Product Service Systems: A Sustainable Choice

At the iLetYou blog, I wrote a blog post about Product Service Systems.  Check it out.

Product Service Systems put the emphasis on results, rather than consumption of a product and the inefficiencies and waste caused by pure consumption.  You’ll surely hear more about Product Service Systems, both from myself and elsewhere.

BTW–Software as a Service is a huge example of a Product Service System.  The analogy between SaaS for computing and PSS in general is very strong.  How they both change the world may be equally profound.

Yahoo BOSSes Its Way Into Long Tail of Search

I could have almost missed this: Yahoo has announced Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build your own search service) as also reported by GigaOM and TechCrunch. You can access Yahoo! search results via API or framework, mashing up Yahoo’s index, and ranking and relevance, with your own algorithmic take on search. Not much concrete is being commented, possibly because there’s not much to be said. Om Malik has has reservations, but is interested in seeing what comes of it.

Broadly, it is one of the neater applications of open strategy and web service. For Yahoo, it’s smart indeed just like SearchMonkey was the neat and smart first part of its open strategy.

It is hard, or maybe impossible, to tell what will come of the strategy. It still hinges on someone to create a better secret sauce of smart algorithms, data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence and all the cornerstones of CS intelligence. And it must be done: it’s a hedge to give Yahoo a better shot at possibly acquiring or partnering with the big bang company that somehow does search better than Google. But all the infrastructure savings doesn’t presume that a better algorithm will emerge.

So I do applaud Yahoo for going down the long tail of search with BOSS. Yet Farecast, Kayak and Sidestep, Oodle, Vast, SimplyHired, NexTag, Shopping.com and many more “vertical search” aggregators ofttimes rich in metadata dominate the fat middle (fat belly?)– and I bet they will continue to do so.

Yelp beats Citysearch in Traffic?

Compete has Yelp beating Citysearch in monthly unique visitors for a few months now, although both the New York Times (via Comscore for March) and Quantcast have Citysearch trouncing Yelp with 8M or 16M uniques to Yelp’s approximately 3M uniques, respectively depending on who you believe.

Yelp is most definitely an interesting, and thus far successful, case study but certainly the story is not over for finding success in local with SMBs as a notoriously difficult group of businesses to sell into.

Yet Yelp is not universally known.  It’s a Bay Area staple and people SWEAR by it here.  A business that doesn’t have a Yelp sticker on its window is clearly clueless.  But step just barely outside of Yelp’s big presence here and outside of the technorati and it’s probably the biggest property for which you’ll hear “what’s that?”  It’s still showing a great growth curve, and the biggest hurdle for Yelp is just simply the difficulty of repeating its success here into nationwide success.

At its heart, Yelp is still just a venue reviews site.  They’ve done a insanely tremendous job of integrating the famous Yelp parties and Yelper badge of honor, and translating that fanatic behavior into fanatic online behavior.  The same went visa versa, and the snowball effect launched from there.

My top questions from the Yelp story:

• How do you best cultivate offline “socializing” to translate to online activity?
• Is there an upcoming backlash in social media and social networks?  It’s en vogue to call this fatigue, but I would call this “I’d rather be outside than staring at a computer” for the vast majority of people.  It’s well known that traffic spikes during the week and during work hours when you’re forced to stare at a computer.
• In the long run, what garners more wins: utility or entertainment “time wasters”?  I personally think there will still be winners in both, but the current Web 2.0 landscape is focused on the time wasters.  Note that also an explosive success like YouTube successfully navigates both.
• What are the opportunities in ubiquitous computing?  A march back towards utility benefits mobile and ubiquitous computing.

I sometime wonder how much we really “enjoy” being in front of a computer.  Even for a computer geek like me, I still have to answer “not so much.”  Maybe that’s what Yelp beating (or soon beating) Citysearch means.

Latest (direct from Compete site):

May 2007 to May 2008 traffic (saved):

Contradictions, Changing the World & Success

The contradictions and absurdities that exist in the city always crack me up. I could honestly go on and on.

