Category Archives: Technology

From Web 2.0 Expo: How do you solve the IE6 problem?

05 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by in Technology, Web 2.0 Expo

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I attended the Web 2.0 Expo session where representatives from the major browser providers (sans Safari) talked about the future of browsers.

One popular topic was the IE6 problem; i.e., how do we get users off IE6 onto a more modern browser with more capabilities?

Douglas Crockford of Yahoo! had the soundbite quote of the panel: “The problem is that web developers are doing a good job supporting these bastards.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

He (and pretty much the rest of the panel) put the onus of getting users to upgrade on the web developers. Web developers need to force users to upgrade by serving error pages driving them to upgrade before they can use the site. He even suggested that the web developers of major sites agree to do it all on the same day to mitigate the business damage of doing it.

Unfortunately, to me, all this smacks of “we know what’s best for you, so do what we want”. In his suggestion of a simultaneous launch of IE6 blocks, Doug is really just admitting that the natural reaction of users would be to go to another site.

Similarly, isn’t the fact that users are still on IE6 stem from the fact that the browser fundamentally does what the users, the web developers of the sites they visit, and (in corporate settings) their IT managers want? It may be an old browser with limitations but it has enough capabilities and work arounds that the modern web delivers some great experiences on it.

The onus is on the web developers to solve the IE6 problem, but not to decide to block IE6. The onus is on web developers to come up with the killer app/experience that compels them to upgrade that can’t be implemented in IE6. Until that happens, we’ll have to wait through the slow progress of upgrades we curretly have.

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Lean Startup in a Large Corporation

05 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by in Intuit, Software Development, Startups, Technology, Web 2.0 Expo

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I’ve seen Eric Ries speak before; Scott Cook brought him into Intuit to go over his Lean Startup message (http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/05/lean-startup-intensive-is-tomorrow-at.html) that he’s been pushing around. It’s really good stuff and as someone who’s made all of the mistakes he talks about I highly recommend it.

In the keynote he gave at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, he added something I don’t remember seeing the first time. He said the goal is to minimize the total time for one “pivot” cycle.

The important thing is the definition of a “pivot”. Paraphrasing and interpreting, a pivot here is a change in direction caused by something you’ve learned about your business, be it your market, product, customer, whatever. And there are three steps in the cycle: build (the product), measure (the result), and learn (the reasons behind the result).

This helps illustrate the problem I’ve experienced in a large company. Minimizing time through this loop requires cross functional thinking and objectives that is ubiquitous in startups but is disappointingly rare in larger corporations where employees tend to be over-specialized.

For instance, at Intuit, there is a lot of focus in the engineering community around faster build and launch cycles. It’s all about continuous deployment, unit testing, server virtualization, etc. All good stuff, but it’s all focused on pure product cycles and not business cycles. Tracking is an afterthought.

For many designers and engineers, there’s a mental milestone (and thus, relief) when the product/version/build launches. The real milestone for the business (and so it should be as well for all employees) is when we’ve learned what we need to learn and made the right business decision on the next step.

We’re getting better. Tracking and data are beginning to play a larger role, and business interests are creeping their way into product conversations (“No!!!”). The key for any org, large or small, in minimizing the time through the loop is focusing all employees on the higher level business objective and Eric’s framework is a great way to have that conversation.

Dropbox and Xobni at Web 2.0 Expo

05 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by in Analytics, Technology, Web 2.0 Expo

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In the first session I attended on Day 2 of Web 2.0 Expo 2010, Dropbox and Xobni shared their stories and lessons from launch.  It was a really good presentation (Adam Smith from Xobni posted the slides on his blog post, linked above).

A lot of the advice is stuff we’ve all heard before: make sure you have a great product, test a lot, get user feedback, create scarcity to build buzz, be responsive and bold, focus on doing the critical few really, really well.  Even if that advice has been beaten to death, I still find startup success stories inspiring.

One thing that caught my attention was an almost throw-away statement that Adam (I think it was him) made at the end.  He said that users they acquired through PPC didn’t convert to paying at a very high rate, but they tended to refer a lot of customers who did.  He also mentioned that Zynga measures referrals through Facebook as well.  The interesting thing is not that the referrals happen, but that they measure it and account for it in the ROI analysis of their marketing campaigns.

