Connecting the Dots

Why you should NOT buy Target's TruTech brand

UPDATE 12/25/07: I've been amazed at the hundreds of pageviews of this post every day between the day after Thanksgiving and today, Christmas day (over 16,000 total so far). I've received emails from people, you can read the comments, and see for yourself that there is a tremendous amount of dissatisfaction with the Trutech products. Please note that I cannot do anything myself but have, in fact, reached out via email to Kimberly Youngstrom (kyoungstrom@kaplowpr.com) who is the person sanctioned as responsible for public relations for the Target Owned Brands. Ms. Youngstrom is with Target's public relations agency in New York, Kaplow PR. I've emailed twice, the last time on November 26th but there has been no response.

UPDATE 9/3/07: This post has been amazing in the HUGE number of people that have read it (especially during this back-to-school season) and, most troubling, how many have commented AND have sent me emails asking for help. Target has used at least two vendors to make electronics for the TruTech brand. I've tried to locate the electronics buyer for Target Stores responsible for this brand, but after four hours of trying I've given up. I'd recommend calling Target Customer Service (1.800.440.0680) and let them know of your displeasure and what you could and should do.

Here's a rant/report on an experience I had with Target Stores that might prove helpful as you think about your interactions with customers, how you support them and what it does for a brand -- and a huge caution if you ever considering buying Target's consumer electronics brand, TruTech.

Before I get started some disclosure is necessary: my wife was once the audio buyer for Target and I was a manufacturer's representative calling on her with Pioneer Electronics (no...I didn't ask her out while she was a buyer but waited until she was promoted out of the area into a non-conflict of interest position...but I digress). So we both know this game well and I can only imagine what Joe SixPack thinks since alot of "Joe's" seem to be having similar experiences.

Last November I purchased a Target brand TV/DVD combo for my first year college daughter (this Target "TruTech" model). It was cheap but more than sufficient for her needs. When plugging the batteries into the remote I remarked on how cheap it was and -- having broken and lost many remotes in my day -- was not terribly concerned since universal remotes are so easy to find and cheap to buy...

...unless you're a major mass merchandiser that buys from multiple vendors that do not offer or publish their remote control codes and have one place to buy a replacement for nearly 17% of the retail price of the unit itself!   

Steve & Bill: A perfect time for *you* to reflect...

Early this morning I watched the video of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at AllThingsD conference. So many people have written about this event -- and many were hoping it would be a cage match between Bill and Steve -- that I'm going to add a perspective and place this event into a different context.

In January of 2005, I reminisced a bit about being in Hawaii in November of 1983 when Steve intro'ed the Macintosh to the company (I was with Apple's manufacturer's representative group in Minnesota at the time).

When I work on technology innovation with senior strategists in organizations through strategy and ideation work, it's important to appreciate the revolutionary and evolutionary aspects of human creation without solely focusing on the past. But having a perspective on what it was like and where we are now can inform where we're headed and help set expectations on how fast the future we invent will be adopted.

Listening to these guys talk about 128kb's of memory in the first Macintosh with an operating system taking ~20kb's of RAM is hilarious to me as I sit in front of a laptop with 3GB's of memory that can run Mac, Windows and Linux OS'es; an 120GB hard drive (floppies at the time held 400kb which is less than half of one jpeg image from my digital camera!); and recipes were the killer app for personal computers while I now can do press layout and video editing while casually looking up almost any piece of data I need instantly with bits flying through the air to my wireless card. Add to that webcams, digital video and still cameras, software for blogging, social connections and even virtual spaces, searchable worldwide information and knowledge sets (e.g., Wikipedia) being delivered and the changes are incredible...and accelerating.

But there is SO MUCH change underway that the less than 30 years worth of changes in personal computing Steve and Bill have experienced will happen in years instead of decades and we're already in a time of change that is thrilling and scary as hell at the same time.

Communication breakthroughs...

With free time this weekend to explore online, I was able to perform a cursory examination of the landscape of breakthrough communications providers in telephony, web conferencing and streaming video (the last one I'll discuss in this post). Certainly not a comprehensive analysis by any means, but it gave me a good sense of where we are and what needs to yet happen.

As you can see from this screenshot from one of my non-public 'test' blogs, I was goofin' around and testing streaming video offerings from Stickam and uStream. The former has been around awhile longer so I like their technology better and it works great, but they're targeting a young, social network crowd and positioning streaming as a way to connect with one another. Cool but not yet useful for business purposes (yeah...I care about the social stuff but we need commerce too!).

uStream is certainly driving toward a more serious technology user -- and people that are interested in delivering value of some sort with shows and connecting with an audience -- so it suits my needs, those of my clients, and just about everyone else I know that is in business, education or an organization of some sort....but can it or any of these shows deliver?

