Google's New Technology – More Power and Simplicity

Google took the internet by storm years ago with a super-fast search scheme and has continued to be a leader in creating innovative tools allowing non-programmers to create sophisticated solutions to get results.

Dick and I have been attending the DC simulcast of Google's I/O three-day event underway in San Francisco – and they are unveiling some truly advanced Android devices and applications.

Here's some highlights of new software, applications, and hardware:

Google Plus Hangouts (video conferencing of up to 10 people), has been enhanced with a business meeting app – Symphonical – and two social apps Event – to schedule meetings and social events complete with invitations - and Party Mode – which permits sharing of pictures/video before, after and real-time during the event by any of the attendees. Video easily accessed is a powerful tool for business – for meetings, for demos or other show & tell sessions, and to 'live stream' events to a public audience.

The next generation of the Android operating system – Android v4.1, nicknamed Jellybean, and a new Android phone – the Galaxy Nexus – combine for a new level of productivity and simplicity. In Google Search learns from your keyboard strokes and accessibility for users is upgraded. Voice Search is included in the function and will return result in audio as well as screen text and video. The phone has a simple new gesture – the flick – just like you'd flick a bug off your shirt, you can use this to delete what's on the screen.

You can also use Voice to dictate text, chat, and emails when in that function. Keeping track of appointments and other interests is done automatically through Google Alerts , by popping up note cards with all the relevant details – it can be an appointment, airline flights, or current score for your team.

The Nexus 7 Tablet using the new Android 4.1 OS (built by ASUS with delivery expected in mid-July) was introduced with a 7-inch HD screen, 9-hour battery life, and a $199 price tag – what a treat! The Nexus 7 has a fast 3-core processor and 13 other background processors – for a total of 16 CPUs speeding through the material for quick display and smooth transition.

For entertainment, you can read ebooks and documents; read magazines – uniquely formatted to have the look and feel of the paper publication, with thumbnails of articles for the reader to 'leaf through' to find articles of interest; view pictures and albums; and videos, movies, TV shows, and YouTube; listen to music from personal collections and internet sources. For business and other tasks, you can read and write email, browse the web, read your blogs, access your Google Plus and hangouts (forward facing camera for the video), do detailed search by text and voice, and get pop-up notification cards automatically for upcoming appointments and other items of interest.

Carrying forward the social aspects of the phone and tablet, Google has developed the Nexus Q which is an in-home collaborative media streamer device connected to your speakers and large-screes TV. You can pull pictures, videos, music, art, and other entertainment items from anywhere in your extended network – by just swiping your Android phone or other NFC-function device across the Nexus Q. In addition guests can share their entertainment libraries with a simple swipe across the Q.

The Chrome browser now can sync the browser settings, bookmarks, and recent search results across multiple platforms – computer, tablet, phone – and automatically optimize the format for the device. So, you can access a search result done on your home computer from your Android phone while you are mobile instead of making a paper copy of the screen as you go out.

A key to all these advances is direct access to the Google Cloud – material is stored or held in the cloud for access by any of the Google-based devices. This aids to flexibility of access to your content and documents, as well as facilitating collaboration among team members or others by giving focused access to specific files.

A preview of what's in the works shown at the conference is Google Glass – wearable computers. This is a device, which looks like a pair of eyeglasses that has a camera, audio receiver, and heads up display, so you can access the internet, a hangout, or snap pictures or videos of what you are seeing. To introduce this prototype device, Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google) staged a parachute jump to the roof of the convention center with an elaborate 'pony express' style delivery to the stage for a pair of these glasses. All the while, the screens showed live video of what the participants were actually seeing (using Hangout technology). Quite exciting staged event.

There were three quotes that nicely summed up the philosophy of these developments in computer tools:

Larry Page (co-founder of Google): “Have a healthy disrespect for the impossible.”

Vic Guntodtra (Google SR VP Engineering): “The best thing is for the computer to have your back – then you don't have to worry about it!”

Clay Bauer (Google Director Chrome Development): “What we want is that it works without even noticing.”

As these advances roll out, we will find business applications for them – to get better results, or to do something that was not practical (or possible) before.

Guy Kawasaki's recommendation for getting visibility on the internet certainly sums up the development that Google has highlighted at this conference: “Write Good Stuff!”

What do you find most relevant for your operations from the new features offered by Google?

Customer Orbits

A previous post, Target Markets, finished, Mastery is having your finite resources satisfy the entire market...

Let’s define that market.

Seth Godin has already debunked the myth of prospects. Nobody wants to be a prospect. It’s a code between the salesperson and the sales mangler to identify who they intend to commit sales upon. Seth thinks a better term is “citizens.”

We have a good model for how sales professionals spend their time to maximize sales taking advantage of social media advantages.

Today we’ll define not from what our citizens think, but what sellers can observe. Otherwise it’s fiction and suspection.

Think of electrons orbiting around the nucleus of an atom. There are many orbits, extending outward, and the electrons don’t spiral toward the center, they jump to a different orbit in reaction to stimuli.

That’s a good model for observing people in a buying process.

The farthest orbit would be Awareness, when they notice you.

Next in would be Potential, when they are aware that you might provide something they need.

Then Benefit, when they harness how you might help them.

After that, Observation, because seeing is believing.

Inside that would be Acquisition, the area where old time salesmen spend all their time.

Getting closer is Installation, where they get access to use it.

A further step is Adaptation, where they change their work processes to gain advantages from it.

