Dimen Designs

Carr's Big Switch Exemplified by ISPs Going Metered Usage

  more bandwidth && more sandwich 
  Originally uploaded by EisFrei.

Given NYT's article on some of the major ISPs moving to a metered usage fee model, this matches Nick Carr's premise in his newest book, The Big Switch (at bar/lounge right now reading it), that the IT & bandwidth model is going the way of electricity. What Carr points out is that electricity has a positive feedback loop, the more you made it available, the more of people used-- this wasn't the thinking of many analysts & ISPs back in the Dot Com Bubble who didn't think the fiber being laid everywhere would ever be used (e.g. Level 3 who almost went under with the Dot Com Crash but seems to be sitting pretty).

What's spurring the ISPs current push for metered usage?

It's to make more money but what's driving the decision, is it because:

1. Demand is truly outstripping supply or
2. Is it to combat the power users who unbalance the price equilibrium that used to exist between average users using slightly less bandwidth and the minority power users who used slightly more bandwidth?

If we move past that point, the more important question is will we as consumers except the metered usage idea?

Of course the bloggers and techies will protest but will the average user notice or care? They won't care unless they start seeing exceptional high bills-- and that will happen, per Carr's premise that if you give them bandwidth (and Web2.0 is guzzling up more and more) they will want more bandwidth, then average consumers will eventually complain unless the usage fees are scaled correctly as bandwidth use for average users increases.

And this last point is exactly why Net Neutrality is so important-- bandwidth shouldn't be a scarce resource (this doesn't  preclude software & web engineers from designing w/ scarcity or constraints in mind-- see 37 Signals) that ISPs and current internet heavyweights wield to curtail the next generation of web entrepreneurs, companies, and ideas.

Also, research shows that even the idea of costs, either in the form of carrots or sticks, has a pyschological impact on people and changes people's behaivors quite easily.

Innovative Customer Service Organizations - Zappos Mini-Case Study

I used to work exclusively researching the customer service function of Fortune 500 companies but since moving to London, I'm moved into a new role more involved with product management.

For that reason, I do excited (as only a researcher can) when you read positive coverage in the mainstream news about customer service successes. We have experienced and read about the horror stories about customer service (long wait times, never speaking to an actual person, having to call back multiple times to resolve issues, etc.) so those rare stories about satisfied, happy customers that do reach the media really stick in my mind. The reason we don't hear more about happy customer service stories is because most often customer service does it's job and customers don't think twice about it; conversely, one bad experience with customer service and that's what you remember and tell your friends

Beyond the rarity of those positive customer service experiences in the media, however, is the even more unusual coverage of innovative practices or stores from the customer service world. When you read those stories in the press, you really get excited.

  logo via Google.

So with preface, I wanted to make sure Zappo's recent coverage was recognized. Zappos is an online shoe company that has made a name for itself with it's quirky, non-traditional approaches to customer service. And what's garnered them their most recent news coverage is their policy of paying newly hired staff to quit, if the employee doesn't feel that they're a good fit with the company.  As a researcher  of the customer service function for Fortune 500 companies, I'm not suggesting that what Zappos is doing is best practice or even the right policy for *most* companies.

But the idea, or insight underlying Zappo's policy is valuable and transferrable across industries and different sized companies: it's not company culture that Zappos is directly going after with this policy (although it's a nice side benefit), what this policy underscores is that retaining staff is more cost-efficient than the hiring and onboarding training of new staff.

In fact, in the medium and long run (6months and up to 3+ years), customer service will see a much larger return on investment (staff productivity in this case) from the retention of the *right* staff versus the hiring and re-hiring of staff who don't stay with the job for long enough-- that may seem obvious but less known to most people is that retaining those *right* people, even if they're not the all-stars, is more cost efficient than trying to hire the very best of the best who don't stay in the customer service position for as long (they're promoted or poached by competitors).

So for all of those reasons, watch the Harvard Business Review video below on paying non-*right* new hires to quit and better understand this mini-case from Zappos. Think about how you can apply the idea of retaining your solid performers versus hiring the all-stars in your particular business or organization.