Listening (and once watching a uStream streaming video) Leo Laporte of TechTV and now TwIT fame, he'd talked with the founders of uStream (on Net@Nite with Amber Macarthur) about one of his shows which he had streamed live. He had just over 4,000 viewers and the server blew up. The uStream team is remedying that problem but this brings up my #1 issue: to be serious contenders, these communications technologies must scale.

I've brought up scale over-n-over again on this blog and I know that streaming video is really hard and the bandwidth needed is expensive. What if a hot 'show' is streamed on Stickam or uStream and has even 1% of the disappearing network TV show audience (37.5 million viewers in the US in March for broadcast networks), there is NO way that any of these lower end solutions would be up to the task of streaming to an audience of 375,000 people...let alone millions.

When individuals, companies or organizations start down a path of choosing superior communication technologies, they are placing a bet. I view many solutions -- Skype, Stickam, uStream, and many Web 2.0 solutions -- are bleeding edge and not a safe bet. That said, I'm experiencing many solutions myself and know exactly what I (and many of my clients) want but believe that we're not quite there yet...

...but man, are we close.

VoIP: I had no idea there was so much going on...

Like you, I take incremental changes and small moves in technology and disruption in stride. Then something will happen to make me sit up straight in my chair and say, "Whoa!" as I realize how much is going on in some given space, the pace of change within it and how much disruption is occurring when my attention was elsewhere.

Since I don't specifically follow the telephony space, I sat bolt upright today as I realized that there is A LOT more going on in with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) than I'd ever dreamed.

Yesterday's post about Skype vs. Gizmo and their respective call-out pricing, had two guys weigh in with comments: Kris Tuttle who is a researcher with interesting things to say about this space and a guy named Ken Kennedy who left a comment with this amazing link to VoIP providers around the planet.

Over lunch today I went through a few dozen of these links (skimming only, of course) and thought about what was happening with voice. I was stunned by how many providers are offering robust and interesting voice services. Of course, interoperability between providers is key (and the basis for the open SIP protocol) for a level playing field of services to explode with use.

I'll come back to this post on Skype and the disruptive innovation occurring in telephony and that, "Telephony companies are on life support (and arguably have been for years) but their death may never come even though they may be in a vegetative state for decades. The voice over IP (VoIP) disruptive innovation is going to continue and, in my opinion, accelerate as always-on, ubiquitous wireless internet connections proliferate." The kicker? Most people I know:

a) Won't take the time to play with most of these providers and figure out how to use them

b) Just want to pick up a phone and dial it to connect with someone

c) Won't bet their personal telephony use -- or especially their business use -- on some unknown provider or service that can't give them a service level agreement or ensure a qualitative experience for callers

d) Don't care and get pissed off when they do choose a provider and can't call between services. The mess with instant messaging is a great example as AIM, Yahoo, Microsoft and Jabber users couldn't interoperate and IM each other across services.

Throw in companies embracing the Asterisk open source PBX for businesses (which is SIP-based) and we'll experience growing demands for seamless and quality interoperability. I also see this entire space as one just waiting for someone to herd-the-cats together and offer an infrastructure from which interoperability between services can occur

The good news? All of us will win with all the energy, effort and enthusiasm being pored into internet telephony as services make this space better and better.

Skype = $30 or Gizmo = $624

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is really coming of age. In the last year, I've experienced a marked shift of companies I do business with using the Asterisk open source PBX, many people and companies using the Skype PC-based system, and hardly anyone I know using SIPPhone or GizmoProject.

This post is about Gizmo and Skype specifically and what accelerates adoption and what doesn't.

I love Gizmo. It sports a far superior and more intuitive interface than Skype; recording capability built right in to the software; and an open vs. a proprietary protocol (Skype's is closed).

When I've been in spirited discussions about Skype's superior peer-to-peer architecture over SIP's point-to-point one, I'm interested...to a point. What I care most about is a system that provides significant cost reduction, new features and benefits along with my biggest hot button: double the call quality over landline-to-landline calling (8khz on phone lines vs. 16khz with VoIP approaches taken by Skype and Gizmo).

But I'm really wrestling with why I'd use Gizmo over Skype. I'm on the phone an average of 10 hours per week which is 520 hours a year or 31,200 minutes (I call both local and long distance in the US and in Canada to both mobile and landlines) and:

• I pay Skype $30 and have unlimited calling in the US and Canada for one year
• I'd pay Gizmo $624 for those same minutes at about two cents per minute.