Then comes Belief, based on internal stories of value.

With luck we get Expansion, where your offering spreads to more of the customer organization.

Then the fantasy, where your customer begins to Refer new citizens, who want to repeat your customer’s experience.

Finally there are the Zealots, who decide they would rather work with your product than theirs, and come over to you.

I think we’ve all seen isolated instances of each to these orbits. Applying the opening definition - Mastery is having your finite resources satisfy the entire market... how would you change your focus to accomplish this?

My experience is as you broaden your focus to strengthen the before the transaction, and apply resources after the “love ’em and leave ’em stage, total cost of sales is greatly reduced, on the order of 50% or more. The pitfall is maintaining your expanded process over time and new managers who see the value of the check writing part of the relationship.

Don't File It – Use That Data

Big Data is a means to extract useful information from great volumes of data collected from various inputs. If the data is available and accurate, the distilled information can be useful if the project is well conceived.

Last week we attended a Big Data session put on by NCA-GTUG to highlight some successful in-use projects with Splunk boiling down huge quantities of continuous real-time data into useful information about monitored activities – almost real-time. Fascinating.

Next day I participated in a GovLoop Webinar on Optimizing Service With Big Data, which outlined the expanding use of the Big Data approach in the Government sector – and an example of effective use of police data to reduce crime.

The city of Santa Cruz applied Big Data tools to 10 years of collected police crime data. They cut the data by type of crime; they sliced it by location; they diced it by time, day of week, day of month, and month of year, to get a detailed picture of the characteristics of crime occurring in Santa Cruz.

Then the process was reversed to create when, where, and what predictors of crime probabilities as a data based tool to apprehend or prevent area crime.

By manipulation of large volumes of existing data, the police department created a knowledgebase analogous to the instincts of long-service patrolmen with a 'feeling' about crime activity and targets. This predictive tool is intended to help the SCPD be more effective in the reduction of crime. Of course, personal experience is what sets the Doers apart from others – this data approach is a supplement, not a replacement for experience.

The results bear out this supposition: property-based crime is down by 12% and burglaries down by 25% since implementing the project. Good results, which supplement the other tools available to the police in doing their jobs – like when the two-way radios replaced the call boxes on the street.

This example demonstrates a valuable subsequent use of gathered data to glean information about patterns, trends, or other relationships among the measured items. Two important element to a successful project with massive volume of data is the relevancy of the project to get usable information and the completeness and accuracy of the input to get sound information.

What are some Big Data applications that could create valuable information for your operations or future planning?

Target Markets

My favorite user group has announced a change of direction. A user group is usually independent of a specific software, made up of enthusiasts, rather than company representatives. They provide a friendly forum for the company representatives.

The company feels they can get greater traction in the market appealing to wizzerd programmers instead of buyers. I’ve seen that a couple of times from inside a company. Usually it means a new market manager has a bigger quota.

Ten years ago I learned that when the new executive director wanted to change the name of a successful organization, she didn’t understand the mission, leading to rounds of rightsizing.

Yesterday, I was driving up US 95 through Virginia next to a truck I recognized. Fifteen years ago, one of my government customers had the third largest transaction website in the world...written entirely in COBOL. They published a monster catalog, like the old Sears big book...entirely in COBOL. These guys could do anything with my product.

Then some marketers in my organization figured out that what they had bought was worth more than they paid, so they instituted retroactive “value pricing.” Took my customer six months to rebuild their web empire in Microsoft. I lost the world’s greatest reference account.

Last month Ardell Fleeson gave a powerful talk at the Virginia Leadership Breakfast. What stuck with me was her observation that we divide our focus into two groups, “target markets” and “all others.” Did you ever look at how much business comes from “all others?”

The lesson I’m getting is to respect and aid everyone who has an interest. Mastery is having your finite resources satisfy the entire market, both who you think is your buyer and those who just buy.

Changing Education

Video is a powerful educational tool. With internet distribution and storage, a world class video can easily be shared globally. Salman Khan of the Khan Academy has been making short videos that teach specific technical skills to students from elementary school to graduate level. These are available for free on the web.

One of the challenges of internet based video education is that students aren’t really learning, they just feel like they are learning, let’s call that couch potato syndrome. That’s a small, easily addressed problem. The larger problem is presenters faxing in their performance while standing at the front of a classroom.

Sebastian Thrun, who knows something about education, puts it this way, “You don’t lose weight by watching someone else exercise,” he says. “You don’t learn by watching someone else solve problems. It became clear to me that the only way to do online learning effectively is to have students solve problems.”

So lesson one is Go Make Something. Come to think of it, that’s what work is these days.

A major change in learning is information is available anywhere. In the old days, students went to University to learn the Canon of Western Civilization, all three books, because there was a good chance that when they went back home, they weren’t going to see another book again. Scholars were walking search engines. They weren’t expected to work, they were expected to provide answers and educate the baron’s whelps in their downtime.

There are still people who think their job is to have an opinion and opine. Nice work if you can get it.

For most of us, job one is to turn that knowledge into something valuable, on demand.

The purpose of video education is to provide the knowledge. Education comes from using it to make something useful.

Another value of video education is modeling behavior. Kipling provided Victorian behavior modeling through his writing, and The Man Who Would Be King shows heroic behavior, like High Noon, and even Leroy Jethro Gibbs or Frank Reagan.

Let’s take the best parts of video and work it like a rented mule in the interests of better education.