Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com - Facebook Archives

Moped 2.0 Blends Social, Messaging and Cloud Storage

2013-06-06T14:00:00Z

There are a plethora of apps to communicate but precious few bubble up to the top. Quite often a company comes up with an idea for a service which improves on another form of communications. Tweetdeck and Hootsuite come to mind as examples.

Another new option is Moped 2.0 which goes live as you read this entry and allows users to more easily communicate with their social circles while adding in the capability of sharing media. I like to think of it as social SharePoint.

The company bills itself as open-web messaging and connects with contacts from Twitter, Facebook, Google and Linked In while enabling cloud storage via Dropbox. When you send media to your contacts it is also searchable later through a web-based and mobile application.

The company also has integration with IFTTT – a programmatic service which allows users to have the system automatically take actions based on specific sets of circumstances. An example is automatically saving all photos from an Instagram account to a Dropbox account.

Although the system does not act as an email client it can send you a message when you get a message sent to you via this manner when you are not logged in.

Moped is an intriguing addition to the collaborative process – allowing far richer and more powerful group discussions, work and play sessions. In some ways it overlaps social networking sites from Google and Facebook and in other ways it adds a great deal of value. There are certainly many workgroup applications for this innovative new service and we look forwards to seeing how the market accepts Moped 2.0. Perhaps it will one day be mentioned with the other services mentioned at the start of this post.

Update June 6, 2013 3:36 pm EST:

Moped founder Schuyler Deerman who you may remember as the whiz-kid from Digium and I have a discussion using Moped

A Billion WebRTC Endpoints Force Voice and Data Players to Adapt or Die

2013-06-05T21:52:30Z

From an evolutionary standpoint regardless of whether we talk about nature or business, adaptation is a key to success in changing environments. During the industrial revolution in London a species of moth with a white color blended in with the bark of the local trees until soot from the nearby factories turned the trees black. Some darker moths were now camouflaged in the dark trees and eventually the species adapted and became black. When air quality improved, the moths over successive generations changed color again.

Although this may not be the most flattering segue, WebRTC is spreading like the soot from factories in London – it’s now available on one-billion endpoints… It’s beyond the point of no return and tech and telecom companies which don’t adapt will get eaten, just like a white moth on a black tree.

It’s worth pointing out there are some potential question marks regarding implementation of this new standard which encompasses peer-to-peer audio, video and data sharing. For example, when will Microsoft and Apple decide to support or ignore this standard.

It seems inconceivable however that either company could ignore WebRTC because quite frankly the ecosystem of companies developing new applications which leverage this new standard is staggering. In fact our upcoming WebRTC World Conference in Atlanta later this month had to expand its exhibit area twice to handle all the companies that wanted to participate.

These and many other entrants and existing organizations will be offering compelling services to the market and in order for companies to take advantage of them, they will have to leverage devices which run Chrome or Firefox as these are currently the browsers supporting the new standard. This will eventually force Redmond and Cupertino to come around and support WebRTC in my opinion.

But I digress – there are a few points regarding this disruptive technology which we should all consider. The first is how Unified Communications or UC vendors will handle this transition. Steve Anderson writes an intriguing piece about the matter on the WebRTC World website and it’s worth a read. Rory Lindstone writes another piece about how gateway vendors such as Voxeo, Huawei and Mavenir are helping bridge the old and new worlds of telecom meaning you won’t have to retire your existing solutions to take advantage of WebRTC.

Doug Mohney also writes on WebRTC World and describes some of the differences between RCS and WebRTC – he explains the latter is on a fast track when compared to the former. He has a good point – I heard about RCS quite often since the last few SuperComm shows which haven’t existed for years and still, RCS seems to be getting rolled out very slowly.

The point is, WebRTC is changing everything again. The same way IP led us to IP communications with new possibilities and entrants in the market, WebRTC will see hundreds if not thousands of new companies releasing products and services and many new entrants will displace older ones.

