Chris Crosby

A big cheers to one of my favorite start-ups, DimDim (see blog post here). They just raised $6M in capital. Nice work guys. It demonstrates what’s possible if you come to market with a viable product in the right niche and execute well.  These guys didn’t come out of the gate as a “Web 2.0″ company trying to boil the ocean. They started small and grew organically through partners and beta customers until they worked out the bugs and kinks. My guess is that these guys will continue to execute well and get acquired by someone looking to get into the collaboration space to augment their existing apps (Google anyone?)

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.

About a month ago, I wrote a post on the book “A Billion Bootstraps” and briefly discussed the concept of Microcredit. Since reading the book earlier this year, Amy and I have been actively researching Microcredit and sizing up the best angle and mechanisms for us to get involved. Coincidentally about two weeks ago, we saw a special on the Chicago channel about Microfinance and Kiva.Org. This program anchored our attention towards what I believe is the future of philanthropy; and I think once you check it out you’ll agree.

Kiva is a non-profit organization that connects microloan lenders directly to Microfinance institutions via the internet. The Microfinance field partner works in the local community to identify and manage the individual loans. (A field partner is essentially a mini-bank without the commercialized aspects that we’re accustomed to). They post the individuals seeking loans with descriptions of who the money will go to and what they’ll be using it for. Individual loan needs range from $200 up to about $1,200.

Would-be loaners can then browse Kiva’s web site and select which individuals they’d like to help. They can contribute anywhere from $25 to the full amount of the loan with literally the click of a mouse. When the loaner decides which loan they’d like to fund and for how much, they are taken to PayPal to process the transaction (PayPal is not charging any processing fees).

Once the transaction is complete, Kiva provides a basic portfolio management tool that allows you to track your loans and the repayment process. They also have some nice community building features such as online journals from the loan recipients.  

Beyond the idea of Microloans, what I am amazed at is how simple and effective the Kiva concept is. Kiva has almost no overhead, operates from donations only and doesn’t take an administration fee out of your loan (thus negating those frustrating annual reports from large charities breaking down how much of your contribution goes to “overhead and administration costs”).

The ability to cost effectively connect individual philanthropists directly with those in need on a global scale is truly revolutionary.   

I believe this model is ingenious. The technology and concepts could be applied to many vertical charitable initiatives. I can envision a similar charity helping America’s homeless population. Someone could take the basic idea of Microloans and extend it to allow people to contribute or fund other services like mental health and chemical dependency counseling, or temporary living to help people get back on their feet, or…

When people can see the individuals they are helping and visualize where their contributions are going, I believe they will be much more likely to get involved (and especially from the comfort of their home PC).

Kiva.Org has gained a great deal of media attention lately and from the looks of it, they’re about to be featured on Oprah.  They also offer Gift Certificates starting from $25, what a great gift for the holidays…

Here is an example loan from their web site: Miguel Mazzini (picture in the banner below). He needs $550 to expand his seafood selling business. Miguel will be repaying the loan over eight months.

Miguel has 7 years’ experience in selling seafood, which he learned from his father who took him to work with him from a very young age. Miguel learned and mastered the trade as he gained more experience. He decided to work on his own since he was married and needed to be able to cover the expenses for his household. He works from 4 am to 11 am every day with his wife and a relative who helps them remove the meat from crabs so that later it can be put into tubs and sold.

Miguel wants a loan to be able to invest in different types of seafood. This is his second loan with our program. He hopes that he can give his brother work with the income generated. Miguel is married, 23 years old, and has a daughter six months old. He hopes to be able to earn enough to have his own home, since he now lives with his parents.

Go ahead and say it, “This is awesome….”

	Make a loan Change a life
Name: Kossi A. Location: Togo	Loan Needed: $1,000 33 % funded

I want to pass along information on a webinar that AC2 Solutions, Latigent’s preferred Workforce Management Partner, is doing later this week. If you have never seen AC2 Solutions products you are truly missing out on the future of workforce management. These guys have a killer solution and a clear vision on where contact centers are going and how you’ll need to forecast and staff for them. 

Dr. Aykin is extremely knowledgeable and regardless of which WFM product you use you won’t want to miss their free events.  

You can register for the webinar here.  Please see below for the description of the event.

Each month, Dr. Turgut Aykin discusses relevant topics in the workforce optimization arena via free web seminars.  Every workforce manager can benefit extensively from Dr. Aykin’s knowledge and experience.
On Thursday September 6, forecasting, probably the most vital step in the workforce management process, will be the topic of discussion. Without a solid forecast in place, the best workforce management systems will falter. While forecasting methodologies range from simple gut feel to intricate mathematical algorithms, there are several that every workforce manager should be aware of to effectively forecast the center’s workload.

In today’s complex multi-skill, multi-site, multimedia contact centers, forecasting contact volumes and average handling times accurately can be an extraordinary challenge.  During this web seminar Dr. Aykin will review several techniques used for forecasting and discuss advantages and risks of each.
Participants will learn about the following:

• Why accuracy in workforce planning matters?
• Time series models
• Exponential smoothing
• Time series decomposition
• Box-Jenkins ARIMA Models
• Dynamic regression
• Curve fitting
• Expert systems for contact center forecasting
• Agent requirements forecasting
• Forecast accuracy tracking
• Overview of upcoming seminar:  Optimal Scheduling (September 21, 3pm ET)

To register, please go to http://www.ac2solutions.com/index.php/about/seminar-registration/

Be sure to join Dr. Aykin on future web seminars as well.

