Booz Allen Global Innovation study shows rising R&D investments in 2011 … what about 2013?

The global innovation report is a yearly report showing R&D spendings across different industries. For reference, I have included the 2009 results by industry and the 2011 version below. The sectors which invest in R&D do not differ much from one year to another.

Although the report states that R&D investments doesn’t always mean that innovation is produced, or that this innovation is performing better than other products investments diluted across other budgets, there a precious few metrics that make it possible for us to measure how innovation is faring. So we’ll have to make do with this.

What the report shows as well is that rising investments mostly happe in America, whereas Europe was already deep in recession at that time. I can’t wait to see what the 2013 report will show.

At last, the report shows a strong correllation between sales and R&D investments. One could read this either of two ways: when sales are good, R&D investments grow, or … when R&D investments grow sales are better.

An interesting question would also be to wonder what is actually meant by R&D spending and whether all product development efforts are measured under that umbrella. I have seen a lot of companies in which R&D is kept as a separate effort and doesn’t represent the main area for product design and development ; this is significant in a world in which innovation is driven by vendors’ offerings, mostly in the Computing & Electronics world, the first sector for innovation in that study.s

R&D Spending Returns to Pre-Recession Levels, Finds Booz & Company Global Innovation 1000 Study | Innovation Management

key findings from this year’s Global Innovation 1000 study:

• The three industries with the greatest R&D investment were computing and electronics, health, and automotive (28 percent, 21 percent, and 16 percent of the total Global Innovation 1000 spend, respectively).
• Two-thirds of the $53 billion increase in R&D spending between 2010 and 2011 came from the computing and electronics, automotive, and industrials sectors.
• 75 percent of companies increased their R&D spending from the previous year in 2011, up from 68 percent in 2010.
• This year Amazon joined the top 10 “Most Innovative” companies pushing out Facebook. For the third straight year Samsung rose in rank on the list (to fourth place, up from seventh place last year), and Apple, Google, and 3M took the top three positions, respectively, also for the third consecutive year.
• Regionally, companies based in North America grew their R&D spending by 9.7 percent—just above the global average of 9.6 percent—while Europe and Japan grew theirs at below-average rates of 5.4 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively.
• India- and China-based firms again increased R&D investment at the highest rate overall across regions (27 percent on average), although from a small R&D spending base.

via R&D Spending Returns to Pre-Recession Levels, Finds Booz & Company Global Innovation 1000 Study | Innovation Management.

of geeks and men … a case of “us and them”

I spotted that picture (or rather, my wife did, let’s be honest) posted by Physicisttv on their Facebook page last night and I couldn’t help share it with you on this blog. The fact is we could change the caption for almost any kind of job that you/others/we (change pronoun) don’t – quite – understand.

Very often I have seen “business” people label their digital experts “geeks” while meaning “martians”. Even myself (roarrrrrring laughter!). Conversely, programmers see users as dummies (remember the intelligence chart in the Dilbert Principle in which Dilbert descibes end users as more stupid that hammers  and “silly putty”?!)

 [in Dilbert Principle]

After all, I could well place an accountant in that chair and I’d see him as a martian because I never understood what these guys were up to. A case of “us and them”… a bit like what’s happening with helpdesks …

New Innovation Blog Launched

A few years ago, I used to be a regular contributor to bnet in the UK but the site pulled out of the European market in 2010. Fortunately, a new project has just been launched and I’m very happy to embark on it. It is named innovation generation and it is sponsored by our peers from Alcatel.You can find my first piece on that blog under the following title: Governments Ease Into Cyberspace. Below is the announcement for the new website; stay tuned for more info …

We are living in a truly connected world. That’s something most people might take for granted when they make a phone call or watch TV, but when you consider how a wireless network brings books to your e-reader, an Ethernet network keeps your savings account secure, and a cloud holds most of your online identity, it becomes a pretty powerful proposition.

It is the services that run on these networks that are the lifeblood of society, and the potential for innovation here is limited only by our own creativity.

Enter Innovation Generation. It’s a generation that’s not confined to baby boomers, Gen Xers, or smartphone-toting Millennials, but rather encompasses everyone living in today’s globally connected society. Our goal here is to explore the potential for personalized, interesting, and, of course, innovative new services that can increase the quality of life and work for end users while also increasing the value of the service provider in the process.

How are service providers delivering these new services to businesses and consumers? How can they get more from their infrastructures than they already do? What are the opportunities for business model innovation? How can service providers improve the customer experience?

These are just a few of the questions we’ll strive to answer on Innovation Generation. If you’re a global communications service provider or enterprise IT leader, Innovation Generation is your guide to navigating the challenges and opportunities in creating innovative business opportunities for your company and your customers. Here, we explore innovation at all levels of today’s connected businesses, from software to services to groundbreaking business models – with an eye on what’s practical, what’s clouded by hype, and what’s going to help the bottom line.

These are services that are transforming industries like utilities, transportation, the public sector, healthcare, oil and gas, manufacturing, defense, railways, and even the government. And service providers are at the heart of it.

via Innovation Generation – Named Documents – About Us

Yossi Vardi’s top tips for start-up owners – #leweb

Israeli entrepreneur and business leader Yossi Vardi came on stage at Le Web 12 in Paris today to deliver some of his tips. Unfortunately he was a bit rushed out and didn’t have time to finish his presentation. Here are the tips I was to able to pick up as I was listening to him.

[this piece written during a blogging stint for Live.Orange.com]

Yossi Vardi What should start-ups do to succeed?

1- What it takes to succeed?

The most important factor for success is luck. People who are hard-working though are often in the best position for being able to reap the harvest of serendipity. Trying and reaching out to people increases your ability to be lucky, Vardi said.

2 – raising too much money can be toxic

Start-ups which raise too much money want to show their investors that they are using the money and they are often led to burn too much money too early and fail to make a profit

3- right size for team?