The international rates are cheaper on Skype which hasn't been a big deal for me since the people I talk to internationally are on Skype. To show you how little I'm using Gizmo and how Skype-oriented I've become, I still have over $8 of the Gizmo callout minutes I bought early last year and instead have paid the money for unlimited US and Canada calling ($29.95); purchased a SkypeIn phone number ($30); adapters, Wifi phones and other Skype stuff all because of no unlimited calling on Gizmo.

I *really* want Gizmo and SIP to succeed since it's an open protocol and everyone can play in this sandbox with software and hardware. But just like the early days of paying by the megabyte for access to the Internet, it wasn't until Earthlink had an all-you-can-eat for $19.95 per month that the doors blew off Internet use. I believe that's what it's going to take for Gizmo to get on the radar screen of users who are using Skype (Note: there are 8,692,139 online with Skype now which is nearly 3 million more than this time last year so it's being adopted quickly).

Am I missing something? Should Gizmo immediately offer an unlimited $30 for an all-you-can-eat deal for calling in North America?

Hidden Value in Web 2.0

Yesterday I received an email from Paul Freet, founder and CEO of BigContacts. Since it was a generic "I thought you'd be interested in this since you have written about stuff like this before" email, I was going to instantly delete it. Instead, I wrote him back a hopefully productive email explaining why I thought generic ones like his didn't work and, in fact, usually backfired with bloggers.

That got us into an email dialogue about the challenges in getting noticed and I share his pain with my clients as well as my bride's business. As more and more people are connected via the 'net, the noise has already become deafening and getting noticed is harder than ever.

I'm probably the only person I know that's gone to every Web 2.0 company (see Lists of Web 2.0 Lists here) at least once per quarter for the last five quarters. I've learned how Web 2.0 companies should tell a value proposition story in 15 seconds (the time it takes to absorb it on the home page); who has updated their offering adding more value or starting to charge for it; the offerings that are features...not companies; which ones have failed (they're offline though still in the directories); and how much incredible value is just laying there waiting to be discovered.

Paul's offering is very robust and is something you should go take a peek at right now. There is a fully populated demo so you can try it.

Part of our dialogue included a statement on how bummed I am that there is so much incredible value in Web 2.0-land and almost no one that I talk to -- especially with great needs that could be solved by Paul's solution and dozens of others in many categories -- has any clue they even exist!

The answer isn't Techcrunch since "buyers" don't go there (and especially in light of this post by Mike). I've been noodling over what is needed to match demand (since users don't even know stuff exists) with the solutions providers. If you've seen any nouveau sales or distribution model out there for Web 2.0 companies, I'm really interested.

Inefficient to Efficient: Bringo

Like you probably are, I'm always frustrated when trying to navigate through call trees. I find myself zoning out when I hear, "Please listen carefully to the following options" and after I do make a connection, "Your call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes."

Bringo is a new service (with the unfortunately different NoPhoneTrees.com domain name since they started off apparently as a Dentist connection service) that provides an incredibly useful and efficient service: navigating phone trees so you can get connected with an actual human being.

I tried it with Vonage and was immediately connected to "advanced tech support" though scratched my head since what if I wanted to talk to customer service? Billing? I did, however, have an advanced tech question that's been percolating on the back burner (did any other SIP softphone work with Vonage? No.) so I got that answered.

Next was a car rental company. Within moments I was connected with reservations so was able to ask about my next trip and any deals. Cool.

In both cases, I was pleased at how simple it was to use and that it removed a surprising amount of angst and bother when trying to connect to some company. I know they're in beta, but they need a lot more companies in their database. What I'd also like to see going forward is to have them build-out per company selections for different departments within the company (e.g., tech support, advanced tech support, customer service, billing, supervisors, etc.).

Bringo is a perfect example of what I posted about a week and a half ago about the Internet making the inefficient, efficient.

One more thing: I'd like to see Bringo add recording to their service. When I mentioned above how every company seems to have some variation on the phrase, "Your call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes", I've clearly agreed to a recording or monitoring of my call. Sometimes with critical support, reservation, billing or other calls I record it on my end too with Audio Hijack Pro since I call-out often using Skype and recording it is a two click process (and it's legal in Minnesota).

Under Minnesota Statute 626A.02, Subdivision 2: Exemptions, (c): It is not unlawful under this chapter for a person acting under color of law to intercept a  wire, electronic, or oral communication, where such person is a party to the communication or one of the parties to the communication has given prior consent to such interception. In order to deploy a recording service, Bringo would have to ensure that somehow that statement is made to me, a caller, and that I'm the agreeing party to the call.

If Bringo could offer it in those areas where an agreeing party recording a call is legal (and it may be nationally), they could legally record it and make it available for download only to the account holder who is the agreeing party. What a fantastic audit trail this would make in the event of an arbitration or lawsuit!

