Category: Business

APIs: A Strategy Guide by Daniel Jacobson, Greg Brail and Dan Woods

Learn to Speak API for The Sake of Your Business

You should read this book if you are remotely interested in the following:

1. Why your company needs to have an API

2. How to design, secure and manage the API

3. What API strategies your company should adopt, including legal and operational considerations

4. How to measure the success of the API

5. How to drive API engagement

The authors have years of experience in the API space and I think they did a pretty good job distilling their collective wisdom and learned best practices in this “short and sweet” booklet (134-pages!) I think it is important for the success of any API initiative that *all* stakeholders read this book to get on the same page of what needs to take place to ensure the success of the initiative. It’s hard to argue with the “tried and true” practices of which this book is rife.

If you’re interested in getting into the nitty gritty technical details of how to build an API, I highly recommend RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity as a technical companion read to this book. Read this book first, and then delve into the technical details with Subbu’s book. Full Review

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Jobs is a Four Letter Word

Many people might mistake this book for a mere biography of the man that made Apple a household name and its products coveted by millions around the world. It’s not.

This book is actually three books in one. It’s a business book on how to (and not to) run a company using Apple, NeXT and Pixar as case studies. It’s also a history book on the ascent and the drama behind the consumer electronics evolution. And as its title suggests, it’s the fascinating story of one of the most gifted people of our time.

As a business book, Isaacson writes about three distinct business practices. The first is how to really create a company from scratch. The passion exuded by Jobs and Wozniak is detailed with infectious enthusiasm in the first half of the book.

The second practice (and one often not talked about in business books) is how to drive a company to the ground. The book is rife with examples of internal politics, lack of leadership and the absence of focus that truly illustrate how companies fail.

The last practice is how to build and operate a creative company that endures. For me, this is the most fascinating narrative of all. But to fully appreciate it, one must truly understand the first two, which almost always precede this one.

The book offers a great case study of three companies: Apple, NeXT and Pixar. One fascinating vignette in the book draws a contrast between Apple and Sony and why Apple was successful in conquering the consumer-end of the music business while Sony, who was in a favorable position to do exactly that, failed to do so. This story draws attention to the importance of inter-departmental cohesion that Apple possessed and Sony didn’t, to the success of innovation in a company.

Business leaders reading this book will learn a lot about the power of “focus” in business. Steve Jobs’s most doled out advice was “focus.” Throughout the book, we learn how Jobs followed his own advice to a deadly fault.

As a business book, it is amongst the best.

It’s also an even better history book. It details the ascent of personal computing from the perspective of the very people that were (and still are) at its helm. The book doesn’t only cover Apple’s evolution, but Full Article

Highlights from Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored Event in San Francisco

Great conferences don’t need to span two or three days. In fact, they can be done in one day as Fast Company fabulously demonstrated earlier this week.

The Innovation Uncensored Conference was an impressive feat. It featured great speakers like Scott Case of Startup America, Padmaress Warrior of Cisco and Seth Priebatsch of SCNGR, who discussed pressing topics like customer-centric development, social in the enterprise and game mechanics in business. The mix of speakers and topics was intense without being overwhelming. I was able to walk away with many great learnings.

Oh and the catering … amazing!

Here are some of the learnings I gleaned from the conference:

#1 Successful Businesses are Flexible and Persistent

Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn gave general good advice to startups. He singled out perseverance and focus as the two main objectives of any business. He emphasized the importance of listening to the “smartest people that will talk to you” and heed their advice. He also recommended getting an introduction to VCs you don’t know instead of sending them unsolicited emails (they hate it.)

Scott Case of Startup America echoed Hoffman’s sentiments with his “10 Steps Toward Success:”

  1. Ecosystem: Be part of the environment in which you partake. Give your time to fledgling startups that seek your help.
  2. Pick Your Team Carefully: Founding team members can make or break your business.
  3. Embrace the Pivot: Know how to pivot. Read Eric Reis’s book (my review.)
  4. FOCUS: You have to manage distractions, otherwise you’ll fail.
  5. Build Your Network: The smartest people in the world can’t get anything done without help. Build your support system and mingle with people that are smarter than you.
  6. FOCUS: You have to manage distractions, otherwise you’ll fail.
  7. Customer Development: Know your customers. Read Steven Blank’s book.
  8. Capital: Are you going to raise money? Self-fund? Where is your capital coming from?
  9. Get The Boring Stuff Right: Business, legal, accounting, …etc. Most founders waste their time figuring this out instead of focusing on their product.
  10. FOCUS: Do I really need to say it?
Pretty much everyone that spoke mentioned “focus.” They made a compelling case for the power of saying “NO” and how crucial that is for success. It’s only when you’re “focused” you can be flexible and have the energy to persist.

