On an average day I probably get 5-10 unsolicited emails from someone trying to get me to outsource web, mobile, social application development to their company.

They all happen to have very American sounding names despite being offshore – ex-pats maybe? – are all “the very best” at web, mobile and/or social, are all ISO / CMMi certified, and are all Microsoft or IBM or Oracle gold partners.

Here is the most recent e-mail that I received from one such company:


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Bob Smith to me

Hello ,

IntelliExtremeXienceE-CorpGroup® is the world’s leading Mobile Applications Design, Development and Delivery services company. We are interested in offering our mobile development services to your company and would like to explore possible opportunities regarding the same. The following is our brief overview:

Company : IntelliExtremeXienceE-CorpGroup® - People.Process.Power / Results Delivered since 1989™
Services : Mobile App Design, Development and Porting
Locations : US, UK, Sweden and India
Resources : 10,500,000+ developers

Engagement Models : Pro Mobility Program, Offshore Team, Dual-shore Team, Fixed scope-fixed cost

Accolades : ISO® 9001 certified, Microsoft® Gold Partner, Official Apple® Developer, NASSCOM® award winner (www.nasscom.in)

Supported Platforms : 7 including iPhone OS, Android OS, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm WebOS and Nokia Maemo

App categories : Books, Business, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Health, Lifestyle, Medical, Music, Navigation, Music, Photography, Productivity, Reference, Social Networking, Sports, Travel, Utilities and Weather
App technologies : Accelerometer, SQLite, File System, Networking, GPS, Core Location, Camera, Open AL, Open GL ES

Please let us know if there exists such an opportunity with your company and we would be happy to get back to you accordingly.

Reference Links
1. IntelliExtremeXienceE-CorpGroup®
www.IntelliExtremeXienceE-CorpGroup.com

2. About IntelliExtremeXienceE-CorpGroup®
www.IntelliExtremeXienceE-CorpGroup®.com/About

Regards,
Bob Smith
Head Business Development,
IntelliExtremeXienceE-CorpGroup®,

Portfolio iPhone:-
1. http://itunes.apple.com/in/app/atomic-chalk-scribble-talk/id374247494?mt=8
2. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/footyroom/id364550897?mt=8
3. http://itunes.apple.com/in/app/iappmatch/id347194540?mt=8
4. http://itunes.apple.com/in/app/fuel-smart-us/id340435838?mt=8
5. http://itunes.apple.com/in/app/asafedrive/id327598691?mt=8
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Here is why these emails get deleted immediately if they happen to make it past my spam filter:

1. I hate email. I barely read email from people that I want to talk to much less from the 10 Indian / Chinese / Bulgarians with American names that are the very best iso-9000 cmmi level 5 mobile app developers in the world that want to chit chat.
2. What is the call to action? I assume it is to have a vague conversation about how you may be able to get my business? That doesn’t sound like a very productive use of my extremely limited time at all. I need a succinct and specific request for you that will help make my life easier and explain why you will make me look like a rock star to my boss if you want a chunk of my very valuable time.
3. I have no idea who you are. I am suspect of the accolades you have received and I doubt the great work you have done because I have never heard of any of those apps or customers. I think a lot like the Bonnano Crime Family from the film Donnie Brasco – If you want me to trust you, you need to be introduced to me by someone I know and trust that can vouch for you.
4. Who emails anymore? You have a much better shot at following me on twitter and replying @ me, or friend requesting me on Facebook and commenting on a few of my extremely clever and pithy (if I do say so myself) status updates telling me how super clever and hilarious they were before moving in for the kill.

Bottom line – if you want to stand out in the crowded outsourcing market you’re going to have to try harder. Be creative, be memorable, and most importantly, be interesting.

Here are some quick hints on how to effectively sell someone like me:

• If I don’t know you or if I don’t get introduced to you by someone I know then I probably won’t talk to you.
• If I don’t know you, and you don’t know someone that knows me, then you better grab my attention with the creative approach you take to meet me AND/OR you better have the most impressive client list known to man.
• once you do get in the door make sure you fully understand the context of what I am trying to build and why. Build a prototype as part of the sales process to prove to me that you get it, can do the work, and that our business matters to your firm.