Vardi suggests that the optimal size for initiating a start-up is 3. Having only 1 is too hard and above 3 it’s too difficult to get oneself organised.

4 – a mentor is needed

A mentor is needed to help support the team and help them meet the right people Vardi went on.

5 – pivoting

Start-ups have to pivot, i.e. be able to modify the concept so that it adapts to the Market. Pivoting is important but it can also prove that the founders can’t learn from experience if they are pivoting too often. This is a double-edged sword.

6- attracting investors’ attention

Finding an introduction to the right investors is important, this is why networking is key. The is also confirming what we had witnessed in  Silicon Valley last September.

7- exits

There is a debate – in Israel and elsewhere – between experts about whether it’s better to do an early or late exit. When doing exits, one has to remember that one is not selling one’s company to another one, one is selling to an individual Vardi said.

As mentioned above, Yossi Vardi’s presentation was unfortunately interrupted. There a many other recommendations Vardi can deliver to entrepreneurs, we’ll probably have to wait until the 2013 edition of Le Web for us to hear the rest of the presentation and Vardi’s advice.

5 major trends for the future of IT and the Web – #blogbus

The Orange Blogger bus tour – of which I am the organiser on behalf of Orange of which I am the Director of Internet and social media – was stopping by San Francisco today and the whole day was hosted by Orange Silicon Valley

Georges Nahon delivered a very inspiring keynote today before our panel of bloggers in which he shared his vision with regard to what is happening in IT in general, and in the Valley in particular. I will begin my account of Georges’s visionary presentation by detailing his conclusions. As I always do, I have taken detailed notes of the pitch and they are made available at the end of this piece. If there is one thing that should be remembered from that pitch is that the Web is everywhere and in everything that will be happening in the future. Something which established players don’t like according to the Head of Orange Silicon Valley. However, Nahon insisted on the fact that it won’t be the same Internet we used to know.

Facebook will be “Yahooed!”

“Social” has been going through a rough patch over the Summer, with the now infamous Facebook IPO, dubbed “IPOcalypse”, IPO meaning “It’s Probably Overpriced” Nahon said facetiously. Yet, Europeans are wrong when they interpret these issues as the end of social media, Georges Nahon said in essence. Social is here to stay, and beyond, it will change everything which takes place on the Web, even though Facebook itself will probably be “Yahooed!” Georges added.

But the worrying thing I got from his pitch is that, according to his analysis, next to the World Wide Web that we all know, an increasing number of companies, including Amazon, are creating a “non-searchable adjacent Web” which sounds very much like the end of the Web as Chris Anderson announced in Wired a few years ago. I think Georges is right indeed, there is a growing concern that Net neutrality is being sacrificed for the sake of user experience. Time will tell, but there are indeed worrying signs.

Georges Nahon, head of Orange Silicon Valley, on the first day of the blogger bus tour

Here is how I summed up Georges’s 5 trends for the future of IT:

1. Tech is all about mobile: “Twitter is a mobile-first company” and thriving he said, “Facebook isn’t and is suffering”. 10% of Internet traffic is made of mobile traffic. Yet, 25% of US users are using the Web from mobile only, but in Egypt, this number soars up to 70%, and India is close to 60%! And 68% place their mobile next to their bed while sleeping at night.
2. The default is now social: and social meets mobile (over 50% of smartphones connect to Facebook). Social graph (Facebook), interest graph (Twitter) and influence graph (Klout) are the new frontiers of the Web and “they are here to stay … for a long time” Nahon said. For many, Facebook is the new web (“find us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter). What is the future of search? it is social and both Google and Microsoft are working on it… “and Facebook search is coming fast” Nahon added.
3. Another Web: At the same time, traditional web development is slowing down, and Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Mobile will continue develop their “non-searchable adjacent webs” as Nahon called it.
4. The Cloud as a new frontier: “The new guys are Amazon, Zynga, Rackspace and even people like Google were taken by surprise” Nahon said. But there are even newer guys you may never heard of such as Bluejeans, Alfresco, Joyent and many many more. Explosive data growth is also forcing companies to develop solutions for data reduction. And “the next big thing isn’t Software, it’s data” Nahon concluded on that subject.
5. All video will be on the Net: most players in that field are coming from the Internet world, not the media world. “We think that the future of TV is to be streamed” Nahon said. There is more innovation than ever before in that area he said. Nahon added though that the concept of app-centric TV on smart TVs wasn’t entirely convincing. Time Warner see their future in apps but another trend is Social TV (described by Nahon as “a descendant of interactive TV which never worked”. 85% of tablet owners use their device while watching TV he said. What are they doing? Social websites, Zynga, Search, Craigslits (an old web survivor!) according to Nielsen.

the future of the World Wide Web

So, what is the future of the Web? Georges Nahon highlighted 10 trends in that area too:

1. the web is becoming data centric
2. apps will rule consumer and entreprise innovations and html5 will infiltrate apps and web services
3. non searchable adjacent webs will continue to develop and the web will be fragmented and site-less (mobile, apps)
4. the web of sites is dead and Facebook like buttons are the new hyper links
5. Real-time multi-user game cloud platforms will influence enterprise cloud technologies: the main issue will be “latency” ‘as already explained on that blog)
6. 4G/LTE (which we all were using to day via local mifi devives) will trigger innovation
7. mobile payment will kick off from 2015
8. all video will be on the web
9. Enterprise IT will shift to the cloud.
10. Facebook will rule the web during the next 2 years and Google will be in catch-up mode and within 3 years they will be “Yahooed!” Nahon said
11. Amazon will continue to diversify and will create more online commerce/entertainment clouds and mobile devices (tablets/phones). “Amazon is belittled in Europe” Nahon added, “and it should be considered as a major player, for Bezos is the new Steve Jobs”.

