There are a number of tools available on the web that will take your documents and analyze the contents statistically to help you identify patterns. For the investment community, these technologies are not quite ready for prime time. In other words, the potential to glean insights is hit-or-miss. But, I’ve been impressed with a tool launched a year ago by IBM (IBM) called Many Eyes which does some simple stats on document contents and provides the output in various forms. Many Eyes is a visualization tool for data focused on natural language. When the data is words, as in a lengthy 10K form, I begin to wonder if some processing of these words can tell us something we don’t already know.

I’ve taken the contents of Google’s (GOOG) 2007 10K and loaded it as a data set in the visualization tool. Do you think any meaningful insights can be derived? Here’s a summary of my results in this simple experiment.

First, I loaded the Product Section of the document, which lists and discusses about 35 products within Google’s consumer portfolio. Enterprise products (Google Apps, Google Appliance) are covered under a separate section. I excluded terms/words like “Google”, “users”, “web” and others that don’t inform the analysis.

Click here or the image below to see the visualization results.

Some themes that standout include (based on term-frequency):

=> Mobile
=> Maps
=> Gmail
=> Groups
=> News

Nothing here is a surprise, as these are all product categories where Google has a significant product in the market.

Some other terms that stood out to me are “free” and [user] “experience”, two central aspects of Google’s focus and way of doing business.

One valuable thing I learned from these results is the lack of product focus on web 2.0 trends and drivers. There’s not a major role for “social networking” themes like “syndication”, “tagging”, “sharing”, “commenting”, etc. across the product portfolio. Could this speak to weakness in product breadth? Where’s the web 2.0 lingo and product focus?

Next, I upload the Risk Factors section on the hopes it would reveal patterns related to Google’s concerns. Read more »

• One Month Retro on IBM's Many Eyes App
• IBM Wants Many Eyes on Visualization
• IBM's Many Eyes Project Seeks Stats Freaks

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Many large companies find themselves launching new businesses at unprecedented rates in an effort to maintain growth profiles, margins and leadership status. When a company pursues new markets, that can include a variety of corporate initiatives which are distinct from each other. At the highest level in terms of potential value creation is the process of vying for a new category. I call this category-creation or entry. Category-creation is different than finding a new market for an existing line of business.

In the latter case, an existing product or service is re-oriented from a positioning, capability and/or distribution standpoint beyond existing customer focus into distinct and additive customer groups. This can be a complex activity for an established business because success often leads to inertia. In other words, it’s hard but necessary to unlearn certain aspects of an existing success formula in order to make the business mix work for new sets of buyers. Expansion of existing products lines into new customer groups holds a lower risk profile than the pursuit of a new category because some aspects of these new markets leverage existing capability. But product line expansion to new segments also carries lower magnitude of order growth potential. Only truly new categories move the needle in breakout ways.

These two growth strategies are equally important — one should not exist without the other. But it’s far more likely that a company is proficient at market expansion than market creation and development. That’s why I’m going to share some thoughts on the category-creation process. Read more »

• Reinventing innovation at consumer goods companies - McKinsey Quarterly;
• How companies approach innovation - A McKinsey Global Survey;
• The Granularity of Growth - McKinsey Quarterly

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So, is Facebook a media firm or a technology company? In case you don’t know, the conversation was spurred by Mark Zuckerberg’s comments at the iMeme event (held in SF during late June), which I attended. Mark takes the perspective that the company is in the technology business. This existential-like question is difficult to wrestle down, not only for Facebook but for the industry more broadly.

Facebook’s position on the matter is very timely, and somewhat predictable, since platform is the strategic mantra of the company now. In case you’ve been living on Mars for a while, Facebook is an engine gaining steam despite its existing scale by opening-up. It’s demonstrated the horsepower to haul the core social networking market but is gaining the strength to pull along all kinds of adjacent services. Under the hood, it’s a jumbo-jet. But the plane has many, many empty seats where applications can sit. These applications are, of course, best sourced from the market and third-parties. Facebook’s core has therefore become open to others to wrap around the social networking phenomenon. Powerful stuff. Keep in mind, not all platforms are alike….plenty of companies have developer programs but they’re offering more of a bus-ride, rickshaw experience or mini-jet seat, compared to Facebook’s Dreamliner. Playing enabler, the company has deduced, supports the notion that it fits “lower in the technology stack” than where media businesses reside. Read more »

