Chris Crosby

Here is a useful article for any software company considering using open source components in your applications. I can tell you from personal experience that if you think getting acquired is part of your exit strategy then you need to pay attention to what open source code may find its way into yours, because your acquirer certainly will. If you’re not planning on getting acquired, its still a good idea to understand what your legal exposures might be.

My suggestion is to make sure you document any third party (even commercial) code and how you’re using it across your applications; and then have an attorney review the appropriate license agreements.

I came across a clever demonstration of Analytics from a Business Intelligence software provider called QlikView, and thought it worth sharing. Note- In an indirect way, Latigent competed with QlikView and I always admired their clever marketing campaigns. In this application of their analytics tool, they dumped radio airplay data from  MediaGuide.com into an OLAP cube and overlayed the QlikView front end (demo found here).

Originally I just wanted to play around with the data, so I filtered based on the greatest band of all time, Van Halen.

Unexpectedly, a couple of things struck me about the results:

1. The top two most played songs both appear on the album 1984, but 1984 is the second most played album: Seems a bit counter intuitive at first, but upon closer inspection we discover that the album Van Halen’s songs may be played fewer times, but there are more of them. The aggregate is greater by more than 300 song plays. There is a lesson to be learned here about product distribution, and a pretty good example of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory in action.
2. Why the big disparity between the “David Lee Roth Van Halen” and the “Sammy Hagar Van Halen”? My assumption is that this is most likely because Van Halen is on tour right now with David Lee Roth. No doubt radio stations are heavily promoting this tour by spinning the vintage favorites. My hypothesis though is one that is impossible to prove given the current data set. One would “just need to know” that these guys are on tour to draw that conclusion. Without this information, what conclusions would you draw? Would they be accurate? Is mine accurate?

Now, an interesting exercise would be to take the chart below that displays where these songs are being played and overlay the tour schedule. Also, the data is only available from Feb 24, 2007 to current. What would a wider data set show us? Is the distribution reversed when they’re on tour with Sammy Hagar? What about when they’re not on tour?

This example demonstrates that the unlocked power of analytics is not just about spotting trends that you otherwise would not have, but its often in finding and qualifying external (and sometimes non-structured) data points and quantifying their impact. It also causes you to ask questions and seek answers that you otherwise wouldn’t: What long tails are hiding in your data? How can you leverage them? What external events influence your business? How do you qualify them, and quantify their impact?

What else do you not know you need to know?

Looks like Pentaho closed a $12M Series C round of financing. This is exciting stuff. With the consolidation of large Business Intelligence players its opening the market for the already under served SMB and for Enterprise BI projects looking for a lower cost of ownership.

The only real question is if these guys will join the ranks of Zimbra and become a promising start-up swallowed by a behemoth too soon…

Last summer I wrote a post about the book A Billion Bootstraps which led to Amy and I getting involved in Microfinance. Since that time, I’ve been wrestling in my mind with how to combine some of the most successful elements of capitalism with those of non-profits in order to create charities that are self-sustaining. The idea is to structure companies in such a way that they could generate their own consistent revenue stream by other means than donations and bake sales. The companies however would still be non-profit and targeted on specific philanthropic initiatives.

Well, long story short, I got a little distracted last fall and was never able to reconcile the concept in my mind. That is until I picked-up Muhammad Yunus’ new book Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism. After reading this, its safe to say that the creator of Microfinance has done it again. 

In this book Yunus introduces the idea of the Social Business model which he defines as:

a non-loss, non-dividend business. Rather than being passed on to investors, the surplus generated by the social business is reinvested in the business. Ultimately, it is passed on to the target group of beneficiaries in such forms as lower prices, better service, and greater accessibility

Yunus’ first voyage into Social Business was a joint effort between Grameen Bank and Danone to offer highly nutritional yogurt at prices that are affordable to the poorest people in Bangladesh (great overview available here).

It only took until Chapter 2 in the book before my head was spinning with ideas about, not only how to expand this concept to address our country’s poor, but also what will be required to create a true Social Sector and bring the idea of Social Business mainstream.  Thoughts of creating Social Venture Capital Funds and working with Congress to create new and unique tax and entity structures is rather exciting. Expect to hear more from me on this in future posts.

I also have to think that the answer to America’s (and the world’s for that matter) Health Care crisis lies not in relying on our Government to push some type of “Universal” Plan, but rather in creative individuals creating a social business model to redirect industry profits back into solving the problem.

Seth Godin has an interesting post about why your last impression with a customer is more important than the first (you know the old adage “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”).

He’s right, and I thinks its really about making every interaction count across your organization. When you consistently deliver you build credibility with your customers that leads to repeat business and the word of mouth marketing that Seth talks about. You may have a “great” sales team that wows your prospect on the first sales call, but if the rest of your team can’t deliver on these expectations then it doesn’t really matter.

This theory applies in mass when you look at a contact center where a customer may be calling (or emailing or chatting) with an agent about anything from placing a new order to questioning a billing issue. Its important to focus on every aspect of this interaction, from how long the customer sat in queue, to how long the agent left them on hold, to how professional and knowledgeable the agent was.

Sometimes you never know when the current interaction will be the last.

