Dave Jenkins

Okay, that was a pretty lame title, but it’s actually the most clear way to express the question: what criteria or elements need to be in place to justify a mobile version of a website?

I was talking with a friend of mine, who recently got the .mobi version of his company’s domain, but hadn’t done anything with it.  He asked for advice, and I offered up the following crude thumbnail that Internet (not web) information can be broken into three main types:

1. Transactional snippets of information: flight times, restaurant addresses, bank account info, sports scores, short text email, answers to salient questions.  Mobile phones do very well at this– iphone or not– just about everyone with a phone participates in this type of internet transaction.  If you see it that way, the iphone app store really becomes a collection ot targetted info queries all eye-candied up.
2. Search-centric information: Any business model that centers around the shear number of stuff for sale/rent/download/sharing is really a search-centric model and not a browsing model.  Amazon, zappos, walmart, piratebay, and wikipedia are all search-centric.  So is Yelp.  Notice how all of these operations are either exploiting a mobile strategy fairly well (half-way), or are likely close to one.
3. Browsing ecommerce information: anything that is a context-rich window-shopping experience doesn’t do well on a mobile phone.  The screen isn’t big enough, and we don’t have the patience to make the Solomon’s decision of either viewing a stripped down version of the site or spend the time endlessly scrolling around to see the website in it’s original layout.  Etsy, Borders magic shelf, Dell, or other ecommerce sites that are inherently dependent on the web-surfing serendipity of the site won’t do well on a mobile phone– at least not without some major rethinking on what works and what doesn’t.

My friend is in an information-sharing business.  He handles sets up relationships between business partners, and brokers deals where he sees possible matches.  His real strength is the depth of information, but he certainly has plenty of small transaction-level updates that would be more valuable if offered in near real-time.  My advice to him was to look through all the activities he does, find those that are in the first bucket, and go with the .mobi version.

Times are tough.  Escapism is rising. As with all depressions, movie attendance is up, Hulu actually has a shot at beating Youtube at its own game, and alcohol sales are up, as are random hook-ups.  We can see the trend on TV: two years ago, the prime-time dreck centered around bling and fabulous homes and even more fabulous lives of the fabulous people that live in them.  Now, that same focus on the rich is there, but it’s gotten nasty: they’re being shown as the bunch of back-biting vapid rodents that they are.  I am not going to expand much on that, because you already know your favorite rodent shows that you watch every week.

Here’s the question: spending is down, and escapism is up– do those two factors translate into higher ’shopping by proxy’?  Do you find yourself spending more time online, “researching” products?  Do you use this research time as a methadone substitute to your normal online shopping habit?  My thesis was that page views on shopping sites would be higher, as people spend more time browsing around, but not necessarily buying anything.  So far, my thesis is half-right:

Discounters like ebay and Walmart are up, as is the unstoppable ruthlessly efficient Amazon (which I hate and admire at the same time, like Ash did in the first Alien):

But overall page views are the same, or slightly down.  Page views have steadily declined as site navigation becomes more efficient, and as buyers decrease, less people go through the shopping cart, which also brings down the average– but the point is that people simply aren’t window shopping on the intarwebs like everyone thinks:

Perhaps the time-wasting website traffic is up?  Are we filling our time photoshopping domo-kun and pictures of Kim Jong Il? Nope– flat, with the only gain coming from hulu (likely due to their very expensive ad campaign).

So, what is everyone doing all night?  I hate to postulate, but in the end, I think TeeVee will win the day.  It may come in through our desktops instead of home theatres, but professionally written stories with good-looking people will beat mindless cartoons and witty political banter discussion threads for the vast majority of us.

So, the Internet is everywhere.  Times was (back in the day), that we used to surf around to websites just to see the design or some cool functionality, but we are no longer enamored with the technology (well, almost).  Futurists no longer spend their time pontificating about capacity, bandwidth, or the extent of data that could be recorded in their great computers– all of that is assumed to be in place.  Rather, these seers spend their time in two activities:

a) Blowing their own horn on twitter — not worth watching

b) Showing insights on the social interaction of the great online hive that has now come into being — these are what I’ll call  “Network Biologists”, and are worth your time.

