Tag Archives: technology

As Goes the Web, So Goes, well… Everything

AI, Industry, Insights / Research, Social Media, , , , ,

There is a great school of thought, an interesting debate really, loosely related to the idea that we just started talking about here within the concept of architecture and it’s role in business. That is, that as technology becomes more pervasive in everything we do, so too is that the case in business. CFOs, CMOs, and CEOs are nearly expected to capably play the role of CIO; for without a firm understanding of the implication of technology (or at least the costs, considerations, and opportunities therein), your business is doomed.

Ford's innovation in assemblyThat debate, has to do with the fact that as a capitalist society takes hold of something, anything, we have a natural tendency to maximize the value of said thing by increasing it’s market penetration (scale), reducing the cost (innovation), and removing constraints (efficiency). A random walk through history validates this idea as it can be said for just about anything from food (from gardens in our backyards to corporate, industrial farms), photography (from chemicals and paper to instagram), the automobile or PC (from the product of hobbyists to commoditized technology)… you get the idea. I’m sure the same can be said of software so can it also be said of the programming languages and skillsets therein?

Scrambling for Programmers

The excitement of such a debate is the constant ebb and flow of the programming skillset. A language en vogue today will be deprecated tomorrow. The platform or user interface of yesterday will be replaced by Friday. Just consider for a moment, that only years ago, we had no smart phones, no tablets, no game consoles… software was designed for the PC form factor and only a handful of programming languages were necessary. Now, with the web and the never ending release of new user experiences (Has anyone started redesigning their mobile app for Google Glasses yet?), programmers nearly have to be machines themselves, able to both do their jobs AND keep up with the next, the latest, the greatest, for which they remain relevant or risk dying off.

Question it? Think about simply, what it took to create a web site 15 years ago. You had to know how to write HTML. You had to code. Today, not only is knowing HTML alone, worthless (of course, there is an exception in understanding HTML5), anyone coding a basic website from scratch is as smart as that Chief Executive who doesn’t understand and embrace technology. The web page has gone through the same evolution as the farm, photograph, and automobile – as the commercialization of the internet took place, aspiring entrepreneurs built DreamWeaver (ugh, remember that?), Geocities, Joomla, Wix, WordPress… the web site has become pervasive, one can develop an exceptional one with no technical knowledge at all, at exceptionally low cost.

So it’s true of software, is it true of the skillset? Is the debate about how we commoditize things we need true of not just the product but the skills behind them? Perhaps. Marketing automation has replaced much of what marketers once did. Web analytics continue to replace traditional business analysts. Accountants lost work to Mint.com and Realtors became irrelevant because of Zillow. No. No, wait. No, they didn’t. The art inherent in skill can’t be commodotized; it can’t be automated or industrialized. Experienced marketers are worth their weight in gold not because of what they do but what they know. Analytics tools still simply provide data and intelligence, metrics that have to be understood and interpreted. Mint.com, perhaps, empowered Accountants and Tax Professional and consumers were empowered with the knowledge of the value of understanding their finances and Zillow enabled Realtors to focus on closing more homes, stimulating the economy and our housing market, by leaving Zillow and the buyers and sellers to do much of the heavily lifting about the details of the industry that could, should, be commodotized.

And so too is the case with programmers and developers; engineering isn’t about what, it’s about how well, how efficiently, how effectively. Great developers are too worth their weight in gold (perhaps more), and yet, we will continue to deprecate the languages with which they work.

As a result, we scramble with both opportunity and desperation.

CIO Magazine reported today in fact, CIOs Struggle with the Great Talent Hunt. Over a two-year period in 2010, Stephanie Overby reports, Bill Weeks, new CIO of SquareTwo Financial, saw 70 percent of his development team walk out the door. More than half left; Weeks fired the rest.

It might sound like a leadership disaster, but it was the best thing that had happened to the $250 million asset-recovery company’s IT organization in years.

CIOThe company, 3 years ago, was in growth mode, but, as often is the case in established businesses, IT was falling behind. Weeks wanted to transform the team into one focused on results, “but many on staff refused to engage with business.” Sound familiar? The previous CIO of SquareTwo Financial had established that very culture, “Business people are busy doing business things, and if I catch you talking to them, I’ll fire you,” shared Weeks with CIO Magazine.

Many more IT departments or technology professionals fail to simply keep up with that evolution in the software and languages involved. As those business people, with whom Weeks wanted his team to collaborate, get involved, technology gets commercialized and it’s expected to become more efficient, effective, and inexpensive – results oriented.

That opportunity we face, is to make software and technology more accessible, efficient, available, and pervasive. In doing that, we can all leverage it for our business; we no longer need the web site developer to code a site in HTML. Entrepreneurs move into the market to enable tools, software, and services that create businesses out of the gaps left behind… we don’t need to hire developers, we have WordPress, but most business owners don’t even have the time for that. But we also foster desperation.