• Facebook's Plan to Hook up the World
• Repeat After Mark: Facebook is Not a Media Company
• Facebook: “Not Media Business”
• The Best Facebook Apps
• The Race to Buy Facebook Apps
• Should Yahoo Try Again for Facebook

Filed under: User Experiences, Web Apps, Web 2.0, Innovation, Traditional Media | 2 Comments »

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Launching iPhone is a lot more fun than doing the same for even the coolest web app. The physical nature of consumer electronics allows for some launch activities that can’t be replicated with web products. This includes the promotional frenzy of having people line-up outside retail outlets to get early access to a new gadget. As Apple demonstrated last week, nothing beats the dynamic of a physical crowd even in the digital age.

But after launch, true glory tilts in the favor of the web. Web products may launch with a whisper but when things go right, their traction and growth can be heard with a roar.

This starts with the fact that web products are generally available to everyone. There are little to no barriers to consumption. Not only are they almost always free, increasingly, they are also registration-free. Examples of this would be Pageflakes and Netvibes, which allow you to customize a personal page without any sign-up. Web products generally subscribe to logic that product consumption will speak for itself, leaving traditional (outbound) product marketing obsolete.

Distribution is getting to be almost frictionless as well. In web 1.0, there were many gatekeepers like AOL and Yahoo. But now users can add services to their pages whether those pages sit in a content or social network. Facebook and now MySpace are being fairly open about all of this. Blogging platforms have allowed for this from the start. Browser extensions also opened a new channel of portal-circumvention that is now so obvious, we are drowning in a sea of options. The word of mouth factor is so powerful on the web that new products need only get two things right to grow business. The first is the core application and innovation. Not so easy. The second is allowing for all the hooks that users could imagine as ways to pluck great services into other places on the web.

Maintenance is also a snap compared to physical products. iPhone is reported to have bugs. With a web product those bugs can be fixed right away. Most early web companies conduct major releases monthly, minor releases weekly and random fixes on a daily basis.

So what exactly would be some best practices on launching web products? I decided to look into the matter.  Here are four key takeaways. Read more »

• Techcrunch - Don't Blow Your Beta
• Beta--The Four Letter Word of Web 2.0
• iPhone Debuts in Sea of Hype
• Can iPhone Sustain its Launch Success?

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I was on-site at Supernova today. David Weinberger, author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and the recently published Everything is Miscellaneous, spoke during an afternoon panel. His new book is a thought-provoking work about how we need to get comfortable with the disorder of information spawned by the web. David covers a lot of ground in the book but I’d like to focus on the observation he makes about information overload. He says that the way to solve the overload problem (think 13bn web pages and growing) is to feed more information to the user. It’s a powerful, yet counter intuitive, idea to which I’d like to add a branch or extension.My extension is that users face a different kind of information selection problem depending upon where they stand in the consumption lifecycle. Specifically, that the overload problem is much more acute later on in the lifecycle than in the beginning.Since lifecycles have a front-end and a back-end, we’ll break down consumption into those two spaces, recognizing that gray area exists. By front-end, I mean the user’s objective starting from the “point of inspiration”. There’s always something that motivates a user to seek out information to begin with. This inspiration can be casual or deliberate. A casual intent includes the desire to kill time or have fun…info-snacking, as they say. Deliberate intent is usually task-oriented but as I’ll demonstrate later, the distinction may not matter when it comes to overload.You might ask why information management would more challenging for users in the midst of consumption (versus at the start) when they face the same problem scope on the front-end as they do on the back-end (13bn pages to wrestle with no matter which end you’re into). To answer that you’d have to look at the “what and how” of content consumption from the “point of inspiration” to the “point of resolution.” Let me break that down. Read more »

• How the Web Destroys Categories
• Book Review - Delight in Disorder
• Interview with David Weinberger

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I’ll admit to being schizophrenic in my web usage. This explains why plain-vanilla Google is set as my default browser homepage. On the one hand, I don’t want anything pre-defined for me when I start web browsing. The idea of a personalized page with feeds from sources tailored to my interests feels limiting to me. That may sound counter-intuitive because the point of such personalization is to save me time and effort by aggregating what I’ve defined as important. But it just doesn’t work for me precisely because it’s pre-defined. I prefer to start knowing that the whole web is my oyster.Google’s simple search box respects this sentiment. It stares back at me, daring me to query. It’s a much better starting companion on a journey into the web because it allows me to start anywhere I want.