Started as an R&D organisation and evolved towards what they are today (scouting organisation). 60 people, 40 of  which are in a position to file patents and they file 20 per annum. Often, it’s about reviewing the strategy. Statement from Prussian general “no plan survives contact with the enemy” e.g. 5 years ago, no one had seen the iPhone coming. Even analysts. An none of these people has seen Apple becoming a major player in the Telecom industry => be prepared for the unexpected. There were times in which you telcos could go to the ITU organisation and get things sorted but this isn’t the case anymore.

Essentially Orange wants to get prepared for the future. One of the key elements for Silicon Valley is capital investment. In Bay Area only, venture investments represent $3.2 bn 46% of total investments in the USA (San Jose chronicle on Q2 results). Texas only represents $ 179 m (3%) despite the huge tech firms in that state. The core subjects is ICT and media but not only.

The software industry in Q2 of this year received the highest level of funding. (34 out of 39% other source) $2.37 bn i.e. 32% of the total.

Market capitalisation: Apple + Cisco +Oracle +Google +Intel have a total of $ 1,261.82 bn (IBM is only $236b or FTE $37b). What this hides is the myriad of small companies which help these companies become what they are.

SAS can’t “buy” fans but knows how to attract customers #csmb2c

The second usefulsocialmedia presentation this afternoon was presented by Christian Kamhaug from Scandinavian airline SAS. Scandinavians are known for flying a lot for business. And Scandinavians have 5 weeks holidays so they fly a lot for leisure too; also because Summers are wet and cold in Scandinavia and they want to fly where the sun is shining. “Unlike Nissan we can’t buy any fans” Kamhaug said, so they decided to do something else instead, like using their own customers, a first-rate free resource SAS had… and that proved to be a very good idea!

from simple Facebook questions …

SAS asked its 100,000 Facebook fans “where do you want to fly this Summer?” and they asked them to suggest a destination. SAS received 800 suggestions in one week and more than 180 destinations were suggested. The top 10 destinations went for vote and Alanya (Turkey) was the winner. FLights started July 3, 2012 and will be operated twice a week year-round. SAS also used this vehicle in order to make it known that a new service is on offer: after a number of years, SAS decided to offer coffee on board after years of buy-on-board policies.

to mySASidea.flysas.net 

After these 2 small campaigns, SAS decided to take the initiative to the next level. Two weeks ago, SAS walked in the steps of Dell’s Ideastorm and launched mySASidea.flysas.net. What SAS has realised is that not only customers are adding their ideas, they are also commenting on other people’s ideas. “This is really what crowd-sourcing is about” Christian Kamhaug added.

In 6 days, SAS got 500+ new regostered members, 400+ ideas and 2000+ votes. “You can save millions in consultants’ fees” Kamhaug said, “all can be done online”.

Horowitz recognises Google+ is late to market but announces growth

Where is Google+ at nowadays. Barely a year after its launch in Summer 2011, Bradley Horowitz, President product management at Google gave us an overview of where they are at and where they are heading … and evaded a few questions too ! [this post was originally written live from Le Web 12 in London on behalf of the live.orange blog]

“Google search had a very short-lived memory and Google+ has been introduced to change that. Google+ is helping us understand our users betters and provide better services to them” Horowitz said as an introduction. As a proof of how Google wants to improve the user experience of its social media platform, he pointed out that Google Local has been made a part of Google+ for a couple of weeks. “The idea is for Google to improve existing services by enhancing them with the power of sharing”.

“We recognise being late to market”

When pressed with questions by Loic Lemeur, he replied: “We recognise being late to market but this offers opportunities to do things differently and enable users to have different kinds of discussions with different kinds of users”.

[Google’s Bradley Horowitz live on stage at Le Web 12 in London]

The strategy is not to have people wishing happy birthday”. What we have is hangouts. “Every kind of user, from music artists to politicians are using hangouts” he said. This is a differentiator and we are only getting started. A very effective demonstration of a live hangout was delivered introducing participants in a multicast presentation from all around the world (Canada, US, UK and France) and remote users were able to ask questions to Bradley Horowitz who answered them. In essence, this isn’t very different from traditional Web conferencing as it has existed for over 10 years, but the fact that it is linked to a social platform should “change the world for users to interact in the same way that Youtube did” Horowitz added

[a live demo of a Google+ hangout at Le Web 12 in London]

numbers?

“170 million users have upgraded their accounts, have updated their profiles. Getting 200 million users in just eleven month is a real challenge and we will be announcing new numbers soon and they are really good”, Horowitz said. “our best days are ahead of us”. One example of the good things they have introduced are the mobile clients which were launched on IOS and Android, more graphical and much more emotional. This has led to a dramatic increase in mobile usage (but no precise numbers were given despite Loic Lemeur’s insistance). Similarly, the number of actual users wasn’t unveiled by the Google exec.

“We have tried to compress a decade of social networking into 11 months! and now I am “happy to announce that Google is opening to another partner “Flipboard” and it will be opened as soon as it is safe for our users and is debugged” the Google exec added. But “we are admittedly moving cautiously” he added, before taking this to the next level.

Sonia Carter from Kraft Foods explained how they are using Google+: Chocolate is the main subject, but also sponsorships that the brand is involved in, because they realised “that people were already talking about this”. Bonin Bough who runs advertising for Kraft foods explained that the introduction of social media wasn’t about the shifting of budgets but the shifting of mindset.

Is Innovation In The Room? #MWC12

It may seem strange but somehow, I’m not entirely certain that innovation is always where you think it is. Sometimes it hides in corners, or even is conspicuous but you were looking in another direction. Perhaps that’s what happened at showstoppers on February 26th (a preview event before MWC in Barcelona) when I was looking and interviewing stand owners and had failed to spot that gentleman with a camera on his hat, filming the show. Now that’s innovation for you!

