@ The Wall Street Journal D9 Conference

31 May

It is a beautiful day in southern California for a technology conference. If the lineup weren’t so good (as it always is) many of the attendees would probably play hookey and enjoy the golden California sunshine. (Apologies to those folks who are reading this where it is raining….)

It is the ninth annual WSJ D conference since Walt and Kara started this global gathering of the digital elite, and my fifteenth since I left daily newspaper journalism at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones to get involved in this “obscure” (as it was considered then) and “geeky” (again, that was then) thing called….The Internet….

Today, what is now known simply as “Convergence” has brought together the worlds of media, communications and technology in ways that were simply a vision back then.

I have been privileged to operate big jobs at the center of this “Convergence” from several vantage points (“Big Media” (@TimeWarner), “Big Internet” (@Yahoo!), “Big Telecom” (EarthLink), and successful startups in websearch and mobile (Infoseek->Disney and WHERE->EBay).

And it’s funny: when you look forward, big changes really seem evolutionary. It is only when you have the perspective and opportunity to look backwards that you can see how revolutionary the changes really are….

This WSJ D Conference provides plenty of both perspective and opportunity – so I will be pimping for my current startups every way I can! 🙂

And Walt and Kara and their growing team have assembled a great lineup, including Google’s Eric Schmidt, Hewlett-Packard CEO Léo Apotheker, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, DARPA director Regina Dugan, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft’s Windows division, among others….

I’ll tweet as best I can! Once a reporter, always a reporter….

The Looming Sunni-Shia Battle

25 Apr

It’s an old habit, but I like to visit into far-off places at times of big change. (This was an especially useful talent to have in my days as a foreign correspondent, but also keeps life interesting now).

I just returned from a longish trip to the Mideast including Lebanon and Turkey and this post is mostly about the perspective one gets from such travel. As a telecom and technology executive, I was fascinated to see up-close the powerful role mobile and social technology are playing in the popular uprisings currently shaking so much of the Arab world. And it was so interesting – and invaluable – to meet and speak with to speak with so many people who are using new mobile technology to create a new landscape in the region.

Just over the past week, unrest in Syria left over a hundred people dead and underscored a widening of the popular uprisings that have already occurred this year (in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Tunisia and Libya) to Lebanon’s neighbor to the East. There surely is more upheaval to come.

I spent much of the past week in Lebanon, traveling from the southern Shuf Mountains to the northern city of Tripoli. I had a memorable time seeing a beautiful, diverse country that is rebuilding and seems on the move despite all the obstacles stacked against it.

In contrast to the impression one has from afar, Beirut today and its suburbs nowadays are a bustling hive of construction sites, highway projects and a busy international airport. Years of civil war have left deep scars of course, and opened the door for such rivals as Dubai to eclipse Beirut as a regional center. But with such awe-inspiring construction projects as the center-city Solidere redevelopment site – one of the largest engineering projects in the world – it is possible to imagine Beirut once again becoming the ‘Paris of the Mideast.’

Of course, the outward appearance of modernity and economic progress may prove fragile, as it has so many times before by intervention from its neighbors and internal civil strife.

To say it’s a complex neighborhood is a deliberate understatement.

Regardless, one principal impression stays with me after 10 days spent in the region:

The coming fault line of conflict in the Mideast will be within the “neighborhood” of Islamic Arabia itself, and it will NOT principally be a battle of Islam with the rest of the world. The United States and the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa are not at the center of this reformation. Nor is the Palestinian-Israeli issue the key. In fact, this isn’t even principally a battle involving nation-states.

Rather, the confrontation is shaping up as a battle for the soul of Islam – between extremist Shia and Sunni groups.

The Arab uprisings of 2011 in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and now Syria have thus far not illustrated this in the early rounds. But I have a hunch we will see the Sunni-Shia extremist conflict emerging soon as a central narrative in the so-called Arab Uprising of 2011. When? It may be a while, because so many institutions of post-authoritarian regimes need to be rebuilt. But there is very little question it is coming, and in some places possibly soon.

How can this be? Many of the worst repressive regimes kept “bottled up” the worst kinds of the religious conflicts among the two main strains of Islamic faith. Now, as these regimes crumble, the prospects for more openness and democracy increase, but so do the possibly of internal civil war.