The adaptable startups and existing companies will make it through this transition and perhaps become tomorrow’s Skype, Facebook or Twitter. You may not realize it but Skype was released six years after the VoIP market was conceived! In other words when it comes to disruption it is difficult to predict who the next winners and losers will be but what you can generally predict is the more adaptable the company to new technology, the better it will do.

Oh and if you made it this far, I have a present for you… Here is a special code you can use for 50% off at WebRTC Conference & Expo. It’s only for friends of Rich Tehrani – if you enter it manually it is: WRTCRich and it will save you $397.50.

I hope to see you at the show.

Yahoo! Should Buy Waze

2013-06-04T13:20:57Z

If you haven’t checked out the TMCnet feature by Josh Alexander about companies Yahoo! should purchase, please do… I’ll wait. Ok – now that you’re back – isn’t this guy funny? It isn’t too often I read an article about tech where I learn things and also laugh out loud.

Thankfully the piece reminded me to write something I have been thinking for a while. Yahoo! should buy Waze. Yes, the mobile, social company is rumored to be in discussions on-and-off with Google and Facebook but Yahoo makes more sense to me as the best suitor because the world’s first web directory needs to be strong in mobile and social.

If you haven’t tried Waze, please take a moment to download it... Again, I’ll wait. This app is easy to use and is infectious in nature. It’s successfully warned me of a number of road hazards ahead of time and saved me from tons of traffic. Moreover, it is smart… It knows where I am going and routes me there without me asking. It’s an app with intelligence. Other developers can learn from their examples.

It is easy to see how this app can be extended to provide relevant information when you are walking around city streets or in a mall. For example, I can envision a popup from another Wazer telling me about the shoes they just bought on sale or the special two-for-one offer at the corner coffee shop.

The point is, Waze is an amazing app and gives Yahoo exactly what they need. If Google were to purchase the company, it would further cement their position in mobile and location based services. Facebook would gain from a Waze buy as it would have a strong GPS play but the social networks are obviously redundant. Then again, Instagram is redundant as well and that turned out to be a good decision by Zuckerberg.

Wearable Tech to Grow Even Faster than 40% a Year?

2013-05-09T11:08:15Z

If you had a chance to listen to my radio interview with IMI TechTalk you know I believe the analytics behinds wearable computing will be a huge business. As sensors and cameras become part of our wardrobe, there will be billions of new data gathering devices connected to the cloud.

Companies like Facebook and Google will want to soak up as much of this data as possible and use it to generate revenue through a variety of services.

At a certain point, many of us will have sensors on our bodies - perhaps as part of our smarphones which measure our pulse and body temperature in real time. Using analytics we can use this data to determine the epicenter of a variety of incidents. For example, one imagines heart rates will increase in unison when there is roaring thunder, tsunami or earthquake.

Moreover, this data can be used to determine the spread of the flu or a pandemic based upon the increasing temperature of a population.

In addition there could be early heart attack symptoms we can determine from this wealth of sensory information which means lives can be saved... Who knows what other treasures we will discover as this is an untapped area of research.

Enter Stephen Wolfrom, the man behind Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha... His latest adventure is personal analytics and has already developed an app for Facebook which can tell you interesting facts about your friends and relationships. He also records his phone calls and keystrokes and monitors his personal productivity in this manner.

He beleives that by using such data, people and companies will become more efficient. In fact he compares the ability to monitor this information with investing. He says, you are basically investing blind if you can't track your investments but if you do track them, you can make a lot more money.

Seems to me the key takeaway here is wearable tech + big data analytics means better personal and corporate productivity.

If purchasing decisions in this new market begin to be driven by such logic, the already optimistic estimates about the growth of wearable tech could be low.

This could be a very big deal for this emerging space as some analysts already say the market will reach $5.8 billion in 2018, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40.8 percent from 2012 to 2018!

Disclosure: I am CEO of TMC and my company is the host of the world's first Wearable Tech Expo July 24-25, 2013 in NYC.

