Improving Airline Travel

Yesterday evening I was on a train back from NYC which, because of the impending snow storm, was pretty chaotic. In a crowded train, folks are chatty, and the table conversation on the Acela was fabulous. One of my travelling companions, Theresa Podrebarac, suggested during the conversation that the airlines should not charge for checked baggage but instead for carry-on baggage.

We all agreed this was a great idea … the convenience is in the carry-on bags, and because of the checked-bags charge, more people are bringing overstuffed carry-on bags, making the entire experience less pleasant than ever. By charging for the carry-ons (probably for anything over a specified size) you would provide an incentive to check bags, and make the cabin less cluttered, boarding and exiting easier, and the airlines could probably charge more, too.

I tweeted this from my trusty Droid and within an hour or so I had five retweets, and by now I am up to a dozen (see live search results).

Perhaps I am on to something. Airlines, listen up!

Incentives

As I tweeted last month: Inverse Law of Usenet Bandwidth: The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post... and vice versa. Jorn Barger, 1994.

Usenet was pretty early version of what is now the web 2.0 world of user generated content. Today's simple corollary is: The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post [on blogs]... and vice versa. This leads to wondering whether the incentive (or reward) for blogging is gratification in boring moments...

There is a question about whether Twittering follows the same pattern. Many folks note that it is so easy to tweet that interesting lives lead to more tweeting. That is for another post.

This blog has been silent for over a week exactly because I have been busy on interesting things, mostly work related, mostly our just completed annual advisory committee meeting. I considered live-tweeting the event for about one nanosecond (talk about a breach of etiquette and career-ending adventure). An example tweet might have been "Partner X now telling LPs that deal Y is going to be worth $1b", and another example would be "Partner X now telling LPs that deal Y better show progress before June 30 or it will be shut down". Last night's dinner tweets would have been interesting too, but I can't even hint at those. You can see why the public twitterstream is not ideal for this kind of commentary!

I did want to mention a couple of interesting articles I gleaned from the twittersphere recently. One talks about the very obvious (to me) comment that even *free* will not get physicians to adopt electronic medical records - see this short post on e-patients. Secondly with an eye to my non-profit volunteer work, consider this WSJ blog post on how increasing the price of membership can increase memberships. In both cases the incentive structure is non-intuitive, or at least against the classical or conventional wisdom.

Incentive compensation (bonus plans) are amongst the most complicated parts of my life as a board member on startups. CEOs and their VPs generally have bonus plans approved by the board (or its compensation committee). It is a cliche that "you get what you pay for" and we have to be excruciatingly careful not to encourage unhelpful outcomes through an inadvertent side-effect of a bonus plan. If we offer a bonus for maintaining a healthy cash balance, the CEO might fire a bunch of people and reduce sales or service levels. If we focus on revenue we may encourage profligate spending and reduce our cash cushion. It gets worse from there. Even the seeming alignment around incentive stock options can lead to problems, and not just those seen on Wall Street.

Incentives in all these areas remain intriguing and annoying because they seem to amplify unexpected behavior as much as desired behavior. Despite the concerns and contradictions, or perhaps because of them, they remain a source of constant interest for me in my venture capital (and venture cyclist) work.

Twitter; still; again

Twitter is only becoming more fascinating to larger groups of people. The possibilities are expanding even while we await an announcement about a business model.

The Singularity Hub blog posted an interesting thought about the idea of a tweetbomb which is like a virtual Flash Crowd or Flash Mob. Twitter has this possibility where blogs (and even blog rallies) do not. Repressive governments beware!

Many commentators remain mesmerized by the real time search possibilities (eg Twitscoop, Tweetmeme) in tracking what is going on in the Twitterstream. This strikes me as an amazing by-product of Twitter, but not the core of its value. My own thinking is that Twitter should learn a little from Google. It should embrace its universal nature, promise and try not to be evil, and offer premium corporate services for a fee, leveraging its universality and simplicity. I see both corporate social media revenue opportunities, and automated enterprise uses. In either case, Twitter would charge for high volume usage, and would charge for ancillary services (SLAs, security options, archive options, multi-account management etc).

To reinforce some of this, let me repeat and expand on a previous post when reporting on my presentation at Social Media Jungle Boston in March. In that presentation I posit that automated tweeting is a hidden opportunity and possible future for Twitter, alongside its very human current incarnation. In the comments of that post, I added a few examples of automated tweeting and consolidate them here.

Here is a commercial idea that is in use: a semi-automated tweet when fresh stuff ready at the bakery. Check out the video on Vimeo. I also found a (completely non-commercial) great tweeting cat door.

I also heard about Zappo's real time sales map: a real-time automated (mapped) data stream of sales made ... if sent to twitter simultaneously this would be another example of my hypothesis, and is pretty close, wouldn't you say? The a grand "now" dashboard from Sprint, is also on the same topic, showing the power of automated sharing of mechanically collected data (although this widget may in fact be "calculated" data rather than "collected" data).