A Design Story: 11Mystics

Sit back, relax and let me tell you a short story about design, pent-up demand and being positioned well for the next big evolution of the Web.

You know I've talked before on how design matters...a lot. That said, there seems to be a huge reluctance on the part of tools providers to make a tool high function and high design. They either throw in every possible feature or make a tool so stupid simple that anyone serious would be embarrassed to use them.

But in a time of accelerating change around people generating content, increasingly using the Web for communications and participation, there is significant pent-up demand for easy-to-use, highly functional and in-the-hands-of-mere-mortals vs. propeller-headed designer toolsets and some vendors are shipping new tools that are meeting demand in the marketplace.

Last October we embarked upon an adventure to build Rise of the Participation Culture, initially as a Web-based report. It seemed prudent to use content management or blogging engines like Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress or even Typepad to deliver it, but the realization quickly came to us that we were considering using bazooka's to kill an ant.

I'm revealing for the first time -- and holding myself up for potential ridicule from those who view iWeb, Rapidweaver (RW) or Sandvox as "stupid simple" or "Borsch you should be embarrassed to use it" -- that we used iWeb to deliver the report. It was clearly a 22 caliber pistol to go after that ant and allowed us to quickly deliver the content...and that's what mattered and no one cared if it was created in Dreamweaver, Expression or any other higher level and more complex tool.

As has always been my experience, the stock templates in iWeb are cheesy so I went on the hunt for more professional looking templates (and one that would resemble the look-n-feel of my blog).

I found them at 11Mystics since I was searching for great design that I could map to iWeb and 11Mystics offered very nice templates that would do the job. After buying one and discovering that the PNG images wouldn't render in Internet Explorer 6 (one reason why I wrote When Will Internet Explorer 6 Die?), I queried support and the owner, Suzanne Boden Boben, and I began interacting by email. She provided us with a pre-release version of the template with JPG images instead of PNGs and it was flawless. GREAT customer service.

But it gets more interesting and revealing. I'll tell you why all of this matters to you and how I perceive Suzanne as the poster child for remaking yourself and creating a business where one didn't exist through great design, filling a need and being well versed at conversational marketing.

Death of Distance...

Early this morning I emailed Christian Long at think:lab (he's a thought leader in School 2.0 and design for the future schools and cutting edge education) since I had sort of an "Aha!" and I knew he'd instantly understand the possibilities.

Schools constantly scramble for money. Access to thought leaders is challenging for the big Districts...let alone ones in rural schools. Same thing with respect to kids in other countries and this is acute in developing ones especially.

Connecting up kids with the best and brightest, the thought leaders, the astronauts and Senators, or even people from different disciplines whom educators would like to expose their kids to, spending huge bucks on satellite downlinks, lots of gear and technicians to set it all up simply isn't possible in today's current school funding situation.

But a few hundred dollars is possible and a missed opportunity if not acted upon.

When I first read Frances Cairncross' book Death of Distance back in the late 1990's, her premise that geography and distance would dissolve was a prescient perspective at the time. Not only has it dissolved, but the tools (like Skype and the Internet itself along with all the solutions leaping onto the scene) are accelerating the rate at which distance is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

The experiential impact of having Malcolm Cohan talking over Skype from Australia to Minneapolis (see Sydney to Minneapolis on Skype Video) was a wakeup call to me about the power of Internet-centric communications and how *I* have taken it for granted in some ways...but it caused me to have a knowing that I had to help others understand what's possible right this minute.

Though what I'm about to describe has implications for businesses of all sizes as well as non-profit organizations desiring to have interactive venues with key people, I'm especially keen on what this can mean to schools and specifically K-12 education.  Educators could begin to tap into the knowledge and brain trust that exists globally without budgeting for big infrastructure or the expense of flying someone to their location. They could even connect with other educators -- perhaps a professor steeped in knowledge of a topic *or* even another classroom on the other side of the world -- for laughingly low costs.

Scaling Web 2.0: The Dirty Little Secret Exposed?

Was very pleased to see Tim O'Reilly bringing forth the issue of Web 2.0 scaling and Ray Ozzie's perspective. This is such a vitally important issue and it needs analysis, facts and discussion and big time thought leading exposure.

I first wrote about the "dirty little secret" of Web 2.0 back in December of 2005. That secret is that infrastructure, bandwidth and minimizing latency is a huge issue for startups and is one little discussed.  It's one I know first hand from a conferencing startup I worked with last year -- and informing developers is an imperative since this dirty little secret will impact rich, internet applications; mashups; widgets; and other composite applications delivered going forward.