Unless you live in a cave you have likely noticed the hoopla around the Apple iPad.  When it first came out many people immediately came to the conclusion that this was an attack by Apple on the Amazon Kindle as well as eBook sales in general.

I don’t agree.

Amazon is in the business of selling books.  Apple is in the business of selling hardware (consumer electronics to be exact).  The iPad is just a new distribution media for Amazon to sell books – just like the Kindle was.  

The iPad happens to have been brought to market by Apple whereas the Kindle happens to have been brought to market by Amazon.  Big deal.  It’s just a new way for Amazon to sell more eBooks.

This is a good thing…

…. If Amazon sticks to its core business and doesn’t get into a pissing contest with Apple over a device, and market, that is irrelevant to Amazon.

Another great business lesson on keeping things simple and staying focused.

If you’ve ever been involved in a startup you know that it’s a different world. I have the advantage of having been on both sides of the corporate wall. I’ve been at the head of a successful startup, and I’ve been an executive at a 100-year old company. Startups are their own unique creatures.

Now, one of the sports I truly enjoy is Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). MMA is, in many ways, the perfect confluence of the fighting sports. Wrestling, Muay Thai, Jiu-Jitsu, Boxing and all of it meet in this environment.

The same is true with starting a company. It’s a wild ride, where every possible business variable comes into play. And starting a company is also a lot like MMA training in a number of ways:

Practice all you want, at some point you’ve got to perform.

At some point, you need to free your product from the confines of the startup environment. You’ve got to create a winning product. Your startup needs to put something out there that does its job, and does it well. Amazing and robust solutions that never leave the confines of the test environment are useless.

It’s all about survival of the fittest.

The startup world is one of heavy competition. Your opponents are out there, and they’re doing their damndest to get your customers. You need to not only perform, but to perform better than everyone else out there in the field. One weak link in your startup will cause the whole thing to fail. You need to be the best of the best.

No matter how strong your supporting cast, it falls on you alone to make things happen

Talented product development teams, spot-on marketers and a dynamic sales force are essential to the success of a startup. At the end of the day, however, it’s up to you to put those assets to work in a way that really impacts the market. The startup will rise and fall on your vision and leadership (or lack thereof).

Ideas don’t mean jack shit. Only execution matters.

You might think you’ve got the best moves, that your product is better than anyone else’s. You might even be right. But if you can’t successfully get that product to the market and then beat out the competition, having the better product doesn’t do much for you. If you don’t believe me, just remember the lesson of Betamax. An arguably superior technology was put to bed by VHS because the folks behind VHS were better at getting their product to the people.

Sometimes, the guy who can hold his breath the longest wins.

It isn’t always the company with the best idea that wins out. In many cases, startups aren’t going to beat their competition because they have a better product or even better tactics. Many battles are simply battles of attrition. The longer you can take a beating or hold your breath, the more likely you are to wind up in the victory circle.

I’m proud to work in the education field. Being part of a 110-year old organization that has provided services to the education world is at once a humbling and daunting task. Being involved in the new media side of things is even more daunting, as sometimes it takes a lot of work to draw out the true potential of an established company in an established field.

Still, there is a sense in which the educational world has been at the fore when it comes to technology. There are few areas in which this is as obvious as the area of open source.

Educational institutions have, historically, been hotbeds of activity for incubating open source projects. Take, for example, Free BSD and Berkeley Unix, developed initially at Berkeley. Consider GNU and the Free Software Foundation, housed at MIT. Even FileZilla, the fifth most popular download of all time on SourceForge.net, was originally developed as a university class project by Tim Kosse and two of his classmates.

This connection between open source and education goes back a couple of decades. Universities began adopting open source software in the early 1990s. it was ideal for Universities, because it was low-cost software and it let the University tech staff make small changes and tweaks. It gave Universities the kind of agility and control they wanted and needed as the Internet and the World Wide Web began to take hold as part of the Universities’ suite of services.

