Dandelife Reception

Dandelife.com, a social biography network, which allows users to write stories about their lives and connect on life events, launched earlier this week an was covered by TechCrunch this morning.  The feedback we received was mainly very positive, with hundreds of users joining the site.  There were also some very helpful comments on the structure of the site and its current state.  In product development, listening to users is the only practice that leads to success and we are listening.  Any feedback is appreciated.

Many thanks to everyone who signed in!

Plastic Surgery in Reverse

I had vision correction surgery last week. Still adjusting to the new shapes and colors. Psychologically, there are no differences. In short, it’s plastic surgery in reverse: everything just looks better to you, instead of you looking better yourself.

Poetry Sells

The latest issues of "The New Yorker", and probably a variety of other publications, feature an ad with Lang Lang, now a world-famous Chinese pianist. The byline says:

Some people create poetry without ever picking up a pen.

Here's what it looks like online.

Apparently, Rolex must have picked up on the desire of consumers to have more poetry in their lives, whether it's coming from Lang Lang or a watch-piece . Even this reference to poetry (and to poetics), not even its application, seems to point to the need for the creation of experiential or associative brands. Lang Lang's music is his poetry; Rolex' watches are their poetry. If companies are willing to use the word "poetry" to sell goods, does this mean they are ready to take the next step and dive in with further applying poetics in their messaging or product development?

Back to the Future

Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Young Woman Admiring her Laptop”. If I were Dan Brown, this could’ve probably turned into a decent bestseller about hidden messages pointing to Toulouse-Lautrec’s unpublicized love of time travel.

Quantum Art Releases QP7.Payment

Who said content management is not about revenue generation? QP7.Payment is a transaction capture solution designed to help governments and corporation centralize disparate electronic revenue management functions. For example, say you are a government with 60 different departments. Each of the departments has a specific business process and product categories for generating revenue (Treasurer collects property taxes; Clerk's office sells records, both certified and not; Planning and Zoning issues permits; Parks allows you to reserve facilities; etc.).

Now, integrating all of these items into a single catalog is a major undertaking. Plus, the checkout process will be different for every department. In this situation, does it make any sense to do the integration on the product or the content level? We didn't think so either and architected QP7.Payment to be a web-services solution that integrates these disparate revenue generation sources on the transaction level, thus becoming a transaction capture solution.

The government process I described is just an example. It's actually based on Bernalillo County (NM) that already implemented QP7.Payment. But same applies to sales of, say, digital assets, or an actual product inventory.

QP7.Payment is, of course, based on QP7. All the nice things about the platform still apply.

Web 2.0 Discrimination

Pundits say that Web 2.0 (besides being an overused and unclear term) is more than just an attempt for those who did not financially succeed in the 1990s to make up for the lost opportunity. There are actually arguments that Web 2.0 is a completely new phenomenon, very different from the original web that gave birth to Yahoo! and Amazon.

I actually have to agree on multiple levels. Web 2.0 seems to be about a new fabric of the web, a move towards structured information, more precise indexing, collaboration, user generated content, etc.

However, this is a post about another difference. The latest statistics on Web 2.0 Awards are missing one key bit of information:

None of the companies on the list have letters Q or X in the titles.

It’s certainly not discrimination, but is a departure from previous generation names. Remember, Quokka.com or Excite.com? What about XO? And Qwest or Xbox? The list can actually be quite long, but the point is that the naming conventions have changed. An immediate reaction is that Web 2.0 names are less scientific, not as geeky or alien-like as some Web 1.0 names. Web 2.0 names are, in fact, friendlier, more humane, even somewhat child-like.

But naming also changes the audience, and current name choices not only suggest that the web has matured and become mainstream (as opposed to engineer-driven), but that the audience has expanded to include a younger generation. Current teenagers don’t know life without the web and are starting to own it. It’s not really Web 2.0 for them. It’s just web. With no numbers. Just names, that this time around do not include letter Q and X.

So to remember those that made it in the 1990s, any other Q/X names?