#2 Your Customers are Your No. 1 Asset

This was another common takeaway and one we take to heart at Edmunds.com.

David Cush of Virgin America stressed the paramount importance of managing customer expectations when rolling out a new system. Virgin America just recently implemented a new reservation system (still buggy as of this writing) and they have worked closely with the marketing department to manage customer expectations and reactions.

Padmaress Warrior of Cisco said the same thing. She implemented BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy at work after her customers (i.e. Cisco engineers) continued using their “unsupported devices” (i.e. Macs.) The new policy has been great not only for her consumers but for business as well.

Customer is the No.1 asset. Also, if your employees are happy and satisfied, that normally translates to customer satisfaction as well.

#3 Focus

I know I mentioned it above, but it was such a focal (no pun intended) point at the event. Focus is success.

Gary White of Water.org and Doug Ulman of Livestrong talked about passion, social responsibility and the role of focus in their success. If you come up with ten projects, prioritize them and then cut the last two and focus all your resources on the first eight. Personally, I’d go further and say cut eight and focus on the top two, but I guess it all depends on the amount of resources you have. Full Article

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

Important History All Entrepreneurs Should Know

I read this book when it first came out back in November 2010 and I’ve been catching myself referencing it ever since.

From describing to my colleagues what a “Cycle” meant to engaging in long debates about what constituted a sustaining versus disruptive innovation in the context of the projects we’re working on. One story I find myself relaying whenever I get a chance is the one about how the telegraph was rendered obsolete with the introduction of the telephone and how that represented a typical “Cycle.”

Tim Wu does something very powerful in this book; he defines a cyclical business pattern, calls it a “Cycle,” explores its history and explains the one we’re going through right now and its probable outcomes. He relies on history to understand the present and foretell the future, which makes the book a very entertaining read if you’re a history buff.

The book is rife with accounts of industries that have gone through the “Cycle.” They rose to success, conquered the competition, became a closed system, declined slowly and invariably fell. Tim says:

History also shows that whatever has been closed too long is ripe for ingenuity’s assault: in time a closed industry can be opened anew, giving way to all sorts of technical possibilities and expressive uses for the medium before the effort to close the system likewise begins again.

This oscillation of information in industries between open and closed is so typical a phenomenon that I have given it a name: “the Cycle.”

Business owners and senior executives must be aware of the “Cycle” and the stage of the Cycle at which their business lies in order to make informed decisions about the future and continuity of that business. Understanding the Cycle and preparing for it is prudent if not absolutely crucial to the survival of a business. Full Review

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

117478738 Crucial Lessons for Fledgeling and Mature Companies

I started reading Eric Ries's blog, "Startup Lessons Learned," back in October 2008. I was quickly impressed by his technical acumen and the simplicity of his writing. I also enjoyed the breadth of topics covered and how engaging they were.

Needless to say, I was glad to hear that he was going to distill all his knowledge into a book, and now that I read the book, I'm glad to say that he didn't disappoint.

The book defines a startup as a 1) a human institution designed to 2) create a new product/service under conditions of 3) extreme uncertainty.

Notice how the definition doesn't address the size of the venture or its backers or its origins. As long as it is a team building a product with high uncertainty, it is a startup.

The book also covers the entire life cycle of a lean startup, Figure 1.

Lean-startup

Figure 1.
Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop that's at the core of the lean startup (image source)

Eric puts a huge emphasis on "validated learning" as opposed to "failure as a way of learning." He says, "a failure to deliver results is due to either a failure to plan adequately or a failure to execute properly." He's all about accountability, which is sorely lacking in so many institutions these day, with the most egregious being Wall Street.

Eric goes on to explain the principles of the lean startup with andecodotes of successes and failures in business. One of the most fascinating and very telling for me was the SnapTax story. The fact that a giant company like Intuit could spawn an innovative startup (i.e. a team + a product + high uncertainty) was a nice validation for my unsuccessful push for an R&D department within the companies at which I worked in the past. SnapTax was a team of five individuals that was given freedom to experiement while held accountable throughout the process. The results were impresssive.

If nothing else, the reader, especially those running mature companies, should pay close attention to Eric's conclusion. He stresses the points of validating assumptions, rapid testing of ideas, and most importantly, "stop wasting people's time."

I think that's the most valuable lesson in the entire book. Mature companies that continue to waste their talents' time with banal and insipid tasks are bound to lose those talents and will only be left with lazy, oftentime overpaid individuals that are too comfortable, too politically secure that they can't produce anything new or original even if they tried.

