Tag Archives: Opinion

Review: Is the tech entrepreneurial community in Cape Town alive and kicking?

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Monday evening this week saw a “Great Debate” hosted by Neal Gandhi at the iPlex co-working space in Cape Town. I attended out of personal interest because since I’ve been based here for 11 months now but still trying to work out what’s going on with the tech “scene” here.

It was meant to be a formal debate with a few people in favour and a few against the motion that “The tech entrepreneurial community in Cape Town is alive and kicking”. However, it started a little oddly as those against the motion proceeded to announce the were asked to be against rather than it being of their own choosing! It sounded like they were a little cautious or burnt be recent flames aimed at them from non-attendees who had seen the announcement prior.

The “for” motion was put forward by Daniel Guasco, one of the joint-CEO’s of Groupon in SA who put forward a number of success stories both of buyouts and inflowing development through things like Google Umbono as proof that it was. Unfortunately as he closed there was a heckle rough speaking that “you’ve named them all”!

This led nicely into the “against” position delivered by the supposedly “pressured into it” but surprising-lucid-and-passionate Eric Edelstein from Evly. His argument was nicely built upon the foundational statement that the community was alive but by no means kicking. He raised a number of excellent points that showed how you differentiate between the two states using Silicon Valley as a benchmark. A number of the audience challenged this as unfair afterwards in the open questions session but I personally think that firstly if you aim low, you deliver low. Secondly, calling the initiative to ignite the region “Silicon Cape” says that most people identify with that focus as being critical. I think his best point was that the ecosystem of related businesses and systems are just not here at the moment in Cape Town. Its not just the finance eco-system (though that could do with an injection of life) but the lawyers, accountants, education, etc. that need to be there to support the entrepreneur in their endeavors.

Eric was so brutal in his delivery and the follow-up debate ended up dragging in a few of the “for” panellists into making “against” statements!

However, there were a few things unsaid that stick out for me as the deciding factors in this debate right now. The first was that though this event took place at 4.30 in the afternoon, as I drove there I did so against the massive rush hour traffic out of the CBD! At 4 in the afternoon. Those people are generally not going home to carry on there like the crazy Americans. They’re going home to watch bad TV. I think the overriding culture amongst the educated middle-classes of Cape Town is one of quiet contentment, which is fine and nice, but not conducive to a hunger to leave comfortable corporate land and risk all on a start-up. The majority of those with a fire in their belly to create the companies of the future are not sitting on a body of knowledge and experience that will set them up for success.

The second thing that stuck out for me as unspoken is the requirement for South African businesses to wake up and adopt 10 to 15 year old technologies (such as a basic catalogue style website) to allow the next generation of South African based companies to build upon it and get quick, local, visual feedback on how their technologies are being used. Yes, the digital world allows us to throw something on a server and have people in China, India and Iceland try it out but in the world of user experience there’s somethings best done in-person.

The debate ended with a question time which was wasted mostly with people making statements (fine if that’s the deal, but that’s not a question time) but I got to ask one on the feeling of the experts around the concept of the “pivot” being acceptable here. Blank stares from around the room led me to think the concept is not even truly understood here but another one of the Evly guys, the verbose Eran, did and told a funny story about a South African investor who was outraged that a (successful) pivot had seemed to strongly indicate in favour of returning to the unsuccessful model!

The vote was overwhelmingly “against” the motion at the end, I think mainly to do with the excellent “alive but not kicking” point. I hope when the time comes for me to complete my “start-up sabbatical” in corporate land and reenter start-up land that its alive enough still and I can help make it a little more kicking.

Thanks to the iPlex for hosting, looking forward to returning and sorry for not eating the food but I was going out for dinner and it would have been rude to show up full!

Legal Exoskeletons

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I like to think most of the IT systems I work on as being best suited to extending human capabilities in an “exoskelaton” manner. In doing so we gather data about interactions that are of varying importance that occur person-to-person, person-to-system (and even perhaps system-to-system). Sig likes to talk about passing an object through a workflow and storing the changes in state as it goes. I wonder however in these days of information laws such as the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act, how much and to what level of detail, we are allowed to capture, store and use before we are touching the edges of legality.

Technotainment

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I used to be an avid Gillmor Gang listener before the canned it at its peak in something like a Faulty Towers/The Office move. I also listen to the TWiT podcast but recently I’ve become rather disappointed by its content which I’ve decided is best labelled “Technotainment”.  The biggest difference between the two shows is that on TWiT whenever they talk about something which I know a lot about they seem to get it totally wrong. Whereas with the Gillmor Gang it was almost always the opposite with them providing a different and interesting angle on the subjects.

