Content Log

Doing Davos Does Not Help Blogging

Me in a Davos collaboration session on building new resilience into business

Where I last left you, I was on my way to Davos and the World Economic Forum. I tried twittering to keep up with what was going on, but it's really tricky spending any time writing when you are at an event like that. In the central lobby area, there are only a few seats and I would always see Justin Fox, correspondent for Time Magazine, occupying some of the few sofas along with his wife and other "Young Global Pioneers" of the World Economic Forum. I asked Justin if he had been to any of the sessions, which he said he had, but it seemed like he was always blogging. It was good that he was there though. He had a Mac and I could borrow a recharge every once in a while.

A giant YouTuber addressing 1000 people in the WEF plenary hall, while the President of Switzerland sitting alone below him is probably trying to figure out what is going on.

Chad Hurley, founder of YouTube, apologizing for mistakenly showing the previously shown video for the video greetings from George Bush. Sorry George! (BTW, I doubt you will ever see George Bush at Davos. Alliances and Internationalism are not really his thing.)

That's the problem when there is so much stuff going on. You need to sit down and digest a huge amount of information, impressions, emotions and sheer overwhelmingness. The year before, I wrote one blog and missed so much, so I thought I should really just experience this and then write it down. Now I won't be able to get on with writing my blog properly until I do. So forgive this somewhat rambling post.

Robert Scoble interviewing Vinod Khosla. Scoble doesn't have a problem keeping up his blog.

About a week after Davos, a friend of mine asked me who I met this year at Davos. Ironically, the only person I could think of was Emma Thompson and a bunch of CEOs. So, I start where I finished last time. On the plane back from Zurich to London, I saw Emma waiting for her luggage and I just had to say hello. I asked her how she like Davos. Her response was, "Wasn't that amazing! I must write it down!" At the time, I thought yeah, me too and I will get to it on Monday. Five months later...

Loic LeMeur interviews Emma Thompson

( If you can't see the video, try: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIHnqEhAAA0 )

In reality, I met a lot more people. I met Tony Blair and Bono, which I thought was pretty cool. I tried to get up early(ish) and at 8am in the morning one day I just saw Blair walking down a white, glistening snow covered street with only a couple of people in tow. I just reached out as I walked in the opposite direction and said "Hello Mr. Blair." With a politician's instinct, he grinned, said hello, shook my hand and moved on. Bono came tumbling out of some party the night before along with Queen Raina of Jordan and her entourage from London, and few other celebrities. I was in an WEF IT Governors meeting where guys like Bill Gates and Michael Dell were supposed to be, but were probably at the same party. Being at Davos is part of being in elevated circles, but even the elevated circles have their upper levels.

Passing Henry Kissinger in the hall

Compared to the previous year, the US political events were far less overwhelming given the current presidential elections, but the global politics portions was at least as interesting. Hanging around after Condoleeza Rice's speech, I saw Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch also hanging around me along with Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan. I doubt they recognized me though. I was invited to a breakfast session with Purvez Musharraf, who was much more articulate and persuasive than I expected. I got some flack from some people of even attending, but I sat next to Jasmine Whitbread, CEO of Save the Children UK, who I figured if she was interested in different opinions of what was going, why could I be. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, and the blogger Robert Scoble were there as well and you can read Scoble's account of what happened. I saw Gordon Brown in a couple of sessions, but at the time I was no where near as furious with him then as I am now.

Hamid Karzai in a rush. (So I just didn't have good camera with me. :-( )

Pervez Musharraf talking over a croissant at breakfast

Technology definitely took a back seat to Social Enterprise this year. Although there were still luminaries, some of which I got introduced to thanks to Brian Behlendorf (man that guy networks well), it was guys like Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus that took center stage. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, scoffed at being called legendary after being introduced after Muhammad Yunus, the man who created Microfinance. Unlike last year where Web 2.0 was a major theme, people who are trying to change the lives of people using the forces of capitalism and entrepreneurialism rightly were given the spotlight. Most of them you would never heard of, but they seem to really be making a difference in the developing world. One you may have heard of is Nicholas Negroponte, who I sat next to at a lunch after he mistakenly tried to steal mine. We have since exchanged emails about how Alfresco and open source might be able to help the One Laptop Per Child initiative. If open source can help serve up content to all those OLPC systems, so much the better.

Nicholas Negroponte with blogger Jeff Jarvis taking notes. Sorry this is a scary picture, but I was sitting right next to the guy when he was speaking.

Most people at Davos are business people. Emma Thompson apparently described the crowd on BBC Radio 4 as a bunch of gray, middle aged businessmen in suits. (Well excuse me Emma!) There were in all the sessions and the vast majority of them are extremely nice and sociable. It was pretty cool hanging out with the Accel guys, Joe Schoendorf and Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm, drinking 50 year old Bordeaux wine. I shared a taxi with George Soros, who stole a place from my friend Magid Abraham, CEO of ComScore. Soros then had the misfortune of me plugging at him on the future of the dollar and pound. Eventually, he asked me what I did and I explained about Alfresco. George then said, "I *like* open source." So here's a scoop for you, George Soros is bearish on the US economy, the dollar, the pound and George Bush and bullish on China, India, and Open Source.