Metaswitch Clearwater: Game Changing Open Source IMS Initiative

2013-05-08T12:20:23Z

The march to a software telco world is progressing nicely

Communications service providers are at war with OTT providers and need to ensure they are able to battle on as level a playing field as possible. There are significant costs associated with running a major telco and hardware infrastructure certainly ranks high among them. Sure, OTT providers like Skype and WhatsApp have infrastructure costs as well but they often leverage standard servers and software to achieve their goals. Contrast this to a telecom operator who typically buys proprietary equipment from a number of specialized manufacturers. The difference in costs between these approaches is quite steep.

This is of course is why carriers are pushing equipment providers to provide all of the network functions they supply in software which will run in virtualized instances on off-the-shelf servers. It also explains what ETSI network functions virtualization or NFV is all about and Metaswitch Networks has been on the forefront of this trend and hopes to ride the wave into larger carriers worldwide.

To further this push from hardware into software, the company recently announced Project Clearwater which takes the components of IMS and runs them on standard servers in an open-source manner. A number of carriers have leveraged open-source Asterisk in the past to provide telephony service to their customers, now they and others can take advantage of this new initiative to provide open-source IMS as well.

One of the main reasons carriers want to shift their network functions to software is it allows them to select products from a wider variety of vendors. The reason has to do with the costs of developing telephony hardware for carriers. You need phenomenally deep pockets and lots of patience to sell to carriers as an upstart hardware provider. As a result, an amazing number of equipment companies have gone belly up waiting to become adopted by telcos worldwide. Software on the other hand has less cost associated with it meaning a potentially higher likelihood of success.

Still, telcos can never be too cautious choosing a company to base their network on. One of the benefits of going with an open-source project is you no longer need to worry about one company to support it.

I spoke at length with CTO Martin Taylor and he tells me they learned a great deal from the efforts of many of the players in the social networking and cloud space and took the best ideas from these players and applied them to a SIP centric IMS network. Some things they learned and applied were using DNS as a load balancing technique as well as building massively scalable and resilient solutions in a low-cost manner.

How low cost you ask? Well, I am glad you did. Taylor says about 2 cents per subscriber per year based on the costs of AWS. Of course the solution is not dependent on Amazon, but this is just a guideline to consider. Moreover, this cost covers core plumbing of voice, video and messaging… You would still need an SBC, telephony app servers, messaging app servers and media gateways.

He further explained that carriers who are looking to deploy RCS know they have compete with OTT providers and being able to lower the cost of IMS is a huge help in doing so.

Metaswitch will supply support and bug fixes for the project. Taylor exclaimed, “Charging for peace of mind really is what it boils down to.” This and supplying additional solutions is how the company hopes to monetize this new initiative which is free for telcos to use.

This news is a potential game changer for telecom. Carriers once had to grapple with whether to purchase their IMS solutions from the US, Europe or Chinese equipment providers… Now they have the option of trying a software-centric, open-source approach. They can even try this solution in tandem with other trials going on in their labs.

Be sure to learn everything there is to know about NFV and the birth of the software telco at Software Telco Congress, Nov 19-21, 2013 in Santa Clara, Ca.

Is The Media Tweeting Away its Profits?

2013-04-16T20:15:13Z

I’d like to start by saying my heart goes out to the victims of the horrific Boston Marathon and their families. Having said that I read with interest that The New York Times, Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal took down their paywalls during this crisis and moreover many reporters were reporting on Twitter without linking to any content on their sites.

The challenge paid and many other media outlets face is obvious… They need to master social media while also getting readers to pay for their news and/or visit their websites for more information.

Of course there is the ability to give away a great deal of free content on Twitter and other social sites in order to get many followers who can be then directed to special subscription offers.

Perhaps the ideal scenario is a social model which shares revenue with publishers. For example, YouTube allows content creators to share in the proceeds of the ad sales from the content they create. Twitter and Facebook will probably want to consider a similar strategy.

Then again, these two social sites are so popular they may not need to change a single thing in order to keep the growth of their sites going. This of course means media companies will have to adhere to guidelines to ensure they don’t tweet away news which someone would consider paying for. Ron Matejko at Publishing Executive has more and is especially irritated at media sites which drop paywalls when these sites have news which readers need most.

