Webnomena

This may sound trivial to the people who are very close to mobile marketing world, but it is not that obvious to others who are still trying to adjust to the rapid mobile market development.

First, mobile is not just your cell phone, and it is not just the new smart phones like iPhone or Droid. It is also eReaders like Nook and Kindle, tablet devices like the iPad and its mini version, the iPod Touch. Even Nintendo DS could connect to the web. And it is also your old and suddenly cumbersomely looking laptop. If it receives data and could be carried then it is another mobile channel.

Yet, even all these mobile devices does not sum to the entire multichannel marketing story. A brand can communicate its messages in more than one way using smart phones.

• SMS – short messages
• eMail
• Mobile web site
• Mobile search
• Apps:
  • With or without LBS (location based services)
  • Apps that uses the camera for capturing and scanning objects
  • Context specific apps like Drync

Why is it so important to be aware of all these interaction points? Read about the results of Microsoft’s experiment using multichannel mobile marketing here. Quoting Alison Engel, senior marketing director at Microsoft Advertising (from the same blog post)

The advertising effectiveness results demonstrated that advertiser value increases incrementally with the addition of digital media channels.

Some examples for running mobile campaigns using different communication channels:

• Bottom up – start-ups like Foursquare and Gowalla that started as mobile apps – Foursquare encourages people to visit different locations many times. FS uses game like campaigns to drive traffic, loyalty, and revenue for customers like Starbucks.
• Top down
  • Companies like Yelp and Facebook that adds mobile app to their web site – Social networks where people share about what they like or not. Knowing where they are in addition to what they like would help to build even more powerful campaigns.
  • The big brands that are using mobile apps to run location based campaigns like: Pepsi, Rolls-Royce, and others.
  • Companies such as McDonald that uses LBS services like Navteq to run mobile location based campaigns and seeing higher CTR.
  • News and content web-site like NYT, and The Weather Channel.

I’m sure that all these new mobile channels in addition to the already growing number of web channels, like Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are raising some tough questions in the Marketing department:

• Finding the right balance of resources and budget allocation per channel
• Executing different communication strategies via each channel
• Measuring the effectiveness for a multichannel play

Your thoughts,

Pictures credit: Keith Williamson

On New Year’s Eve I wished to stay focused during the year ahead. I knew that besides my job I want to work on my graduate school application and that it takes time. I minimized my social web activities like blogging, tweeting, commenting on blogs, and even reading blogs, an activity that I missed the most. Well, it paid off. I made it to the MBA program at Boston University.

I’m looking forward to being a student again starting this August. I’m also very excited that I’m studying in USA – where else in the world will you go to learn about the art of management?

My school will probably take away from my social media time, but maybe, occasionally, I will be able to share about things that I’m learning at school, observations about the process, and other experiences.

My take away from the school of management application process:

• Go to the information session and other gatherings, it is your chance to put a face to your application. Take the business cards from the school staff and keep them, you may need those later to contact and ask questions. Make a good impression, remember that leadership is the key in Business School.
• Take advantage of the GMAT to improve your English – I actually enjoyed that part.
• Look for recommenders that have recent knowledge about your work experience and accomplishments because it will make things easier for them and you.
• Focus your resume on accomplishments not just skills.
• The essays: there are many books, and websites that talk extensively about this effort, but try not to make this task bigger than it actually is. When I finally sat down to do it, I think that I had only spent 4 hours total (to answer 4 questions, 500-700 words each).
• Prepare for the interview – think about:
  • Your reasons for going after MBA
  • Your reasons for the specific program
  • What are you going to do after the graduation
  • Your leadership style
  • Come up with a question or two for the interviewer – you must have some in your mind! I asked about how the program is kept up to date. Beside the globalization and the Internet more changes are coming due to social media, location based services, and mobile devices like the iPhone. My understanding after the interview is that the school brings great voices from the field, change agents, and technology leaders to lecture and share about what that they are seeing. The business school is also one of the heaviest user of the technology provided by BU.

I think the most important advice that I can give is to stay focused, to start the process and to finish it.

1. 2010 FIFA World Cup Final
2. Movie near Lexington, MA
3. Red Sox
4. Life expectancy – the world is far from flat
5. Time in India (or anywhere else)
6. AAPL
7. Currency conversions
8. Flight progress
9. Math and Physics: 2^64, pi, e, sqrt(100), The speed of light, Avogadro Constant
10. Translate cool to Spanish and Chinese
11. Weather
12. Free images for your your blog (don’t forget to add picture credit) – you can also use this link instead
13. Mark R. Levin on twitter and the results
14. How to (almost anything) – How to eat a jellyfish
15. X vs. Y

I recently discovered that Google shows Life Expectancy graphs for many countries around the globe.