Changing Places (on the move again)

So as I started blogging, community feedback began pouring in.  The best advice on blogging I received this far came from Zoli Erdos, whose first suggestion was to quit Blogger and move to WordPress.  Good bye poor user experience, hello categorization.  Thank you, Zoli!

Click… and mortal

I was introduced to a new term today: “click & mortal”. As opposed to a better known “click & mortar” term, which is the last boom’s description of traditional business engaged in e-commerce, “click & mortal” must be describing e-commerce companies that were buried by the bust.

By the same token, the term “brick & mortal” must also exist, but has nothing to do with commerce.

From an anonymous online source:

Throughout the years, we have assisted our clients to transform their “brick and mortal” business to “click and mortal” business. They are happy on the results as thousands of dollars have been saved, the major benefits are reduction in office rental, staff cost as well as advertisement cost.

The “brick and mortal” approach must really be a hit with staff cost reduction initiatives.

Content Management Is Not Rocket Science

Web content management is not rocket science. But web content management and rocket science are a powerful combination. One of Quantum Art’s earliest international customers was the Khrunichev Space Center, the Russian rocket science institution. They are the people behind the Soviet Mir space station and the international version currently under development. So when the scientists needed a way to communicate with their peers or publish information for the rest of us, they realized that they need a solution for managing online content.

The mind of an engineer works in mysterious ways. I realize now that Khrunichev’s problems were not unique, but when they approached us wanting to manage information by types, not by pages, we were simply too excited about our customers sharing the same philosophy as we were on managing online content. It’s not about pages, but about handling your content inventory, reusing information, and managing relations between different pieces of content to achieve a fluid publishing environment.

When we started working with Khrunichev, it didn’t occur to me that the problems we solved would ultimately lead to the idea of a content application server, a solution that for many reasons is replacing traditional web CMS tools. A parallel that I draw now is that to the CERN content management project that started in the early 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee and grew into the world wide web. At CERN it was nuclear physicists that pioneered HTML to create the fabric of the web as we know it today. By a similar token, Khrunichev’s rocket scientists pushed Quantum Art to rethink its product development strategy and deliver an enterprise solution for publishing to the new fabric of the web, the one where information is structured, tagged, and easily indexed.

In short, kudos to Quantum Art’s engineers, who may not be rocket scientists, but who could certainly speak their language and years ago foresee problems that are now becoming commonplace.

P.S. This glance into the past was in part caused by the product development plans Quantum Art’s technology team presented to the management earlier this week. The plans will soon be publicly announced on Quantum Art’s site with a flurry of activity around them. Check back shortly!

The Death of the Letter

Blogs are killers. Not bloggers, by any means – the writers themselves are generally harmless (even if the pen is mightier than the sword), but in transforming communications, blogs are the killers of personal correspondence. Blogs are the death of the letter.

What’s even more curious is that the rise of blogging both signals and facilitates a significant social change. For centuries people confided their personal thoughts, desires, intentions and general feelings to their correspondents. Remember, Choderlos de Laclos’ “Dangerous Liaisons”, constructed completely from letters? And how about volumes of Lord Byron’s or Mark Twain’s correspondence?

What about the idea of a pen pal? Do you have one right now? Did you correspond with someone regularly just a few years ago? I certainly did. In fact, this post is a result of me rereading some of the letters I wrote in 2003/04 to Alexei Parshchikov, a Russian poet living in Germany.

Letters to the editor, which are more like “emails to the editor” now, as the electronic form replaced the physical, are still in existence, but have also evolved. They’ve become more of a “forum-around-the-editor”, not direct correspondence. Hell, the whole idea of an editor was really deflated with the rise of blogosphere.

Some industry insiders have described blogs and wikis as solutions to the email problem. Of course, there is spam, but as emails are just letters in cyberspace, blogs are out to rid the world of personal correspondence. Blogs become the death of the letter.

In conclusion, letters are private by nature and privacy of thought does not exist in blogosphere by definition (it is paradoxical, as all thoughts in the blogosphere are private). Then again, if letters were representative of a society of individuals and empires, does the appearance of the blogosphere mirror the society characterized by lack of privacy, exploding social pressures, and growing terrorism? Am I making the world a better place by blogging or adding to the downfall of the Western world?