Trying to Be Everything at Once

So where is all this "convergence" going?

Services are now integrating with other services, content with content housers, big companies gobbling up small startups, and the advertiser always running along trying to bring the point of sale closer to home (or to the mobile phone).

Oh, and there is a flashy new webpage technology that can handle it all.

Its might be fair to say that this Ultimate Portal Concept is crossing the mind of most companies out there. And although some companies have seemingly failed in being "everything at once", others seem to have an upper hand on bring it all together.

Its clear that one´s strategy is of utmost importance here. And as Rafat Ali puts it, in light of everythingitis there are still those that keep it "simple, and great at what they do". This principle seems to have stood the time, but among other implications, it postulates that the existing companies have that upper hand when faced with changes and competition.

It is true that, when in comes to 2.0, the companies that do start trying for the homerun, end up short. As do the companies that that try to better what is already out there.

The interesting twist is, the closest companies to being everything, aren´t companies that neccessarily directed themselves that way.

Facebook (already becoming a tired example) initiated subtle changes to their model that got them from a college network of friends to where they are today. Google specialized in one core service, before everything else. (Googlezon?)

So really, where does the strategy take you? Gary Hamel says there are only rule makers, rule takers, and rule breakers out there. Strategy must be subversive. Its revolutionary.

I think that we can conclude that, for the most part, being good at what you do is important, but thinking progressively is necessary.

More than likely, this new aggregation storm will take over your internet experience on a daily basis. Bringing everything together just makes logical sense. Yet, the potential consequences of such an idea are also bit scary. It means more power for the already able and established, not to mention the presence of the only consistency in the whole package: advertising.

Until something more revolutionary comes along.

See...

• Googlezon: the fictional company of the future
• Conflicts of Interest: Google Watch
• List of companies that essentially do the same thing: aggregate
• Gary Hamel: Strategy is Revolution
  

jajaja = rsrsrs = hihahiha = hahaha

¿Sabes cuál es el denominador común de la aparente ecuación del título?

Que todas son formas de expresar la risa por escrito: en español, portugués, austríaco e inglés, respectivamente.

Cuando lo supe, el detalle me causó mucha curiosidad. Y yendo más allá... ¿cómo fue que lo pude saber? Pues gracias al chat y a Internet.

Arabes, chinos, africanos, franceses, anglosajones, alemanes, hispanos, latinos... todos confluyen y participan como audiencia de los diferentes y miles de sitios que rondan en la web.

Si hay algo que caracteriza a los usuarios que están realmente enganchados con el fenónemo evolutivo de Internet es la globalización o, como plantea Thomas Friedman, que la Tierra es plana.

Que nos sintamos parte del mundo en Twittervision. Que tengamos un amigo tailandés en Facebook o Bebo. Que le hayas dejado un comentario a un keniano en Flickr. Que sepa que hay un Ricardo Moreno mexicano y otro estadounidense gracias a Yoname ... en fin, cientos de ejemplos.

Conclusión: Si antes un negocio era naturalmente aislado del mundo por sus fronteras, hoy el que se cierra a las fronteras o piensa con límites será, desde ahora, el que correrá mayor riesgo.

O como dice el profesor de Sistemas y Tecnologías de Información del Instituto Empresa Enrique Dans en la página 7 de su artículo La Empresa y la Web 2.0:

"Las empresas, tras años de construir muros a su alrededor para evitar que lo que ocurría en su interior trascendiera al exterior, tras mucho tiempo de relacionarse con el mundo únicamente a través de un departamento de relaciones externas especialmente diseñado para ello (...), necesitan convertirse en entidades capaces de dialogar, de recibir información de su entorno".

Además...

• Wiki summary: The World is Flat.
• Blogs Corporativos, entrevista a David Bravo.
  

Trabajar... ¿Cuatro horas a la semana?

Este es el planteamiento de Timothy Ferris, un emprendedor estadounidense que con tan sólo 29 años está convertido en un nuevo gurú del management.