Startups are a "human institution" first and foremost. If the right team isn't in place, you do not have a startup. Nurture those talents and don't waste their time. Only then will the trappings of success adorn your business and you.

The Devil in The White City by Erik Larson

This book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, other in the manufacture of sorrow.

– Erik Larson.

The Devil in The White City The Spirit of Entrepreneurship in America

This is a fascinating book. Yes it is a great read full of suspenseful moments, and at times horrific details, of the murders by H. H. Holmes in Chicago circa 1890s. Yes it is a great book about the Columbus World's Fair that was built in Chicago in 1893 by America's greatest architects. Yes it is entertaining and yes it is historic.

But what makes this book fascinating to me is the fact that it's a case study of entrepreneurship in America in the late 1800s.

The project at hand was the World's Fair and the man behind it was Daniel Burnham. Burnham was a successful Chicago-based architect when his firm was selected to design and manage what most thought was an impossible undertaking: build a World's Fair that makes America (and Chicago in particular) proud. Expectations were very high given the astounding success of the World's Fair in Paris a few years earlier at which the Eiffel Tower was unveiled.

Burnham was not a man with small vision. He was known for this frequent admonition:

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.

Burnham made no little plans indeed. He built the Montauk–the first skyscraper ever.

Once built, the Montauk was so novel, so tall, it defied description by conventional means.

He was one of the most celebrated entrepreneurs of his time and this book is about how he managed to take on something so ambitious, so impossible, and made it a reality.

Burnham had to deal with government bureaucracy, inflated egos, unexpected setbacks, budgetary issues, amongst other things. Sounds familiar?

The Burnham story is a testament to the American innovative spirit. It's also an inspiration to all entrepreneurs and those who "choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible."

Are you one of those lucky few? Find out if you got what it takes. Read this book.

Can Google+ Be The “Actionable,” Relevant Social Network? You Bet!

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about relevancy and the future of user experience on Facebook. I argued that relevancy in Facebook was broken and suggested a way to fix it.

Google+
Two days ago, Google released its newest social product, Google+. As I read through the Tech Crunch post explaing what the product was about, I couldn't help but smile. Google's Vic Gundotra was quoted saying:

We believe online sharing is broken. And even awkward. We think connecting with other people is a basic human need. We do it all the time in real life, but our online tools are rigid. They force us into buckets — or into being completely public. Real life sharing is nuanced and rich. It has been hard to get that into software.

Thank you! That's precisely the arguement I made. Google is finally onto something big in the social space! Moving away from the "walled garden" approach that's at the core of Facebook, Google+ focuses more on shared, real-time interests than mapping real life relationships.

Google+ is inherintly relevant. You don't need a virtual handshake of "friending" another person to connect. With Google+, you can hang out with anyone, no strings attached.

So it's open, it's relevant, but is it actionable?

I worte in my previous post about the detailed, localized and actionable relevant experiences on Facebook. What I meant by actionable was giving the user the ability to transact on that piece of relevant content without leaving his/her profile page.

So, does Goolge+ offer that capability?

Google+, Circles, Hangouts and Sparks

Not yet, but it's definitely within the realm of possibility.

What's currently missing in Google+ is autodiscovery. Right now, you can follow a topic by creating a "spark." This allows you to get content from everyone following the same topic. However, if someone who's not following that topic shares a related piece of content on the topic, you won't see it.

Sparks depend on the explicit intention of the user (ala Facebook) instead of the context of the shared content itself. As it is today, Sparks are useless, but they can be great!

The good news here is Google can easily implement autodiscovery. If you read In The Plex, you know they can. So the question here is, how can autodiscovery make the experience actionable?

For starters, if Google is able (and it is) to recognize the category and context of every piece of content users share on Google+, then they are able to monetize that content by making it actionable.

For example, let's say I'm into photography. I go ahead and create a "photography" spark to follow all the related content people share on photography. A week later, some random person (who is not following the "photography topic) on Google shares the following post:

Dude, I love my Canon 5D Mark II. It's like the best. camera. ever!

Because Google now recognizes the category and context of content, it flags this content as, "photography, canon, 5d mark II, ….etc." And as a result of that, I would see that post under my "photography" spark … with a link to buy the Canon 5D Mark II from the Google Store or Amazon.com or whatever.

That added link, which is a call to action, is where the power of Google+ lies! By knowing what the content is about, you can enhance it by offering a call to action that makes sense to the user who is more likely to engage with it.

