A new medical journal search tool from DeepDyve

A new search site is in beta called DeepDyve that has some promise. First, they claim that they index millions of medical papers from paid journals and free sites. The problem in the past is that this content wasn’t too readily available. Yes, there is Medline, but not a very user-friendly tool. Second, getting copies of the papers to read has never been easy, particularly for those of us in the lay community that don’t have medical center accounts or access to medical libraries.

This is where DeepDyve comes in. They charge a buck to rent the paper for 24 hours. You can get other “plans” that allow unlimited access for more money. Does this sound familiar, like renting movies? Got it. Their search engine is very simplistic — you can’t sort by date for example. But you can enter an entire abstract into the search query to narrow things down.

What is cloud computing?

Cisco has put together this hilarious video taken from trade show visitors at their booth who are asked the question above. There are some very funny bits here.

The different Twitter account types

I have been studying a presentation that Brent Payne made earlier this year and can be found here, entitled “How to Connect Great Journalism with the Greatest Possible Audience.”

Payne is in charge of the search engine optimization efforts for the Chicago Tribune Web site, and knows a lot about what he speaks. The presentation is chock full of a lot of great stuff, and I would urge you to download it and study it as I did. One particular section bears further discussion, and that is how to deploy a corporate Twitter strategy.

Payne talks about several different Twitter account types that are part and parcel to any business use of the popular microblogging service. And until I saw them delineated, I didn’t realize how important it is to keep them straight. The four basic types are:

News feeds — Here is where you automate posts from your blog sites and other RSS properties to this account. Don’t follow anyone or send any direct messages from it. An example of such an account is @ccnbrk, the breaking news feed from CNN.

Celebs – You should force them on Twitter and give them the freedom to be human and Tweet about their personal lives and follow/respond to their followers. If you want some extra assurance, work with Twitter to have these made into verified accounts so people will realize that they are legit. @Andersoncooper and @oprah are two of these, I am sure you can think of dozens more. If your company doesn’t have a celebrity spokesmodel, then don’t worry about this.

Brand Personae – These are characters or avatars or Twavatars (I just made that up), something that your customers can identify with and lead brand awareness and perception on Twitter. This is the social media face to the public of your brand. They can engage your audience and represent you in the Twittersphere. Think of what Spencer the Katt did for PC Week back in the heyday of the PC era. And as we did with Spencer, we protected who it “really” was that was writing that important back-page rumor column as a trade secret (no, I never penned the column while I was there).

Ordinary folk – For the rest of us that don’t fit into any of the above categories, it is still important to be on Twitter. Make sure you set some ground rules about how people will participate and what they will and won’t Tweet that is part of your corporate acceptable use policies. Make sure you give employees some basic training in libel laws and also mention that they should be able to Tweet about competitors and speak honestly. Understand that mistakes will occur and that sometimes human resources might have to help out here. Don’t get too heavy-handed though.

Finally, make sure you promote your Twitterers. List their IDs on their business cards, in their email sigs, and on your corporate Web site right next to their email addresses in your contact page. What you don’t list email addresses on your Web site? Hmm, that is the subject for another day.

When you think about it, the different Twitter accounts is similar to the different ways that companies use blogs too: the difference is that with 140 characters, a Tweet can be a lot more flexible than a longer blog entry in terms of developing a personna.

Free vs. Freemium in online markets

I was talking to a colleague of mine who is an Amazon Vine reviewer — a select group of customers who are invited to post their opinions about new books and other items on Amazon’s Web site. They get free copies, and their reviews aren’t edited or modified in any fashion by the company after they are written. I was jealous, but started thinking more about the meaning of free.

Coincidentally, I have been reading (on my iKindle, of course) Chris Anderson’s latest book “Free, the future of a radical price.” The book is based on a Wired magazine article of the same subject (he runs the editorial for the magazine). He describes the various efforts of vendors to make money at giving away free stuff, by building a market or demonstrating value or building word of mouth. In the digital age, it is easy to have a place to download an app or read through a Web site and then offer paid upgrades for people who want more. Fred Wilson coined the term “freemium” to refer to this practice, and it is now so widespread that most online shoppers have come to expect that they can get something for nothing on just about every Web site that they land on these days. Or least a limited 30 day trial or download or subscription.