Su best seller The Four Hour Workweek plantea como los cambios tecnológicos de los últimos años permiten que una persona pueda optimizar su vida de tal manera de disfrutarla como lo hace un millonario.

Ferriss era el CEO de su start up en Silicon Valley y un día dejó todo y se dedicó a viajar por el mundo. Así fue como se dio cuenta que viajando y pasándolo bien igual ganaba lo mismo que encerrado todo el día en su oficina.

La verdad es que los comentarios que he visto en blogs sobre el libro me han provocado muchas ganas de leerlo. Obviamente que el libro no presentará ninguna fórmula mágica de éxito, sin embargo es curioso el planteamiento de buscar outsourcing para cumplir con muchas obligaciones que presenta el trabajo y así mejorar el estilo de vida. Quizás estoy siendo víctima del "marketing viral", pero para saberlo habrá que leerlo.

Más:

• Problogger entrevista a Tim Ferriss: Parte I y Parte II.
• Steve Rubel: The Four Hour Workweek, Behind the Meme.
• The NY Times: Time Wasted? Perhaps It's well spent. (Artículo sobre las horas de trabajo).

The Value of Information

At work, usually its Enrique who has the music playing for the whole office. And though he uses a number of internet radio sites, his favorite had always been Pandora, until licensing issues closed it for international users. Since our restriction, both him and I have been swapping internet radio sites that we find, trying to find one that kept the music flowing as we used to have it. Quite simply, nothing matched up.

What we most miss about Pandora was the capacity it had to take a song or artist, and offer recommendations that were similar and totally new based on filtered criteria (of over 400 variables, based in a study called the Music Genome Project). We would input a song or artist, and were amazed at how often we would find new artists we never heard of before that we enjoyed.

The way he measures the quality of an internet radio site is in the amount of times he manually skips songs (an advantage internet radio has over satellite and terrestrial). With Pandora, it would run for hours.

And then an amazing point occured to him as he discussed this with me. The business of recommendations is already well covered (by a monster like Amazon). But with something as popular as music, as accessible as one song, and as tangible as radio, the value of a database with this kind of capability is staggering. And whats more, its based in an extensive musical study. Now, they´ve started plans for bridging their service for mobile distribution. What else could Pandora have planned for their database? What other applications in music could this be potentially used for?

Screen capture of the Pandora interface

--- UPDATE! ---
CBS just bought Last.fm for $280 million, possibly an indication of where Internet Radio is headed. However, with this site, Enrique´s skip-track-rate was way too high. Story and Analysis

Interview with Tim Westergen, Pandora Founder

Does the Music Industry Make Any Sense?

Around the internet over the the last week, the name of Trent Reznor (of the band Nine Inch Nails) has been circulating and gathering a lot of attention for an interview he had given with the Herald Sun of Australia. In it, he builds a sensation of the kind of hopelessness that apparently surrounds his position in the music industry.

"I've got a battle where I'm trying to put out quality material that matters and I've got fans that feel it's their right to steal it and I've got a company that's so bureaucratic and clumsy and ignorant and behind the times they don't know what to do, so they rip the people off."

He then tells the story of how he walked into a music store in Sydney, and found his new album on sale for $10 more than any other album around. After asking why, he was told the following...

"Basically it's because we know you've got a core audience that's gonna buy whatever you put out, so we can charge more for that. It's the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy it. True fans will pay whatever. "

His response...

"And I just said "That's the most insulting thing I've heard. I've garnered a core audience that you feel it's OK to rip off? .... I don't blame people for stealing music if this is the kind of s--- that they pull off.

Click for the entire interview with Trent Reznor

Does this kind of action by the distribution system have a negative affect on band reputation? Reznor says yes, and "that it's hard to position yourself in a place with the fans where you don't look like a greedy asshole".

The music industry is a mess, how can anyone navigate through this, and do it ethically? An answer that has always come up is to look forward to technology, a marvelous social construct that helps make most of our lives easier (and its a great "clave" or key for all those case studies). Yet, I think that the point needs to be made that the internet as technology is exactly what has changed the whole game from the way it had worked for decades. A more radical technology [probably won´t] come around for generations. All parties will need to face and deal with this.