Today at Mobile World Congress, we’ll find out more about some of the innovations on display. Stay tuned …

first few slices of technological innovation at #mwc12

reporting live from MWC2012 in Barcelona

You certainly know you are in Spain when you can spot the Patanegra at a buffet, but the motivation for the happy few who were present and invited act the showstoppers event in Barcelona today, didn’t quite come for the quality of the cured ham. Press pass bearing delegates (including bloggers) were indeed allowed in after a short wait a little after 4pm on Sunday 26th and therefore I was able to spend two hours looking at some of the innovations which were on display. Here is a selection, enhanced with a few pictures .

It all started with Nuance, the makers of Dragon NaturallySpeaking – the voice recognition giant of which I am a faithful user and (even unofficially) behind Apple’s SIRI technology – who are into the development of the next generations of set top boxes, ones which will understand you thanks to natural language recognition. For instance, you will soon just say “show me a film in which Tom Cruise is playing” and you will be shown a selection of films starring the famous actor. We’re not there yet, but it may well mean the end of EPG (Electronic Program Guides) browsing.

The next stand at which I stopped was that of Gracenote, a system mainly know by users who wish to digitalise their – legally purchased – music on their computers. Gracenote is a database containing minute details about music albums but also films. Yet, Gracenote – now part of Sony for 5 years – is making money on its APIs, not on the database itself (which is updated and maintained collaboratively by its users). The most interesting thing they showed was what they called Moodgrid which lets you choose music according to your mood as shown on the tablet of the above picture. Other potential applications exist, namely for car music systems.

A third innovation I found particularly interesting was … not really an innovation but a way of showing that sometimes, older is better than new! The company is called Emporia and is Austrian. It has been operating for 20 years but has only been active in the mobile sector for 6 years. Everything happened when Dr Albert Fellner, the CEO of Emporia, realised that each week when he visited his Mom he had to explain to her how her phone works. It had nothing to  with dementia but really with the fact that the product isn’t suited to elderly persons. So he decided to build special phones, with special features of which:

• a torch is always made available on the outside of the handset and is operated at the touch of a button
• a simple alarm button (black button hence less conspicuous)
• a simple lock button (a real button, not a complex combination of key strokes)
• a simple charger base (see picture above)
• very large buttons which elderly people can press easily. The company even works with Cambridge university on the usability of their phones

A very clever design which shows that innovation isn’t always equal to modernity.

Last but not least, I stopped by HZO’s stand, a company which is working with handset manufacturers in order to equip all phones with thin protective and invisible layers one can add on the motherboards in order to protect phones from water. Their demo was amazing as they showed phones in perfect working order which had spent up to five hours in a bowl full of water. This innovation should equip new handsets progressively, in the next 2 years according to HZO representatives who aren’t selling their solutions to the public though.

With innovations like these, should never be afraid anymore of flushing your phone through the toilets!

>> see a demo on this online video

Pespsico: from crisps to “innovation incubator”

PespsiCo UK, the company behind famous CPG brands such as Gatorade, 7up or Walkers may not be a high-tech giant as such but it has a knack for joint innovation anyway. The company indeed created an innovation challenge entitled PepsiCo10, the aim of which is to reward 10 digital entrepreneurs in the fields of social commerce and mobile technologies out of 130 appplicants.

The challenge gives these 10 startups a unique opportunity to boost their businesses as well as “drive business value for PepsiCo“. The challenge is about creating social commerce or mobile applications related to PepsiCo products; each of these 10 business ventures will be granted the status of a “strategic business partner, working closely with [PespsiCo] teams, internally and externally”. Winners will also be awarded £10,000 in cash but PespiCo will take no equity in those businesses.

It’s such a clever idea, one wonders why a high tech giant hasn’t yet thought about it! While launching this programme in Europe (after last year’s successful creation of the US contest), PepsiCo is promoting itself as an “innovation incubator”.

There are 5 suggested categories in this challenge:

• Social Media Community-based Marketing,
• Mobile Marketing: On the Phone, Tablets and Beyond,
• Place-based Technology,
• Online Video and Advertising,
• Gaming / Learning Platforms.

Partners of this campaign include high tech experts from OMD UK, Highland Capital Partners, Wired and Mashable. Last but not least, through this challenge, PepsiCo willl be saving on the development of innovative technologies which will help them promote their own brands … a win-win challenge and a clever Marketing trick!

more information about the 10 selected start-ups at www.pepsico10.com.

Neuromarketing: Manipulating or Understaning Consumer Behaviour?

today’s reading tip …

There is at least one post on the Internet which is not debating how Facebook will change the world and I have found it!  I will need to get back to this soon, as it seems that marketers now have little to share beyond the tools with which they share it. Anyway, today’s reading selection is taking us to Fastcompany’s Kevin Randall’s post on Neuromarketing, i.e the use of neuroscience in order to tap into consumers’ subconscious and understand their motivations. 5 brands – quoted by Randall – are already using this kind of “science”. No doubt that nice debates will crop up in the future, this is Randall’s conclusion too:

“Neuromarketing Hope and Hype: 5 Brands Conducting Brain Research

BY KEVIN RANDALLTue Sep 15, 2009

Even before the age of Mad Men marketers were trying to tap into the human subconscious to influence consumers to buy their products.

But over the last decade or so, as the fields of neuroscience and marketing science (as some like to call it) have evolved, the area of Neuromarketing has emerged. Today more companies are investing in the technology and studies. Neuromarketing blogs (Roger Dooley) and books (Buyology) are being accorded more attention and legitimacy. Nielsen’s recent investment in researcher NeuroFocus has increased the influence and credibility of neuromarketing. However, the field is young and a bit like the wild west. And many in and out of marketing have raised concerns about the reliability and ethicality of neuromarketing.

What is Neuromarketing?