Another interesting week in San Francisco. A stranger tracks your contact information down, and mails you your a stranded credit card as simple courtesy. An accidental bump when running down a busy boardwalk with a group leads to a lecture about “running in single file line” as the proper formation when going for a leisurely run. Or at a free concert: defensiveness over a piece of grass when there was no outward intention to steal the free grass, yet a willingness just minutes later to scoot in closer to your two children just to make your young neighbors a little more comfortable.

This is generally a business blog, but it’s also just my ramblings about how to tie life and business together and a process I find unendingly enjoyable.

There was a short interview with Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster, on GigaOM. There are elements here of benevolence as a effective business strategy. The essence, without agreeing completely with some overly save the world sentiments, is that changing the world with a side consequence of making a lot of money is today’s recipe for success both in life and work.

This is not the touchy-feely argument either. There are many reasons by focusing on “get rich! get rich!” will lead you down the wrong path. Most simply, you’re not going to innovate. And you’re just another rider just looking to steal a position too late to ride a wave of money, ready to get pummeled in the white water. Ride the wave you’re meant to ride in a strong yet principled way, and you might ride the wave of your life.

My question in today’s world is: which of these above people are you and do you want to be? Seems like a simple choice to me.

Internet Famous (and Successful) in San Francisco

Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and Founder/CEO of Slide, walked into the coffee shop I was posted up at this afternoon.  He was talking something about widgets, RockYou and such, but I didn’t encroach enough to gather much more than that or anything of substance.

Cool though… Yet another gotta love SF Tech story!

Long Term Confidence, Short Term Stress

I’ve recently summarized my current status many times as “long term I’m very confident, but tons of short term stress”.

This probably characterizes most startups and entrepreneurs.  If you’ve given up on the long-term confidence, the battle is probably lost.  Phrased this way, short-term stress can be alleviated by what an entrepreneur does best, producing results, en route to long term realization of that confidence.  It requires two skills:

• Ability to push through short-term stress to get to long-term success
• Ability to spot when your long-term optimism is simply delusion

Notice I call them skills, instead of abilities.  Skills of most stripes can be learned, abilities are more innate.  It’s the subject of Seth Godin’s The Dip.  It’s not a new subject, but perhaps still underrated as required skills of succeeding.  If you don’t acquire and possess BOTH, your chance of success is truly reduced.

Getting Ahead of the Curve, Lost of Reason

I’ve been busy in the weeds, the real work to make iLetYou as useful to people as possibly can be.  Blog posts have been slow in coming, and this post might even be a little light on substance (although most are).

As of this writing, I’m about 8 months into my San Francisco/Silicon Valley/Bay Area adventure.  I could make hundreds of observations thus far, but I’ll make one stand out: acclimation comes quickly here.

When applied to the hype machine of the Valley, live here for a while and you start to see things the way the collective “we” of the patch stretching from approximately San Jose to San Francisco (maybe partially into Marin County) sees things…  And I think most people actually believe that is a positive.  I tend to agree.

This is a land of forward thinkers, borne of reason and deep contemplation (there’s the Ivy influence for you).  I always fancied myself a forward thinker, but this is where forward thinking is pushed to boundaries.  That boundary where most reasonable people would label people a “nut job”.

Steve Wozniak was a nut job.  Bruce Sterling can seem like a nut job.  On and on.

And it’s in the fabric here.  Everyone who’s anyone has an idea, everyone’s an innovator of some sort small or not.

An aside about Twitter: I have not yet set up a Twitter account.  To balance the sides out, I can see how a lot of people don’t get Twitter.   I can see how it’s enjoyable as is updating your Facebook status, but I really can’t understand it myself because I’m not addicted to it.  There’s just so much going on, that sometimes I choose to filter noise to the better cause of focus.  Lots of people here choose to always be the prototypical early adopter – some wisely, some not I would think.  For me, sometimes you can’t always allow yourself to hear the noise – it’s much better to concentrate on the signal.

So now when people ask about Facebook apps, social networking monetization, online video monetization, Twittering, Office versus Google apps, altruistic and open source projects, cloud computing, software as a service, I just tell people that it’s just a matter of time.  In these easy cases, the signal is loud and clear.

To do something interesting and to have the best chance of success, you have to get ahead of the curve.  This is especially the case in technology.  Like I said, I think I possess the ability to see ahead but it’s a process that I’m glad my peers in the area embrace likewise.  And, yes, you do have to be right.  And you do have to be in a position to take advantage of trends.

