Yesterday I had the pleasure of joining Stephen Powers from Forrester and Joel Shore of Ziff Davis for a webinar on globalization title “Getting Started With Your Global Site Initiative. The event was sponsored by SDL Tridion and is now available online at eSeminarslive.com.

Getting Started With Your Global Web Site Initiative

Many organizations face the challenge of going global, particularly when it comes to Web site strategies. While these organizations have made the decision to better manage their Web sites globally, they face many issues deploying multiple Web sites, in multiple languages.

Topics Discussed:

• How to get started on a globalized Web site project, before even looking at specific technologies
• What stumbling blocks to avoid, depending on organization and culture.
• Tips on implementing technologies and gaining user adoption

This past week I had the opportunity to participate in two Interwoven events directed at interactive marketers and the challenges they are facing online. The first event was a panel discussion, entitled “From Browsers to Buyers: How to Drive More Value From Your Online Marketing” that took place Tuesday night at Umbria Ristorante in Boston and was expertly moderated by Senior Editor-in-Chief at 1to1 Magazine, Ginger Conlon. Panelist Dave Churbuck, VP of Global Web Marketing at Lenvo and Ben Kiker, CMO at Interwoven both provided excellent insight into how companies are addressing the new online challenges facing their marketing departments. The discussion was very interactive and the format provided a good forum for open discussion and sharing of ideas. I was particular impressed with David’s thoughts around “The Year of the Landing Page” and enjoyed the other insights the former founder of Forbes.com and author of churbuck.com talked about during the evening.

Earlier that day I got a chance to participate with Eben Miller, Director of Product Marketing, as a guest on Interwoven’s “Intersections” podcast to discuss the topic “User Generated Content (UGC) and Its Effect On Your Brand”. The podcast was hosted by Scott Whitney and runs about 25 minutes. You can listen to the show at www.interwovenpodcasts.com.

Web Content Management is more than just a technology; utilized correctly, it can become the hub for all your digital content, an enabler to engage your customers in ways never before possible, if you are a marketer your WCM system could (and should) be the most valuable weapon in your arsenal for differentiation.

This has long been a belief of Molecular, but the recent acquisition of MediaSurface by Alterian is a good example of how WCM is being seen as a necessary component to any successful marketing offering

Here’s the first line of the Alterian press release, “Integrated marketing platform provider combines online and offline analytics with content and multi-channel execution to help marketers optimise customer experiences across the web”

A lot of marketing speak for sure, but I think Jason McNamara (Alterian CMO) is correct when he says “Analytics is the new measure of how well marketers understand their customers, but people react to content. And reaction and interaction with content creates new analytics. Unlike offline, these interactions are often inbound and real-time in nature, thus impossible to manage with manual processes….”

This is just one example of how technology companies are trying to combine, analytics, content management and campaign management to create offerings that speak better to marketing departments. Something they all feel they most do as they see the money (and decision making power) moving from IT to to the business.

Other recent examples include Interwoven’s acquisition of Optimost (A/B testing) and Vignette’s acquisition of Vidavee (video and analytics).

Will all this activity enable these companies to make the jump from selling technology to IT to selling solutions to marketing? In the future, maybe, but right now it’s just a good story with little “real” integration and few success stories. And as is always the case with technology, it’s usually not the product itself that makes you successful, it’s HOW your organization uses that technology that gives you the competitive advantage. If you don’t understand what you need the technology to do, just buying an integrated platform isn’t going to make you a success.

No matter how you get your news these days you can’t help being bombarded by the talk of a recession. With all the talk I thought I’d take a quick look at some of the WCM vendors and see how they were doing.

This is not an in depth financial analysis, but I think it is safe to say the WCM market is still strong and shows few signs of slowing down. The vast majoriy of vendors has posted records numbers, with (Vignette and MediaSurface being key exceptions, and seem to have positive outlooks for 2008.

Here’s is a summary of the most recent releases.

Interwoven
Interwoven reported total revenues of $61.5 million for the first quarter of 2008, an increase of 17% from total revenues of $52.7 million for the first quarter of 2007.

