Endeavour Partners - Blog

I am taking some time off this week with my family, which means that I’m mostly only doing critical work things each day (the price of being an entrepreneur – rather than ‘no rest for the wicked’, it should be no rest for the entrepreneur’).

I couldn’t resist posting, however, about the excellence of the iPad (and soon hopefully other tablet class devices) as a device for e-mail when traveling internationally:

• it is lightweight and much more robust than a laptop – a key consideration when on a boat
• it is excellent for reading and reviewing and quickly responding to e-mail, perhaps in ghe morning over a croissant and a cappuccino
• it is surprisingly good for longer e-mails if you’re a touch typist
• perhaps most importantly, it sips data, rather than slurping it, which is extremely important in these days of metered broadband and extortionate rates for international data roaming

In sharp contrast, even a lightweight laptop is only slightly more effective, unless you need to go all the way back into your whole IMAP archive, and is bulky, fragile and a bandwidth hog.

Despite (or because of?) the advent of 4G, managing bandwidth will become a key issue.

(Written on an iPad)

Earlier this week I was in Oslo, giving a presentation on the future of the digital ecosystem on behalf of Innovation Norway. There is a huge shift in value underway, triggered by the advent of the app phone, and now extending across the whole of the digital ecosystem: communications, computing, consumer electronics and content. While this is creating lots of new opportunities, one of the key challenges facing any entrepreneurial venture is the clash amongst three titans – Google, Microsoft and Apple – all of whom have market caps north of $150 billion and see this as a death match.

Market capitalization of the three titans

There’s a great picture of the clash on DataViz today:

Clash of the Titans

We are delighted to see that we continue to blaze a trail that the White House follows. Having migrated our IT infrastructure into the cloud, we have also embraced the iPad; apparently now the White House has also.

The folks who gather early every morning in the West Wing office of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have something new in common these days. Practically everyone has an iPad — or will have one very soon.

Apple's iPad

One of the most interesting questions arising from convergence is the impact on content businesses (what people sometimes call the ‘media’, but that’s so exactly wrong nowadays, we should focus on the message, the content). A piece in todays NY Times – the proverbial ‘Gray Lady’ perfectly illustrates what we call the…”…you didn’t get the memo…” phenomenon:

For many Americans, cellphones have become irreplaceable tools to manage their lives and stay connected to the outside world, their families and networks of friends online. But increasingly, by several measures, that does not mean talking on them very much.

Liza Colburn and her 12-year-old daughter, Abigail, use their cellphones for many tasks, but make relatively few phone calls.

Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.

Say it isn’t so….

It’s nice to be a trailblazer…. Following our recent move to using Amazon’s cloud to host our information technology infrastructure, we’re delighted to see that the White House has recognized the wisdom of our choice and followed our lead:

Earlier today in a blog post on WhiteHouse.gov, federal CIO Vivek Kundra announced thatRecovery.gov would be moving to the cloud. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board’s primary contractor,Smartronix, chose Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to host the site. NASA has used EC2 for testing, but this will be the first time a government website — a “.gov” — has been hosted on Amazon’s EC2.

Here is a fascinating graphic showing how age affects the likelihood that a household has wireless only coverage, and how that pattern has evolved over time. It shows three effects:

• younger households are much more likely not to have wireline service
• regardless of age, the proportion of households without wireline services is rising rapidly – it’s not just households without wireline getting older
• the rate at which the proportion of households without wireline is rising fastest amongst younger households

Age and households without wireline

A post this morning on Engadget about the similarity between the most recent ad for the iPad, and one for the original Apple Newton gave me a profound sense of déjà vu.

It’s far from unusual to see Apple ripping off others when it comes to spots, and the same is true in reverse. But copying itself? Head on past the break to catch the similarities between Cupertino’s freshest iPad commercial and an eerily familiar Newton ad from yesteryear — something tells us the former will make a somewhat more indelible mark on the world than the latter, though.

