All posts by Jim Muttram

Uncategorised

Kabbage finds niche

22nd September 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

One of the really interesting things about the internet is the way that the data which is thrown off creates new and exciting businesses that simply could not have existed before. One such case was brought to my attention by an article in Bloomberg Businessweek about startup Kabbage.

Kabbage – named after the slang name for money – has a clever risk model that analyses data from sites like eBay, Amazon and Yahoo! such as transaction history and user ratings to produce a creditworthiness score.

By doing this they are able to advance money to small traders (they are not a bank so they can’t loan) who otherwise would fail traditional financial services criteria.

This is exactly the kind of brand new business (Kiva is another example) entirely made possible by the essential characteristics of the web.

Uncategorised

Phone becomes wallet

19th September 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

I have been reading an interesting post from Springwise (one of my sources of innovation inspiration, by the way) which points the way to an ever greater role for the smartphone in our lives. Navigo is shortly going to be trialling a service in Paris which will allow travellers with NFC enabled smartphones to pay for their tickets with their phones. NFC is already in some Android phones and the chances are the iPhone 5 will incorporate the technology too. Is this the beginning of the end for the wallet.

Uncategorised

Scribe – doing the job for me?

11th September 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

I was reading about the new feature called Scribe on the Blogger in Draft blog. This post is being written using this interesting auto-suggestion system. It takes some time to get used to reading the word forming ahead of the cursor – which you need to do if you are going to really take advantage of the functionality. And for touch-typists it is probably more of a hindrance than a help. But I can see it being quite useful if you find yourself lost for words.
One more example of the spurt of functionality coming from the Blogger team – see my last post on the iOS app.

Uncategorised

Dangerous ways to celebrate

22nd August 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

The BBC just answered a question I often find myself asking: how dangerous is firing a gun into the air? The answer, apparently, is “fairly dangerous”. It seems obvious that if you fire a bullet into the air it will come down to land somewhere. And research from 1962, quoted by the BBC, shows falling bullets can reach a terminal velocity of 300 feet per second, 100 feet per second more than is required to penetrate a human skull. In populous areas where a lot of this celebratory gun-firing seems to take place, the chances of falling munitions hitting the unsuspecting must be quite real and often presumably fatal.
The BBC cites a number of cases of known deaths; for example, these:

When the Iraqi football team defeated Vietnam in 2007’s Asia Cup, three people were killed in Baghdad amid widespread gunshots as fans celebrated. Celebratory gunfire in Kuwait after the end of the Gulf War in 1991 was blamed for 20 deaths.

So now I know and it doesn’t make watching the celebrations in Tripoli any easier. I just watched BBC footage of a man firing off anti-aircraft rounds into the air to mark the liberation of the city (the firing happens at about 2.02 minutes in). Someone somewhere probably regrets that he chose to show his enthusiasm in quite that way.

Update: Another article in today’s Guardian has more on the subject. If you are shot in a regular way your chance of death is between 2% and 6%, according to the article. If a falling bullet lands on you it is closer to one third. There you go.

Uncategorised

Time to get back to blogging again

21st August 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

Blogging has been pushed into the background lately owing to the enormous popularity of Facebook, Twitter, Google + et al, but I’ve noticed a bit of a reappraisal going on. The latest example was Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void who put his decision to cut out Twitter and Facebook to refocus on his blog thus:

Why? Because Facebook and Twitter are too easy. Keeping up a decent blog that people actually want to take the time to read, that’s much harder. And it’s the hard stuff that pays off in the end.

Besides, even if they’re very good at hiding the fact, over on Twitter and Facebook, it’s not your content, it’s their content.

The content on your blog, however, belongs to you, and you alone. People come to your online home, to hear what you have to say, not to hear what everybody else has to say. This sense of personal sovereignty is important.

I am having similar feelings. I realise I first started blogging on August 11th 2005 which means there is a lot of me invested in my blog. But for the past year I’ve barely blogged at all, keeping up with what is going on through Twitter, Google + and, to a lesser extent, Facebook. That, I sense, is about to change a bit.

Uncategorised

How to succeed at product design

2nd February 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

There is always a lot of mystery around why one product succeeds and another, pretty much identical one fails. In a very honest post Isaac Hall, founder of Recurly.com sets out to explain. His product pre-dated Dropbox but ultimately failed to be anything like as widely known or successful.
The main reason for this boils down to overcomplication. As he says:

If you’re starting a new company, the best thing you can do is keep your feature set small and focused. Do one thing as best as you possibly can. Your users will beg and beg for more functionality. They will tell you their problems and ask you to fix it. My philosophy is that they’re right if their feature request is right only if it works for 80% of your customers. Until you have a lot of resources, stay focused on your core competency.

Of course there were some other clever things Dropbox did, which Isaac mentions:

closed beta – creates pent up demand while allowing the company to scale the back end to cope
having a Mac client – many of the commentators are on Macs even if PCs still dominate the world
creating an early product video which created viral buzz around the product

I would also add – having a very fashionable brand design in tune with the Web 2.0 design ethos.

Uncategorised

Bowtie vs. Diamond

22nd September 2010 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

I have a theory that there are two basic shapes of organisation when it comes to organising IT – bow-tie and diamond.

A bow-tie shaped organisation aims to keep the "business people" on one side of the bow-tie and the "techies" on the other side. The "knot" is where the two are supposed to meet, to exchange instructions.

The diamond-shaped organisation, on the other hand, has no such pinch-point in the middle – just a thick middle where business and techies intermingle, speaking pretty-much the same language. Most start-ups are shaped like diamonds – whenever I have walked into a Silicon Valley start-up, for instance, I am hard-pushed to tell who is responsible for what.

Most large corporates are bowtie shaped. There would be some merit in trying to at least thicken out the "knot".

Posted via email from Inflection Point v2

Uncategorised

Innovation and big companies

21st September 2010 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

I watched an interesting video interview with Tim Weller of Incisive Media yesterday in which Tim explained one of his top priorities was returning the company to the innovative, risk-taking culture of its early years. I think most big companies spend a lot of time puzzling over how to increase agility and innovative spirt in their organisations, and most don’t really make much of a fist of it.

One reason, I believe, is that as companies grow complexity increases. In a start-up mode everybody does everything (more or less) but later specialisms emerge and so getting things done involve large groups of “experts”.They are already busy, so co-ordination becomes a real challenge and progress slows, a process Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of 37 Signals, offer an antidote to in their book Rework.

Another reason is IT complexity; multiple systems are “upgraded” and added to over long periods of time so that integrating with them becomes a mammoth task, and doing so only increases the complexity and inter-dependency.

So is there a way to cut through this? I don’t really know, but I do believe that the recent developments of cloud computing which allow small pieces loosely joined but running on other people’s infrastructure do offer real hope here. If you are renting computing cycle time and storage from Amazon for a few dollars, it is much more easy to imagine lots more innovative small projects getting off the ground outside of the corporate spaghetti. It is (relatively) easy for start-ups like 37 Signals to keep the agility and simplicity in their businesses – it’s much harder for corporates who have spent years building up complexity and the organistional structures which keep things complex.

Posted via email from Inflection Point v2

Uncategorized

The Great Paywall Experiment

16th August 2010 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

I have been watching with interest the Times‘ experiment with paid content – or rather cutting off non-paying customers from stories. This chart from Alexa today tells the traffic story – stable traffic for The Guardian and The Telegraph and sharply declining traffice for The Times. The FT perhaps provides a paid-for benchmark, although The Times has sailed on down through these levels – at least as of today.

Posted via email from Inflection Point v2