“Our first quarter performance provided an excellent start to 2008″, said Joe Cowan, CEO of Interwoven. “We posted a revenue increase of 17% over last year, while increasing earnings and cash flows. These results are a direct result of a strategy that is tuned to the needs of our customers.” Full Story (Interwoven)

OpenText
Total revenue for the third quarter was US$178.8 million, up 15% compared to US$156.1 million for the same period in the prior fiscal year. License revenue in the third quarter was US$51.5 million, up 20% compared to US$43.0 million in the third quarter of the prior fiscal year. Full Story (CIO)

Tridion
“SDL Tridion’s revenues hit a record USD 42M in 2007 driven by strong expansion in the US and UK markets as well as market share growth across Europe. With year-on-year revenuegrowth of 58% and license revenuegrowth of 67%, ….. Net profit also reached record levels in 2007 and net margin was a class leading 16% of revenues in spite of heavy investments in global expansion and incidental costs related to the acquisition by SDL” Full Story (Tridion)

Fatwire
Web Content Management Provider Achieves 21 Percent Increase in Year-Over-Year RevenueGrowth

FatWire Software…., announced that the company delivered its strongest year ever with record-breaking fourth quarter fiscal year 2007 results. FatWire achieved an exceptional 35 percent growth in total revenuefor the quarter which ended on December 31st, 2007, driven by a strong demand worldwide for its products and services.” Full Story (Fatwire)

Day Software
The Company reported a record first quarter, achieving a 15% growth in total revenue over the same period in 2007. Revenues for the first quarter totaled CHF 7.4 million, compared with revenues of CHF 6.4 million for the first quarter of 2007. License revenues increased by 39% over last year, totaling CHF 4.3 million, compared with license revenues of CHF 3.1 million for the same period last year.” Full Story (Day)

Clickability
Clickability, …… today announced the closing of $8 million in its second round of venture funding. Shasta Ventures led the round, with additional investment from Convergence Partners, which financed Clickability’s initial venture capital round. Full Story (Clickability)

Vignette Corporation
Vignette Corporation (NASDAQ: VIGN) today announced that total revenue for the first quarter 2008 was $44.8 million, a decrease of 6.0% from the first quarter of 2007.

“Our business remains volatile on a quarter by quarter basis,” said Mike Aviles, president and CEO of Vignette. “We need stronger focus and more consistent results from our sales and marketing efforts. License revenue in North America was particularly challenging for us in the first quarter; however, services were strong, and we continue to make good progress around our technology. Customer satisfaction and renewal rates are up. We announced several new products during the quarter and added integrated video content management capabilities with the acquisition of Vidavee.” Full Story (Vignette)

MediaSurface
“In recent years Mediasurface has grown — a bit haphazardly we thought — via acquisition, but evidently failed to control costs, and a surprise announcement (pdf) of losses late last year sent the stock tumbling from around 25p to languish at about 5p per share, at least until this latest courtship. You can track the stock price here.” Full Story (CMSWatch)

The Molecular CM Team got a demo of Percussion’s new Personalization Solution the other day. Tying CM and Personalization is not a new concept and Percussion is not the first CM vendor to offer a solution like this, but their open implementation offers extensibility and simplified integration.

As with all products I’m holding my final opinion until I work with it at least once.

After reading a blog posting on CMS Watch the other day about how SaaS Content Management vendors are trying to position themselves as the “Green” solution to Content Management I thought it would be a good time to write about my desire to be a “green consultant”.

I’ve started my journey with the following initiatives:

Commute – Although it would be great to move closer to the office and reduce my one hour (each way) commute time, I really like my neighborhood and my current residence, so I looked for innovative ways to better utilize my commuting time. My first initiative was to purchase carbon-offset certificates to ensure I was compensating for the CO2 my drive time was putting into the atmosphere. I choose to purchase my certificate through RenewableChoice.com, but there a plenty of sites available (Carbonfund.org is another good one). My second initiative was to take advantage of the energy my car was producing while I was driving. I decided to use the two hours per day I sit in the car to charge my electronic devices. Using a variety of gadgets I’m able to charge my Blackberry, Bluetooth headset, digital camera, laptop and iPod with just the energy from my 12v car outlets during my commute! This was good, but I wanted to go one step further. Wouldn’t it be great if I could run my laptop all day using my commute as the energy source? Thanks to some innovative technology from Batterygeek.net this was a real possibility. Batterygeek offers lightweight external ‘Green Lithium’ batteries that can produce 9+ hours of laptop operation, and thanks to an available 130w inverter you can charge the battery from your car. I’m still waiting for my Portable Power Station from Batterygeek, but I’m optimistic this will enable me to operate all day without drawing any additional power from the office. I’m also assuming that I might need more than my commute time to charge the batter, but no worries, I just pre-registered with NSTAR Green to make sure 100% of my home energy is delivered via a wind farm in upstate NY.