As a result of the rapid pace at which technology evolves, the aversion of business and technology to truly work together as one, the control over executive organizations by inexperienced CEOs and business owners, and the inability of everyone, from Marketers to Programmers, to simply keep up, our economy isn’t facing a talent shortage, it’s facing a skills gap. And that is a critical distinction because what businesses fail to embrace is the fact that you aren’t hiring the skill, you’re hiring the talent. Skills can be learned, skills can be replaced by technology. Talent, the art and experience in what we all do, is irreplaceable and invaluable.

Adam Popescu shared on Mashable today that Coding Is the Must-Have Job Skill of the Future, and he’s right, but as he insight-fully goes on to point out in the article, the skill is not what matters, is the talent involved.

“Well, we may be getting ahead of ourselves slightly. It’s uncertain that HTML and CSS in their current form will be on the menu of the next decade. But what we do know is, for the foreseeable future, coding is one of the most important and desirable skills there is, no matter how it evolves,” writes Popescu. “Coding is the new black. And it’s getting so hot that there are a slew of startups focusing on teaching coding — to your kids.”

“Learning HTML and CSS creates a really valuable way for people to efficiently design for the web,” explains Asher Hunt, leading mobile designer at LivePerson. “I say this because understanding those languages provides understandings of their limitations, and general capabilities. For every pixel I put down in photoshop, I know exactly how I’m going to code that in HTML and CSS.” That bold highlight is my own; learning the skill, a skill that’s constantly changing and evolving, teaching the talent we all so desperately seek.

“The value of coding is learning how to use data to drive decisions,” says C.J. Windisch, lead engineer and co-founder of GonnaBe.

As the Web Goes, So Goes Mobile

Validating these ideas is an interesting set of developments in the industry that have taken place in just the last few days.

Yesterday, my Quora thread list up with the question, what mobile apps could conceivably cost >$750k to build? Consider what WordPress did for website development, it’s a great question, how on earth could it possibly cost an exceptional amount of money to create a mobile app??? Mobile software, sure, perhaps; but an app for a business?? Anurag Rastogi, CEO of newgenapps.com proposed today in reply, “Smartphones pioneered by iPhone are relatively new, and being able to develop apps for them using distribution Channel’s like App Store or Google play became mainstream just a few years back…. The app stores have democratized ideation. Anyone can build an app and launch it to a global audience without incurring huge distribution costs.”

Well well.

And then today, in my own back yard here in Austin, AVAI Mobile announced a mobile application content management platform (you mean like WordPress for websites?) for the enterprise mobile market. AMP, as they call it, enables enterprises to “avoid the high cost and risk associated with custom app development and versioning by leveraging a proven platform as a service.”

“We are announcing AMP Enterprise to address a very clear need among mid to large enterprises for a scalable yet customizable mobile app development platform which eliminates the need for custom development on every project,” says Rand Arnold, CEO of AVAI Mobile. “AMP Enterprise is an extension to our popular Cloud-based AMP™ solution already being successfully used as a development platform for our channel partners.”

According to a Q1 2013 Mobile Enterprise Report from Appcelerator (registration required to download the report), the largest obstacle facing Enterprise is a scarcity of mobile development resources.

Well what do you know.

“AVAI Mobile’s AMP Platform allowed us to communicate the latest updates of our products and specifications more efficiently with our team and partners,” says John Hewson, Residential Solutions Marketing Manager for Lutron Electronics

There’s that word again.

Indeed, entrepreneurs are moving to fill the commercial opportunity and gap, created as mobile software and languages become pervasive and commoditized.  The talent to accelerate our economy through technology is enabling all of us to leverage the skills as our access to them becomes more efficient. Rastogi went on to posit that the companies to look to in providing services for mobile are those that:

  1. Saw the future that mobile and cloud are going to be big
  2. Did not copy anyone, started early and have a great track record
  3. Have the competence to deliver
  4. Are not legacy companies, old System Integrators, who live on support business for enterprise companies like SAP and MSFT who have 3 year release cycles. Mobile has 3 month cycles
  5. Companies that charge a ridiculous amount like 500,000. The project sizes are much smaller and the larger companies are at a loss to adjust to this new normal (funny thing though, I think he meant to say, Companies that don’t charge…” no?)

As went the web, so goes everything we do with technology.

Cospace.co Grows to Serve All Work Spaces – Austin’s Cospace Coworking Closes

Local, Startups, Vertical Search, , , , , ,

Last week, the Cospace brand evolved to focus on serving entrepreneurs and professionals throughout the world as our web service continues to aggregate and promote work spaces; providing economic and real estate intelligence. In July 2012, we launched https://cospace.co to index and promote every work environment; connecting skilled professionals with the right place to work.

