Innovation in Software

Whilst it was announced by the conference itself a week or two back and it appeared via @vagueware, I realised today I’d not mentioned it here: I’m speaking at ThinkVisibility on the 12th September.

It’s the first scheduled talk I’ve done in a long while – perhaps the first I’ve done since I started attending/organising BarCamp conferences – so it’s a bit weird actually planning it all this far in advance. I am however looking forward to it, as my talk for online marketers is focused on a subject area I’ve not been able to discuss publicly for the several years I’ve been learning it.

Whilst I’ve sworn to the organisers that I won’t discuss Kagtum per se, a lot of my talk will focus on techniques and technologies that underpin it. My abstract reads like this:

Why do marketers exert more effort trying to convince people who have never heard of their companies – whether it be through SEO, CPC campaigns and building social media audiences – to spend money, than they spend using technology to understand people they already have a relationship with?

Do you know how many of your current customers or site visitors are pre-disposed to buying a particular type of product online? Do you have statistics on cross-selling opportunities at checkout? Do you even know where to find that data? Or how to use technology to make sure your e-commerce platform does?

Applied software engineering, advanced data sets and a little bit of lateral thinking means your website can do your customer’s searching for them, before they know they need to search for something themselves. All you need is a little bit of knowledge, a friendly developer or geek and a leap of imagination.

In a talk tailored for people who are more curious about what’s possible rather than studying the status quo, we’ll briefly cover how centuries old mathematics can help your online presence as much as it has helped your inbox stay junk-free, touch on collaborative filtering and the possibilities unlocked in your software through just one or two key pieces of information about a customer. Finally we’ll touch on how software can constantly learn about your customers and automatically work to increase conversions.

An abstract – and hopefully intellectually stimulating – talk, you might leave wanting to learn some maths and computer science to understand how your website can serve your customers better, even if the thought of such a prospect appals you right now.

I’ll be tweaking it a little bit as I always do when developing a talk properly, but that’s the main gist of it.

A short/cut-down version will probably get done as a screen-cast for some time in later September or early Ocotber, but if you want to hear the full thing or discuss what I talk about in detail in person, I’d suggest you go and register now. The focus is around online marketing and SEO, and my talk will of course reflect the audience who will be there, so if that’s your bag there should be plenty of other talks to grab your attention and make the fee worthwhile. I hope to see you there.

Tim O’Reilly posted some extracts today from a New York Times piece on Jon Stewart, possibly one of the most famous faces of American comedy satire – and journalism – in the World.

What does this have to do with software innovation? Stay with me.

Here in the UK, his program is broadcast the day after it’s broadcast in the US on More4. I find myself twitching slightly if I’m not near a Freeview box around 8:30pm as a result. For a long time I’ve been trying to work out what this means to the future of journalism – thanks to my vested interest in such questions – but also how this translates into an era of Web editorial. What I’ve begun to realise is my fascination is with the disruptive innovation the Daily Show represents:

‘When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press to name the journalist they most admired, Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, came in at No. 4, tied with the real news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Anderson Cooper of CNN. And a study this year from the center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that “ ‘The Daily Show’ is clearly impacting American dialogue” and “getting people to think critically about the public square.”’

A comedian who in his own words is “throwing spitballs” is the 4th most admired journalist in America? Here’s the real meat for me though:

“Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it’s been “The Daily Show” that has tenaciously tracked big, “super depressing” issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.”

When Outfoxed came out I was angry about how news had become entertainment specifically because journalists were not dealing with the big issues and producers were allowing those with very strong political views help a political administration skip over troubling questions by suggesting it was the questioners who were at fault.

Yet here we are with somebody using news as a platform on which to build comedy, attacking the establishment. Do I like this more because I agree with his politics? Or because it’s funny rather than nasty? No, I like it more than Fox because he uses the technique to point out the lies rather than promote them as truth.

So, back to software innovation. For the last year I’ve had this mantra: it’s not about the idea, it’s about the execution. It’s about making sure you know exactly what your intended outcome is, testing your assumptions every step of the way, and aiming for that goal. If that goal isn’t something tangible (money in the bank, simpler processes, helping people see truth), you’re not going to get anywhere.

And just like Jon Stewart, every programmer and software entrepreneur has the opportunity to disrupt and make a hit potentially by looking at something they hate and despise and using the techniques of their “enemy” to promote values of a bygone era (in Stewart’s case journalistic, in our case scientific).

I’m starting to get a hint from programmers I know that they realise that during the last decade of dot.com boom and bust and “Web 2.0” hype, they’ve lost some rigour in the process. I’m just as guilty as any one. I think we’re going to see a scientific renaissance in the web industry and some smash hits will emerge as a result.

I also think Tim O’Reilly’s point that potentially we’re going to see bloggers adopt the same techniques to try and push the envelope a little further is intriguing. If they do, they’re going to need the tools to help them do that. Perhaps UK bloggers could try and take the lead and reverse the trend of poor success rates around commercial blogging here in the UK.