Now, a lot of this early open-source activity met poor ends. Many Universities argued that development and changes they made to open-source software were valuable intellectual property, and might have commercial value. This meant that much of the software produced during that time was locally developed and not shared. Without the full community of developers, then, much of the development would wind up being just sort of barely good enough. Part of the point of open source is that there are literally thousands of developers waiting to improve your product, as opposed to the one or two a University might have on staff.

As time went on, however, more and more Universities could see the value in contributing to open source. In particular, some of the most popular suites of Learning Management Software (LMS) have been developed in universities for an open source environment.

Whether you’re talking about something like FileZilla, the various LMS or the Geographic Information Systems software MapWindow GIS, most of the open source apps developed in Universities were born of necessity. Faculty and students had a need to accomplish a specific educational task, and so they designed software to handle it. By doing it in an open-source environment, today we have robust, versatile and efficient apps to aid in the task of educating young minds. In that way, the world of education has both benefited from and contributed to the open source movement.

Even with the occasional bump in the road, you’d be hard-pressed to suggest that any other field has had the kind of positive impact on open source that education has had.

Most startups fail. That’s just a simple fact. Of those startups that do manage to get out of the startup phase intact, few are around in two years, and fewer are profitable. Those that do make it through do so through a combination of great products, stellar leadership, and a little bit of dumb luck.

I know what I’m talking about. My startup, Speek, was one of the few startups in our market that proved to have what it takes. Speek is still humming along smoothly and daily capturing more market.

I won’t pretend that our success was all due to my amazing technical leadership. In fact, some of our success was quite in spite of some of my leadership decisions. No one gets it all right, ever.

One thing I did right, though, was set the tone for what we did at Speek. I developed a set of 10 golden principles that drove every decision that we ever made about our product. I believe these principles were at the root of our success.

Here, then are the 10 things we strove for in our product at Speek:

1. Speed. Our app must be fast from the user perspective. More than one second for any task is unacceptable.
2. Instant Utility. Our app must be instantly useful, out of the box. If it takes too long or is too complex to configure, it’s useless.
3. Voice. Our app must have attitude. It must have personality. It must be unique and different. Think Twitter’s “fail whale” (without the fail).
4. Less is more. Either we do it right or we pull it. Do what needs to be done to make it work and make it work well.
5. Programmable. We offer more than a product. We offer a platform. Customers can take what we build and improve upon it.
6. Personal. Our app must generate endearment. We want users to be rabid fans and product evangelists. More than just a product or a platform, our product should create a community of connected people.
7. Restful. Each aspect of our app should have a free and comprehensible URL.
8. Discoverable. Our app should be friendly to search engines and social media. It should easily be discovered by the world.
9. Clean. We should have a simple user interface with large fonts and lots of space. No UI screen should ever feel busy or confusing. It should be crystal clear what should be done on each screen.
10. Playful. We have a damn monkey for a logo. Our app should invoke that kind of playful spirit and attitude.

Now, I get that some of these principles might not fit certain startups. Some are more or less specific to the software startup environment. For the most part, however, you can extrapolate these ideas to give your startup a serious advantage in your market, no matter what your product.

Have you ever noticed that, when a new employee starts working for you, they’re highly motivated? They feel the need to make their mark on the company. They want to be impressive. They want to set a trajectory that will ensure their advancement. Sure, sometimes it’s just sycophantic nonsense, but in most cases they genuinely want to demonstrate their skills and their worth to the company.

This is a good thing. This is a really good thing. That drive to demonstrate worth will, in most cases, pay off for the company. But, how do you take advantage of this phenomenon?

Positive Reinforcement Does Wonders

The corporate environment can have a mind-numbing effect on even the most motivated, high-quality performer. Getting past the entrenched politics, the written and unwritten procedures and policies and the general corporate malaise is a challenge. And, while motivated employees like to make a positive difference for the company with their ideas, they don’t usually relish the idea of having to jump through so many hoops to make a positive change.

One way, then, to reward that new blood drive is to remove barriers. When you see a new employee who has a good idea, do what you can to fast-track the idea. Help her overcome the political barriers. Give her a head’s-up on how to grease certain wheels, or who to talk to about cutting red tape.