Nobel Prize Winner, Muhammad Yunus

I attended a panel on Strategy in a Networked World with Sam DiPiazza, CEO of PWC, Chris Conde of Sungard, Marc Benioff from Salesforce, Michael Porter, business professor at the Harvard Business School, and moderated by Tom Stewart, editor of the Harvard Business Review. I have met all of them and they are all nice, grey, middle aged and in suits, although Benioff stands out as being different. He is a bit younger, dresses more informally and is less likely to listen to what you are saying. I was in a collaboration session with him, business people from Cisco, HP, Sun and social entrepreneurs at the front line bringing in water, power and connectivity. Chris Gopalakrishan, COO of Infosys, actually knows a lot more about the 3rd world than most. Yet Mark was trying to tell him and others that the solution to poverty, disease and privation is a Web 2.0 center in villages running Salesforce.com.

Marc Benioff telling us how its gonna be

The dinners and parties continued to be the most impressive and fun part of Davos. The Accel party is definitely one of the highlights. One moment at this year's party that I really liked was being able to introduce Michael Porter to Tim O'Reilly. Tim definitely knew who Michael Porter was, but Michael had no idea that Tim was the one who started a lot of all this Web 2.0 stuff. If Tim O'Reilly came away impressed, this event must be something else. Also, I am hanging around talking to people waiting to chat with Larry Page and find I am talking to the CEO of Mattel. Good thing I didn't ask him about toys from China. One of the Accel guys introduced me to the video blogger Loic LeMeur and I said, "I know you! You're famous." Immediately afterwards is the Google party with absolutely everyone in there. I attended a great "Eat Local" dinner hosted by Chez Panisse owner, Alice Waters, and the theater director Peter Sellars. The food was absolutely fabulous and it was really nice to meet Alice since I have enjoyed her food since my days in Berkeley, although Sergey Brin got a lot more attention. The Nerd's Dinner was also fascinating with so many famous tech people, I couldn't possibly list them here. That I have to blog separately.

I tried to get a picture of Michael Porter when he wasn't moving his hands. I failed. He is very animated.

In the end though, it is the people who make you think that have the most lasting impression. As always, it is great pleasure to hang around Geoffrey Moore, from whom I always learn something. I was also very pleased to meet Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, and his wife. On the last night, I hung out with he and his wife and discovered he is a great jazz pianist. However, I learned about his next book about the Millennial generation joining the work force. The futurist Paul Saffo, the host of the Nerd's Dinner makes me feel like a real laggard. I am still in awe of Tim O'Reilly. Although I don't agree with some of what Tom Friedman writes, I still respect his perspective, which as influential when we started Alfresco, and I got to meet him this time and learn about his next book about Green Technology.

Don Tapscott, Author of Wikinomics

Finally, Bill Gates got me thinking a lot. His speech on what he is doing next was well worth attending. Bill's thesis is that if we can apply the principles of capitalism to solving the world's problems, we can eradicate hunger, poverty, disease, lack of power and climate change. Market and financial incentives alone are insufficient. We should all acting based upon self-interest and incentivized to work in that self-interest. Governments can help with tax incentives, but giving recognition to those companies and individuals are potentially more powerful. Companies should also be incentivized not to give money, but talent, which in turn provides recognition of the individual and organization making a difference. This recognition can be its own market-based reward since it will benefit the company in the competitive marketplace. This approach can be used to provide not just manpower, but solutions to accessibility of information, medicine and healthcare.

Bill Gates talking about what he is planning next.

Perhaps Google thought of this all along, but it seems like Bill has a point. As much as that pains me to say, clearly the programs and techniques that we have used in the past have not worked and we need to try something else. Maybe its time to try Bill's plan. I was challenged by one of the more liberal participants to not even think that. He said, "It's easy for him to say that. He's a billionaire. He made his money with blood money stealing from the poor children of the world." That's a bit extreme and I was just as culpable in this guy's eyes for even suggesting it, but I think it's worth exploring.

Mitch Kapoor

If you have gotten this far, well done. Now that I have this one out of the way, I can concentrate on blogging properly hopefully.

Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief of WPP, asking everyone to calm down.

Off to Davos and the World Economic Form

I am currently writing this on the train from Zurich Airport to Davos journeying through amazing Swiss scenery. The flight from Heathrow was completely full and Davos was probably the reason. I saw a few faces that were vaguely familiar, probably because they won the Nobel prize. In the seat behind me was Emma Thompson, which was a thrill for me and looking at all the faces of the guys behind me queuing to get out of the airplane, probably a thrill for them too. Our investor from Accel, Kevin Comolli, was in the front of the plane.

I am cheating and using o picture from last year's trip.