The principal Shia action groups on the list are very familiar: Iran, Amal, and of course Hezbollah (which in Lebanon these days seems as much the huge force it is in the mainstream of political life, with visible signs of its power plastered all over, especially in the south, not at all a marginalized splinter group it is sometimes portrayed outside the country). On the Sunni side, the names are less well-known to non-Mideast experts but no less lethal. Perhaps the most terrifyingly brutal are the extremist fighters belonging to the Salafi orthodox Sunni sect, who claimed responsibility for the brutal murder of a pro-Palestinian Italian activist kidnapped and murdered in Gaza while I was traveling here.

In Syria, there is a scenario in which Syrian strongman Bashar Al Assad losing his grip on the country, and setting up a conflict between Sunni majority in the country, and the Shia and Alawite minority who have dominated the political landscape for 40 years. In the region, Christians, Druze and other religious minorities all fear becoming caught in the cross-fire. Such a shift in the balance of power in Syria could put Hezbollah and Iran on the defensive, and then usher in a new period of realignment in the region.

Despite the West’s strong interests and involvement in the region, the heart of the issue is essentially local in nature. It does not revolve around Washington, London, Beijing or other world capitals. Which may be worth remembering as the calls for global action, especially for the U.S., escalate.

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My new role at WHERE…

28 Feb

I have been happy to be a board director of WHERE for the past several years. Now I am very excited to be taking on an additional role as Executive Chairman as announced today.

WHERE is the leading location media company and provides a hugely useful mobile service that helps you find and share your favorite places, at home or on the road. My view is such mobile, location-aware services are at the forefront of the next-generation of consumer and business marketing, media, advertising and technology. Innovating a breakneck pace, WHERE sits at the crossroads of the local, social, mobile and technology ecosystem.

WHERE’s latest product release reflects all that. I’ve commented before about the usefulness of features that help you store, manage and share the places you like. With the current release (updated last week for Android and iPhone) WHERE now is starting to recommend local places that you and your friends are likely to find most alluring, based on algorithmic analysis of you and your friends’ preferences. It’s very cool.

And the company is on a tear! In addition to reaching four million mobile customers monthly, WHERE is also the biggest location-aware advertising network — (that hasn’t been snapped up by Apple or Google) — serving more than two billion monthly mobile advertising impressions. Although a private company that doesn’t release its financials, WHERE is both growing revenues fast (in the double-digit millions) and has been profitable for the past six consecutive quarters. That kind of performance reflects the fact the company is a great team, led at its top by a terrific CEO – Walt Doyle.

What does an executive chairman do? I’ll be working on corporate development and strategy with the team, who are doing great things in the relationships with carriers, handset manufacturers and other important partners. Mostly, I will try to be helpful to the WHERE team and its stakeholders, just as WHERE tries to be helpful to its customers. And I’ll continue with my board roles at several other private companies I am equally enthusiastic about.

I am excited to be off on the next phase of the WHERE ride!

Creating Sustainable Online Revenue and Profit Growth

5 Nov

With apologies to Charles Dickens, our current economic “worst of times and best of times” provide an inkling of an uneven future across the global economic landscape. Just ask someone trying to sell a home in southern Florida these days, or looking for work in the developed world. Times are difficult indeed.

But when it comes to global consumers benefiting from advances in technology, media and telecom (my professional “workshop”) I find it hard to be anything other than optimistic.

Here’s why: We are at the beginning of another major wave of innovation, which promises to accelerate changes that will enhance the business and personal lives of producers and consumers alike. And in terms of “manufacturing growth online” or “accelerating” such growth, I am focusing on companies, products and services that leverage three dramatically innovative technologies that are forever going to change the we use and interact with content, people, locations and commerce.

That’s my conclusion from my involvement with several emerging internet, online-video, telecom and consumer-technology businesses in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, (and after four years in the southeastern U.S. focused on internet, media and telecommunications issues in the U.S. and globally).

To start at the beginning: In recent posts, I have discussed the importance of saving users’ time, money and delighting customers when it comes to designing winning products.

