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.

Custom publishing 2.0 with MagCloud

Not every Web service has to be completely an online operation. Take as an example Netflix – when they started it wasn’t really possible to stream an entire DVD across the Internets and they developed a system to mail DVDs to their customers. Now, of course, they have some very innovative ways to “watch instantly” your videos, including to Ethernet-connected Blu-Ray and Xbox players. 

But the combination of on and offline components isn’t widely exploited by many businesses, either because they are so enamored by Web 2.0 (or whatever we are calling it this week), or because they lack the offline skill sets or institutional memories to be effective in both camps. 

Let’s take a look at one service that does a great job in both worlds, called MagCloud.com, which is sponsored by HP. As someone who once ran the editorial operations of several computer magazines that have gone by the wayside (no fault of my own in particular, at least so I like to think), I welcome the effort. 

It works this way. Let’s say you want to produce a small number of copies of a custom published magazine – say something more than a sales brochure that has actual editorial content. You want to approach this project with the same kind of quality that a regular printed magazine would entail – full color printing, nice graphics and layout, and mailed to potential readers. This is the idea behind their service. You create your magazine just as you would with the usual Adobe tools, upload the digital files to their service, along with the mailing addresses of your readers. HP takes care of printing, proofing, binding, polybagging and postage. 

You can get an idea of what is involved by browsing their Web site and seeing some of the magazines that are offered for sale there. I got a copy of “Georgia Speaker” – a magazine that is published by the Atlanta chapter of the National Speakers Association (an organization that I am a member). It was well put together and arrived in the mail in a few days and cost about $5 all told. 

What I like about MagCloud is that it combines the best attributes of print-on-demand with online access for searchability, marketing and awareness. The price is reasonable and you can set up any number of custom-published pieces. Obviously, HP Is doing this to tout its printing business, but why not? 

When I first heard of MagCloud, I thought the service would email me the PDF that I would then print myself. And I was pleasantly surprised when the magazine arrived in my snail mail a few days later. Then I realized the genius of this service. How much stuff do you get in the mail that you actually look forward to these days? Other than paychecks from my clients and my Netflix DVDs, not a heckuva lot. This can be high impact just because it is something so retro that it stands out. 

Now, I don’t know if MagCloud has a future, but certainly it can bring some bright spots of hope to some of the 11,000 journalists who lost their jobs last year (according to the Columbia Journalism Review). While that is small change compared to the number of idled GM or US Steel workers, it still means that there is a large talent pool to produce custom-published zines. And if any of you do produce your own custom magazines using the service, please let me know and I will post links to them here.

MarkMonitor Brandjacking Index Year in Review

In this report for MarkMonitor, I look at  the overall trends for 2008. We found that con artists are continuing to mature and sharpen their business practices as they hijack well-known brands for their own profit. Fully 80 percent of the abusive domains that we identified in our first study, in 2007, were still live during our study period and brandjackers continue to use cybersquatting as their tool of choice. Phishing attacks increased in the last quarter of 2008,
particularly targeted at financial sites.

It is called the Brandjacking Index and measures how pervasive these attacks are and to identify the potential threats to the world’s strongest brands.

Slow and steady wins online

While many of us marvel at those Web sites and “viral videos” that take the Internets by storm and quickly gain viewership, I think the sign of truly successful sites are those that more slowly and incrementally gain their fans. The motto for today’s essay is that slow and steady will win the online video race. And those sites that are quick to gain attention are also quick to lose it: the longer it takes you to build your followers, the better a chance you’ve have at keeping them.

Too often we get consumed by playing the numbers game: is traffic for our Web site up from last month? What were the big ticket articles or pages that brought in the most visitors? Did we get anything posted on Slashdot (which has a huge following, and can often spike traffic if articles get the right position)? These aren’t the right questions to be asking.

Instead, lengthen your time horizon to the next quarter, and look for efforts that will build interest for more than just the quick hit. Is your site truly useful as a resource and will bring back returning visitors several times over the course of the year? Do you regularly post new content? Are your most popular pages easily accessible from your home page or clearly labeled at the top menu bar? Do you tie in your Web site with social network group postings and with regular (weekly or twice monthly) email blasts that have something of value in them? Do you look at your site logs and understand what they are telling you?

I realize that there are a lot of questions here, more than answers. Too often, Web site operators are easily swayed by the latest trend-let or Search Engine Optimization seminar come-on. It doesn’t have to be that way. Here are a couple of examples from my own efforts that you can use to guide your own strategies.