Sometimes you get trampled.  But it’s necessary to lose that sensibility that every naysayer espouses.  That loss of sensibility is what drives the area, what makes me really embrace all that the Valley is about.

It’s iPhone Time!

Reported by Gizmodo according to Fortune, a $199 3G thinner and lighter iPhone is coming this summer.  Apparently it’s been just around the corner, and according to Walt Mossberg, we’re no more than 5 weeks away.

Whatever the price, I’ve been planning to buy the 3G version since I’m now out of contract and stuck with a company that just isn’t innovating (Palm).

It’s easy enough to dismiss the iPhone based on its shortfalls, the worst of which is the lack of a tactile keyboard.  I do wish they would fix it or make it easier to do workarounds.  As I’ve said before, I’m on board with the Mac.  But the godphone is a really great device, and hopefully I’ll be on board with the legions soon enough.

Google and Salesforce.com: Spinning a better tomorrow

The interpreters of spin say this is just a partnership to stick it to Microsoft, and Marc Benioff admits as much, amounting to no more than adding a tab on Salesforce.com.

True, but it’s still a partnership between what I would consider to be the two biggest, most important platform, cloud computing, software as a service providers. Or in Valleyspeak: “this is a validation of the Web OS.” Amazon.com is right there too, as may be others, but Amazon.com also has a much more diversified revenue base as of today.

It’s not a stretch at all to see Google buying Salesforce.com.

We’ve put a lot of stock in software as a service at iLetYou.

And I would add that the semantic web is a somewhat unpractical and somewhat unnecessary creation of technologists. Although the semantic web will play a part, realize that the Web OS is where the action is. I have very little doubt about that, and the proof is ample and world-changing.

SNAP Summit, Facebook Apps and the Open Web

This last Tuesday, I attended SNAP Summit which was a pleasantly surprising and meaty collection of interesting insights into the art, science and business of creating social applications.

Facebook launched its developer platform in May 2007. The glow is off, but now big players have settled down to make the social application ecosystem work.

As a financing and exit strategy panelist, VC Jeremy Liew pointed out that the social app exits are small-ish. Mid single digit millions are the maximum exits to date, and usually in a combination of cash and private stock. They pointed out the inherent issues that the potential exits are not big enough to justify the still low chance of a home run and high opportunity cost of not participating in other areas. The same panel continued to point out that patience is the only thing that will solve this. It’s only been 10 months since the launch of FB platform, and Open Social is only slowly becoming something.

Jeremy Liew also pointed out (possibly bad paraphrase) that to many Facebook, social applications, and Open Social will be viewed as another distribution channel. It’s very important to note that it still happens to be a highly effective and potentially viral distribution channel hence it’s popularity among developers, even if you believe that the best time is past.

BJ Fogg, a Stanford research professor who co-taught the Facebook app class at Stanford, talked about Mass Interpersonal Persuasion. Probably the most eloquent way I’ve heard of why Facebook opening its platform up means some powerful things. A critical, organized mass like the one that’s developing around social networks means that masses of people can be moved like never before.

Dave Morin, platform manager at Facebook, believes that you’ll see more interesting applications leveraging the Facebook API to access the social graph off of Facebook. He has admitted earlier that the progress has been slow in this area. Off-Facebook leveraging of the social graph has not been explored because it’s much easier to get distribution when staying in the Facebook sandbox. But as people look to add value, some of most valuable uses of Facebook’s social graph will be on the open web. You’ll be able to utilize the flexibility of the open web combined with leveraging the value of that social graph.

What was revolutionary about Facebook was that it became the biggest Internet network to ever open proprietary and valuable data, allowing developers to leverage this data to create compelling applications through its easy-to-use (fun for developers!) API. It would be as if Google opened it’s search algorithm and gave you immediate access to many (not all) of the calculations that go into brewing up a search or data discovery system.

Now that the dust has settled, I agree that you’ll see integrated development and marketing strategies that include Facebook and other social platforms moving forward. That’s the obvious observation.

But as with everything around the Valley, be aware that the longer horizon of maybe five years out is where you’ll see the really interesting stuff when people really dig in and focus on building out compelling applications and uses. False hype be damned.