David Galipeau: Knowledge vs Wisdom vs The Enterprise

the root cause of business problems is not financial, not product-related and not structure-related. Businesses live and die by its executives’ and employees’ talents, levels of empathy and ability to play well with others… and by their willingness to listen and acknowledge that customers (also people) just may have some valuable input. […]

The solution is not a new business model: or organizational model: it’s a new people model.

We don’t need a new ad campaign or a new org chart. There are no quick fixes. The skill sets needed in today’s times are not management consultants or marketing specialists. If we’re all really honest with ourselves, what we really need are psychologists and coaches and relationship experts. We’re talking about real people connections, not a personalized direct mail piece.

And this is why blogging and other social technologies have exploded onto the scene.

Link

1up runs an article about “sweatshops” where Chinese guys “play” massive multiplayer online (MMO) games for hours to accumulate virtual goods they resell for real money. A completely underground economy based on poverty and new technologies.

“Sack” is the only name I’m given for the person I’m supposed to contact. He lives in the Fujian province of China, but his place of business is online—he plays Lineage II. He’s paid about 56 cents an hour to work in a videogame “sweatshop.” […]

Sack is the low man in these operations. “I work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on the U.S. Lineage II server,” he says. He works long, boring hours for low pay and gets no holidays. Carefully constructed macros do most of the work; Sack is just there to fend off the occasional player itching for.

Link

Libération évoque les conséquences sur le monde du travail de ces technologies qui “brouillent de plus en plus la frontière entre vie privée et vie au travail” (sujet que j’avais évoqué dans les colonnes du Temps lors d’une interview du sociologue anglais Cary Cooper).

Au bureau des petits profits

Lire ses e-mails, réserver ses billets de train, se servir dans le pot à crayons ou gérer sa propre boîte sur ses heures de boulot… Revue de détail de ces moments ou objets dérobés à l’entreprise.

(thx nico)

Instructif comparatif entre Macs et PCs sur quelques points clés comme la facilité d’installation, de maintenance, et la rapidité. L’étude a été menée sur un des publics cibles d’Apple – les professionnels de l’édition – rare domaine ou l’on trouve autant d’accrocs à Windows qu’à OSx.

Lien

Different interesting services have been released lately, and put together they form a framework that anyone with ideas could use to release large-scale web applications for minimal costs. From Pete Cashmore :

Following Amazon’s release of S3 (an on-demand storage solution), Mechanical Turk (human tasks on demand) […], I’ve been told that Sun has now released grid computing on-demand for $1 per CPU-hour.

Link

So you have a virtual hard drive (S3 ), CPU (Network.com) and workforce (mechanical turk), all you need is an idea, talent, and a bit of time. Really, bringing an idea to the market has never been easier and cheaper.

The cost of launching a web business has never been that low. Web technologies are in general more mature, as a framework like Ruby on rails shows. It is free, and not only facilitates and speeds up development, it also scales while remaining flexible over time!

I was really amazed last week when I met Tony Conrad, CEO of sphere (note: if you ever bump into him be sure to ask for the French border story). His company is launching a blog search engine with only four people on the payroll (and less than 200’000$). Wordpress? Five guys. 37 signals? Six or seven guys and 400’000 clients. I am sure this was absolutely impossible five years ago, technologies really got closer to both users and developers needs.

It would be interesting to calculate some kind of technology maturity index for companies, by dividing the total number of clients served per the headcount. This would be going up over time, staffers getting more effective as technology continues to get better.

Mature technologies are probably one of the two main reasons why we have an Internet rush these days (the other is that advertising equals decent cash). More income, less expenses, less time to market. The burst won’t have to be that painful this time around ;-)

Si comme moi vous n’avez pas encore eu le temps de vous plonger dans le fantastique manifesto de Julian Bleecker sur les objets en réseau, le journal du Net publie un article qui reprend certaines idées autour d’un thème qui sera très bientôt au coeur de notre quotidien.

Objets Intelligents Non Identifiés

Grâce aux puces, ces objets seront capables de vous informer sur leur parcours et leur origines, de faire de l’auto-diagnostic, de l’auto-régulation, de communiquer entre eux et de ” pré-décider ” en amont de toute intervention humaine, d’envoyer par eux même des alertes à un autre objet ou à un humain…

Au delà des aspects réjouissants l’auteur évoque également quelques raisons de s’inquiéter de ces objets à l’intelligence parfois envahissante. Un thème qu’il va définitivement nous falloir traiter à LIFT07.

Podzinger indexes thousands of audio recordings and creates an index that you can search. Watchlists are available, so it is possible to subscribe to a particular term and see who is talking about it.

Even if the system is not perfect (listen to Cory Doctorow speak about LIFT and you will notice some differences between the audio and the text, nobody was called “receivers Sterling” as far as I remember) it is a major step.

The Podcastosphere just started to make sense. (via)

With only a few developers and in only three months, Virtual Network managed to roll out their own blogging platform.

Virtual Network’s […] small team of developers put together in three months a new blogging platform for the firm’s popular web sites, Romandie.com, musique.com and jeu.com. […]

This is not very good news for pure-play blog publishing startups. If it is this easy for a web savvy startup to roll its own […] blog platform (based on open the pblogs open source software distribution), the future for pure-play blog publishing platforms, such as Wordpress, Kaywa, Six Apart, Bloggers.it, Overblog, or any of the others that are active in the region, is going to be more limited […] than the hype suggests.

Link (thx Marco)

That is a consequence open-source has had on this market: you aren’t protected by technology anymore, as any competent person can replicate what you do in a few days (the good news: you can also replicate what your competition does in a snap).

Web companies are more and more like Nike or Sony. They sell the same core product/service than their competitors. Unable to gain an edge in that area, they focus on creating relationships with their customers via a set of values (or a cool design). Is branding becoming the key success factor in technology?

Related news: SixApart raises 12 millions

A recent study claims that despite the fact we have only a 50% chance of correctly understanding the tone of an email message, we think we got it right 90% of the time. The consequences? Flame wars!

Obviously the richness of human communication (irony, teasing, sarcasm, etc..) can NOT be adequately transmitted via emails, but the problem is much bigger than I thought.

Wired News: The Secret Cause of Flame Wars

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

Remember this next time you get mad over a message.