BizTechTalk

Conversationally Interactive Audio and Video

My longtime colleague Tom Koulopoulos (blogging at The Innovation Zone) and I recently did a BlogTalkRadio interview with Howard Seibel, VP of Marketing from Veotag, where we were discussing trends in the way audio and video are produced, consumed, viewed, manipulated and mangled, from the beginning of TV to the new dawn of YouTube and beyond. Veotag provides an audio/video tagging platform, which allows internal bookmarks to be applied, syncing of PPT, embedding animation, and a number of other features. I had first stumbled onto Veotag back in January, via a Guy Kawasaki clip, and then in experimenting with veotag myself.

The BlogTalkRadio interview was audio only, but see below to experience a Veotagged audio clip. This allows you to easily bounce around in the file, rather than having to simply fast-forward or rewind blind. I'm planning to work back through my podcast archive and redo them to allow this style of interaction.

Timely enough, I finally watched a video tonight that I'd kept hearing about on the various blogs and newsletters I read, titled "Web 2.0... The Machine is Us/ing Us." Something about the title and the buzz going, had initially kept me from watching it, but I've finally experienced the video, and it is quite something. (Not quite at the same level, I had avoided reading "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell for a year or two, and wow, wish I hadn't waited to read that book. Old hypertrend avoidance habits die slowly though!)

Take a peek below...

Very interesting, and nicely done! I remember when we were doing some video editing in the very early days of my work at Delphi Group, and a fellow who was a professional video editor and producer was assisting us, with his in home (a large home, mind you) studio full of literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. This was only 10 years ago. The tools have radically changed...

But that's not my focus. So YouTube and consumer-generated media, and the tools that enable this are all fantastic pieces of technological stuff by themselves. But who cares? I've gotten to a discussion over on IT Toolbox, that certain types of content, as well as certain sites still don't truly provide the conversations and interaction that *I* am looking for.

Take a look at the clip below - it's the same as the original above, but with conversation overlaid on it, rather than below it (YouTube comments don't travel with the embedded version - but jump to YouTube and you'll see my point).

Now I'll admit that the commentary over the top of the video is in this case, very annoying - but the early stages of experimentation, or innovation, well, they aren't necessarily pretty folks! But having such comments (if they were USEFUL comments that is), could provide an important, conversational dialog OVER TIME, and IN CONTEXT, with the existing audio and video. Very interesting - clearly much work to be done, but this is an intriguing direction to me.

The Revolution Will Be... well, Revolutionary... *and* Evolutionary...

Re: In praise of a blank page

I receive the occasional e-mail announcing new "Lenses" (semi-structured web pages) from the fine folk at Squidoo from time to time, and bit on the hook tonight.

Seth Godin (marketing guru, has had a nice run of 7 books, and seems to just burst with ideas that sprout as soon as they hit the soil) is the man behind Squidoo, and so I rapidly latched onto one of his Lenses (anyone can author these, it's a nice platform, feature rich, and easy to use - different than a blog, but Web 2.0 in look and feel) and stumbled back onto his blog...

The most recent entry was titled "In praise of a blank page" - which is a great eye-catcher/attention-getter, as at least for me, it spawned thinking about tying the fear of blank pages into the mind killer that it can be for idea generators, painters, musicians, writers, etc.. But no, he's talking about a friend's book cover that seems was so inappropriate (mediocre) that leaving it blank would've been a better approach. I could easily see that happening...

But what REALLY caught my eye - his riff on refusing to ship/create unworthy products. He's been discussing making remarkable products, services, etc. for years now, and there is plenty of life left there - but the final paragraph is what got me, as it takes me back to one of the most interesting podcast interviews I've done so far, with Matthew E. May at Aevitas, and discussing his book titled "The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation."

Seth discusses kanban, which in a Japanese car factory, gave workers permission to stop the entire assembly line to fix a problem, no matter how big or small. The counterintuitive piece there is that in giving that power to any worker to push the big red button that grinds everything to a halt, production doesn't drop through the floor (overall) as you might expect, but that quality goes up, process times shrink, workers feel more empowered, and improvements pile on top of each other so subtly that no one notices (particularly outside the company) how much improvement has piled up until WHAM, it looks like INNOVATION (Big I) from the outside, and people wonder what happened.

Correction! (on Friday, April 6)

Just received word from Matthew E. May - updating me live from a plane before the "all cells off" call, who was TXT MSGD by a friend (I'd guess Ralph Bernstein, at Productivity Press - as Seth has made the correction now as well) about this post...

Seems both I (definitely) and Seth (yep) confused the terminology here. It should be Andon, not Kanban that we're talking about.