I assumed a big gap between the developed and the third world countries in their average life expectancy,  the data did confirm my assumption, but it become way more apparent when I actually saw it using Google graph.

In Japan, the country with the highest average longevity in the world, based on the World Bank, World Development Indicators data, people lives up to 83 years old.

On the other end of the world, in Afghanistan, the average life expectancy is only 44 years.

ALMOST HALF!

It is also very interesting to see the growth rate. In Japan LE grew from 68 to 83 during the years 1960-2008 (~22%) whereas in Afghanistan, LE grew from 31 to 44(~41%) during the same period. Yet, I as you can see from the graph above it is harder to add more years as the average grows.

It is important to monitor the growth rate for each country, as an indicator for improving health condition in each region.

Here is another picture showing more countries and their corresponding Life Expectancy graphs:

Here you can see a huge growth for China during the 60th, and sadly, a huge drop for some troubled areas in Africa mainly due to HIV/AIDS infections. – some hope here.

Finally, average life expectancy does not seem to be totally correlated with financial success as you can see in the next picture for Iceland and Greece two recently troubled economies.

Probably beyond initial crucial conditions, other factors like work life balance, health care system, crime rate, dining habit, and others contribute to the health of the entire population increasing the average life expectancy.

Other source of Life Expectancy data is Wikipedia – List of countries by life expectancy. This page shows data for the years 2005-2010 and the country with the lowest LE average is Swaziland with 39.6 years.

The world is getting more flat over time, but there are still huge gaps between different regions in the world due to lack of basic human needs.

Do we have a Science Fiction imagination shortage? Can we ever be surprised by a new digital gadget again?

I watched Knight and Day movie the other day, it was funny and Cameron Diaz did a nice job. What that caught my attention in this movie was seeing Tom Cruise using a cell phone that looked very much like an iPhone running some sort of location based application to track the bad guys. I believe that few years ago it would’ve looked like a cool futuristic capability, yet these days I found that scene to be as fascinating as someone cooking food using his/her microwave. Actually, this scene got me thinking about the current gap between visionary and fantasy movies. I know that Knight and Day is not considered a Sci-Fi move or a gadget packed film, it is actually a comedy. Yet, seeing an iPhone in a an action movie a la James Bond style (even though that it is a comedy) was enough to trigger my thoughts about where we are in the technology world and this post.

What that also happened during that movie trip is seeing the preview of a new DiCaprio film Inception. This movie is considered a Sci-Fi movie (by IMDB – see next to Genre), but I disagree with that categorization. I can live with smart robots, doctors replacing human body parts with machines, the big brother (no more privacy), and even a trip to space that involved meeting aliens, but, for now, I have hard time making the leap to someone getting inside someone else’s brain, dreams, or people going back in time. I don’t have problem enjoying such a movie, I just don’t see the existing technology even to start supporting this kind of capabilities.

Over the years we saw movies that introduced technology that did not exist yet, but was somehow on the near to mid-term roadmap. These movies actually helped to inspire inventors to build that technology a little later, including smart computers, robots, phone, location based services, touch screens, real-time video streaming,and more. Today, in a movie like Inception I can’t see the next few steps ahead between what that we have now and what that is presented in the movie. Someone could say that Inception is 30, 40, or more steps ahead, and maybe this is true, but for now, it seems more like fantasy to me. I would like to see in a Sci-Fi movie the world 10 to 20 years from now. I would like to see the next generation of scientist inspired by the creative power of Hollywood.

One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that we are maybe getting closer to the point where the digital world has run its course and we need to look for the next thing in other places. The first transistor was invented in 1947 and since then we experienced the digital revolution in almost every part of our lives: communication, commerce, finance, news, entertainment, education, science, politics, transportation, dining and more. Maybe this process is near its ending. At least in modern countries. It could be just a temporary halt and we are about to be surprised with something totally new. Btw, I’m yet to find a good reason for owning an iPad:)

Where to look for the next thing?  PCR was invented in the early Seventies, mapping of the Human Genome was accomplished between 2000-2003, and recently J. Craig Venter Institute announce the construction of the first Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell. This seems like the beginning of a new revolution to me with potential products on the mid term road-map (average life expectancy over 100 years).

