Mediablather podcast with Adam Christensen of IBM

Paul Gillin and I have restarted our ever-popular series of podcasts called MediaBlather. This week we interview Adam Christensen, the head of social media communications for IBM. Just get a look at some of these stats:

  • Internal blogs: 17,000
  • Members of the Beehive social network: 60,000
  • Daily page views on IBM’s internal wiki: 1,000,000
  • IBMers on Twitter: 3,000
  • IBMers on Facebook: 52,000
  • IBMers on LinkedIn: 198,000

You can download and listen to the podcast here.

 

The evolution of Web-based enterprise video

This week Brightcove begins a new lower-priced video service called Express that starts at $100 a month and offers some impressive features. I’m glad to see them in this space, which is still very much in the pre-Gutenberg publishing era. I thought I would take this moment to talk about some of the issues involved in publishing Web videos for corporate uses, putting aside all the tectonic shifts that are happening in the Web entertainment arena for another essay.

To put things in perspective, realize that it took only a few years for the Web to evolve from its first crude text-only efforts to a full graphical experience. Yet it has taken more than a decade to get videos inside the browser page. And while there are dozens of video streaming service providers, including Brightcove, Wistia, Fliqz and Kaltura, that offer ways of delivering videos, none of them are as easy to use as they could be, and almost none of them offer one-stop solutions for publishers.

In the last year I have spent a lot of time with video publishing as a result of my five-minute screencast videos, where I write, review, narrate and produce everything about a particular product. The product’s vendor sponsors each video that appears on my WebInformant.tv site along with 20 other places around the Internet.

Just take a look at the most popular Web content creation tool of the moment, WordPress, as a good case in point. If you create your own blog and host it using WordPress.com, you can purchase a “space upgrade” for $20 a year and start uploading video content. But if you decide that you want more control over your page design and host your blog on your own Web server, this space upgrade option isn’t available and you have to dive into the nasty world of third-party video player plug-ins. Even though you are still using WordPress software. It is these sorts of gotchas that can drive you crazy, or keep me fully employed explaining them.

All of these video services operate in some broad basic ways. After you prepare your video, you upload it to their server and then annotate it with any supporting text, keywords, and other information. You are then given a bunch of HTML code to embed the video player into your Web page. When you view the page, you see a player that you can click on and control the video playback, just as you would come to expect from YouTube et al. The special embed code contains tracking information that the service collects and then offers reports so you can see who watched what videos.

The service that I use at the moment is Wistia.com. Their most basic plan starts at less than $40 a month, and offers some very sophisticated tracking and embedding features. Their video player is very clean and crisp, and I haven’t had too many reports about playback quality issues from my site. I recommend that you start with them and see if they meet your needs, and if not then you might want to ask the following questions:

First, do you need a branded player for your videos? Meaning that you have your logo somewhere on the first or end screen, or underneath the video image. For some people, this is important. Some services offer a single player, like Wistia, while others, such as Brightcove, give you more stylistic choices.

Second, do you need control over the ultimate size of the video image on your Web site? The various hosting services either offer this explicitly, or else (like the basic plan from Fliqz.com) leave it up to you to edit their embed codes that they provide for you to copy and paste into your Web page. If you have to manually edit the code, you want to maintain the aspect ration (horizontal to vertical) so your video displays correctly. (It helps if you produce your video for the ultimate intended size that it will appear on your Web site, too.)

Third, how big of an audience do you expect for your videos? Given that these are targeted at potential customers and not people looking for the latest skateboarding cats or guys gone wild, you should set expectations accordingly: several thousand views over a period of a few months is a good audience. Some of the services, like Wistia, charge by playbacks per month. Brightcove charges on the number of individual videos and on your bitstream consumption, which is harder to estimate. Kaltura offers a free WordPress plug-in for hosting up to 10 GB of monthly video data.

Fourth, what kinds of reports and features are available from your service provider? With some services like Fliqz and Brightcove, their more expensive plans give you more features and choices.

Finally, what else is or isn’t included in the service? One of the things that I like about Wistia is the ability to share the video project with a number of collaborators, such as my clients, who can view the video directly, without my having to email them a huge attachment.

As you can see, there is a still a lot to deal with when it comes to Web videos. If you have another site that you would like to recommend, please let me know on my Strominator blog. And if you are a subscriber of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey, you can listen to me and Sam talk about some of these video hosting and production issues on a Webinar that we will host this coming Thursday afternoon. For those of you that aren’t subscribers, I will post my Powerpoint slides on my slideshare.net/davidstrom account here.

Managing your firewalls with McAfee Firewall Enterprise Profiler

Profiler makes it easier to troubleshoot and manage up to five McAfee Enterprise firewalls from one central console and help you keep up with changes to your network and applications. You can examine the implications to real-time changes in your network before you commit them and also quickly do ad hoc analysis on rule sets.