The Commoditization of the Social Graph

  No Facebook - Blessington St, St Kilda 
  Originally uploaded by avlxyz.

The data portability dust up, thanks to Google's announcement of Google Connect, and covered by the Gillmor Gang and Techmeme, is continuing the conversation that Umair at BubbleGeneration started awhile ago. He deserves the credit for being one of the first to posit the notion that Facebook was evil and wrapped within that theme is the idea that their model or platform would start to crumble:

Which, in turn, begs the question: will it be plastic, or specific?

That is, will it be dependent on graph/platform/profile/etc data from a single network, or from many networks?

If you understand what network scale economies really are, it's almost inevitably the latter.

So who's in a dominant position - Google, or Facebook?

I think we, not the mainstream press but the early adopters of the web/techie world, are starting to see the same cracks in Facebook's amour that Umair has been thinking and blogging about for some time.

Fred posted on this topic today, in fact citing a lunch conversation he had with Umair a few months ago, and here's the synthesis of the future of the social graph:

What you cannot commoditize is the desire to create a social graph on a web service and the desire to maintain a social graph on a web service and the flow of data into and around that social graph.

The internet, if it has any one permanent characteristic in the way that is has evolved so far, is a fundamentally disruptive force on every product, service, business, or industry that tries to harness its power.

What does this mean for technologists and entrepreneurs?

Think hard about how to use the internet because we are in its infancy and there are millions of opportunities out there. But as well, be cognizant of how quickly your idea can be copied and cannibalized by those same internet forces that first gave you inspiration.

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Now playing: Bloc Party - Tulips 

Long on Twitter: It's Their Unique Space on the Internet

  Twitter 6x6 
  Originally uploaded by Steve Woolf.

From my Exeter trip on Wed., where I found wifi at the train station that let me access a few sites for free, the BBC had a succinct article on the unique space that Twitter fills: http://tinyurl.com/58p9be

I've called it microblogging or short status messages to friends and family unfamiliar with Twitter but the weak description doesn't do it justice.

I found myself using Twitter as a starting point for my news, in addition to my iGoogle homepage. In fact, I noticed a fundamental shift in my reading habits as Twitter has increased it share in my reading and online activity use. When I have a second of free wifi on my smartphone (see my last post about how I'm using my mobile as a wifi device here in the UK) and only a site or two to scan, I'm now reading Twitter because I get a good mix of news/updates from those I follow and it's always current (as someone on Techmeme pointed out, Twitter beat the USGS in announcing the devastating China earthquake).

''But as I sit here writing this I feel connected to a community of people, feel that we share a space that none of the social network sites can conjure up, a space that is both here and not here, somewhere between offline and online.''

The following & followers feature on Twitter is easy to describe but the benefit or value of this feature is quite difficult to express to non-Twitter users. There is connection to these people in your Twitter community that I don't have from other social or communication platforms because my Twitter community isn't composed of people who are friends in the traditional sense of the word, which is how I've been using Facebook (meaning I don't accept just casual  acquaintances or one-time meets offline as a Robert Scoble or Jason Calacanis does).

So it means that Twitter, and I'm sure this was an accidental innovation-- the way that most disruptive technologies or innovations occur-- is a unique platform/service in my online presences. Fred and Brad at Union Square Ventures were smart to invest because they understood this unique space that Twitter fills, even if 'monetization' isn't yet clearly defined. Since you get addicted to Twitter for both personal and professional reasons around staying connected to your friends and community (whether social, tech, or business), I'm not worried about monetization right now and am long on Twitter.

A Smartphone Without the Phone

       My old but
  dependable XV6700

Having moved to London, I've been in the quandary of what to do for a mobile device. My old smartphone, an XV6700 from Verizon, was a birthday present from three years ago. While awkward at the beginning, I did become quite attached to it (I thought maybe I could have the phone chipped over here and keep using it).

Or I thought I was addicted to the smarthphone.

What I've realized after having been without the phone connection, however, is that I'm addicted to the web, not to the phone connection or even the device.