To be fair to Hollywood, most movies that involved biological Sci-Fi where too scary or depressing to watch(Twelve Monkeys, I Am Legend).

What was your experience watching a recent Sci-Fi movie?

Picture credit: Lara604

In a world where many people can write code, it is not always easy to see who is the right person to hire. From the employee perspective, being a well rounded software developer can help one to successfully compete in the marketplace and to edge the ups and downs cycles in the tech world.

Becoming a well rounded software developer, takes time and effort, there is a lot to cover. At the basis, it requires having the right skills, attitude and motivation.  Next, it requires making the right choices about the education, the experience, and the technology to be exposed to. Then it requires investing long hours building the technical skills. The final piece is working on the soft skills like communication, good understanding of the business objectives, and customers needs.

I’ve compiled the list below to help you choose your path for becoming a great resource in today’s marketplace, and also to remind me what am I looking for in a candidate when I’m hiring.

• Education – bachelor or master degree in computer sciences from a decent college
• Experience:
  • Significant contributor to one ore more of the projects listed below:
    • Building scalable enterprise solutions – high throughput
    • Building High traffic web-sites
    • Building custom UI controls (rich client)
    • Building Real-time application – low latency
  • Supporting large scale implementations of one of the above applications
• Technology
  • Computer language – object oriented design and programming, reflection, exception handling, libraries(files system, logging, tracing), data structures, debugging, multi threading.
  • Databases – transactions(isolation levels) , queries that spans multiple tables, concurrency (database contention). More than one database type.
  • Performance analysis – code profiling, memory, GC monitoring, query analyzer tools
  • Application server – configuration, deployment, performance tuning
  • Deep understanding of the underline OS(s) (now it is even required to have some understanding of virtualization technology )
  • Web development  – MVC, Java Script, CSS, HTML, session management, AJAX, template language, SSL
  • Security – understanding of IT compliance requirements.
    • Web site- configurations, encryption, eliminate cross site scripting, SQL injection, validation, and etc.
    • Back-end – to design it in such a way that only few IT personnel should perform operation on the server.
  • I18N and L10N – Unicode, the advantage of UTF-8, date and money formats, resource bundle, the cost of localization and how to minimize it, database considerations.
  • Unit testing tools,  ORM tools, Interoperability
  • Design patterns – at the minimum: singleton, decorator, publisher/subscriber(observer)
  • Architectural patterns – at the minimum: pipes and filters, layers, MVC, n-tier
  • Algorithms- at the minimum: sorting, searching/traversing (BFS, DFS), automaton, recursion
  • Scalability: Load Balancing(horizontal), threads and objects pooling(vertical), queues and remoting technologies(distributed), and caching.
• Mentality
  • Being humble and curious, how else you can learn?
  • When something does not make sense to you, you know that it is an opportunity to learn something new.
  • You care about TPS (Transaction Per Second) and or the number of concurrent users so much that you want to frame those performance reports.
  • The answers you provide to customers, tech support, consultants, and peers are always as accurate as you can deliver. It means that you will have researched and double checked your answer before providing it.
  • Commitment
    • It is OK to be behind schedule, as long as you know it, and you have alerted your manager with enough time that something can be done about it.
    • It is given that there is not enough time during the work week to become a well rounded software developer
    • You know that when the commitment is driven by the business there is no “work week”
  • You can recognize a good idea when you see it, but you don’t need to be the one that came up with it.
  • Business acumen – good balance between doing what that is right for engineering and what that is right for the business.
  • You can’t live without: source control, requirements analysis, some sort of development process, your own toolkit, google, several technical newsgroup, and blogs.
  • Thinking about testability and supportability during design time
  • When using a new library, framework, or API, it is not a black box for you – you look under the cover.
  • When you need to fix something in somebody else’s code, rewriting it is not the only/first option that comes to mind.

I probably missed few items and some technologies may change over time, but I hope that it could help you to stay on track for becoming a well rounded software developer.

Now, if you are one, I would love to chat- see the About page for contact information.

Picture credit Ansomia

Google’s search engine is the 21st infrastructure.

Search is infrastructure

When we think about infrastructure on a large scale we think about roads, train tracks, ports, and utilities – all things that are essential to the smooth running of our economy. Online searching has become so essential to our lives today that I think that we should add it to the traditional world infrastructure list.

Building and maintaining a search engine is so expensive and labor intensive that it requires the same kind of planning and upkeep that, say, the Golden Gate Bridge does.

