Fish culture but also to many external factors such as market dynamics.

My basket of examples include,

• Mobile payment : has travelled from developing countries to the developed ones like a financial and regulatory Benjamin Button. (TTM : ~7y, STM: sponsored by heavy banking industry to open-up consumers)
• Peer-to-peer communications : have travelled from early experimental internet to the gray napsteric zones, masked in skypish applications to land through Big Fish in the B2B space as a feature of datacenter operating systems / “branch cache” how it is called in MSFT (TTM : ~15y, STM: integration into the mosaic, identity change)
• Video semantics tracking : has travelled from academia to consumers in speed-light (less than a decade to launch project Natal) (TTM : ~10y, STM: innovation transforms the product)
• Biscuit-flavored yoghurt : Marketing innovation, where you test a few recipes and you build on on insghts that people love biscuits but are too guilty to consume them at the rhythm of yoghurts. Also have to buy the rights of a favorite biscuit brand. (TTM : ~6m, STM: act naturally )
• With this last one I want to emphasize that if software was simpler to build, simpler to adopt, and was sold in cheaper units, end users could possibly profit from and indulge in innovation faster and more naturally. This is why social-technology + M&As are a better match.

Hey I am not pocket-Gartner, so please feel free to challenge my examples.

After aaaall this analysis, I come up with a…question: We’re pretty much involved in producing innovation so it’s normal that we’re pretty demanding on change happening fast. However, how fast can an average consumer or ITpro absorb and adopt software innovation?

In virtualization for example, a lot of which passed through M&As, MSFT carries the burden of late TTM. By the time MSFT was into virtualization, it was no longer innovative. But still adoption rates by the market were loooooow and (relatively) sloooow moving. So buzz-wise TTM was late, but adoption-wise TTM was early. Crazy? just a paradox of software and friends. The attained benefit for MSFT was catching up with the buzz rhythm and also syncing with the adoption rhythm. Isn’t this a successful strategy?

Conclusion?

Overall, even though M&As slow down and phase out a lot of good stuff, technology is still a great industry for M&As because

• A lot more of fresh attitudes survive in tec- fresh towards life and change as well.
• The money culture is less pronounced
• Creativity and innovation need change even in dinosaur size and style.

“Don’t feed the lions!”  – please do….

Have you ever noticed, the increasing interest of your old Aunts  in facebook or other social networking websites? Have you ever noticed, people updating their status messages (provoking conversations and chitchats). I have observed these kind of behavior and sometimes participated in these conversations as well. But where am I heading with all this? Letme ask you a question, How social are you?

Answer comes from a researcher Josh Bernoff who noted a “new behavior” in patterns of social technology usage by the people, and made a new category to describe such users: “conversationalists.” Bernoff defines conversationalists as “people who update their social network status to converse” on at least a weekly basis. According to Forrester surveys, the category is 56 percent female, more so than any other group, with 70 percent aged 30 and older. All of which fits quite nicely with my anecdotal evidence.

They take a close look at the social and demographic structure of the social web population ( To be more exhaustive and close to accurately model the user behavior, they analyzed the profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors).  The categorization of users is different than  Technorati’s statistics which mostly focus on raw blog growth numbers and structural features of the blogosphere.

P.S: Note that participation at one level may or may not overlap with the participation at other levels — so the ratios sum up to over 100%.

I am trying to explain as well as compare the increase and change in the user behavior for two years of their research. Results for previous year research can be found here.

Creators publish blogs, maintain Web pages, or upload videos to sites like YouTube at least once per month. Creators include just 24% of the adult online population. Creators are generally youngsters the average age of adult users is 39 — but are evenly split between men and women. This percent in year 2007 was just 13%.

Critics participate in either of two ways commenting on blogs or posting ratings and reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Critics represent 37% of all adult online consumers and on average are several years older than Creators. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Collectors create metadata that’s shared with the entire community, e.g. by saving URLs on a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or using RSS feeds on Bloglines. Collectors represent 20% of the adult online population and are the most male-dominated of all the Social Technographics groups. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Joiners use a social networking site like MySpace.com or Facebook. Joiners represent 59% of the adult online population and are the youngest of the Social Technographics groups. They are highly likely to engage in other Social Computing activities — 59% also read blogs, while 30% publish blogs. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Spectators represent 70% of the adult online population and are slightly more likely to be women and have the lowest household income of all the social Technographics groups. The most common activity for Spectators is reading blogs, with only a small overlap with users who watch peer-generated video on sites like YouTube. This percent in year 2007 was just 33%.

