A Reason facebook should be highly valued

In a recent piece on why Google was bad and the trouble they are in for, Gizmodo pointed out that Google was losing its core search centricity.  They cite Chris Anderson (wired) as saying that the problem is all the silo'd data in foursquare, twitter, yelp and all those other apps on our mobile devices.  

They included Facebook in the list of "silo'd" apps, but that's something I disagree with.  In my heaviest used applications they are all linked by Facebook.  Basically everything I do is on the timeline somewhere, or I don't want the usage indexed.  The problem they say Google faces is their credibility and indexing all this data.  

I consider what ever I post on Facebook the equivalent of standing in the middle of the street and doing it for everyone to see.  Postings come from tumblr, foursquare, yelp, spotify and so many other applications.  Facebook is indexing my habits that I spend money on, and as a result I expect their ad targeting if the future to be dead-on.

Now consider Google's market share and value and slide it across the table....to Facebook.

A reason facebook's value might be an overreach.

If you’re looking for another reason why the Facebook valuation is completely overpriced, look no further.  This article does a great job of explaining how Apple plans to change the way we consume the Internet, again.

The stories about Steve Jobs having 4-5 product iterations planned at any time always got product managers (and the rest of the world) excited.  He appeared to be able to see the future, but in my opinion he created Apple’s future not predicted it.  Here we see an analysis of how OS X Mountain Lion begins to glue all our cloud interactions together to devalue the social experience.

Facebook is an application where OS X is an operating system.  Jobs’ described DropBox as a feature, not a platform.  Here again his past thinking of Facebook as an application vs. a platform is taking shape.  With Apple and their billions of dollars aimed squarely at your space I’d think its time to react.

And for all the investors out there seeing so many zeros after their Facebook stock, maybe its time to think again.  Given the might Apple’s ability to shake markets and drive audience to consume HOW they want them to consume makes Facebook a viable threat.  Devalue the application by decentralizing the relationships and moving the pictures, posts and other content into a non-app driven cloud, and Facebook has some serious problems.

Slowly replacing my laptop with an iPad

Over the last few months I've been adopting more and more high end software on my iPad. I started with OmniGraffle and it blew me away. Truly an impressive piece of software with great capabilities for charting processes and doing flow design. Omnigraffle is now indispensable in my regular work life on both my iPad and MacBook.

The last few weeks I've adopted Pages and Keynote on my iPad. Apple software is expected to work better on iPads then most other first generation tablet software, and my expectations were met and surpassed. Pages being able to natively export to PDF and Word is great. Keynote carries the same functionality for PDF and includes PowerPoint. The new Office 2011 PowerPoint is sick, so I don't expect to replace that with Keynote on my MacBook, but on my tablet.... It's Keynote all the way.

Being able to work on presentations while traveling without lugging out the computer is worth it all by itself. But the functionality and interface leave very little more to be desired. Great app.
Now glue it all together with Dropbox connected via DropDav and you're golden. Everything shares, connects, links for easy access and even maintains versioning.

Apple you've made me more entertained each day with your devices and access to content and now my productivity level is off the charts. If you're not a member of the cult of Mac or the living in the Apple ecosphere, maybe its time you booked yourself a trip and took the full suite for a tour. Worth every penny (so far under $100 not counting the iPad).

With a travel schedule like mine, being productive between flights, on board and everywhere else is a must.

$3.95 IKEA wall clock turned into a cool looking coltrane clock.

I had a really ugly clock from IKEA and one of those heavy duty metal razor blade knives.  The last time I was on Main Street in Greenville this art store we like was selling vinyl record clocks for over $30. So I took my knife and cut up the IKEA clock and glued it to the back of the record.

A little bit of work and hot glue and I turned it into a cool Coltrane wall clock. If you like you can even buy it on Etsy. Click here and I'll even give you a discount!

What will the software industry look like in 3, 5, even 10 years from now?