I see two similarities between traditional infrastructure and search engines. The first is that a search engine is a mission critical system. The second is because the cost required for building and maintaining a good search engine is enormous—just as the costs are for ports, railroad tracks, and the electrical grid.

Mission critical system

Can you imagine a week without Google? Think for a moment how many times a day you use a search engine for a task. Life would be much harder without it. We are using a search engine to find a place, a person or a job. It is the same case when looking for information about a disease, a company or a product. Modern search engines also help to find directions, contact info, stock quotes and innumerable other things. I can’t think of a day without using a search engine (mostly Google but others too). Metaphorically search engines take us from one place to another (like planes, trains and boats), and if well designed and maintained they can save us an enormous amount of time and energy. But if that is not the case, they can be a big waste of time!

The mighty task

The web is big and expanding. In February of 2007, the Netcraft Web Server Survey found 108,810,358 distinct websites (not pages). In March of 2009 (only two years later) the number had more than doubled, to 224,749,695. The number of web pages is more accurate than the number of websites but I think that the numbers above tell us enough about the size of the web.

New blogs are popping up every day, and blogs can post in some cases multiple times a day. With the recent introduction of microblogging services like Twitter and other personal life streaming tools, content is growing even more rapidly. The information is also dynamic: websites go down and pages are being constantly modified. Blogs allow people to leave comments over time. Content is much more than text and can include video, audio, and images.

A search consists of many steps. It usually starts with crawling – getting the data. This is a mighty task that requires building an army of web crawlers to spider the web. It requires a crawling plan using sophisticated algorithms looking for new content and also for keeping the stored ones up to date. It necessitates an immense amount of storage space and heavy computation resources.
The other tasks include indexing, lingual processing and ranking (for relevance and popularity). (If you are interested in learning how Google scales this process by breaking down tasks even further, read the following blog post about Google Architecture)

It is impossible to compare entirely, but it seems like building and maintaining a large-scale search engine is as hard as building a new power station and probably costs as much too.

Living with Monopoly

The purpose of this section is to get you thinking about my analogy and what it might mean.

The Monopoly question – do we need more than one search engine?

In some ways, a search engine industry might fit the definition of what’s known as a “Natural monopoly” (wikipedia):

1. “…it is the assertion about an industry, that multiple firms providing a good or service is less efficient (more costly to a nation or economy) than would be the case if a single firm provided a good or service.”
2. “It is said that this is the result of high fixed costs of entering an industry which causes long run average costs to decline as output expands”

Google could be defined as a natural monopoly.  It now has more than a 70% market share.
The first definition raises the question: why do we need to more than one search engine provider? The second could explain why only one provider may survive.

Why we don’t need more than this one?

I’m personally not concerned about Google’s monopoly power to set rates. As a consumer I don’t feel any pricing power:) but maybe the companies that pay for ads do.

I do have a couple of concerns: The first is about the cost to the country and the world of maintaining a search engine or duplicating the effort in a large scale.
The second is that because it is such an important and world critical system, more stakeholders around the globe should be paying attention.

High Energy cost

Here is an excerpt from Data Center Energy Forecast – Executive Summary – July 29, 2008.

“As of 2006, the electricity use attributable to the nation’s servers and data centers is estimated at about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. Between 2000 and 2006 electricity use more than doubled, amounting to about $4.5 billion in electricity costs. This amount was more than the electricity consumed by color televisions in the U.S. It was equivalent to the electricity consumed by 5.8 million average U.S. households (which represent 5% of the U.S. housing stock). And it was similar to the amount of electricity used by the entire U.S. transportation manufacturing industry (including the manufacture of automobiles, aircraft, trucks, and ships)”

Google is making an effort to reduce the cost of their data centers’ energy bills. My concern is that having multiple Google size search engine companies around seems as wasteful as pooling multiple power lines to every home. I also think that the energy consumption should be distributed across the globe since the search engine serves the entire world and not only one country.

What will happen if Google goes belly up?

I know that this seems radical and almost unimaginable at this point, but what if one day advertisers find another place to buy ad-space other than SERPs? Our lives are so dependent on Internet search technology that if no one can pay for the cost of maintaining one, that would have a direct impact on the world economy.

Maybe we need a different solution?

To reiterate:
-Search is a very large task
-Search is costly
-Search has become essential to the modern economy
-Google is effective but it is a monopoly
Yet today it is so mission critical that we need to watch it closely or maybe even break it up.