Has the SEC killed the Press Release?

2013-04-04T20:17:55Z

Has the SEC just signed the death warrant for the press release market? Possibly. Standard operating procedure today is to distribute press releases through established services like Business Wire and PR Newswire but thanks to the SEC, you can post your news on social sites – as long as users are told where to look.

Reed Hastings accelerated this move by posting materially important information about his company to his Facebook page. This set off a fire storm regarding whether this action was proper or not based on current investment rules. It seems the SEC does think the behavior was OK as he is not being prosecuted.

This gets us to the news made today by Business Wire in the form of, you guessed it – a press release, where they explain social can be one form of full and fair disclosure and offers but “Business Wire believes that a broadly disseminated news release -- distributed simultaneously and in real-time via a legitimate news wire service -- is still the most effective way to maximize investor outreach, and to inclusively serve the needs of all market participants.”

The release goes on to explain how it is a more suitable platform than social because it protects its clients security and also ensures there is an audit trail in the case of a regulatory investigation.

Here is the reality… Companies can easily host their news on their own sites and tweet it, use Google+ or whichever services they desire. Yes, press release distribution is important but it is less so as search engines have lessened their importance in results.

I do see this move by the SEC as a major blow to Business Wire and the whole industry – that is exactly why they put out the release… To counteract the damage.

The winner here is all the social platforms you know and love and Bloomberg for its part has announced tweets will now be integrated into its terminals.

“When important news is shared on Twitter, traders and investors need to be able to access it, and validate its importance in order to incorporate that information into their decision making process,” said Jean-Paul Zammitt, head of sales and product development for the Bloomberg Professional service. “Bloomberg’s platform now provides this ability, along with the high-quality news, data and analytics our users need and have come to expect from us.”

Chorus.im Reduces IM Islands with HTML5

2013-04-02T16:27:46Z

With the billions of messages sent each year it is tough to come to the conclusion that messaging is broken but it is. If I send an SMS from a cell phone for example it typically goes to another cell phone. Lets say I am on a PC and want to communicate via SMS - I can use an email gateway but I would have to know which carrier first before I choose a gateway. For example Vodafone in western Japan uses the following gateway address: number@n.vodafone.ne.jp while Vodafone in Okinawa uses the following slightly different address: number@q.vodafone.ne.jp.

Likewise for iMessage, it works great until you want to communicate outside the Apple ecosystem. Skype works great but requires downloads to all of your devices - of course we expect tighter integration into all Microsoft products over time.

This leaves an opening for Chorus.im which recently launched an HTML5-based messaging solution which works across platforms without the need for downloading plugins, software or anything.

Certainly, there is a need for such a solution since I do beleive messaging is broken but inertia is a powerful force and it remains to be seen how quickly people jump off their current messaging systems and embrace this new solution. One benefit of course to Chorus is it allows messaging without identities needing to be shared meaning it can be used as a communications medium for online dating or transactions where you don't want to give your email address. This reminds us of SnapChat - the service which allows a user to send messages which quickly auto-destruct. Chorus.im could be an enabler for a web-based version of such a solution and it could in-turn be embraced by people who gravitate to services like Facebook's Poke.

Interactive Intelligence Explores Small Call Center Roots

2013-03-18T13:00:00Z

Interactive Intelligence is an example of a disruptor which went mainstream and in the process changed the way contact centers operated. Soon after launching in the mid-nineties the company would attract huge crowds to its booths at trade shows as it showed off all-in-one solutions which combined the dialer, ACD, PBX and more into a complete solution which operated seamlessly together. The company was first to espouse the concept and is responsible for getting the competition to emulate them.

In a recent meeting with Joe Staples, CMO and Senior VP of Marketing he told me the company has successfully acted upon its growth strategy from 2006 which was designed to increase its sales to large companies such as Rolex, BMW, Crutchfield, Sony Honda and many others. Their average deal-size in 2005 was in fact $87k and it is now $306 with its number of deals over $1m increasing from just one to 49 on a comparative basis over these seven years.