Back in the mid-90’s, more than fifteen years ago, I was one of the pioneers of tablets with digital cellular connectivity: working in New Zealand for what is now Vodafone New Zealand we put together the Apple Newton with the Nokia DataCard and the Nokia 2110 to provide the first predecessor for today’s smart phones; this was before event the very first Nokia Communicator.

Anyway, take a look at the two videos:

We’re back; the recent hiatus arose from our migrating all of our information technology infrastructure to cloud services.

There were two motivations for this:

1. better service for us
2. investment in learning about the reality of working with cloud services

We will be posting about our experiences doing this, as it was very instructive. For those who are curious, we’re using WordPress and Zimbra running on Amazon.

The transition is now complete, so watch this space.

There’s an interesting guest post on TechCrunch this morning by Marc Benioff of salesforce.com, an archetype for or epitome of cloud services, talking about how ‘cloud services’ are evolving. I hate is ‘Cloud 2′ moniker, and agree with some of his hypothesis, if not all:

Cloud 1 ————————————->Cloud 2

Type/Click———————————->Touch
Yahoo/Amazon—————————–>Facebook
Tabs——————————————>Feeds
Chat——————————————>Video
Pull——————————————->Push
Create—————————————->Consume
Location Unknown————————->Location Known
Desktop/notebook————————->Smart phone/Tablet
Windows/Mac——————————>Cocoa/HTML 5

Fundamental Shift in Cloud Computing

FWIW, we believe that amazon.com and Google will both thrive, and remain deeply skeptical about Twitter.

One very interesting development, is how this battle is affecting standards for rich graphics on the web. Marc notes the move to Cocoa and HTML5; we were skeptical about HTML5 but may re-examine our position given the impact of the iPad and the iPhone, as highlighted by this recent post from Gizmodo:

The iPad doesn’t run Flash. If your website uses Flash, it won’t play well on the iPad. Turns out, a lot of people want their sites to look pretty on the iPad. So the internet’s already starting to look different.

One of the more interesting effects of the iPhone was that it drove a ton of websites to format their content for the phone in at least of two ways, and often both: iPhone-optimized sites, with more finger-friendly navigational elements that look almost app-like, and actual iPhone apps. We’re seeing a repeat with the iPad, though the adjustment appears to be less about the screen size than its lack of Flash support, and there’s the fact a lot of sites will be ready on day one. (Though before we go any further, let’s be clear: Flash is sticking around, for many reasons, regardless of Apple’s opinion of it.)

One of the most significant challenges in management in high-tech is communicating information; sharing perspectives on the complex, dynamic world in which we work. It’s the whole process of encoding what you know in a way that makes it most likely to be effectively decoded.

As a result, I made graphical communication one of the central planks of the Systems, Leadership & Management Lab (SL&M lab) that I teach at MIT; as part of that this year the whole cohort attended Edward Tufte’s program. In an interesting development, he’s been appointed to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel:

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board was created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 with two goals:

• To provide transparency in relation to the use of Recovery-related funds.
• To prevent and detect fraud, waste, and mismanagement.

I hope that what comes out of this is fascinating and informative graphical insights into where the money’s going.

Minard's diagram of Napoleon's march on Moscow

This famous graphic shows six dimensions on a single page.

• Geography: rivers, cities and battles are named and placed according to their occurrence on a regular map.
• The army’s course: the path’s flow follows the way in and out that Napoleon followed.
• The army’s direction: indicated by the colour of the path, gold leading into Russia, black leading out of it.
• The number of soldiers remaining: the path gets successively narrower, a plain reminder of the campaigns human toll, as each millimetre represents 10.000 men.
• Temperature: the freezing cold of the Russian winter on the return trip is indicated at the bottom, in the republican measurement of degrees of réaumur (water freezes at 0° réaumur, boils at 80° réaumur).
• Time: in relation to the temperature indicated at the bottom, from right to left, starting 24 October (pluie, i.e. ‘rain’) to 7 December (-27°).