Social Graph Paper

Goodbye Rogers! - Is a class-action appropriate?

2009-09-28T14:00:00.001-07:00

Not that it will make a difference, but the story needs to be told -- if only for my personal sanity. I'll make it short here, I promise:

Becky and I move back to Canada last year, she brings a BlackBerry (she had her own hardware, this is important) and I sign her up for no-contract service.
Becky starts school at Ryerson - and they up sell her, over the phone, to a "student plan". Cool - good deal.
Turns out we don't need Becky's line anymore, so we go to cancel it. Rogers dutifully cancelled the service.

Here's where it goes pear-shaped I get a bill in the mail, and I'm actually excited. Will be nice to not have that re-occurring expense. Turns out there was an early cancellation fee of $400 on the student plan.

This is BS for so many reasons:

We didn't even need their stupid student plan.
We didn't even get a "phone" out of the deal. If they had subsidized the phone, this is fair, but for an under-used wireless line, $400 is a little heavy handed.
I've been a subscriber of rogers services as long as I've been buying phone-internet-cable.
They screwed me last time I moved from Waterloo->Seattle with an early termination fee.
We don't remember, but at no time were we told that there was an early-cancellation clause.

Anyway, I digress - so:

I call rogers last week and say "come on guys, this is crazy. I've been a rogers subscriber for years. I still have internet and cable with you. Cut me a break." The woman on the phone was arrogant and antagonistic and didn't budge.
I tweet my discontent and several people write back saying "check out teksavvy". I call them up, and they're rad - nicest people on the phone (the one guy said sarcastically about their $0.25/GB overage charge, "yeah, we rape our customers" (!awesome), great price, no contracts, they're in Chatham. Great except I needed to confirm that my building supports their service.
Confirmed today.
I called Rogers to cancel, one last chance to be a good corporate steward. Nope. I told him to cancel the remainder of my services, didn't ask for anything, didn't really mention the wireless issue until he asked, "yes, I'm a little frustrated with the wireless guys." His retort, "what?! you expect that you're going to threaten to cancel over a $400 ecf from a contract that YOU signed?" Fair enough, but still.

Technically, that is legally-technically, it's probably my fault -- I should have inquired about early-cancelation-fees, though I don't remember signing a contract. The spirit of the situation here makes me think we need more consumer protection around this sort of thing:

Here are the clinchers:

When I left Seattle for Toronto, TMobile hit me with an early cancellation fee. I called an explained - THEY WAIVED IT!
I recently got an annual fee for a TD visa card that we don't use anymore. I called and cancelled the card after-the-fact, and TD (a bank for christ's-sake!) waived the fee and closed the card.

When the banks are the good guys in a story, you know we have problems with wireless providers in Canada.

2009-09-14T09:47:00.001-07:00

To all the Americans looking forward to the 'public option' imagine renewing your healthcard at the dmv. I am doing so in Ontario right now.

2009-08-31T17:43:00.001-07:00

Ask Phil Asmundson what his duties are at Deloitte & Touche and be ready for an earful. As the vice chairman and national managing partner of Technology, Media & Entertainment and Telecommunications (TMT), Asmundson helps set the overall TMT strategy for the firm, advises clients directly, and serves as a member of the TMT Deloitte Editorial Committee. He is a regular speaker at industry events and is regularly quoted on emerging trends in the space.

Asmundson has spent 28 years at Deloitte & Touche and will speak at our upcoming conference, Mobilize 09. In the edited interview below, he discusses the impact of ever-increasing traffic on mobile networks and some of the ways carriers can avoid becoming dumb pipes.

Colin Gibbs: We’ve seen a dramatic surge in mobile data usage in North America in the last year or so as smartphones move into the mainstream and on-the-go computing gets legs. How are carriers' attitudes toward mobile VoIP and other non-cellular technologies evolving due to the increasing traffic?

