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Gary Edwards

The Real Power of Platforms Is Helping People Self-Organize - 0 views

hbr.org/...s-helping-people-self-organize

Uber

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • It’s also interesting to note that Uber doesn’t expect exclusivity from its extended labor force. Many people who drive for Uber also drive for competing services like Lyft. That lifts a key constraint — namely that the company must optimize a fixed amount of a worker’s time. Drivers opt-in to drive the schedules that work best for them — maybe the free time they have between dropping kids off at school and then picking them up. For others, they may opt to work 12-hour-long days. There is no central actor setting the rules such as having to manage artificial constraints like a fixed eight-hour workday. Nothing is pre-planned and everything is left to the market to come up with efficient solutions.
  • they focus on creating a market where people with cars can connect with people who need rides.
  • How does Uber handle the holiday crunch? They let the market solve that issue through surge pricing. At peak times, prices rise — which reduces demand AND increases supply of drivers. Sure, some folks consider this price gouging at times. But it’s interesting to see how the higher fares create incentives for more drivers to hit the roads to meet that demand. Problem solved, again without any preplanning.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • It so happens that open source software works very similarly to Uber in terms of stoking active participation beyond any one company’s boundaries. Contributors choose to participate on a project. They may have a job or be in school. Regardless of what they do, they voluntarily opt in to a system, which self-organizes based on the need at hand. As with Uber, there is no preplanning of resources or scheduled shifts; everything is self-organized by volunteers interested in tackling that job at that time.
  • If these participative systems can solve complex optimization problems without central planning, like managing Uber’s logistics or developing the open source Linux kernel, what else can they do? Traditional institutions as we know them today will not exist in their current forms in twenty years. The boundaries of the traditional corporation are becoming more and more porous as the value of centralized planning and coordination declines. That’s a truly disruptive development and something that every organization, regardless of industry, should be paying attention to.
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 16
     
    "Uber, the car-sharing service, has become ubiquitous. It's now a multi-billion-dollar global business. It's even become a noun of sorts - uberization - which people use to describe a disruptive change to a staid industry ripe for innovation (though, to be sure, the popularization of the word "disruptive" means that it is often used in ways that the concept's author, Clay Christensen, didn't intend). But I would argue that the real reason Uber is disruptive is because it is reshaping how we can think about organizing people, not cars. Uber has shown how you can actually empower many thousands of people to self-organize to tackle a task (shuffling people to their destination in this case) without the preplanning that is the norm in traditional enterprises. Put another way, Uber's business model extends a very complex supply chain beyond the boundaries of a corporation in a way that creates real results without any planning in advance. That is a remarkable example of how technology will reshape how we organize to get work done at scale in the future. For context, I worked at Delta Air Lines for many years before I joined Red Hat, the open source software provider where I am now CEO. When I was at Delta, we spent enormous resources in terms of time and money on planning. Airline operations are a huge optimization challenge. There are hundreds of planes, thousands of pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, and ground crews that must be properly deployed for the system to work efficiently. We needed to process reams of data using expensive and sophisticated software and computers to predict demand, know the capabilities of each aircraft type, and to understand each work group's constraints. We also had an army of PhD-caliber people whose full-time jobs involved figuring out this puzzle in a way that we could still make money. Uber's value chain has a similar optimization challenge - it needs to deal with variable demand, thousands of drivers,
Gary Edwards

What Platforms Do Differently than Traditional Businesses - 0 views

hbr.org/...ly-than-traditional-businesses

matchmakers new-economy platform-economics

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 May 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 11 May 16
     
    "One of the oldest business models in the world is using new technology to trample traditional businesses, drive innovation, and create new and immense sources of value. Matchmakers, the subject of our new book, make it easy for two or more groups of customers, like drivers and riders in the case of Uber, to get together and do business. They operate platforms that make it easy and efficient for participants to connect and exchange value. Unlike traditional businesses, they don't buy inputs, make stuff, and sell it. Instead, they recruit participants, and then sell each group of participants access to the other group of participants. The "participants" are the "inputs" that they use to produce the intermediation service they provide. Today, we're living in the matchmaker economy. It is a bigger and more pervasive part of our lives than many imagine. Three of the five most highly valued companies in the world - Apple, Google, and Microsoft - make much of their profits from connecting different groups, like developers and users in the case of Apple. So do seven of the most valuable unicorns - startups worth more than $1 billion in their latest funding round - such as Uber, Airbnb, and Flipkart. And then many other companies that have IPO'd in the last decade, like Visa, which connects cardholders and merchants, and Facebook, which connects friends, advertisers, and developers. And it's not just these humongous companies. Westfield Malls operates shopping malls that help retailers and shoppers to get together. Then there are all the ad-supported media that troll for eyeballs so they can sell them to marketers. In fact, if you think about, as a consumer and a worker, you probably use multiple matchmakers throughout your day, from the operating system on your phone, to an exchange for trading stock, to a dating app for finding a mate. The firms that make up the gig economy and the sharing economy - the new darlings - are matchmakers t
Gary Edwards