Now think of all the other verticals that this could apply to: travel, financial, automotive, gifts, …etc. Google can partner with subject matter experts in each vertical to provide to help it enhance the relevant experience by making it detailed, localized and actionable.

Thought?

Relevancy and The Future of User Experience on Facebook

Gs-450h Last summer, I had a friend over for dinner. When he got to my house, he pulled into the driveway in a brand new Lexus GS 450 Hybrid. I congratulated him on his new purchase and told him that I was looking to lease the same car next year when my current lease was due. He had no idea. My response was, "yeah, I posted something on Facebook like a week ago about it."

Evidently, he didn't see my post.

I went on to ask him when he got the car and how much he paid for it. His story was fascinating. The way he pit dealers against each other to get the best deal possible was revelatory. He didn't step foot in one dealerships; He did it all over the phone, and ended up getting the car plus all the fees involved for below market value.

Dumbfounded, I confessed I had no idea he was such an aggressive negotiator and that I wanted him to negotiate my next car lease. His response was, "I'd love to." But then he said, "I'm surprised you didn't know about this since you're on Facebook all the time. It's all over my Facebook page."

I was surprised as well since none of these posts made it to my wall. I only saw links about real estate from him (he's a realtor,) but none about cars.

The point of my story here is this: Facebook does not recognize or elevate relevant content between friends.

It would have been awesome if Facebook somehow realized that my status update in which I mentioned I was looking to lease the GS 450h was related to my friend's posts about his purchase experience and somehow got us to connect.

But Facebook doesn't work that way (yet.)

Right now, relevant content is discovered on Facebook by chance. My ability to find relevant content to me is depending on 1) the frequency in which my friends share content and 2) the time at which the content is shared and 3) the time at which I check my wall. All three conditions have to align for me to see that one piece of content that's relevant to me.

It sucks, doesn't it? If I'm willing to sift through countless irrelevant posts from my friends, the least of my expectations is that the relevant posts are brought to the top of my wall where I can easily see them.

But how do you define "relevant?"

A Real Opportunity

Since I do work for @Edmunds, I automatically switched to "find a solution" mode. When I got into the office the next day, I talked to my colleague @HowardOgawa about my experience. After bouncing ideas off of each other, we decided to take this on as a challenge.

Our objective: Elevate Relevant Automotive Content and Conversations to Friends That Care About Them within the Facebook Ecosystem.

We decided to build a Facebook app to do this. Our app at a high level would passively listen to the stream of activities (i.e. status updates, links, checkins, photos, ..etc) coming from the app subscribers and try to mine the data for automotive relevancy. As relevant data is found, other subscribers are notified. Subscribers would also get to indicate some of their friends as "auto experts," which in turn will render automotive content coming from those individuals even more relevant to that user (granted they subscribe to our app, of course.)

Soon after we started looking at the data in a user's Open Graph, we realized that we couldn't mine that data efficiently. Something was missing from the structured data. As we dug deeper, we were convinced that for the data to be meaningful for us, it had to be segmented or categorized.

Content Segmentation and Relevancy

It's hard to determine whether a link a user shares on his/her wall is a link to an article, a YouTube video, a Flickr image or an audio file. The type property of the link object in the Open Graph always returns "link." Sure we have access to the optional message the user attaches to the link and the description that is captured with the link, but that isn't enough to determine the type of that link, and most importantly, the category into which the content of the link falls.

Howard and I went back to the drawing board. It was pretty clear to us at this point that in order to truly recognize relevant content on Facebook, the Facebook structured data had to include segmentation or category.

A shared YouTube link about the President giving a speech in Egypt should be categorically distinguished from a shared YouTube link about Arcade Fire rocking out at The Hollywood Bowl. The former falls under "politics" and the latter under "music."

When that segmentation is embedded into the Open Graph, relevancy becomes much easier to discern and users can specify what content they care about from what friends. I'm sure many of my friends on Facebook would rather see less of my political posts and more of my entertainment ones. With segmentation, they will have that choice.

Facebook Committed to Relevancy

About three weeks ago, a Facebook spokesperson was quoted in a New York Times article saying, "We’re always looking for better ways to help people discover the most relevant content on Facebook…"

This was great news to me! As a Facebook user, this would help me a whole lot. But according to the article, the approach that Facebook is taking won't help me in my particular use case. The same questions remain unanswered: How will I be able to see relevant posts from my friends? How can I specify what specific topics I trust which specific friends with? How can I ensure that my wall is 80% relevant to my real life needs?