Lakes as large as seas, snow covered mountains, rushing rivers and cows grazing on pastoral land have been rushing by me for nearly an hour. It's hard to believe it has been a year since the last time I saw this gorgeous scenery, but what an amazing year it has been. The insights that I gained from Davos last year helped me understand what was going on in the world and how it affected Alfresco. Davos was where I finally understood Web 2.0 and it is core to where we are taking the company.

This year's theme for Davos is the Power of Collaborative Innovation, a topic near and dear to my heart. Although, there is less tech content than last year, I will be particularly interested in how innovation and collaboration can be applied to some of the world's most difficult problems. I am also keenly interested to see where the economy is heading. If this group of people don't know, we're in a heap of trouble. As always, I will look forward to the workshop sessions and the one on one interaction that is unique to Davos.

I am going to try to keep up my blogging while I am here and try a Twitter or three, as well as keeping my Facebook page up to date.

Ooooh. It's starting to snow now...

Scaling Out Like Technorati

My fellow World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, was also in Dalian, China for the “Meeting of New Champions” or “Summer Davos” as the Chinese like to call it. During Davos in January, I had the great misfortune of pitching Alfresco against Technorati in a competition between tech pioneer companies. As fantastically well as Alfresco is doing, Technorati has the temerity to compete against Google in blog search and win.

I got the chance to talk to Dave during the conference and ask him some questions on the technology and architecture behind Technorati, the internet blog search site. I thought that someone who could take ordinary computer components and build a huge internet architecture could possibly teach something to people running enterprise architectures that are puny in comparison.

Technorati is a web site that tracks blogs, pictures and any user generated content and allows you to search those sites about what people are thinking, seeing and hearing. When a new or urgent situation breaks out, you can do worse than to search Technorati for immediate reaction. Every day, every hour, every second, Technorati is indexing over 10 million blogs with over 10 billion objects. Technorati’s user base is doubling every six months and quick and accurate response is critical for retaining those users.

David Sifry, Founder and Chairman of Technorati

I asked Dave about his architecture and what applicability their might be for enterprise architectures.

John Newton: In building Technorati, what were some of the issues that you had in architecting your systems.

David Sifry: I was looking at just temporal information. I had no idea how big it could get. When I looked at the architecture, instead of architecting it right, I architected it for right now. I had no big budget and I didn’t want to wait six months to build it. Also, I had no idea what the killer app would be.

I focused on data flexibility. At the time, that meant putting everything into a relational database. That was okay while the size of the indexes is less than RAM and about a million blocks of data. That was okay while there were less than 20 million blogs.

The next generation took advantage of data parallelism. That meant upon update send a signal to all the other systems. We expanded the data over several “shards” [segments of data partitioned on different databases on separate machines].

What was surprising was that we were writing as much data as we were reading. At this point Technorati was as big as some of the biggest OLTP. Even so, maintaining data integrity was important, because you would want the link count [count of how many other blogs point to a particular URL] to be out of sync. This put real pressure on the system. At the same time, we realized that time was more important dimension than URL. People didn’t want to sort or search on URL, they wanted to search on time. [i.e. what are the latest blogs on a particular subject?]

By this point, we understood the application more and more. The app [Technorati] is about real time access. You need to be able to count on finding latest information on a subject. That’s when we built the third architecture. Scaling was well understood and we build the shards on time rather than on URLs. Instead of putting data into a DBMS, we put it into special purpose databases. It was more of a bus-based architecture. Each database could be scalable and grow as big as we needed.

JN: The notion of shards - did you call it that at the time? I have been looking into shards and I was only aware of or heard of them for about the last year.

DS: Back in 2002 when we were pitching this to VCs, I at least explained the theory. All I just thought through the problem carefully. Doing it this way, we could add hundreds of systems, lots of cheap CPUs, RAM and disks. It provides inherent parallelism. I can’t believe that I was the first one to think this up.

JN: How big does this architecture scale?

DS: We are loading one terabyte a day into Technorati. That’s 100 million blogs or about 10 billion objects. A lot of is new types of tagged data. There are about a half billion videos and photos.

With all that data, you have to think about what do you throw away?  We can’t really delete anything, because we are potentially losing an asset. We don’t delete anything. So we take data out of the spin cycle. [Transitory data used in preparation.] We take the long-term data and put it into low latency storage.

When data is doubling in size every six months, that means that only one quarter is a year old. We don’t need to worry old data.

JN: How do you deal with large number of users with very large data sets?

DS: Any off the shelf tools falls over. There is a lot of interesting analysis on old data, but no off the shelf tools can handle that much data. It’s only just now that some tools can handle it.

JN: What are those tools?

DS: One is Green Plum by a bunch of O’Reilly guys. If you use ordinary data warehouse tools, they would just scream and shout.

JN: Actually what I was originally referring to was the fact that you are showing lots of data that are not users used to enterprise information management tools. How do you present this information to consumer-level users? How do you deal with the user interface and visualization of all this data?

DS: Gotcha. It depends on what the user wants to get out of Technorati. If the user wants search results, then we give it to them. Sometimes they want to browse or discover information. We have spent a lot of time on visual design. Then we give them lots of bright, shiny things for them to click on.  Things like metadata, video or other links.