Apple vs. Google and Facebook messaging - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/and-facebook-messaging-2015-12

Messaging ChatBots ChatOps

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Or look at the fact that you can call a Lyft car from Slack, or an Uber from Atlassian's HipChat, without ever leaving a chat window. The idea is pretty straightforward: People like to chat and don't like leaving chat to open another app. Put the app in the chat, and you get the best of all possible worlds. It's a proven concept in Japan. There, the mega-popular messaging app Line is so successful that it was able to introduce mobile payments and taxi services of its own right next to the main chat functions.
  • Once you get or buy an app for Facebook Messenger — or Slack or whatever Google once — you have it anywhere on any device. Same for Slack or HipChat.
  • You don't even have to install these apps, really. Since they live in your chat app, installing Facebook Messenger more or less automatically installs your apps, too. They'll work the same way on every device you own, and every device you ever will own, as long as it runs Messenger.
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Mar 16
     
    "There's a quiet revolution going on in messaging. Companies like Facebook, Google, Atlassian, and Slack are expanding their messaging apps beyond merely sending text, video, and audio and into something a little bit more like an operating system. On Tuesday, for example, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google is working on a new chat app that will let developers build apps that plug right into an instant-messaging window by way of a simple text interface. It sounds like a competitor to the Facebook "M" project, a virtual assistant that aims to help you do everything from shopping to making restaurant reservations, right from within Facebook Messenger. Right now, at the tail end of 2015, these souped-up chat apps look like an interesting trend. Some tech types call it ChatOps. But if I were Apple, I would be losing a lot of sleep over the rise of the smarter messaging app."
Gary Edwards

Email took an almighty beating this week, but it's far from dead | VentureBeat | Apps |... - 0 views

venturebeat.com/...his-week-but-its-far-from-dead

eMail Messaging

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Yesterday, email-killing team-collaboration upstart Slack nabbed another $200 million in funding, valuing the company at $3.8 billion. But perhaps more importantly, Slack now claims 2.7 million daily active users, up from 2.3 million just last month, with big-brand customers including CenturyLink, CBS, Dow Jones, Harvard University, Samsung, the U.S. State Department, and the Federal Aviation Administration.
  • Fast-forward six years and you could now say that SMS is also on the way out, replaced by a plethora of Internet-based messaging services. But Sandberg had a point — looking at the methods of communication that permeate the lives of young people gives the biggest clue as to where we’re heading. But it will be a gradual process guided by the demographics of people who use a given service; Uber may be phasing out email completely, but that’s because the majority of its users — in the U.S. at least — are under the age of 35 according to recent reports. But an airline such as KLM will have customers spanning all age groups, so it would be less likely to switch off telephone or email support quite so quickly.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Apr 16
     
    "While 2016 is shaping up to be the year virtual reality and the Internet of Things went mainstream, it could also go down in history as the year email's much-touted demise cranked into overdrive. At least, if this week's events are anything to go by. With the likes of Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Twitter, and a myriad of communication conduits springing up over the past decade, there's little question that people use email less than they once did for personal communications, and when you swing the demographic dial down to teenagers, the shift is even more pronounced. But email has remained in rude health despite the rise in mobile messaging, and this has been in no small part due to businesses - within companies, between companies, and between companies and customers. But things are changing."
Gary Edwards

