Time for Xobni to Shift Focus

We are inundated with information constantly.  I myself confess to be a self-proclaimed info-philiac.  But at times I feel overwhelmed with the barrage of emails, texts, phone calls, voice mails.  We’ve all felt it at one time or another.  And we’ve all sought to manage the chaos is our own ways.  I’ve been through the 7 habits, the GTD method, as well as dozens of other leadership courses through various vendors.  In the end I am a big believer that you have to find blaze your own trail while infusing the best practices that are the most effective for your personal management style.  

It was 5 years my boss introduced me to what at the time I thought was a revolutionary product.  For those of your in the sales world I would be surprised if you have not of Xobni.  This tiny plugin for Microsoft Outlook did something amazing.  It didn’t organize my email, it helped shape my relationships.  Within minutes of installing it I was hooked.  For those unfamiliar with the product, in a nutshell it scours your email for information about contacts, and develops neural networks to map out relationships, both for yourself and those that email you.  

For those of you in careers where you manage relationships(aren’t we all), this can be an invaluable tool to start you out on improving your CRM skills by allowing you to focus on the key discussions happening in your professional network.  About the only thing missing seems to be integration with a larger scale CRM solution such as the dreaded Salesforce.  I think Xobni’s product managers are probably sleeping on this one or lacking serious strategic direction.

I recently checked on their new products and they have added support for Gmail (kudos) with social media and personal/professional network integration.  Hoovers puts their annual revenue at 1.3M.  For a technology company that’s been around for almost 7 years, it’s not so not likely that they’ll be taking off anytime soon unless they develop some stronger business strategies.  Jeff, if you’re reading this, I think you need to acknowledge the landscape is changing for email startups.  The product has great potential; perhaps it’s time to shift the positioning of the product to focus on relationships from a project execution perspective.  

Use the competitive advantage you have in neural mapping, (1) add in enterprise support, (2) enhance your natural language processing capabilities (3) then integrate it with a project management solution that enables businesses to track the effectiveness of resources applied to projects.  I think you can see how this would be be much Smartr.

Public and Private Garden Approach

Conflict is at the center of every relationship.  It’s a necessary event that happens regardless of whether we intend for it or not.  People are different.  Your opinion varies from my own and if there is mutual gain to both parties sufficient to overcome those difference then a relationship generally ensues.  Over the years this conflict has played out in the IT world in a variety of forms such as the ping pong effect of centralized vs. decentralized, waterfall vs. agile, proprietary vs. open-source, top-down vs. object orientated;  the list goes on.  

Like unrequited lovers these ideas and philosophies of thought court one another  through various points in the creation of value.  One of my more favorite terms is captured in a decade old book called The Cathedral and the Bazaar.  

It’s this concept of having an ordered approach that is driven from a authoritarian structure that dictates and controls how software carefully vetting each developer that you let into the holy church of clean code.  The opposite to this approach much like what you find at any local market (especially your European or Asian street markets) is this kind of free for all approach to presenting value and letting the customer decide what’s best for them.  The only prerequisite to being a developer in this scenario is having a computer, some way of compiling code, and a market place to showcase your product.  

In recent years Apple’s seen a decline in their popularity as the appeal of the iPhone has dwindled in favor of Android devices.  This is an interesting dichotomy as it is essentially a battle between two technology behemoths flexing their own ideology.  

Google which has much more of field of dreams or public garden approach “if we build it ( a basic mobile platform) you will come [and develop your code for us and make lots of money while we get richer off of the increased internet traffic and ad revenues].  Apple on the other hand has a much more proprietorial approach as evidenced by their recent clashes with Samsung.  I can’t resist mentioning the irony of this as so much of their comeback was a result of NextSTEP and a plethora of open source products tightly designed around Apple hardware.

My old IT bones are tingling and I sense a swing is in progress.  While the pendulum is currently swinging over to Android, I suspect there will be a new player on the market that thanks to low interest rates and a aggressive M & A market, will likely be swallowed up by one of the aforementioned hegemonic technology companies.  The next big product will infuse customer choice into UI design, and the company that is smart enough to realize it will capitalize on that by capturing the customer UI preference for mobile devices and cross reference it against social and demographic factors maybe even with bio metric analysis from front facing cameras.  

Will it be Google, Apple, Samsung, or you? and 

Knowledge Economy

The basic definition of economy is:

the wealth and resources of a country or region, esp. in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services.

And with knowledge existing as one of the primary inputs of the products and services we could say that there is a sort of an economy of knowledge that naturally exists within a company.  Understanding that economy could yield benefits to predicting the ebbs and flows of innovation, thereby enabling management to know when more resources or training is required to maximize the potential for the creative process so critical to providing valuable services.

When supply of knowledge services go up, the relative cost goes down.  Conversely, when the demand for services increases inversely to the availability of knowledge services, one can expect the cost of those services to increase as well.  Of course these services as I call them here largely come in the form of individual contributors and are not as easy to manage as the raw materials operational managers typically deal with in their own respective value creation processes.

A Chaotic Web Means a Profitable Google

Let me first say that I have tremendous respect for Google and love their products.  They have become somewhat of a cultural icon that transcends borders.  If this offends any google fans out there –get over it; it wasn’t my intention to do so.  Aside from Yandex(Russia) and Baidu(China), they are recognized worldwide as the definitive way to interact with the web.  They are