We have used enterprise class web tools to analyze what users are doing? We look at the click stream and see what is successful or not. That helps to make the information contextual.

One of the big mistakes that we made is to not do this [buy click stream analysis tools] sooner. It was only $80K. Up to that point it was so much trial and error. I’m glad we finally did it. Now we can see how much time a user spends on a feature. We can see page views, goals per visitor.

JN: So what do you measure on Technorati?

DS: Measuring a web site is like forecasting the weather. Yesterday it’s sunny and today it is cloudy. Why is it cloudy?  Sometimes you have no idea. Sometimes you realize that that a change in barometric pressure has a lot to do with it.

We look at the number of newbies, number of reports, session lengths and then measure them against prior periods. It’s not always consistent.

I had never built a B2C site before. I just focused on me, on what I wanted. That worked well for a while when I was the target audience. But we have to build for a broader audience.

JN: At Alfresco, we measure conversions. Are you measuring things like performance? Does that affect retention of users?

DS: Of course, but if the system is falling down, then even performance doesn’t matter. So I don’t get too stressed out about it.

JN: When we met at Davos you wanted to move Technorati to be the Internet Now! Is that still the case?

DS: Everything is shifting. I wanted it to be a site that everyone is able to use. We forgot about the core users that just wanted to find out about blogs and any real time information. In an attempt to jump the chasm, we chased after 100 million users and tried to be everything to everyone. Now we try to make blogs and user driven content available for those looking for that.

Also performance is improved significantly. Now I notice how slow other sites are. This is a total tribute to the engineering team. Everything is easier and faster.

Pretty soon we will have a whole lot of stuff that we have been working for a year.

JN: Can you say what it is?

DS: I don’t pre-announce.

JN: What does the Technorati brand stand for today?

DS: Good question. What’s popping up now on the internet, especially user generated content? It’s about users tagging user generated content and finding it.

JN: Who are your competitors?

DS: I probably sound like the typical entrepreneur, but nobody really seriously. Google provides blog search, but other than that nobody really. Other people are trying to identify and tag information like Digg and del.icio.us, but they aren’t really competition.

JN: What do you want Technorati to be in two years time? Five years would be ridiculous.

DS: I would like Technorati to be a profitable business that is strongly differentiated. It will be the place that you would go for mobile, RSS or push information. For all that you would come to Technorati.

Jimmy Wales and Enterprise Wikis

At the Summer Davos in Dalian, China, I was able to speak to Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, about wikis in the enterprise. Wikipedia has become not only the world’s most popular wiki, but the ninth most popular web site in the world. Jimmy is here as a Young Global Leader with others that are defining where the world is going in the future.

Although wikis have become popular for people to collaborate on alternatives to encyclopedias, wikis can be used as tools to collaborate in the enterprise. Wikis are now being used to define product specifications, user documentation, policies and procedures. In addition, teams are using wikis to share ideas, discuss issues and define strategy. MediaWiki is the engine beneath Wikipedia and thus developed by the Wikipedia Foundation. It is available for anyone to use in their enterprise since it open source, so, I figured that Jimmy was a good person to ask about wikis in the enterprise.

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

John Newton: I have been interested in wikis in the enterprise for a while. Do you have any general comments on how they can be used?

Jimmy Wales: Wikis have been used to collaborate on all sorts of documents. They have even been used to manage schedules. I have seen people abandon [Microsoft] Outlook and schedule in a wiki as a better alternative.

The big difference is a design change in process. People don’t necessarily want to use a CMS. You need to drop the a priori assumptions on how you do workflow. The old notions of workflow are too cumbersome. Wikis provide enormous flexibility in how users can work together.

JN: Is this a replacement for workflow or a new way to do workflow?

JW: It’s more an ad hoc workflow by the users. In a wiki, users decide who can contribute to the group and create their own ad hoc workflows. It is a completely different security model. With the old model, you can define that a certain group can edit some content and define who owns the content.

With wikis, it is a completely different model that is more open. The implications of this are that you have accountability versus a gate keeper. Who is allowed to do what is socially enforced.

For instance, you can have an HR policy that says that John can update the HR policy, but the company policy is that regular workers can’t update that policy. But if you can have employees fix spelling errors or explain obscure paragraphs, then it would make that policy better. But that doesn’t reflect current policy, even though what is important is who does what to that policy and what matters is who is accountable.

[We didn’t discuss this, but a wiki allows anyone to revert changes back to their original state, so any malicious damage can be undone. Likewise an administrator of a page can prevent individuals from updating the page or anything on a site. That is the source of accountability.]

JN: How many organizations or enterprises are using MediaWiki in the enterprise?

JW: I have no idea. I have no clue on the quantity or number of systems used in the enterprise. We don’t track stuff like that.