Indeed, in the new ventures that I have been mentoring I start almost immediately thinking about what they can give away for free. It is still the best way to start out in this chaotic eWorld. If you are starting a new business, you might want to take the time to at least skim Anderson’s book. You also might want to read this New York Times article that analyzes the cash flow from Evernote, an online services company.

Evernote converts less than one percent of the 4500 customers who sign up everyday to try their service into paying customers at $5 a month. But the more interesting number is that within a year of using the free service, the conversion rate jumps to four percent, because customers get more deeply involved and are willing to pay to enable more storage or more features. This brings the share of revenue per customer up from three cents to 35 cents. That is a powerful argument towards free. What is also interesting is that their variable costs have been plummeting, as you would expect: from 50 cents a month per active user down to nine cents today.

This is very typical of an online business, and indeed another example is how Google continually adds storage to its Gmail service, or why Yahoo can offer unlimited email storage – because these costs are dropping fast.

Then I realized that I have been doing this exact same strategy for the last 15 or so years ever since I started this Web Informant mail newsletter/blog/social network thingie. Whatever it has become, I do spend a lot of time each week thinking about what I am going to write to you all, and then posting it in its various forms around the Internets. And I don’t ask you for money (well, I do ask for charitable contributions once a year, but that is another matter) and do it willingly and with the expectation that at some point in the future, you will “upgrade” to the paid Strom service of having me write something or speak somewhere or consult on something. Not all of you have hired me, of course, and some of you will never do so (don’t worry, I don’t take it personally). But enough of you do that this method has served me well in my business, bringing many loyal readers and clients over the years. The free Web Informants, and the various other cyber collections of stuff that I curate (there are tons of products on my various lists here) and hand-pick have built up a level of value, trust, and quality that I like to think you all appreciate.

Ten things to help promote a successful tech center

I was fortunate enough to cover the annual convention of the International Association of Science Parks, held this year in Raleigh, N.C. The group is composed of a variety of people who operate industrial and technology “parks” like the granddaddy of them all, Research Triangle Park, which is located nearby.

I have been to RTP many times, mostly to visit IBM, which is the huge anchor tenant there and has 10,000 or so employees working there. Over the years this IBM facility has gone through many iterations – it was a key player in the early days of the PC, but that business was sold to Lenovo years ago.

What I took away from my meetings was a set of ten principles for people who want to establish their own future successful tech centers.

1. Have a good source of university talent nearby. What made RTP work was its proximity to three great universities (hence the “triangle” in the name). Other science parks have figured this out but it is more than just being close by: you have to engage academia in interesting ways, and exploit cross-discipline work. One of the best examples of that is RTI International, a large mostly government-sponsored institution that is in RTP and has hundreds of research scientists that work jointly with the academics. “There is no one dominant industry here in RTP unlike Silicon Valley, and we have found that innovation occurs at the boundaries of various disciplines,” said one RTI manager to me.
2. The ideal situation is to cross-pollinate ideas between entrepreneurs, academics, government, and established industry. At a science park in Berlin, they worked with two different universities, one that specialized in the arts and one in the sciences, to create joint research projects and to enhance each other’s graduate programs.
3. Build community however you can. At RTP, there are softball leagues, golf games, bike paths, and various other events to try to get communities started and nurtured.
4. Build in your legacy for the next generation of leaders. Some of the companies at RTP have been there close to 50 years. “We endure because we had the longer-term vision and knew that as the older generation retires or ages out, we needed new faces. We realized that no one group was going to get to finish RTP,” says Rick Weddle, the CEO of RTP. “We needed to reach consensus around a grand scheme and create a trans-generational leadership legacy to see this through.”
5. You need a mix of big and small companies. Just like the best shopping malls, you want both big and small ventures to play off each other’s skills and needs. RTP has both, including three incubators that can handle the earliest of startups. “More jobs have come out of the smaller firms than out of the big companies put together,” said RTP’s Weddle. Since the 1970s, more than 1,500 RTP-grown startups have been created. That’s a lot of new jobs coming from someplace that was a bunch of “pig farms and tobacco fields” back in the 1950s, as one person put it. 
6. Eat your own dog food. In Brazil, a science park that was specializing in experimental construction technologies built a flexible building that demonstrated many of these technologies and was both a showroom and a proving ground for what they were trying to accomplish. I saw the same thing at TechColumbus where you could reconfigure office space by moving walls and other modules.
7. Test, and retest and don’t be afraid to fail. The best parks are the result of serendipitous experiments, unplanned fortuitous circumstances, and other oddities. You can’t plan everything so try a lot of different approaches.
8. Mixed use is essential. If you aren’t going to be in a center city, figure out what it will take to keep people near where they work. One of the things that RTP didn’t get right was nearby residential use, something that they are now building. People want to live near where they work. The ultimate example of this is at SAS, which isn’t inside RTP but nearby in its own office-park like setting. The CEO actually lives on campus. Too bad they didn’t think about housing for the rest of their staff.
9. Have a liberal telecommuting policy in place early. At IBM in Raleigh nearly 40% of its staff telecommutes. They did this for a number of reasons, but it just makes good sense. And while it is harder for managers to cope with people when they aren’t there, if you are going to attract the best and brightest people, they don’t have to show up at their desk every day to get their jobs done.
10. Have a mentoring plan in place early on. You want to exploit the learning and tutoring that happens in these highly intellectual environments. Hold seminars, encourage staffers to do community outreach, and in general get people talking to each other.