These are the most important building blocks of great online products. And at the start of the consumer internet, there was an “architectural” reason why the most successful brands (for instance, Yahoo!, EBay, and Amazon, to name just three) became so: They used the basic “building blocks” of the medium — hypertext markup language (HTML) – to usefully link related text documents in a manner that delighted, and saved time, and saved money for their millions of customers.

(To be sure, they also took advantage of the power of the distributed architecture of the internet-protocol (IP) network to ensure point-to-point communications, regardless of the route the digital packets take to reach their destination. But that’s another story, for another time. This post is already “geeky” enough ;-).)

Today, dramatically new ways are emerging to usefully link information and thereby create the building blocks of sustainably successful online businesses.

In my view, the three that are most profoundly meaningful are the social graph, the location graph (a “graph” for places), and the video graph: more about each of them below. Amid evidence that “silos” are emerging that threaten to render these three radically new approaches less effective than they otherwise might be, there is emerging great business opportunity in “mashing up” and merging technologies that take the best of each and drive value from all — or a synthesis of several — of them.

That’s where I am focusing my investment attention and board leadership. Each of the four companies on whose boards I sit (WHERE, Coincident TV, Success Television and MotiveCast) are playing innovative roles in meshing these various silos of user engagement and attention. And they are generating meaningful revenue, engagement and customer growth as a result.

The first of the new methodologies is the “social graph,” or social ecosystem, which is linking many of us through our “friends” and expanded contact lists. Both Facebook and LinkedIn are two companies exploiting the social ecosystem very effectively and with great success. OK, perhaps now it is not so “new,” but it’s worth keeping in mind that 500 million-member Facebook is still less than a decade old, and we are only beginning to see its impact on the social graph.

In the social-graph organizational construct, I know you, and you know me – with the appropriate nod to privacy settings, and familiarity, we share a web of interests, web objects and social “relationships,” and we can benefit from each other’s networks. The net result from a business-process improvement perspective is — among other benefits — dramatically lower customer acquisition and retention costs, as well as dramatically higher-value relationships with your customers (largely because businesses have the potential to know so much more and have such closer relationships with those customers).

There are similar business-acceleration benefits when it comes to the “location graph.” A number of companies are using location awareness to drive customer gratification and revenue generation. Location-based Service (LBS) leaders such as WHERE, Foursquare, Groupon and Gowalla are using location as the key-building block of a new “location-centric” web. Their applications – helping users find valuable local businesses and offers – is providing another organizational theme for distributed information.

At MotiveCast, the team has built a powerful platform for branded advertising in a location-centric, social gaming environment. They recently were selected by PepsiCo as one of the 10 most innovative online companies as a result.

Finally, there is video. Although online video is now a mass phenomenon (and Success TV and before that MyPrimeTime were true pioneers in that), online video in my view remains stuck in a very “1.0” experience.

That’s starting to change. Coincident TV has created a new programming language, along with a software editor and API set, that allows owners of online video to link that video in context to another other distributed objected on the internet.

In just six months after shipping its first product, Coincident TV has developed dramatic performance enhancements for its customers (including MTV,Fox’s GLEE franchise and Audi) in terms of generating more clicks, more Facebook “like”-button adoption and more search.

I’m betting that applications and software that leverage these new ways of “navigating’ across the social, location and video grid (as well as text of course) will deliver tremendous new growth for those companies smart and innovative enough to deploy them in ways that save user’s time, money or delight them in some way.

We are already seeing it at WHERE, CoincidentTV, MotiveCast and Success Television. And my view is we have only just begun.

(Note: This is an expanded version of some remarks I delivered at Landmark Ventures recent conference on Media and Technology in Los Angeles. I want to thank the Landmark folks for giving me an opportunity to assemble these thoughts. Some coverage photos of the event are here.)

How Online Video Is Creating the Movie Hits of Tomorrow — Today

11 Oct

Few experiences are more gripping for an audience than cinema. Throughout the past century or so of motion picture history, technology has constantly enhanced the movie-going experience, from the advent of “talkies” (when sound was introduced) to the cutting-edge, big-budget 3D releases of today.