Inactives. Today, 17% of online adults do not participate at all in social computing activities. These Inactives have an average age of 50, are more likely to be women, and are much less likely to consider themselves leaders or tell their friends about products that interest them. This percent in year 2007 was 52%.

What we see from the above classification is a drastic change in behaviour of online users in last two years, most changes are directed towards the Inactives and Spectators. So now next time if you see your aunt updating her status message in Facebook, consider her among the new Joiners to the world of social networking.

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

Be it Automobile , Aviation or Heavy Metal Industries, everyone felt the heat of recession but regardless IT fared better than most. In spite of worst economic meltdowns in history, acquisitions among big vendors continued to reshape the market, operating-system wars extended to mobile battlefields, microblogging became a powerful source of real-time information, and the take-up of small, Net-connected devices was stronger than ever.

But how good is this wave of mergers and acquisitions for the future? ( By future I mean upcoming innovation and future of Startups which target innovation not business)

Whenever your biggest competitor takes you over, it blunts the competitive spirit that can drive innovations. Thats what concerns me most, the spirit of innovation is somehow compromised because of takeovers.

Not always always a potential Merger or Takeover can be taken as a positive sign of ever increasing competition and globalization. And particularly not right now when it comes to web and social media startups, many of which are still more focused on innovation and building up audiences than on making profits. Rushing them into deals to fulfill long-delayed plans for an exit strategy could derail the evolution of a strong business plan.

From an investment standpoint, founders and venture capitalists have good reasons to cash out now. Market caps of public tech giants are rising — the Nasdaq gaining big time – and so are their cash stockpiles. For Instance Microsoft has a stock pile of about $49 billion in cash; similar is the story of Google with $24 billion. High-profile Multi Billion dollar deals like the ones we had in recent times have a way of spurring on other acquisitions.

TimeWarner buying AOL and eBay buying Skype come to mind. Even snapping up a hot startup for its technology or talent — Google buying Dodgeball or Yahoo buying Flickr – can lead to culture clashes, customer anger and other disappointing results.

I  tried to re-compile the list of some major takeovers which are substantial enough to change the future of computing.   We are talking about some multibillion dollar mergers and acquisitions, where the Big gets even Bigger.

Oracle eclipses the SUN @ $7.4 Billion

This Merger can be coined as “father of all the Tech Mergers” announced last year. If the announced the deal went through, Oracle,  the industry’s largest database software vendor would get an entry into the server and storage markets worldwide.

The acquisition, still pending, was announced in April, and may even be blocked because European regulators are contending that combining Oracle’s technology with Sun’s open source MySQL database would violate competition laws. Lets see if this deal goes through.

Xerox snaps up ACS in $6.4 billion

Another major takeover, Xerox pays about $6.4 billion in cash and stock for Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a large IT and outsourcing firm. With this merger Xerox hopes it will give it a bigger foothold in the business services space. While the deal will surely boost Xerox, investors wondered whether it overpriced the deal.

Calling the ACS deal “a game-changer” for Xerox, Burns, CEO of the company, said it would help Xerox “expand our business and benefit from stronger revenue and earnings growth.” The deal will triple the service component of Xerox’s revenue to roughly $10 billion annually from $3.5 billion, according to the company.

Dell – Perot Catch-Up Deal worth $ 3.9 Billion

Buying Perot was a part of Dell’s plan to expand its footprint in the IT services market, which was  a necessity in a time when hardware sales were falling. Dell offered a staggering $3.9 billion for Perot Systems, a 68% premium over Perot’s actual stock value. Dell’s purchase can also be seen as a response to rival HP’s $13.9 billion acquisition the previous year of EDS — another services company founded by Perot.

Cisco-Tandberg worth  $3.4 billion

Cisco, already a major player in collaboration products with WebEx and TelePresence, signed an agreement in October to purchase videoconferencing vendor Tandberg, which makes both video devices and network infrastructure products. The acquisition, if completed, could have both a direct and indirect impact on Cisco’s bottom line, because expanded use of videoconferencing may increase network traffic, letting Cisco sell more switches and routers.

