Do people currently feel so proprietary about their professional connections that they feel their connections must remain confidential to remain professionally competitive?

In the fairly recent past some have certainly felt this way, but the interent is radically changing that. Search, social networks and the massive increase of data available online to anyone makes it much easier to find people and things. This is causing our understanding and appreciation of relationships to change back to the way things were much longer ago…

It’s 1500, somewhere in Europe. Everyone in town knows the blacksmith; so what? The interesting questions were much more complex and contextual - eg who would the blacksmith let slide on payments? Who does the blacksmith socialize with? Is the farrier in town profesionally cooperative with the blacksmith, or is she a competitor?

Preserving knowledge of the existence of nodes in a social network as if they are proprietary IP and must remain obfuscated is an “old school” modern business behavior. It implies that the node on the other end would be happy to deal in the same manner with anyone, and as such it devalues the relationship to such a great extent that you have to wonder if there’s a relationship there at all.

Economies based on this kind of artificial scarcity are excessively vulnerable in a modern age of search and the internet.

Back when I ran a paintball field, and long before the interwebz had search, I found a source for the smoke grenades that most of us sold at our fields in WA state. It was hard to find this guy; he was in the Midwest somewhere and it took about 3 or 4 people hops and lots of phone chatting to get to him.

Once I did find him I was able to buy the grenades in fairly small numbers - say a case at a time - and sell them at a significant mark-up while still under-cutting my local competition. In essence I became a regional distributor. It was a good deal for me and for the other guy.

However he owed me nothing and he just wanted to move product, and so ANYONE who found him could get the same deal I got. Eventually someone did, which cut my regional advantage down to nothing. I still got a good price, but ultimately what happened was the regional price re-set so that we all got close to the same markup of a buck or so a grenade.

These days, that kind of advantage is tremendously fleeting. What matters is relationships themselves, and how they are nurtured over time. If just know who I talk to makes you directly competitive with me, then I am not doing my job.

I understand that sales relationships can be different animals than other kinds of relationships, and that sales people can feel very proprietary about their network. Inside Trampoline we’ve been very fortunate in that Adrian and the rest of the sales team treat our sales relationships as long-term investments which aren’t prone to being under-mined by other people simply knowing about them.

This happens to align nicely with our overall view of relationships - it’s not only who you know but also how you know them that matters.

I’ve travelled in Japan in the past but this was my first visit in a business context. The amazing etiquette involved in exchanging business cards was the first thing that struck me. In an unstructured setting like a drinks reception in the West cards are typically swapped at the end of a conversation if there’s a likely relevance for future contact. In Japan cards are exchanged at the start of a conversation with no filter for relevance. This means you get through a lot of cards and your pockets rapidly end up bulging with other people’s.

Cards must be offered horizontally with the text in the correct orientation for the recipient, held at the corners in both hands. When you receive a card you must hold it similarly in both hands and give it your full attention for a second or two before looking up or continuing conversation. You must hold the card in front of you throughout the conversation. It’s insulting to put it in your pocket, scribble a note on it or (worst of all) hand someone a crumpled or disfigured card. If you’re sitting around a table with people the correct thing to do is lay everyone’s cards out in front of you in a neat row matching their positions around the table.

What interested me most, however, was the cultural alignment of Japanese enterprises with social computing solutions. Previously I’d assumed that Japanese business culture would be intrinsically hostile to technologies that make informal groupings and networks visible, or which lead to information being shared in new ways, since there is sensitive etiquette surrounding these processes. However my experiences in Sapporo completely changed my view of this.

The connection I’d failed to make previously is that Japanese corporations have historically placed a much higher value on the informal networks amongst their employees than their Western counterparts. Within the “shushin koyo” model of life-long relationships between employer and employee, many aspects of the individual’s social life were organised and supported by the corporation. This was seen to build organisational strength and forge links outside the formal structure (both of which are also notable drivers for social networking tools in the enterprise). During the long recession in the 1990s a lot of these extra-curricular activities were cut, but a management culture persisted in which informal networks were highly valued. On the face of it enterprise social computing tools are perfectly placed to fill this gap.

In many cases products developed for a Western market will need to be modified significantly before they are suitable for Japanese customers. This won’t simply be a case of changing language in the user interface. Behaviours around privacy management and authorisation will almost certainly need to be modified to fit different cultural nuances. But contrary to my initial assumption, Japanese corporations may prove to be early and well-informed adopters of social computing technologies.