But the marketing experience for filmed entertainment simply has not kept pace with the constant transitions and advancements of filmmaking. The audience that saw the trailer for “Casablanca” would be entirely comfortable watching the trailer for this season’s “The Town.” Marketers still employ this “one-way” promotional technique – directly from the producer to the audience – offering film highlights but not much else. Until now, studios still unroll the traditional and dated film trailer for every new cinematic release.

With the launches of the interactive trailers for 20th Century Fox’s “Machete” and “Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps”, Coincident TV (CTV) is changing things — bringing its interactive, immersive video technology experiences to a new audience – the film-going public.

The Coincident TV bet (I am on the board; please look below for a disclaimer) is that movie marketing and promotion will never be the same. Rather than simply providing an internet-distributed video of edited film highlights – as in an online trailer – CTV is partnering with 20th Century Fox to create an interactive experience designed to promote the film well before the ticket-buying window opens, and to carry that immersive experience well beyond the actual cinema viewing of the film.

How is it done? Basically, the idea is to use the interactive power of CTV’s programming language to create relevant links, or cue-points, for the audience that go well beyond the linear highlights of the film. These can include:

• Links to the online “social-grid” involving stars and their characters, as a way of including producers and talent and allowing the audience to interact.

• Links to the merchandising opportunities created by the film, including access to ancillary products ranging from soundtrack albums to logo-merchandise.

• E-ticketing. This one is obvious but CTV provides a direct way for interested audience members to pre-book their seats with all the various popular ticketing platforms.

• Brand extensions and franchise development. This is a major enhancement of the film marketing experience. Through the CTV online platform, film-goers can continue to engage with the characters, stars and brands that are created in the magic of the movie theater well after the lights have come back up.

Indeed, the interactive film trailers hold the prospect of becoming ongoing destinations in and of themselves, with a lifecycle that could continue until a sequel or a new franchise is underway.

These two titles also underscore the ability of CTV technology to “write once, run anywhere” as they function seamlessly on Apple, Android or Flash technology. With the combination of new technology and interactivity, CTV is helping Hollywood and movie-marketeers worldwide take that big next step to the future.

To be sure, not everything is currently appearing in our apps for these two trailers. Some of the above features are still “world-of-tomorrow” enhancements that CTV’s team of creative minds and engineers are diligently working to create.

Still, as Humphrey Bogart says in “Casablanca,” CTV believes its partnership with Hollywood marks “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

(Note — This is a slightly expanded version of my post on the CoincidentTV blog. I am on the board at CTV, whose new video technology (which basically does for video what HTML did for text) is currently powering interactive sites for Fox, MTV, Audi and several other media and consumer companies).

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Great Products Do Three Things….

2 Mar

Yahoo! is a complex place to build products, and I recall early in my tenure trying to focus our Media and Information Division on three core objectives that would be clear, undebatable and useful in building better consumer products.

I won’t go into the details of how we got there (although that’s an interesting story). But get there, we did. And we believed then, as I do today, that a great product:

1. Saves customers’ time.

2. Saves customers’ money.

3. Delights customers in new ways.

Seems simple? Well, in my experience this is far easier to say than it is to do.

I am reminded of this today because after some very hard work, the WHERE team (full disclosure: I am a board member) has launched a feature called Placebook in its new location-based app build that does all three. And thank heavens, because the pain relieved by this new release is large and longstanding.

Placebook is a constantly updatable ‘Rolodex’ of your (and your friends) favorite spots. You can use it on your IPhone. You can access it on the web. (They sync)! And you can FORGET having to REMEMBER all those names, addresses, phone numbers, etc.

You might be wondering “what’s the excitement?” Please let me answer that, from a personal POV.

Have you ever had the experience of knowing that the restaurant you love, in a city you visit frequently, is just around the corner somewhere. But you can’t recall the address, or exactly the route to get there, or even the restaurant’s name? Frustrating? Time-wasting? Totally useless?

The problem is solved. Go to a restaurant, or any favorite spot. Click once in the WHERE app to store it to your Placebook. Click again to give it a rating. And from now on, you can simply forget about having to remember. Once stored, your profile and Placebook will remember for you.