Version 1.5.1
Price: $19,500 for appliance model
http://www.mcafee.com/us/local_content/datasheets/ds_fw_profiler.pdf

Book review: Detecting Malice by Robert Hansen

In his ebook Detecting Malice, Robert Hansen has a difficult task. To compile in one place a variety of attack descriptions and forensic methods for various Internet intrusions. He does a great job of covering the landscape, talking in plain language without a lot of technical jargon and with many clear examples. If you have never read packet captures this book will be an eye opener, and if you have some exposure to hacking tools and Web traces then you will do fine with the examples that he portrays.

Think that your Web site is immune from these exploits? Think again. Just about everyone has some kind of exposure, and part of understanding exactly what that is is being able to get into the bad guys’ mindset and see how they can penetrate your servers.

I highly recommend this book, well worth the time and money. It will stimulate your thinking and certainly raise your level of paranoia, and perhaps level of motivation, to lock things down.

Digging deeper in microfinance with Kiva.org

I have been a long time donor to Kiva.org, a peer microfinance lending site that has been around for several years. When I first heard about it I thought it was an interesting idea and donated some money to fund a few different third-world start up businesses.

Kiva works by hooking up generous folks with microfinance lenders by promoting the individual beneficiaries on their Web site. You get the feeling that your donation is going straight into the pockets of these worthy folks. And you can watch your donation be repaid in painfully small increments as the business owner (usually women) succeeds.

The only trouble is this isn’t quite accurate. The charity does support the individuals pictured on their site, but the timeline for how the funds are actually distributed aren’t correct. The microfinance institutions fund most loans before they are posted on Kiva’s site, so in a sense you are participating in a scheme of sorts.

I got started down this path with a story in the New York Times by Stephanie Strom (sadly, no relation) about posts by David Roodman, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development. Roodman blew the whistle on Kiva about a month ago on his blog, and many others in this space have chimed in. You can view them here.

Since then, the folks at Kiva have done an excellent job at fixing some of the misperceptions about their processes and releasing even more information to understand what they are doing. I believe they are sincere in their efforts and have acted with honor and well-meaning to address Roodman’s complaints.

But I am still somewhat confused, and the more that I have dug deeper into microfinance charities, the less I really know.

Kiva, at your command, will take the money that is repaid and keep it in their ecosystem, allowing you to re-lend your initial stake in $25 increments to new projects. You can also donate the funds to the organization if you are tired of choosing worthy recipients. I have made 8 loans in the past several years, some of them repaid in full, some still owing money. While it is frustrating to know that the inspirational stories aren’t really where my money is going, on the whole I am happy with the outcomes and glad that my minimal funds can make a difference in a few people’s lives.

I am also impressed with the whole Kiva quantitative ecosystem as well. There is a link to KivaPedia, a list of all their lenders and links to their Web sites, and KivaData, an independent Web site by Jon Earles which analyzes Kiva lending data. Neither of these efforts would be possible without Kiva providing data and programming interfaces to access it.

But the more that I thought about what Kiva was doing, the more questions I began to ask:

How about a “Kiva Gold” membership that allowed those of us who have been with the organization through a few loan cycles to bypass all the poster stories and go right to a lender that is delivering quality non-defaulting loans at lower interest rates and running with a low overhead? Wouldn’t it be better if I could direct my funds towards this lender? My thought on this is that if I already have a relationship with a lender thru Kiva and they have repaid my loan (or loans), then why not support them directly? Well, you can’t. Most lenders aren’t set up to take donations, especially in US currency or from US credit cards. They also have no real way to track what you give and what you get back. That is why Kiva is critical.

Plus, there isn’t any easy way to find them using the Kiva search screens, or any of the data analysis sources, at least that I know of. There are other microlending sites such as Wokai.org that show you the interest rates of their lenders (they can do this because they have just two lenders at the moment) and show how it compares with local loan sharks for their potential customers. Some of the interest rates charged by Kiva’s approved lenders are close to 20% a year, which sounds high to those of us in the first world with 5% mortgages but is typical for this audience. Wokai.org only allows three periods to recycle your funds before they take it from you and put into working capital, which I am not sure I like either.

Another choice is Microplace.org, which gives you an actual investment return on your donation, but that isn’t important to me, plus their finances are hidden behind eBay (their owners) so not much in the transparency realm there either. And then there are the big microfinance guns such as Accionusa.org or GrameenFoundation.org — both of which have huge overheads and salaries as a percentage of their programs, which doesn’t thrill me either.

How about better metrics and data for the whole microfinance lending community? There are a few efforts here. For mainstream charities, Guidestar.org allows you to view their most recent IRS 990 reports, where you can exactly how much overhead they have and who gets paid what. There is also a site called MFITransparency, which is beginning to calculate lending and delinquency rates. And Mixmarket.org, which has so much data on lenders that even my operations research trained brain gets overwhelmed. One of the truisms of all this Web 2.0 mashup stuff is that the more data you make accessible, the more people want to analyze things.

I have come full circle on Kiva as a result of all this Internet research — meaning that I still like their model, their low overheads, and their high(er) transparency. If Kiva could add a way to search their lenders by interest rate or just bypass the individual stories, that would help.

What’s the Best Approach to Business Continuity?

Business continuity is critical to delivering world-class service to your customers, so it’s important to understand the variety of approaches available. Whether you ultimately decide to employ cloud services or a remote hot site data center, understanding the implications of your decisions may be more important than the actual technologies you deploy.