When the change does happen, reward him in other ways. Simple verbal praise is all right and important, but it isn’t enough. You need to offer other rewards, such as peer recognition. Ideally, an idea or innovation that makes or saves the company money ought to have a monetary reward.

Keep Staffed with Highly Motivated People

So, you understand how to take advantage of this new blood motivation on an individual level. But, how do you keep it fresh? How do you keep bringing in new blood?

It’s simple enough. You constantly evolve your staff by finding ways to always bring in new, motivated, intelligent personnel.

You have to be careful here, of course. You don’t want to lose motivated employees. If your bottom 10% are all still motivated and productive, they don’t deserve to be killed off and the company will be worse off without them.  This is what is sometimes problematic with the old GE / Six Sigma mentality of “killing off” 10% of your work force periodically.

You also need to watch out for the potential negative impact this has on productive employees. In some cases, it will have the unintended consequence of scaring the hell out of them. Employees will start to dread the regularly-scheduled new folks, and may begin to get paranoid and feel as though they have a target on their backs.

If you’re lavish with your rewards, this isn’t as much of a danger, of course.

A better option may be to occasionally find ways to bring in new staff and grow. This is especially true if you already have a dynamite, productive team. Find new roles, and find the budget. Of course, this works well with bigger organizations, and not so well with startups.

Finally, you need to realize that not every new employee has that “new car” shine. If you bring someone in who doesn’t seem interested in making her mark on your organization, cut them loose sooner, rather than later. Then, go out and find an employee who wants to make a difference.

I’ll be at TechCrunch Disrupt and Startup Alley next week (Tuesday and Wednesday).

Should be an awesome event!

TechCrunch Disrupt is the only conference that gathers both Web innovators disrupting media and technology and also executives successfully navigating disruption to talk about turning change into opportunity.  Disrupt is for innovators in new Internet-enabled industries: social Web. Mobile computing. Real-time data. Sentiment analysis. Web targeting. Smart devices. The app ecosystem. The rise of micro-celebrity. Gaming and virtual goods. And more.

Kinda funny – Lady Gaga’s worldwide manager and digital strategist, Troy Carter, will be there to discuss new realities in content creation and distribution.

Here are some of the other speakers that will be there

Here is the link to get tickets to attend

I was recently asked to help build a case for investing millions of dollars into converting a monolithic architecture into a Service Oriented Architecture. The audience were to be very senior level executives that are not technical at all.

I thought it may be useful to post the 4 key points I gave to go along with this PPT Slide as well as some good metaphors/analogies helping non-techies understand SOA.

Here they are:

– Enabling: SOA/Web Services are what enabled us to build the QoTD iPhone app and are what will enable us to build the future web 2.0, mobile and social apps that we want and need.
- Efficient: Having a web service layer allows us to write functionality once and then re-use it on future projects.
- Agility: A Service Oriented Architecture allows us to decouple logic from presentation. This makes it easier and faster to changes look, feel, and functionality on the fly.
- Integration: Web Services allows us to easily exchange functionality and data with our partners, schools and customers.

Some good analogies/metaphors to describe SOA:

1. Printing Press: SOA is a lot like the invention of the printing press. Prior to the printing press scribes had to manually copy a book each time it changed or needed to be distributed. When the printing press came out a book could be written once and then easily changed or re-used in a centralized fashion. Things got faster and cheaper.
2. Food/Chef: SOA is like eating at a buffet: the chef prepares a range of dishes from which you build your own meal. The meal you choose does not require the whole ensemble to be put together ‘in the kitchen’: rather, the chef focuses solely on ensuring that there is an appropriate range of dishes provided in the buffet to keep most people happy for most of the time, based on market demand, season (and other prevailing conditions), consumer feedback/requests/suggestions, etc.  I got this from Beta Thoughts.
3. Lego’s:  -  This is probably the most widely used and most popular.  It’s kind of long so I’ll link to it rather than re-posting the entire thing.  I got this from ZapThink.