The network biologist will spend his/her time researching the strange interactions between people, and the even stranger medium that is created as a result.  They are not sociologists, because it is more than the interactions of the humans; there are robots, scripts, and crude AI influencing the mix.  The environment itself is ever changing– and the actors change as a result– but the center of focus has shifted to the behaviour of the fish, not the mechanical workings of the reef: hence the term ‘biologist’.

The usability managers in ecommerce companies were an early manifestation.  Now, everyone in the online marketing department, merchandising, and even finance is trying to ascertain how the huge mass of people will react to the online environment.  This is different from standard “retail science” or “catalog management” because of the constant arms race in online functionality as well as the multiple-variable equation where customers will influence each other in real time, as well as try to get in on the deal with some sort of affiliate, coupon, or recommendation in exchange for a slice of the profits.

The best results so far have been to segment and clasify online users into their various behavioural patterns.  Oddly enough, people don’t mind surrendering them willingly.  The current spate of “what [blank] are you?” viruses circulating on facebook are a segmentation maker’s dream: people are happy to tell us exactly what drives their brightest fears and darkest hopes. The most successful websites out there have tapped into the hive behaviour that humans portray when given just the right mix of anonymity and self-aggrandizement: Google’s page rankings are a canopy of dominant players and ground-dwellers in their shadow; Amazon’s entire merchandising catalog for millions of products is an expansion of fecundity like salmon spawning; Facebook is basic tribalism that proves Dunbar’s number, De.licio.us is our own pollen-finding wiggle dance; twitter is a sea of iridescent jellyfish desperate for attention; there is a flavour of pr0n out there for every strange perversion you could imagine (and a few you don’t want to).

I would imagine that colleges will soon have some sort of degree in Network Biology: it will be a combination of sociology, crowd biology, and basic network mechanics, to show how it is all wired together.

I am not sure if it is a show of weakness, or just another table-upsetting play by our old friend Son Masayoshi, but Softbank is now offering a Free 8GB iPhone as long as you sign up for the two-year data plan.  We’ve seen this model before: Japan pioneered the ‘free crack pipe’ model almost 10 years ago with game consoles and cell phones.  But as functionality, swiveling screens, and other doohickeys made their way into the small devices, prices started to creep up.  Hardware prices took a real hike as the portable chips made jail breaking the phones an assumption, and as all signal carriers standardized.  (In fact, most electronics stores will transfer your chip into your new phone right there when you buy it.)

But Softbank has two things going for it: 1. jailbreaking the iPhone is possible but not easy, 2. the 3G network is still somewhat proprietary.  With these, Softbank can go back to the market-share giveaways that made them famous.  Earlier, I didn’t see the iPhone taking off so strongly inside the Empire.  Now– maybe we’ve got a real race.  In response, competitors could go either way:

a) Use Android to lower the cost of the hardware (also offer for free), and then use VoIP wherever possible to lower radio costs.  However, this doesn’t work because– believe it or not– open wifi networks are not that common in Tokyo

b) Use Android or another OS platform to out-app the iphone (weak strategy)

If the iPhone can get sufficient marketshare, it will be fascinating to see what unexpected apps the Japanese developer community comes up with.

My good friend has decided to look for a new job.  Today, she brought in some good Mexican food for the crew as a thank you.  It was, however, not a free lunch.  In return for the tacos, we were supposed to go to the white board in the conference room and suggest where she might work next.  For the price of 2 dozen lunches, my friend tried to crowdsource her next job.

Soon enough (if not already), everyone will be connected to everyone else in their immediate market segment.  We’ll all have a Kevin Bacon number of 3 or lower.  Linkedin, which originally provided value as the “inside connection” to a given company or executive, now has become the ubiquitous contact folder for everyone.  Where recruiters used to thrive on Linkedin because it complimented and extended their most valuable asset: their rolodex of contacts, it now threatens to replace that rolodex completely.  The Recruiter still has value, as someone who knows how to interview a candidate and get at the soft chewy center of a person to see if they are a good match for the company with an open position, but not as a simple nexus of resumes in one hand and job openings in another.

Given that Linkedin has given us all that magic rolodex, why not try to crowdsource positions?  How could one simultaneously incent the armchair recruiter in all of us, yet invoke enough friction to keep out the spammers and robots?