Potential Solution: schema.org

Schema Interestingly enough, around the time the Facebook story broke, TechCrunch reported that Google, Yahoo and Bing were collaborating on a structured data initiative, or schema.org. The goal of this initiative is to help websites optimize their HTML and crawlable data structures to make their content more accurately searchable.

The question here is, why isn't Facebook working with these companies on this initiative?! Facebook already has the social sentiment component that all three of these companies lack. All it needs now is to ensure that the content people share to their wall is meaningful and structured, which in turn will help with the relevancy goal and will help me find the content I really care about.

Imagine if Amazon uses the right semantic tags to describe items on their pages. When users share an Amazon link on Facebook, it's no longer just a "link." It's now a "link to a book called ABC by author XYZ and it's currently listed for $xx." This granularity adds meaning to the "link." Meaning that is translated to metadata that algorithms can computer, manipulate and correlate, all of which can easily produce true relevancy.

The Real Business Potential

Creating a relevant experience on Facebook is great and I'm pretty sure Facebook will get there one day. But there's a potential here to create an experience that far surpasses that. An experience that's not only great, but awesome.

Facebook knows how to do social very well and its objective is to keep users on its platform for as long as possible. But to do that, showing relevant content isn't enough. They need to think about creating a user experience that is detailed, localized and actionable. But in order to do that, they would need to partner with subject matter experts in each content segment (e.g. travel, retail, automotive, finance, …etc) to provide the missing data points that will enhance the relevant experience Facebook is building and make it detailed, localized and actionable.

What do I mean by detailed, localized and actionable? Here's an example:

Mary just read a review of "Under the Tuscan Sun" by Frances Mayes on oprah.com. She decides to share that review with her girlfriends on Facebook and she does.

What Mary doesn't know is that oprah.com's content is semantically structured which allows Facebook to understand what the content of this link is all about. Also, Mary doesn't know that Facebook uses Amazon.com's APIs to enhance the experience for Mary's friends by offering them more detail about the book (i.e. price) and locality (i.e. availability at Borders down the street) and a call to action (i.e. Amazon buy button.) All of which is customized to each friend as they see Mary's post on their wall.

The next day, Kirstin, one of Mary's Book Club friends and Facebook friend, logs on to her Facebook. Kirstin has previously indicated in her Facebook preferences that Mary was a good source for literary/readying content. As a result, Mary's book link is now at the top of Kirstin's wall since it's a piece of content that is likely relevant to her. Kirstin is so compelled by the review she goes ahead a buys the book, by clicking on the Amazon link attached to the post and without ever leaving Facebook!

This could be applied to any segment. Facebook can partner with @Kayak to allow users to find travel deals to Heathrow when reading a link about London. Facebook can partner with @Edmunds to allow users to see the price of a vehicle and contact dealers nearby when watching a YouTube video about Toyota Prius.

The possibilities are endless.

What I'm talking about here could be huge. Google, Yahoo and Bing can get the structured data, but they don't have the social sentiment. Facebook has that, but what they need to do now is ensure the content shared on the platform is structured. Once that's accomplished, partner up with subject matter experts in every segment and use their APIs to enhance the content.

The resulting experience is not only social, personal and timely; it's relevant and actionable.

When a simple Facebook search returns all the relevant content that friends (and all of Facebook users when privacy allows) are sharing in realtime with specific calls to action that meaningfully transition the online experience to an offline transaction, why bother go somewhere else?

Does this make sense? Am I missing something? I'd love to hear what you think. You can leave a comment here or find me on Twitter at @ielshareef

Foreigners Attending US Grad Schools Way Down: Wake Up, Xenophobes

Oh no. This is not good. Will America still lead if it continues to stem the flow of raw, ambitious and hungry foreign talent? The answer is NO.

What’s really sad is that instead of stopping the illegal, poor masses flooding this country every day, setting us back culturally and economically, we’re keeping out the educated, smart guys who can actually lift us out of the state of stagnation in which we’ve been bogged down for so long.

Foreigners Attending US Grad Schools Way Down: Wake Up, Xenophobes

It’s happening: Lou Dobbs’ dream come true and Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare. We’re already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their US educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries.  But now, xenophobia and the lack of any sensible H-1B visa policy is keeping the world’s brightest minds from coming to the U.S. in the first place.

U.S. grad school admissions for would-be international students plummeted this year, according to the Council of Graduate Schools—the first decline in five years.  The decline was 3% on average, thanks to increases from China and the Middle East, but some countries saw double-digit declines in interest in a U.S. education. Applicants from India and South Korea fell 12% and 9% respectively—with students turning their sights on schools in Asia and Europe instead.

via www.techcrunch.com