I'll drop in the correction here, straight from Matthew:

Kanban is something Toyota borrowed from the US grocery industry. It's a request. It means "sign card." It's what makes Just In Time work. Grocery markets and bakeries need fresh produce and run on a JIT basis. Toyota saw how it worked in the 50s and used it. It's a customer request essentially. When you go to the store and see the "Out of stock, Time to reorder" card...that's a kanban. In a Toyota plant no work is performed until the Kanban is empty and calls for it. It's a pull system.

Andon refers to stopping when there's a problem and dates back to Sakichi Toyoda's quest to build a loom that would automatically stop when a thread broke. Whenever something goes wrong you pull the andon cord. In newer plants now it's a Dell flatscreen that goes to a team leader's BlackBerry. But the line doesn't stop. Unless the problem can't be fixed by the next station. It's a call for help. You never want to stop the line if possible. It works like the stop cord on a bus. The bus stops at the next stop, or safest spot if it's an emergency. The andon is pulled thousands of times a shift...but line rarely stops. Heck, there's a Camry coming off the line every 57 seconds!

So... sorry about that folks, slight (ok, large - or larger than I'd like at any rate - the dangers of blogging at midnight) mixup in the terminology here, but the underling point remains the same, planned or unplanned disruptions will happen in your business, quickly responding and adapting is the key. Allowing and encouraging workers to acknowledge and fix problems as they happen (within the stop points Matthew describes above), constantly, always, is the way to keep the system and it's output not just running in the short-term, but continuously improving over the long-term as well. Always much to learn here - and I'm certainly not a Lean expert!

And now that the correction has been made, if you are interested in Lean Thinking, and need some definitions to grab onto, you may want to grab a copy of LeanSpeak (available as ebook or hardcopy - Seth would be so proud!). There is also of course the Lean Enterprise Institute, across the river from me in Cambridge, MA, which has quite the collection of Lean books, training, seminars, workshops, a thriving community, and more!

Thanks Seth, for bringing me back to those concepts, and raising them once more, in your classic attention getting style, and Matthew, thanks again for doing the interview with me (and supplying the correction!). Great conversation, and a great, easy to understand book. We could all use more of both.

Predictions in the air (Baynote via Mashable)

Synchronicity? Irony? Just posted the interview with Jack Jia of Baynote today, and a blog I recently stumbled onto from the Web 2.0 world, Mashable, has a brief link/description about Baynote, which came from a brief article/review over at VentureBeat. Initially became aware of this thru the latest craze in social software, twitter. Still trying to determine how best to tap into the twittersphere, but worth taking a look at. Realtime voyeurism - sustainable? Nonetheless, interesting conversations happening on twitter, get it while it lasts! Find me at http://twitter.com/dankeldsen

Powering The Long Tail with Invisible Crowds

When do communities become crowds? When do crowds become mobs? What makes any of these smart or dumb, loud or silent, useful or painful?

What is "The Long Tail" (www.longtail.com - blog for the book by Chris Anderson) and how is it changing the way people find information and interact with it? Is you website built for people to "bowl alone" or for the Invisible Crowds scampering about, to help each other by exposing the information/products they've successfully found?

Emergent behavior and automatically adapting systems are clearly changing the way that search and navigation can and will be done - and the revolution is at hand!

This is an interview between Dan Keldsen (www.BizTechTalk.com) and Jack Jia, CEO of Baynote (www.baynote.com), a search and navigation solution provider.

Are you using Baynote or other similar systems, tying in Web 2.0 directly into the operations of your marketing/sales engine? Leave some commentary here, trackback from your own blog, or call me at 781-268-0716 and leave some audio commentary, which I will post back to the blog, and continue this conversation!

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One Day to New Roof?

This will be short - just reading in the Boston Globe tonight, about a new trend washing across the US, with roofing services that will drop a large enough roofing crew to strip and redo your roof in a single day. Wow - having just had the pleasure of having my roof replaced last year (sideways rain over a week = not good, particularly with a 20-25 year old roof with vertically cracked, manufacturer defect shingles), this is pretty amazing.

Now, innovation is so frequently focused on a new product being delivered, and New Product Development (or NPD), gets a HUGE proportion of "innovation limelight" - but what about services? I hope to not experience having a roof redone any time soon, but apparently these services, like many in the housing/building industry (houses being built TO spec [yours], rather than ON spec [in hope of selling to someone, sometime soon] - AND faster, better, cheaper, higher margins, greater predictability, etc.), are significantly changing the landscape (pun not intended), and taking the true "professionals" to a much higher playing field.

Mr. Roof is one company providing the "one day roof" - these folks and their competitors aren't everywhere just yet, but the wave is coming - keep an eye out.