Here is my idea:

1. Vigorously pursue companies to list their open positions on the network
2. Invite people to recommend people in their network for the open positions, with a standing bounty of 10% of first-year salary (still leaving room for the recruiter doing the actual interviews to make 10-15%)
3. If Andy is going to recommend Betty to C Corporation, then Andy needs to pay $5 to Betty (she’s the one looking for a job, and probably needs the $5 anyway)
4. C Company would see that Betty is recommended by 7 of her friends (all willing to stake $5 on it), and therefore she is probably worth a look.  If Betty is hired, the 10% is split amongst the 7 people who recommended her.
5. Andy just profited $1423 for his work (assuming 10% of $100,000 job, spilt 7 ways, minus the $5)

Hmmm.  This might work.  I should ping Harry or Alex or my old friends at Daijob.

The haters are out, there is no profitability on the horizon.  Facebook is definitely well on it’s way to Stage 5 of the cocktail party: the cool kids are leaving, only the hucksters and sham artist are left.  This party is no longer cool.

At the same time, we have a new administration that owes its existence and success to a mass movement of online communities binding together around key issues.  That same administration is now trying to rally an even larger group– all 310 million of us– around key points of its agenda.   Back in the 50s, the Feds would have duped Jimmy Stewart into making a propaganda film.  That won’t work anymore.  Thanks to those hippies over at the ACLU, the government cannot invade our privacy.

If only there were some way to get down to a majority of the citizenry, and find out their known associates, their political and sexual preferences, and their GPS coordinates.  If only there were some network out there where people were ready to hand over all this information in exchange for some cheap games and zombie bites.

The federal government should nationalize Facebook.  It’s not seeing any profit, yet it is sitting on top of an incredible amount of personal information, all surrendered willingly.  The Obama administration could forward its plans at the grass roots level.  Anyone who doesn’t play ball could be outted to their friend list.  Together with Twitter for up-to-the-minute updates on terrorist threat levels and natural disasters, the Federal Government could finally achieve the true Jeffersonian democracy mass movement that has stood as an idealistic utopia since– well– Plato’s Republic.

Nationalize Facebook Now!

I’ll be in Orlando this next week for the Shop.org Strategy and Innovation Forum.  The noise from vendors is discernibly more quiet, compared to last year.  I am also getting a vibe that not so many people (customers like me) will be attending.  I’ve got some specific people to visit, and some intel to gather on a couple of vendors.  We’ll see.

i’ll be sending updates at @davejenk1ns.

Every year, the geeks declare ‘Year of the Linux Desktop‘.  So often, in fact, that’s it’s become a running gag.  In fact, Apple has made in-roads, and Ubuntu is more popular than ever.  Progress comes in small steps.

We actually may have taken a relatively large step this week: the new Obama adminstration has declared a very open information policy, and their IT structure shows promise in moving this same direction.  While not running Apache and Red Hat yet, they’ve certainly adopted some open social interaction structures.  It would be safe to say that the Obama administration is the best so far at “getting it“.

The missing element here, and the biggest specific step the US Government could make next would be to demand that all documentation be saved in an open format.  Want proof that Microsoft still has a monopoly?  Try sending someone your resume, proposal, or memo in something other than .DOC format.  If the government simply declared that all archives and transactional documents must be saved in .  The ODF is a deeply-flawed, but acceptable good start.  Ultimately, I am not sure the document format will matter.  Within the next 3 years, I bet that words and numbers and tables and figures and images are simply kept in the cloud.  I know I am not the first one to say this– but I can hope that the government would take an active role in pushing documentation into the common external places.  Cloud computing is not a technological hurdle, it’s a social acceptance problem.  I still encounter many people that resist putting things “out there”.  When pressed, there is no specific reason, other than people think the hard drive on their laptop is somehow safer than the huge servers tucked into concrete bunkers somewhere along the Columbia River.

I would hope that the transparency issue continues to gather steam.  I would hope to see the day when the government simply insists that all documentation: project bids, meeting minutes, deliberations, and especially lobbyist efforts, get published in a format that is easily remixed, chewed up, and boiled around in ways that slightly scare the powers-that-be.  We’ve seen a steady march forward with DARPA since the 60s and 70s, early gopher scientific info in the 80s, and then Thomas in the 90s, but the government certainly has dropped the ball in the last 5 years.  If the government can resume its Jeffersonian role in pushing new things for the republic, and allowing the market to fill in where advantageous, then maybe someone’s next interaction with the government will force them into putting things out there for scrutiny (policy or code), and they’ll realize that privacy ultimately depends on open scrutiny, not secrecy.

