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!):

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.

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

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.

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

If you’re like me you have accumulated thousands of PDF documents on your computer, many of which don’t have meaningful names.  I added to my own problems by putting an automatic document scanner in place which stores most of my incoming paper documents with useful handles like 2007_07_20_10_29_50.pdf.

Enter a little piece of software (Mac only) called Yep from two guys up in Canada.  It basically takes your inventory of PDF files and makes it more like managing photos; including tags, thumbnails and other tools.

It will simplify my daily file management considerably so it will probably justify the paying the $35 when free trail is over.  For those Mac users that want to give it a spin you can find it at www.yepsoftware.com.

Like some of the tool choices we have profiled in the past we hope you find this useful.

Tags: Tools, Productivity, Software, Yep, Mac Software, PDF

We’ve experimented with quite a few technologies to be used for personal organization and productivity.  Most recently we have been using Google Apps, MindManager (planning), Backpack (projects) and Qumana (blog).

Google Apps:  So far we’re a little disappointed.  We are going to stick with Google Apps for our Research 2.0 business because it works well enough for email but the other applications are just plain flaky.  We have had to abandon many a spreadsheet due to sporadic performance or freezes.  We just don’t have any patience for that so will be using Microsoft Excel for our work unless and until something changes there.  Documents are a little easier to work with but again we find ourselves still doing most things in Word instead.

MindManager: We’ve tried earlier versions but the new one rocks.  We are using V6 for Mac and it seems to answer many of our demands for planning flexible networks of tasks, projects, flows and so on.  The latest version makes it easy to incorporate notes, files and links which was the key ingredient missing from the earlier versions we tried.  Although it is expensive for us it’s worth the price. (There is a free trial download.)  We had been using Yojimbo which is fairly solid but the network model in MindMap is far more reflective of how we plan and model.

Backpack:  We like the products from 37Signals and use the little brother (Ta-Da Lists) for some family projects and the big brother (Basecamp) for clients.  Backpack seems just right for us as a personal project tool.  We use it mostly for organizing material since it has the key feature of allowing email access to projects. This makes it very practical to add bits of content, thoughts, links or whatever to projects with a simple email and get project data sent to you on request as an email.

Qumana:  Updating blogs is not fun online.  Even one is a pain and having several makes it essential to find a better way of doing it.  Of the tools we tried Qumana is the best since it has plenty of features but is very easy to use, extremely stable (hasn’t crashed in several days with three sites open) and cheap.    The ability to build posts and do everything offline is essential.  If one is doing a personal blog about what your cat did today you don’t need it but if you are publishing a professional blog or doing multiple blogs you will love this software.

Hope those of you picking through tools to do these types of things will find this information helpful.

Tags: Organization, GTD, Blogging, Planning, PIM, Qumana, Backpack, MindManager, Yojimbo

]]> http://blog.research2zero.com/2007/04/power-tools/feed/ 1 http://blog.research2zero.com/2007/02/out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new/ http://blog.research2zero.com/2007/02/out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new/#comments Thu, 08 Feb 2007 15:05:21 +0000 Kris_Tuttle http://research2zero.com/blog/2007/02/08/out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new/

For those following our path through our start up phase we made quite a few changes with the new year. Here is a quick summary:

1. We moved away from a deep focus on MIT research to a broader approach looking at efforts of “lesser” schools. For one thing there is a huge amount of compelling research work going on around the globe. The other reason is that MIT is so good at what they do there are dozens if not a dozen dozen corporate officers, venture capitalists and technology business writers swarming all over the place. When a pin drops at MIT it sounds like an earthquake everywhere else. On the other hand we have been able to find very good research work that struggles for recognition in other places. We can probably find more opportunities to add value in the latter.

2. Even after carefully selecting a handful of distribution partners to work, with we discovered they just don’t fit our model. So out went Research & Markets, Reuters, Payloadz and a few others too small to mention. We built our own distribution infrastructure and have chosen to work with S&P/Capital IQ to the extent we need a dedicated institutional investor channel.

3. We opted for new web development tools like WordPress for the blog and plain old HTML and PHP/MySQL for the website. Dreamweaver is still used a bit but most of the site can be edited simply as text. For the record Yahoo Sitebuilder and tools like it get you started but then make it very hard to move to a more powerful platform. If I had it to do over again I would have started out with CSS, HTML and PHP to begin with.

4. No advertising, only sponsorships. We played around with AdWords, AdSense and competitors over the year to understand them. They certainly work well for many businesses but not ours. We have found some sponsorships to work well for us in terms of finding customers and similarly believe we have many potential sponsors for 2007 that want to reach out to our client base.