Phil Asmundson: I think we’re at an early stage of wireless transformation that will ultimately require collaboration across various networks. Carriers have traditionally been reluctant to circumvent their cellular networks, but the shift to data from voice will ultimately force them to offload traffic. I think we’ll get to the point where carriers don’t care whether a call is being carried on their network or on another network, and I think all-you-can-eat plans are going to help drive that.

Gibbs: It still seems like some network operators are having a hard time accepting that, though. How far have they come in changing their thinking regarding non-cellular use?

Asmundson: I think they’re all in the early stages at this point. The carriers have always been the main point of contact, the control point for the customer, and it’s tough to relinquish some of that.

Gibbs: Earlier this year we read headlines detailing how mobile networks in Japan were struggling to deliver content to users. Are we seeing those kinds of network strains in the U.S. yet? If not, when should we expect them?

Asmundson: It really depends on how pricing goes. One of the things about smartphones is that they’re going to increase my usage so much that metering me, billing me on minutes, isn’t going to make any sense.

Carriers are quite reluctant to give up control, and I understand why if I had invested billions of dollars to build out my network, I would want to see a return on that investment, too. But I will also say that carriers are extraordinarily concerned about the experience of the customer out there. The real impetus that will push this over the edge will be when you start to have failure of access. That may not be just around the corner; that may be here already. But to me this is a good problem. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in math to conclude that voice ARPU is declining. If this is the case, the future of wireless must be focused on data traffic, not voice. That’s a big conversion to be done, which is why carriers are anxious to build out 4G networks.

Gibbs: I'm reading a lot about things like off-peak content delivery and the use of femtocells to minimize network traffic, but other than Wi-Fi, I have yet to see much real progress. How important will those kinds of solutions be in the next few years? What other kinds of potential solutions have you seen?

Asmundson: Ultimately, what we’re facing is that the interface between various wireless technologies will become very important. I personally believe that as you start to get into ultraband, ultimately we’re going to see a world where my device will communicate with networks in real time. It will look at many different attributes including signal strength, device type, congestion it will look at that in real time, and it will determine which technology is best suited to deliver that to me.

Gibbs: It seems that’s beginning to happen on very high-end, enterprise-focused mobile computers. But how close are we to seeing that with more consumer-targeted phones?

Asmundson: I think we’re years from seeing it because it requires a whole new revenue model. Media is really interesting if you get a dollar of media revenue you can watch how it’s sliced and diced up (among multiple partners). That’s how it would have to happen in telecom. This would be something that would be handing off in real time, and that would require new revenue agreements.

Gibbs: When will we see mobile broadband consumer services being deployed in any real way?

Asmundson: We have to get LTE and WiMAX first, so in any meaningful way we’re looking at four to six years. I think the economic downturn sure put a downturn on that, the availability of funds, because let’s face it: It’s expensive.

Gibbs: What tools can carriers leverage as they fight the war against becoming dump pipes?

Asmundson: I think there are a lot of revenue opportunities that go beyond the pipe, and maybe that’s the next generation of telcos. As you start to move more and more things that are personal to you into the cloud, there is the question of who’s going to store it for you. Who’s going to back it up? Who’s going to secure your privacy? I think there is a lot of opportunity for carriers who have huge data centers. They haven’t done an awful lot in that area I have one case I can’t talk about but there are some movements from carriers who are trying to get more aggressive.

Yelp: When Community Management Reinforces Real-Life Weak Ties

2009-07-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, some family, friends, and I ventured from Waterloo to Toronto to participate in theYelp CMYE: Toronto Cupcake Crawl. It was a gluttonous, sugar-coma-inducing day wherein we sampled cupcakes from a dozen local and independent downtown vendors.

I was most impressed by the level of sophisication inYelp's community management. Kat, the Toronto-area Community Manager fit the role perfectly: outgoing, engaging, welcoming, and knows her food. Kat is actually employed by Yelp and, that got me thinking, how does Yelp-corporate justify paying her?

Seeding Content

I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm betting that some quant-jock-analyst at Yelp recognized that they were seeing a disproportionate number of searches for 'cupcakes' in toronto. Google Trends is showing that 'muffin' search volumes have been steady-to-decling, whereas 'cupcakes' have been steadily increasing to the point where 'cupcake' search volumes are at par with 'muffin' searches.