Interactive Intelligence hasn’t lost track of the companies that helped it get started as evidenced by the launch today of its new CaaS Small Center solution, which gives small contact centers with up to 50 contact center agents many of the same features the vendor has offered for years to the most sophisticated contact centers in the world. Pricing for CaaS Small Center starts at a flat fee of $99 per agent, per month. Included in the offer is the ability to add the company’s cloud-based PBX features for up to 100 non-contact center users.

Joe was sure to point out how mature the company’s offering features recording, UC, real-time speech analytics, quality management, multichannel communications including voice, web chat and social media, routing and real-time speech analytics with keyword spotting. There is also integration with Salesforce and other services out of the box. Finally there are guaranteed service levels, geo-redundancy from 11 global data centers, security, compliance including JITC, and customer isolation through virtualization.

He further explained the company focused on keeping the offering easy to use with limited set-up options and deployment within 15 days instead of months. Other areas of note are the ability to sign a one-year contract to lock in your price – a dedicated implementation manager, Quick Spin which allows you to try before you buy and of course a month-to-month commitment if you prefer this option

Interestingly Interactive Intelligence has gone from a disruptive new entrant in the market to an established player. By offering much of the power of its full contact center solutions in a simple, cost-effective, no-commitment way, it has to some degree slowed the disruption it could see from a new breed of cloud-based solutions providers. Moreover, the benefit Interactive brings to the table is stability as well as scalability – companies want a system that grows with them.

Staples says 65% of contact centers in the world have less than 50 agents but they are often underserved because they buy from a startup or just go with an add-on solution provided by a PBX vendor. In fact, one of the company’s newest customers for this new offering switched from another solution which didn’t allow them to see how many calls were waiting in the queue.

The purpose of CaaS Small Center is to allow these call centers who have the same needs as their larger brethren to access the same features and functions they have on a pay-as-you-go or should I say pay-as-you-grow-basis.

Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and Google: France's War With US Tech Firms

2013-03-13T17:45:27Z

Ten years ago the people of France had to deal with a major challenge – English tech words were beginning to become more popular than baguettes. As a result, the country’s Culture Ministry banned the term e-mail and replaced it with the term Courriel. A decade later, the country decreed the word hashtag shouldn’t be used but instead they suggested 'mot-dièse' which we believe may be French for “too much time on our hands due to overly generous government handouts.”

The country’s battle against tech terms coming from the US is dwarfed only by the country’s attack on US tech corporations. Most recently, Apple was fined 10,000 euros for having its workers work past 9:00 p.m. in retail stores. The French ban working between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. unless it is required. Now the country is after Skype – France isn’t happy the free service hasn’t registered as a telecoms operator.

Last week I pointed out the irony in the delayed EU fine of Microsoft after it didn’t give users an option to install competitive browsers. The point is by the time the company got fined, it had lost a good deal of marketshare because the internet itself allowed the competition to bypass the installed browser default which Microsoft provided in its OS.

Facebook too has had to deal with EU regulators on privacy issues – in 2011 the EU started to look at how the service tagged photos using facial recognition and over a year later the social networking giant removed all the facial recognition data from the EU.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of French and EU conflicts with tech companies – many know Google has had a number of back-and-forth legal challenges relating to advertising and newspapers.

It’s worth pointing out in many of these cases I am sure the companies in question were on the wrong side of the law and did need to be slapped on the wrist in court, through fines, etc to bring them in line.

It is however worth considering the German and French governments came together in 2008 to build a competitor to Google called Quaero. The plan was scrapped after the Germans pulled out but the project was slated to be massive – up to $2.6B was to be spent on it over five years.

This isn’t to say the US government hasn’t at times made life difficult for tech companies. The FTC for example just decided that social media like Facebook and Twitter need to have the same consumer protection disclaimers as other forms of advertising. While this makes sense from a fairness perspective, how you put a disclaimer and a message in 140 characters has yet to be determined.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see a pattern emerging here. First the French go after the terms, then the business models and finally the companies themselves.

