Thomas Howe

A very charming video that I caught after checking in on an adhearsion demo on blip.tv…

exactly what sort of website my elementary school kids would build if they could.  No longer, because I’ve found their perfect site: bacn.  They sell bacon there; nothing else. Gotta love that focus.  I’m strangely hungry for something crunchy, salty and downright bad for you.

Right after my presentation at the last Telco 2.0 show, I had a chance to be interviewed by Martyn Warwick (almost sounds as English as Thomas Spencer Howe) at the Convention Center in Nice.  Really nice guy – great crew around him.  In a little bit of video magic, his side of the questions were done after the fact; during my taping he just read the questions and I spoke to the camera.  As I remember, it was a really hot room and I was so wiped from my talk that I could barely keep my head up.  Anyways, although it was as painful as videos normally are for me, at least this time I like the tie I’m wearing.  Flush the rest of it.

I wish I had this diagram before.

I’m really growing to like Gil Yehuda’s blog. I caught this post this morning about claiming more of an ROI than you sould…

In analyzing the conversations that lead to the decision to try this out, we observed that since we were billable resources, we could quantify the cost of our time.  Given the number of analysts that attended this meeting and the billing rates we charge — we were in the $10,000 ballpark for that one hour.  In other words — had we all been at clients for that time, we could have billed $10K during that hour.  Of course, we don’t bill clients every moment of the day, and despite the quote “Time is Money” — it’s not.  So I used the statement “It might be simplistic to say that we saved $10,000 a month using Yammer. ”  And I meant “it issimplistic to say…” that we saved $10K a month using Yammer. OK, yes I did say “But in some way it’s a reasonable way to measure the value that open microsharing brought to the company.”  Did I go too far on the limb with a statement of simplistic ROI as a measure of value?  I think I went as far as I was willing to go, but no further.

Awesome point, and in this current econolypse, everyone wants to talk about ROIs, and sometimes goes too far out on a limb. Later on in the article, Gil explains how Yammer posted that Forrester saved $10,000 a month using their application.  Can’t blame them for trying, but boy that was a stretch.

Made me think about work that VoiceSage has done in the past proving the ROI of Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) to their customers.  In one story I heard, they were working with a publisher of home shopping catalogs, and to prove the ROI, they made reminder calls to the customers in one geographical area, and not to others. (Perhaps they ran it for one month to all customers, then turned it off for a month, but whatever.)  Then, they could measure the returns based on zip code.  This is a process that could be repeated at will, and ROI was easily determined. No stretching required.

Really liking txt2go, a way of purchasing bus tickets in the UK using your mobile phone.  You simply set up an account, text to 60060, and your bus ticket is sent back to you as a WAP link.  Because you setup your account before hand, you are not bound by whatever phone carrier you have service with.  It’s perfect for kids because you don’t need cash on hand to get bus tickets, and you can’t purchase anything else with them, so it can’t be easily abused. It’s also a great service to deploy, because there’s no upgrades required to the phones or the network.  I think this would be an excellent approach to similar problems: school cafeteria purchases, bookstores, etc.

It’s all getting easier, don’t you think?

In the will probably become a best practice department, I caught this post today about a classic CEBP deployment.  The Taco Maker, a Puerto-Rican based food chain, recently ran an ad campaign featuring a heavily accented cook called Juan Maker to promote the restaurant. As part of the approach, consumers were instructed to text to a short code to receive a coupon offer.  The results?

The Taco Maker received nearly 5,000 texts in response to their
campaign and gave away
nearly 2,500 burritos — a response rate of about 50%. But customers
that received free tacos then stayed to purchase food from The Taco
Maker. The promotion resulted in same-store sales increases of 21% in
the first quarter. And Taco Maker CEO Carlos Budet said that people
liked the character of Juan Maker so much that they called the radio
show asking to speak with him.

Sort of reminds me of the service from Orange called “Orange Wednesdays“.  With this service, you text ‘FILM’ to a short code, and they send you back a coupon that lets your friend get into the movies with you for free. The benefits to the cinema? Higher ticket revenue, higher concession revenue and a long term change in audience behavior. What about Orange? Differentiation, increased loyalty and new customer acquisition.