Laptop – To get through a full day on battery power there are few things you can do to your laptop to help conserve energy. 1) Don’t use an external monitor 2) Decrease the brightness on your laptop LCD screen 3) Maximize your power setting (for Windows machines you can do this under ‘Power Options’ in the control panel) 4) Use an Ethernet cable instead of wireless and make sure your wireless adapter is off

Lights – The best way to reduce the energy you use for lighting is to utilize natural sun light. If that’s not possible the second best option is to use an LED desk lamp and if that’s not in the cards the last resort is to buy a CFL lamp or bulb. I good source for LED and CFL lighting is www.eco-lights.com.

Printing – This is simple. I try not to do it. If I absolutely need to print a document I print on both sides of the paper. Printing on recycled paper is another step.

Office Supplies – I try to use recycled products as much a possible Staples has an “Eco Easy” section of their site that offers a great selection of products.

I’ve got a long way to go before I can claim to be a green consultant. I should be bringing filtered tap water instead of grabbing bottled water at work, bringing local foods for lunch instead of grabbing packaged food from the vending machines and should probably look harder for earth friendly clothing (Bollorganic has great organic cotton dress shirts) but for now I’m happy I’m just moving in the right direction.

This month I have been interviewing some of our colleagues and researching tools for a bug tracking system to be adopted as our standard. What became salient is that the tools are important but irrelevant if we don’t have the necessary processes and disciplines to support it.

Coincidentally this week I was reading the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge newsletter and came across a very interesting article, which made me think about the other incredible important factor on this equation: human resources! We can have the best tools, the best processes and methodologies, but finding testers is still very challenging, and that is because people are challenged by novelty and can’t stand doing the same task over and over again. It is common knowledge that after a while testers get burned out and start making mistakes.

According to the article – summary and link below - a Danish company found the perfect fit for the function. It employs people with a form of autism, that have the characteristics needed for the testing process: high intelligence, precision-oriented skills, deep concentration, and patience to be checking and rechecking outcomes, documenting test plans, and maintaining follow-through.

I think one of the lessons here is that when thinking about QA we need to think about documentation, stress the need of having very detailed test plans to be able to rotate testers and to outsource parts of the process.

Executive Summary:

Software analysts and programmers live to innovate—but hate to run tests. Yet top-notch testing saves many a company money when bugs are caught early. A new case coauthored by HBS professor Robert D. Austin describes the secret behind a Danish consultancy’s success: The majority of its testers have Asperger syndrome or a form of autism spectrum disorder. Key concepts include:

• Techies tend to be idiosyncratically talented. The case “Specialisterne: Sense & Details” is about putting diverse talent where it will be most effective.
• Software testing requires superb powers of concentration combined with tolerance (even preference) for routine tasks.
• Seventy-five percent of the software consultants in the Specialisterne case have Asperger syndrome or some form of autism spectrum disorder.
• Some software testing may be offshored, but mission-critical testing must be done near the client.

For the whole article: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5869.html

]]> http://molecularvoices.molecular.com/2008/qa-process-design/feed/ http://molecularvoices.molecular.com/2008/some-people-don%e2%80%99t-have-maps-we-have-google-maps/ http://molecularvoices.molecular.com/2008/some-people-don%e2%80%99t-have-maps-we-have-google-maps/#comments Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:13:32 +0000 David Tong http://molecularvoices.molecular.com/2008/some-people-don%e2%80%99t-have-maps-we-have-google-maps/

Last Friday, I attended the Google Geo Developer Workshop at UC Berkeley. Pamela Fox and Mano Marks from Google gave an informative session on Geo API and KLM in Google Earth.

Google Earth has made a revolutionary impact on the way we perceive and imagine the universe. However, as one of the few standalone Desktop applications provided by Google, I always thought that the fact that Google Earth has to be downloaded to run makes this application less attractive and it doesn’t align with other web apps. Mano Marks presented what Google Earth can do with KML (Keyhole Markup Language). Because it’s XML-based, I see it as a great way for information exchange with other Google products. On a side note, Mano mentioned that Google generates revenue indirectly from free applications like Google Earth. Google’s mission has always been indexing the universe’s information. The more information people can search through Google, and higher the exposure the ads become.

As a “web guy,” I am fascinated by the Geo API. I became even more excited when Pamela showed an example of extracting data from a Google Spreadsheet and placing corresponding markers on the map. Using Google Spreadsheet as the web database is a revolutionary idea. Because of the established way of using spreadsheets, in many cases, Google Spreadsheet can replace SQL databases, or even content management systems.