IPgallery Helps Carriers Become Social Hub and More

2013-03-01T19:57:11Z

Communications service providers once the center of the customer's world have awoken to the new reality - social and apps are the new hub. In fact, Facebook, Twitter and a wave of other social networks have fully overtaken the telephone number as the primary method of communicating among many - especially younger users. Then there are the the OTT VoIP and video vendors such as Skype. The telephone number has gone from being a protected client relationship to an afterthought. Even the bright spot related to phone numbers - massive texting revenue has recently been eroded by OTT apps like WhatsApp and even iOS messaging which seamlessly takes text messages off the operator network.

Enter IPgallery, a company playing in the IP communications carrier space for over a decade who wants to help service providers become the focal point of this brave new world of social and apps. Their suggestion is to provide customers with a social communications and hosted-PBX solution which integrates so seamlessly with popular web-based servies that users will rarely need to leave the comfort of the environment. An HTML5 interface allows a cloud-based service to tap into APIs of a slew of other companies to provide social, mapping and just about anything else a user can think of.

Just like a person might use HootSuite as a central hub to interface with numerous social networks, IPgallery helps carriers provide customized user interfaces which they believe are captivating enough to keep consumers living inside them.

Consumers for their part have shown a willingness to spend huge amounts off time interfacing with specific services such as Facebook. In fact, companies are tripping over themselves to have users interact with them on the world's most-popular social network. Carriers have a shot to get control back by providing customers with a user interface worth "living in."

In addition, they can add services such as shopping and entertainment and even combine location information to provide compelling applications which rival those of the OTT world. As carrier information is even richer than what is available to typical smart phone applications, they can actually provide better services than consumers can get elsewhere.

At Mobile World Congress in 2013 the Israeli company showed me an app they wrote which accesses Facebook and Maps and provides the photos of friends on their actual locations on a map. A user can select one or more friends and start a group communication, complete with file sharing and collaboration.

There is a great deal more - such as integrated e-learning, a hosted PBX with separate skins and functionality broken out by department such as accounting or sales. Finally, operators can add functionality by providing cloud-storage which could be used to hold content which is shared between users on the system.

IPgallery functions as part software/integration vendor and part systems-integrator, working with carriers the world-over to develop solutions which they need in their particular markets. This allows carriers to focus on their core competency while taking advantage of best-practices being developed by other service providers.

We often hear of discussion revolving around whether carriers are ok just being "dumb pipe" providers and regardless of the answer, there is definite value in owning the home page of the customer's world. Amazon has used this prime real estate to successfully push Kindle devices and Google uses it to push its Chrome OS, tablets and other devices.

Perhaps the better question is - what are the benefits from being the gateway to your customer's online activities including social, commerce and shopping? The answer of course is increased revenue and flexibility. And as service providers grapple with stagnant to lower ARPU and increasing network costs as they upgrade to 4G and beyond, exploring new revenue opportunities which could also reduce churn seems to make a lot of sense.

Comverse Gets Social at MWC2013

2013-02-28T17:49:07Z

Comverse showed me their Share solution at Mobile World Congress 2013 which allows carriers to deliver a Facebook app giving the user a portal into their subscriber account. Once you enter the app, you are prompted to enter a phone number and are subsequently sent a text message allowing you to get a code which enables authentication.

At this point you can check your account balance, send notes to customer care and more. The operator benefits as well because they can mine the user likes and preferences allowing them to determine for example if they may be a candidate for a bundle or special offering.

Moreover by integrating the traditional knowledge a carrier has about a customer, for example what device they use, they can offered targeted ads. For example if they are an Android user with a Samsung device near contract-end, they may be interested and likely to click on an ad for an HTC One.

In addition, Alice Bartram, AVP Portfolio Marketing told me there is a strong push into the cloud, allowing a service provider to outsource their MMS to the company and thus minimize CAPEX spending. Moreover, there is a focus here at the show on telling operators that Comverse is the right partner to bring them into the world of new services. This is done by first bringing existing services into the world of IMS and then enabling new next-gen IP services to be rolled out quickly.

