Cesar Brea's Weblog

I’ve posted a new article on some of the things I’ve learned about tech sales and marketing at ESM Partners.  Feedback welcome.

Bill Ives formerly ran Accenture’s Knowledge Management/ Portals Practice.  In this post he explores blogs as the “missing link” for the traditionally (and unfortunately) disconnected worlds of KM and eLearning inside companies.  Drawing on his experiences at Accenture and with his clients, he describes organizational and technical barriers to integration of these two capabilities, and mentions .LRN/OpenACS as an example of promising technologies that pre-integrate these capabilities to help overcome these obstacles.

I’m giving a talk titled “Social Networking Solutions for the Enterprise” on May 20, 2004, at a meeting of the Boston chapter of the American Marketing Association.  The objective will be to provide marketing executives with a way to evaluate which if any solution is right for their organizations.  Although I’m not directly involved with the business at this point, I’ll draw on my experiences as a sponsor, user, and vendor, as well as provide a survey of the progress that’s been reported, to inform the discussion.

Post-script:

Bill Ives referred me to an article in eWeek by David Coursey titled, “No Business in Social Networking”.  The article is down on the prospects for the public social networking services like LinkedIn as business propositions.  I agree with this point of view, and have made the point in the past that it’s the affinity among members of a network, not the size of the network, that really matters.   LinkedIn seems to have realized this, somewhat belatedly.  This morning I got the following email from the service:

“Dear Cesar,

As more professionals are actively adopting LinkedIn, you may have noticed that you are also getting more emails from people inviting you to be their connection.

While this is the easiest way to build your network and a testament to your reputation as a professional, we recommend you only accept invitations from people you know and who you are willing and able to recommend to other professionals you know.

To prioritize your inbox and reduce the number of invitation messages you receive, you now have the option of limiting incoming invitations to those coming from people who you already have in your address book.

Turn on invitation blocking…”

Of course this begs the question of how they would know the contents of my address book, since I’m loath to let that be sucked up into a public service.  Those who have seem to regret having done so…

We’ve seen this movie before.  Remember B2B exchanges?  Most public ones failed, because they failed to achieve liquidity sufficient to drive purchasing volume they could take a little slice from to make a living.  The ones that survived were the private exchanges, consortia of members with lots of incentives (both carrots and sticks) to participate.  The companies that made money were the supply chain software and service firms (i2, Ariba, FreeMarkets) that sold jeans to the miners.  I think once the right models get worked out, we’ll see the same thing here, if on a smaller (post-boom) scale.

Here’s an article on business development I wrote in 2002 to explain this function to people who asked me about it, and hopefully to learn more from people with more experience. 

Last week I went to Germany for the OpenACS and .LRN meetings in Heidelberg, hosted by .LRN Executive Board members Michael Hebgen and Carl Robert Blesius of Heidelberg University.  These open-source software projects for online communities and e-learning are thriving.  Here’s my summary of the trip.

Last week I went to Germany for the OpenACS and .LRN meetings in Heidelberg, hosted by .LRN Executive Board members Michael Hebgen and Carl Robert Blesius of Heidelberg University.

(For the un-initiated, OpenACS — Open Architecture Community System — is a free, open-source software application toolkit (including many modules that work “out-of-the-box”, as well as a sophisticated development framework) for online communities.  Originally developed at ArsDigita (acquired by Red Hat in 2002), OpenACS is maintained and has been significantly extended by the OpenACS project, a community of more than 7,000 people around the world who use it in their organizations and as the foundations of their software and IT services businesses.  The OpenACS architecture is the foundation for Siemens’ award-winning global knowledge management application, Sharenet, which has been the subject of a Harvard Business School case study.  But, it is also used by many other smaller organizations, like Greenpeace, and by countless individuals around the world, since it supports an entirely free-and open-source software infrastructure stack as an option for those who don’t/ can’t use tools like Oracle’s RDBMS.

.LRN, also free and open-source, is a related project  that uses OpenACS as its foundation and extends the toolkit for use in a variety of educational settings.  MIT’s Sloan School and nearly a  million users at more than 25 other major universities and other organizations around the world are now using .LRN extensively in ten languages with another 20 on the way, in many cases as the main e-learning application platform for thousands, and tens of thousands of users at each school.  It was also selected as the foundation application technology for the E-Lane project, which was organized by Spain’s Telefonica and recently received a 3-million Euro grant from the European Union.  Along with the better-known OpenCourseWare Project, .LRN is part of MIT’s Intellectual Commons.

The .LRN pitch is simple.  The educational world is still figuring out how best to deliver e-learning, especially to external audiences.  While commercial vendors are adding zeros to their prices, .LRN is providing a suite of applications and a development framework free and open-source so you can save your dollars and have the flexibility for the innovations that will work at your school.  The more people that adopt and contribute to the toolkit, the more powerful the starting point.)