This problem becomes more acute as we all pull data from geographically disbursed hosted online services. I can't tell you how many times I've waited...and waited...and waited....for some data to appear in a widget, an ad served from DoubleClick, or a startpage pulling simple RSS text data from dozens of different sources. Imagine when several, dozens or numerous interdependent sources (ones that pull data from other services to deliver a composite web service that is, in turn, consumed by yet another new application!). It's a recipe for disaster unless managed at a world-class level.

Now that more of us are playing with video, Flash and, especially, streaming video (e.g., uStream and like what I did at a low level yesterday with Skype video), the challenges in betting a business, a workshop series, a product category or composite applications means that we all better get more informed about this issue and damn fast.

I've said before that one key to the dotcom crash was HUGE amounts of content and functionality being shoved into the top of the funnel while those of us consuming it were drinking from the tiny end of the funnel through 56kbps straws.

I fear that unless this dirty little secret is handled and done so by disseminating understanding amongst ALL creators, developers, business strategists and users of Web/Enterprise 2.0 products and services, users expectations are going to be dashed and it will create material barriers to adoption and use. Maybe not another crash, but the barriers and obstacles that will come are preventable with enhanced understanding and knowledge dissemination.

Sydney to Minneapolis on Skype Video

Last evening I helped stage (with Entrevis and Heartland Circle) an event and three profound things happened:

1) Malcolm Cohan was introduced to several dozen people in Minneapolis before coming here in person in a couple of weeks. Malcolm is being brought to the US by George Johnson of Entrevis. You'll be hearing a lot about Malcolm and his Vision's for Humanity. The entire premise of telling vision stories is profound in-and-of-itself, but this guy is so incredibly delightful and the vision stories so powerful and fun to watch that people are creating them like crazy and I'm surprised they are so compelling.

2) We had Malcolm speaking to an audience over Skype video and you can seem him projected in front of the group in the top photo. This isn't a big deal to do, you might think. It turned out to be a bit of a challenge to hook up to the in-house mixing board (I even brought my own board!) while ensuring the audio from Malcolm came through the speakers so the audience could hear him *and* so that the microphone was fed back into my laptop so Malcolm could interact with the hosts and audience.

After getting everything set up, tested and underway, Murphy's Law appeared and suddenly the DSL connection dropped completely a few minutes into it! After determining with the excellent staff at Horst Rechelbacher's Intelligent Nutrients that it was dead, I pulled a rabbit-out-of-a-hat and connected through my Treo 700p and my Verizon EVDO connection and it worked! It still dropped the Skype video call several times, but it got us through until the DSL came back up in the last ten minutes.

Being a Thought Leader in a Time of Collective Intelligence

I've been thinking about what it means to be a thought leader in a time where the tools to deliver thoughts globally are easier to use and more available than at any time in human history.

Blogs, podcasts, videos, voice over Internet solutions, free or cheap software for Web sites, forums and commerce, social networks are but a few of the tools available to anyone with a penchant for getting their opinions out into the world. Couple these Internet-centric methods with the more affordable and easy-to-use tools like camcorders, smartphones, audio creation software and hardware -- and ever increasing bandwidth -- and you have a perfect storm of communication methods that is perfect for thought leaders to deliver big thoughts and facilitate the conversation.

What's missing? Aggregators of thought leaders coupled with community networks. Corante is one organization that has done a fine job of pulling together thought leaders into one core group around subject categories. Another fine one is ManyWorlds. These and others do not, however, facilitate the conversation in my opinion. They're set as experts or thought leaders somehow above us who read them.

But here's my problem: I don't believe that experts exist. For the same reason unconferences (read Dave Winer's take on them) have exploded on to the scene and are beginning to disrupt the conference-as-a-huge-revenue-generator,. Most conferences always purport to have 'experts' up pontificating about some subject to a passive audience...but we're no longer passive and the best ideas come from conversation. By design, unconferences are all about participants and conversation...not so-called experts delivering yet another Powerpoint slide deck and joking about "I only have 400 slides" with a courtesy laugh from the audience.

Oliver Schwabe has one of the best posts about this topic I've read in some time entitled, The guru is dead. Long live the network:

Skype at WAL*MART

Was surprised to not see a lot of buzz on Techmeme this morning about the press release regarding Wal-Mart to display Skype phone gear.

This is huge for Skype and really puts them front-n-center in VoIP. The plan is to rollout accessories and calling cards for Skype to ~1,800 of their 3,300 US stores.

I've talked to a few people this morning about this after reading a small article in The Wall Street Journal. Reactions ranged from an elitist "harumph...who shops for technology at Walmart?" to "This really puts Skype telephony on the map."

I agree with the latter statement. I've evangelized Skype to numerous groups and individuals with great success and it has materially changed their ability to easily and affordably talk with people (and loved ones as I've helped some seniors get started with Skype so they could see their grandchildren growing up in other countries for example).