• Advanced Forecasting (Sept. 6, 3pm ET)
• Optimal Scheduling (Sept. 21, 3pm ET)
• Revenue Optimal Staffing & Scheduling (Oct. 4, 3pm ET)
• Safety Staffing (Oct. 18, 3pm ET)
• Multi-criteria schedule Bidding & Vacation Planning (Nov. 1, 3pm ET)

Dr. Turgut Aykin is the president of ac2 Solutions. He has published numerous scientific articles in refereed professional journals on contact center efficiencies, and he has routinely been invited to contribute at national conferences. He has served as an Area Editor and member of the Editorial Board for the International Journal of Information Systems in the Service Sector (IJISSS), and is a member of the International Journal of Operations and Quantitative Management. He has worked with many Fortune 500 companies including Bank of America, Caterpillar, Celestica, Charter Communications, Convergys, Delta Air Lines, IBM, Lucent Technologies, Motorola, Phillips, and Siemens (Munich, Germany) in improving their processes and performance.  Dr. Aykin holds BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.

 

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

The blogoshere and news headlines are a blaze lately with articles on “Politics 2.0” and candidates harnessing the Internet and social networks to gain wider exposure and raise money.

But what if you’re not a candidate or PAC and you want to influence a campaign? Or make your voice heard to other voters about an issue or a politician that you love or hate?

Traditionally this was a difficult task. You used to have print flyers and knock on doors or pass them out on street corners. In today’s world, you just start a blog. Think blogs don’t matter? Do a Google search on “Pete Roskam”, the Congressman for IL-06.

The fifth result down is Dump Roskam, a blog “Dedicated to tracking Roskam in DC. This blog will show his policies and votes that are way too conservative for Illinois.” A little more poking around Google gets you to The Roskam Record, a blog “Committed to monitoring Rookie Congressman Roskam’s words and actions.”

In a world where, if you don’t appear on the first couple pages of a Google search you don’t exist, this type of publicity can be very damaging for a candidate’s image.

As a congressman, Roskam is up for reelection in 2008. Now, as much as I wish that traditional big media and 30 second sound bites on TV won’t be an influence in 2008, they will. However, as the Internet takes on a more influential component of campaigning its going to be tough for candidates to protect their online identity. (Just ask Hillary Clinton after the famous YouTube video that kicked off the 2008 political season).

Surely it won’t be long before a web savvy campaign manager creates a smear campaign by helping supporters to optimize their blogs and web sites for search engines and Google page rank. However, in the meantime, here’s to the Internet helping individuals get their voices and opinions heard!!

Ok, while most everyone else is busy puking on Cisco’s parade for their two recent acquisitions of Social Networking Companies, and wasting otherwise productive time by ranting about why this is such a bad idea. Let’s take a look at what’s really going on here.

Unlike the News Corp-MySpace acquisition, Cisco clearly isn’t after these companies for their customer or user base. Cisco could careless about ad generated revenue. What they’re really after here is the technology. Granted, just about any high school kid could code one of these things, but why reinvent the wheel if its only going to cost you a couple million bucks to buy it?

So the question becomes, why would a router & switch company want “social networking” software? The answer is actually pretty simple.

The Contact Center.

In 1999, Cisco bought a company called Geotel that provided CTI and Enterprise Call Center Routing functionality. Over the years that followed they’ve acquired companies that provide other contact center functionality such as email, chat, web collaboration, and self-service IVR. They’ve integrated these technologies into what we in the contact center world call Multi-Channel Communications, or to be more specific Cisco Unified Contact Center Solutions.

Ok, so why social networking? Let’s start by taking a look at a still relatively unintegrated form of customer contact; the online user group forum.

A traditional customer forum site, like Roxio/Sonic for example, can divert thousands of calls into the call center by allowing customers to leverage this as a form of self-service.

Now, enter the “intelligent user group forum” a la social networks into the equation and what you have is a mechanism by which customers can actually interact with your brand online (need I mention my.barackobama.com?). To put it bluntly, Social Networks are really nothing more than online user forums that will enable companies to further extend their customer interactions on the web.

So, now you’re Cisco and you take this new software and integrate it in with the rest of the suite. What you get here is pretty damn powerful stuff.

Imagine for a minute that you’re a customer on a company’s website surfing for boxer shorts. Now let’s say you’ve been on one page for several minutes and for whatever reason you can’t find your size so you haven’t placed your order yet. 

Also keep in mind that the boxer shorts company knows your size because of previous orders, it also knows that you’re looking for the yellow polka-dot kind because you belong to the yellow-polka dot customer forum. All of a sudden your cell phone rings and its your personal shopper on the line ready to help you find those special undies in your size and color.

This does two things for the boxer shorts company:

1. Reduce cost by deflecting self service calls
2. Increase Revenue Opportunities by customer profiling and an integrated communication strategy

 

“Welcome to the Human Network”

Ok pardon the bad pun in the title, but I couldn’t resist…

As I mentioned in my first post about politics 2.0, this is not a political blog, however I have taken a certain fascination with how the Internet and the “web 2.0 phenomenon” is going to shape the 2008 elections. As such, I will be discussing the non-partisan/platform aspects here:

I was almost finished wrapping-up the 2nd post in this series “from grassroots to netroots” when I received an email from Barack Obama’s PAC that I thought warranted discussion.

The blast was presumably sent to his email base with the goal to build awareness and excitement about his announcement tomorrow to run for the big house in 08. Beyond the “come join us for the rallies” there was a link to a 2 minute video clip (not uncommon for his campaign strategy).

What I find fascinating is that the clip didn’t mention ANY POLITICAL AGENDAS!!! It is merely a discussion about how his campaign will engage the constituent base, many aspects of which I touched on in my last post. It’s arguable whether or not the first 49 seconds of the clip stand for a platform in-and-of-itself, but we’ll save that discussion for another time and place.

I don’t have time to write about it here, but ponder just for a second what Barack’s cost per voter impression (I just made that metric up) is vs. traditional media (compared to say, Rudy Giuliani)… 

-Chris

Previous in series