In fact, I could almost care less about the phone. So I did use it for voice calls-- quite often in fact and with a full QWERTY keyboard, texting was a breeze-- but I've never used my personal mobile that much during the day for phone calls because of office line.

So until I picked up a new, cheap, pay-as-you go phone via Virgin, I was really only missing the mobile after work. And I will admit, looking for a flat in London without a mobile is almost a suicide mission; even with Google Maps, you still get lost.

  My new MotoFone F3 via Virgin

What's surprised me is that the smartphone is almost as valuable as before, even without the phone service, because it has a wi-fi connection.

All of a sudden, I'm no longer dependent on Verizon for getting on the web, checking Gmail, sending Twitter posts, etc., I'm now dependent on free, open wi-fi hotspots.

But the fact that I can get by with almost 75% -85% of the my phone tasks without having the  smartphone on a phone network should tell you a lot; it's all about the web now.

Granted, I'm an early adopter so I everyone may not yet be at this stage but this case exemplifies where the world is going within the mobile market. Yes, we still want to talk and text each other, but damn it, just get me on the web somehow (and wi-fi hotspots, at least in a big city, are easy to come by) and I can get by just fine, thank you very much Mr. Dinosaur Teleco.

The telecoms aren't disappearing but their market is all about 1s and 0s now and that's a hard notion for them to grasp. And once the voice connections become better via VoIP and Skype on the smartphones, then the assumption that we still need a dedicated voice connection for our phones may start to crumble.

Could you get by with almost 75-85% of your must-have tasks without being connected to the phone network and only using the smartphone's wi-fi connection?

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Now playing: Death Cab For Cutie - I Will Possess Your Heart

MicroHoo Deal Falls Through and That's the Right Outcome

  Microsoft is taking over Yahoo! 
  Originally uploaded by Gnal.

[May 7th Update: Meant to post this late Sunday night before the amrkets clsoed but that didn't happen. SO a little dated now but I was right about the stock price hitting $24 a share.]

Read late last night that the Microsoft-Yahoo deal has collapsed, primarily due to price differences (Microsoft was willing to pay $33 a share, Yahoo wanted $37) but there are lots of reasons that this fell through. Marc Andreessen's extremely insightful pre-collapse analysis explores all of the why-not reasons, which he wrote before the collapse was announced.

I didn't want this deal to go through and I'd suggested to friends when I went to the Utah Ski Trip back in late February. that this wasn't a good acquisition.

Two dinosaur tech companies without clear internet strategies means two poor players merging to become a super poor-player.

Here are some good posts on why the deal wouldn't or shouldn't happen:

• Mike Arrington interviews Citi analyst Mike Mahaney
• Bijan- "big market share doesn't equal innovation or success"
• Gillmor Gang- emergency May 3rd addition on MicroHoo deal collapse

I'll also be interested to see if Umair weighs in on this merger-collapse discussion.

Quickly, who are the winners and losers?

• Winners- Google (in the same way that it "won" the FCC's wirless spectrum auction) and the us (e.g. internet users)
• Losers- Microsoft, and less so, Yahoo

So looking ahead, Fred Wilson and others are taking guesses on where Yahoo's stock price will go on Monday. Take the poll below to participate:

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

Harvard Debating Open Publishing: Yet Newspapers Still Don't Get It

Everyone knows the newspaper industry is in trouble: circulation numbers are down and there a lots of staff layoffs (most recently at the NYT). I talked about it soon after Sam Zell bought the Chicago Tribune and blamed Google for killing the newspaper industry.

While the mainstream media/publishing still don't get it (free your content, syndicate it everywhere and then make money from the ad revenues and from the publicity/consulting/speaking engagements that come from having the best (and most well-known) talent), the ivory towers of academia are starting to get it.

NYT reported earlier in the week that Harvard is proposing that its professors publish their scholarship free on the web. This is a big step because we all know the entrenched motto for professors of "publish or die," so the fact that a university, Harvard no less, is debating this type of monumental shift towards free and open is amazing.

  Free Birma 
  Originally uploaded by (Erik).

