I'm an Australian, based in the Washington, DC, area of the United States. I spend a lot of time there with Jasmine, Australia's best-known speedsolver of the Rubik's Cube. Prior to the US, Jasmine and I were based in London, UK. We have also lived previously in the United States and Australia.
I have worked for an Australian business rules and compliance company since 1999 in Australia, the US and the UK. I have also lectured in IT and Law related topics at King's College, London, and at The Australian National University.
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Sun, 18 Mar 2007 [Australian eastern time]
RuleBurst mentioned on Vendorprisey blog
Thomas Otter has an interesting write-up of my company, RuleBurst, on his Vendorprisey blog. RuleBurst sells a product suite to prevent, detect and cure breaches of regulations, rules and policy. The process begins with automation of complex decisions, using familiar business tools, and includes simulation and analytic capabilities. The software integrates easily with enterprise software such as SAP, which is a major RuleBurst partner.
Thomas Otter writes (in part):
The article actually links to my publication list!I could see all sorts of uses for this application for testing policies and then passing the configuration rules to multiple applications, and when the policy changes, update the application rules. So image you have 20 union agreements and your company has grown with lots of acquisitions. This means you are faced with several 100 pages of rules and policies, with conflicts and ambiguities. Typically analysing this lot would take ages, even before any attempt to automate it, and whenever you create a new policy it would need to be checked against old ones. With Ruleburst this process could be dramatically improved, both in terms of speed and accuracy. The Ruleburst is delivered as a webservice that you can call from SAP or other applications.
Technorati tags for this post: Business RuleBurst SAP SOA business+rules
Sun, 26 Nov 2006 [Australian eastern time]CrunchNotes recently ran an article with the title "Best Way To Be Ignored" and the following text:
Submit a company for review that starts off with:
“_____.com Leads Web 2.0 Revolution with New Unrivalled Revenue-Sharing Social Networking Site
– In one of the most monumental projects ever created for the Internet, _____.com has launched a never-before-seen user-powered news site, positioning the company to achieve success of MySpace and YouTube proportions.”
This made me smile. Then I used Google to search for that text and found that there really are people making exactly those claims.
As someone who is somewhat involved in marketing and PR (although my main job is doing other things), this highlights the omni-present tension between wanting to make big claims and needing some evidence to show that you are actually delivering on your claims. A reference site where someone is doing what you are trying to sell is invaluable! Unfortunately for the market, there is a lot of hype and a lot of noise, which sometimes makes it very difficult to find the companies, products and services that would most meet a need.
Of course, I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with the fundamentals of a company which runs PR like the example above... but this PR is ultimately not as helpful as something that refers extenisvely to solid performance metrics which show definite value. Sometimes people just need to work more on their press releases.
Technorati tags for this post: Business marketing public+relations PR CrunchNotes
Sun, 01 Oct 2006 [Australian eastern time]
Bootstrapping new IT companies
I just found an awesome (although now slightly old) article from the San Francisco Chronicle about young engineers starting IT companies in the US (linked from GoGoGetter). The article describes its protagonists as living and working in cramped communal quarters to focus on their ideas and build companies quickly:
It's the quintessential post-adolescent male fantasy of the business world: a grungy remix of the "Revenge of the Nerds" frat house with bunk beds and Snoopy sheets, a refrigerator packed with soda and beer, and a garage that doubles as the company break room, where employees can channel surf from the couch or take a dip in the inflatable swimming pool. There is no firewall between life and work for these young entrepreneurs...
The article singles out three start-ups for attention: Meetro, Box.net and HubPages -- and they actually all have pretty cool ideas.
When I first started out in IT, we used to joke about how our company's software engineers would claim they could produce anything (or so it seemed) in a weekend, and how they would hide in an office, accepting only flat food (pizzas) under the door. From the Chronicle article, it seems this dream is alive and well around Silicon Valley today.