“

via Neuromarketing Hope and Hype: 5 Brands Conducting Brain Research | Fast Company.

mobile OS market share comparison (via @icrossing_uk)

There are several ways of looking at the market share comparison map by iCrossing. One is to highlight that Apple now has gone over the 50% market share mark in many countries (per below). Another is to stress that France and Australia are even the 60% bar, which is absolutely amazing. A third would be to spot that in America, their market share is only 35%, but that Blackberry is taking the plunge save for Britain (numbers per below). A fourth would be to show that Android is very strong in South Korea but still falls behind in countries like France and Spain and UK. Eventually, Nokia is still strongest in most emerging countries – countries in which feature phones are king – but time will tell whether the Windows phone gamble will work out for them. In any case, this map is really useful; a fine job.

for those who might wonder about the representativeness of the the data, it has been  collected from the http://gs.statcounter.com/ website

 

Mobile OS market shares

This map shows the popularity of different mobile browsing platforms country by country, with some interesting results.

Apple’s dominance can clearly be seen, with the iPhone and iTouch accounting for over half the market in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Japan.

via Mobile browser market share map – iCrossing.

new shopping carts being implemented at last … but not by IDEO

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The future of the shopping cart is here, at last. In this interesting story, Yannig Roth provides a follow up to the early developments of new style shopping carts as was described in a famous 1998 IDEO video. As Roth puts it in his post, this is a subject which I had debated a few times already (check http://bit.ly/ideosc for details) but what is interesting is that IDEO’s principles are now being implemented by … companies which have nothing to do with IDEO. One more proof of what Steven Johnson describes as “the slow hunch” in  ”where good ideas come from”  and also that being a prime mover in an innovative field may not always be a good idea.

[ps: the shopping carts I saw last November as quoted by Roth in my blog comment  were actually very similar if not entirely identical to IDEO's original prototype. You can find them in the above slideshow. The pictures were taken last November at a the Franprix supermarket in Limeil Brévannes, in the Paris region. Franprix is a subsidiary of French retail giant Casino]

  I remember writing a blog post about another IDEO concept: Shimano Coasting. Their concept was supposed to make cycling attractive for the masses, but it eventually got dropped, what led my to question about the possible reasons for this failure. This post, is about a well-documented IDEO case: a shopping cart developped in 1998, that obviously didn’t make it to the stores… … Read More

via Yannig Roth / marketing, design & other exciting subjects

From the Silicon Valley: “Nexenta is a kind of Linux for storage and that has never been done before”

On June 1, 2010 we paid a visit to Nexenta, to attend a company presentation delivered by Jon Ash, VP of Sales and Marketing and and Brad Stone, CTO. There are 30 people working for Nexenta, a lot of the development being done in Russia, and there are also contractors working for them (including some figureheads such as one of the people who wrote ZFS, a file system devised by Sun, now acquired by Oracle); but the strength of Nexenta is not in its headcount. “We are 30 people plus 30,000 others who work for us, but I don’t pay for the 30,000″ Jon Ash says. By that he means that Nexenta is based on the opensource model and that the community developing for them are doing this for free, as is the case of Linux or any other opensource solution for that matter.

As a matter of fact, the numbers may be a little different as Dmitry Yusupov, Nextenta’s co-founder told us, it’s only 10 people who develop on the more proprietary layers of Nexenta and 50,000 who take part in its testing and evolution at various levels. Anyway, this gives us a flavour of what the company is all about, this is Opensource and collaborative work

Nextenta is a software company, founded in 2005 and Nexentastor is its software package which supports all sorts of technologies: CIFS, iSCSI, NFS, FC etc. 20 applications exist and are now part of the application catalogue. Nexenta’s founders wrote the iSCSI stack (“i” stands for Internet and SCSI is the name of a protocol for disk controllers). They are both Russian and they came to the Silicon Valley to develop their business and take it to the next step. Nexenta is acknowledged for disrupting the market and if they succeed it will have a great impact on the industry, and if nothing else, it will have a huge impact on prices.

Using the Internet to increase brand awareness

One of the things I found most interesting though is how a very small company with virtually no brand awareness at all can work its way through the big names and become a supplier of significant players in the marketplace just using the Internet and leveraging the tools which enable to boost a reputation. The Nexenta web lead generation model is depicted above as shown by Jon Ash during the presentation.

To conclude this brief introduction to Nexenta and its offer, and before letting you delve into the script of the presentation by Jon Ash, let me introduce you to Dmitry Yusupov, co-founder of Nexenta who describes the ups and downs of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came all the way from Russia to settle down in California. I found this interview very refreshing and very tale-telling of the courage required to become a full-fledged successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. There are a lot of take aways to be taken from this interview:

Following is a transcript of the presentation by Jon Ash

background

• It’s a unmatched enterprise features with 70-80% savings.
• ZFS: best system in the world.
• Nexenta OS: 1 million users around the world. It’s an open source model, it had never been applied to storage yet and this is giving a fair advantage to Nexenta over Netapp and others. Nexentastor is a closed source layer on top of the open source core in order to commercialise it. The enterprise edition adds synchronous replication to ZFS as well as ease of use. Optional modules include VM management + worm + Pomona.
• Extremely scalable: it can be even run over a laptop. Nexenta licences is a universal licence which can be passed from one machine to another. Only software suite able to do compression, dedupe and in-box virus scan (according to Jon ash Sun can do all other features apart from virus scan).
• a graphical interface is made available to the administrator.
• Comparing us to other vendors, Nexenta offers – according to Jon Ash – more features, is more scalable all that a superior price
• “Nexenta is a kind of Linux for storage and that has never been done before”. It’s just storage that hasn’t gone the non proprietary route and we are trying to change that, all at a price point which is making things more rewarding.
• The pricing is extremely aggressice, 60-70% lower than competitors but the discounts are low. This is just the opposite of what the market is doing on average. Jon Ash says that the “industry is set up in this crazy way” and that hardware vendors “own the client” and that this is not the way it should be.
• on the Web side: Communities, bloggers, partners and adwords lead to serious web traffic and that brings trial users, interested partners and eventually conversions. 3-5% conversion rates on average of the people that download the software. The result is that Nexenta is doing more web hits than Netapp on certain days only via word of mouth.
• Business model: the ZFS core is free but all that goes on top has to be paid for: Gui + all additional functionality (synch replication, optional modules etc.). Support also has to be paid for but the licence is perpetual and is paid once and for all.
• adoption hotspots
  • cloud computing with discussions engaged with all major providers at the moment. Some vendors are asking the company how you can deploy the software across 10,000 servers at the same time!
  • virtual desktops: handles bootstorms (ability to boot large numbers of desktops at the same time)
• What Nexenta provides is fast storage. Nexenta starts with the core and adds things to it and tries and make things better.
• Work with people like supermicro to achieve certification, work with LSI, HP, Xyratex and Dell certifications
• growing channel with 100+ resellers
• Nexenta is acknowledged to disrupt the market and if they succeed it will have a great impact on the industry, and if nothing else, it will have a huge impact on prices. Legacy storage technologies