Point being, we aren't moving to an all-IP world tomorrow but that is the destination. As we travel down the road, carriers need to be able to provide new as well as legacy services to their diverse subscriber base.

How Steve Jobs Even Transformed Our Views on Management

2013-02-09T19:23:24Z

Steve Jobs was such an amazing entrepreneur - even calling him the ultimate visionary doesn't seem to describe accurately how amazing he was at reinventing numerous business categories. Like so many creative visionaries, early in his career he lacked the political and people skills which many people believed were necessary to run a company effectively.

When he was "pushed out" of Apple it was seen as a normal incident - CEOs were pushed out of companies all the time as past Apple CEO John Sculley has said. In fact Scully spoke just over a week ago at StartUp Camp7 collocated with ITEXPO Miami 2013 and gave the inside scoop on many important events which transpired between him and Jobs over the years.

What is interesting though is how Sculley defends Jobs and says it was a mistake to push him out. It seems John's view on management and entrepreneurship has changed over the years and others are beginning to agree with him. In fact, changing the view of the founder-CEO is just one other massive accomplishment Steve Jobs should get credit for. As if his list of accomplishments was somehow lacking until now.

Throughout my career the common knowledge has always been entrepreneurs can't run companies - at some point you need to bring in a real manager who can run operations.

Common knowledge seems to have changed recently and Jessi Hempel writes a compelling article for Fortune which makes the case for having the founder run the company.

The article does lead with a statistic which seems to make the opposite case though:

Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman has spent the past decade studying the impact a founder has on a company. In a study of 460 American startups, he found that on average those in which founding CEOs remained the top decision-makers were less valuable than those managed by outside CEOs. Simply put, the skills needed to invent a new product or service are different from those needed to manage a business, and few people possess both.

The interesting twist however is while the outside manager is better at running a company on a day-to-day basis, they are far less creative than a founder and in-fact almost every company which has become uber-successful has been run by a founder.

Reid Hoffman the co-founder of Linked In explains in-part why there has been a shift in thinking:

20 years ago, you could count on product cycles lasting years, which meant that constantly developing new products and refining the vision was relatively less important than aggressive execution. The “professional” CEO back then just had to be a superb executor for the founder’s vision. The rise of internet time has reduced product cycles to months and weeks. As such, a CEO can’t focus solely on scaling concerns—today, the CEO has to be involved in the product.

Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz details his thoughts on the matter in a piece titled Why We Prefer Founding CEOs and it describes how today [constant] innovation = [the best chance of] success. If we take it as a given that entrepreneurs are best able to innovate then it becomes a given that a "professional CEO" isn't the right person to guide a company forward.

This part of the post sums it up best:

The reason is that innovation is the most difficult core competency to build in any business. Innovation is almost insane by definition: most people view any truly innovative idea as stupid, because if it was a good idea, somebody would have already done it. So, the innovator is guaranteed to have more natural initial detractors than followers.

Moreover he says these are the three ingredients to being a great innovator:

Comprehensive knowledge
Moral authority
Total commitment to the long-term

Here is another great point he makes:

Founding CEOs naturally take a long view of their companies. The company is their life’s work. Their emotional commitment exceeds their equity stake. Their goal from the start is to build something significant. They instinctively know that big product cycles come from investment and that even the biggest product cycles will eventually fade. Professional CEOs, on the other hand, tend to be driven by relatively shorter-term goals. They are paid in terms of stock options that vest over 4 years and cash bonuses for quarterly and yearly performance.

One other idea he brings up worth discussing is that Eric Schmidt is an important exception to the rule as a "professional CEO" he came to Google and launched Apps and Android. He did so by, "teaming with the founders and gaining the benefits of their knowledge, moral authority, and long-term vision." He continues to say this is an obvious strategy, but shared leadership and control are incredibly difficult to achieve." he further describes what is needed to make it work: "Intense communication, deep humility, and some hard compromises." Of course he conludes by reminding us that almost nobody ever pulls it off, making Eric Schmidt a very important exception.

