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Lately at ReadWriteStart we have talked with a few people working with startups in the co-creation and mass customization industry. Some of these startups use on-demand production techniques to minimize overhead costs and create early cash flow for their businesses. Of course, this business technique is nothing new; larger companies have put this to practice for years, like Dell which custom fits computers to customer specifications. Sponsor More recently, however, startups have begun to jump on the mass customization bandwagon. Cafe Press and Spreadshirt allow customers to custom design t-shirts, and others allow users to make bags, jewelry, perfume, games and even food to order. While these kinds of startups have become more popular in recent years, they have been more successful in nations with smaller markets, such as Germany , and have not taken off in larger markets like America. For those looking to begin a startup and who want to learn more about mass customization, we've compiled a quick list of a few books to get a crash course on the basics. Bear in mind the following list is in no particular order and is not a ranking, but merely a run-down of some of the more popular books on mass customization and co-creation. If you have any further suggested reading that people interested in this topic might find useful, by all means please let us know in the comments. Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition , by B. Joseph Pine II Mass Customization: An Enterprise-Wide Business Strategy , by David J. Gardner SPARK: Be More Innovative Through Co-Creation , by John Winsor The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks , by C. K. Prahalad Discuss
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Weekend Reading: Mass Customization Round Up
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It never ceases to amaze me how many high-tech industry elites get ensnared in every Twitter phishing attack. (See our November story 7 High-Tech Twitter Users Who Fell for Phishing Scams ) This evening Twitter announced that a new program will intercept links sent out by Direct Message and through email , checking to make sure they are safe. Phishing prevention is no small matter. Twitter's is a good move but a lot more is needed all over the web. If we want a transactional developer ecosystem of distributed identity and portable user data, there are both user education and technical changes that need to be made. Sponsor I don't mean to be pedantic about this, but here's my take on the subject. It's only because there is a big developer ecosystem creating interesting new services on top of our Twitter identities that any of us would ever consider logging in to Twitter while on another website. That ecosystem is great, and it's the kind of thing that an interconnected web that leverages portable user data would be filled with. But if user data is a form of currency and even people who are professional technology analysts (paid hundreds of dollars an hour for their technology advice - and many of these people are falling for Twitter phishing scams) - if even these people can't tell the difference between a good transaction and a bad one, then what does that say for the future of distributed developer ecosystems and data portability? Apparently, though, fooling people these days into handing over their Twitter login through an unsafe transaction is like taking candy from a baby. It's really easy. That's a failing of user education and of the design of distributed authentication transactions, isn't it? (Though it's tempting to blame the users who fall for it, it really is!) Remember when debit and credit cards were first introduced and many people didn't trust them? Aren't you glad we figured out how to make that work? Similarly, we need a combination of user education (don't give out your credit card number to random people who call you on the phone) and practical measures - credit card transaction receipts have two copies, your copy is the one with the full number printed on it - take it with you. Little things like that and more made plastic a viable platform for commerce. Distributed online identity needs similar measures taken. You know what also doesn't help? People who try to be helpful by urging users to not even click on phishing links. It's not like these are mysterious poisonous substances that will kill you if you touch them. Go ahead and click on them! Just don't give the resulting spoof pages your username and password. That's the problem! It's early days in all of this and more moves like Twitter's tonight will be needed. For the good of user security but also for the good of all the innovation this web has the potential to deliver. Discuss
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Twitter to Save Us From Ourselves & Phishing; More Is Needed to Make Innovation Safe & Viable
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Today, Cisco announced the CSR-3 product , a game-changing system to managing the network core. But for CEO John Chambers, the news is about market transition forces and being ready for the next generation of the Internet. The company invested $1.6 billion research and development in CRS-3 to be ready for the next phase of market growth that merges video, cloud, and mobile trajectories. When asked, he said when his team looks out 3-5 years that network growth may be 300 to 500%. Cisco is investing that another revolution is on the way for consumer access and enterprise productivity. Sponsor Getting a handle on scale Cisco's fabric offers network speed never seen before. According it's' own estimates the CRS-3 could offer bandwidth for: Every man woman and child in China the ability to make a simultaneous video call. All movies ever made to be downloaded in 4 minutes (if you had enough disk to store them). 