What's more valuable, the content or the platform?

It is no secret, at least here in the USA, that the traditional newspaper and print publishing industries have been forced to undergo significant change, adaptation, and even re-invention not only to thrive in the new digital economy, but merely to survive. While the last decade has seen the rise of new information sources architected completely for the digital age, and some other long-time industry standard bearers adapt to this new world, many others have failed and have declared bankruptcy. Being in the print news business certainly has not been easy, and for those organizations still fighting the battle for reader's time and attention with the incredible array of options for news and information that are available, it certainly seems that creativity, innovative ideas, and fresh thinking might be the only way to get by.

Two such enterprises, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News think they have one of these fresh ideas. They plan to buy Android-based tablet computers, pre-load them with their news organization's content and apps, then re-sell the bundle (at a discount), to try and generate interest and ongoing subscription revenues for their digital content properties.  Some additional details from the Ad Week piece describing the plan:

On July 11, the two papers plan to announce a pilot program under which they will sell Android tablets with their content already built in at a discount. Icons on the tablets' home screen will take users to digital replicas of both newspapers as well as a separateInquirer app and Philly.com, the papers’ online hub.

The idea of giving away or selling devices has been widelydiscussed in the publishing industry, but the Philadelphia experiment seems to be the most aggressivepush in that direction thus far.

Greg Osberg, CEO and publisher of the Philadelphia Media Network, the entity that includes the papers and Philly.com, believes the company is making history with the program, the cost for which he estimated will come in somewhere in six figures. The deal lets the Philadelphia papers keep all the revenue and the consumer data, though, which will give it a read on how people consume newspaper content on a tablet.

A pretty bold move for sure. The Philly news organizations (correctly), get that the tablet market is where tremendous interest and consumer adoption are taking place, they can see hundreds if not thousands of locals riding buses and trains playing Angry Birds reading the news of the day on tablets and smartphones, and therefore want to create and exploit an opportunity to try and merge a real consumer need - 'I want a tablet', with a manufactured need - 'I want to read the Philly Inquirer'. 

It seems today that every publisher, consumer website, online productivity tool, and even increasingly enterprise technologies meant to support functions like recruiting, performance and talent management, analytics and the like are developing solutions for mobiles and tablets, and aggressively marketing the same. And this makes perfect sense given the market's reaction and almost insatiable desire for all things mobile and tablet. 

I wonder, particularly in the HCM enterprise technology space, if we will see a 'Philly Inquirer-style', marketing approach soon as well. One where the solution provider does more than simply demo their tablet-ready solution to an eager buying audience, but rather offers the entire package, pre-loaded pre-configured, and ready to work. Walk out of the meeting toting your brand new, ready to rock, Human Capital Management tablet. I know I am oversimplifying, but you get the idea. How many of us try on that new pair of kicks in the Foot Locker and just have to wear them home?

Corporate IT departments have been doing this kind of thing for ages, supplying staff with PCs and laptops with the 'official' image and set of applications that are supported. But today, I wonder if this process is too slow, too inflexible and not designed for today's much more demanding consumers of enterprise technology.

Any vendor out there in the space already doing this? If you know of someone, drop me a comment.

Foursquare for Kids, or Technology Means Never Having To Let Go

I was a little late to the Foursquare hype, but in the interests of wanting to stay up to speed on the latest developments in technology and social networking I did, eventually create an account. I wrote a little about that experiment here. I still do use Foursquare pretty regularly, although my long reigns as Mayor of both the local Bruegger's Bagel Bakery and my son's elementary school have yet to pay off in the form of free bagels or a hearty 'Welcome Mr. Mayor!' from the principal on days I pick up Patrick from school. 

Certainly like all other social applications, the real value is in the interaction and insight you can gain from friends' Foursquare activity, but since my Foursquare friends are scattered all over the country the knowledge that Sam Higgins is eating breakfast in Austin, TX has not really paid off for me all that much. But still I persist, somehow comforted that if I ever go missing, someone could look at my Foursquare check-in log and attempt to track me down.

Like many parents the idea of your kids growing up, becoming more independent, moving about the world much more freely can also engender those same feelings of worry and concern - 'What if little Timmy does not come home one day?' or even the more benign but common lament - 'Where the heck is that kid, he was supposed to be home an hour ago?'

Most parents elect to try and mitigate these concerns by giving their kids cellphones. In fact, in most areas of the country you'd be hard pressed to find many 12 or 13 year-olds that didn't have some kind of mobile device. The story plays out mostly the same way everywhere. Kid starts begging for a mobile phone at about age 11 or 12, kid assures the parents that the phone will let them stay in touch at all times, and that they will always and immediately answer calls and texts from the parents, and voila - everyone is happy and content in the understanding that mutual assurance or location and safety is just a text or phone call away.