Regulations

One way to deal with a mission-critical natural monopoly is to turn it into some sort of government-granted monopoly. In this case it is not the government but some sort of world organization that can enforce regulations and demands like:

• More energy efficient data centers
• Better storage solutions
• Crawl to cover more ground – deep web
• Accounting governance and building cash reserves.

I know that this might sound like a radical idea. Please remember, the purpose of this article is not to support a return to a controlled market but to get us aware of the cost, power and dependencies associated with search engines.

Explore alternative search technologies (similar to exploring alternative energy sources)

In addition to possible regulations, there are other ways to address the functions that a natural monopoly like Google currently serves:

• Split the search task like crawling, storage and indexing and distribute them across multiple venors.
• Create better crawling algorithms – Cuil claimed to find a more efficient and scalable ways to crawl the web (it is not about Cuil it is about the idea).
• Real-time search (conversational search) – If you believe that real-time search is the future than you already know that maybe there is no need for deploying such a huge crawling tasks in order to find great content. Let the crowd do the job.
• p2p - distribute the the crawl, indexing, ranking and storage, across many search users. This technology mitigates the single point of failure risk and leverages existing unused computational resources.

Summary

The new president of the United States, Barack Obama, is leading his 21st Century New Deal with the hope that big investment in the country’s infrastructure will spur economic growth and prosperity. Online search has become a mission critical task in our lives. It has an impact on the world economy and energy consumption. I think that it should not be overlooked. To the traditional infrastructure list of transportation, telecommunication and energy we should add the 21st century infrastructure – online search engine.
In the same way that nations monitor the condition of their infrastructure, they should be looking at search engine implementations and technologies.

A few points that I like you to take from this post are:

• A search engine is more than software
• The tasks of building and maintaining new search engine on a large scale have an impact on society
• Search is a global objective
• We are heavily dependent on this technology
• Google is a monopoly – for better or worse.

Do you share my opinion that search engines have an impact on the world economy?
Do you agree with me that Google is a mission critical system today?
Should we be worried if someone might duplicate the task of keeping a large portion of the web crawled, stored and indexed?

**This blog post was published before on AltSearchEngine.com (my guest post) and it is no longer available so I decided to publish it here again.

Picture credit to my favorite artist Ron Shoshani

I like this song even more now after I learned the meaning of “My heart is tattooed on my sleeve”

Display your feelings openly, for all to see.

Lyrics here.

Enjoy

A little more than a year ago I wrote here about Datanetis, a cool company and technology that helps its customers to identify influencers within their customers database.

Datanetis just got funded with a $6 million Series A investment from Battery Ventures, and changed its name to Pursway. It also seems like there are new large customers on board.

Elery is a good friend and I’m very happy for him and his team.

Here is the press release.

Congratulation!

I had the pleasure of participating in #140conf Boston Meetup this evening.

Jeff Pulver was very inspiring showing enthusiasm, about the “state of now”, twitter, and how the real-time web empowers each and every one of us to make a real change in our world.

I listened to Adam Wallace (@adwal) and Brian Simpson (@Bsimi) from the Roger Smith Hotel telling other businesses that “it is ok not to be perfect”. The brand is not measured by not making any mistake, but by how it reacts to shortfalls. The key takeaway here is that don’t let the fear of bad criticisms to stop you from building your brand’s web presence.  The real-time web is the best new tool for listening and responding in timely manner to customers’ incidents as they develop. This tool provides a human voice to the company.

I heard from Kerry Israel (@kerryisrael) about how her re-tweets become the bridge between fans, having similar entertaining experiences, provided by the American Repertory Theater (americanrep). The real-time web people are becoming the glue, the hyper-channels, and the connectors for the rest of the community members.

I listened to a very moving presentation by Alicia Staley (@stales), 3 times cancer survivor, about her experience comparing the pre-internet and twitter era to nowadays. The real-time web helps you not to feel a lone. Not because you have a lot of friends, or followers but because you’ll find support from others in similar situation. It is helpful and rewarding to share both the good and bad experiences with other people. Twitter is also the best place to post a question when no one in your local network has any idea how to solve it, including your physician.

Finally, I had a very interesting conversation with Will Eisner (willboston) from awareness a B2B SAAS offering for building online communities. The real-time web sure plays a big role in this task. I hope to learn more about this field and product in the near future.

It was an interesting evening (at some point more interesting than anyone expected) and I hope to attend the 2 days big event in NYC around April time. Go real!