People talk about the power of LinkedIn and other social networks. I have built my own into several hundred people gradually, by adding a few people at a time. Now the whole thing is self-sustaining. And while it seems impressive now when you look at the total members that I can reach, I think it is a much better list because I built them up gradually. I use LinkedIn to find sources for stories that I am working on, or to try to discover new clients from my installed base. After all, these are the people that are most familiar with my work. I also use it as an online resume/reference source, so potential clients can check out what my previous clients have said about me.

The same goes for you, the Web Informant reader. These weekly emails are a great way for me to continue to engage you, because I hopefully send something out of value rather than a marketing blast that is content-free. I hear from many of you that save these missives, or that reply to ones that I wrote months ago, and that is a very potent connection and a great motivation for me to continue to write them.

As many of you know, I began creating my own series of sponsored video screencast product reviews over on WebInformant.tv. So far I have posted 15 videos, and they are slowly gaining viewership on more than a dozen different video sharing and how-to Web sites. While none of them are at the level of the Coke-and-Mentos guys, I am glad to see that day after day and week after week they are getting watched and more importantly, serve as a great resource for enterprise IT managers that are trying to figure out whether they can buy these products.

Another thought: always freely offer something of value on your Web site, even if you are tempted to charge for it. The more people can stop and smell and taste what you have, the more they are going to want to stick around and eventually dive in deeper. Some people suggest that you offer almost everything for free, and then charge them to customize your content. I can’t tell you how many Web sites that I visit that still don’t do this, and insist on registering you or tracking you or verifying you before you can get inside the front door. You can make money by giving things away for free.

And if you feel like sharing your own thoughts with my audience, please post your comments here.

My network stimulus package

With all the talk of billions for this program or that in Washington, I thought I would put together my own stimulus package that can help your network run smoother. I don’t know whether $10 billion to buy steel (domestic preferred) for new bridges or $9 billion to put up new rural DSL lines will really be effective (my initial reaction is dubious), but the idea of spending lots of money quickly by our Congress is a scary one. And despite serving on my local school board several years, I am not qualified to run any cabinet department or national office (I have dutifully and fully paid my income taxes and don’t have any dark family embarrassments). But I think I can offer a few ideas for you. So here are a few suggestions that won’t cost (much) dough and could save your own bacon if you are trying to impress the boss that your name doesn’t belong on the cut list quite yet.

First off, do you actually know what kind of traffic is running on your network? Have you looked at your top applications? You would be surprised. At an event that I attended yesterday sponsored by Blue Coat, they talked about how when they did these assessments they always found ten times the number of applications that most IT admins thought they were supporting. That is a factor of ten. The best story was a company that found out that one of its most popular mission critical apps was a home-grown one running on a box under someone’s desk.  I am sure this isn’t unique, or even rare. It doesn’t matter what fancy tool you use to do this apps census, and there are many vendors besides Blue Coat who would gladly come in and do one for you (in the hopes that you will eventually buy their gear). But the more that you know, the more you fine tune your network and reduce the traffic from the apps that aren’t business-related.

Second, have you looked at your latency lately? Has someone along the way added a few new router hops somewhere that you didn’t know about? I am amazed that we are still talking about a concept that is decades old and should be better understood. Latency improvements are the best bang for your buck short of hiring a DC lobbyist to get some of that earmark money. And you don’t have to wait for any Congressional action either.

Third, how many people still have admin rights to their own desktop PCs? This makes it impossible to manage these machines, and allows users to install their own apps. Granted, it may be politically difficult to change this policy now, but hey, change is in the air and you might as well start somewhere.

Next, have you looked at your user accounts lately and seen if anyone that you have laid off is still using your network? You would be surprised at how often this happens. At one hospital that I visited, the IT manager told me that an employee who was laid off went home and started using his girlfriend’s login credentials at night. They caught it because the girlfriend was still logged in at the same time at work. And the number of people that I talk to that don’t have regular password change policies, or have the same password for all of their critical servers, is amazingly high. Take the time to get this set up properly. Given the number of layoffs these days, this is probably the biggest thing that you can do to fix your security loopholes that doesn’t even cost you a dime.

I will have lots of other suggestions, if you are interested; check out my article in next week’s Information Security magazine. I will post a link to it here when it goes live. In the meantime, you can post your own network stimulus ideas here if you are feeling a need to share them.