Ultimately, Yelp wants to drive users to their site and get them engaged to drive page views and, therefore, ad revenue. Having high-quality, trust-worthy, recent, relevant content is an engagement-driver. At time of writing, the cupcake crawl has 10 reviews totalling ~350

0 words.

As an aside, I was amazed at the role of mobile computing played in creating this content. Several people were Tweeting, but more interesting, people were shooting and posting images of their cupcakes in real-time using their iPhones. A lesson-learned for UGC-reliant sites -mobility lowers the barrier-to-contribution for your site.

Converting Weak Ties to Strong Ties

When I was at Livemocha, no tangible benefit occurred to me to introduce our community members at face-to-face events. After observing the Yelp community in action, it's clear:

Members that engage face-to-face are your most dedicated customers
Your most dedicated customers are most engaged
Your most engaged members contribute content (this is, by far, a minority, of your users)

Converting the weak ties of users that know each other only as avatars and nicknames to strong ties (friendships) means your highly-engaged users return to your site to be with their friends, and these friendships make more effective/ relevant the other engagement mechanisms in place (point systems, for example).

In conclusion, for those that care, Babycakes was the best-of-show (but, truthfully, I'm more of a cookie-man).

2009-05-02T07:15:00.001-07:00

I'm at SFO way too early. Awesome week in the valley-coming back in 3 weeks hopefully.

2009-04-19T16:41:00.001-07:00

http://ping.fm/p/i035X - Tired of hard drive failures. Raidin' it now.

2009-04-14T15:11:00.001-07:00

Think of mapping applications as spatial browsers. How does maps as a platform intersect with web?
Sent from my BlackBerry� wireless device

2009-04-11T08:06:00.001-07:00

Note to Coffee Culture in Fort Erie: an Americano is not a drip. Wow - did that sound pretentious?

2009-04-07T04:45:00.001-07:00

http://ping.fm/p/OHhUc - A touch of authenticity at the Harmony Lunch in waterloo, on.
Sent from my BlackBerry� wireless device

2009-04-06T16:45:00.001-07:00

http://ping.fm/p/B3VNF - Testing ping still. What will happen with this image?
Sent from my BlackBerry� wireless device

2009-04-06T15:53:00.001-07:00

Testing out ping.fm - multi-service status updating - is the future here now? http://ping.fm

Why Advertising is (NOT) Failing on the 'Net

2009-03-22T15:41:00.001-07:00

Really interesting and controversial Techcrunch-guest-piece by Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He makes the basic argument that users will ignore and/or disintermediate advertising online and therefore advertising will ultimatly fail.

The internet is about freedom, and I suspect that a truly free population will not be held captive and forced to watch ads.

I think he's wrong. Here's why:

Performance vs Brand: He totally ignores brand advertising. Online, performance based ads are high-profile, and has dominated over brand advertising. This is due to the medium - the Internet is data rich and user-interactive (unlike TV that is passively consumed)
Brand advertising isn't about conversions exclusively, it's about moving people through the purchase decision process and increasingly brand familiarity/ favorability with the goal of increasing the probability that someone will buy your product vs a competitor's. The point: an ad on a screen doesn't need to be clicked on to be impactful (from the point of view of a brand advertiser). Eg. If the Watchmen movie is launching this weekend, the studio would prefer that you click on the banner ad and explore the content THEN go watch the movie, but if you just decide to watch the movie (because the ad made the movie top of mind), they're also happy.
Everything he said about the Internet is true about meatspace TV advertising: people do not trust, want, or need advertising. He then argues that synchronicity of TV makes those ads more impactful, but has he never made a bag of popcorn during commercial breaks on TV?
He narrowly defines "advertising" as the banner ad: corporate/ product sites are a form of advertising, and research shows that though this isn't the most trustworthy source, it's a primary source used by consumers to help make a purchase decision.

