One of the projects that I worked on was to create a map of customer value transactions across multiple communications channels.  Let me give you an example. 

A customer browses something on a company website, and puts a call into his rep with a technical question. The rep lets the customer know that it will need to be researched and someone else will get back to them. The rep opens up a trouble ticket, which a technician then opens, answers the question and sends an email to the customer.  Simple enough if it works, but is an example of multiple communications channels (web, voice, and email) all being used to process a single question.  Multiply that times thousands of customers, reps, and there is quite a bit of room for gaps.  While common sense recognizes that all of those things are related, most IT systems cannot. 

Our idea was to run correlations across web, voice, and email to make sure that each of the value transactions was a closed loop.  Doing that kind of analysis should help identify trouble spots.  It is really as simple as matching the customer to each of these transactions.  Most IT systems generate the raw transaction logs to do this kind of analysis.

Google recently announced the ability to download Google Voice data as part of the Google Takeout initiative.  Extremely cool, and should work for the kinds of value analysis that I’m talking about. 

Ed Johnson was one of the driving forces behind creating the 401(k) industries. He has a wealth of experience in investing and more importantly, in actually running businesses.   Ed invested a lot of his time in me as a person.  He was concerned that I was ethical and above board in all things.  Ed has raised a family and worked with lots of young people and I think believed in erring on the side of giving clear advice.  He also did not shy away from giving advice about what he believed to be right thing to do.  Frankly, I needed a fair amount of advice in general. 

Reading today’s Wall Street Journal article about the SEC investigation of Facebook reminded me of another piece of mentoring advice that Ed gave me.  He said that he believed in keeping businesses private, but holding them to the standards of public companies.  My take on it, was he believed that most businesses (and the people in them) performed better when they held themselves accountable and were transparent.  Having said that, I think that he also preferred that to be by choice, not by requirement. 

The SEC inquiry is looking into rewriting disclosure rules in response to a private offering of Facebook equity to a pool of investors prior to an initial stock offering.  The general sense seems to be that the private offering is large enough that it should be held to financial disclosure regulations, even though the structure doesn’t legally require it .

There seems to be very little in the way of the Facebook and Goldman Sachs Group holding themselves accountable to higher standards.  I would expect any company that is intending to go public to be well on their way to acting like a public company.  I can’t help but wondering if the recent investment melt down is far enough in the past that the whole idea of investment banks doing things that are technically legal doesn’t ring some warning bells in investors minds. 

While women play an increasingly important role in making money, many have a knowledge gap when it comes to finances and building wealth.  This can become a real problem, particularly if divorce, job loss, or other major life events happen.  And sooner or later, some of these things do happen. 

Delivered in crisp daily doses, Daily Worth provides genuine and intelligent financial advice.  It strikes me as a nice balance of content and reinforcement.  By that, I mean its one thing to make a New Year’s resolution, and quite another thing to stick to it all year.  For most of us, building up our net worth is a life long process. 

Looking at Daily Worth brought a few questions to mind.  Is a woman’s perspective on finance that different from a man’s?   I wondered how differences in math education affect financial intelligence.  I also wondered if community participation like this has an impact on actually changing behavior.  The best that I could think to do was to send trial copies to a bunch of women that I know and ask them for their comments and feedback on Daily Worth.

I’ll interested in following this along as it develops. 

Here are the apps on my home page right now. While I have seen a few “Top 25” and “Top 10” app lists, listing the Top 16 made the most sense to me, as that’s what fits on my home page.  While at any given time I may be experimenting around with a half dozen new apps, these are the applications that I use regularly.  I keep the experimental ones on a separate page.  I don’t root my phone.  I work with lots of sharp people that do that, but I rely on this phone to do my job.  Neither Verizon nor my company IT desk really have much patience for support calls that start out with “I have been playing around with the underlying OS…”

Core Communications – 1. Phone,  2. Touchdown, 3. Gmail, 4. Google Voice 5. Messaging, 6. Skype

At its heart, sales is depends upon communicating with people.  I need to be as responsive as possible, in the way that each person likes.  Some like email, some prefer texts, some really only want you to leave voice mail.   I think that three of these apps deserve a bit more information. 

I am on the Verizon network, and they have a special arrangement with Skype so that Skype calls are treated as on network.  I use Skype for the folks that I work with in Europe.