OK, so the title is a bit overstated, but now that I have your attention:

A couple months ago Google [quietly] released a hosted charting API. Albeit it lacks the sex appeal of their big splash products like GMail or Google Docs, it tapped my imagination.

The basic concept is that your application passes parameters to a URL hosted at Google. It allows you to define things like chart type, size, colors, data values, etc. For example, hitting this URL,

 http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250×100&chl=Hello|World

returns the following image:

Part of the reason this grabbed my attention is that its very similar to Latigent’s BlueVue (now Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite ((CUIS))) “API” for accessing reports & charts from other applications (except you don’t actually pass the data to CUIS, since that’s the real point of having a full blown BI App What I find amusing here is that Google, whether intentionally or not, has basically entered into the 3rd party control business. Very few people ever build their own charting control as its not core to their application, and there are inexpensive alternatives to coding your own. Google just introduced another inexpensive option. Now, I seriously doubt that Google will ever cut into the market share of guys like Dundas, but it could certainly address the needs of some low-level apps.

Expanding on this hosted API/3rd Party Control concept, it’s reasonable to think that a creative developer could duct-tape together the APIs from Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Charts, Google Reader (unsupported “API” here) and Google Search Appliance to come up with a rudimentary and functional presentation layer for a reporting application.

When you pepper in things like databases in the cloud, one begins to ponder if every aspect of an application will eventually be distributed, and perhaps the next software evolution will be nothing but middleware that glues stuff together.

One of the most effective, and ineffective, ways to increase the value of a customer is by upselling additional products or services at the time of a sale. Effectively this can increase your items/revenue per sale and raise your gross margin, ineffectively you can frustrate your customer and send them somewhere else. Here’s an example of the latter:

Amy and I went to open a new checking account a couple weeks ago and over the course of 15 minutes we were offered: a Home Equity Line of Credit on our home that we had owned for two weeks, we were pre-approved for a credit card we didn’t ask for, and we were pitched overdraft protection (apparently incase we somehow forget how to balance our checkbook). At this point it became blatantly apparent that the woman helping us was just reading prompts on her screen vs. actually identifying what services Amy and I might find useful based on our needs (interestingly enough we were dealing with the branch manager). 

By the end of the conversation I was almost frustrated enough to walk out and skip the whole deal, but the idea of going through the exact same scenario at another bank was nauseating.

Ironically, the only offer I did accept was the option to have my monthly statements sent via email vs. the old fashion printed/snail-mail way. In my opinion this offer was actually backwards, “eStatements” should be the standard offer and paper statements being the downsell.

The moral of the story is this:

Are you qualifying your customers’ needs and offering appropriate services and products, or are you taking a shotgun offer approach just to try and hit a monthly quota? How are you really impacting your bottom line and your customers’ experience? Are you training and empowering your employees to discern the difference, or just populating scripts for them?

Government Transparency is almost as big a buzzword as Web 2.0 lately. And for that matter, you would think the two would go hand-and-hand. With all of the killer technology available in our information age, one would think that it should be relatively straight forward to get a picture of what our government does in return for our tax dollars and votes.

The sad truth is that it is extremely difficult to decipher anything that goes on in Washington, from laws that are passed to how tax dollars are spent.

Jason recently pointed out an article on Why Congress needs version control. I think its a fantastic idea, and certainly serves as an example of how today’s technology can be applied to the governmental processes. However, I think we can go well beyond that.

I’ve spent the last several months scouring the net for what information is publicly available and from where. There are a number of government sites that make pieces of information available, and private sites that take those pieces of raw data and try to make something intelligent out of it.

For example:

• The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) makes available the donor records of everyone that contributes more than $200 to a politicians campaign. But who wants to download all that data and crunch it through excel? I tried, trust me its interesting stuff but tough to glean anything useful from it.
• GovTrack.US does a fantastic job of tracking every bill that hits the floor of the House and the Senate, complete with voting records of politicians. They even make it available in RSS feeds. This is cool, but as a standalone tool you can’t figure out much more than how many Post Offices Congress has named this year.
• Maplight is trying to marry these two concepts together and tie voting records with PAC contributions. That’s an admirable effort and I think with a little data modeling and consolidation we could use this as a starting point to gain some very useful knowledge.

The examples go on and on, and if you have some good ones, I’d love to see them. But the point is when you step back from all of this it starts to resemble a corporation, or “the enterprise”, with multiple data points and silo vendors trying to address individual application needs.

Enter Business Intelligence.

First we start with a data mart. We identify all the publicly available data points (there are far more available than I mentioned above), and we create a data model that does some cool things like create unique identifiers for congressmen and candidates and Bills that hit the floor, etc. It will take some leg work to get all of the ETL loads, or automated data pulls, set-up. But as the sites mentioned above have demonstrated this is not insurmountable.

The next step is the presentation layer. Once we have all the data and its modeled appropriately, the sky is the limit here. If built correctly, every U.S. citizen could have an almost real time dashboard on Congress, or run an ad hoc report on budgetary spending, or create a scorecard on their local Congressman, or… (more on these in a later post).

I think the key to this is to treat it like an open source project. So perhaps MYSQL and something like Pentaho are in order. This would keep commercial conflicts out of the equation and make people feel like they are more apart of the process.

I don’t see Washington creating a tool like this anytime soon, therefore we’ll have to take a step forward in doing it ourselves. Any takers?

politics