Advertising on the internet suffers for a couple reasons:

Supply: Unlike TV where the advertising is "hardcoded" into the content, and there's a limited # of impressions possible, the Internet's has billions-billions-trillions of impressions everyday. At AdTech, interactive folks complained that the price of a broadcast impression is higher than an online impression. My arguement back: increase the quality of your content to have parity with TV and reduce the number of available of impressions/ user to the same as TV (say 5/ hour), and you have an arguement.
Relevance/ Trust: Relevance is really just a response to the supply problem. Mobile advertising,behavioral targeting capabilities, really rich niche content, social advertising really just allow advertisers to increase the probability of conversion (or a high-quality impression) and efficiency of spend. They're willing to pay more for inventory that "works" better.

In other words, I sense online people have high expectations for both the performance of ads and how they expect people will interact with ads. In general, people do not want to interact with ads, but they don't mind high-quality content sponsored by high-quality, relevant advertisers.

The problem from the publisher perspective - it's a race to the bottom, the market is too efficient:

Any high-quality content they make, is competing with "good enough" or "more relevant" content from another publisher. Eg I don't read CNN's political coverage, I go to huffingtonpost - I don't read their tech news, I go to Techcrunch.
The Internet evens the playing field to attract ad dollars (not quite, but it's moving this way). Programmatic ad buying/ placement/ measurement means a big brand can just as easily advertise on a niche site as on a large publisher's site and if it performs, there's no reason to buy elsewhere.

Both of these factors result in an ever-reducing ad rates: good for advertisers because it provides the opportunity for huge reach, bad for publishers because they have to actually provide good content.

Typealyzer.com - Analyzes Your Blog for Personality Disposition

2009-03-21T15:40:00.000-07:00

Found typealyzer at thoughtgadgets.com. It's an interesting tool that scans the contents of your blog to determine your meyers-briggs personality bias.

Mobile Ubiquitous Banking and the Future of Money

2009-03-17T14:43:00.001-07:00

Location Location Location: The Future of Mobile Advertising

2009-03-17T13:15:00.001-07:00

SXSW2009 - Tuesday Keynote: Chris Anderson / Guy Kawasaki Conversation

2009-03-17T11:53:00.000-07:00

Beyond Apple TV: Next-Generation Systems for Acquiring Content

2009-03-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

Cloud Computing: Defending the Undefinable

2009-03-17T07:54:00.001-07:00

Trying out ScribbleLive.com - they're a Canadian live blogging company out of Toronto.

Bruce Sterling Sessions

2009-03-16T15:01:00.000-07:00

Social networking bigger than email.

These artifacts are what we call books... Let me explain how these devices work.

Publishing, in my lifetime, has never been in such a perilious state.

Kindle is like a cassette plug-in for an atari.

Less conerned about "death of author" more concerned with "death of audience"

Connectivity will be a signifier of poverty.

Canadians are like back bacon, great white north.

Ultra-right bookstore in Austin: Brave New Books

A year ago, video game conference, with ike refugees in the next room, who looked more futuristic? The greying game programmers?

The elderly will be the backbone of the social web.

Old Man Nielsen vs. New Market Research

2009-03-16T13:25:00.000-07:00

Daniel Neely   Founder/CEO,   Networked Insights
Dave McClure   Troublemaker,   Founders Fund
Jim Schroer   Founder,   EngageNextGen LLC
Michael J Lambie   Digital Research Dir-,   Nielsen Company

Neely (Networked Insights):

Social media has made access to data easy/ cheap.
The same, companies are still selling things, need to stay relevant.
How to take customer message and put into my message
"Engagement" and "impression" are over-used words.
Old way: lots of data -> new way: actionable insights (free -> insight -> valuable insight -> actionable)
2 by 2: high/low engagement, negative/positive sentiment. high/neg = pr, high/high = marketing
Tools: networked insights, visible tech, quantcast, radian, kissmetrics, trackur, scountlabs, comscore, nielsen, whostalking.com, google alerts/search, twitter.
New way: actionable insights: adding anthropological perspective to the numbers

Measurement

Nielsen (Lambie)

Tools: Ethnolgraphy, neuro science, cams

Jim (Engage next gen)

Thesis: actionable/buzz means more than exposure. Eg Teleflora - winner on superbowl (1400% inrease in "buzz"). Coke "buzz' went down post superbowl.
Is social media a good proxy for word of mouth? If so, then it should impact spending.