What we learn from the above is professional CEOs need to be humble and able to communicate well to be successful in business today. My personal experience has shown me many entrepreneur CEOs while very creative are pretty bad at the "business side" of the job. This is in-part why most of them fail - something we should keep in mind. Yes, the great companies are run by their founders but remember, most new companies do fail.

This tells us that CEOs who aren't very effective at doing the non-creative part of the CEO job - running meetings, managing, etc should bring in someone to assist. That is if they want to maximize the value of their company. When interviewing such a person they should be sure to look for someone who is able to admit past mistakes and who learned from them. I would go so far as asking them to list their top three mistakes and ask what was learned from each.

Another thought which comes to mind is this change in "founder philosophy" sums up why in-part Amazon's shares trade at an exponentially-higher multiple than those of Apple. Something I have discussed before.

We know that finding another Jobs, Zuckerberg or Bezos is rare and we also know if we can team more professional CEOs who don't think they know it all with some creative founders, we can unlock tons of value in a slew of companies. Of course the founders would need to realize their shortcomings in order to allow such a "partnership." Hopefully this will happen as word gets out about how Jobs and Sculley worked side-by-side and moreover how much of Apple's success today (especially in product design and marketing) came from that initial collaboration between a founder and solid "professional CEO."

To me it is fascinating to see how "common knowledge" about the ongoing ability of a founder to run the company has changed because we are in an age of acceleration. In other words, the shortcomings of the CEO from a management perspective have become less important because a well-managed company without innovation will get eaten alive by its competitors. The situation with John Sculley of course is an extreme example and shows how their relationship and poor decisions made by the board at the time have helped lead to a change in thinking about the importance in keeping a founder at the helm. Moreover as we can see from Amazon's P/E multiple, the investment community definitely agrees.

Sheldon Adelson Continues to Give Back

2013-02-08T14:50:06Z

Sheldon Adelson was the founder of the COMDEX trade show and early in my career his team was gracious enough to work with me to promote the first magazine I published named CTI. I have always been impressed by his business skills – he ran the largest show in the US and when he sold it and stopped his involvement it went downhill fairly quickly and eventually collapsed.

At the peak of the show in the late nineties in Atlanta, GA, TMC gave away well over 10,000 magazines from a 20x30 booth – there are few other shows – even today where you could achieve such a feat. As I recall, we probably could have given out even more but we ran out!

After he sold COMDEX, he then went on to run a string of global casinos – very successfully. He seems to turn everything he touches into gold. Moreover he has been a great philanthropist having founded a school in his local community which I hear firsthand is quite good. He has now donated an additional $50M to The Adelson Educational Campus allowing it to expand and improve the education of students in the Las Vegas area.

The media seems to be obsessed with talking about tech’s latest movers and shakers like Mark Zuckerberg but its worth pointing out that events like COMDEX were in-part responsible for laying the foundation for everything we experience in tech today. Moreover, yesterday’s tech leaders like Adelson are still actively giving back to the world in many positive ways.

Facebook Enables Free VoIP Calls for U.S. iOS Messenger Users

2013-01-16T22:01:04Z

Facebook launched free VoIP calling for U.S. Facebook iOS Messenger app users. Here's the problem though. Almost no one uses the Facebook Messenger app - they use the main Facebook iOS app. Why not bundle these these two together? Messenger seems redundant.

Second problem - it's iOS only. Really? No Android support? Third problem is it only works over WiFi so 3G/4G won't work unless you jailbreak your iOS device and install a 3G/4G to WiFi faker.

I briefly tested it, but apparently none of my Facebook friends were curently using their iOS device with the Messenger app loaded. So pretty pointless. Don't even think it supports Notifications so iOS users can at least get a notification and launch the Messenger app. Still, a step in the right direction. But I'd like to see more - including as I already stated in an article last week - support for WebRTC - though WebRTC on mobile browsers is a ways off.

I wonder if your VoIP conversations will be auto-transcribed and put into the Newsfeed of all your friends. Then we will never see talking behind someone's back ever again! Woohoo! Screw the privacy implications. Lets make everything public domain. I kid... I kid....