I’m indebted to Shuji Honjo for drawing my attention to the possible like between social computing and corporate involvement in extra-curricular activities.

Charles will be speaking with Philip Ross, CEO of Cordless Group, on the topic The Connected Enterprise. They will look at technology trends that empower employees to connect, collaborate and innovate, and examine ways of strengthening informal employee networks across departments and geographies.

WorkTech08 North will be held at The Lowry, Salford Quays, Greater Manchester on 23rd and 24th July. Learn more here.

Trampoline visualisations video from rebecca kemp on Vimeo.

I wanted our product to look like art, and we did a pretty good job, if i do say so myself. It was made so fabulous by Eddie Codel (editing) and Trampoline Dev (product)! The content is taken from SONAR Dashboard, SONAR Flightdeck and Metascope.

Right now I’m sitting in the EMC booth stealing their hardline because WiFi is down (again) and our hardline is down (again). Evidently Enterprise 2.0 still doesn’t mean reliable internet connections or badge readers which, like, read badges.

Ironically even the toasters on the breakfast bar this morning were teh fail and I had to steal one and jack it into a power strip inside one of the breakout rooms to toast my bagel. (Which, by the way, was artfully sliced to look like the victim of a drunken accident with a chainsaw. Not that I am in the least bit picky about my toasting. Oh no, not me.)

The deepest irony about the toasters was that during the “Evening in the Cloud” event several speakers likened cloud computing to needing to be as predictable, reliable and standards-driven as our electricity supply, clearly tempting fate and cursing the event and my breakfast toasting.

New England is in the middle of one of the weirdest early June weather fronts in history with temperatures in the high 90’s and huge thunder-storms and even tornado warnings, and really, there’s only one company on the planet to blame all of this on…

I blame google, of course.

I hereby declare that cloud computing evangelists are no longer to be taken seriously if they liken their services to electricity. In fact you should probably immediately take proactive de-cursing actions lest you find yourself suddenly in a region-wide freak weather phenom, total blackout or starring in a real-life version of I Am Legend.

Adrian, Steve Ardire and I worked the booth yesterday (with occasional support from Rebecca and Jules, who had lots to do on the party and so were constantly jetting about the hotel alternatively solving herculean problems and looking wistfully out the window at the sailboats).

The booth experience was very, very interesting. As always Adrian was the companies greatest low-key evangelist and gave great demo while Steve managed little micro-demos on his mac off on the side. (The people Steve talked to all left with a very pleased but somewhat dazed look in their eyes.) We were 2 or 3 rows deep for most of the day, even when all we had was Rebecca’s awesome slide deck because our hardline to the internet was dead (as were most booths) Tuesday morning.

The people who have visited us at the booth have been uniformly smart and enthusiastic and ask really great questions. While some folks are clearly still just looking and thinking (which is fine) the interest level at this show in real solutions to current enterprise problems is very high. So ++ on SONAR Server, Dashboard and Flightdeck.

When I joined Trampoline we were still supporting a product called “Collaboration Engine” which dated back to the earliest days of the company. It did what our customers wanted it to and it was also decent revenue, however when I looked at the product, talked with the team about it and then looked around at the marketplace and compared it to where other folks seemed to be headed, I recommended that we should cut it completely.

Why? Because I thought then that everybody would be doing “collaboration software” and it would become increasingly difficult to clearly differentiate our collaboration offering from others in this space. Collaboration in an enterprise means getting many many things right and it means potentially competing with experienced and/or entrenched competitors. There are clearly vendors here who are doing this well (IBM Connections is looking very slick, while Jive is here as well) and others who are highly entrenched (MS is here with SharePoint).

Most of the people I’ve spoken with told me “wow. Everyone else showing here is doing the same thing as eachother except for you. Your stuff is cool!” This was a really important bit of feedback and was very rewarding to hear. It’s nice to be told that you don’t look exactly the same as everybody else and to be appreciate for what you think you are doing well. People seem to really appreciate that we don’t build wiki, group, IM, email, workspace and blogging software but that we do make it much easier to build profiles to find people, skills and interests across large groups of people, and to visualize networks in interesting and engaging ways.