This reminds me of some interesting discussions I have had with people around London. You would think that in a city of London's size (7.5 million people in Greater London, which makes it the largest city in Europe), it would be possible to find any opportunity. However, I have never heard of this style of garage-based startup over here. More generally, it is interesting to see how the United States really is the biggest hub around in IT, with even European companies like SAP focusing more and more of their corporate operations in the US.
GoGoGetter has a cool idea based on all of this: a Big Brother-like reality show for future IT entrepreneurs:
They’d be required to live and work together in a small geek abode, ala the Meetro commune, and given, say, $10K in seed money to survive on over the next several months. These would be people from disparate backgrounds rather than friends, who have the potential to either gel or clash mightily.
I would watch it!
Technorati tags for this post: Business Web+2.0 start-up Meetro Box.net HubPages Silicon+Valley London GoGoGetter
Different web advertising models
Robert Scoble argues that not all web advertising is created equal. Flashy, colourful banner advertising, based on a cost per thousand impressions, is ineffective, he says -- and a discretionary expense which businesses will curb when they need to watch costs. However, he claims that search-based text advertising, charged on a click-through model, does have an impact on web users -- and that Google is becoming a Yellow Pages for the internet. He uses this argument to explain a recent large share price drop at Yahoo!, which was not matched by Google.
This is an interesting argument, and more nuanced than the common street wisdom I often hear, which holds that web advertising is a complete waste of time. However, Google must still be keen to find a way to expand its revenue beyond advertising, by making money from all the other cool ideas it produces.
Technorati tags for this post: Business Google Yahoo advertising Robert+Scoble
Fri, 29 Sep 2006 [Australian eastern time]Seth Godin recently published some thoughts on the fortunes and management of the Ford Motor Company. As he points out, it's easy to kick someone who is down, but his comments about the company's short-term focus at the expense of long-term strategy are interesting. Here's a little extract from the full piece:
Making cars is not an unprofitable undertaking, unless you insist on making it one. At just about every turn the company ignored the market, alienated their workforce, distanced themselves from their distribution network, vilified their customers and chose short-term expediency ahead of long-term change. They lobbied to keep gas mileage standards high (doing the opposite would have increased the market for cars). They lobbied to keep SUVs unregulated (and got addicted to a short-term high-profit alternative to cars) and they bought remarkable brands and made them average.
Technorati tags for this post: Business Seth+Godin Ford
Sun, 27 Aug 2006 [Australian eastern time]Tim Harford, of BBC TV's Trust Me: I'm an Economist has written an interesting article on product sabotage for the BBC website. The article talks about a common problem for businesses who want to sell something: they want to sell at the maximum price, but different people have different prices they are willing to pay because each group values different aspects of the product. The trick is to work out what a product is worth to each group in the market and to determine pricing strategies for the separate groups accordingly. Each pricing strategy is based on what is valuable to a particular group. In some cases, customers will demand a lower-priced version, and vendors will remove or disable features to justify a lower price, without cannibalising their own high-end market. This is called "product sabotage" -- but it has the positive effect of making products available to the widest range of people.
Haford describes different ways that businesses can meet this challenge. For example, Starbucks is described as having a smaller "short" coffee which is sold cheaply but not listed on menus; and IBM is described as having sold a downmarket printer which was actually the same as a more expensive printer, but with some of its features turned off.
There is an interesting discussion of the article on Digg. Comments range from predictable complaints about Starbuck's, to a comment that it is best to buy the largest coffee sizes because they are cheaper per millilitre, to a comment that smaller cappuccinos have better foam, to a rant about the evils of taxation, which is said to distort businesses' pricing models!
Technorati tags for this post: Business Tim+Harford Trust+Me+I'm+An+Economist economics
Sun, 28 May 2006 [Australian eastern time]
"Almost a home run" doesn't count
I have been working in business development-related areas for a number of years now. I don't know how many times I have met people from companies who have "just about" sewn up a major deal, which "will" make their company huge.