HP Acquires 3Com For $2.7 Billion

HP launched a straightforward assault on Cisco in their own Game of Networks. HP’s increasing influence in data center networking and convergence markets will have a big boost with its purchase of 3Com, a maker of switches, routers and security products. HP says the acquisition will further its data center strategy “built on the convergence of servers, storage, networking, management, facilities and services.” The acquisition of 3Com also help to expand HP’s Ethernet switching offerings, add routing solutions and significantly strengthen the company’s position in China thanks to 3Com’s strong presence in China. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

I have collected the figures and numbers from various sources including PCWorld, Gigaom and Wikipedia. Let me know if you have a suggestion or correction to make. Please forgive me for the grammar, I was always bad in Grammar since school

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

Materialism doesn’t matter. There, I’ve said it. Nothing material, nothing that you can touch, matters… when talking about computers. See, I’m not that evolved.

Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, my laptop got stolen on the train. Last summer, due to a friend of mine “borrowing” my laptop at an event without telling me, I realised that I better start backing up if this were to happen again. So, on the 27th of December, a day before my laptop actually disappeared, I had a full backup made via Apple’s Time Machine, as part of my weekly routine.

And now, some hardware expenses later, one of which was a gigantic (640 GB) laptop hard drive by Western Digital which I’m loving, I have a different Macbook, but with exactly the same data I had before and am running it like nothing ever happened. And I’m telling you, I didn’t like spending money on this, but having all my data back feels like that money was inconsequential. Backups rock, as does OS X for having backup software built in!

OK, philosophically speaking, I’m still being materialistic about my data. Clearly, I’m not “if you could take one item to a deserted island data, what would it be?” material. But it’s kind of a revelation to me that hardware (and software) and money really is much, much less important than data.

I also hope that this inspires you to make a last minute resolution for 2010. Always back up your data because you never, ever know when it might just be gone.

Vincent

As most of us by now have heard about the tragic earthquake at Haiti, which took more than 1000 lives today. I am writing this blog to help people in Haiti, who might have lost almost every thing in their life. In this posting I am trying to enlist all possible website through which one can contribute to the earthquake relief funds. I am not sure about the authenticity (nor i care about this moment of time) of these websites. But most of them I am enlisting are renowned globally for their efforts.

I quit Farmville yesterday, after 3.5 weeks of pushing it up to level 20. In the first week, I wanted to write a review of how awesome it was and how it changed the social dynamic of Facebook. Now after a few weeks of wintery downtime, my gaming habit is back in the closet where it belongs, and my opinion is somewhat different.

What attracted me to Farmville in the first place? Well, in true Web3.0 spirit, it was someone raving about it on Twitter (Fidji Simo, I believe). It made me check it out and when I found out that some of my friends were on it, it made me give it a chance. I also remember SimFarm being one of the first games I played on my first PC and there was the nostalgia factor.

Farmville = FunVille?
The fun part of Farmville was to me truly the social dynamic. You build experience by doing different activities, such as growing fruit and vegetables, herding animals, and also helping out your friends. You can also give gifts to friends who in turn gift you back. All of that leads to two ways of measuring progress: experience points, which leads to new levels and abilities, and achievements, which you get after doing certain activities enough. While helping friends fuels my socialist—we are all equal, blablabla—self, the latter fuels my competitive—I am better, haha—self. As such, Farmville gives me complex feelings of satisfaction that can’t be found in every activity or game.

Now, while I admit that the latter statement is a little weird, but hopefully sufficient to explain why I liked the game, let me get to the parts that made me quit Farmville. They are, simply put: money, Adobe’s Flash, and boredom.

Farmville = CashVille
Farmville was admittedly the biggest blockbuster on the Facebook platform in 2009 and I have no doubt it will do well in 2010 also. The reason it is what it is, is because of its way of making money. Yes, if you want the easy way to winning, which is measured by how beautiful your farm is, you have to pay! There are three ways to pay for stuff in Farmville: achievements, such as having many neighbours or growing many tomatoes, which gets you free stuff; fake money, which buys you stuff; and Farmville money, which you get by either levelling up or by buying it for real dollars.