But MediaWiki has its strengths and weaknesses in the enterprise. Its strengths are that it is the same software that runs the 9th largest website on the internet and can be used by anyone. I have a copy of MediaWiki on my laptop and it is the same software, except for all the caching stuff. It is highly scalable. You know that it can go from department to enterprise-wide to internet.

Its disadvantages are that it doesn’t integrate with corporate logins. There is no Outlook integration. I don’t really care about that stuff.

[At this point, Mozilla COO John Lilly, who happened to be sitting at the same table, interjected. “Yeah, no open source software does. But we use MediaWiki a lot. We have tons of documentation in it.”]

JW: I saw an implementation [of an enterprise wiki] at Best Buy. I was invited to Best Buy on the day they launched their wiki. They were using FlexWiki from Microsoft. That has got to be the worst wiki on the planet. It’s open source, but it was awful.

JN: Then why did they use it?

JW: The classic reason. Microsoft asked them to use it. It integrated with Microsoft logins, accounting and stuff like that. I haven’t followed FlexWiki since then, but I haven’t heard anything about it either.

JN: I believe that Microsoft’s wiki strategy now is to use SharePoint as the platform, for a lack of a better term, for collaboration. I have seen a number of situations where enterprises are comparing wikis and SharePoint. Are you seeing [your new company] Wikia positioned against SharePoint?

JW: Wikia is really focused on large, public-facing web sites. We don’t really have the consulting available to make it work in the enterprise. I have never run into SharePoint. I have never seen it. In fact, I don’t really know anything about SharePoint, only anecdotes.

JN: Most people reading this have probably never heard of Wikia, can you define it briefly?

JW: Wikipedia is about building out the reference library. Wikia is about building out everything else like magazines, novels, books. It is not neutral [like Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View requirement]. It has humor, fun, it’s political.  It’s every publication you would want to build.

It’s also about Search. Most important is that it is open source and open algorithms. We use [Apache projects] Lucene and Nutch. Search so far has been about good enough search and good quality search has become a commodity. There is still an opportunity to build around brand and distribution.

JN: Aren’t you worried that would dilute the Wikia brand by addressing both the wiki and search markets?

JW: Not really, because my personal brand is about mass participation, open source, transparency and editorial content.

JN: I have heard Twiki being used in enterprises as much as MediaWiki. Any idea which is being used more often?

JW: I don’t know Twiki that well. I am really more familiar with the mass market, consumer market. I would think that MediaWiki is used more often.

[John Lilly interjects: “No, I think that Twiki is being used more often.”]

JN: All this MediaWiki stuff, Facebook, YouTube is being lumped into the same bucket as part of Web 2.0. Do you think they are related?

JW: Yeah, it is over-hyped. I think it is about social networking and social connections.

JN: I have theory that Web 2.0 is about the right brain - creativity, faces, connections, music, and artistic expression. What do you think?

JW: Maybe so. Maybe so.

JN: What about data? Dan Bricklin’s WikiCalc is about managing data and spread sheets? What do think about WikiCalc? Do you think there is any applicability to Wikipedia?

JW: I love the concept and there is a really cool guy working on it. It’s a great way to extend collaboration the same way that Google Docs is. I am on the board of SocialText that is backing WikiCalc.

JN: The other day in one of the [Dalian] sessions, you talked about the fact that users put data into tables even though you provided mechanisms [categories] to avoid that. Do you think that shows that people want managing this type of tabular information in a wiki?

JW: Yeah. Tables have been useful.

Summer Davos in Dalian China

Last week I was in Dalian, China for the World Economic Forum Inaugural Meeting of the New Champions. That’s a mouthful, so the Chinese simply called it the “Summer Davos”. It makes sense as this feels very much like Davos only a bit smaller and slightly more relaxed and less intimidating. It is still difficult to be really relaxed with some many diverse bright minds, but the scope of topics was more manageable the number of sessions made it easier to choose. There were still the same types of plenaries, panels, board room discussions and collaborative workshops. The focus was global, but the star of the show was China as the world's manufacturer, major outsource destination, next consumer society, and next world economic power.

Wen Jiabao, Premier of the People's Republic of China, speaking in Dalian. Photo courtesy of the World Economic Forum by Natalie Behring.

Given where we were, the Chinese government made a concerted effort to put on a really good show. Dalian is a city that most of the participants that I spoke to, including myself, had never heard of before this conference was organized. Few of us expected a large city with tall, new buildings, clean streets and significant infrastructure. While I expect some small, seaside fishing town, what I found was a major industrial port with tourist attractions and resembling a Chinese San Diego. Everything was big, clean and shiny. What I have heard is that Dalian was the point of Japanese invasion during World War II and the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. For good or ill, there has been a long history of connections to Japan that has encouraged investment in this industrial capacity and outsourcing. Much of the city looks like it has been built in the last decade. Companies such as Intel, HP and British Telecom have very large development operations there.