My hope is that this also shifts the mindset of telephony products vendors who've pretty much abdicated the delivery of Skype phones to either Asian or geeky product providers. Simplicity is what will continue to accelerate VoIP and it's still a little too "bit-twiddling" for Joe SixPack.

Apple at Best Buy

Stopped at the Eden Prairie, MN Best Buy store yesterday and was pleased to see several Macintoshes mixed in with the PCs. I've known for some time that there was a rollout occurring, but the reality of seeing it was disappointing.

The MacBooks were already dirty with body oil. Like a car dealer that has people whose job it is to clean the cars and keep fingerprints off of them, why doesn't Best Buy do the same thing with ALL their computers? The sales staff was surprisingly clueless about the Macs (an off day perhaps?) and had only heard vague rumblings that the Macs could run both Mac OS X, Windows and Linux using Parallels or Boot Camp and thought my description of multi-OS use was pretty cool (hmmm....shouldn't that be a major selling feature?).

The visual merchandising of Macintoshes wasn't even close to the "Apple mini store" as shown and discussed in this post. The Macs were scattered all over.

This new store in Eden Prairie is apparently a showcase store just down the road from Best Buy's headquarters and they use it for VIP tours and the like. It's a fine location, well merchandised, but I find that -- like most Best Buy stores I go in to -- I know more than the floor people about most of the products they carry.

While cluelessness about Macs may be understandable since this rollout is so new (though preparing in advance would've been prudent), it shouldn't extend to products they've carried for some time. Also, Best Buy needs a "Geek Stand" like Apple's "Genius Bar" with a twist...

Internet Innovation and Optimizing the Status Quo

Minnesota is a great place to live and raise kids. Yes, the winters are brutal but the benefits outweigh the troubles. So much so that most of my 600+ high school graduating class members still live here after several decades.

There are A LOT of smart people in the Land of 10,000 Lakes -- both home grown and those transplanted here. Successful businesses abound like Target, Best Buy, Medtronic, General Mills, 3M, UnitedHealth Group and many, many more. World class businesses and leadership in their respective industries. But as the world of business gets increasingly mapped on to the Internet, it's highly unlikely that these organizations will lead us to the promised land of Internet innovation. They'll just wait and see who is successful and leverage capital to buy-in strategically. Sadly this is often a too-little-too-late move.

Frequently I complain about my conversations with leaders in Minnesota and how I first need to educate them on Web 2.0 and Internet-as-a-platform before we can have a productive conversation about the paradigm shifts and disruption occurring. The next challenge is how to work on driving forward strategically and embracing the changes. "Why aren't you already innovating on the rapidly accelerating Internet platform?", I'll ask. The answers range from "Not sure what to do" to "it's not a big deal for my business yet". The former we can work on...the latter closes the door.

Closing the door isn't an option in a time of accelerating change. Every client I have and every industry I analyze is being disrupted in some fashion by the Internet. Fortunately there are thought leaders guiding us.

Internet is making the Inefficient Efficient

If you're trying to figure out how your business or career is being disrupted by this Internet thingy, don't look to the flipper-flappers and dweebezarbs....look at processes and value chains.

Chris Pirillo has an interesting post today about "How to Start Business" but instead of it focusing on how to start *a* business, his words encompass more than just startups trying to make the inefficient efficient and disrupt the status quo. I view his post as one that also concerns those trying to reinvent, disrupt or recreate their own businesses:

The Internet is a pretty amazing tool for business—so long as you know how to use it. It is essential to understand that the Internet doesn’t work like more traditional forms of media. The Internet has changed the way that businesses and consumers interact. In order to help you understand this new paradigm here are a few of the key concepts essential to success on the Internet - especially in the blogosphere.

I've worked with clients since January of 2006 in a variety of business types in traditional media, telephony, publishing, marketing, public relations and technology. Every single one of them either is being disrupted by new, more efficient (and Internet-centric) offerings or are trying to figure out how they fit in a world where every business is either online or trying to figure out how to map to it.

I just had coffee with a guy from the radio business who has one foot in the traditional and one foot in the new media worlds. He's a thought leader pushing against the membrane of the future trying to see what's ahead and we brainstormed several ideas that are so laughingly obvious as a need that bridges these two worlds that I'm stunned they haven't happened yet (and I've been poking around for a bit and there aren't any that I can find).

Navigation System or a Map?

Saturday in northern Minnesota saw Eric, Kevin and I heading to a state park for our photographic adventure while on Eric's Photofest. I drove my wife's Acura RDX to Eric's lake home and we used the navigation system to find our way to the park and back. Man! It was at least five times harder to use the nav system than it would've been if we'd had along a paper map.