What's truly important here is not the money that Harvard professors might lose from the royalties they make from publishing their article in those fancy (read: expensive) academic journals. And it's not about the fact that we witnessing the potential demise of those academic journals (we've heard that defense from the RIAA and MPAA, I note this in my list of takeaways below) because of the web yet again destroying a traditional, old media business model.

What's important here?

The formal recognition that what makes professors and their scholarship truly valuable (in the economic sense) is their knowledge and the recognition of that expertise by the greater world at large.

When publishing and writing on the web is practically free, then your reputation as an expert in a given field becomes the scarce good, not the physical good that used to be a scarce good (because of the high price of academic journals; publishers could limit supply through the need for peer-based reviewing, the costs of the reviewing processes, and the costs of producing hard copies of the journals, all of which artificially drove up prices).

None of this is ground-breaking if you've been paying attention to the market forces at work on the internet but the newspaper and publishing industries don't seem to get it.

Other key points (some which I already touched upon):

1. Free is even hitting the ivory towers of academia, a place typically slow to change-- that's a sign of the tide changing


2. This would be an opt-out system; as Lessig has advocated for copyright renewals, it makes sense that the content goes free unless you make a specific note to the contrary


3. Destroying a business model is no defense for maintaining a closed, proprietary systems


4. The opponents of open publishing are using the same arguments as RIAA and MPAA-- that should scare you


5. As John Perry Barlow has argued, The Grateful Dead didn't make money off albums, they made money by performing-- the same thing for professors. Aside-- I had the lucky chance to join a classroom conversation with Mr. Barlow my senior year at Colorado College and wish I had kept in touch with him.

Now playing: Doves - Walk In Fire

Why Can't I Easily Widgitize My Reading List?

  SynCh Adaptors 
  Originally uploaded by Ross Burton.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, which is why I haven’t posted as much lately. No excuses so why not merge the two and write about my reading list.

The problems is that I can’t easily use my Amazon wishlist on this blog to show you what I've been reading.

I can send people that link above and they can see my wishlist but I want a widget that displays my wishlist on my blog without having to navigate to Amazon. More than anything, I want a visual representation of those books, which is a lot faster and easier for people to grasp instead of a simple text list.

While I have a few of recent books in the left-side bar of this blog, I have to manually update that via Amazon and my Typepad typelists. It means going into the code and updating, which is a pain. But on Facebook, Shelfari takes care of this for me. I simply add the books I’ve read and then have an easy widget displaying my books. Amazon, why can’t you do that?

Amazon does have widgets but it’s not a simple click/export from my wishlist page, I have to go to my Associates profile, log in again, and choose the widget there. Shelfari wins this battle for simplicity and ease of use but there’s still one stumbling block: Shelfari on Facebook is closed.

I can’t export that Shelfari widget to my blog, it’s locked into the Facebook world. So I still do have a solution to a simple question, how can I use a widegt to display my books on my blog?

The solution?

Spending 10 minutes copy/pasting and ALT+TABing between browser tabs to synch my Amazon Wishlist and my newly created Shelfari account. Note, that’s my new Shelfari account via their website, not my Shelfari account/page via Facebook. Can I sync my Facebook Shelfari account with my non-Facebook Shelfari account? I don’t know but it’s not obvious (and it should be- that's the problem).

Here’s the result of that work, a widget that visually displays my recent and plan to read books:

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog

In conclusion, here are my takeaways and remaining questions:

• Amazon- have a one-click feature for widigitizing your wishlist or reading list. You patented the one-click purchase feature (which is IMHO completely ridiculous), why can’t I make widgets with one click?


• Shelfari- can I synch my Facebook widget list with my non-Facebook widget list?


• Facebook apps are still closed to the outside world, creating redundancies for anyone trying to synch their multiple online presences or social networks.


• There’s money to be made in reducing redundancies and improving synchronization between online profiles and social networks. Hopefully OpenSocial or maybe even OpenID are addressing this exact problem. Jason and Mahalo are even addressing this challenge/opportunity by allowing people to view all of their social networks from one page.