Finally, here are the slides (again), and the video of the presentation.

Twitter as a Universal Information Stream

Twitter data stream redux

A couple of weeks ago I posted my slides from Social Media Jungle Boston on Twitter as a Universal Data Stream. Jared Rosoff responded with a series of thoughtful questions and let me know it was fine for me to post and answer his questions here.

Jared's questions are in this red color, and my responses are in purple, flagged RMD.

1) Centralized vs. Distributed event stream architecture

-- Unclear twitter can scale to handle the flood of data that would come with "automated publishing" from things like sensors and systems. Not sure if this is a systemic problem of this kind of architecture, or rather a twitter specific deficiency.
RMD: clearly Twitter can't scale to handle its own organic growth right now. I think this is a Twitter specific deficiency. However, putting "all the world's messages" (automated and not) onto Twitter would increase the load by several orders of magnitude. This may take the load to somewhere with real systemic problems. Hopefully this is not the case ... see Sigma portfolio company Tervela... perhaps they can help.

-- Do we really as a community want to endow any single company with all of the value that that data holds?
RMD: Great question. Google already has "all" the public data (effectively), but this goes to a new level when I suggest proprietary streams be published using Twitter as well. Answer, probably not, at least not without assurance that Twitter does not have ownership rights which they can assert. However, charging for access to such a rich *and integrated* data stream seems OK to me. If the data provider wants to charge for access, perhaps Twitter can be a pass through biller (with appropriate markup). Perhaps the source data provider would also provide other means of access to assure a competitive marketplace for the data. Then Twitter's specific value becomes the fact "all" the data is available in one place.

-- Corollary: Are companies that have valuable data going to be willing to hand over the keys to someone else?
RMD: probably not! However, if the value to their customers of integrating their own data with a wealth of other data is sufficient, then perhaps.

-- With twitter's focus on social updates, do you think a different player will emerge that will focus on more "machine readable" event streams?
RMD: very possibly ... want to pitch a startup?

2) Search / Filter methodology

-- Search on twitter is pretty limited. To do the kind of analytical reasoning you suggest in your prezo, it strikes me that you need a more sophisticated query language. Something beyond keyword search. Need to be able to deal with structured and semi-structured data as well as calculate statistics over the set of data in the streams. Do you have thoughts on what kind of search technology is needed for a system like twitter?
RMD: You are right. The 140 character limit is also terrible for this... back to "want to pitch a startup?" The character limit is probably what does this in ... a longer (or unlimited) message can be tagged (either with folksonomy based hash tags, or with references to published ontologies). Once properly tagged, the data becomes searchable, and we are back to "just" a scale problem.

-- Is analytical reasoning separate from the event stream aggregator? Or does it need to be part of it? In other words, can I plug a tool like Visual Sciences or SAS into the data I get out of the event-stream or am I limited to the analytical tools that twitter (or a twitter like business) provides me? Benefit of having the tools at twitter are that it can access the "whole data set" whereas if I'm using SAS or VS, I'm probably working on some subset of data that I've downloaded...
RMD: I definitely want to be able to use third-party tools to do the search/filter/analysis. My original assertion was based on Twitter's very simple, easy and *open* API, which (assuming volume access is allowed) enables you to use whatever tools you want. Your notion of tools built in to Twitter makes sense (another revenue idea for them). If this all ever really happened I imagine you would be able to subscribe to sub-streams from Twitter for real time analysis, as well as going back later for data exploration.

All great questions - thanks Jared!

Non-profit Twitter

In the tech world, it is a little bit of wry humor to say that all twittering is non-profit. No-one really knows how to make money from Twitter (the company Twitter, least of all, it seems).

Here are a couple of links about real non-profits (charities, as opposed to early stage startups) and twitter:

• 10 Twitter Tips for Nonprofit Organizations (Change.org)
• And now, Twitter philanthropy (Christian Science Monitor)
• Betsy's Blog: How some nonprofits use twitter

I also want to highlight Beth Kanter's blog on "How Non-profits can use Social Media" which is about twitter and all the other aspects of Web 2.0 and social media for non-profits.

Report from the Jungle

I spent today at Social Media Jungle Boston, organized by Jeff Pulver. Check out the twitter stream on #smjbos, if you want to see the back-channel chatter.

The speakers mostly (and understandably) looked at the interpersonal interactions of what is, after all, social media. However when I got up for my slot, I choose to talk about Twitter as a Universal Information Stream. Slides below or here.

I included an idea from Matt Volpi (about automatically reporting point-of-sale data and also DVR data), from his comment on this blog when I first previewed this talk and asked for input. Thanks, Matt! Others may also recognise their ideas replayed here as well, so please remind me if I owe you credit.