Enterprise startups to bet on in 2016 - Business Insider Deutschland - 0 views

www.businessinsider.de/tups-to-bet-on-in-2016-2015-11

Startups

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Docusign: replacing paper signaturesDocuSignDocuSign CEO Keith Krach. Company name: DocusignHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date: $508.1 million in 14 rounds Anytime your company’s name becomes a verb, it means you’ve made it. That’s the case with Docusign, whose name is almost used as a verb in the digital-document area ("just Docusign it"). Docusign offers a simple and secure way to sign documents online, allowing businesses to approve transactions on the go. It's used across many different industries, from real estate and auto insurance to technology and travel services. Investors have been lining up to throw money at this company, investing almost $400 million in just the last two years.
  • Zuora is a cloud service that specializes in subscription billing.
  • Tenable offers something called "continuous threat monitoring"
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Slack took Silicon Valley’s startup scene by storm, reaching a whopping $2.8 billion valuation in less than two years.
  • Its work-communication app isn’t just for messaging coworkers — it can do a lot of different things, from getting automatic Twitter notifications to calling a Lyft cab or looking up restaurants nearby.
  • Spark is a way to sift through massive amounts of data really fast. It can be used with a popular way to store all that data, Hadoop, but increasingly, Spark is being used on its own as an alternative to Hadoop.
  • Checkmarx helps software programmers check their apps for security holes.
  • Illumio is offers a security product that protects apps inside the data center even after a hacker breaks into the network.
  • MuleSoft offers technology that makes it easier for enterprise applications to talk to each other and share data.
  • Blue Jeans is becoming a household name in the enterprise videoconferencing scene. It created a cloud service that lets different people on different online video services, like Google Hangouts and Skype, talk to each other. It also has its own browser-based service, and recently expanded to broadcasting services too.
  • Qualtrics offers a service for doing sophisticated online employee or customer surveys. The company has been on fire lately, raising all of its $220 million in venture funding over the past three years
  • Insidesales is making life easy for a lot of salespeople. It can predict the best time and person to contact before making a sales call, using machine-learning and data intelligence.
  • Tanium impressed Sinofsky because it detects when hackers are attacking as the hack is occurring, instead of what usually happens, finding out after-the-fact.
  • Optimizely didn’t invent A/B testing, the standard technique in which two different versions of the same product are tested in the market — it just made it easier for everyone to do it.
  • Xamarin offers tools for writing enterprise mobile apps and has exploded in the past year.
  • CloudFlare is a web-performance and security company that serves as a “digital bouncer” for millions of websites around the world. Its technology filters the web traffic before it reaches its customers’ websites, and sends it on the most efficient route to help websites run faster. The company claims its service handles nearly 5% of all web traffic.
  • GainSight has won the respect of Silicon Valley investors by making a solution to help enterprises keep track of their customers — and help make sure they stay loyal. Customers like HP, Workday, and Adobe all use Gainsight to manage their customer contracts, helping divisions like product development, sales, and marketing all better understand just who's buying their stuff.
  • Adaptive Insights is quickly rising through the ranks in the corporate-performance management (CPM) market, where software is used to improve budgeting, forecasting, and other financial activities. In a nutshell, it’s trying to replace a lot of the work Excel spreadsheets used to do in the past for finance people.
  • Bracket offers software that lets enterprises securely run apps and data on multiple clouds, with a minimum of management hassles.
  • Enterprises are racing to ditch their data centers and use more clouds and there are a lot of clouds to choose from. Some want to mix and match and Bracket helps them do it.
  • While he was an engineer at Facebook, Avinash Lakshman created Apache Cassandra, a "big data" database originally built to handle Facebook’s Inbox Search feature.
  • Lakshman went on to found Hedvig, which offers software that makes all of a company's computer-storage systems act like one really big, really fast hard disk.
  • open-source project called Kafka, which quickly became a popular technology used by many big internet companies: Yahoo, Spotify, Airbnb, and many others.
  • left LinkedIn to launch Confluent, which provides a commercial version of Kafka.
  • created some of Facebook's most popular data-analysis tools, Bobby Johnson and Lior Abraham. They are famous in the big-data world for creating the open-source tools Scribe and Haystack.
  • With this startup, their mission is to do for every enterprise what Facebook did for friendships: Analyze billions of events in seconds to bring you the relevant info.
  • If you’ve ever used Uber before, chances are you’ve used Twilio’s service. Same goes for apps like Lyft, Airbnb, and Match.com. That's because these apps are plugging into Twilio’s service that helps provide communications features like text messages, phone calls, and video chat. So the Uber text message you get is powered by Twilio's service.
  • Twilio has become a top choice for developers looking to add communications features to their apps. More than 700,000 developers have used Twilio’s platform so far, the company says.
  • For small and midsize businesses that hire workers and contractors overseas, Payoneer solves a big problem. It lets them make and receive cross-border payments in other currencies. Payoneer has racked up a user base of millions of businesses and professionals in more than 200 countries, it says.
  • Stack Exchange, founded in 2008, has grown from its modest roots as a question-and-answer site for programmers into a network that provides expert help and advice to over 26 million programmers every month, at all skill levels.
  • SimilarWeb seemed to spring out of nowhere a couple of years ago to become a star in the web- and mobile-app-analysis world.
  • Mesosphere offers what it calls a Data Center Operating System (DCOS). It's a commercial version of an increasingly popular free and open-source project called Mesos that's used by developers.
  • AtScale is an engine that slips almost invisibly into Hadoop and then easily lets business managers use their favorite analysis tools like Excel,
  • Tableau Software, or Microstrategy with the data stored in Hadoop. 
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 16
     
    "The 2015 holiday season is upon us and the year is drawing to a close. Soon our thoughts will drift to our hopes and goals for 2016. For those who are dreaming of a new job at an up-and-coming young company, we've compiled this list to help. All of these companies specialize in making tech for work and business use, a $3.5 trillion worldwide market. All of them had spectacular years in 2015, by launching great new technology or getting a boatload of funding or landing big partnerships and generally setting themselves up for a successful 2016 and beyond."
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