Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Kathy Sierra has become a perennial hit at South by Southwest Interactive. She’s one of the prime movers behind O’Reilly’s Head First series of software books, and she’s won a large following with her smart application of neuroscience and psychology to the challenges of making software more user-friendly.

Although she suspending blogging at Creating Passionate Users last year, her archives are still available to inspire those looking for better solutions to usability problems. While I don’t write software, I love thinking about how Sierra’s insights apply to broader issues of teaching/training and to much broader issues of general management. Smart companies are increasingly turning to the insights of neuroscience to tease out better ways of doing things.

Some of what Sierra said in this year’s speech was old hat for her long-time followers, but who cares? Her talk was so popular that it filled Ballroom A at the Austin Convention Center, and then filled overflow rooms as well.

I won’t recap the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

• The goal of your products shouldn’t be to have users crowing about your company, or even about your products, but rather crowing about how they — the users — now “kick ass” by using our products. You want them saying “I kick ass!” (This is one of Sierra’s favorite lines, and always draws a laugh.)
• To do this, we need to make software applications that compensate for the missing “human-ness” in human-computer interactions.
• Why do people want to grow and get better? Read more
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Another good idea for a SXSW session: Get somebody as swift as Jason Fried to share his views on how to do business.

37signals makes online collaboration software such as Basecamp and Highrise. The company punches way above its weight: despite employing about 10 people, it has developed a large and devoted following, both for its sweet-and-simple products and for its blog, Signal vs. Noise.

From listening to Fried, it’s easy to understand where 37signals gets its devotion to simplicity: he talks in clear, declarative sentences that hammer his points home. His presentation was lucid and down-to-earth — just like his products.

The point of this session was to share the business lessons that 37signals has learned since it started up a few years ago. Here were some of the best points that Fried made:

–Entrepreneurs and makers of new products will always face “The great unknown” - the cloud of the unknown that usually scares people away from doing something new. But you don’t need to worry about what you don’t know. Just build something and see what happens.

–Don’t ever worry about what-if questions like “But what happens about when we have 1,000,000 customers?” Fried says: “Who knows, who cares.” The decisions you make now don’t have to last forever. If things need to change, you change.

Read more

Who will come up with the system for transforming the world’s giant backlog of printed books into e-books? I assume it will be done. The question is, by whom?

The blogosphere (including us) is awash in talk about Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader, and Steven Levy’s big Newsweek cover story about it. Sample reactions:

• Kevin Kelly thinks the Kindle is headed in the right direction, but doesn’t yet attain what he wants: “that one Cloudbook device still to come” that will integrate everything: books, video, Web, e-mail, phone, whatever — all in one place.
• Rex Hammock is in line with Kelly (and me, by the way): even last year, before the iPhone or the iPod Touch ever came out, he was calling for a book-sized, iPhone-like device that would let you read e-books and do all these other functions.
• John Scalzi is happy to have one of his own novels among the Kindle’s debut titles, but he doesn’t see shelling out $400 for a reader and no books when you could buy 50 printed books for the price.
• Robert Scoble thinks that the Kindle itself will probably fail, but could be important for opening the gateway to e-book readers that really work.
• Peter Kafka disputes the notion that the Kindle will, or even can, be the e-book equivalent of the iPod, simply “because the books you own, the ones you borrow from the library, and every book you buy for the forseeable future, are stubbornly locked in paper format. If you want to read a book on your Kindle, you’ll have to buy a digital copy.” This is very much unlike the current iPod model, in which you can load your whole CD collection — or songs you find online etc. — onto the device with minimal friction.

Which leads me back to my original question. In fuller form: Who will come up with the BitTorrent- or early-Napster-style system for jumping the analog-to-digital hurdle, to transform printed books into e-books?