You can do pretty much everything you want without spending Farmville cash. Except for two things: expanding your farm, which would lead to having more real-estate and thus more “fun.” And, buying fuel. You can buy vehicles that make farming an easier chore, but using those vehicles requires fuel, which is expensive to buy and slow to recharge. The fact that I couldn’t sustainably earn income and spend it (without spending real cash) was a real downer in terms of gameplay.

Farmville = FlashVille
Flash made headlines these last few years mostly because of three things. It got bought by Adobe, its Air-platform and the sheer ubiquity of Flash as a development platform on sites such as Facebook. And, its lack of support on the iPhone / iPod Touch OS. And the latter is the case because Flash really sucks! It’s bloated, it’s not as good as pretty much any other interfacing technology (for lack of a better term), and it reminds us all of badly designed Myspace sites.

For me, the lack of iPhone OS support was a real factor as I got a Touch this Christmas, which became my nr. 1 Facebook interface, minus the reason* why I mainly visited Facebook these last few weeks (*: yes, yes, I really did mean it when I wished my friends a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year, but that just wasn’t getting me the experience points to get me ahead on Farmville…).

The second factor was that Flash is simply a bad technology. 1. it was incredibly slow and I had to reload the page several times, also losing my progress. 2. the Farmville interface is split up into blocks, on which you can farm, build, plant trees, or herd animals. Doing stuff on these chunks required actual movement of my avatar/farmer, who wasn’t moving to swiftly because of “Flashville’s bloatyness,” and I also couldn’t drag actions across the screen, which I would have been able to do even in the 16 years older SimFarm! Flash sucks and was the no. 2 reason for quitting Farmville.

I think Farmville would make the perfect iPhone App, but I really think Flash needs a major overhaul and/or be killed of.

Farmville = FrustrationVille
I already mentioned how repetitive the actual playing part became, going from one block to the next to plant or harvest. Every level felt slower and more frustrating, which was mostly due to Flash, but also perhaps due to Farmville making it harder to get to the next level. In the end, I kind of started wondering why I was playing this game and if I was even playing and not just doing manual labour. The only real reward seemed to be Farmcash, which you could either earn by levelling up (1 Farmcash per level, while buying more farmland costs like 20-30 farm-dollars, seems frustrating) or by paying real money (and that would just be sad). I could also spam my friends to join Farmville and become my neighbours, but come on!

I did get some satisfaction out of reading the several strategy guides that exist for Farmville and there really is no shortage of community support. But in the end it seems like Farmville emulates actual farming too closely, by making it tedious manual labour to grow stuff on your farm (mostly due to Flash sucking!) and it also makes it feel like serfdom, by having to buy Farmcash from your “masters,” in order to have a great-looking farm.

Well, that’s all I have to say on Farmville. It was a fun experience during the holidays and I don’t regret trying it. But while I think social gaming has a strong future, I really don’t like business models that rely on making its users’ lives more frustrating. I know World of Warcraft has a similar model and is the most successful multiplayer game ever made, but that doesn’t mean that it makes it the best game ever made. I can name a dozen single player and half a dozen multiplayer games that aren’t as successful financially, but just work well in terms of gameplay. And games like Farmville have a long way to go before they get there.

End review.
Vincent

If you are new to Twitter then it’s easy to get confused with so many twitter applications out there. Further, if you are a business user than you may have no time to do research on the applications. We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape.  You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I used many of the tools available in internet to manage my old twitter account.

With this idea behind I am trying to categorize the tools which may be helpful for our readers to use according to their needs. Here are some twitter tools  along with the snapshots which impressed me and according to me will be easy to use even for a newbie to  promote his/her business .

1. Buzzom Premium http://premium.buzzom.com/

Buzzom Premium is very newly launched application which allows you to focus in your twitter growth. It has many functions to choose from but more essentially its spam filter, scheduler and monitor. These are the three basic functions over which the application is build.

Direct Message is full of SPAM and it is almost unusable now. Thanks to various gaming applications and welcome or thank you messages. I like Buzzom SPAM filtering for DM. It actually makes this feature usable.