5. Go monthly. We published some industry and company reports in 2006 but not nearly enough. Part of the solution is to create a train that leaves the station regularly – that’s the monthly. The other is to have a hard production plan for industry and company reports that will start modestly and adjusted as needed. By adding an institutional membership level we make it possible to push out unedited content that might or might not be part of our research agenda but is unquestionably of interest to institutional investors.

6. After spending much of 2006 learning we are dramatically scaling back our conference attendance in 2007. Although we will miss being there we’re building tools and content that should be on the agenda one year rather than sitting around listening to what others are doing. To us this is a better use of our time now. We will still do FiRE 2007 and may only do TED in 2008.

As soon as things settle down we will update our resources page that tracks the tools and services we are using in our business.

I got blog tagged by Mike Herrick. (For those of you new to this if we get tagged we have to post five things most people wouldn’t know about us and then tag five new folks who have to do the same.)

Of course it’s a little like a chain letter but it adds some fun since we are creating some new information here and it can be interesting.

So here goes…

1. At 16 I tried to get a job at every fast food joint and department store and was turned down without so much as an interview. After giving up I started playing a game in a computer store and seeing my interest they hired me to do odd jobs like empty trash, pull weeds and so forth. A year later I was building and programming the first mainstream microcomputers. So from complete failure my 27 year (and counting) career in technology was born.

2. In my first days of showing up at Carnegie Mellon University I got hired to work with professors like John McDermott, Lanny Forgy, Allen Newell and many others. This had a more formative effect on me than all the classes I rarely attended. I’ll never forget my job interview with John McDermott: “Are you familiar with the LISP language?” No. “Are you familiar with BLISS or C?” No. “Are you familiar with production system languages?” No. “Okay well you are hired to recode routines used to implement the OPS production system from LISP to BLISS. Here they are. Let me know when you are finished and ready for your next assignment.”

3. I’m an existentialist. Don’t know what it means but neither does anyone else. So I enjoy Camus, Sartre, The Talking Heads, Nabokov, Kafka and all the rest. At the same time I believe in Universal Law from the teachings of Arnold Patent and Zen from the teachings of Charlotte Joko Beck.

4. I have a barn with a woodshop. It’s a very relaxing place. I’m into furniture design and construction, architecture, woodworking and doing work outside like clearing, dry-stacked stone walls, and just being out on the land. I have 10,000 bd/ft of rough lumber there begging for more time in the shop.

5. I hate the phone. I’m not sure why but I just do. Even when I am initiating the call I generally don’t like it. I prefer face to face meetings or even IM to the phone. I think I’m souring on email these days as well. There were jobs I had where being on the phone would have been normal but I almost always found a way to do it as well or even better by not having to use the phone. I think it’s strange but find there is little I can do about it.

Here are my five tags: Roman Stanek, JP Rangaswami, Roger Ehrenberg, Annrai O’Toole, and Tim O’Reilly.

Since moving to WP we have come to understand that it is indeed much more than a blogging tool. The primary reason for this is due to the architecture of the system and the openness of the implementation.

There is a growing divide between very easy to use tools which are generally free and the more complex tools and services which tend to be expensive. The problem with the very simple free tools is that they break down soon after one begins to get serious about anything. What we mean when we say divide is that once you decide the simple solution is not acceptable the available options have steep curves in cost and/or effort.

Beyond the superior blogging capabilities in WP there is an active development community building not just themes but additional functions and features that can be added easily via a plug-in manager. Before this one had to be willing to write code to customize functions.

As the open source tools and platforms like WP continue to evolve it’s hard to continue to think about “investing” in tools from Adobe and Microsoft given the cost not so much in dollars (although the ADBE stuff is very expensive) but in the learning curve. Maybe it’s just me but I can actually learn a new scripting language and write something myself faster than figure out how to use InDesign or Illustrator. Even after two decades of rust on my technical machinery.

So as we build out for 2007 we are increasingly leaning towards a fuller open source solution and the real potential of not using any MSFT or ADBE products. There are still reasons we may never be totally free of MSFT products, especially since part of our business is in serving the institutional investment community and we have advisory clients that sit on Microsoft infrastructure. However we are likely to be able to run our core business and all production in a cruft-free software enviroment of our own design and construction!

We’ve upgraded to a full-time office in France. It’s required a move to a new building but the space is very good in terms of location and has a reasonable vibe for a “corporate space.” The place is just outside Paris in what can only be described as a sort of corporate Disneyland called La Defense. Most of the tall corporate buildings are located here rather than in the city limits. To complete the picture we have three 4 story high sculptures in our courtyard including one of a human thumb. Yes, that’s right, a 4 story tall thumb.

Still in all it’s a productive place to be just a short train ride from home and a few minutes to central Paris. The offices are big, the bandwidth is flowing freely and our ideas are begging to be researched, refined and produced from the land of many cheeses.

We’re open for business and visits here at 9-11 Allee de l’Arche, Coubevoie Cedex France 92671.