Let’s do some amateur reverse-engineering to figure out what would be needed:

1. A workable system for translating large numbers of printed books into digital files. This could all sorts of approaches:

• optical scans, with or without character-recognition, image smoothing, and so on;
• system hacks of publisher/compositor computer networks that would enable direct piracy of typesetting files;*
• Project Gutenberg-style keyboarding ventures. It seems clear that a technologically-driven solution based on scanning would be infinitely preferable to relying upon individuals (haphazard volunteers, paid employees, whoever) to keyboard very much material.

2. For distribution of newly created digital files: BitTorrent and its existing analogues. In other words, at this point, the challenge becomes trivial, because it relies on technology already in place.

As far as I can tell, that’s all you would need. Fairly simple project, once you jump the analog/digital divide.

As for who would do this . . . I don’t know. Step #1 is potentially far more labor-intensive than the sort of coding at the root of BitTorrent or the original Napster. Then again, it might be just the sort of challenge that would inspire some in the MAKE crowd to get creative.

What do you think?

~

* Let me be explicit in saying that I would never advocate breaking the law this way. I’m just observing that it could be done.

Garmin and TomTom are in a bidding match to buy the digital mapping outfit Tele Atlas.

Tele Atlas to review TomTom’s sweetened bid

Dutch digital map company Tele Atlas, which is at the centre of a bidding war between navigation device makers Garmin and TomTom, said on Wednesday it would review TomTom’s revised offer.

Tele Atlas said in a statement it had received the intended bid from TomTom, raised to 30 euros per Tele Atlas share from a previous 21.25 euros, valuing the company at about 2.9 billion euros ($4.2 billion).

If you haven’t been following this story, it has everything to do with Nokia’s recent agreement to shell out $8.1 billion (an amount that Nokia keeps in its checkbook for just such contingencies) to buy NAVTEQ — which has built the biggest digital mapping database and which competes head-to-head with Tele Atlas.

Conveniently enough, NAVTEQ topped our latest Hoover’s Index list, so we profiled it in both text and video on our Hoover’s Index page.

Garmin in particular doesn’t want to be put over a barrel by a NAVTEQ-owning Nokia. The cell-phone giant could make life difficult for the GPS device maker, especially since (a) Garmin currently pays to use the NAVTEQ database in its own navigational devices, and (b) Nokia has been introducing GPS-enabled phones that could eat up a chunk of Garmin’s turf.

What’s at stake in the future: more and better interactive wireless location-driven applications. At the moment, it’s easy to have your Garmin device or Nokia smartphone to show you the map for a particular address. In the future, it will be much easier to get an answer to fuzzier questions along the lines of, “Hey, we’re here in Minneapolis for the conference, and we want Chinese food — where can we get Chinese food around here?”

The beneficiaries: NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas, of course. Their products have value to begin with, but any product will command a higher premium when it has a very particular value to certain bidders. It’s a nice place to be in, if you happen to have a giant mapping database in your hip pocket.

As predicted, Halo 3 sold like hotcakes when it debuted last week.

Microsoft’s Halo 3 release sets sales record

The marketing blitz paid off, as Microsoft reported $170 million in U.S. sales in the first 24 hours after Monday’s midnight release, breaking the U.S. first-day sales record set by predecessor Halo 2.

Meanwhile, Microsoft hasn’t won big with Vista, the newest version of the Windows operating system, which was released in January of this year:

Act Now and Get a Downgrade to the OS You Really Want, ABSOLUTELY FREE!

With Vista failing to win over the consumer and enterprise markets in the way it had imagined, Microsoft over the summer quietly began allowing PC makers to offer a “downgrade” option to customers who prefer XP to the pre-installed Vista software. Now the company has gone a step further and extended by five months the deadline to buy Windows XP at retail or with a new PC. Microsoft had planned to cut off XP sales on Jan. 30, 2008, one year after the launch of Vista. Now, it will cut them off on June 30, 2008.

Maybe if they had replaced the old, much-despised “Clippy” with the icon of a helpful Master Chief . . .