Wikis are clearly hot and there are lots of wiki companies here doing some neat stuff and again, glad they are doing it and doing it well, also very glad to not be “another wiki company”.

I don’t think that anyone one else at this show is eating email and automagically producing and maintaining user profiles of themes and connections, and lots of potential customers are noticing that this is what we do and they like it. It’s really refreshing.

Many of the vendors here at the show have come by and asked us about our upcoming API as they see what we are doing as very complimentary to their offerings. We can make collaboration tools like email and wikis work better. All cool.

The party last night was very good. Massive props to Rebecca; she kept her cool and created a really nice event. It was probably the nicest conference drinking event I’ve ever been to (and really, I’ve been to LOTS. Like, way more than 100), and that’s in spite of having to “work it” in the sense that we paid for it and so it was clearly soft marketing for us. It was really chill and fun and intimate and the music was good and people really seemed to be having a good time. Charles did a neat presentation on St. Agnes that was as interesting and low-key as the rest of the party.

As near as I can tell folks had lots of fun, and when Boston’s finest came they didn’t see the burned furniture or the donkey, so it was all good. (Okay, just kidding about some of that.)

Note to conference party planners – more money and more drinking and famous bands don’t always make for a better party. Try for intimate and fun and get fun smart people to show up. Think of the best non-work parties you’ve ever been to – they probably were way less over the top than the next conference party you are planning.  

So – despite the hiccups it’s been a great event. I’m really glad we are here.

We’ve all been on our feet all day again, but for the booth at least we are in the home stretch – just one more session on the demo floor for of boothy goodness! W007!

There are some great sessions, but the very best one will be the one where we buy you drinks - that’s Tuesday night. It says “smart dress is appreciated” but what we’d really like is if you show up wearing a cool hat. We love hats.

We have been pondering the almost obligatory references to the Boston Tea Party. If you have any suggestions for ways we can mine that particular cultural reference, please let us know.

The last post I made I referenced Spain and Spanish, and that produced an instantaneous onslaught of localized Spanish spam in our comments (all of which Wordpress very precisely blocked). As blatant spam-bait, I am now going to attempt to reproduce this effect, except only with Boston English, hoping that the spam-bots are so good they will give me not only Boston-themed spam, but also spam written in Bostonian:

“Come across the rivah and inta town fuh the wicked pissa kegga we aw havin’ Toozday night! We ah down by the hawbah, therall be potty plattas, sgunna be killa!”

If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, please give me a shout! rebecca [at] trampolinesystems [dot] com, or +44 207 253 6959.

Link to pic.

1. Multi-core - we’ve already factored SONAR for multi-threading, so we are in good shape to take advantage of multi-core solutions, provided of course we are on top of any OS that supports multi-core well. I think for Debian 64 we are pretty solid at least up to the number of cores we’re likely to see in the near future.
2. Virtualization - as you’ve seen in some of our other posts, we view virtualization as a great way to manage a complete SONAR install. It’s not the only way, of course - eg a VM is vastly larger (and often somewhat slower) than a native solution, however virtualization lets us build a complete working OS, JVM and SONAR solution here in the Trampery without having to worry about the underlying OS or Enterprise environment. VMWare FTW! (Hypervisors, as it turns out, are really important. Who knew?)
3. Social Networks and Social Software - w007! SONAR FTW!!! Nice to see Gartner putting this as number 3!
4. Cloud Computing and Cloud/Web Platforms - Gartner is basically saying that IT needs to just get over the whole “my stuff can’t run on a computer with their stuff” thing. Gartner note that Enterprises should know they can survive this because any enterprise which doesn’t actively BLOCK Google is sharing significant computing with, well, everyone else using google, and yet still everyone uses google and nothing bad seems to happen. We would love to run a hosted environment for customers on a third party like Amazon, however so far we’ve found that the security and overall risk-management concerns have prevented this. I look forward to trying this out - it could really free us up in some ways that could be quite handy for both us and for our customers.
5. Web Mashups - this is something we are, quite recently, seeing a lot more interest in, primarily from other Enterprise-serving vendors who see SONAR as providing them with some great capabilities they would have to work really hard to build themselves. We’ve started work on a meta-data framework and API which we think will radically improve what we can do in a mash-up environment, so stay tuned for more information on that.