Playing Innovation Games

I went to Dallas this week to play a few games. Not Scrabble or Monopoly but serious games that are used as a mechanism to help customers better direct the features and futures of their software products. The setting was the annual user conference of Teres Solutions, a leading provider of credit union back office operations software suites. Facilitating the games was Luke Hohmann, the CEO of Enthiosys, who wrote a book, developed the idea and does dozens of these gaming events around the world every year.

The day of games was at times part encounter group, part revival meeting, part chaos, but totally serious work. The facilitators used a variety of public speaking, psychology, standard marketing techniques and group dynamics – along with the games – to elicit ideas and thoughts from the participants about product features and future product roadmaps and strategies for Teres.

“We tried to do other sessions at earlier conferences that involved our customers telling us what they wanted to see in our products, but they were unstructured and they turned more into bitch sessions,” said Rosa Trachta, a senior product manager at Teres. “We really didn’t end up getting the information that we wanted but saw the games at another conference and wanted to bring them here.”

The games we played involved no fancy technology – for the most part we used things found at office supply store such as index cards and flip charts rather than computer screen projectors. But more important than the materials was the processes used to get people talking to each other and collaborating on ideas.

The first game we played was called “20/20 vision,” based on when you visit your eye doctor and try to find what prescription will improve your eyesight by comparing lenses in pairs. In the game, the group expressed their preferences to a series of product enhancements that were printed on a series of index cards, and had been seeded ahead of time by Teres’ product managers. In the room were customers of Teres who managed departments at various credit unions. For each product enhancement, the customers would justify what they thought, how it could improve their jobs, or be better than what they have at present from Teres.

What impressed me is that unlike many breakout sessions in numerous conferences that I have been to, there was a constant give and take of conversation among the customers and with Hohmann leading the game. It was an honest stream of consciousness, almost too dense and thick for me to capture as a reporter – part of this was because the information was too technical for me and specific to their industry; but also because many people were speaking to each other at once. What I liked about this process was that Hohmann could get all sorts of information about the product and features without having actually touched it. He got down into the weeds about each feature and explored exactly what it meant to the daily user of the software.

I also liked that the customers started talking about their underlying business practices and how they did their jobs, such as working with credit bureaus, originating loans, and so forth. Given the current state of confusion in the financial services industry, it was fascinating to be at ground zero with the people in the room who actually have to approve consumer loans. These were people who were passionate about their application, because their daily jobs depend on it.

As more index cards are posted on the wall, the ranking changes as people argue for higher or lower placement of the specific features. It also becomes more difficult to rank them, and people would get into the finer points of the implications of each feature. We finished this game by evaluating a few of the features in more detail in terms of their financial benefits and costs.