Oh yeah...we didn't just rely on the RDX nav system (which was included in the nearly $7k step up technology package we bought on this SUV) but we had Eric's handheld GPS, three Palm smartphones (mine with Google Maps on it) and we fooled with all of them at some point on our return.

The problem was the navigation system wanted to return us via highways adding a dozen miles to the trip. We changed that to minimize highways to no avail. We took county roads that we knew went closer to Eric's place and finally Kevin discovered (since he has an Acura TL with navigation) that if we selected "unverified" roads it would enable us to just start to drive one of these roads and then the system would reconfigure the trip back to Eric's using the most direct route.

It's not like these roads were gravel logging roads. These were paved, highway-like county roads that should be on any navigation system. The other amazing thing was watching my very techno-savvy buddy Eric being befuddled by the illogical menu structure and nomenclature to look something up. For example, discovering the Savanna State Park should have been in some sort of easily accessible hierarchy but instead brought up Savannah, Georgia and other Savanna's. Shouldn't this system be smart enough to know that lookups should be narrowed to areas one is driving in?

What was fascinating about this occurrence was how many people I know who have begun to rely completely on the navigation systems in their cars. My daughter will at some point since she's navigationally challenged and my bride loves nav systems for much the same reason. If three guys like Eric, Kevin and myself are challenged to use thousands of dollars worth of systems like we had at our fingertips and find them inefficient and cumbersome to configure appropriately, what chance do others have?

The atlas you see to the right is one that I've used extensively over the years as I've poked around my state. It has every rural road and even logging roads in it and thus it's incredibly simple to look up and plot a route at a glance. Even a Minnesota roadmap would've been more useful than our respective navigation electronics.

One more reason to understand the limitations of technology and to be pragmatic about their use.

Eric's Photofest

Heading up to my buddy Eric's lake home this weekend for Photofest. He, his friend and colleague Kevin and I have done this before and it's been great.

The problem with having great gear and a high degree of interest in photography means that your family and friends are *always* agitated as you linger trying to set up a shot on vacation. "Come ON Dad" the kids shout and my bride acts graciously as she patiently waits for me.

The problem is this: photography is all about seeing and you can't see unless you're completely present in the moment. If there are feelings of urgency, guilt and other emotions tugging at you, the shot is hurried, the composition isn't its best and thus the experience isn't one I want to repeat.

The cool thing about this weekend's adventure being photography is that our sole purpose is to simply be and take whatever time is necessary to shoot. After stumbling across the now deceased former Senator Barry Goldwater's photo site, my absolute knowing about being in Arizona -- by myself with no distractions or people tugging at me -- is something I will do and soon. My plan is to go the state I'm beginning to love deeply and drive around for a week or so doing nothing but experiencing that place and seeing it and its people....really seeing it and attempting to capture it photographically.

There are lessons here for anything we do. Not just lessons on presence, but lessons on how to see. If you concentrate you'll see, but if you open yourself completely to the place, the moment, the problem, the people, and feel yourself stepping back to observe, it's stunning what unfolds.

One example: on our last Photofest we headed into a state forest in northern Minnesota. Eric and Kevin headed off on a lakeside trail to shoot and I said, "I'll think I'll stay right here and see what unfolds." The clearing I was in had been logged and new growth made it look decidedly non-photogenic! They looked at me quizzically but understood and left me alone.

I began to see things in the clearing as I slowly opened myself to what was there: a fungal growth on a tree that looked like an old man's face; a rusty coffee can with bullet holes in it that was beautiful in the late day sun; strange plants that looked amazing when shot in macro; a woodpecker's hole in a tree that -- with good depth of field -- looked like a cave in the side of that tree. This was the first time I'd really opened up and I'm pleased with at least a dozen of the 100 or so photos I took that day. That experience taught me a bit about what it takes to really see the beauty in everything and in an area I would've overlooked in the past as I chased the perfect setting...which doesn't exist anyway.

Google's Wireless Agenda

Often I write about Google Goodness, and then I go into the closet, slip on my tinfoil hat and my lead underwear (you should know that both protect against the surveillance gamma rays emanating from a laptop), and write about the possible negative implications about what they're doing. If you can't look at both up-n-downsides in a pragmatic and open way, then there's no guidance as change accelerates and no assurance Google won't inadvertently slip into doing evil.