I might be reading into his really brief comment, but if it’s true, that’s definitely an area where I could learn a lot more.

At Homestead and mostly at Intuit, we only do the first level accounting in measuring the ROI of campaigns. That is, we count the number of users who are directly attributable to the campaign.  It’s definitely easier measuring users by their propensity to sign up/purchase than measuring users by their propensity to refer others.  All referred sign ups are really just considered gravy. This first level of ROI accounting has been really successful for us as it still continues to scale.  But the question remains: are we leaving money on the table?

There are a lot of questions in the details of how you’d go about doing this “second level accounting”:

  • What are the best ways to track a second level user back to the referring user and then back to the originating lead gen source?
  • Assuming we would track using links of some sort, should we try to account for “offline” referrals (using untracked links)?
  • What is a reasonable time frame to count the referrals from a first level user?
  • Does a first level user get any credit for third level signups?
  • Do you account for the speed of the referral?  For instance, you could credit the first level user with all $ collected from the second level user within 12 months of the first level user’s signup, thus rewarding those who refer faster.

I’m sure there’s more.

If we can figure this out with any reasonable amount of accuracy, this could significantly change the economics of how we do acquisition marketing right now.

Thoughts from Web 2.0 Expo: Communilytics

03 Monday May 2010

Posted by in Analytics, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0 Expo

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My first day at Web 2.0 Expo 2010 was spent in the Applied Communilytics Intensive workshop.  Basically, it was a look at how and why you should look at the analytics of social marketing campaigns and was headed by Alistair Croll and Sean Power of Watching Websites.  Here is their rundown of the day.

My take?  It was too high-level for me and didn’t really get into a lot of details.  Maybe I’ve been living in the world of web and business analytics too much but there really wasn’t much new or ground-breaking here.  But there were some interesting points.

For example: the primary point that Sean kept referring to all day was that you should know your business goals before you embark on any social campaign, so you know what to measure and whether or not you’re succeeding.  Seems obvious and, well, is obvious.  Ryan Kuder, one of the panelists who was recently laid off from his company due to an acquisition (awkward!) harped on that point, too.  This sounds like the gripes from marketers who are asked to do work because some exec thinks it’s interesting instead of knowing why it’s important.  I feel your pain; I know I feel it all the time.  But unfortunately, that doesn’t make for an interesting presentation about communilytics.  That’s really just Project Management 101: be very clear about your goal.

In the defense of the presenters, I think they really did know what they were talking about and if I had a particular question, I think they’d be great resources.  Which leads me to believe that the lack of detail in the presentation stems from one of two things:

  1. It’s difficult to create a detailed presentation with truly actionable ideas in this area for this broad of a group.
  2. Communilytics really is just a flavor of web/business analytics and there really is no other special sauce.  Know your goals, translate to KPIs, and you’re off to the races.

So which do I think it is?  At the end of the day, we joined with the Lean Startup Intensive by Eric Ries.  At the end of that session, Eric said that those of us in attendance were at the cutting edge of this stuff, the earliest adopters, the trail blazers.  If that’s true, then it’s #2.  And I tend to agree.

Here at Intuit, it really doesn’t feel like we’re doing anything that cutting edge in tracking or measuring our social efforts, but Kira Wampler  told me that everyone told her that we were cutting edge, too.  Maybe I’ve been living and breathing analytics and optimization so much that I’ve lost sight of that.

I’ll just spew out my other observations… uh… now:

  • Referring URLs are useless (or becoming more useless) as people follow links found in apps (like desktop/phone Twitter apps).
  • Alistair and Sean defined your message as becoming “viral” when the average number of people who repeat/amplify/retweet your message is > 1.  Maybe not a new definition, but I hadn’t heard it before.
  • A lot rides on your ability to get your followers/fans/users to “retweet” or otherwise amplify your message (in Facebook, would that be “like”?).  So watch and track that carefully; learn from what does and doesn’t trigger a retweet from your base.
  • Successful social campaigns are not about me (the company) or you (the user) but about something else. Get the user into a safe conversation where they don’t feel they owe you anything in return (money, time, etc.). Not terribly new, but illustrated amusingly by Alistair with a story about picking up women in Las Vegas.
  • Tactic: send meeting requests to bloggers to get on their calendars. Makes sense to me; that’s how to make sure I do something too!
  • You can’t really A/B test Twitter messages (it’s a broadcast medium so everyone gets it). One alternative: use PPC ad copy and measure click-through rate to test your message if you really want to.  Or as Hiten Shah from Kiss Metrics suggested, just send it out and apologize if it bombs.
  • Alistair predicted that we’ll go from a PPC to a PPA (acquisition) to a PP-change-of-opinion model.  That is, as social sites get better at measuring your brand value on their network, they could charge you based on that increase, not just per impression, click, or acquisition.  Interesting to consider.
  • And the people who impressed me were the presenters, Alistair Croll and Sean Powell, as well as Hiten Shah, Erin Hunter, and Dave McClure.

And that’s it!  Looking forward to tomorrow!

The Commoditization of Technology

24 Wednesday Mar 2010

Posted by in Software Development, Startups, Technology, Uncategorized

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I’m a software engineer by training, somewhat by practice, and, in a sadly diminishing way, by mindset.  Maybe some of the real engineers around me can back me up on some of that. (Please?)

So it is with a heavy heart that I say that software technology has become a commodity.  Evidence is everywhere:

  • Increasingly, technical work is contracted out to third-party developers, sometimes offshore.  “Here’s a spec; how cheaply can you build it?”
  • Platforms are getting faster every day.  You can stand up a Rails site now orders of magnitude faster than what you could do just a few years ago.  Hell, you can configure a WordPress site to do almost anything you want orders of magnitude faster than a Rails site, for free.  Why stop there?  You can pick-and-click your way to a Ning site orders of magnitude faster than configuring a WordPress site.  (I know all those technologies/platforms don’t serve the same need, but you get the idea.)
  • Software technologist supply is increasing; i.e., there are more software developers now than ever.  The ease of building things is dropping the bar so low that a 17-year old kid can build Chatroulette in a few days.  Culture and technology is changing so that everyone can be, and is becoming, a technologist.
  • Costs of apps are dropping.  Mobile apps cost $0.99, not per use, not monthly, but once ever.  That’s because it takes a 17-year old a few days to build it.  If you make $500 on your app, you’re ecstatic.

There’s nothing terribly radical about this observation; I’m sure it’s out there everywhere.  It is very interesting to me, though, to take it to its logical conclusion.

Imagine if technology becomes so easy, so ubiquitous, so accessible that if you can imagine it, you can build it (or have it built) for nearly free.  I think we would all agree that that’s where we’re headed, amazingly quickly.  How would the software/internet industry change?

My take (thanks for asking) is you end up with something like the mass-market clothing industry (forget haute couture for this comparison).

Stick with me for a bit. Now, I won’t pretend to really know the clothing industry, but my naïve view is that it’s driven by designers and marketers.  The “builders” are outsourced to the cheapest suppliers possible such that if a designer can imagine it, they could have 20,000 units drop shipped to their warehouse in a week.  The success of a designer or a retailer or a brand is never about whether it can be built, or how efficiently it can be built, or how cheaply can it be built, but is only about whether enough people will buy it.

You can already say the exact same thing about the software industry, and I run into this all the time at Intuit.  An engineer or architect will have or hear about an idea and jump straight to the standard question: how are we going to build it?  They start thinking about data models, class structures, engineering processes, etc., stuff that I personally love arguing about.

But whenever I’m in these conversations I ask the same questions: what is the big unknown about whether or not this will be a successful idea? “Can it be built?” or “How efficiently can it be built?” is almost never the issue.  Put another way: if you ask the engineer/architect if they think it can be built, their answer is always “Of course”; if you ask them if people will actually use it/pay for it, the answer is typically “I don’t know”.  Voila, your big unknown.

I’ve rambled on for long enough, but I’d love to know what people think.  I actually have many, many more thoughts of what the software/internet world would be like with free technology, but strangely, they all have one common theme: we’re here already.

