Who am I? I pasted in my recommendations on Linkedin to find out.

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything "free" was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You'd get one thing free if you bought another, or you'd get a product free only if you paid for a service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies -- the shifting of costs from one product to another -- but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It's as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)

Easily one of if not the most important thing you'll read this year.

enterprise 2.0

old business processes/tools allow management impose their will on company

enterprise 2.0 is the use of emerging social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

• wikis


• blogs


• SNs


• predictive markets

Importance of enterprise 2.0
Technology and approaches are novel
Offer more than incremental improvements

• innovation


• collaboration


• knowledge sharing


• collective intelligence


• search and discovery

Who's pursuing 2.0?
google, avenue a/razorfish, mckinsey, lockheed, US intelligence, BT, fidelity, IBM

Underlying Trends
1. social software
2. network effects

3. free and easy platforms for communication
4. Lack of upfront structure
5. mechanisms to let structure emerge

Channels and platforms

• email = channel


• point to point


• invisible to others


• can't be consulted

• website = Platform (old school)
• universal
• visible
• consultable

• blog=free, easy platform
• no $, expertise required
• also wikis, facebook, flickr, youtube

enterprise IT loves structure
how does IT bring structure to work?

• Roles, identity, privileges


• Workflow, process steps


• Dataformats, required content

Why is choosing no structure (or emerging) valuable
Newpedia: tried to do the same thing as wikipedia first, but had a 7 step workflow, as an author you had to be credentialed... Jimmy Wales was afraid to submit. Newpedia got closed down with about 25 articles.

Delicious and tags

Tags were not from a dropdown, not from a controlled vocabularly. Things like enterprise 2,0 show up as well as enterprise 2.0... delicious doesn't try to keep you from screwing up upfront. And users are tolerant.

Mechanisms to let structures emerge.

They used to say, the internet is the biggest library in the world, the problem is all the books are on the floor. Search used to be hard.

Google changed the rules by realized the web had structure, but it was not apparent, it was in the links.

Delicious tags... when you see a tag cloud, you see that others are tagging similarly, and if you can tolerate a little slop (blog and blogs) you get the value of the collective wisdom and the emergent structure.

Flickr clusters allows types of images be collected i.e. boston creates an architecture cluster, a red sox cluster, then boston terrier cluster, and then lousy winter weather cluster


The potential benefits of Enterprise 2.0
A Knowledge worker's benefits

(read strength of weak ties)
Teams with weakties get more done, weak ties get you jobs. etc.

Prototypical tools: strong ties

• Wiki

Benefits

• Productivity, agility, responsiveness

Example: intellepedia: what happened at a crash,

Protypical tools: weak ties

• Social networking software (facebook)

Prototypical tool: potential ties

• Blogosphere

Benefits

• Innovation, serendipity


• Bridging

Idea sharing at Intrawest
They build resorts in northern California and Canada. For some reason, they decided they should have internal blogs. Shown was an example of how to save a 500K on install, and here is a comment on how it can be done.... That blogging tool did not cost 500K to roll out.

Avenue A | razorfish

Used mediawiki
Wiki, blog, but also flickr, dig, and delicious ... tags of AARF get called in to the intranet
(see his blog)
Ppl thought it was intel, but AARF didn't.. they said, it would be a shame if our competitors discovered we like starbucks.

Prototypical tool: no ties

Prediction markets
Benefits

Collective intelligence

Iowa's prediction market is better than any of the professional polls consistently.

Collective and convergence: Hollywood stock exchange
A professional said no one can tell you how well a movie will do, but the crowd does.

Challenges

(prospect theory) we overweight the incumbent by a factor of 3, and underweight the replacement by a factor of 3, so it has to be 10 times better or it'll be a niche technology.

Conclusion

• enterprise 2.0 is going to increase difference between companies




• willingness to embark


• sincerity of effort


• ability to execute




• • these difference will be important




• responsiveness


• knowledge capture and sharing


• collective intelligence




• tools approaches and business models are still in flux, much more innovation to come


• enterprise 2.0 will play out over the next several years

Posted at 06:19 PM, February 21, 2008
permalink | 6 Comments

Or at least a sign that journalism is dead: "local woman has 33 friends on facebook!!!"

New York Times on the semicolon

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life," Kurt Vonnegut once said. "Old age is more like a semicolon."

Customer Centric Organizations - Hype or Innovation?

Many companies talk about being customer focused and selling on value, but where's the evidence? Too often customer value is expressed, as in value propositions, but lost in execution they become value cliches that don't set us apart, don't connect us to the customer and don't compel the customer to act.

We've got her doing tech support.

Count Every Vote

When are they going to start usability testing ballots, already?