According to this BusinessWeek article, Google is fighting-the-good-fight against wireless net neutrality to which I need to call bullsh*t to both Google's counsel and BW itself:

"Google's agenda is clear. As a provider of a host of Internet services, including search, e-mail, and online video through YouTube (NWS), Google wants to ensure its content can flow unimpeded and untaxed over the world's broadband networks. One way to do that is by making sure there's plenty of competition in the market for high-speed Internet access—in particular, from providers other than behemoths like AT&T (T) and Comcast (CMCSA). "Google's key interest here is in seeing fourth and fifth [broadband access] pipes to the home to compete with cable and telecom companies," says Whitt." (Richard Whitt is the former head of the regulatory department for MCI and is acting as Google's Washington telecom and media counsel).

To me, their agenda is clear and it's only marginally about the pipes or defending against the anti-net neutrality trolls. It's all about selling ads.

Let's follow the money. According to Google's own annual report, "We derive most of our revenues from fees we receive from our advertisers through our AdWords and AdSense programs." We knew that since many of us marvel at the amazingly-accelerating-revenues of the Google advertising machine. But if those ad dollars are tied only to our seeking behavior while performing a search -- instead of when we're doing email, reading a blog or site, collaborating on a document, looking up something on a map on our PC or handheld, roaming around with our smartphone or sitting in a cafe with Wifi or on a park bench with municipal wireless, etc. -- then they're inherently limited in top-line revenue to only search-centric, behaviorial advertising.

Google wants unfettered distribution via wireless networks and that's one key part to the "Google Ads Everywhere" strategy too. But if *I* were in strategy sessions at Google, I'd be more interested in being able to deliver targeted ads to a specific person and their precise needs at every single touch point possible.

That's the agenda kids.

Brain Hacks: An update on Learning Breakthrough

It's been a hair over two months since my 12 year old son and I began the brain hacking with the Learning Breakthrough system and I'd promised you an update.

Both my son and I experienced a giddy, major initial boost when we began. If you've ever been sedentary for a time, gone out for an exercise session and come back tired but alert, refreshed and eager to continue, you'll have a sense of what we experienced in the beginning. But just like exercise, it soon becomes something you either relish and look forward to...or start to dread doing.

For weeks Alex was eager. I was so eager and committed that I started packing the balance board and bean bags to take on my trips (four so far) and I'm performing the exercises in hotel bathrooms (tile floor is necessary). I even ripped the DVD to have it on my laptop to ensure I'm doing all the activities. We're both in a phase now where the twice daily sessions are a motivation challenge, but I'm hyper-committed to go the distance (12-15 months) and will do it right alongside Alex since we're both experiencing increasing benefits and this is likely to be life-changing for my little guy.

So what are those increasing benefits?

Silverlight and Apollo: The Creation Tools Will Matter

Now that Microsoft's Mix '07 is put-to-bed and all the requisite excitement has devolved into a mulling it over stage, I'd like to add one thing to the conversation. The container for Apollo and Silverlight isn't what matters. The tools to *create* what goes in those containers is what matters.

When I wrote Microsoft Surprise: Controlling the Process days ago, I was already fully aware that the tools Microsoft had developed (Expression) could be the defining factor on who would win the container war. Though Adobe would argue this point with Flex -- and I'm not aware of what they probably have up their sleeve -- I'm not seeing the high level tools that the people working on the brushstrokes need (the graphic designers, user interface people, etc.). Flex is a tool for those creating/programming with keystrokes and is not a tool for someone who is skilled at look-n-feel, color and a users experience.

Adobe releasing Apollo and Microsoft, Silverlight is just the first skirmish...there haven't been any battles yet and the war is far from over. Why will higher level tools matter?

When I remember back to the early days of the desktop publishing revolution, I became a student of printing history and enamored with what Johannes Gutenberg had done to explode literacy around the world with his tool to create printed works. Without movable type and the press, books would still be created by hand.

Pagemaker and then Quark gave designers the tools to create printed works and pass off digital files to a prepress house and ultimately to the press. The analogue to today's Internet world is that the page layout designers are to the Web creation folks as programmers are to prepress and press operators (though my developer buddies would cough up a hairball to hear me talk about them like they're unionized keyboard bangers and ink pushers, but you catch my drift).

These higher level tools is why my wife's business of 21 years exists. Without the major cost reductions available to common folks like us, we never would've started the publishing business.

Tools are also why I think Brightcove has an excellent chance of being the company to break out in the create-your-own-video channel space. They've got tools for producers and programmers (TV programmers, that is) to perform ad insertion, replays and other workflow that make running ones own "channel" possible.

I'm less interested in the container runtime that all this stuff collapses in to and more interested in who is nailing the workflow and higher level tools to create and deliver rich, Internet applications. Microsoft appears to have a competitive differentiator with Expression and they really understand the people that do keystroking...

...but Adobe totally and completely understands the design community and it's in their DNA. I'm betting Adobe only released a developer-centric version of Apollo since they're not ready to release their higher level tools. This is gonna be fun to watch.