But after a short time for many kids and parents reality sets in, and increasingly persistent calls and texts from parents get slower and slower responses, kids' excuses that start with 'I forgot my phone at school' or 'The battery died' get more frequent, and many families end up sort of where they started - maturing and adventurous kids out making their way in the world, with nervous parents at home to wait and worry. Sort of the way life has played out for, well, pretty much forever.

Enter a new application (currently in private beta) called 'I'mOK'. I'mOK is a location-based check-in service (think Foursquare), for iPhone that helps parents monitor the whereabouts and activities of their children. Every time a child checks in with the app to let the parents know where and who they are with, they are rewarded with points that can be exchanged for parent-supplied perks such as TV time or allowance money. Check out the video below for an overview of the service (email and RSS readers may have to click through)

ImOK Intro Video - Knowing without the nagging from I'mOK on Vimeo.

The service's tag line is 'Knowing without the nagging' and while I suppose the idea is sound in behavioral modification theory, (kid checks in a lot, earns points and rewards for checking in, parents feel good about knowing the kids are safe and thus are happy to provide more rewards), I wonder if application and the others like it that are bound to come, are pushing some of the less appealing aspects of the social web further down the demographic chain.  I feel a little silly letting my 10 or so Foursquare friends know I am at the gas station, but I know that no one is really watching or monitoring my movements (at least I don't think so).

But with a 'family' location-based tracking application, the ideas of constant connection, of small insignificant activities gaining more value in the form of rewards, and the feeling of never really having true and complete privacy and anonymity, even for a short time, seem to be a pretty high price to pay for peace of mind. 

Back in the day my parents (and I am sure many of yours), sent us out in the world to hang out with our friends, to play sports, to ride bikes - whatever. They had no practical way to monitor our movements. But even if they had such a way, I am not completely convinced they would have wanted that ability. Not because they did not care about our safety, but rather because they knew that we needed to learn how to navigate the world for ourselves, and that they couldn't or shouldn't always be at the ready, a phone call or a text message away from us.

What do you think - would you set up a 'family' based location network to keep track of your kids?

Before you know you want it

As the World Wide Web has developed and evolved the methods and strategies utilized for information discovery have also undergone tremendous growth and evolution.  In the late 1990s portal and categorization technology from Yahoo dominated. If you wanted to find something, chances are a walk down Yahoo's categorization hierarchy was your starting point.

Over time as the web exploded in content and complexity and since human-curated categorization simply could not keep up with the growth, search took over as the primary tool for finding content. This market was led by Yahoo for a time, and eventually came to be dominated by Google.  More recently, social discovery has come to rival search as a primary and important mechanism for surfacing important and meaningful web content.  I know something is important, and quite likely worth my time and attention if a trusted friend or colleague has shared it on Twitter, or recommended it on Facebook.

But despite the obvious improvements in the underlying technology and usability exhibited by the evolution of discovery tools and methods, there still seems an element of inefficiency and imperfection in the strategies and actions that many of us leverage to find interesting information.  Keeping informed of news and developments in our areas of interest, and perhaps most importantly, surfacing content and expertise in adjacent or complimentary spaces, the kinds of resources that are most likely to expose us to new thinking, ideas, and challenge our conception of the status quo, is increasingly seen as an endless, and hopeless struggle.

It is only logical that there is something next, something better and more effective than the combination of search and social curation and discovery that most of us have come to rely upon in an attempt to learn, adapt, and stay informed.  What if the next development is a kind of new technology that not only presents you with a collection of relevant resources and links based on your active preferences and the content shared by your trusted networks, but is intelligent enough to predict what you will be interested in next, and offers information and insights based on a more informed prediction about not just what you may have liked in the past, but what is most relevant to you today, and quite likely tomorrow.

That is the basic premise behind an interesting startup from Finland called Futureful.  Futureful is in the process of developing what they call a 'Predictive Discovery Engine'.  What exactly is 'predictive discovery?' From the Futureful 'about' page:

Futureful’s predictive discovery engine analyzes relevant information flows to open up the potential future around you. We use a combination of personal, social and contextual filters to understand interests, influences and intentions, and provide you with inspiring seeds to play with. Then its up to you to pick and choose, discover and share. 

I have to admit that while a little unsure about the specific ability of Futureful to build and successfully deploy the self-described predictive discovery engine, I do think that in time, and perhaps sooner than later a better, and more precise method and technology for information discovery and presentation will have to emerge.  The current, seemingly unsustainable cycle of adding feeds to Google Reader, adding friends on the various social networks, and the development of new and improved mobile devices that provide constant access to all the noise, with only a passing ability to discover the signal will eventually have to change.

If you are like me, you might feel like you are reading every possible blog, news source, and mass media site you can find.  You may have developed a large, diverse, and valuable set of networks across numerous social platforms.  You are constantly reading, updating, reviewing, and sharing.  But despite all this activity, you never shake the feeling that you are missing something. So you add 'more'. Another feed, another friend, an so on.