Buzzom also provides a great way to visualize your Twitter growth and network’s activity such as tweets, Retweets etc. The service also has the auto grow and follow system to increase your network’s size. Scheduler allows you to schedule tweets at certain time and control it by specifying its repeat cycle for future tweets.

2. Twonvert http://www.twonvert.com/

Twitter is all about 140 characters of words. People are already got use to expressing themselves in 140 characters with shorthand notation and some ingenuity. But that takes time and when you are in hurry, its more frustrating. With Twonvert you can easily convert your tweets into SMS shorthand language and allows you to say more with less characters!

3. Wefollow http://wefollow.com/

WeFollow is the directory of all the people in the Twitter, who have added themselves to the list. It provides an easy way for you to find relevant people in twitter and connect with them. You can find all short of people from celebrity to technologist in the list. WeFollow.com helps you use your time efficiently by making your people search easy and fast.

4. Twitscoop http://www.twitscoop.com/

Twitscoop is the service which lets you search the real-time trend in the twitter. Twitscoop uses the dynamic tag cloud to show the most talked topic in an interactive way. You can also search for related keyword and finds its popularity in the Twitter network.

Overall, it allows users to “Mine the thought stream” provided by Twitter. Twitscoop’s algorithm cuts every English non-spam tweets into pieces (“tags”), and ranks them by how frequently they are used versus normal usage. Twitscoop can essentially be described as your real-time web’s monitor.

5. Twittercal http://twittercal.com/

Managing your calendar is very tedious. You may have to enter new task on the go and may not have access to web version of Google calendar. Now you can do that easily via Twitter, you just have to send a small tweet and it gets added to your Google Calendar.

It’s a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar. Add events in a snap from your favorite Twitter client. Follow the 5 steps procedure to get started.

6. Socialtoo http://www.socialtoo.com/

Socialtoo is a paid service that lets you manage your twitter account by autofollow and unfollow tool. It also provides you basic statistics about your followers count and tweet count. It helps you manage your account and reduce the spam in your network.

It has interesting features like social survey that allows you to create survey that will allow you to understand your network much better.

7. StrawPoll http://strawpollnow.com/

Can you measure the sentiment of your network? Ets say you have 1000 people in your network, getting everyone’s opinion one to one is difficult. If you just want to measure if your network is Pro Apple or Pro Google, what do you do? Well Strawpoll is the tool you are looking for.

StrawPoll is the coolest way to follow the opinions of people onTwitter. It allows you to create poll and communicate with your network and understand their opinion.

8. TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/

Tweetdeck is the most popular desktop application for Twitter developer in Adobeair. It is very popular for its interface. It provides you a very easy way to maintain your daily twitter activities. Tweetdeck provides easy way to group your friends into different tabs and clean up the twitter stream. You can also search in the Tweetdeck and open a dedicated tab for the keyword; this allows you to track them easily. Recently, TweetDeck also has added TweetDeck Directory which is similar to WeFollow.

9. Stocktwits http://stocktwits.com/

StockTwits is an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.

User can add a set of specific stocks, save them to their own portfolio and limit the conversation around it or focus only on their favorite and trusted sources. Watch the whole stream or create your own filters. User can follow the best on the site, the best only in your areas of interest and in turn share your best actionable ideas. This is the best Twitter related financial site on the web does this in real-time.

10. TwitterSearch http://search.twitter.com/

TwitterSearch is the basic framework of the entire search engine that is present. It provides an easiest way to find out tweets related to keywords. It also has an advanced feature that lets you customize your query to find relevant tweets. It is small but powerful tool.  Once you get hang of it, it can be your most powerful tool of all. Beside search, it was shows the trending topic which can be useful to get hold of the perspective of twitter.

To Actually understand how to use twitter to promote your business here is a link to an awesome article by Chris Brogan.

P.S : All the rankings and stats are based on my personal opinions and experiences while using them.

(Knowledge Capture in Enterprise 2.0 – click to enlarge)

Knowledge Worker : one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace (Peter Drucker – 1959)

If the definition above applies to your job then you probably are a knowledge worker. I personally am. And knowledge is the raw material we’re working with.