Agencies hide behind metrics (according to a brand). Not just sentiment, but interactions -> impacts marketing spend.

Promoter score (McClure) don't promote until sentiment is positive.

User voice, get satisfaction

Other tools (neely): truecast (invisible technologies), trackr, biz360

Mcclure: compete, hitwise

Browser Wars III: The Platform Wins

2009-03-16T09:32:00.000-07:00

Arun Ranganathan  Mozilla
Chris Wilson   Web Platform Architect,   Microsoft
Brendan Eich   CTO,   Mozilla Foundation
Charles McCathieNevile   Chief Standards Officer,   Opera Software
Darin Fisher   Software Engineer,   Google

What's in it for Google in the browser game (to Google). You chose webkit.

Initially, focus was "how to make Firefox more successful"
2006, looking at other opps to radically improve browsers (multi-process, rending engines, make it faster).
Gecko vs webkit - webkit was fast (surprisingly, fast). Code base was simpler and was adopted by mobile. Smaller footprint.
Gecko is a full platform for app dev, webkit is only a rending engine.

With the declining marketshare of IE6 (cheers), potential adoption of IE8 - there is no real majority rendering engine. Where to collab, where to compete? Chris (MSFT) Standards in the context of silverlight - you're the chair of the HTML working-group.

Doesn't work, or evangelize siverlight, but there are scenarios where it makes sense.

Standardization of web APIs - opera has a lot of skin in the game.

There are some scenarios, but limits reach. If you want broad reach, you'll need to rely on standards.

People still have to pull hair out to dev for web. What gives? (Mozilla)

Silverlight isn't taking over the web. A lot less worried this year, than last.

How standards are actually made. HTML5 discussions: APIs, video, 2/3d graphics. Modifying the spec license.

(MSFT) Distiguish between open source licenses: do whatever vs do and contribute back.

Javascript performance wars:

IE8 seriously by MSFT? Yes. Performance, though, not just focused on JS (holistic approach).

Battery dying...

Shift happens: moving from words to picture

2009-03-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

Sunni Brown   Owner,   BrightSpot Info Design
Tom Crawford   CEO,   VizThink
Dave Gray   Chairman,   XPLANE
Lee LeFever   Principal,   Common Craft
Dan Roam   President,   Digital Roam Inc

I caught the tail end of this session - I know Lee LeFever from my days in Seattle. His work rocks.

Dan Roam (I think) showed some really interesting visualizations of the stimulus package. You can see some of them here.

Beyond Aggregation - Finding the Web's Best Content

2009-03-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

Marshall Kirkpatrick   VP Content Dev,   ReadWriteWeb
Louis Gray   Author/Publisher,   louisgray.com
Gabe Rivera   Founder/CEO,   Techmeme
Melanie Baker   Community Mgr,   AideRSS Inc
Micah Baldwin   VP Business Dev,   Lijit Networks Inc

Postrank leverages "engagement metrics" to determine hot stories.

Postrank , yahoo!pipes

Layers necessary for aggregation:

Layer 1: enough data
Layer 2: enough meta-data and linking

2 More Days at SXSW

2009-03-15T19:55:00.000-07:00

Some post-Salt Lick recovery was required today and I'm refusing to carry around my lenovo T61p. Not only is my laptop huge, but I'm a dork among dorks - at least everyone else has sweet MacBooks.