7. Touchdown is a really good exchange client for Android. It costs around $20.  Outlook is nerve center of my scheduling and contact management systems.  Salesforce.com pulls data from it, I use Plaxo to sync my different contact bases to it, and so on.  Touchdown does everything that I would expect, it pops up alarms, keeps the calendar, and handles email.  It works for me, as I am really only looking for a mobile client to keep a pulse on what’s going on.  I’m not sure it would work if it was my only system.

I find smartphones frustrating if you have to do much real work. I prefer to use a full computer for all of the real backoffice work.  I update my opportunities and everything back home, but by keeping everything in Outlook, I make it easy to process my backlog in one go.  

 8. Google Voice has become an important utility for me.  If you aren’t familiar with it, it acts like a combination of call routing and voicemail with online access.  With Google Voice, you get a phone number assigned, which then can be used to ring any and all other lines that you want.  For example, you could give that number to someone, then have it forward to both your desk and cell phone, so that it acts like a “find me, follow me” service.  I use it a bit differently.  I have my calls routed so that my desk phone rings 4 times, then forwards to my cell phone.  It then goes to Google voice (acting as voicemail) immediately.  I do it that way, because if I’m on the phone at my home office, I can see who is calling when it forwards to my cell.  That setup works for me whether I’m in my home office or on the road.  The nice thing is that Google Voice attempts to transcribe the voicemail and shows it to you visually.  The phone signals that a voice mail has arrived, and the text is displayed briefly.  You can then call up the voicemail either through gmail or the Google voice app.  In most cases, just seeing the caller and text is enough for the time.  It also has the benefit of making voice mails easy to forward. 

9. Navigation has been a real savings in time and money, simple as that.  Most rental car companies charge $15 a day.  It is also pretty easy to get twisted up, make a wrong turn on the interstate and spend at least 15 minutes getting lost the first time that you go anywhere.  I typically have a hard copy of directions as part of my Tripit package (more on that below), but the Google Navigator works well.  I have recently started using voice, and so far, it has worked perfectly. 

10. Settings isn’t really an app, but I use it a lot.  Settings is where you switch “airport mode” on and off.  You also go there to tether, manage bluetooth, wi-fi, and other networks, and lots of different things.  It gives you the ability to backup settings offline. I changed the settings so that the button on top hangs up phone calls.  I think that is an accessibility setting. 

I use 11.PDA Net to turn my Droid into a wireless modem when I am stuck for connectivity.  Too often, the connectivity at hotels is either problematic or expensive.  PDA net works pretty well, even with VPNs.  You also need to install a utility on your PC so that it can treat your phone like a modem.  That’s something that you need to have taken care of before you actually need it. 

The main time I end up using it is when I see in Touchdown that I have an updated presentation or contract that I need to get onto my laptop, but don’t have any other access.  I fire up PDA net, download the mail into Outlook, then get on with it.

12. Tripit.com is all about managing travel stuff, although I rarely use the mobile client.  The Tripit.com service is pretty idiot proof, in that you forward an itinerary from your corporate travel to a mailbox (plans@tripit.com).  It then breaks it down into components and saves it online.  

Tripit creates a printable itinerary that includes driving instructions, all of the information about flights, car rentals, and so on.  The Tripit service then acts like an update and reminder service.  It sends me an email or text message if my flight has been delayed.  It also provides some social features so that your trip can be posted on Facebook or LinkedIn.  It isn’t as contrived as it sounds. It effectively becomes an automatic notice for friends and family. We created a Tripit group for our team at work so that we can easily compare notes on itineraries and travel plans.  Tripit becomes a nice little travel process prompter.  It sends out a reminder email 24 hours before flight time reminding that you can check in online, then sends status alerts based upon your instructions.

 As you can see , the mobile client keeps the itinerary details, and if you click on the directions, it will open up and provide a navigation option.  It’s pretty slick all around. 

You can see an example of what a Tripit posting looks like on Facebook.  It will post a notice before the trip saying something like “Don is planning a trip to Chicago” and show the date range.  Like anything else, if you use the standard templates, it looks kind of mechanical.  If you take the time to upload a relevant picture and add some real details, it starts to become more useful. 

I also use 13. Foursquare for similar purposes.  I absolutely like the idea of being in control of when I make my location public. That said, I’m not always sure that I get quite enough value out of Foursquare.  I am using it, because I kind of get the potential, but I wouldn’t pay money for it.  (After I wrote this post, they really cheesed me off by automatically posting a “You Won a “You voted” badge” onto Facebook and Twitter.  I found it a real violation of my privacy. I decide who and when I tell people that I voted.  Major violation! I’m checking out Whrrl.)