Due to the location, the spectacular growth and potential power of China, 1500 attendees came to the World Economic Forum event to learn more about China. The majority of the agenda of the conference focused on the role that China and the other “New Champions”, India, Russia and Brazil or the so called BRIC countries, will play in the global economy, including in information technology, outsourcing and innovation. I was particularly interested in software and technology development in these countries. As discussed in numerous sessions, by many measures China is the third or fourth largest economy and is on track soon to become the second largest economy. During the conference, several people described the United States as the Great Britain of the 21st Century and nobody disagreed. Still with large numbers that means a GDP of under $5000 in the coastal areas and $1000 in the interior and obviously still a developing country.

I was invited to a private lunch that benchmarked venture capital investment between China and India that featured some key venture capitalists like Joe Schoendorf from Accel Partners (who are an investor of Alfresco). One of the presenters, Professor Martin Haemmig from the Center for Technology and Innovation Management, has probably come up with the only analysis of the VC investing between the two countries and the US. Martin stated that over the last five years the median return on investment in Chinese technology has been an astounding 25 times, a top quartile return of 40 times and lower quartile return of 14 times. This compares with the US where the median return of venture capital is 6.8 times. Even the bottom return of a Chinese fund exceeds the best return of a US fund. As Martin points out, “No wonder all the VCs are piling into China.” Although China doesn’t really come close to matching the amount of VC investing in the US, it is now number two in the world. There is six times as much VC investing in China as there is in India.

Everyone anticipates continued growth in China, especially as the boom moves westward from the coastal cities. As in Davos, I focused much of my time on the interactive workshops that allow us to engage more directly the other participants of the conference. I will be writing up what I learned at those sessions and interviews with some of the people that I met that are from the IT sectors. I also like politics, so I will write up my views on what I learned just from being in China and one of the most controversial sessions featuring Thomas Friedman, the author of “The World is Flat”.

Going to Dalian, China

As part of the Technology Pioneers program of the World Economic Forum Inaugural Meeting of the New Champions, I will be attending the  in Dalian, China (map).  (See my blogs on the World Economic Forum at Davos) The organizer of the event  Klaus Schwab has said that the event of Dalian will become a second pillar to Davos recognizing the rise of Asian emerging markets and new players in the bigger economy. Many of the people from Davos will be there. I plan to arrive on the Sept 5 and go back to England on the 9th.

One of my objectives is to help determine our strategy for Asia and building up Alfresco in the east. China in particular is already one of the top ten countries using Alfresco and participating in our forums and wikis and Alfresco has been translated into Chinese for awhile now. We are looking for ways to bridge the big geographical divide to participate and share in one of the biggest economic explosions of all time.

In addition, I will be part of a panel discussion on New Internet Technologies on the 8th moderated by Thomas Crampton of the International Herald Tribute along with the CTO of Nokia and the CEO of Netvibes. It should be interesting.

Since I have never been to China, I plan on stopping off in Beijing and seeing the forbidden city. If you live in Beijing and are around the morning of September 5th, perhaps we can meet up there. Just drop me a line.

Shai Agassi and the Long Tailpipe

It's good to see that Shai Agassi has found an blogging outlet now that he has left SAP. I found it by accident when somebody was searching my blog for the Geek Dinner at Davos. Shai's blog was probably the funniest moment during the dinner. The video that Shai mentions doesn't seem to be on AlwaysOn's web site. That is probably because I don't think Tony actually got permission before he brought his cameraman into the room. I was at the same table as Sergey and Shai, so I saw the whole thing. The trick is to take 3 glasses widely separated, 3 butter knives and rest the bottle on top of the knives. The answer looks something like this:

Shai is apparently off working on things environmental now and I guess still in enterprise software. While we are at Davos, we were in the same working group on what life would be like in the year 2015. Shai discussed what I thought must be one of the most innovative ideas I have heard in a decade - a physical analog to the internet. In other words, a world-wide mechanism that handles the logistics of physical things the way the internet handles packets. You don't care how things get there, you just send them. In the process, objects can actually be assembled and packaged as well. Having earlier come from a session on city design where Larry Page, the other Google founder, envisioned a world where "if I want a tomato, I just ask for it and it arrives a few minutes later," I could see a perfect meshing of these two visions. In fact, from my phone, I could arrange to have a physical good routed to my phone, no matter where I am with that phone. Thinking about it later, the whole notion of transportation could revolutionized with a physical goods infrastructure that didn't even need people or roads. The possibilities are too endless to mention. I hope this is a concept that Shai explores with his blog.

It is also a good time for him to ponder his previous reluctance to open source. When I was at Documentum and even immediately after, I just didn't get open source. Like Bill Gates, I compared open source to communism. It took Marten Mickos from MySQL to explain it to me before I actually got how you could make money with open source. Shai has not been quite as strident about open source, but he hasn't exactly been embracing. Perhaps freed from the mind set of SAP, it will be easier to see the opportunities that open source make possible. In fact, although I think the idea of a Physical or Logistical Internet would be brilliant, I don't think it would be possible without large portions being driven by open source concepts, just like the current internet is.

I wish him luck in his future endeavors.