The idea of internet record labels, recording software, and internet radio is amazing (I loved Pandora while it worked for me), but there are still the incentives of too many interested parties to consider and the potential competition between new options that result from them. I think that much of the new confusion for the majority of users stems from this.

But, I would still not want to have it any other way, even Reznor admits that he steals music. Though, now we hear about those stories of black lists and law suits from record companies every once in a while, and how stores justify charging $10 more unethically. What we have here is really a Catch-22 - essentially, both listeners to music and the right holders to music both feel they have a right to steal it. And neither party knows where to go from here.

Supplemental Links:

• A Diagram: Engineering History of the Music Industry
• Pandora: Closes to International Users
• Third Party Predictions: The Future of the Music Industry
  

Actitud 2.0

¿Qué caracteriza a quienes pertenecen a las denominadas generaciones MTV o Y?

Entre muchas cualidades, a tener en cuenta:

• Prefieren ver y oir a leer.
• Desafiantes, retadores y cuestionadores.
• Amantes de videojuegos, mp3's, películas... y todo lo tecnológico.
  
• No piden permiso, informan.
  
• Prefieren la informalidad.
• Preocupados del yo más que del tu, él o ellos.

Ahora vean este video (inglés):

The Break Up
Uploaded by geertdesager

Algunas conclusiones

- El cambio generacional va de la mano con las nuevas tendencias que marcan el desarrollo y la evolución de Internet.

- La web no plasma otra cosa que la natural evolución del pensar humano y al mismo tiempo la técnica volverá a ser aprehendida -con nuevos efectos- por las futuras generaciones generando nuevos cambios.

- En 2007 estamos en pleno cambio generacional. Pronto el modelo de la web 2.0 tomará el poder y seguirá allí hasta que venga el tiempo de la 3.0 y así.

- Cualquier empresa debe entender que el cambio llegó y pronto se establecerá. Es el consumidor el que manda y te busca. Es la actitud 2.0. Y para peor o para mejor, o esto se acepta o nos quedamos sin nada, tal como le sucede al tipo en el video.

Más sobre el video:

• The Viral Garden: The "Breakup" Video.
• Enrique Dans: No hay dudas: la larga cola existe.
• Geert Desager (el creador del video): Varios links sobre éste.

El cambio tiene nombre

Para explicar a que va este título que suena tanto a eslogan político, me quedo con esta reflexión de Rob Malda, fundador de Slashdot en una entrevista que publica el diario El País en internet.

¿Qué influye más en el éxito de una página: su diseño, el sistema, sus contenidos?

Malda: "La frase, el tópico, dice que "el contenido es el rey, pero tras el éxito de una página hay algo más. El éxito tiene que ver con la pasión que hay tras los contenidos. Cualquiera puede construir un buen sistema. Internet está lleno de sitios bien diseñados, dinámicos, bonitos, en los que se han gastado miles de dólares, pero están vacíos. También hay sitios que no son particularmente atractivos, que tienen contenidos, pero nadie los visita. Creo que la gente puede oler la mentira, pueden detectar el fraude, así que lo importante es que cuando haces una web creas en lo que estás haciendo y diciendo. Las comunidades de usuarios se crean en torno a un interés compartido, una pasión común, y en el centro de ella debe haber alguien instigándola y animándola. Si no compartes esa pasión no tendrás ninguna posibilidad".

En los últimos días este blog ha sido objeto de una serie de cambios en diseño y contenido. Pues el cambio tiene nombre y apellido: Riley Maguire.

Doy aquí la bienvenida oficial a Nw Md Mngmt a mi compañero (y amigo) del MGEC que se incorpora al trabajo de este blog para hacerlo más interesante, entretenido (y bilingüe).

En la línea de Malda, los autores apostamos por diseño y contenido, con el fin de analizar, debatir, enseñar (y nosotros aprender) sobre este maravilloso abanico de nuevas oportunidades que internet le brinda al apasionante mundo de la comunicación. ¡A por ello!