The 14. camera and 15. Facebook app are my other two mainstay applications.  I always try to take pictures while I’m with customers.  I’ve gotten some great pictures that way.  The easiest thing to do right now is to send the pictures to Facebook via MMS or email.  You can see the picture from my hotel room in Chicago.  The Droid camera is fine for this kind of thing.  I think that the folks over at Foursquare should think really hard about how they can add the ability for me to create these kinds of messages from a checkin.  As with Tripit, the ability to change the picture and add my own text is all of the difference in the world.  My latest everyday camera has GPS built in.  It seems to me that being able to pick an image is part of the whole “check-in” concept.  It lets me tell people where I am and share it a bit more.  If you compare the picture from my hotel room to the map that was included with the Cheesecake factory checkin, you can kind of sense the opportunity.  The restaurant was really very rich visually, the map doesn’t tell the story. 

The final “must have” travel app is the 16. clock.  It has become my daily alarm clock.  I never call down for wake-up calls anymore.  I also use it for some meetings with people that just don’t seem to have any time boundaries.  When I have a meeting with someone that runs fast and loose with time, I try to remember to set an alarm for 5 minutes before my hard stop.  I warn them that I have a hard stop at the end, then when it goes off, they understand that I need to cut things off and they don’t take it personally. 

These seem to cover the bases for me.  I am always looking for other great tools, but these are my mainstays.  I am looking for a better contact system than comes with the phone, but haven’t found it yet.  

I would love to see comments on what works for you.

I believe that some students make conscious choices to reveal more of themselves because they have learned the value of social capital and believe that “you have to give to get”.  There was a general trend that students that had previously established social networks in high school, understood the value of social capital and were more likely to participate at college early.

There is real risk that they are exposing quite a bit more information than they are aware of.  There has been quite a bit of negative discussion around Facebook’s privacy settings, particularly in that they tend to be open by default, but it isn’t clear to me that Facebook policy is at the root.  The range of voluntary disclosure we found seemed unrelated to settings and more driven by personal choices. 

The issue that more people need to be aware of is just how the combination of relatively benign information can be used to deduce much more sensitive information.  I vaguely remember reading that if a “hacker” has both your birthdate and hometown, that they can figure out your social security # more than 50% of the time.   An MIT study referenced in the Times article found that people were able to predict with 78% accuracy which students were gay males, purely based on Facebook data.   

The story highlights another serious issue, which is the whole concept of personally identifiable information.  An associate director of privacy for the FTC is quoted as saying “Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete”.  Information such as SS#, mother’s maiden name, favorite pet’s name, and so on used to be reliable as a verification of identity. I have to believe that the correlation power of today’s networked computers being applied to more than a decades worth of periodically revealed little pieces of information has rendered the concept suspect at best.  Being as many, many systems use this type of information in order to release passwords, we have a potentially serious problem on our hands. 

I use Skype most often for international communications.  It works and is easy to use.  I find Skype to be a bit ahead of its competition with new features.  They do a good job of presenting a simple interface that you can use for voice, IM, or video conferencing.  In Enterprise technology we call it UC, which stands for Unified Communications.  Skype does that, and it does it pretty well. It has presence, so that you can see when people are available. If they aren’t, you can leave messages that the person will get later.

I used Skype while my son was travelling across Europe last summer.  He was  staying in different hostels in different countries and was “playing it by ear”.  Skype allowed him to stay in touch.  As a parent, it was a joy to see his face and let him see everyone (even the dogs) at home. 

Here is how I understand the partnership.  Skype calls will be carried over the Verizon Wireless voice network, not the data network.  That makes sense to me.  The Verizon Wireless network is already optimized for voice service.   The calls will be converted over to Skype VoIP when they leave the Verizon Wireless network in order to travel across the public internet. So now, if you are talking to someone on Skype, they don’t count as minutes on your Verizon Wireless plan. If you want to jump off the Skype network, you can use Skype Out to call international phones at their rates.

The Skype application will be available to the BlackBerry Storm 9530, Storm2 9550, Curve 8530, Curve 8330, and BlackBerry 8830 World Edition; and the Motorola Droid and Devour; and the HTC Eris.

Industry reaction to the announcement has been interesting.  Quite a few people have focused on the “changing of the guard” from wireless to VoIP.  Others have focused on telco vs. internet types of competition.  Still others focused on who got the better end of the deal.  Given that all of these dynamics were at work, what was most interesting to me was the fact that Skype and Verizon were able to successfully negotiate an agreement that added value to their consumers and to each other.  It isn’t easy.