Multi-disciplinary Collaboration at Davos

Photo of me outside the Davos Congress Center taken by Commissioner Annette Nazareth of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, who just happened to be passing by when I asked if she could take my picture.

It has been nearly two weeks since Davos finished, but I still haven’t written up all my blogs from Davos. It was the most intense intellectual experience I have ever had and I could probably write a book about it. Just goes to show, I need to change my style of blogging.

There are many reasons for the intellectual intensity, the plenary sessions with some of the most important people in the world, amazing people are standing right next to you with whom can you can just start a conversation, you have the world’s experts on panels discussing the most important problems in the world, and there are dinners on many eclectic subjects that attract people from all walks of life.

However, one of the unique aspects of Davos is the ability to attend workshops that bring together people interested in many subjects from different backgrounds. You can probably set up a one on one meeting with anyone if you try really hard. You can watch the talking heads say the same thing they said on television what they said at Davos. But where else can you work in a group of 4 to 6 people who are experts in there own respective field and may actually be able to affect some of the changes recommended by the group? Where else can you sit next to a major CEO and understand where he is coming from and influence his thinking in a somewhat unguarded environment? I think this is part of what they describe as the Spirit of Davos.

These workshops attract high-level CEOs, subject matter experts and political leaders and are facilitated by people who are some of the best people I have ever seen in these types of sessions. Workshops generally have around 36 people who break up into 6 groups of 6. It’s generally potluck who you get paired up with, but chances are they share common interests. The groupings are either by subject or by the leader of the group who might be an expert who might actually be a Nobel Prize winner. The sessions are generally a little over two hours long - the time slot of two regular sessions. A typical agenda would be to have experts discuss the scope of a major problem, participants breakout into groups to brainstorm on implications of the problem, groups share results with the whole, groups go back to brainstorm on solutions, everyone shares and summarize solutions. During these breakout sessions, we get magnetic tiles to summarize our results and many people create colorful pictures to convey the message more succinctly.

I attended four of these sessions and here are the links to my blogs on each:

• Demystifying Growth and Productivity which was really a session on Global Competition.
• Collaborate to Innovate to which I was invited to attend as a contributor by the Forum.
• Designing Sustainable Cities which is an area on which I am a complete novice, but I thought I would get a chance to harangue the Mayor of London.
• Living in a Connected World - Life in 2015  was so fascinating that I am still writing up my notes

The conclusions I came to from these sessions were that:

• Working with incredibly intelligent people is humbling, but very energizing
• Pulling together highly competent people from multiple disciplines creates off the wall ideas that just might work
• By bringing your own unique competence to solving a problem, you can interact with anyone, no matter how high or mighty, as a peer
• Most CEOs are actually good listeners, but have their own strong opinions - providing a new idea or concept from a completely different angle will at least get them thinking differently
• Communicate your own perspective with a story that is personal to you - it will come out as genuine and engage the other members of your team. Make sure it is a short story though
• With that many powerful and influential people in a room, it is tempting for some to grab the agenda - just see what happened to Sharon Stone
• He who has the pen sets the agenda, unless John Chambers or Arianna Huffington are in the room
• Try to carry on the conversation after the workshop is over - blog or email. Hopefully, WEF’s plans for electronic collaboration will carry over
• Try this at home - pull together people from very different competencies and discuss one of these big problems in a book club type of format - you might surprise yourself
• Workshops are the best thing about Davos

I'll bore you with one last blog from Davos on the Life in 2015 before going on to my regular ramblings.

Davos Workshop - Collaborate to Innovate

The “Collaborate to Innovate” session was attended by around 40 people, mainly CEOs and people who are keenly interested in innovation and collaboration. I actually studied the subject as part of a research project at Documentum where I interviewed 50 of Documentum’s largest customers over an 18 month period on how they manage knowledge in their organizations and how that helps build the top line of their businesses. The session broke up into 6 groups supporting three different types of innovation models. The open source model is probably the best understood with open and transparent development driving changes from the community. The marketplace model uses the transaction process to allow employees and customers to engage in dialog and participate in the product / service development process. The Al Qaeda model is about using a core cell to distribute values and objectives to loosely cells that can act independently and freely to local conditions. All of these were compared and contrasted by the moderators that included Tim Brown , CEO of IDEO, the company that has designed everything from the Mac mouse to the Palm V to power tools and office furniture.

During the overview session, I didn’t realize that I was sitting just behind CK Prahalad, one of the greatest thinkers on the subject of innovation, strategy and core competence. When I realized this, I went to go to whatever group he was going to. Of course I should have gone to the group on the open source model, but I ended up in the group on marketplace innovation. CK explained to us that he thought that they were just stylizations of the same model, which makes sense to me. He is currently working on a new book that discusses the core model which has extended from an internal looking model focused on product to one that has expanded into services and ultimately solutions that incorporates channels and now the customer, which is becoming increasingly more powerful in the market and innovation processes. Dov Baharav, CEO of Amdocs, brought up a good point that your current customers are not necessarily going to take you to new markets. We discussed that perhaps that required identifying the types of customers that will lead you into the markets. In other words, this is the Innovator's Dilemma. This was reflected by Mark Penn, an adviser to Bill Clinton, Tony Blair in his last campaign and Hillary Clinton in her Senate bid, in espousing the concept of Micro-targeting.