As opposed to the raw material manual workers deal with, knowledge is immaterial, it is just floating around. If we want to be productive we need to make sure this knowledge is harnessed, i.e captured and easily accessible.

Some studies show that between 25 and 50% of the communication between knowledge workers remains tacit and uncaptured. The question is how can we be productive and comfortable with our daily work if about half of the raw material we’re working with is wandering around ?

In the enterprise 2.0 presentation, I compare the knowledge capture in Enterprise 1.0 and 2.0. And it goes like this … Read more »

The compass functionality is still a bit underutilized

The media seems to be a bit obsessed with hardware, iPhone and its “killers” and software (“apps”). This is technology after all. For me, much more interesting phenomenon are applications. I’m not talking about software but more generally what we use the technology for. In “Salmon of Doubt”, Douglas Adams put it well that “[we] are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” I believe that iPhone and what have followed since it are enabling just this. I also believe by just being “stuff that works” was the feature that made iPhone what it is today, while Nokia was fiddling around with technologies.

When I’m talking about mobile phones as Human-World Interface, I’m not really talking about augmented reality. For most part augmented reality is just hype and worst of all, it was just technology. There was some cool factor in being able to see where the London Tube stations were, but all of a sudden it seems like people are far more interested in “monetizing” the technology instead of looking for applications.

Instead, in my view one of the examples of how iPhone gives you an interface to the world around us are the public transportation guides. With access to your location, you can easily check out when the next bus or tram arrive and what bus or tram you actually need to take to get wherever you’re going. I think that the applications for more specialized uses are more interesting, like snipers using iPhone for calculations and doctors using it for stethoscope. For me, Human-World Interface could be summarised as the ultimate universal remote for the world.

I think we’re finally arriving to the vision of a PDA. What the things we used to call PDAs a decade ago were crucially missing were mobile internet and user contexts (fe. location). One important part is also a universal information exchange protocol, and for most part the Web fills that role on modern phones. Right now it would look like instead of general-purpose web, one-application “Apps” are the way to go. I don’t think this is a sustainable way forward, though. It works as long as you only focus on one device (like the iPhone) and you believe in an Apple monopoly, but if/when in the future we have forward-incompatible iPhones and plethora of smartphones running Nokia’s Maemo or Google’s Android, you might be better off falling back to the common Web.

Google’s opinion is that the Web will eventually win, but you have to keep in mind that their whole business depends on that. In the short-term, there’s still loads of money to be made in Apps, but in the long-term investing in the Web will pay off. It is however quite hard to justify investing for the long-term unless you have boatloads of capital, but Google’s planning to be here for that long. There’s no money to be made in infrastructure or technology per se (as RSS and Atom have shown) but once you have an application that depends on them, it all pays out (but you really need an application that has or adds value, not just a fancy feed reader/parser).

One of the still-in-R&D technologies for smartphones is Near Field Communications, which would enable one to (finally?) use one’s smartphone for paying for public transportation or at point of sales. Unfortunately this stuff has been so long in the pipeline that it might really be a technology in search of a problem. It is however a foray into the world where we would use our smartphone to interact with the world.

A similar idea of replacing one’s wallet with one’s mobile phone has been one that Nokia et al. have at various times tried to push, but like NFC, the main problem is that the advantages are not really significant (yet?) and there are serious drawbacks compared to the things you actually have in your wallet. For example, the credit card you have in your wallet is probably almost universally accepted, unlike mobile payment. Overcoming this rather crucial shortcoming is a chicken-egg-problem, however for mobile phone manufacturers. The companies that should develop this stuff are the credit card companies.

The same thing goes for everything else, like using your phone to open your garage door. The two things that need to happen for a universal remote for thw world are open technologies (in this case an API for your garage door), which in turn requires a business case for the companies to open up their interfaces. Only then is the Internet of Things possible. I believe that for Internet of Things to emerge, there’s little point in just identifying everything around us, but also interacting with them. Other than implants, mobile phones seem to be the best thing we have to do that.

Digital Chocolate’s Trip Hawkins has said that the iPhone is the coolest thing in all time and for him, it’s vastly superior to what Kirk had in Star Trek. I’m not as optimistic about iPhone of today, I’m sure there’s going to be much more cooler things in the future. Of the things that we have right now, I have to agree.