Q&A

• how come you don’t have more clients if it’s so good and so cheap?
  • it’s a different model, and Nexenta didn’t want to scale before the service was built and there was certain functionality we needed. this is taking time to scale.
• how do teach your clients to store cleverly rather than just do dedupe and compress?
  • it’s an area where we need to do more. We need to partner with different people in different areas and we are starting to partner with people in order to do that but this is not done yet. It’s a huge opportunity for us.

Social CRM: 3 stages of Social integration within sales force automation

(note: this piece was originally written for the Orange Business Services blog)

A couple of days ago, I was able to talk to Jan Sysmans, director of product marketing at Sugar CRM in Cupertino, California. Jan was able to take me through a major evolution of its CRM systems in order to incorporate social media. This is more than just about adding a few features to a piece of software, it is an entire change in the approach to sales force automation and how salespeople do business; let’s see why and how.

Those familiar with orange business TV may have already had the opportunity to watch our video interview with Larry Augustin, recorded a little bit earlier this year, which introduced the famous open source CRM platform to our listeners. This time, we pursued our discussions with the execs from the Silicon Valley firm in order to analyse how Social was transforming CRM. In just the space of six months, the entire landscape of customer relationship management and sales force automation in particular, has changed dramatically. The intrusion of social media in our lives, both professional and personal, has brought in new requirements in the traditional landscape of sales force automation. It used to be sufficient for sales people to keep track of deals, prospective deals and customers in one’s own proprietary database, but it’s no longer the case. Customers want to be talked to in many different ways nowadays. At a time when e-mailing performance is slowing down, mostly in the US, customers want to be talked to through various channels and don’t be mistaken: they are the ones who want to be calling the shots, not you. Here is what is happening with regard to the integration of social within CRM systems as seen through the eyes of one of the leading experts in that area.

defining what Social CRM really is

“A lot of people talk about social CRM, but few know what it means” Jan Sysmans told us when he introduced to us this major shift in the way that sales force automation is designed at this very moment. There are three ways in which social can be introduced within customer relationship management Jan said, on top of the manual access to information from various sources:

1. what my customers are saying about themselves on various social media platforms: this is the listening component
2. there is the way that your customers want to be talked to: this is the talking component
3. there is the way that your customers want to be engaged with: this is an engaging component

(see CRM adoption curve on the lefthand side, click to enlarge)

listening

One of the most important things you must do in sales is not talk but listen. Listening is important because it enables you to understand your customer’s interests and pain points. Listening used to be done through face-to-face interviews or telephone conversations; and it still is. But they are new ways of listening to customers nowadays. One can be linked to one’s customers and customers’ company pages through LinkedIn for instance, or their company twitter account, or even each individual person’s twitter account. The possibilities are numerous; and each individual or company chooses their own preferred channel. Some prefer to use Facebook, others favour twitter. And one needs also to look at blogs. As you can see, there is a variety of ways in which you can gain insight about people and companies. But the real issue is how you keep your salespeople focused on raising dollars and not be distracted from their main tasks by having to look at umpteen different sources of information.

The answer to that question is “by moving that information to the CRM application, because this is how people stay focused on their sales job” Jan added.

This is why Sugar CRM has developed a way of bringing the information back into the CRM platform which is populated by sales people. The latter can attach blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter handles, and LinkedIn addresses etc. to a customer/company profile. This is still not real-time though, Jan admitted, but this is the way forward for getting the information through different channels. The challenge though it’s about how to try and make this information relevant to the sales person/company. Chances are that for the foreseeable future, human intervention will still be required in that area.

8 lessons learnt from entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley

I have just come back from a week spent in the Silicon Valley, during which I was
able to have meetings – as
part of a press tour – with various start-ups in the areas of IT infrastructure,
software , storage area networks to name but a few of the subjects that were tackled
during that trip. Beyond the various interviews and discussions that we had with
leading entrepreneurs in the Bay area, I have tried to highlight the eight points
which, at this very moment and in my opinion, are making the Silicon Valley stand
out from the rest of the world in terms of high-tech innovation; here they are:

• above all, the Silicon Valley is about a state of mind in sync with entrepreneurship; the whole Valley is resonating with the desire to foster free enterprise and innovate,
• secondly, there is the possibility for such entrepreneurs to find easy money and the real ecosystem to launch new ideas and new services,
• thirdly, swiftness of action, which enables a new high-tech venture to be set up in something like 3 months or even less,
• fourthly, the strength of the Silicon Valley is in the software, what ever the application concerned, even in the infrastructure business. We have indeed seen several start-ups work up to 4 years in order to develop a new operating system and therefore try and get a leg up in competition,
• fifthly, a true myth, which enables the Silicon Valley to live on, despite the current credit crunch and the crisis that everyone has been through,
• the sixth characteristic of the Bay area is private money, often coming from families or entrepreneurs (not VCs) who have succeeded; ethnic funds are also involved significantly (Indian and Chinese mainly),
• the seventh reason is a sense of a global perspective, whereby Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are thinking global even before the opportunity arises to launch beyond their local markets,
• lastly, the intensive use of offshoring for software developments, with unlikely countries like France being used as cheap alternatives to Bay area developers (a junior php developer in the silicon valley is paid $60,000
  to 80,000 a year, a senior developer $120,000 to $150,000 per annum).