The next game was called “Speed Boat” and involves eliminating obstacles, or anchors that will drag down a product, or slowing down a user’s productivity. A new set of index cards were distributed with a new group of participants to fill out. “We generally don’t do more than one game a day with the same people, because the process is so demanding,” says Hohmann. Then the fun began. Each person came up to the front of the room and pasted their cards on the wall, and others moved them around – the bigger the drag, the lower the card is placed on the wall. Within a few minutes, the wall was covered with items. The wall served as the basis of discussion of why these features were an issue and how they impacted a particular credit union’s business processes. As in the morning session, there was a lot of interaction with the audience, with suggestions flying fast and furious.

The third game was called “Buy a Feature” and this involved handing out Monopoly money that is used to purchase particular product features. (Some of Enthiosys’ other clients have actually minted their own currency. For example, the games at Intuit had pictures of founder Scott Cook on the bills.) Like Vegas, this game is rigged ahead of time because there isn’t enough dough to go around, and people have to pool their funds to get what they want. Again, a lot of give and take here among the participants.

How did the overall process fare? Jack Jordan, VP of product development for Teres, says, “One of the features got more value from the participants than I expected, and one feature that I thought had more priority ended up at the very bottom of the queue. This would have been a lot of development effort; we could very easily have built this feature into our product. Overall, the sessions have been very helpful.” What I saw was a very direct display of different priorities – some customers wanted X or Y features, for example, while others would find X or Y features not useful but want A or B.

I have done a few encounter sessions with computer product managers over my years as a consultant and reporter, and I have to say that the games process is a very efficient mechanism for getting very precise feedback and to help improve products. I was glad to be a witness to this process, and would urge other product teams to employ Enthiosys and its channel to help with their future product strategies. If you want more information, buy Hohmann’s book (which goes into detail on many more games that he’s designed) or attend one of his seminars.

Hatching new ideas at Washington University

One of the most fun things that I get to do professionally is be a volunteer judge at some of the entrepreneur competitions over at Washington University. Today I was listening to nine different student presentations for the final class projects at the “Hatchery“. The students learn to write business plans, refine their ideas, put together a slide deck and presentation, and figure out funding models and how they are going to create a new business during the course of the semester.

What was impressive were the presentations by the kids themselves. As a professional speaker, I can appreciate all the hard work that goes into polishing up a talk and making your points — and they only have 15 minutes to get across a lot of information for us to judge whether they make the grade. We have an additional 15 minutes to ask questions and all the students did well under our scrutiny.

Here are some of the lessons that I learned from my day at Wash U:

• Know your P&L’s. The weakest parts of the presentations were the financial portion. While the students submitted full accounting statements in their written backups, some of them made absolutely no sense to me. Either they were giving away too much equity for too little value, had odd gross margins of 89%, structured unsecured loans as their initial capitalization, or whatnot, clearly they all could use more work in this area.
• These are the Google generation, and many of them were all over Adwords and other online funding models. But one caution that I would have is that the best plans combined some aspects of online and offline funding and marketing mechanisms.
• Odd uses of IT resources. Some of the teams over-estimated the costs of IT support, some grossly underestimated them. $120,000 to build a Website? Try to do it for $1,000. A part-time CTO with a company that is still developing their iPhone app? I think not.
• Sales was another weak spot. One team that produces a very good student magazine was planning on expanding the magazine to other college campuses. They had never sold advertising until now — because Wash U. supports the publication. While they had some good ideas on how to do this, shoe leather and visiting local watering holes is not a sales strategy.
• Focus on the first hires. The most impressive presentation was by a company-to-be that is going to sell custom women’s sleepwear. What got me, apart from some of the girls modeling the goods, was how the CEO knew what she didn’t know and needed to hire right off the bat. She also had some very clever ideas on using user-generated contests to help refine and perfect her initial prototypes.

I wish all of the students well in their ventures, and I hope to see good things from some of them as the summer goes on and they put their ideas into practice.