No home wifi firewall will protect us from an opaque government.

A good friend of mine (Let’s call him Sam Rothstein) is just finishing up a stint in the hedge fund business.  He is a bit of a quant and an overall critical thinker, so I ran the Keyword Derivative Market idea by him.  His verdict?

“It won’t work”

“Why not?”

“The risk– there’s no way to calculate the risk.  You think you’re all smart and have worked out the percentages on the bell curves and all the possibilities of what might happen that would wreck your prices, then wham! That one-in-a-billion thing that could sink your risk hedges actually happens, because it turns out to be a one-in-a-thousand thing.”

“Yeah, but that’s why I pad the keyword bids a little.”

“By how much?  What amount?  That padding is your determination of the cost of the risk– you cannot calculate it, therefore you cannot come up with a price.”

“shit.”

Sam went on to describe the basic flaws in risk-based hedge funds.  He complimented me on coming up with a business model that had recently bilked billions out of the market, but simultaneously reminded me that there are thousands of people trying to figure this out– many of them much smarter than me.

In the end, a keyword is an expungable commodity, but it also has something what I’ll call “high sucker elasticity“: Retail companies calculate the price they are willing to pay for a keyword position, usually based on some determined cost-of-acquistion equation.  If the price of a keyword bid gets pushed too high (according to a rational cost/revenue calculation), there is always another sucker to buy that irrationally high keyword postion.   Google’s profits are intrinsically linked to the irrationality of the market.

Keyword management software providers like efficientfrontier, kenshoo, marin, and others are making great headway in bringing rationality to this market, and are good for the long haul or large corporate spends– but the little man will always make keyword purchases with snap decisions based on insufficient information.  He’ll get suckered.

To their credit, Google tries to explain this out as much as possible: they make their API open to the keyword management companies, they give away performance statistics for free, they try not to be evil.

The odds on craps are written right there on the green felt, too.

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” –T.S. Eliot

Many people think back to their juvenile literature classes and remember that Farenheit 451 was a cautionary tale.  They then assume to remember that it’s a cautionary tale against oppressive governments that burn books.  I would proffer that this ‘oppressive fascist regime’ interpretation is a remnant of post-war public school social engineering.  I think that Bradbury might just as much have been lamenting the death of the book as a medium.  The populous of his future dystopia voluntarily stopped reading– preferring abridged versions to formal novels, then pamphlets, and finally, a small steady diet of word-pablum from the government.

I am a few days into Twitter so far, and I am starting to think that we may be one step closer: books became articles several decades ago.  The web shortened those further to summaries, and RSS shortened the news even further.  On a personal level, publishing has exploded; everyone’s an author, a film critic, a technomaven, a pop-diva queen.  However, the publishing medium is getting shorter and shorter.  Back in the day, we had to code our HTML by hand (dammit).  Soon enough, we publi-shit-izens [yes, intentional] realized we could get attention and traffic by simply uploading pictures of our cat, or describing the toast we had that morning.  TypePad made this all too easy.  Blogs got shorter.  Now we’ve come to twitter, and we’re down to a simple 160 characters.  Services now can simply ping each other’s mobile phones and tell you if a friend is within 500 feet (physically).

My money is on the iPhone app that can sense your mood from your body heat and movement while it sits in your pants pocket– and broadcasts out to all your peeps when it judges that you’re likely in heat.

Mind you, I’m not passing judgment one way or the other on this.  It’s not evil or good– the text is just getting progressively shorter.  I am still trying to figure out if it’s because the reader attention-span is getting shorter, or because 99.9% of the masses have anything viable to say beyond 160 characters.  I suspect the latter.

This post took me ten minutes to write.  I still haven’t said jack that has not been said a thousand times previously.  Do you feel smarter now that you’re at the end?  This post was really just a way to get my twitter address out: @davejenk1ns

note: that is a real photo of a real book burning in 2007 New Mexico, United States.  Some Christians think Harry Potter is evil.