by Kris_Tuttle on December 19, 2008
This one isn’t about stocks but rather information and some of the new services out there that have changed how information is received, shared and put to use (sometimes.)
At the beginning of the year most of us weren’t using services like Twitter and social networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have come a fair way over the course of the year. At the same time filtering services, alerts and Google reader are all very good alternatives to email for processing information.
Here are a few things to consider doing over the holidays (feel free to add more in comments!):
- Most people are on far too many email lists. This tends to make actually using email fairly difficult. Most services now have an RSS feed which means they can be received in a service like Google Reader. If you haven’t investigated Google Reader yet now is the time to do so and set yours up. Start at the link above. It’s worth spending a few hours doing this instead of reading your Sunday paper. By eliminating email subscriptions and putting them in your Google Reader you can spend time quickly scanning the news when you have time to do so.
- Eliminate some subscriptions but save the links. We tend to accumulate subscriptions that become junk because we can’t keep up with them. However we still have an interest so may not want to eliminate them entirely. One strategy is to out them into the Reader as outlined above but they can also simply be saved to shared book marking tool like Delicious. What’s good about this is that they can be tagged with your interest (like solar or dogs) and you can find them later. Also you’ll be able to see many other links with the same tags and expand your online resources when you find time to do so. Again it gets things out of your inbox and available in a better way for future use.
- Get a Twitter account and explore ways to use it. Twitter is basically a new service that posts short messages around to people who "follow" one another. Sometimes the services are not people but vendors like Amazon or Dell. There are many use models for Twitter but instead of getting an email from Amazon on the "deals of the day" if you are into that maybe it’s better to get a Twitter message about it. It’s easy to act on or ignore. No deleting is necessary. Twitter has a passionate following but it’s also a tool that should be in your communication arsenal.
- Set up and/or update your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. These are free and useful services these days. LinkedIn works well for your professional contacts and Facebook is better for those that know you but may not be in the business world. (BTW your Twitter messages can be used to update your Facebook status, helping friends stay up to date with what you are doing.) There are also fairly vibrant special interest groups emerging on these platforms that are worth joining.
- In the event that you are somehow not already using IM and online collaboration tools get set-up on Skype or similar. These tools have the somewhat unique quality of detecting and sharing online presence and allowing real-time chat, discussion, video or information sharing to occur. They sit at the core of any high-performance team.
- Lastly if you have even slightly considered starting a blog this is a good time to get that set up as well. It’s just as important to have it so that others can communicate with you as you are with the world. Some of you already have monthly updates and letters that can at least start to serve as a starting point for a blog. We’re talking mostly professional stuff here but there’s a whole personal side there as well for those that get excited about it. There are lots of blog choices out there. We’ve used them all and prefer Wordpress but they are all pretty good. Google Blogger is probably the most simple to use. You also might want to start commenting and/or writing a guest post or two on other blogs if you’d rather get started that way.
This is also a good time of the year to consider an upgrade to a time management tool of some sort. Lately we have been using Mac-based Things and like it quite a bit. Reading some books like Getting Things Done or the 4-hour Work Week may also help stimulate some better work habits in the new year.
In summary this is a good time to rationalize and prioritize your information processing and the new tools out there are important elements of taking full advantage of what’s out there. We left out as many as we included here so this is just a start.
by Kris_Tuttle on September 25, 2008
As a research firm we may select conferences a bit differently than those who go for "networking" reasons. We went to quite a few conferences three or four years ago and they served us quite well as a firehose of information and new contacts to replace what had been lost after a few years in "management" on Wall Street.
Besides being back up to speed a few things have also changed since then. First of all online information and social networking has evolved very quickly. So often access to the presentation and related material is available during or immediately after the event. Somewhat perversely the presentation content that companies bring to investment conferences is often available online *before* conference attendees can see it. For example there is a UBS conference today and a number of companies scheduled to present filed their content with the SEC early this morning so we’ve already had a chance to review it all by 7:30 a.m. but I digress.
They key to conferences these days is getting to them at a point where they have a critical mass of content and attendees but before they go super commercial as many do. They also obviously have different content focuses today so it’s more possible to attend shorter, more narrowly defined events. For example we just attended a two-day workshop on open source software in Europe that was worth the time and very complete. By doing it we are able to very effectively get our arms around all that we need to know for the next six to twelve months.
Our next event is the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin on October 21-23 which is very focused on more practical content around emerging web technologies. As we prepare for broader enterprise adoption in the coming few years we think this is an important area to focus on. It is after all the commercial absorption of these technologies that will define some of our best investment results in the next five years which is what matters most to us and our clients.
The hands-on focus of many of the talks will be injecting a healthy dose of reality regarding many of our key research areas including cloud computing, social networks, mobile Internet, online collaboration, and analytics to name a few. We also expect to get some new insights on some public companies in our ecosystem like Adobe, Google and Nokia.
For anyone that wants to enjoy a 35% discount for the event please use our discount code: webeu08gr63 and let us know if you are coming.
