The Week in Geek™ – March 15, 2010
Carroll School Ranks #9 in BusinessWeek!
Huge point of pride as BC’s Carroll School of Management (profile) was ranked #9 in the nation in BusinessWeek’s 2010 “Best Undergraduate Business Programs”. It was great to crack the Top Ten, as only those schools made the cut for publication in the print edition, however an expanded table is available online. The rankings are based on measures of student satisfaction, post-graduation outcomes, and academic quality. Across all these fronts the administration has been working tirelessly – upping advising, crafting new programs, and embedding top-tier career counseling inside the school. The Dean’s office points out that three year data, not printed in the study, indicates BC has a recruiter rank of 3rd nationally, and seniors rated BC’s job placement as A+, a great accomplishment in a down economy. We’ve still got work to do, but it’s great to see recognition for our efforts. It’s been a good year for BC’s programs. The Full-Time MBA program ranked #23 nationally in Financial Times’ 2010 list (that’s 47 worldwide when global competition is included).
IS faculty, we’ve also received assurances from BusinessWeek that starting in 2011 the magazine will begin including IS in specialty program rankings. Here’s hoping that our program, with it’s 3 fold increase in majors in 3 years, award-winning field studies, and venture programs that continue to spew startups, will rate.
Setting the Stage: Technology, The Manager, and the Modern Enterprise
Chapters continue to roll out for our free online textbook. The first draft of the newly released first chapter, still in unedited .pdf form, covers much of the material used in our ‘first class’ of the semester. The chapter begins framing how tech has radically reshaped the business landscape during the past decade, it underscores that the tech revolution is championed by the young, it shows how every managerial discipline has become more reliant on tech, and career opportunities are introduced. The latter part of the chapter summarizes the book’s other 13 themes. Faculty can request a free, printed version from Flat World Knowledge. Edited versions of the other chapters in version 1.1 are already online. And look for another complete update & refresh this summer, available in August for Fall semester courses.
Can Twitter Make Money?
Twitter may now be profitable – Technology Review reports that the $25 million deals with both Microsoft and Google that deliver real-time Twitter results to both search rivals was enough to push the firm into the black. And Yahoo will also start featuring Twitter integration across its various services. Google & Bing recognize that real-time information can be critical when news breaks – ‘the crowd’ now reports well ahead of the media filter or conventional systems. Consider the Jan. 7th Mountain View tremors (Grad TechTrek just missed the quiver). Google had quake-confirming results from Twitter about 8 minutes before anything registered from national seismic monitoring services (video: Twitter & Google execs talk real-time search). The Yahoo! deal offers additional advantage – encouraging visitors to Yahoo to tweet the site’s content as well as consume what Twitter serves up. While we’re still not sure of what a commercially successful Twitter will look like, the service has spawned a huge eco-system of thousands of apps and related products. StockTwits sifts through tweets that discuss stocks. Bit.ly leads the URL shortner race key for squeezing links into 140 characters (Have you tried the service’s analytics? Very cool to track activities around your post). YFrog & TweetPhoto embed photos, while TwitVid and others do the same for video. TweetDeck and Seesmic provide easy tweeting tools that also filter out content (like creating a column for mentions or keywords, like the #cs021 hash tag we’re using for my “Computers in Management” course). CoTweet – the service most widely used by corporate Twitter accounts (allowing multiple users to an account, analytics, and timed tweet releases, among other benefits), was recently acquired. Of course, such clients also present a problem for Twitter since it means the service is used by many who rarely visit Twitter.com (known in management circles as the free-rider problem). That also makes measuring Twitter more difficult. Page views and unique visitors – metrics used by conventional websites, are pretty much meaningless for Twitter. Even counting the number of tweets doesn’t tell the full story, as many people are using Twitter not so much to post, but to observe & filter (Twitter’s goal is to become the ‘pulse of the planet’). Still, with 75 million users and climbing, Twitter is now pushing ahead of the nay-sayers who once claimed the service was a mere fad. Course note: savvy observers can spot our Fall 2009 speaker, Twitter investor (and BC alum), Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet in the Tech Review photo montage. The talk was yet another example of how our alumni continue to help keep classroom learning cutting edge (thanks again, Bijan)!
Foursquare Introduces New Tools for Businesses
The location-based combo bar game, scavenger hunt, and promotional tool, Foursquare, continues to gain legitimate corporate partners while upping the quality of its tools for firms seeking to use the platform for customer engagement. New corporate tools allow firms to view a dashboard of Foursquare visitors including patterns and demographics (see cool dashboard pic from the NY Times). Corporate users can even reach out to users – say welcome new users or offer specials to win-back those who haven’t stopped by in a while. Foursquare has since inked deals with Zagat, the New York Times, HBO, Warner Brothers, the History Channel, Bravo, and a slew of Conde Naste publications (the latter just in time for socializing hipsters attending Fashion Week). And now social media powerhouse Starbucks is in, too. Check in to five separate Starbucks locations and you get the nifty ‘Barista’ badge at the left. The badges are fun, but turning Foursquare into a loyalty program is the real trick, and many are doing just that. While I still think Foursquare has to sanitize its offerings to be more family-friendly (yes, I’m talking about ‘that’ badge), corporate partnerships are a very good sign. A bunch of the Undergrad TechTrek crowd became Foursquare fans over spring break, and it was neat to see specials pop up throughout San Francisco and Mountain view (e.g. ‘free appetizers for the 5th check in’, or the mysterious ‘stop in and find Shlomo for a free drink’ which, for the record, we didn’t do with the under 21 crowd). Foursquare has lots of competitors (Gowalla being the biggest), and Twitter and Facebook are rolling-out location-based tagging for tweets / status updates. All this suggests the geotagged mobile web is about to have its mainstream coming out party.