This leaves me in a position of distrust with TWiT… thinking: “if they are completely off with stuff I know about, are they the same with stuff I’m not an expert in?”

Steve, please bring back the Gillmor Gang… train journeys suck without it!

Cost of unpersonal

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What is the cost of sending an unpersonalised and untargetted email once you:

  1. collect the data from them
  2. give them a taste of tailoring in action

While working on my currect project which involves working for a large IT supplier the question above struck me.

What the client initially got excited about I’m sure was the ultra-personalised nature of the campaign they were pitched. All the way down to the imagary used reflecting the character of the account managers and customers. While driving the customers to give them descriptions of their appearance they also ask for information about their interests (relating only to their purchasing habits). This data could later dictate what information the do and more importantaly don’t receive. At the moment though the logic is not being added to the mailing tools that could alert the senders to the fact they are about to blast someone with information they’ve already declared a non-interest in.

This will assure the sales people continue to behave as they always have rather than give them information to alter their behaviour. I think its almost like “the boy who cried wolf” and I am still pondering what the average clients threshold is for “wolf cries”?

Using the technology of “now”

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One of my great influencers is a guy called Jon Udell and I’ve mentioned his work here before. He recently joined Microsoft after a long career in various journalistic roles including time at Byte Magazine and more recently InfoWorld. His role at Microsoft will be to continue to make abstract technical capabilities into real-world, exciting use cases but he’s going to try to also move the audience to a less “geeky” one. Jon is such a geek that he uses the term “outlying data point” to describe himself, which is in itself a geeky phrase!

The reason I wanted to write about it was I’ve been thinking along these lines for the areas that I’m working in at the moment. If you can’t make your technology accessible, understandable, relevant, etc. to end-users then it can be the most life changing software in the world but it will not gain adoption.

Technology will continue to advance at an enormous rate, but will it be adopted at even a moderate rate?

I recently attended a training course for Groove 2007 in Berlin, Germany which took place after the SharePoint Conference. Groove is an excellent software tool that I used to run my consultancy a few years back before it got acquired by Microsoft … Groove that is, not my consultancy! It’s best used as a tool to enable small teams to collaborate on a shared goal or goals. It encompasses document creation, communication, note taking, data gathering and many other things. It’s even clever enough to have the right mix of technology to be peer-to-peer and manageable by an organisation. Most people think of peer-to-peer in the negative sense of disruptive and bandwidth-intensive. One of the many things that struck me as interesting on the course was that they were acquired back in April 2005 and released no products from then until the release now of Office Groove 2007 which actually has features removed from the version 3.1 which was their last before Microsoft. Sure they’ve added some manageability features and made it fall under the security programme that Microsoft run, but how much more innovation could they have had outside, in the agile start-up world? Then I realised that it didn’t really matter! Groove as it stands now has enough features now to more than satisfy most peoples needs. What it needs is adoption by passionate lead users who will invite colleagues to work with them and help them overcome the inevitable conceptual and technical problems will have.

Groove will have a helping hand because it is very different to most enterprise (not consumer) software that exists today because it is viral. When you want to work with someone in Groove you “invite” them. If they don’t have Groove they can get a 120 day trial and by then they’re either hooked or they’ve finished the project but lost nothing.

Most software doesn’t have this advantage but what can we do to make sure that our friends, colleagues and clients can get hold of the knowledge and understanding that will help them run their organisations better? I believe one of the key ways will be defining use cases and finding ways to present them better. Whether this be podcasting (subscribe-able audio downloads), videoblogging (capturing people talking on camera), screencasting (videos of software demonstrations) or any of the presentation methods yet to be invented it has to be language that is accessible and use cases that are relevant.

Another key way will be not telling people about things. It sounds odd but sometimes my passion makes me tell people about stuff that is not ready for prime time. I often haven’t realise how many work-arounds I’ve unconsciously done to make something work until I try to introduce it to someone else and then I have to say “Oh yeah, ignore that button for now it’ll crash it” or other such phrases.

I look forward to the future of technology but I think a job more important is to make the most of what we have now.
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Pointless Gestures

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Bill Gates - CESThis morning Steve Clayton pointed to a video of Bill Gates and Gordon Brown speaking at the Scottish Parliament (Windows Media File). I noted in the comments that it only takes Gordon Brown 20 seconds to make his first mistake by calling Bill the CEO… he’s the Chairman. If you jump to 50 minutes into it you get to the point where they sit down and take questions from people who’ve written in and both of them seem to become more engaging. They seem very comfortable and even make a few jokes! However they both make the same irritating pointless gestures with their hands that a lot of public speakers seem to make these days in an attempt to appear more active and lively. When I talk I like to put one hand in my pocket (I feel a song coming on) to stop me falling into that trap, and only bring it out when making a gesture that requires it.