Tags: web2expoEU, web2expoEU08, w2e_europe08, eurotech, ADBE, GOOG, NOK
by Kris_Tuttle on July 28, 2008
Outside of the dry statistics concerning the ongoing consolidation in the software market is our own readership and contact network. Research 2.0 has always focused on the position and influence of clients and readers rather than sheer numbers. The number of CEO research clients has been an important aspect to our business model.
We always loose some CEO clients to acquisition but lately the pace seems to have quickened and moved to smaller companies as well. At first we lost Alfred Chuang as BEA got absorbed into Oracle and then Bernard Liautaud as Business Objects became part of SAP.
Then today we saw ILOG get acquired by IBM after years of innovative management by Pierre Haren. Just a week or two ago Datallegro was acquired by Microsoft and Stuart Frost dropped from our CEO list as well.
Fortunately we have picked up some new CEO reader/clients and our numbers around the number of technology CEO and institutional PM readers that we have direct input to has never been higher either in terms of numbers or market capitalization.
Still the velocity of change seems to be ever increasing and it further influences are thinking on approach and business model. We also know that many of our prior-CEO friends will again be at the helm of even more interesting start-up companies.
One in the SaaS/Data space is Good Data which has just raised a significant round of financing and his entering very early stages of technology demonstration. The company is led by CEO Roman Stanek who successfully piloted prior startups like NetBeans and Systinet.
As always the ratio of "what’s new and interesting" versus "what’s old and boring" is increasing every day at Research 2.0. We all need to get used to shorter cycles.
by Kris_Tuttle on April 25, 2008
For the last three years we have been working on leveraging new technologies and methods to create a much more effective model for research and investments in emerging technology investments. As one of our colleagues pointed out, we have an opportunity to stand on the shoulders of giants.
Internet technologies and companies like Google, PayPal and Skype are clearly shifting the strength to weight ratio of what an online business. Companies like FaceBook and YouTube can go from zero to $billions very quickly. But moving from the established methods to the new platform isn’t as simple as pushing a button.
There are several reasons why it’s tricky to do in a real business context. Here are the ones we have run into:
1. Some of the new things are just not ready to scale. We’re using Google Apps and it’s had very mixed results when we try and push it beyond the basic use cases. It will certainly come along but it’s going to take time.
2. Many clients and business partners are slow movers. Even if we were ready to move entirely to new technologies many of our customers are not. At the same time many of the new technologies do a poor job of integrating with the old. There are some gap-filling technologies that help. For example Feedburner and Feedblitz can turn blog posts into email, IM messages or even Twitter posts. However many wouldn’t be able to navigate the simple set up process.
3. A few of the things we thought were core values may not be. We’ve always believed that high production values in terms of published research were important. The downside is that it takes a substantial amount of time and cost to produce output of this caliber. I’m beginning to think that the written report may be of far less value than I realized. So we will be revamping our delivery methods to reflect this.
4. There are a few things we thought would go away that are really core. It turns out that the old fashioned phone conversation or meeting is less replaceable than we thought. In fact this may be the only real high value service left in an increasingly noisy and information crowded online space. Email is getting less and less effective as a medium of distribution.
5. Sometimes you forget to pay attention to Internet effects. We tend to start with an approach of what is “best” when we look at a new technology choice. However any choice that doesn’t keep us 100% on the Internet curve starts to conflict with our business model very quickly. There are been many cases where we have had to back off from a decision to use a piece of software, a service or even a whole approach when it became clear that the choice was not on the Internet productivity and cost curve.
6. Simple things get hard, then you learn. Even a task as easy as keeping your background of online CV up to date starts easy and then gets complicated. So we first wrote a great one for our own site. But then one needs to keep LinkedIn up to date if you are going to use it (which we do.) But then there is FaceBook, Xing and so on. At first it’s all extra work and then conditions become right so you can just use a link to your public profile in LinkedIn and take the brave step of removing it from your website. Then it’s back to easy street. Hopefully we’ll get more of this.
Each one of these may seem easy to avoid but taken together it’s hard to do. It’s easy to forget Internet effects when some of your highest paying clients depend on a phone and a secretary for all their interaction. We’ve not done a count but as we start to plot our “core” technology suppliers the list is much longer than we realized. Considering that we’ve cycled through several in most categories, that’s quite a bit of churn.
Of course some of the providers have changed quite a bit over the years. We started out with Yahoo on Day One for many services and their platform is now years behind what is generally available. So we’ve migrated nearly everything from them over time. Google has a way to go but at least they are moving *forward* to deliver more.
The implications for our business, research and investments in emerging technology, are easy to see and already happening. The first is that we are increasingly making more from the direct investment side of our business than from the published research and advisory side. The second is that there will be a smaller (<100) clients that will really be on the inside and close to what we do. Even the ability to achieve this number depends on the successful deployment of some new technology and dynamic delivery methods we are still developing.
– Kris Tuttle
Tags: technology, web 2.0, starting up