Don't forget - innovation comes in many shapes and flavors - don't obsess with PRODUCT innovation only, services and combined product/service innovations (think iPod, iTunes Music Store, iTunes and an ecosystem) are powerful as well.

Taming a Sprawling Crawling Intranet (ii2007 teaser)

You may recall a time, and in fact still be living in a time, when you had a distinctly Web 1.0 Intranet within your organization...

A monster Intranet, with little control or organization, or even more likely, hundreds to thousands of mini-intranets, similar to the wikis/blogs of today, that are running rampant in organizations.

In this teaser, Lisa Butcher gives a hint as to the story behind the March of Dimes journey from a sprawling Intranet to an Enterprise Portal, and what it took to get from there to here, and in keeping it moving forward beyond the migration stage.

Taxonomy as savior? Governance as secret sauce?

Take a listen, and come here Lisa discuss this in more depth at Innovation Insights 2007 (www.ii2007.com) - April 23-25 at the Wigwam Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona.

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The World Speaks... Do you Listen? (ii2007 teaser)

Mass media in prior years was the equivalent of an atom bomb in getting the message out to audiences, and now, for better or worse, the playing field is shifting, and the audience now expects more personalized messages, and more importantly, is conversing back with the companies and organizations that are either important or annoying to them.

Welcome to Web 2.0, and the world of user generated media...

How does your company react in this new world? Full transparency? Total secrecy? A mix? Does the world hate you or love you? How fast do they flip between the extremes? How do YOU react when there is bad weather affecting your flights, when rumors of a french fried finger surface about your fast food chain? When a new product launch falls flat on it's face? Can you react swiftly and purposefully to the ebb and flow, or are your knees kicked out from under you?

In this teaser, Christine Maxwell discusses how organizations are both dipping their toes, and jumping in with both feet, to the Web 2.0 world, and what they are learning from their experience. Christine will provide far more information and case studies at the Innovation Insights 2007 event (www.ii2007.com), April 23-25 at the Wigwam Resort outside of Scottsdale, Arizona - and we hope to see you there to continue the conversation about world wide conversations and Web 2.0.

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Digging out from the Infoglut Trench? (ii2007 teaser)

We're all feeling it...

Infoglut is crushing us on a daily basis, whether it be at work, at home, via the physical junk mail we get, professional magazines, news feeds, etc..

Many solutions have been proposed (in an enterprise setting), to minimize infoglut, and in bringing back enough time and other resources to make the fight to get through to the USEFUL information/knowledge, be a fight that can be WON.

In this session, Jill Konieczko, Director of Information & Research Services at the U.S. News & World Report in DC., will examine the ways that the US News and World Report solved both end-user needs (reporters, who need both precision and recall in their background and other searches for reportable information), as well as in satisfying the management needs in justifying expenditures on the news feeds and other sources, as well as the new search/find solution that was ultimately purchased and turned on, to make suitable decisions as to where current and future funds are allocated.

If you are stuck in your own information ditch, and would like some tips on how to build a ladder and get back out (and STAY out), take a listen to this teaser interview with Jill, and then come on down to Arizona and hear the full details in person at her live session at ii2007 - Innovation Insights 2007 (www.ii2007.com).

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Mind Mapping Tips from A Master

This interview between myself, Dan Keldsen, and Phil Chambers, Founder and Managing Director of Learning Technologies Ltd (www.learning-tech.co.uk), and current reigning World Mind Mapping Champion, centers around how to get started in Mind Mapping, as well as what the typical stumbling blocks are to successfully *doing* Mind Mapping.

Rather than talk about this in the abstract, I am using myself as a guinea pig to discuss common pitfalls (which I've run into myself - glad to hear I'm not alone), the science behind the techniques of Mind Mapping (good to get a reminder that this isn't just "random stuff" that Tony Buzan had come up with), and much more.

We're all in this together, so as always, I invite all listeners to participate in the discussion, by posting a comment or throwing a trackback from your blog to this blog (www.BizTechTalk.com)

Mind Mapping Tips from A Master

Is Your Organization built to Kill Innovation? (ii2007 teaser)

There are many threats to Innovation - and most of those discussions stem from concerns about a lack of "out of the box" thinking within organizations.

But that's not the only problem that is attacking an organizational ability to innovate.

How do regulatory concerns stifle innovation?

How do security measures that are meant to increase productivity and manage risk in an organization, end up not just slowing down innovation, but perhaps kill it outright?

Listen in to this 12 minute preview of Rick Dove's full presentation (which will be presented at Innovation Insights 2007 - www.ii2007.com April 23-25), and you may be shocked at some of the angles he is looking at that go straight to the heart of how businesses operate in the 21st century.

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