There has been a ton of talk online this past week about evil Facebook making yet another change to its privacy policy and getting ever closer to a twitter-esque public network.

Journalists and experts are up in arms because big brother Facebook is going to share your valuable data with 3rd parties.

Guess what?  I like what Facebook is doing.

I have 1,000+ facebook friends.  I am careful not to post things that I don’t want anyone in the world to see – bosses, bosses bosses, clients, customers included.

If you are using social media the way you should be – to establish yourself as an expert or brand or both – then this is good news.  It means that search engines and other 3rd party services will now be able to index what you talk about on Facebook and draw more attention to you.  It makes the grass roots, self-perpetuating capabilities of social media that much more powerful.

Twitter has been sharing your data since it launched.  By its very nature it is an open community.  Unfortunately for Twitter the real “meat” of what they capture about their users comes in 140 character spurts.  Imagine if Twitter had the breadth of data that Facebook has?  I have a not-so-secret secret for you – you won’t have to use your imagination for long.

Be on the look-out for Twitter starting to roll out more Facebook-like features.  Conversely, be on the look-out for Facebook to continue to laxify their privacy policy to be more like what they now wish they had started as – a twitter-esque open community where data flows publicly.

So here’s my advice – don’t fight the inevitable; use it to your advantage.  It’s now easier than ever for John Doe to become a real brand, a real expert, a recognizable name in their field.  Take advantage of that!

Oh, and be very careful with the Facebook chatter.  It is not as private as you may think and it will only lessen.

If you’ve never driven a supercharged Porsche, you really don’t know what you’re missing. A Porsche is the most beautiful piece of machinery ever to hit the road, and when you’re driving one you’re in a whole other world.

Needless to say, I drive a supercharged Porsche, and I drive it fast. I have the speeding tickets to show for it, too. And I don’t drive fast because I like the danger, or even because I’m necessarily in a hurry. I drive fast because my Porsche can handle it. When I’m doing 55 MPH, it handles like most cars do at 25 MPH.

So, it dawned on me one day, as the officer was getting back into her highway patrol car, how little sense the umbrella speed limit makes. Yes, driving 55 MPH is safer in many cars than driving 85 MPH. But every car handles differently. There are some cars that shouldn’t be driven at 45 MPH, much less 85 MPH.

What’s this all go to do with tech and tech business? I think it’s a good analogy for the mistake that many businesses make in developing their products and processes. They look for that one magic number, that single quantitative upper limit, and they won’t go any further. They impose speed limits that might make sense in some circumstances, but that are completely irrelevant in others.

To be successful as an individual or as a company, you have to put umbrella quantitative analysis on the back burner. Sure, there is sometimes a single quantitative silver bullet; cruising down the highway at 150 MPH isn’t safe, Porsche or no. But we need to start from a point that, for the most part, isn’t concerned about a single silver bullet but rather a good blend of quantitative and qualitative criteria for success.

So, how do we do that? Well, we need to start looking past just simple quantitative metrics and see them in context of qualitative metrics. For example, during the process of product development, I’ve used a variety of qualitative measurements, such as web traffic trends, successful new user registrations, click-through rates and referral rates. Alongside those numbers, I’ve also looked at the micro. I’ve watched new users using the app, and asked them questions. Do they like the app? What do they struggle with? Throw in some usability studies and user polls, and you begin to build a data pool that’s both qualitative and quantitative.

It is possible to go too far, of course. You can’t rely only on qualitative measurement. Qualitative measurement has its limitations. Often, it can’t be reproduced due to natural variations, whether that’s a variation in peoples’ buying practices or whether it’s a slight developmental variance, or even the proverbial fly in the ointment. That’s why the most effective methods of business decision making use a balanced blend of both quantitative and qualitative criteria.

There are, of course, risks. When you don’t put in hard and fast limits, sometimes you’re going to pay the price. You’re going to get speeding tickets. You’re going to step on someone’s toes. You’re going to face obstacles anytime you challenge the status quo. In the end, however, the payoff is so significant that you can’t just let it pass you by.