Now, the WHERE guys are not the first folks to think of this. There are countless listing and reviews services. There are competitors. Once upon a time there was a clever startup called Vindigo that did something similar. It was useful, too.

But Placebook is a big step forward, right now.

Of course, simply building such great features as Placebook are no guarantee in and of themselves of a huge business success. Building better products is simply a gating issue that allows successful companies onto the battlefield that will determine their ultimate ability to go from ‘Good to Great’ as Jim Collins puts it.

But it is a great start to have a great product, filled with useful features. And — on behalf of busy, forgetful people all over, thank you to the WHERE team for solving this particular problem.

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It is perhaps, as a great leader once said, ‘The End of the Beginning’

18 Feb

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, we have reached “the end of the beginning” of the online revolution.

A recent week in Europe, including the wonderful Burda DLD Conference, followed by subsequent meetings in SF, LA and NY provides an intriguing glimpse of what comes next:

To me, the omnipresence of broadband in the developed world, coupled with ubiquity of mobile computing (over smartphones, iPads or other portable devices), a generational shift towards e-engagement and the growing power of massive data in the “cloud” are changing every business assumption in the media, telecom and internet economy. These powerful forces are all coming together to create conditions for a huge new wave of innovation that will forever disrupt the information, entertainment, communications and technology economy.

While challenging to navigate, this is an unprecedented opportunity for better products for consumers. There should also be very interesting new business models. And finally, all this should mean intriguing opportunities for investors.

A couple of focus areas – for me:

1.Platforms: The next generation of technology is now being developed that enables media companies to mesh diverse programming assets (video, social media, commerce and communications) into radically new engaging products (For shorthand, think ‘Avatar’ Meets ‘Bloomberg’). Also, technologies will also enable the same media owners to distribute these valuable new programming assets over the bundle of distribution channels (broadband internet, wireless, television and telecom). More on this to come.

2.In the Enterprise and Professional Media sectors, a new generation of opportunities is arriving as the social and real-time web (Twitter, Facebook) meet the Enterprise. This will revolutionize marketing, advertising, and much of the content business. It will also lead to business process reengineering in sectors ranging from content creation and product development to procurement and HR and Training/Talent Development Retention. Mark Benioff’s SalesForce Chatter which went private beta yesterday is a timely example.

3.Business model opportunities: Mobile and Location-specific targeting and monetization. Think lead generation and couponing with increased effectiveness at the point of purchase.

4.Product-Line Opportunities: Hyper-Verticalized Initiatives. Both hyper-local (geographic) and hyper-targeted (Demographic/Psychographic).

It is somewhat early days with all of these themes. But my prediction is they – and others – will keep us all busy for some time to come.

PS: Let’s all watch with great interest as the US FCC unveils the results of its multi-quarter analysis of the broadband opportunity in America. That, too, will surely have some interesting after-effects.

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Evolution -> Revolution

8 Jan

In our global online journey, there are occasional epiphany moments: incidents that make you realize how much technology is changing our civilization.

One comes for me today: I am flying transcontinentally at 36,000 feet today, on an airliner with free wifi. My Mac is running SlingPlayer, which allows me to watch my home television over the internet.

I am live-blogging about watching the College Football Championship Game live, in real-time, as I make my way across the country. I am IM’ing about the game with pals; I am getting real-time game update and stats from various websites, and absorbing a great deal of social media from a variety of great websites. I have a virtual newsroom operating at Seat 3D.

A contrast: This month 19 years ago I was in the Mideast covering the Persian Gulf War. I had a TRS-80, (a Tandy machine that was virtually indestructable and which we affectionately called a ‘Trash 80’). I used an accoustic coupler — earmuffs that attached to a landline phone handset that frequently didn’t work. When it malfunctioned, I used my Swiss Army knife to unscrew the hotel phonejack faceplate. I stripped the wires of the twisted pair and ran a phone line tester to check which was red and green, then I attached alligator clips to the copper wire landline to file my copy at the breathtaking rate of….wait for this…300 Baud…..AND I FELT LIKE A PIONEER IN THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!

In the subsequent decades, there have been other epiphany moments. And much of the change of technology continues to evolve, rather than change things overnight. I have learned profound change does take time.