At the recent Telco 2.0 show in Nice, Mo Firouzabadian, Global Business Line Director for Buongiorno gave a fantastic talk about O2 Extras, a reward program for O2 subscribers. In it, Mo describes the virtuous circle created when  you start to reward using digital content like tickets for consumers based on their interests and segments.  The heart of his talk was called “Win Every Time”, building on the fact that every interaction of a client is a markting opportunity. The example given in his talk was prepaid customers that would be sent a text award every time they topped up. This simple action allowed them to increase ARPU and tenure, while keeping the product fresh and constantly changing.  With more than one third of the subscribers redeeming the awards, they’ve seen increases in ARPU, top up frequency, top up denomination and customer acquisitions.

One of the very interesting things (to me) about cloud computing are the new engineering challenges that it presents. For instance, let’s take my favorite thought experiment: persistent communications. Persistent communications refers to the recording, storing and indexing of all verbal communications for a company. It’s easier to see how valuable it is when you consider the not-so-hidden costs of managing and training call center support teams. If you were able to capture everything that was said by the customer, and the agent, you could then analyze the types of support calls, recall solutions that weren’t properly documented, whatever.  (I realize that there’s going to be a big political pushback from this sort of activity… but it’s a thought experiment.)

Among the first obvious questions would be “Sounds like a lot of data to store” and I would say oh yeah. If you’re considering a company that would do this for others in the cloud, then I would say “oh oh yeah”.  Tons of data.

That’s when I start thinking about Hadoop. Hadoop is an open source effort, supported by Apache, that allows other applications to store, receive and process vast amounts of data.   It’s scalable, economical, efficient and reliable.  Recently, Dave Rosenberg wrote about Hadoop breaking data-sorting world records:

Hadoop is the only open-source software to ever win the GraySort
competition, adding another notch to last year’s win at the Terasort
competition, where Hadoop sorted 1 terabyte of data in 209 seconds.
That beat the previous record of 297 seconds in the terabyte sort benchmark.

Within the rules for the 2009 Gray sort, our 500 GB sort set a new
record for the minute sort and the 100 TB sort set a new record of
0.578 TB/minute. The 1 PB sort ran after the 2009 deadline, but
improves the speed to 1.03 TB/minute. The 62 second terabyte sort would
have set a new record, but the terabyte benchmark that we won last year
has been retired.

Is this a solution that could have come from closed source, proprietary vendors? Maybe, but now that Hadoop is both open and the fastest in the world, it seems like the proprietary providers have something to worry about.

One of my favorite bloggers is Dion Hinchcliffe. As I’ve been diving head first into the ways in which the web is changing telephony, Dion has been thinking about how it will change the Enterprise.  His latest post “The year of the shift to Enterprise 2.0” is a must read..

Intriguing new just-released reports now show that between a third
and one half of businesses either already are or will be employing
so-called Enterprise 2.0 tools in the workplace (blogs, wikis, and
social networking/messaging) in 2009. The data also show that security
concerns remain high, access is actually fairly low, compliance with
mainstream enterprise data practices is poor, and some workers aren’t
planning to get anywhere near them.

The bottom line: The tools have arrived. How enterprise knowledge
and is created and flows within our organizations is beginning to
change dramatically.

One idea I’ve been toying with for a while has to do with capturing all of the customer communications (verbal or not), storing and indexing it, such that it becomes a permanent part of the Enterprise knowledge flow. Can you just imagine how much intelligence is lost because we don’t record and store help desk conversations?  I understand the technical difficulties in transcription, but I have to imagine the quantum leaps in support quality and lowering of support costs with this simple addition.

Plus, I keep thinking of Jean Luc Picard’s Captains log.  That would be cool.

Earlier this week, Ken and I had a chance to sit down on Skype and have a conversation about Jaduka and our mission.  Ken is an excellent interviewer, and I’m really honored that he took the time to sit down with me – especially considering the star power of the other people he and Sheryl have been speaking to lately.   Ken is one of the true visionaries for unified communications, an excellent blogger, and fast becoming the go-to guy for social media applications.   For me – he’s a must read.  Have a listen.