1 GB link to every household in San Francisco. Virtualization and Cloud: Moving from Plumber to Business Architecture The network has many touch points. Chambers said that this has been moving Cisco from being a technology partner to a trusted business partner for nearly all its enterprise and service provider accounts. He views this as a tipping point in how Cisco engages customers and innovates. To that end, the major market transformation underway in the cloud, and Cisco has positioned its network, including the CRS-3 to offer tight linkage between data center and virtualized services. Chambers mentioned "It's all about the cloud, the CRS-3 family talks directly to the UCS in the data center." To that end, it's nice to consider the end-to-end network being prepared for the connections in the data center, especially for physically distributed environments that benefit from fast links between them. Chambers continued: "We kept our partners VMware and EMC in mind in this solution, to be ready to fulfill our vision in the data center". Here it is a summary diagram on CRS-3 connects data centers. Service provider: Critical Network Backbone Keith Cambron, President and CEO, AT&T labs added. "AT&T was the first user of CRS-1 with it's 40 GB interfaces and have been using them to manage their network growth. We are testing the 100GB interface in the labs and real production environments." Chambers mentioned that Cisco's goal is to have long-term partners and to never compete with pervice provider. With a company like AT&T, Cisco's product goals are to help be ready for where things are headed, to be there when it's needed. Cisco does not want to be the bottleneck for the Internet. He continued "Service providers are our partners, if our goal is to bring this technology to everyone in the world, we must work in a tight fashion and follow the market transitions with them" Q&A Some of the best parts of this dialog was the question and answer session, a few excerpts below show the depth of thinking Cisco is moving forward with the intelligent network. Q : How does this impact the mobile data flow? A : The team was asked about how this innovation impacts consumers and the mobile data flow. Chambers added, "As a consumer, I want any video any time. To share it on any device in the living room and to bring it with me when I'm on the go. The network has an important role in enabling that future" Cambron spoke from AT&T's goals with this technology "It provides a single network design for around the globe. Particularly important for important customers who are using private networks and deploying mobile applications. A common network design that is highly video centric is central to our business" Q : Is Cisco an on open vs. closed company, will core innovations from CSR-3 be open source? A : Chambers responded "Interoperability is one thing we don't debate in Cisco. We believe we need to bring together all of these protocols into one network. We will of course be an open architecture." Q : What do you think about Google's service provide announcement? A : Chambers responded "Google is a great company. We love anyone who adds loads to networks. We think the question here is how do we find the "and" here and find ways to build load and also built great networks with the right partners." Q : Why is Cisco building in silicon? A : Chambers was excited to talk about how important silicon was to the company in the products. "Cisco's investments in ASICS has been a key part of many of the core products. The reason that Cisco does our own, is that silicon ties all of the key components together. Cisco had to change the way its working style to have a collaborative team to build this next generation of silicon." Cisco is in a unique position to see the future of bandwidth better than anyone. We wonder if Cisco will be rewarded for avoiding future network bottlenecks and propel the network forward with CRS-3? Discuss
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Cisco in the Core: Preparing for the Next Generation Internet
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This week's poll is inspired our friends at CloudAve . Krishnan Subramanian wrote a post today about open-sourcing data center design . It's about time, isn't it? Subramanian best point comes down to what is happening right now in the cloud computing world. The enthusiasm for cloud computing is such that there is no time to waste. Sponsor Subramanian writes: "Compared to other fields of IT, the innovation on the data center front is relatively slow because the industry as a whole is slow to change. With cloud computing capturing the imagination of enterprises and public, It is important to innovate rapidly on the data center side." We know the role open-source is playing in cloud computing. Just look at the role that Hadoop and Eucalyptus are playing in cloud computing. But opening up the data center is a different story. It may be the last frontier and the key for opening up the enterprise to open-source initiatives. The Open Source Data Center Initiative seems like it sees that potential. The group is challenging the powers of the engineering world by collaborating and pooling information that goes into designing and ultimately constructing data centers. That's pretty interesting. So, here's our question this week: Is There A Place For Open-Source in the Data Center? trends Last Week's Poll: What is the top threat to cloud computing? Last week's poll had 244 people respond. Top response: API's and a poor interface. API's are causing headaches for at least one of the leading cloud service providers . We'll have more later about troublesome API's. In the meantime, what do you think? Is there a place for open-source in the data center? Discuss
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Weekly Poll: Is There A Place For Open-Source in the Data Center?