 All in all, it’s pretty cool to be either directly providing or directly supporting so much here.

It should be interesting as I don’t speak Spanish. Much as I delight in saying “Berthaylona”.

I begged my 12 year old son to ’splain to me how I might go about ordering food, or even just bottled water, when my vocabulary consists of cerveza, a few Mexican food names, and por favor. (I speak Simplified American Taco-Truck quite well, thank you very much). He said he’d try to send me a few sentences in email, which means that evidently some 12 year-olds know of this old-fashioned thing called “email”. Not very many. Like maybe 2. That’s a trend right there! I’m sure Gartner is all over it.

And yes, I do know about the interweb and it’s language-ness, and translation books. It’s just been a few years since I was last in-country where I don’t speak the language AND I’m travelling on my own. I’ve become wussier in my old age. In China, Germany, France, Japan and even the UK, where they speak something called “English”, I have or had the benefit of translators…

Anyway, if you are at either show, please let me know. We can drink some, er, agua and eat some, er, frittata? : ) If you speak Spanish and will be there then hey, you are my new BFF!  Peter (at) trampolinesystems (dot) com

One of the four or five women I spoke to on the Web 2.0 Expo floor declined a “No man is an island” sticker with the rebuttal “I’m a woman.” I was dumbstruck, a rare occurrence when discussing Trampoline. Why did this matter so much to me?

First, it was a failure of a piece of work I’d done. That hurts. We created a material with which to engage people, and on this occasion it failed. A small minority of our target audience, admittedly, but it still sucks.

Now the second, overwhelming reason. I often ponder the disconnect between my personal and professional codes of conduct. On occasion the space between them is wider than I’d like, sometimes I am pleased by their convergence. Critics might argue that I should just be myself at all times – especially seen as Trampoline is meant to be an easy-going, do as you please type workplace, or be 100% corporate automaton – but that doesn’t fit here either. I do find the conflation of, or discrepancy between, work and personal behaviours interesting and a helpful lens at work: hardball for women, anyone? In fact, a core principle of Trampoline’s technology is that personal and work behaviours aren’t that dissimilar.

My current method is to push until I’m blue in the face about matters related to work on which I believe comment necessary. So I emit a constant mantra of “hire women, hire women” and try to call people out when they say something I consider offensive or derogatory to women. That’s because I believe having a woman-positive workplace is vital and that women-positive workplaces aren’t formed without effort from all involved.

But I am careful. I would hate anyone telling me to vote Boris (off topic, but it was very dispiriting to return from a Portland, Oregon so full of optimism for Obama, to a London run by the abhorrent Boris Johnson) so I in return I don’t ask anyone to sign petitions against the reduction of the time limit for legal abortion proposed in the amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. I would love it if you did, though. And besides, my begging quota is most effectively used at work for work stuff.

The Web 2.0 Expo stickers didn’t always bear the legend No Man is an Island. We mocked up an early version which read No man (or woman) is an island.

We nuked this version because:

a) it didn’t look clean enough

b) women were still an afterthought

c) it’s not a real quote

d) Donne’s habit of woman as land metaphor has always pained me

e) we’ve got the sisterhood, right?

I like to think that if we had used this version, the woman would have accepted the sticker. But, perhaps ironically, I still wouldn’t change it.

The use of he/she, man/woman is one crux of my personal and professional conduct conflict. I use “she”, rather than “he”, always in my personal life. In work, I try to use “she” first, then “he”. I don’t like “he” as a catch all but I’m not sure it’s right to use “she” throughout as our audience is primarily men and I don’t want to undermine the good impression Trampoline makes through a writing style that could alienate them. My compromise is to put women first. We’ve been second for too long. Incidentally, I encountered the only drop-down list of titles in online shopping I’ve ever seen at work. It was on Sainsbury’s supermarket. Depressing, much?

Moral of the story? I am glad that woman called Trampoline out and I wish I had an answer for her. Speaking up is always better than remaining quiet. At Portland airport on Sunday I saw a woman with a canvas bag that read “Speak your mind – even if your voice shakes”. These words are from Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Grey Panthers. I will now decline from the opportunity for a rounded, cosy “together we can change the world” conclusion. I’m not convinced it’s that easy, but I’d be pleased if you inferred that logic and acted accordingly.