Valentine's Day, Management Consultant Style

My colleague emailed me a great Valentine's Day consulting presentation. I don't think you need to be a management consultant or even a dork to appreciate this but it helps. Not sure who you are Andy Meyer but thanks for the laugh.

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Now playing: Stars - Your Ex-Lover Is Dead (Live)

The Twitter Business Model Meme (why I love Twitter)

  Source: Twitter

Yesterday Techmeme covered the Twitter Business Model meme and being an avid AVC blog reader, I immediately knew we (the technology blogosphere, Twitter fans, etc.) needed Fred’s input, for two separate reasons:

1) He has great insight about the web and the business worlds

2) He’s an investor in Twitter

And this is why I love Twitter. I twittered the idea above, wondering what Fred would think, and then sent him a quick "@fredwilson" tweet (see Dave Winer’s recent podcast explaining the power of @ symbol on Twitter). Now Fred’s a busy guy and on vacation presently but he’s a hardcore blogger (part of the reason I respect him and always read his posts). That means he’ll respond and get engaged in this conversation even if he’s half-way across the world (which he is).

So why do I love Twitter?

1) For this simple yet powerful example above. I can post a message, tag it to a particular conversation and to a particular person, and instantly know that someone like Fred, who, granted is super-connected, will see the link/gesture, whatever you want to call it, and join the conversation.

Email could have done the same thing but it would have been overkill and antithetical to the basics of this entire Twitter conversation.

Email occurs in a private silo while engaging people in this discussion should be a public and linkable event. Not only will Fred see the tweet but all of my Twitter followers (no, there aren’t many) but Twitter goes to my blog, to Jaiku in case you find me there, to my Tumblr page, and could go to my Google Reader or Facebook page too if I wanted.

I can’t link to an email I send Fred and that email wouldn’t become a part of the conversation. The beauty of Twitter here is precisely that the message I send Fred regarding Twitter used the platform itself to demonstrate it’s own power. Quick, efficient, linkable, and public so that everyone can see the conversation develop. Email can’t do that.

2) Listening to the Dave Winer podcast, he referenced one of his Twitter followers, NewMediaJim, who happens to be involved in new media and is based in DC, as I am too. I would never have been introduced to Jim otherwise and now I’m following him on Twitter.

  eastern_market_crowd 
  Originally uploaded by cherbert.

Part of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail idea is premised on the fact the internet becomes a better discovery engine, that in a world of infinite choices we need better tools to help us discover relevant content, news, people, etc. Twitter does just that.

Serendipity perhaps, but I discovered a new contact thanks to Twitter (and Dave Winer) and I’m now following NewMediaJim because he has an interesting blog, Twitters often, and is a local person.

Why Twitter’s focus on size and scale, rather than on revenue or an explicit business model, isn’t New Economy BS?

I work with corporate America so when I’ve talked with work colleagues about Twitter, invariably they ask what’s the business model, how do they make money? That’s not a wrong question to ask, it’s quite logical coming from our type of work. Follow the money, what are the incentives, etc.

Twitter is a young company in an entirely new field (I wouldn’t call it a business) of communication and as Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder will admit (use BugMeNot's free password to bypass the registration), they don’t know yet how to make money. Being innovative implies some ambiguity by definition and with any new platform, whether it be the telegraph, the telephone, TV, email, or blogging, there will doubt in the beginning.

It’s a real phenomenon, with staying power too (for the two reasons explained above), so the business model and revenue questions aren’t irrelevant but it part of Twitter’s future success comes down to being a first-mover in this burgeoning field of micro-blogging, or however you classify or describe it. That’s good old fashioned MBA lexicon there.

There are other services out there but Twitter could be the leader and the platform that everybody drifts towards as the non-tech blogsphere catches on to the power of this kind of communication.

If you want to know how to monetize Twitter’s users, read Jason, Dave, and of course Fred’s post. But more importantly, join the service and start exploring. Then you’ll understand that Twitter’s future is bright, even if they don’t have a business model right now. It may take some time getting used to but give it time (I'm 8-9 months in on Twitter and still learning things). You'll thank me, I promise.

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Now playing: Stars - The Night Starts Here