As a conclusion, it’s not just one reason that makes the Silicon Valley different from what is seen elsewhere, often copied and rarely matched, even in the United States. This region is really a maelstrom of innovation and entrepreneurship.

note: picture Yann A Gourvennec, Orange Business Services: the photo was taken at the plug and play tech centre in Sunnyvale.

Howard Greenfield at the Plug and play tech center: even in these times of crisis “it’s never been so easy for a start-up to get started on a very low budget”

On June 2nd, 2010 we had the opportunity to meet with Howard Greenfield, president ofGO associates, a global consulting firm that helps companies bring technology to the market place. Howard Greenfield is also EIR (i.e. Executive In Residence) at the plug and play Tech center, a unique facility in Sunnyvale California, at the heart of Silicon Valley, which helps start-ups and big companies get together in order to grow their business.

Howard also worked in Paris for company which developed photo portals in the late 1990s. He also worked with Sun, Informix, Apple and did some consulting work for British Telecom. He is also a columnist and writes pieces for NAB and he is the co-author of a book about IPTV and Internet video which can be found here at Amazon. Currently, Howard is working on an article entitled “the secret life of start-ups” which will describe what goes on in the world of start-ups in the Silicon Valley.

We took this opportunity with our fellow journalists members of the French IT press tour in the Silicon Valley to ask Howard Greenfield a few questions about his feelings on entrepreneurship, the business outlook and how things are going on on a daily basis in the fast lane of high tech Californian business.

Are venture capitalist arrogant?

“Every day, there is a series of 5 to 6 sessions of start-ups in front of venture capitalists” Howard says,  “some of these VCs are very supportive. Some are very arrogant, dismissive, discouraging”. “The reason why VCs are sometimes getting arrogant” Howard adds is that “the financial picture is more squeezed and there is an erosion of the technology financial infrastructure at the moment in the Silicon Valley. There are also arrogant start-ups by the way, which are not respectful of venture capitalists either” Mr. Greenfield points out.

When asked to cite one of the craziest example is that he has witnessed, Howard mentions one particular start-up, which was trying to recreate an entire 3-D desktop browser interface in which every graphic would be 3-D so as to supersede the incumbents which are Microsoft, Google and Apple etc. “That was crazy but exciting (I mean ahead of its time). The response was: ‘are you guys real?’”. But in a way, Howard says, “if your innovative project is embraced upfront it means that you’re doing something wrong! Rejection proves that the technology is disruptive, it’s the foundation for innovation. Because when innovation is significant it is disruptive and it upsets people in the way that they usually do things.

>> read on at http://blogs.orange-business.com/live

Fusion-io’s Carson: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”

On June 2 I was part of a team of journalists for an IT press tour in the Silicon Valley. One of our appointments was with Neil Carson from Fusion-io. Here is an account of what was said at that meeting:

What is there in common between the team which produced clash of the Titans, a stock exchange trading company performing high speed electronic trading and Facebook? The answer is that they are all clients of Fusion-io, a 250 employee company which was created 4 years ago, the chief scientist of which is no one else than Steve Wozniak. “Wosniak saw the technology and it called out to him” Neil Carson said and “we brought him to our board”, he is a “very smart guy and it’s good to have him onboard”, he added.

Fusion-io designs SSD cards for storage to be included in servers in order to improve efficiency, data protection, but also server space and power consumption. On June 1, 2010 I was invited with a selection of French journalists to visit that company and we were welcomed by Neil Carson, CTO for that company who gave us a presentation of his iodrives, a new revolutionary SSD (Solid State Drive) technology for servers and also graphic sessions.

Read on about the Fusion-io story at: http://blogs.orange-business.com/live for a thorough account of that visit

a review of some of the most advanced high-tech companies in the Silicon Valley

It’s not everyday you get invited to tour the Silicon Valley, and this is a worthy experience that I didn’t want to miss for anything in the world. Here is a quick introductory text which was originally written for Orange Business Services and is available at http://blogs.orange-business.com

I have been invited to tour the Silicon Valley with a selection of French journalists from the IT press. During this tour I will represent Orange Business Services and will report in near real-time from the San Jose area about all the startups and high tech companies that we will be able to meet with.

From their own admissions, a few of the fellow journalists I’m travelling with today told me that trips like this one had been few and far between in the past decade. 10 years or so ago, such trips were organised into the Silicon Valley and you would “get to see start up companies that almost didn’t exist the day before tell you about the new economy from their lavish offices at the heart of San Francisco” one of them told me this morning. It didn’t happen to me. When I came to San Jose and Palo Alto in the Summer of 2001, the bubble had already burst and I don’t even dare to mention what happened in the few months following that visit, which tended to make matters even worse. San Jose already looked a bit deserted and so did the famous restaurant in Palo Alto in which many a new Internet project like Yahoo and eBay had been devised.

But despite the crisis, times have changed and optimism is back on the agenda; since 2004 and O’Reilly’s famous pitch on Web 2.0, many good ideas have been launched while avoiding the pitfalls and excesses of the previous period. Many a project now is backed by real money and leads to serious business plans. Besides, web 2.0 has now been rebranded social media, for what the term is worth, and it shows a certain sign of maturity as it is being embraced by many companies like Orange Business Services. As a matter of fact, I will also keynote at the Ragan Social Media Summit which will take place in San Jose at Cisco’s HQ on June 9-11, 2010.