Perhaps we don't need more, we need more precise.

Perhaps we need a way to see the future before it arrives.

How about you - what do you do to try and manage the balance between information overload and the sense you are missing something?

Print Friendly

At the closing session of HRevolution 2010 - 'Breaking out of the Echo Chamber', Laurie Ruettimann and Lance Haun offered a number of suggestions to more effectively spread the power and reach of social and new media, technology, and new ways of viewing networks and collaboration beyond the so-called 'echo chamber' of HR bloggers and social media enthusiasts.

One of the specific recommendations was about sharing online content, specifically blogs and blog posts, with HR and other business leaders that are not aware of or inclined to be regular blog readers. In fact, Laurie specifically advised rather than simply forwarding links to interesting content, to cut and paste the actual content into the body of an email message, or even to printing a particularly good blog post to hand to your VP or CEO.

I think that is actually pretty good advice, and recently I posted about a free service called Tabbloid that can help facilitate making online content from blogs more easily accessible and consumable for those non blog reading executives.  I really like Tabbloid, it delivers a nicely formatted PDF of a week's worth of posts to me every Sunday. But it still requires going to Tabbloid and doing a bit of configuration to get up and running.  Not a big deal, but additional every step in a technical process raises the barrier just a bit more.

A potentially even simpler way to generate clean, printable content from a blog post or web page is from a site called Print Friendly - www.printfriendly.com. Print Friendly allows you to simply cut and paste a URL from a post or page into a dialog box, and with one click generate a PDF file that can be easily printed or shared via email. 

There is even a Print Friendly button that can be embedded inside blog posts to provide readers with access to this simple capability. 

Simply click on the little 'Print/PDF' button above and you will be taken to the Print Friendly version of this post.

This service is simple, useful, free - and an incredibly easy way to help share that great blog post you just read with your boss, her boss, and even that crusty old-timer on your team that just can't be bothered to set up Google Reader or thinks Feedburner is some kind of gasoline additive.

If you are a blogger, consider placing one of these little buttons on your posts to make it easier for your readers to distribute your content.

If you do give this a try, let me know how it works for you, and if you have any other tools or tricks for sharing content 'outside of the echo chamber', please share them as well.

 

Sorry in advance to all the trees that will have to go to support the thousands of folks that will want to print this post!

Have an Idea?

One of the benefits of writing an HR Technology blog is that from time to time I get alerted to new products in the HR Technology space.  Recently I heard about, and had the chance to try out Kindling, an online solution for capturing employee ideas or suggestions, a mechanism for other employees to vote up or down submitted ideas, an approval process for ideas, and finally a way to allow employees to 'volunteer' to work on approved ideas.

I took Kindling for a quick test drive, assisted by Ben Eubanks from the Upstart HR blog, (thanks Ben for helping out).

Step 1 - Submit an Idea

The first step in the process of for an employee to submit an idea. The process is incredibly simple, they enter a title, description, tags, and optionally an attached file to their idea.

Other employees can also add comments and questions to ideas, so a conversation and dialogue can form around any individual idea.

Step 2 - Vote on your favorite ideas

Once some ideas get submitted, each employee is allotted 10 'Votes' to indicate which ideas they like. Votes can be all allocated to one or two ideas, or they can be spread around many ideas. But an employee can only use 10 'votes' at any one time, once an idea is approved or rejected, they can 're-claim' any voted used on those ideas. 

It is a simple concept really, ideas that receive the most employee votes are popular, and potentially deserve some managerial review for possible implementation.

Step 3 - Approve ideas

Once ideas are submitted and voted upon, the system administrator can 'Approve' or 'Reject' the ideas.  Once an idea is approved or rejected the votes for those items are released back to the employees and can be re-used on new ideas.

Step 4 - Make it happen

The last step in the Kindling process is for an employee to 'volunteer' to make an idea 'happen'.  This can mean different things to your organization, but essentially the idea is 'assigned' to the volunteer as this point.

Pricing

Kindling offers three subscription levels, $49/month for up to 40 users, $99/month for up to 100 users, and an 'Enterprise' level that has negotiated pricing for more that 100 users. All plans offer a 30-day free trial. Some additional features that are offered are e-mail digests of idea related activity, RSS feeds, and simple usage reports. 'Enterprise' users can also map a custom domain and implement custom skins for integration with a corporate look and feel.

Value Proposition

Kindling offers a tight set of functionalities in a clean, simple, and easy to use manner. Capturing employee ideas for new products/services, for improvements on existing processes, or for ways to cut costs or improve productivity are all potential uses of an idea platform.  The additional features of employee voting and commenting on ideas helps to foster a sense of inclusion and openness.  Basically, platforms like Kindling provide a modern and enhanced view of the old company 'suggestion box'.  If your organization is interested in trying to more effectively harness the ideas in the workforce, and to give your people more of a voice and a view into decision making, then Kindling may be worth a try.