One of the last things I helped write at Avangate before making the career move to arvato was recently published.  I contributed a signifcant part of the language behind Carmen's interview in the SIIA "Vision from the Top" interview series, and its a pretty solid read.  I stand behind everything in here:

The full set of interviews can be found here. 

What will the software industry look like in 3, 5, even 10 years from now? 

Over the past 10+ years we have watched the outsourced, hosted application model evolve from ASP to SaaS and Cloud Based computing.  The key differentiator between the hosted application service provider models of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s and today’s SaaS applications is the coupling of subject matter and technical experts to the product.  Most of us are aware of this evolution and I believe this path will continue.  Along with this continued evolution will be an increased amount of commercialization with focus on leveraging Cloud based services and other SaaS foundations into user consumable products and services.

The Cloud computing models of today, namely elastic processing models and storage provide little opportunity for broad scale consumption.  Over the next 3-5 years it is my prediction that the software solutions that emerge will be based on the commercialization of these models.  Essentially this is the continuation of the trends we have seen in SaaS: the emergence of solution providers that couple a variety of technologies and services into useable products.  In our business, for example, we couple payment processing and gateway services, electronic software distribution, Cloud based hosting and email fulfillment (among other things) with human driven process such as anti-fraud and customer support.  In this manner Avangate has created a commercialization model coupling all of these services and more into a useable product for software and digital product vendors.

What customer demands and business trends will drive changes in software products, how they're developed and the industry that provides them?

Mobile devices and platforms will continue to increase their market penetration and by doing so create significantly more customer touch points.  As these touch points gain greater adoption customers will demand access to services on their terms, whether that is through a smart phone, tablet, set-top device, power /grid control or any one of the many forthcoming smart devices.   Software vendors will expand their product offerings to allow access to their services via many if not all industry touch points.  These access points will result in an interconnecting mesh of services while further growing data stores.  The large variety of access points will also result in customer data being segregated across a number of independent data stores vs. a centralized facility or services.

The software market will respond by creating layers of technology that sit on top of each touch point and allow access to multiple data stores.  An easy model to visualize this scenario is Mint, a very successful SaaS alternative to QuickBooks.  Mint aggregates data from your credit card, mortgage, checking and savings accounts, gas cards, car loans, etc. into one, central application.  You can see how in this model many if not dozens of data stores were required to build the complete overview.  These application layers will continue to be defined allowing customers to interact how and when they need.

Another example to consider:  growth in the online retail sector will require the ability to couple customer information with social network data and trends.  We are starting to see the emergence of these services with operations such as Amazon integrating Facebook stores with recommendations powered by “friends” and network connections vs. artificial intelligence.  Purchase recommendations driven by the social network will carry significantly more weight than those of anonymous shoppers or shopper trends.

Even though I predict the application layers will start to truly unify relevant data, the data-stores themselves will continue to be segregated if not becoming even further segregated as security concerns reinvigorate the markets love for silos.  The requirements to integrate applicable social network data with consumable software services and an ever emerging number of touch points will keep software companies on their toes.  Those companies who are capable of visualizing and understanding these interactions will lead the market.  Product managers will be required to understand how third party systems with no current interactions to their existing product lines will be needed to drive consumption and adoption down the road.  This is how I believe we will see companies commercialize their technologies and how the customer will drive the market.

AT&T Customer Service Restores Image!

After a night of really dumb arguements with AT&T, they ended up really coming through.  While I would have appreciated the first manager I spent time with being able to do the right thing, in the end they tracked me down, fixed the problems and kept me as a happy customer.

Well played AT&T and good job following the social media space.

SCADA Threats

A recent article posted by ComputerWorld here highlights recent threats to the Seimens SCADA systems.  A few researchers were prepared to present a paper on the threats which they decided to pull, for fear of attacks.  I wrote a Squidoo Lense a few years back covering a history of the threats and it appears not much has changed.  The lense, called Hack Attack, is an entertaining, scary and yet still horribly relevant read.