For example, I often use it to type in the URL for a favorite sports site. I use Google’s box like a keystroke command. I find that easier than navigating to the address bar on the toolbar and mucking around with the entire address. Of course, I can just enter some query terms in the event I ‘m casually or seriously looking for new information. Like you, curiosity strikes me about a half dozen times a day and having Google there as my homepage is my zero latency strategy.

Another way to frame the issue is to say that web schizophrenia comes from the fact that I want nothing and everything at the same time. Google is the only product that offers that to me right now. Read more »

• Google Ramps Up Personalized Search
• Google Blog on Personalization
• Homepage for NetVibes
• Homepage for PageFlakes
• Yahoo Says Search is History!

Filed under: Google, Search Technology, User Experiences, Web Apps, Innovation | 1 Comment »

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Vertical search is not a new area of web apps but I learned something new about it recently. I attended a panel of CTO’s from the space yesterday at the Silicon Valley Web Builder event. Participating companies included Simply Hired, Spock, MEDgle and Riya. Each representative took a couple of minutes to conduct a product demonstration. Spock is still in a private beta, so it was neat to see it in action . My first impressions were very positive.

What’s interesting is that even though these are all search companies, none of the products are competitive. You might think this a very natural dynamic. After all, each vertical is necessarily focused on different slices of web content. But there’s more that makes search a different app as you move from vertical to vertical. It’s not simply a matter of different information. For me, the dividing line between these apps is rooted in how users interact with that information. The way the search process is organized to help users negotiate that interaction can vary widely from app to app. Read more »

• Impact of Universal Search
• Chatting with the MEDgle.com Founders
• First Look at Spock
• Google May Employ Simply Hired

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Video is getting a lot of attention on the web today and rightfully so. But what does this mean for the text-web (you know, information produced in plain-old written form)?

Some Internet analysts are predicting that video will dominate the web content within 5 years.

I don’t agree with that statement despite being very bullish on video web apps.

Video has a huge and growing place in media consumption. No big revelation. One testament to its growing influence on the web is Google Universal Search, which subtly integrates video (along with map, book, blog and image) content into traditional search results. But it’s simplistic to believe that anything produced in text today can be better consumed in video. The written word is and will remain the optimal form for a lot of content. Yes, the same news story can be transformed into news video. But the relevance of one over the other is a function of user needs. Read more »

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Have you noticed that print media is coming to resemble web pages?

Consider the re-design of the Financial Times (first edition of new design on April 23rd). The front page demonstrates four common facets of web content. At the top, there are tabs that highlight key content that sits inside. Not everything can make it to the front page of course. These look like a cross between tabs on a web page (which typically represent different channels or recurring sections) and the slideshow concept. By slideshow, I mean bubbling-up programming from inside the site in a visual manner with some text summary. Slideshows are often implemented in the form of scrolling content vignettes. It’s the experience you find on AOL or Yahoo’s main page, NBA.com or even Rhapsody. If the FT front page were digital, you could just imagine the scroll from one tab to another drawing your attention to 3-4 items beyond the front page that the editors think is great copy. Read more »

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You may have read about P&G’s major decision last week to reduce product packaging sizes in its liquid detergent business. The company intends to double concentration of detergent in smaller bottle sizes. Yes, the change is better for the environment and will trim costs, but could there be something deeper at-work here?

P&G is well-known for its attempt to differentiate through product design. Alan Lafley (CEO) has described it as the company’s core competency. In the case of products like detergents, more concentrated packaging makes a lot of sense from a user experience perspective, which is what design is all about. Who wants to lug around or store in the supply closet a container bigger than it has to be? Why not simplify the experience while promoting social responsibility?

Last week’s news is just another sign that product packaging is experiencing rapid transformation. It’s taking place across consumer categories as we enter an era where companies attempt to leverage design for competitive advantage.

There’s no better example of this upheaval in packaging than on the web through the deployment of interactive technologies such as Ajax and Flex. Read more »

• P&G to concentrate on less packaging

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