Seth Godin has an interesting post on this topic. He refers to a conversation where:
Just got a phone call from someone in the UK. He was in Buffalo, NY, excited to share the news about a meeting he just left. This was the beginning of his breakthrough, he said. 400 stores around the country would be carrying his new product (up from zero). It was (about to be) a home run.
The problem is that these deals often don't work out. Every company wants a huge deal to make growth easy... but in fact, these are hard work and quite frustrating to pursue. Godin points out the importance of smaller, but more frequent, deals which he refers to as "singles" (to continue the baseball analogy):
Singles are less thrilling and require way too much work, but they build on each other. Over time, if you grow by 10 or 15% every week or month, you grow, reliably. And that steady growth transforms into every faster growth.
This reminds me of an interesting article which was run in The Register about a week ago. The Register reported that Intel was not the only candidate to supply chips for new Apple models. It points to PA Semi as another candidate:
PA Semi -- a maker of low-power Power processors -- formed a tight relationship with Apple -- one meant to result in it delivering chips for Apple's notebook line and possibly desktops. The two companies shared software engineering work, trying to see how Apple's applications could be ported onto PA Semi's silicon. When word leaked out that Apple had signed on with Intel, it shocked the PA Semi staff, according to multiple sources.
"PA Semi was counting on that deal," said one source. "They had lots of guys walking around in a daze when Apple went to Intel. They had no idea that would actually happen."
For people working in marketing and sales in growing high-tech companies, this type of situation is incredibly frustrating -- particularly if the potential deal means more to them than it would to the customer. But I guess that is also why work in these companies can be so rewarding, as it's pretty satisfying when the big deals come through!
Technorati tags for this post: Business Seth+Godin marketing PA+Semi
Thu, 05 Jan 2006 [Australian eastern time]
Ikea fine dining and baby-sitting
Spiegel Online has an interesting article about Ikea's German stores taking on a role they had not expected (see also a reference to this story on Boing Boing). It seems that Ikea's cafeteria and baby-sitting services, intended for furniture shoppers, are so cheap and attractive that many people from pensioners to travellers seek out Ikea as a dining venue of choice, and parents drop off their children for baby-sitting and then leave the store to do other things!
Sun, 14 Aug 2005 [Australian eastern time]The company where I work has rebranded itself, from SoftLaw to RuleBurst®. The new RuleBurst name better reflects what the company does -- modelling complex rules for analysis and computer execution. See the company's website for more about the name change.
Mon, 01 Aug 2005 [Australian eastern time]
Employee involvement in cost-cutting: an interesting article about American Airlines
Over the weekend, I came across an interesting article in The Christian Science Monitor (via Boing Boing) which shows that corporate cost-control can be about empowering employees to a much greater extent than the media often suggests. The article's (quite compelling, I think) suggestion is that when companies need to get their costs of doing business down, management needs first to instil awareness of the issue throughout the company, and then to be receptive to employees' suggestions about potential efficiencies.
The article is based on the experience of American Airlines, which has recently returned to profitability after five years of losses:
Two American Airlines mechanics didn't like having to toss out $200 drill bits once they got dull. So they rigged up some old machine parts - a vacuum-cleaner belt and a motor from a science project - and built "Thumping Ralph." It's essentially a drill-bit sharpener that allows them to get more use out of each bit. The savings, according to the company: as much as $300,000 a year.
And it was a group of pilots who realized that they could taxi just as safely with one engine as with two. That was instituted as policy has helped cut American's fuel consumption even as prices have continued to rise to record levels.
...
While the other so-called legacy carriers are also slashing labor costs and increasing efficiency in an effort to compete with successful low-cost airlines, American has been the most aggressive in emulating the positive employee relations of low-cost rivals. Indeed, when American's management intensified its cost-saving efforts, it didn't turn to high-priced outside consultants. Rather, it asked its employees, since they do their jobs day in and out and know them probably better than anyone else.
There are probably a couple of reasons for involving employees heavily: first, their experience working at a detailed level in the business; and second, good employer-employee relationships are less likely to result in industrial action.