It also got me thinking about the parallels in collaboration and team-work. What pointless gestures do we make to try and appear active and lively? The one that immediately came to mind was in the use of carbon copy (cc) in email. We try to include everyone and their uncle that might possibly have a stake in the thing we’re talking about. Instead of just engaging with people to fix a problem or achieve a goal we try to do that and make doubly sure we get credit for it.

[photo courtesy of Lori Tingey]

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Symantec: What do you do?

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I’ve spent a lot of the last year working pretty closely with Symantec here in the UK. Most of the people I’ve run across have been excellent, hard working people. There’s a few “less useful” individuals but with 16,000 employees what do you expect?

Whenever I talk to people about working with Symantec they always say “Oh yeah, the ones who make the anti-virus … That ruined my computer” … or something similar. These people often include hardcore IT professionals. Take a look at the comments on this high profile ZDNet blog. How on earth are they going to get past this negativity? If you take a look at the products pages on their site you’ll see they do a huge amount in a number of areas.

You know what they should be doing? Getting out there and on these blogs and forums using the abundance of tools out there for tracking what people are saying and countering negative with positive. Engaging with the issues which are often repeated again and again. The excellent Jon Udell recently interviewed Paul English on his weekly podcast who stuck his entire staff on support so they would fully appreciate customers problems. I know 30 staff are different from 16,000 but there has to be some parrells!

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All or nothing applications

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I can’t remember where I heard or read the following thought (roughly speaking):

You can’t create tools that don’t reward the user if they commit anything less than 100% because they won’t get “popular”

The example they gave was of a calendar application which if you don’t put all your appointments in it you can not “trust” it. I’ve been trying make sure I apply this to system design I’m thinking about which has multiple points of data entry and where there are lots of ties and links between those individual silos. If the above statement is true then the silos have to be individually valueable and the value that is gleaned by linking the them together must not be a deciding factor in implementing it.

However, if I can make it so the “extra mile” required to do the inferred linking is so easy and valueable to the consumer of that data (and not just their boss or co-worker) then all parties will win. An example of this would be tagging on del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site. On the site the more keywords (tags) you associate with a bookmark you add there, the more likely you are to find it when you go looking for it. The flip-side is if I tag something “IM” and someone else “InstantMessaging” then the same thing can be found via many vectors. Of course del.icio.us takes it to another level by analysing its data and finding closely related “stuff”, which I have to think about for this system.

Thingamy Thoughts

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I had an interesting demo from Sig Rinde this morning of his ‘thingamy‘ platform. I take part in quite a few sales demos of other products and it was a different style to what I’m used to. Usually people start with introductions, background etc. and get an understanding of what the ‘buyer’ is looking for and then during the demo touch against various elements of those requirements. What Sig did was just plough straight into a demo and to honest I’m glad because he made me stretch my mind as to what is possible rather than just think about the problem I want to solve. However, I would warn against this with ‘end users’, it works with system integrators and consultants but in my experience most people don’t want their minds blown, they want their simple problems solved.

The platform itself was quite impressive and with its minimal design it kept you focused on the nuts and bolts and not the Web 2.0 smooth corners. However, because it’s a platform as apposed to an application there’s no reason a sprinkling of AJAX could be added to make certain actions snappier in their response. At the moment the best description I can give it is it feels like wire-framing on steroids!

Being a real time collaboration guy the biggest addition that I would like to see is ‘presence integration’. The idea behind presence integration is if another user has a role in creating or modifying some data that you are looking at then beside it is a status indicator that gives you an at-a-glance understanding of their availability to communicate with you. For example, you’re working on fulfilling an order placed by one of the account managers and you see they’ve put a quantity of 1000 and you think “that the amount is a bit high and they might have slipped on the zeros”. You look at their presence icon and see the current status is ‘in a meeting’ and instead of phoning them and interrupting it you send them an email or IM asking them to check the amount and get back to you. Rather than increasing the interruptions if people are taught to respect your status it decreases it significantly and allows you to manage your personal workflow.

The other addition that I would see very necessary to build into it is email in and out because it plays such a big part in communication these days. I’m sure will be easy considering they have an XML-RPC interface but I’d be interested to see if anyone else has raised this.

I’m looking forward to the getting my hands on it with Sig when he’s next in London. My next task is getting the client I’m planning on using it for to allow me to spend a bit of time with their staff to get a rough sketch of what their process is now so I have a starting point to build from.