Based on what I saw in Heidelberg, the projects are thriving.  The  number of registered users at openacs.org has doubled in the last two years.  More than 60 people came from various parts of Europe and the Americas to get to know each other, present their work, and coordinate their efforts.  Examples of the work presented:

>An advanced Learning Management System (LMS) developed by Vienna University and now used by tens of thousands of users there for online self-testing.  Despite a fixed budget, by law Vienna U. has to accept all comers, and so needs to use e-learning extensively to leverage the school’s physical and human resources.  Vienna evaluated and rejected several commercial options as inadequate to their particular needs for features and support, and eventually selected .LRN as the basis for their platform.  Aware that most instructors at Vienna are already familiar with Microsoft Word, Vienna developed a set of custom styles which test authors can use to designate certain parts of their documents as explanations, questions, instructions, answer options, etc.  When saved, the document translates these styles into a set of XML tags, based on SCORM, that transform the Word-based test into a structured data file that can be imported into .LRN.  In Vienna’s implementation, this structured data file is then administered as a test using the .LRN “Complex Survey” module.  Vienna has pushed the envelope on scalability:  this highly dynamic application, using AOLServer as the web server and PostgreSQL as the RDBMS, gets 3.5 million page views per day and serves users with page load times that average 0.5 seconds.  Vienna has agreed to contribute all of this to .LRN shortly under GPL.

>A multi-player (as in hundreds) simulation for Leiden University’s law school.  This application uses the workflow and notifications capabilities of the OpenACS core to coordinate interactions among the players in the simulation.  While today all of the “work” is manual (students write and instructors and others respond), the system has been architected for increasing levels of automated response using rules-based AI that will be implemented over the next several years.  This also will be contributed to .LRN under GPL.

>a highly sophisticated knowledge management system being developed for the UK’s Camden City Council (the “county”-equivalent counterpart to the municipality of London).  This too will go into OpenACS/ .LRN under GPL after it launches in August 2004 to over 1,000 initial users (government staff workers).

There were several other ambitious and useful innovations using OpenACS and .LRN shown during the meetings that will also be released into the public domain under GPL shortly.  (Professionally-shot and -edited videos of these presentations will be streamed shortly from a server at Heidelberg University, courtesy of Michael Hebgen and his staff, and I’ll post the the URL when it’s available.)

The meetings offered useful insights into the dynamics of successful open-source projects.  This was not the stereotypical gathering of hacker volunteers with outsized anarchic visions.  80% or more of the work being done on OpenACS / .LRN is done in-house by, or funded under contracts with  major organizations and institutions.  Several CIO’s from these organizations attended, as did CEOs from several new IT services firms looking for alternatives to commercial software partnerships that have not met their clients’ needs.  .LRN/ OpenACS development is being done by extremely talented and experienced engineers, who have now worked together long enough to take advantage of each others’ strengths and work around their shortcomings.  Usability is a major focus area, and the community includes users and administrators to help guide that.  The toolkit itself is now nearly ten years old, and the community has survived multiple process-related upheavals to prove its viability.  Finally, the community is now organizing itself in a more formal way to fund promotion and development. 

The perfect weather and setting helped assure a great time — the meetings were held in the Marstall (originally the royal stables) with views of Heidelberg’s lovely schloss and the Neckar out the windows.  And our hosts were extraordinarily gracious and well-organized (thank you again!).  With the momentum I saw here, the next year should be very interesting to watch.

My friend Chris Schroeder is CEO of WashingtonPost Newsweek Interactive.  He’s been traveling in Japan and Korea to learn more about how the more advanced evolution of their consumer telecommunications and personal computing industries is influencing their media markets.  His blog on his trip is very thorough and makes fascinating reading.  I recommend you read it in chronological order (follow the archive links at the right on his page for convenience), since his first posts outline what he was trying to learn and his pre-trip homework.

I’m still absorbing it on the third reading.  But if there’s a single theme that’s hitting my brain stem, it’s that content is still king.  It would be sad if all of this bandwidth and computational power were simply used to deliver the latest editions of Grand Theft Auto to people’s PDA’s.

Maybe there’s hope.  The ohmynews example in Korea is particularly heartening, perhaps a business model for free-lance bloggers here in the US.  (Fodder perhaps for Jeff Jarvis’s session at Bloggercon on 4/17.)

Another idea: in order for consumers in advanced societies to be able to afford these gizmos and the fat pipes they depend on, they will need to remain relatively more productive in an increasingly global labor market.  To do this they will need continuous, lifelong, and more effective re-education.  Perhaps the availability of all of this powerful but cheap hardware and bandwidth, combined with the availability of free, open-source software for education like .LRN (shameless plug, details in a subsequent post), will stimulate the development of innovative online solutions to meet this demand.

Big news, under the radar screen.  Amazon has been granted a patent on cookies.  Given the fundamental role of cookies in Web-based applications, I’d have expected to hear more about this.  I asked my friend Sam Mawn-Mahlau, a partner at Edwards & Angell in Boston, what he thought.  Sam thought the patent could be interesting, but that Amazon has been mostly defensive in its use of patents in the past.  