QuickBase opens up to developers

16 Wednesday Apr 2008

Posted by in Intuit, Software Development, Technology, Web 2.0

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So I’ve been an Intuit employee now for a little over 3 months.  And I’ve met a ton of really passionate, intelligent people. It’s been quite a wild roller coaster ride and is the primary reason why I’ve been so negligent in my blogging.

TechCrunch picked up on QuickBase’s foray into being a developer platform and it’s great hit.  And here’s why:

If there was any hesitation about Homestead joining, it was because Intuit isn’t what you’d typically call an “Internet” company.  Our bread and butter is desktop software; when was the last time you saw TechCrunch or GigaOm write about QuickBooks?

But the QuickBase guys (I’ve met with several of them) are passionate about being on the leading edge of the Internet space.  They’ve never been on the desktop.  They’re pushing RIA and rapid development and open interfaces and all that the Internet is about these days.  You know, “Web 2.0”.  And at the core of it, they’re about providing value to users.

And the fact that TechCrunch picked it up is a great sign that Intuit’s moving in the right direction.

So congrats to the QuickBase team for a great hit!  And here’s to Intuit making more splashes in the blogosphere!

Selling a car: Craigslist vs. Autotrader

14 Monday Apr 2008

Posted by in Technology, Web 2.0

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Count one for the good guys.

I recently sold my Toyota Solara Convertible (going for a sweet, rockin’ minivan) and posted both on Craigslist and Autotrader.

I’m sure it doesn’t surprise you that Craigslist kicked Autotrader’s butt in generating legitimately interested leads, at least here in the uber-connected Bay Area. 

The tale of the tape (Craigslist vs. Autotrader):

  • Cost: Free (duh) vs. $69
  • Online pictures: 4 vs. 18
  • Magazine ads: 0 vs. 1 (I assume, I never saw it)
  • Times I had to post: 4 vs. 1 (CL expires after 7 days, AT doesn’t expire)
  • Actual interested leads: 9 vs. 1
  • “Spam”: 0 vs. 4 (I got 4 calls from businesses who want to help me sell my car)

Even though the ads on Craigslist are free (and therefore, unqualified), the search functionality minimal, and the ads poorly formatted, CL was far and away better than AT.

But you knew that already.  Count a victory for the power of a trusted, “social” classifieds system over the old school advertising system.

An Addendum to the Kandinsky Zone Effect

31 Monday Mar 2008

Posted by in Blogging, Technology

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So I tested the Kandinsky Zone Effect a few weeks ago which tested how quickly Google indexes blog posts (it took less than 10 minutes to get into the general index!).

Now the question is to see if tags matter.  And to do that, I need another term that no one has ever written (and is just one word this time, so it makes the tag simple).  And I’ll use it in the tag alone (not in the body of the post).  Check back soon!

Update 1: So it took less than 10 minutes again for Google to add this latest post to their index, but the tag I used (“miroified”, to follow the theme of modern artists) still does not register any hits.  Now that I’m using the term in the body of the post itself, we’ll see if Google picks it up.

Sun buys MySQL

16 Wednesday Jan 2008

Posted by in Technology

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Wow, Sun is buying MySQL.

Now, I’ve never been mistaken for a Sun fan.  I wrote about their continued slide into irrelevance when they changed their stock symbol to JAVA (huh?).  That move was panned by everyone, including the most avid Sun-philes.

This move, however, is great for Sun, but does it make any sense for MySQL?  I didn’t even know that MySQL was for sale (though, clearly they were).  I just figured a company that was more… um… relevant would pick them up.

But if you think about it, it didn’t make too much sense for the major players who are picking up companies right now.  Oracle would have loved to do it, but I’m sure MySQL would have balked.  The same goes for Microsoft.  Google would not bother to acquire something as mundane as plumbing.  Yahoo has enough trouble right now, and also is not interested in plumbing.

One interesting option would have been Amazon.  They continue to roll out web services that cater to startups; it would have been impressively bold of them to plop down the cash for the most popular database for startups, too.

But Sun takes it.  It makes sense.  Sun can bring their shiny new toy into the enterprise conversations they’re having with the big IT departments that MySQL wants.

Let’s just hope they don’t screw it up.