The very fact that I am being invited to take part in this tour is also a sign that brands – mainly in high-tech – have evolved into content providers of their own; not against journalisms as some are pointing a little too hastily, but alongside journalists, and to an extent, a lot of them are working with brands too, bringing their skills and methods, and that’s also a good sign.
I will be reporting live from San Jose and the Silicon Valley the whole of this week in order to bring you the best of the technologies and insights that we have been able to gather here.

Scott Berkun Spells Out The Myths of Innovation

The Myths of Innovation is a must-read for would-be innovators

(important notice: this post is the original and unabridged version of a post written for Bnet, to which I am a regular contributor)

“Poor is the substance, alas! and yet I’ve read all the books”: Stéphane Mallarmé’s warning would be perfectly valid for most of the literature devoted to innovation. There are books on that subject however, which are really worth reading such as the inevitable myths of innovation by Scott Berkun. Berkun is a full time writer and speaker and former programme manager at Microsoft, the man behind the success of Internet Explorer at a time when the web was dominated by Netscape. He also delivers lectures such as this amazing Carnegie Mellon presentation on the book I am describing here. His book is not based on dubious principles but spells out clearly the “don’ts” of innovation. It’s a lot more powerful than most books because of that, because it’s easier to learn from mistakes than mimic other people’s behaviour. Here are Scott Berkun’s 10 myths of innovation summed up in a few words, and I hope this will convince you to buy a copy of his book too:

• myth number one: the myth of the epiphany
  An epiphany, in essence a sudden moment at which creation is supposed to happen, is epitomised by Archimedes‘s Eureka moment or Newton‘s apple. Yet, if many innovations are described as magical moments, the truth is often more complex: hard-work is required, the Eureka moment is often coming at the end of that process (not the beginning). Most Eureka legends aren’t real, they are myths aimed at giving a romantic view of innovation,

• myth number two: we understand the history of innovation
  Well, so we think, but most of the time we don’t. Most of the stories we read about innovation aren’t real either. Google wasn’t a search engine to start with, nor was Flickr a photo sharing platform etc. in actual fact, most innovations are the results of errors, changes and corrections, but we like history to smooth things out and make them sound perfect and simple,
• myth number three: there is a method for innovation
  How is innovation delivered? Despite our attraction to recipes, innovation is – in essence – a “charge into the unknown” and therefore, a method for innovation is a bit of an oxymoron,
• myth number four: people love new ideas
  So we like to think but most of the time it’s not true. Changing one’s habits is always a challenge, and that is true of customers too (remember Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the chasm?”). There is no end to the list of rejections that innovators have to face. Change management is in an innovator’s best friend,
• myth number five: the lone inventor
  We like stories in which a genius single-handedly changed the world: Edison invented the electric light; Ford invented the automobile; Apple invented the first graphical user interface etc. all wrong! And most of these stories are wrong. Often, innovations happen simultaneously too (in different countries at approximately the same time). Lastly, successful companies are often started by a group of people, not the obligatory lone inventor,
• myth number six: good ideas are hard to find
  Ideas are everywhere, and not just found as a result of a brainstorm session (a tool which most of the time is badly used and implemented). Ideas come in more than many ways, mostly through trial and error. As far as I am concerned, because I am not a very imaginative person, I love to pick other people’s brains and make notes of all the ideas they have had but have never had the pluck to implement. It would be so nice if we could… is often my starting point. The real issue is not the idea(s) but how they could come to fruition and when,
• myth number seven: your boss knows more about innovation than you
  Berkun argues that managers can make decisions that others can’t but this doesn’t mean that they always know what to do. Often, power and a high position in the hierarchy exert pressure on execs and they feel terribly alone. I have witnessed that the higher in the hierarchy two, the farther away you are from the field and it’s easy to lose sight of reality; theoretical views don’t make decision-making easy. Often, managers are therefore afraid of innovation. Berkun provides the antidote by describing the most common necessary traits of successful managers,
• myth number eight: the best ideas win
  There is a fairy tale view of innovation (in fairy tales good guys win and bad guys lose) hence the belief that it’s always the best innovation that wins. There are so many counterexamples such as the QWERTY keyboard (aimed at slowing down typists to avoid jamming), HTML and JavaScript (probably the most horrendous computer languages ever invented), the M-16 rifle etc. There are 7 factors according to Berkun which are leading to product success: culture, dominant design, inheritance and tradition, politics, economics, subjectivity and short-term orientation,
• myth number nine: problems and solutions
  Great innovations – such as the palm pilot project, a pioneering digital notepad invented at the end of the 1990s – often come from the clear and simple spelling of a few problems that they are meant to solve. Believing that serendipity plays a major role is also wrong and yet another proof of the myth of the epiphany. Hard work and prototyping are of the essence,
• myth number ten: innovation is always good
  Rudolf diesel is said to have committed suicide when he realised that his invention would only be bought by the military (and therefore serve the purpose of the war between Germany and France; he was German but had always lived in France). His innovation was being used to do harm and kill people and destroy Europe, not to do good and improve people’s lives. Other examples abound quoted by Berkun in his book — such as the DDT and personal computers and even cell phones, not to mention discrimination via the infamous digital divide.

Such are the lessons we can derive from Scott Berkun’s research on innovation. In one of his posts on the Harvard Business Review blog, Berkun declared that true innovators don’t use the word innovation at all. They talk about new products, new projects, change management or just doing things. Innovation isn’t a playground for intellectuals; it’s a game for doers and hard workers. I found the statements so true, and so close to how I felt (sometimes I’m being asked to pitch about innovation and I feel weird about that, because innovation is something one does but it’s yet difficult to describe) that I decided to know more and buy this book; probably one of my favourite business books.

Find out more

• “Why innovation is overrated” by Scott Berkun
  
• read chapter 4 free of charge, courtesy of O’Reilly publishing
• the “myths of innovation” video at Carnegie Mellon, a presentation by Scott
• buy “the myths of innovation” from Amazon
  

read chapter 4 free of charge, courtesy of O’Reilly publishing