I look at the Verizon Wireless / Skype partnership as basically adding their networks to each other’s to create a more powerful network for all of their users. Given today’s technical, business, and regulatory environments, both companies should be recognized for taking a step forward for their users.

The twine linked to a story titled “Ogle Earth: Hunting for Iran’s Secret Nuclear Power Plant near Qum on Google Earth”.  I subscribe to a twine on data visualization, and have been active with Google Maps programming, so I followed the link. 

Once the story was broken, it was pretty easy to change a setting on Google Maps to see which sites near Qum have been captured by satellites the most often and then compare pictures.  My initial reaction was that the story was too transparent and that the writer was educating the Iranian government on how they could “see what we see”.  I then thought some more, because I do not believe that ignorance makes a good foundation for real security either.

It reminded me of an incident from my hometown back in 1976.  I grew up in Princeton Junction and attended some classes at Princeton University. As best as I can remember, there was a Princeton student named John Phillips who wrote a paper for physics class on how to build an atomic bomb.  I never read his actual paper, but I can assure you that “the word on the street” was that it even went into details about how you could find fissionable material second hand.  I remember us talking about “glow in the dark” watch hands and stuff like that. 

I can also remember the 16 year old sense of righteous outrage that came along with the rumors that the FBI and CIA were trying to squash the whole thing. They wanted to confiscate the kid’s paper and prevent it from being published.  Here was a kid that took publicly available research, then actually thought about what he was being taught, and got into trouble!   I do not know whether the Feds really had anything to do with it or not. It prompted quite a dialog about the boundaries of intellectual freedom. 

At the time, it seemed obvious to me that as a student that I had two choices. I could either be educated, or ignorant.  You could study physics and understand how bombs work, or not.  The idea of learning only some knowledge, but not too much, did not make any sense to me.  How do you know what you aren’t supposed to know?

With regards to Iran and their nuclear facility, I have prayed and decided that education and knowledge is the path to security and peace of mind for all of us.  Benjamin Franklin said that “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” I think that the Iranian people, who by all accounts are well educated and intelligent need to understand just how  the rest of the world is free to see what is going on inside their country.  We need to fear less about what the Iranian government knows and care more about what the Iranian people should know.  

There is so much practical advice in Tamar Weinberg’s new book that I found myself immediately putting her concepts into practice as I read it.  “The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web” provides an overview of the different types of online social media that are available.   It provides practical guidance on how to best use them to achieve your specific goals.  The book should be valuable to product managers, bloggers, consultants, or anyone that is interested in a cheaper alternative to traditional marketing.

I was delighted to see a marketing / technology book that starts with setting goals and creating a plan because setting  goals and objectives are the key to choosing the right technologies and strategies for social media marketing.  Is your goal to increase traffic to your website?  Do you need to increase brand awareness?  Are you focused on improving search engine rankings or reputation management?  Social Media Marketing is also good for increasing sales or for establishing thought leadership. Each of these objectives will drive a different mix of social media technology and messaging. 

Tamar introduces social media marketing by establishing its relevance through some pretty impressive numbers.  Globally, the market for social media is measured in hundreds of millions of users.  She references a recent 2008 study showing that 346 million users read blogs, 307 million users visit friends’ social network profile pages, and 303 million users share video clips.  Social media marketing is a systematic approach to marketing to this audience.

The book takes scenarios based on different objectives such as “you have a product and want to get the word out”, then provides an overview of the different types of social media available, then lists out specific rules for how to use them to achieve your goals.  The technology overviews provide examples of the market leaders, promising new companies, as well as, free alternatives.  Each example includes screenshots and practical “how-to” analysis. 

The technology groups include blogs, micro-blogging, social networks, social bookmarking, social news, photography, video, and podcasting.  Each of these provide different sets of tools that allow to you communicate, influence, and learn from your constituents.  For example, she recommends a tool that allows you to check your name availability across multiple social media outlets.  I was pleased to see that my ID was registered on 19 of the 120 social media outlets listed. Looking deeper, it also reinforced Tamar’s point that managing your social media presence requires a consistent investment in time. I had not visited some of the sites in the last 3 or 4 years, although the sites have continued to become increasingly relevant and powerful. 