Amazon’s in the black right now, but I guess if profits go south this could make a pretty powerful asset for the SCO-inclined.  So, shop at Amazon this holiday season or face the music!

We’re in the middle of a blogging bubble, or at least it feels that way if you spend any time at all in the Blogosphere.  So, many people are asking, “Is there a business here?”  This note suggests some ways of thinking about this.

We’re in the middle of a blogging bubble, or at least it feels that way if you spend any time at all in the Blogosphere.  So, many people are asking, “Is there a business here?”  This note suggests some ways of thinking about this.

Here are some numbers.

First, according to the Pew Research Center’s most recent survey,  over 2 million Americans are reading blogs today, and just under 1 million are authoring them.  As many people read blogs as bid at eBay, and they outnumber those (that will admit to) visiting adult sites.

Blogging is pretty new, but it feels like we’re in the steep part of an adoption curve.  So let’s say those numbers double in the next year and we’ve got ~2 million bloggers out there.

Let’s assume 1/3 blog for free through some service, 1/3 pay a modest fee (~$5/ month at Typepad’s lowest rate) for something snazzier, and the balance blog on organizationally-sponsored blog software at the rate of ~100 bloggers per installation, with each installation costing ~$1k in software license fees/ year (more or less what Manila runs).

So that’s ~1 million bloggers at $60/year, or ~$60 million, plus another million — divided by a hundred per installation — across 10k sites, at 1k a year each, for another $10 million.  Let’s be generous and round up to $100 million, and then globalize things and double it.  So we’re looking at a $200 million/ year market.

This is of course modest by today’s VC standards, which may explain why none have stepped in.  Notwithstanding, Joi Ito and the other  Six Apart investors, and Ross Mayfield’s and Dave Winer’s angels, if any, will doubtless make money because they will build $20m+/ year firms worth 2x+ sales, if and when they sell.  Of course, arguably blogs are ultimately a feature of broader portals, and ISP’s and others will likely offer blogs as part of the basic personal or small business package soon. 

I’m sure this is a pretty narrow way of thinking about things. So let’s come at it from a different angle.  Today, cheap publishing tools (whether blogs, Frontpage, or plain old Notepad+HTML+FTP) have produced an ocean of content on the Web.  Finding what you want and staying engaged with it is still hard.  Search is still primitive: by keyword, occasionally with Boolean connectors.

Now enter RSS.  RSS — and for that matter any other standard for web services that becomes sufficiently popular — could be the basis for “structured” search, that could (will) complement the simple keyword-based search we see today.  With structured search, the entire Web (or at least nodes that publish according to whatever standard emerges for the item being searched for) becomes a database that can be queried in the powerful way we’ve become used to.  Think Froogle, only cleaned up and useful.  So useful in fact, Microsoft is onto it too of course (thanks to my friend Perry Hewitt for forwarding this news).

RSS is an open standard, so it’s free.  But extensions to it don’t need to be, and shouldn’t always be.  Examples of ones that should be include events, as described here before.  But examples of ones that might not be include pricing information.  We can envision a firm that might write such an extension, and then license associated plug-ins to publishers and readers.  This new intermediary could end up being to eBay what NASDAQ has been to the NYSE (a peer-to-peer market vs. a hub-and-spoke one).  Such a firm might not make much money on the plug-ins, because it would certainly want to see them widely deployed.  But it might make money in the information it builds from watching activity across the network of publishers, and possibly from looking at the pollers as well (as in patterns among requesting IP’s, less useful when you’re coming from AOL, but more useful when your request is coming in from XYZ.com).  And the business might not stop with the simple sale of information about this activity, or even value-added analysis of it.  If you can envision people placing bets against possible implications, you have the makings of a financial market, with transaction costs (though I guess eBay still wins because people might use Paypal).  Think “RSS futures”.

(To a certain extent this all feels like a re-hash of the hype around web services of just two years ago, with everyone talking about how much money there might be to be made in such things as UDDI directories and such.  And of course most public exchanges — eBay the prominent exception — failed to generate much liquidity, and  it’s been the private exchanges that streamline supply chains that have ultimately proven to be most economically viable.  But I’m sure there’s lessons from those experiences that could inform the new kind of models I’m speculating on here.)

Andy Roberts just posted on his idea of the Delta Web, which we knocked around at dinner the other night.  Read it as a complement to this post.

I had dinner last night with my friends and college classmates Andy Roberts and Tip Clifton.  Maybe it was the wine, but we got into a pretty deep discussion about potential applications for RSS and related extensions.  Andy’s recently posted some of his ideas for how it could be used beyond blog posts and events for solutions very relevant to Bowstreet’s customers.  In Tip’s world of sophisticated analytics, RSS enables some pretty interesting insights — but as they say, I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you.  Seriously, we’ll elaborate as we get our thoughts together.  Meantime, check out Andy’s post, it’s provocative on its own.

My friend Andrew Grumet has also been working on a very cool RSS extension for TiVo that’s worth hearing about as a good example of creative and useful application of this technology.