During the workshop, I randomly created a employee-address record book, published via Google Spreadsheet, and generated this map:

The highlights of this example:

1) The Spreadsheet can be updated by authorized users. Authorized users just need to log on to spreadsheets.google.com and update the spreadsheet; the spreadsheet will be published as a JSON object.
2) The Map, which reads data from the JSON object, will then be automatically updated
3) The JavaScript code is light-weighted and easy to be tailored

(Paul Irish suggested that I could use Google Map to create a carpool list so that Molecular employees in Boston can come to work with other employees who live within a certain distance. To achieve this, we can modify the above map by drawing a 5-mile-long “GPolygon” at each employee’s location and detect other employees who are within the polygon. There are many other ways to create this kind of carpool list. Nested for-loops that run through the marker array, for example, can also do the job.)

At the end of the event, I talked to Raymond Yee, Lecturer at UC Berkeley and author of Pro Web 2.0 Mashups. On May 12, he will be hosting the “Mixing and Remixing Information” Open House at UC Berkeley. It will be interesting to see students’ projects on mashups. His book is also worth mentioning, for it’s going to be released under a Creative Commons License. Writing books on the latest web technology is a big business, and I admire Yee for his unselfishness in sharing his work with us for free.

In terms of upcoming events, Pamela mentioned during our conversation that she will be going to Boston (MIT) for another workshop. Folks in Boston: bring your data and code with her!

Who should create the news? How should it be consumed?

These are questions every newspaper and news organization should be asking. It was the title of a recent presentation that I gave to several international newspaper executives where opportunities were outlined, and followed by rich discussion.

Defensive postures are occurring – ones that foreshadow an inevitable demise. The most recent indication that the newsmedia is changing is today’s announcement that Gannett Co., Hearst Corp., the New York Times Co. and Tribune Co. are creating an advertising network called quadrantOne. The intent is to allow national advertisers to buy space in the companies’ local properties.

Being forced into a network with your competitors is a defensive posture. (The offensive version is called collusion, which is highly illegal). The papers are doing this because advertising is flat. From the Wall St. Journal:

“The formation of the partnership comes as the newspaper industry is struggling with falling advertising revenue, a result both of advertisers defecting to the Web and the weak economy. Difficult industry conditions sparked a new wave of cost-cutting this week.”

Newspapers need to find a way to become relevant again. And there are many options to:

Present news in a new format; invite interaction; benefit from the wisdom of users; allowing the users to create the news; and ultimately create a new definition of “news”.

To discuss further, I welcome comments or insight on how you think the newspaper industry should change.

Many perceive that the core issue in the “Facebook vs. Robert Scoble” debate is about who owns personal data, but in actuality it’s about Facebook protecting a sustainable competitive advantage. By not allowing Scoble to download his contacts, it creates a high switching cost, and therefore creates a disincentive for Scoble to use other social media sites.

For those unaware of the issue, Robert Scoble’s Facebook account was disabled after he tried to take his personal contacts from the social networking site. From UK Techcrunch:

“Data portability from social networks is going to become a huge tech industry issue in the new year. Why? Because well known tech blogger Robert Scoble has had his Facebook account disabled after he tried to pull out his 5,000 contacts (known as a social graph) from the site. This will fire the starting gun on all the debates about who owns your data on a social network, debates which - till now - have seemed rather theoretical, and could even lead to a revolt amongst some Facebook users.” http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/01/03/facebook-blocks-scoble-for-downloading-his-contacts/

Creating lock-in is a core part of every successful company’s strategy and creates a tangible reason for customers to remain loyal to a company.

Some other places that lock-in is alive and well:

• Online bill paying: Setting up payees takes time and effort creating a reason to not want to change to another bank
• iPod and iTunes: Proprietary synching and usability create a simple buying, managing, and listening experience
• Amazon and Netflix: Recommendations based upon your ratings, as well as wish lists create reasons to keep going back
• Airline miles: Deemed a reward to you, it serves a dual purpose of creating an reason to choose the airline repeatedly

Contracts, exclusive memberships, loyalty cards, even branding create allegiances that help compel customers to choose the same product repeatedly.

Whether Facebook allows Scoble to take his contact data or not, the real question here is, how can your company create a competitive advantage?

I look forward to comments at eric.karofsky@molecular.com