“The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web” makes good on its promise of providing clear advice on how social web technologies work.  If you are interested in learning the art of conversation marketing as it is evolving today, I cannot think of a better resource.  It combines a good technology overview with best practices for using them.  It strikes a very good balance between a high level overview to help you get up to speed with in depth recommended guidance that you can adopt to reach your marketing objectives.

At that time I was supporting Verizon for one of the Bell Labs legacy companies.  I was also advising the Democratic side of the Senate.  At that time, the Senate couldn’t figure out why the service providers were not taking advantage of tax incentives to build out fiber to the home.  My recommendation at the time was that they shift the incentives away from running fiber all the way to the home, rather simply to bring it to the neighborhood.  The fact is that policy and incentives can only influence corporate behavior so far.  There still needs to be a sound fundamental strategy and business case.

At that time, Kevin was focused on the disruptive potential of Voice over IP (VoIP) technology to level the playing field and drive new waves of innovation.  At that time, I was working on a project to provide Verizon with a large scale centralized softswitch so that they could offer VoIP to their customers.  At that time, there were quite a few religious battles over whether intelligence belonged in the core of network or at the edge.  The answer has turned out to be “it depends” and “both”.

Edge devices have become smarter and more complicated, which in turn has driven the need for networks to become much smarter too.  Many functions, such as security, make more sense in the core than at every single end point on a network.  We also continue to put more intelligent routing capabilities like MPLS into the core network, which in turn makes it possible for more power and control to be out at the edge.

Recently, I have been working on IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network design.  IMS is, in essence, a very complex network architecture that enables  networks do some very simple sounding things.  IMS will allow end users to pick and choose the applications that they want, independently of the network that they are on.  You could pick which voicemail that you want for both your desk phone and cell phone.  You could choose a speech to text engine that you want to work across all of your communications.

My hope is that powerful network designs like IMS will enable the collaborative environment that we will need to drive the next wave of innovation.  We need small agile companies that are willing to take risks and create innovative new products.  We also need well managed companies that can be trusted to execute capital intensive network build-outs that take decades and cost billions of dollars.  These companies need to be methodical and extremely efficient.  We need both these types of companies to play nice together.

There is a great opportunity in front of us, to unleash a new round of productivity increases.  Success, however, will not be achieved by picking one side at the other’s expense.  Our technology policy will need to be as intelligent as the networks themselves.  We will need to recognize and reward the type of behavior that we want from our service providers, such as efficient use of capital, reliability, predictability, while at the same time laying down clear rules for how we want their networks to behave in order to create a fair playing field.  The disruptive innovators also have to take on some risk as well.  I don’t think that they should expect free communications services any more than they should expect free electricity.  A business model that relies on getting an essential production component for free is not sustainable in the long run.

Kevin is the right guy to help create this kind of collaborative environment.  He is passionate about the need to drive innovation and improve personal productivity.  He has also been a relentless advocate for net-neutrality.  He has taken companies to task for peer to peer blocking, but has also been quick to recognize when big business gets it right, like with Apple’s App Store and Verizon’s Open Development Initiative, both of which are focused on creating collaborative eco-systems to drive innovation.  He also works really hard.

One of the projects that I’m working on is the Birds of a Feather project at the Lehigh Enterprise Systems Center, the other is more commercially oriented, working with a network service provider to use social networking information to create more value for their customers.

One of the business values that social networking may be able to deliver is reduced fraud. If we have good modeling of communities within a network, we should be able to detect transactions that don’t fit the typical profile. We all see some fraud management activity from our credit card companies, for example, we may be called because a dollar amount is out of the ordinary, or the location or method seems wrong. Social networking could provide us with a new dimension for this.

Probing around this area, led to some interesting discussions regarding trust and social networks. Mike Catalano, who is an expert in wireless technology at Booz Allen Hamilton is working on a project for the Gates Foundation, and was starting to consider the elasticity of trust in a social network. How far can it be extended? Hank Korth, a faculty member at Lehigh had worked on real time fraud management back when he was at Bell Labs. He thought that trust should be another attribute that we look at and capture when we build social network maps.

If you think about examples, I’m sure that you may have family networks where you have trust in something even though it may have travelled through 4 or 5 people, while there are others, such as business deals that you may only trust as far as “a friend of a friend”.

My thoughts are that in addition to weak links and strong links, and direction, frequency, and duration of communications, we need to think about adding a trust attribute to the equation.

I am wondering whether trust can be extracted passively from a network by analyzing data, or you would need to establish and capture trust separately, but then model using the value.

Please let me know what your thoughts.