The task given our group was to come up with a new product or service in the Leisure or Fashion industry. Bruce Nussbaum, Assistant Managing Editor of BusinessWeek, was also in the group, and suggested we address the games industry. I thought that was a great idea since the games industry is going through a major change with the new architectures, such as Xbox 360 and PS/3, required years to develop new games, long after an accompanying film has come and gone. CK had been thinking about this subject already talking about how Lord of the Rings put previews out on the web of how the story would be developed and solicited input from the public. He contrasted this with the secrecy of the DaVinci Code, which bombed in the box office. We then went on to develop the idea further to present to the whole group, creating the idea of a new company that would allow the users of games and viewers of the movie to participate in the create of both. Characters would be reused between games and movies and contributed by users. Those who contribute would profit from the financial rewards of the game and film through a royalty scheme. We all seemed pretty pleased with the idea.

It came time to present the results and out of all the workshops, this was the only one that I saw that had voting. There was a correspondent from CNBC moderating the presentations, and although it was entertaining, it was a pretty nerve racking prospect to get up and get judged by a bunch of CEOs. By far the best presentation was by Bernard Liautaud, Chairman of Business Objects and John Powell’s old boss, who presented a fashion company that used Al Qaeda style tactics to buy and sell fashion items designed by local cells using carbon credits. It was funny and actually compelling to watch.

I came up after that and for the first time in a long time, I was nervous presenting. Well, you try presenting in front of a bunch of power people like were in that audience. I got no votes. But at least the idea was vindicated in the end by the two experts Tim Brown and a Swiss Economics professor as an idea they really liked. This was the only session that had voting as part of a very fast session and I don’t recommend other groups do that.

Davos and Designing Sustainable Cities

In the morning of the last day of the sessions, I attended a session on Designing Sustainable Cities. The reason I went to this one is that I thought that Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, would be one of the workgroup facilitators. I also thought that Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco, who I met the night before at Claudia Schiffer’s Global Warming party was going to be there. Neither was there, Ken due to family commitments and Gavin due to family problems?, but this ended up being a truly multi-disciplinary session.

There were people who designed new cities in China, architects from the major architectural firms, product design people like Tim Brown, Hermann Requart, CTO of Siemens, and some of the Technology Pioneers, who have great ideas, but would never be involved in a session like this. The session had experts from firms who advise governments on how to design cities and upgrade old ones. One odd comment that one of them made was that Dubai was an example of a city that won’t be there in 50 years let alone hundreds. We broke up into groups around areas such as transportation, power, governance, housing and resources.

I went into the breakout group on transportation. What else would someone with a background in IT do? I did study renewable energy when I went to Berkeley, but that is so old. It turns out that Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, thought the same thing. He studied the area of transportation when he was working on his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford. Tim Brown was in my group as well and I was looking forward to hearing what he had to say. Our group decided to start a city from scratch and imagine what was possible from creating entirely new cities as is being done in China now.

Once Larry started talking about how Google was designing a new $1 Billion facility, that some dub GooglePlex, everyone would shut-up. Of course, when a powerful, super-smart billionaire talks about how he is going to solve some of these problems, one would shut up. The amazing ideas that came out were: when we want an item like a tomato, we should be able to get it with a few minutes and the transportation system should be designed around that; battery technology will evolve to the point where a battery will have enough power to move anything; ultra-light aircraft are the most efficient means of people moving from one place to another and that computers will be able to deal with safety issues; the Google complex was designed for efficient movement of people and things to the point of eliminating walls and other obstacles.

We then traded ideas with other groups in an idea of using “speed-dating” between groups. The idea is that each group splits in half and exchange people so that half of one group goes to the other area and half that group comes to yours. You exchange ideas on how things are inter-related. Obviously energy and transportation are inter-related. What I learned in this section is that Ultra-Light Rail is the most efficient form of transportation. Also pneumatic transport of goods and even people can be a very efficient form of transport. Sharing an infrastructure between transport and power can be cost effective, but one expert suggested that we have no wires going in and out of buildings, since it is possible to create completely energy self-sufficient buildings. (Yeah, right. Try doing that in England.) We thought we should also trade ideas with the group that handled buildings, but we ran out of time.

I learned quite a bit about these types of session in this one. I won’t name who, but someone in the planning business just took control of the pen to further their own agenda. Doing stuff like that is why Sharon Stone was not invited to Davos this year. Also, getting this diverse a group of people is fantastic and with the sort of energy that gets generated, you can solve just about any problem. However, two and a bit hours is nowhere near long enough to do anything about it. The rule of the game should be to blue sky given you can really think out of the box, but it would also be interesting to see how we can solve problems like those in London with such brain power. Finally, the conversation needs to extend beyond the Davos event to really take advantage of all the collective thought that has been created.