Think big, start small, and move fast

At the Innovation conference, heard a great presentation from Tracie Gildehaus, the director of portals for Scottrade. Her motto is above — they constantly innovate with their company Intranet and have managed to continually evolve it over the years from a relatively pedestrian upload-the-Word-requirements-and-corporate-policies-manuals to a more Webbified 2.0 version that encompasses blogs, Wikis, and massive amounts of user-generated content. They now have 80 different “publishers” who are responsible for posting their own content, and some blog postings get read by half the staff within the first 24 hours that they are put online. How is that for reach and readership? One of their efforts is a corporate wiki for acronyms and core corporate policies and procedures called purplepedia that has dozens of active authors. Their Intranet now spans more than 70 different Web sites with more than 30,000 pages of content.

Cheap choices for Web hosting

These days, it doesn’t make sense to pay a lot of dough to host your Web site. I am going to give you three alternatives that won’t cost you more than $5 a month. All three are great for people who don’t have a lot of HTML coding expertise and don’t want to shell out the big bucks to pay for graphic designers and programmers. I have built sites using all three methods and while they do have their limitations, they are all acceptable for handling the basics, and in some cases will do a lot more advanced things as well.

Let’s start off with GoDaddy. First, we choose whatever dotcom name your little heart desires, and hopefully is still available.. Next, we take a look at what GoDaddy offers for its own Web hosting plans. If you go to their sign-up page online, you will see lots of choices. Pick the Economy Plan for Linux. If you want to host more than one domain from the same server, you would pick the Deluxe Plan. You can get a better deal for two-year contracts if you call their customer support line rather than signing up online. Still, it works out to $5 a month, on top of the registrar fee to register your domain.

Why Linux? Because we will be using their WordPress..org installation, and that works better on Linux. You don’t need to know anything about Linux to run your site, you get the same great features of having a world-class blogging platform that you have with a WordPress.com hosted site, and you can do a lot more with it as well.

Included in the GoDaddy hosting account are a ton of free applications. Besides WordPress, you can install Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, PostNuke, various shopping cart applications, phpBB, and dozens more. The WordPress install is very straightforward and takes a few minutes, and once that is done you can use your Web browser to run just about everything that you require.

Using GoDaddy-hosted WordPress is great if your content can work within the blogging format, if you want better control over your pages than you would get with WordPress.com-hosting, and if you want to add ads and analytics to your site but don’t want to build your pages from scratch. One thing that the self-hosted WordPress isn’t as good as the dotcom hosted is the ability to stream video content. You are better off using the dotcom hosting and buying the 5GB space upgrade and running your videos there.

Let’s move on to the second method, using Microsoft’s OfficeLive Small Business hosting account. What I like about OfficeLive SB is that you can buy your domain name through Microsoft, although if you plan on moving it to some other provider later on, that might be difficult. Microsoft also doesn’t charge you for the first year that you have the domain, and then $15 a year thereafter. You can’t beat that price. You go to the following page to sign up.

 The Microsoft plan is great if you have Windows and a relatively recent version of IE (v6 or later, running on XP or Vista) that you are going to use to build your site. They give you some simple templates for your page design, and if your site is going to be composed of a few static pages, then this is a really fast way to assemble a site and the price is rock-bottom. They will also hide your domain registration from public whois queries as part of the deal.

What about the third method? Check out the site Weebly.com. They offer free web site hosting, ties into Gmail and Register.com for domain registration as part of their package. I don’t care for Register.com because they charge $35 a year for registering your domain where GoDaddy and others charge less than $10, but what is appealing about Weebly is that you have a lot of control over page design and widgets and templates as well as integration into Google’s Gmail for your domain. The basic service is free, but if you want more than the freebie site – such as password-protected pages, audio players and support, it will cost the same as a more capable GoDaddy account, about $4 a month.

All three will give you more email addresses than you know what to do with, and all are good starting places for your own exploration for other hosting providers, which are overwhelming. Feel free to share your own recommendations here.

A good description of Wolfram’s Alpha

Can be found here, on Nova Spivack’s blog. Spivack is the CEO of Twine, which is another interesting service that helps people understand the semantic Web. Think of this as searching for things that you don’t yet know how to search for. It sounds very Zen. I don’t know where all this going, but I am paying attention.