The Seven Rules for Great Application Design

In this lively and interactive session, Robert Hoekman, Jr., the author of 'Designing the Obvious' and 'Designing the Moment', uses the audience to reveal the 7 essential design principles for achieving great application design and the psychology behind them. And he does it all without a single bullet point (gasp!).
Panelist(s): Robert Hoekman Jr (CEO/Principal Experience Designer, Miskeeto LLC)

People are bad at predicting their own behavior - ask users what they want, then ignore them.
7 Factors:

Understand users, then ignore them. Understand how users actually behave.
Build only what's necessary.
Support user's mental model. Eg. Squidoo calls pages "lenses" - users don't know what that is.
Turn beginner users into intermediate users ASAP. Eg. Get users registered and contributing ASAP.
Prevent errors. Eg. Don't throw random, unintelligible error messages at users. Just prevent it altogether and fail gracefully.
Design for uniformity, consistency, meaning. Make navigation/ layout, as consistent as possible
Reduce, reduce, reduce (refine).

Emerging Trends in Mobile

Panelist(s): Rob Gonda (Dir of Mktg Strategy & Analysis, Sapient), Juan-Carlos Morales (Creative Dir, Sapient Interactive)

Nothing too insightful - some really amazing video footage of augmented reality.
Some rehasing of Apple Appstore app download stats: 15k apps, 500m downloads, $1bn in revenue, 93% have apps, $25bn in mobile content downloads.
Monkeyball is taking $15k/ mo
Allegedly, there's some announcement from MIT where they charge batteries in less than 7 seconds
Update (3/16): Good live stream here

Zappos - Tony Hsieh, CEO Zappos

I have to say, I'm not big on "corporate culture" but this guy really has it down to a science. Zappos has some pretty radical practices: pays new hires $2000 to walk away (to test commitment) and they publish an annual employee contributed "culture of Zappos". If you're ever in Vegas, they'll pick you up from the airport and will give you a company tour - these guys are serious about culture.

His basic premise: brand identity comes when you get the culture right. 6 criteria for developing a healthy culture.

Decide if you want to build a long term brand
Figure out your values and culture
Vision, what you're thinking, and think bigger. Chase vision, not money.
Build relationships, not networks.
Build your team: hire slowly, fire quickly
Think long term. How people remain happy/ engaged: perceived happiness, progress, connectedness, vision.

He got a little philosophical - models of happiness:

Please -> engagement -> meaning
Job -> career -> calling

SXSW (Twitter) Tools

2009-03-13T20:18:00.000-07:00

Twitterati indeed - it's almost comical. People are Twitter-crazy here here at SXSW. There's so much data, I'm having difficult making something meaningful from the stream. That said, lot's of really interesting tools people are using.

Twhirl (http://www.twhirl.org/): A Twitter Air client for your desktop. Looking around at people on their laptops, this seems to be the client of choice. The first question from the first session was "what's the hash for this session?". Twhirl allows you to "search" for hashes (eg. #swsw) and it automatially feeds the stream - really great during the sessions.

Peoplebrowsr (http://www.peoplebrowsr.com). A very feature-rich web-based twitter client. What I really like about it is that you can "search" for and watch multiple streams concurrenting (eg I was watching #sxsw, #austin, #sxswi all at once today - it was pretty crazy).

Outside.in (http://outside.in) This came up during Steve Johnson's (co-creator of outside.in) panel. It's actually primarily to be a crowd-sourced local-news site, but they have a clever mashup that overlays tweets, "story maps", containing geo-data on a map (ie. if you tweet "sxswguide: Heading of to Six Lounge for the Social Media Group party. sxswi (@hametner) MARCH 13" it will put "Six Lounge" on the map).

Other tools people seem to be using:

Sched.org - The SXSW schedule site sucks really bad. Even the printed schedule is unusable this year (I think last year it showed the sessions in order, with a brief summary - this year, not so much). Sched.org is a really usable web-based, SXSW-dedicated, calendar that lets you filter by show (interactive, film, etc) as well provide high-level summary of the sessions. It let's you find free booze and food, and let's you merge calendars with your fellow-attendees.

happyhour.org - SXSW-dedicated party schedules. The sanctioned-sxsw schedule is better this year (it actually shows some of the parties), but this online tool is definitely more complete.