As part of the announcement, BlindOx, LLC, which owned and operated the Cospace coworking space, announced the closure of the space and the end to one of Austin’s original and most iconic coworking brands.

I am very proud of the positive impact Cospace coworking has had in the startup community.”, said Kirtus Dixon, Managing Partner of BlindOx LLC, owner/operator of the Cospace coworking space. “I will be eternally grateful for all of our customers and colleagues, some of who gave of themselves without any expectation of return. It’s been a great run.”

In the past few months, the new, virtual Cospace has grown to serve over 1,000 spaces throughout the United States and is connecting nearly 100,000 professionals, each month, with the ideal work space.

The tangible significance of coworking is that people working in a shared environment, collaborate. Getting out of the home, and into such a work space, fosters business development, job placement, partnerships, and new ideas. The key to economic development is in helping people with skills find the space in which their talent has the most demand. Cospace.co is focused on matching what you do and what you want to do, with the environment in which you are most likely to meet others with whom you can succeed.

Space owners, operators, and investors are encouraged to list their space with Cospace and leverage the extensive community of entrepreneurs seeking the right work environment.

How the Internet Failed to Change Our Lives

Industry, , ,

Wrapping up this year and having spent some incredible time with an amazingly diverse set of innovations (and innovators), I starting wondering if and how the internet has really failed to deliver on its promise. One of the sobering realities of a capitalistic economy is that the almighty dollar, indeed, causes tremendous innovations, services, and technologies to arrest; to stop evolving for the sake of making money. Just the other week, I explored this idea with regard to our internet service and that led me to question how the same is true of the internet in general.

The Promise of the Internet

When I was working at Yahoo, years and years ago, and we were pulling together the different Y! properties (e.g. Sports, News, Finance, etc.), while the world continued to innovate media (Netflix), Commerce (Amazon), etc., the promise of what we were doing by aggregating everything held the possibility of ubiquity and omniscience.

Today, I’m saddened as a user and motivated as an entrepreneur by the fact that we still don’t have that. Nothing works together; I have to have hundreds of accounts and passwords; reviews on Yelp don’t affect my experience with Foursquare; I watch Hulu on my Wii but it doesn’t know what I’ve already seen or reviewed on Amazon or Netflix; I tell the internet when and where I’m traveling but it’s incapable of ensuring I get the best rates on my travel or remembering how and when I want to travel; I pay my taxes with TurboTax but it doesn’t work well with my bank, Ameritrade account, or accounting – and forget about the government (or anyone for that matter) being able to take my money without me having to do something the old fashioned way (in person, via fax, with a signature). The internet knows everything about me – not just what I like but what I need – and yet online advertising still sucks. I can’t pay for a song or service for music on one device and listen to the same song anywhere else whenever I want (okay, so that’s not entirely true when you consider what Spotify has accomplished). I can’t believe I still had to stand in front of a box that looks like it was built in the 90’s to vote for the President of the United States using a dial and an LCD display instead of doing it from my home, naked, with complete and transparent insight to exactly what either candidate actually does – and therefore will do!

Why? Not because it isn’t possible. ALL the data exists. All of the APIs exists to connect everything. The standards have been defined and generally accepted to make it all work.

So why? Because entrepreneurs still generally believe in value in control. (and Governments are ensuring that belief, in spite of “the internet” revolting over the ideas of Net Neutrality or UN oversight).

 What is an API anyway?
An abbreviation of application program interface which is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. A good API makes it easier to develop a program by providing all the building blocks. A programmer then puts the blocks together.

To some extent, it’s true that control = value, but it’s also what holds us back. Think about Google’s mission and how they started – to index all of the world’s information and make it available. They didn’t decide that you had to have a Google account. You didn’t have to pay for it. Then, and now, you didn’t even need to use Google as they offered the search index and experience as an appliance so that anyone else could make it available on their site – free. And that thinking revolutionized the internet more than anything before or since. Sounds like a profound statement but I’d challenge you to justify that anything has had such a revolutionary impact (convince me I’m wrong in the comments). Did it hurt Google to give up that control? Hardly.

Only in thinking so big as to leverage what’s really possible with the internet will we completely revolutionize what it does for us.

It can and should be ubiquitous. And accessible. And simple. And omniscient. It should have changed our lives so much more than it has because you should be able to manage your life simply, be entertained how ever you want, get accurate news and information on demand, provide feedback that’s immediately heard and accounted for.

But you can’t. Not because it can’t, but because even though the promise of that world is incredible, we really don’t want it.