CTI Wraps

The final session of the conference is underway. It’s been an interesting conference. Met a lot of neat folks. Really enjoyed presenting.

Mary Kay Followup

On my flight out to SF Monday, I watched The Matrix on and off on the SciFi Channel (thank you JetBlue!) while I worked. I’ve probably seen the movie a dozen or more times, but it’s been quite a few years since I saw it last. Morpheus has a great quote that I thought was a worthy followup to my post about ideas versus implementation:

There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

So true.

Quote of the Day

You’re not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or who says it.

- Malcolm X

It’s That Time of Year Again…

This morning I prepped the garage, topped up her tank, added some sta-bil, and moved her into her winter resting spot. I haven’t covered her up yet though – I’m hoping maybe there’s another riding day to be had, though I’m clearly not holding my breath.

It could be worse: my friend Greg in El Paso TX got his new F430 delivered to him in five inches of snow. Not sure I can wrap my head around the concept of five inches of snow in El Paso TX!

Hi, I’m Shawn. What is your potentially-useless Identity Token?

Ethan Zuckerman posted a great article last week triggered by issues around “anonymous blogging”. I would encourage all folks interested in online identity to give it (and its comments) a read-through. He wraps his post with some of these thoughts:

… maybe asking for a name is a kind of shorthand. We want to know the community reputation of a person, and asking for a name is a way to retrieve that reputation for some subset of people …

… is this a linguistic legacy, a way of asking for an identity token that may no longer be especially useful?

I’m all-too-frequently surprised when clueful, smart, savvy business people tell me that they don’t worry about the reputation of their communities because everybody has to use their real name. It’s a pleasant, hopeful concept, but it’s not reality. With minimal effort, I can ‘prove’ to you that my name is “Jim Smith” or even “Mary Jones”. As Zuckerman suggests, we don’t really want or need to know each others’ names.

What we want is to know whether or not to interact with the person. Should we invest our time with them? The time might be minimal, as in reading their comments on a blog, or more material, as in buying a couch from them via criagslist, or maybe it’s a serious commitment, perhaps dating them. You want to know their reputation first. Their name is far less critical. At TrustPlus we believe that your online reputation is a combination of:

• your prior behavior,
• the context at hand, and
• your connectedness to the party requesting the reputation.

If I’m considering buying a motorcycle from a seller on EPage, I want to know what people have said about her in similar dealings. Her reputation in dissimilar contexts (dating, as a verterinarian, on dog chat boards) is interesting, but less relevant. Most importantly, I care whether and how these data points are connected between us. If my best friend got burned on a motorcycle deal with her, it won’t matter if five folks I don’t know think she’s the bee’s knees.

For the first time in human history, we can each potentially connect with billions of people. Like that famous designer of Norwegian fjords would say, “our names are not important”. What is important critical in this new world order is our reputation, and how it precedes us.

Guilt By Association

I’ve been observing an intriguing phenomenon around social networks of late: a “guilt by association” challenge that is interesting to ponder. Here’s a scenario:

Jane Smith is looking for a job. She applies at ACME Widgets Inc. The ACME folks interview Jane and think highly of her. The ACME folks research Jane extensively on online, including on networking sites. They find that Jane is connected to John Jones on some networking sites. Unfortunately, John Jones was fired from ACME six months prior for a wide array of serious issues. Jane’s connectedness with John gets judged by ACME to be a big concern.

Parents teach their kids to be careful about what they post online, but it’s not just the content. Where you hang out, and who with is a factor too. We are judged by our actions and the company we keep, no? What does it mean that I have friended folks on various networking sites whom I’ve never met in person? For all I know, these folks could be the worst of the worst! What are we as users to do? What is ACME to do? What are the networking sites themselves to do?

Clearly, we could all benefit from mechanisms that shed some context on these varied connections. Right now, connectedness on these sites ends up looking a whole lot more like “phone books” than “representations of relationships”.

danah boyd (I’m a fan – you should be too!) touches on this in a few of her writings. In the end, the personas we may utilize with different groups of people, and the context of, for example, Jane and John’s connectedness, are all part of our identity data. That data must live under our control and it must live horizontally online; outside of, but actively-informing, the networking sites. The fact that Jane friended John three years ago because she was fishing for a sales lead shouldn’t cost her a job.

Can a Geek Find Happiness @ CircuitCity?

I just had an oddly pleasant experience at a CircuitCity store. I was in need of a wireless presenter – one of those things that lets you control your PowerPoint presentation while you walk around blathering incessantly. Let’s just refer to it as “a widget”.

I found three such widgets on the shelf. None of them indicated they supported Vista. I asked a sales guy and he said I’d more than likely need to download Vista drivers for any of them, but they all might not have Vista drivers. I asked if I could look it up online and he said “sure thing” and pointed me to his computer. I hit the three web sites, checked the driver downloads, and sure enough the Logitech widget had a Vista driver. So I bought that widget.

I walked out of the store shaking my head, surprised at how well that all worked!

Go Mary Kay!

I’ve never come across this quote before, and it’s a stellar one from the late, great Mary Kay Ash:

Ideas are a dime a dozen, but the men and women who implement them are priceless.

I have had the fortune and misfortune of working with, partnering with, and befriending a fair number of “idea people” over my 20+ year career now. For better or worse, I love “idea folks”. They’re creative, deeply knowledgeable about the arenas they love, and they’ve generally got more passion than an entire roomful of business folks with MBAs .

“Idea folks” seem to fall into two buckets. The first bucket consists of the folks who understand that the vast majority of ideas need to get past (sometimes well past) the idea stage in order to actually be valuable. At some point, the proverbial rubber must hit the proverbial road. The second bucket consists of (as you’ve already guessed) the folks who think that the mere contemplation of an idea creates pure value. These folks tend to have a tough go of their business life since there’s something fundamentally broken in their understanding of the commercial world.

When I meet and talk to first-time entrepreneurs, I try to ascertain where the meter sits for them along these two dimensions of ideas and implementation. There are great entrepreneurs who haven’t had an original idea in their lives. The best entrepreneurs (IMO/IME) are great idea folks and great implementers. The folks who are great idea folks but can’t implement have an uphill climb to become great entrepreneurs.

No Zune.

Just a few days ago I was remarking how Microsoft appeared to really be getting their act together with the new Zunes. Alas, I was being too hopeful. Apparently the Zune can’t talk to my media management software of choice, JRiver Media Center. Not a problem with the iPod Classic (though Apple puts protections on its hardware, they clearly don’t “mean it” quite like MS does since they get hacked away within days). I’m told the Zunes are set up to not talk to anything other than zTunes (or whatever the MS software is called). Unfortunate. Dumb play, IMO.

Saying No.

Fred Wilson put a great post up on saying no. Much much better advice and context than that provided by “Venture Insider”, who I took issue with, and who wasn’t even willing to associate his name with his writing. No happens. Everybody has to be smart and mature about it.