That said, tonight’s epiphany moment to me feels equal to a Town Crier seeing the first electronic stock ticker in the late 19th Century, or the linotype operators of the 1930s seeing WYSIWYG electronic publishing of the 1980s.

It is breath-taking, and so I chose to take a moment here at 6 miles above the surface of the earth, to watch Alabama face Texas and to say:

What Hath God Wrought, Indeed…

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Search Engine Wars V: Local Personal Awareness

8 Dec

A holiday dinner last night with some of uLocate’s senior team and the leadership of a major telecom carrier raised an interesting discussion of where search is going.

My view: the next big battle in search is going to be about providing search results BEFORE you even ask a question. The next big frontiers for Search include knowing your location without you having to provide it, knowing your likely queries before you type anything into the searchbox, and knowing your behavioral profile (needs, wants, interests) without you having to do anything.

This is the battlefield for Search Engine Wars V — and it is going to be a major showdown, pitting such behemoths as Google and Microsoft against each other, and with smaller armies from the Facebooks, Twitters and uLocates of the world making alliances and contributing arms and assets to the fray.

A quick recap to point out how we got here. The search wars began in the mid-1990s, when the Infoseeks, Yahoos, Excites, Lycos’s and Alta Vistas brought text search to the mass consumer market via the public internet. Before then, text search and data retrieval had been a large, lucrative backwater — a paid product in the business-professional world (remember such brands as Dialog, Lexis-Nexis, Dow Jones News Retrieval — now known as Factiva?)

Those first search companies went public, made millions, were sometimes acquired (Disney-Infoseek, @Home-Excite) or sometimes went under. After that, search became a feature in what became known as the portal wars. I call this period Search Wars II. Many of the technical leaders thought text search was a finished product, and lost their focus on improvements while turning instead to such important initiatives as personalization, feed syndication and e-commerce tools.

This inattention left open search world to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who did a brilliant job of improving search and threw down the gauntlet of Search Wars III: The Rise of Google. And, more recently with the launch of its vastly improved Bing service, Microsoft has at long last battled back — and, coupled with its Yahoo search deal — is fighting hard in Search Wars IV.

That’s why I believe it is time to think about what’s next. And to my mind, the next battle in search is going to be about saving users time and effort by providing knowledge about likely searches before a customer has to type anything into the search box.

We can already see some of this, with services such as uLocate’s WHERE, which begins to understand some basic information about you (e.g. your location) from your voluntarily-supplied data on your mobile device. With that information, uLocate can tell you the location of nearby businesses (Starbucks, a gas station, the closest Fedex Office or UPS store) as well as provide you with tips and reviews about local restaurants, nightspots, etc. The user doesn’t have to DO anything, other than turn on their mobile device and launch the application.

There is much improvement ahead. Some may argue that the big fight today is about real-time search, but I think that is only a new skirmish in the current Search Wars IV. Only the barest outlines of the battle formations for the big next thing are apparent today. But I am putting some of my bets on those businesses that are preparing for this world of next-generation search.

Let the battles commence….

Note: Danny Sullivan had a related post on Google’s personalized approach here.

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Why I am Joining uLocate’s Board of Directors…

5 Oct

….because it is one of the nation’s most exciting digital information and engagement companies. It’s that simple.

Press release is here Craig Forman Joins uLocate Communications’ Board of Directors

The high-energy location-based services startup has over 1 million uses on its flagship WHERE, which is the leader in the emerging space of combining mobility with useful information and data. And it has a fast-rising new app TRAFFIC which does the same for your daily commute or travels.

It is early days, these services are quickly going from experimental to essential. A quick anecdote: On a recent cross-country trip in the US I found myself in Amarillo, TX for the first time — (great town by the way). In the old days, figuring out where to go would have required maps, guidebooks, maybe even a trip to a bookstore or library. With WHERE, I instantly had access to all the local information I need (dining, gas stations, movies, yellow pages, etc.) in a very intuitive and easy-to-use format.

Usefulness goes well beyond GPS data and driving directions (though that is included, of course). uLocate is pioneering new integration of location and social information that are changing the ways we ‘navigate’ our lives.

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