Video Interview with Jeff Smith of Smule
The kind folks at Smule spent time with our TechTrekkers, sharing their insights on becoming one of the standout successes of the app economy. The firm’s hits include Ocarina, Leaf Trombone, and the wildly successful “I Am T Pain” (which, I have to admit, I was delighted to ‘require’ as part of ‘course materials’ for TechTrek this semester). While our visit was hosted by a BC MBA alum who serves as VP of Development, all may enjoy this interview with Smule CEO Jeff Smith. The video offers fascinating insights an App Store vs. Android. Smith makes the point that Android is not a single deployment platform in the way the App store is. Features and hardware differ by phone, so Android app developers are really faced with ‘write once, test everywhere’. Android has also been tougher to monetize, and the cost to build for the platform is estimated at 2x to 3x. Smith estimates that going from iPhone to iPad will be a single digit percentage of work (2-3%). We also learned I Am T-Pain simply couldn’t be made for existing Android handsets due to abstraction layer (iPhone apps can directly access hardware, and T-Pain’s Auto-Tune mimicry taxes the handset to the limit – the abstraction layer on Android slows things down too much). Apps themselves are now channels, with Smith reporting in the video that some 500,000 songs have been sold through the T-Pain app. Rockin’!
Android Gains as Windows Mobile Plunges
While iPhone continues to dominate and Blackberry has long-established leadership, Android is blasting ahead of old timmers Windows Mobile and Palm. Comscore reports that Backberry and iPhone gained subscribers, but Android saw the biggest jump, from 2.8% to 7.1%. Windows mobile is still ahead of Android, but it fell from 19.7% to 15.1% share. Google also continues to expand its repertoire of offerings, buying photo editing site Picnik (which curiously is Flickr’s default photo editor), snapping up DocVerse (a startup that allows users to collaboratively edit Microsoft Office documents online), and is launching a location-based shopping service that shows if local branches of firms like BestBuy, Sears, and Pottery Barn have an item in stock that you’re looking for (a blue dot will indicate local availability). Some high-ranking Googlers clearly see mobile as important to the firm’s future. Google Europe Boss John Herlihy recently said “In Three Years Desktops Will Be Irrelevant”. Bold.
The Science of Building Trust with Social Media
Mashable continues to produce really great content – ranking them right up there with GigaOM and TechCrunch for quality tech-industry online-only content. This super read offers four quick-takes on how to do it right with social media. See Southwest’s honest response on the Kevin Smith blowup “I’ve read the tweets all night from @thatkevinsmith – He’ll be getting a call at home from our Customer Relations VP tonight.”, VeggieGrill’s shout out to a blogger that essentially says, ‘you’ve got great ideas & we’re doing it, here’s where you can try’ – blogger eventually goes on to praise & advocate. Governer Schwartzenegger goes YouTube to praise a tweeted idea that he should ‘sign used cars’ the state is selling to get more money, while the Domino’s President’s YouTube response is played back with ‘believability ratings’ (he rates high). Learning to communicate via new media is now a key skill – see article for suggestions on how to best construct response in the age of social media dialog.
Wal-Mart Buys VuDu: Jumps Into Video Streaming
This may also be interesting for faculty using the Netflix Case: Wal-Mart’s on-again, off-again competition with Netflix is on again. The Arkansas retail giant (and regularly ranked Fortune 1 behemoth), has spent a reported $100 million to buy video streaming service VuDu. This seems like a very risk move. WalMart goes up not only against red-hot subscription video service Netflix, but also against Apple, Amazon, Google, studio-backed Hulu, Microsoft, and many others. Not sure I’d put my cash on the Sam’s Club sibling in this race.
Want a Job? Get a Computer Science Degree
I’d add “Information Systems” to this list – our business / technology blend remains hugely valuable. But the numbers clearly indicate that those who geek up continue to have great prospects and bulky starting salaries despite a down economy. Yes, tech is once again cool on campus. For the record, while NetworkWorld quotes schools crowing about 5% enrollment boosts and 87% job placement, we’ve consistently done better on both accounts in BC’s IS Dept. I’d welcome a chance to share our success with NetworkWorld!
Fast Company’s Most Innovative Firms
Interesting to compare the Fast Company list with the Top Innovator’s List from MIT’s Technology Review. A123 makes the list – BC Tech Council members, the CEO of A123 will be speaking at this spring’s dinner.
Behind the Scenes at Facebook’s Grown Up HQ
It was great to spend time at the new Facebook digs in both January and March of this year. For those who didn’t make our field study, here are some slides, courtesy of Fast Company (BTW: Facebook tops the Fast Company innovative list).
Notes On Leadership
In a guest post for TechCrunch, Ben Horowitz (partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, co-founder with Andreessen of OpsWare, and one of Andreessen’s execs at Netscape), writes on successful Valley leadership, citing former BC Football Coach and Intuit Chair Bill Campbell, Apple’s Steve Jobs, and Intuit’s Andy Grove. It’s a great list with spot-on criteria. But I think Horowitz might think it’s not possible to ‘teach’ the Campbell trait because he’s never been to BC. This isn’t a chalk-and-talk, textbook & lecture skill, to be sure. But at a university dedicated to the education of “men and women for others“, with a deep commitment to volunteerism as well as ‘cura personalis’ or development of the person, I think BC’s as close as any come to creating Campbells as anyone can be. We’ll try to send you a few of BC-led startups, Ben, and you can see for yourself 🙂