You can read more about this in my feature story in this month’s Baseline magazine here.

Have you driven a Ford lately?

The news this week that Ford is back in the black, and how they did so without becoming a ward of the US taxpayer, is impressive. Coincidentally, I took a look at two of the company’s latest cars to see what they are doing with installing technology there, and came away with mixed feelings. Yes, they are moving in the right direction, albeit clumsily. And while few people buy a car because of the installed computing features, they are becoming a bigger part of the usage equation as we spend more time commuting and working from our cars.

Ford has two very different computing programs underway, and sadly they are mutually exclusive by design. The latest effort is called Ford Work Solutions, and it is only available on its truck line. The system is based on having a touch screen Windows CE 6.5 inch display in the dash, running a wide variety of software programs including a suite of office apps (but not the real MS Office), LogMeIn, GPS, entertainment controls, and more. Yes, that LogMeIn. It comes with a wide variety of confusing options, including a Bluetooth keyboard, printer, and cellular broadband data modem for Internet connectivity. The ideal target buyer is a building contractor who needs to work from the job site, or a delivery service. You can create documents and print them out in the cab, do a remote control session back to your office to pick up some data, and surf the Web to answer customer queries. The touch screen is a bit clunky, because some of the controls are designed for fingers on the screen rather than on the keyboard, but by and large it seemed well thought out.

But I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was going back to the early days of WebTV, and using technology that was already obsolete before its time found its way into many current hotel rooms. Part of the challenge that car makers have is that by the time a computer is installed in the vehicle, it is out of date. Granted, this is a computer that you don’t have to worry too much about — Ford claims it will withstand brutal environmental conditions — but it still is a Windows CE based device that is closer to my Uverse TV settop box or my mobile phone than the PC that I am using to write this essay.

The in-dash PC comes with a few handy things, though. It has SD card and USB ports right there on the dash so you can import files or connect to external data sources. You can synch up your phone’s contacts and do voice command dialing. It has the GPS display and your audio system controls so you don’t have to hunt around for them. And there is an optional tool tracking software where you can stick RFID tags on your tools and instantly do a census before you leave a job site and make sure you got everything back in the truck before you leave. There is also a vehicle tracking and scheduling software called Crew Chief that one Chicago pizza delivery company is using to match demand with supply, as the trucks have their own baking ovens that can finish the pies and get them piping hot to their customers. That seems to offer the most promise, if you can figure out the options.

Ford has done a mediocre job of getting the word out about Work Solutions. They haven’t any press loaners to try anywhere in the country — I had to find one locally that was being used by one of their corporate dealer trainers.The company Web site has some information, but it doesn’t satisfy anyone who has moderate tech knowledge, and indeed asks more questions than it answers. They could do better and appeal to more IT-minded potential buyers, rather than the big and brawny Joe SixPack contractors. (Actually, the contractor that my interior designer wife currently uses has a pretty sophisticated Web site that tracks his job progress and tasks, but that is story for another essay.) Each truck has to be specially ordered with the computer factory installed, so you can’t just walk in off the lot and drive one home. They aren’t all that expensive as computer options go — the monthly fee for the cellular modem is probably the biggest obstacle just because people don’t normally think their car needs an additional monthly payment for communications. And there are a confusing array of options and add-ons, which is why the dealers need training here. The biggest issue  is that they aren’t available in their sedans. I shouldn’t have to buy a pickup truck, or even their sexy Transit Connects (which you see all over Europe and are just being imported here) to get a measly WinCE PC.

Why not just spend your money on a laptop with a cellular modem and call it a day? You can get a “real” PC with a bigger screen and put whatever apps on it you desire, and still have the connectivity back to your office or Internet access if you need it. The only trouble is that you either have to leave your laptop at risk inside your car or have to tote it around with you. If you are a contractor or a delivery person or someone else constantly on the go, it might make sense to go with the in-dash PC.

What about the other Ford tech package? This is the Sync software that they developed with Microsoft. It is designed for a character-mode display and isn’t a real computer in the sense of even a CE-based device. It can sync up with your cell phone, offer turn by turn navigation instructions (but not a visual display of the landscape), and automatically mute the radio when an incoming call is detected for your cell phone. This is available on most of the newer model cars, and Ford will throw in the navigation package free if you buy other options for Sync. Or so I was led to believe. Again, figuring out all these options is maddening, and why so many of us run screaming from our local car dealers.

Now, you should know that I have rather quirky car buying habits: I have only owned cars for about 25 years, roughtly half my life, and only bought one Big Three American car over that period (my current car was made in Canada and is actually offered by Ford, although I bought the Toyota version). I don’t drive it enough to consider the Work Solutions package even if it were available in a sedan.

While I give Ford credit for trying to add some interesting technology to their vehicles, they have a long way to go before many people will choose to use it. Yet it is noteworthy in that they are attempting to go after a part of the market that the other car makers have ignored: road warriors that want to get work done in their cars, and not just deliver fancy infotainment systems. Now if they could appeal to the nerds they might have a winner.