Twitter as a Universal Information Stream

View more presentations from rdale.

Crowd-sourcing Jewish News

In a not particularly subtle imitation of Digg (amongst others), the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has started crowd-sourcing Jewish news.

JTA is democratizing Jewish news gathering by giving you the ability to share with our editors and community of readers the Jewish content which matters most. We believe that together, there's not only strength in numbers, but wisdom to be found.

Read all about it here, and add the bookmarklets to have your voice heard in choosing stories to highlight.

Vignettes from Tech

A couple of tech industry vignettes from Jeff Pulver's Social Communications Summit in NY last month.

Fred Wilson asked the question of all startups who purport to be offering a new platform: "Can I grow a company on your platform?" Of course, the right answer has to be yes. This is an interesting test for both Facebook and Twitter. I think the answer for both of them will be yes ... and there are strong indications that others are building companies on top of Facebook (more) and Twitter (less) already, hence answering the question in the affirmative. What startups have you heard about who are planning to create new platforms? Of our recent investments we hope and expect Viximo will meet this test.

Another speaker, whose name I did not write down (sorry), talked about the new transparent world for consumer products (or even all products). She or he said "The product is your ad. The customer is your agency." The takeaway is that all the fancy advertising and creative agency positioning in the world will be swamped by user-generated content on the internet (blogs, facebook, twitter), discussing the product and whether it matches up to its promise. If the product is good, it will be its own advertisement, and the customers will be your agency. Unfortunately the same goes for if the product is no good at all.

John Stewart takes on Twitter

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Update: YouTube video pulled for copyright reasons - but can embed from Comedy Central, which is what I have now done.
(Email subscribers: click title to link to article on web to see embedded video).

Social Media Jungle Boston

I am going to be addressing an interesting question soon, as a speaker at an event coming up in March. The question is: "What if the twitter stream told us every time a can of soda is sold?” What about every physicians' prescription (not the patient info, just the prescription, maybe with the diagnosis code)? We already have some automated data on the twitterstream (blog postings, transit updates, job postings, amber alerts)... what happens when more and more data is put out there?

What ideas do you have about unusual, or ridiculous, or mundane, streams of data that could be added to the twitterstream, and what would the implications be - please email me richard@sigmapartners.com or leave comments below with those ideas.

What is all this about? It is about Social Media, and social media technology.

Social Media, also known as crowd-powered media, user-generated media, social networking and, generally Web 2.0, is (as I recently posted) a bigger trend than many people currently think. It is probably more than one trend, but that is also, as yet, unclear.

If you are interested in the social and commercial implications of these trends, and are in (or can be near) the Boston area on March 10, then consider participating in Jeff Pulver's Social Media Jungle Boston. I even have a $50-off code for you: JF2CFU6F.

If you can't make it in person, Twitter coverage will include the tag #smjbos.

Meanwhile, send me those ideas.

All Atwitter

If you have not thought much about Twitter, it is time to start thinking. If you think Twitter is just for meaningless chatter, or twenty-something time-wasters, then think again.

Did you hear that the first report, and photo, of the "Miracle on the Hudson" was on Twitter (an example of "crowd powered media")? Did you know CNN (and other news sources) publish important breaking news on twitter, and they really do reserve it for important stories?

What is Twitter anyway?

Twitter is a micro-blogging service for sending out updates of up to 140 characters (exercise to reader: why 140 characters?). Yes, it started as a way to tell your friends that you were awake, brushing teeth, drinking coffee, reading paper ... . But, like the telephone, email, blogs - all equally attractive time-wasters for socialites - new and important utility is emerging.

You can "follow" other people's tweets; I follow CNN, Jeff Pulver, and others; I don't follow the GOP, John Cleese, the UK Prime Minister, Darth Vader (brilliant), or, ... well you get the picture.
You can look at what's hot right now, or how the twittersphere treated a topic recently. You can track specific keywords on twitter (using either twitter search or, even better, TweetGrid or TweetDeck), to see what people are saying about you, your town, your employer, your competitor, your favorite charity. Did you know that someone unauthorized might be misrepresenting you, your company or your favorite charity (check out this Exxon-Mobil story)?

Some folks conjecture that all this may even be a threat to Google's predominance - and from that viewpoint, twitter really is a superior human powered search engine. However, I think there is both more and less to twitter than that. Twitter is less in that it is not about search, and it has a weak position to become a search leader (too easy to spam). Twitter is more in that it is as powerful as email has been, certainly more powerful than blogs, to change how we find and publish information and how we interact with our friends and the world around us.

Get going on Twitter.

Get an account. Go slow. Follow some folks. Don't believe me ... look at what David Pogue (NYT) has to say, and, in a similar vein, see 8 Useful Tips To Become Successful With Twitter.