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Small cap hell is where you end up in about six months after your IPO, when all the high fives and champagne have receded into a distant memory. Unless your company is big enough. How big is big enough? According to Investopedia, small cap refers to companies with "a market capitalization of between $300 million and $2 billion." That's right, to escape small cap hell you need to have a market cap over $2 billion. Sponsor To put that in perspective, that describes one out of 14 publicly traded SaaS companies (Salesforce.com). So 13 out of 14 are in small cap hell. Actually, two out of the 14 are micro cap, i.e. below $300 million in market cap. This matters to all of us. A healthy public market for Web tech ventures ripples all the way down to seed level investing and drives the innovation economy. What Does It Feel Like To Be In Small Cap Hell? Lonely. Nobody cares about your little venture. To the team that endured blood, sweat, toil and tears to get to $50 million in revenues, and then go through all the SEC gyrations to become a public company, that is tough to accept. Here is what you can do. Hire a strong investors relations team and send out lots of press releases, be accessible to the press, go on road shows and speak at conferences for investors. Your IR team can take care of the mechanics, but this is also a big time-suck for the CEO and CFO. (And you cannot say, "Sorry we missed our numbers we were too busy schmoozing folks like you.") The result is a lot of work and you have to do it - but the payoff is small. Every other small cap is doing the same thing. Buy back your own shares. That tells even the most dimwitted investor that you think the stock is undervalued, and as you run the company you probably know. This is fine if you personally are vastly wealthy or you have massive amounts of cash laying idle on the company balance sheet. In other words it is not an option for most companies Social Media IR Rides To The Rescue? Agoracom is a modern IR firm. They use online methods to tell your story. That may not sound like a big deal, but IR is a pretty conservative business, so just using a few tools like Twitter intelligently is a big step forward. Agoracom's pitch is that they can "tell your story". For a while there will be an opportunity to use modern methods while your competitors are stuck with their buggy whips. But that advantage will erode really fast. So this is where the new Finance 2.0 sites like Seeking Alpha , Stocktwits , Kaching and Covestor may have the key. I decided to test this on the 14 publicly traded SaaS companies. Finance 2.0 For Small Cap: It is Too Early To Tell Select a classic small cap stock in the SaaS Index. For example: RightNow Technologies (RNOW). At time of writing, they have a market cap of $525 million. It is a cool company that is growing fast and delivering good results for customers. So how much coverage do they get on these new sites? In my test I looked at RNOW for the period Jan. 1 to March 1. StockTwits : There were nine tweets about RNOW, and many of them mentioned RNOW among a list of other stocks. Some are not very helpful, such as: "Does anyone know the future of $rnow ?" SeekingAlpha : This has two posts that were specific to RNOW and they seemed high quality. That is better than nine tweets that don't say much. Covestor : This is interesting to play around in. You can see the last 10 trades done by Covestor members in RNOW. But you cannot drill from that to any rationale into RNOW. The system is set up to do that, but there is just nothing there yet. Kaching : This gave good news aggregation on RNOW. It looked better than YahooFinance (still the starting point for lots of investors) but seemed to lack depth. Nor did it have any fundamental new information. So, from the limited perspective of one small cap, these sites are at this time not the answer. What about "ye olde stock forum" on Yahoo Finance? Their message board for RNOW for the same period of time has 28 posts, not including the threaded replies. That puts them way ahead of the newcomers.What about quality you ask? What is the use of a lot of noise from anonymous posters pushing the stocks they own (or panning the ones they short)? That seems to be the problem with all these sources. Wanted: Patient, Long-Term Investors Found: Momentum-chasing day traders. You want investors who will buy into the quality of your technology, understand your value proposition, like the market you are in and think you are doing a reasonable job managing the business. In other words, you want Warren Buffett. That is not what these new sites are delivering. They do not seem to be the key to escape from small cap hell. Let Your Story Surface The evolution seems to be: 1.0 Tell Your Story. This is standard investor relations. The updated version of IR is to be present where investors hang out, which today means online. But it is still the old broadcast model. 2.0 Let The Crowd Tell Your Story. This is classic social media - and it suffers from classic social media problems. You might trust a user-generated review on Yelp before going to a diner, but you are likely to be a bit more nervous before investing your kid's college fund in a company. What we need is something that reverses the flow, that lets investors discover you, that lets your story surface. This is where XBRL may help. (For a basic intro to XBRL read our earlier coverage .) The Current XBRL Disconnect For Small Cap Is Temporary XBRL was not any help when I was compiling the data for the 14 companies in the SaaS Index for the Saas Insights Report (a paid report for investors available from CapitalMarkets.com . Disclosure: The guest author wrote this report). The reason is simple. Only one out of 14 reported to the SEC in XBRL format. That company is Salesforce.com (CRM). The reason for that is also simple: The SEC currently mandates that companies with a market cap higher than $ billion report using XBRL. That is what creates the disconnect: 1. XBRL will enable the good investments from small cap companies to surface, but, 2. Only big cap companies report using XBRL (and they have no trouble reaching investors). The good news is that disconnect is temporary. The second wave of new XBRL filers in 2010 is estimated to include 1,500 - 2,000 reporting companies, and the final wave in 2011 is for about 10,000 additional companies. Imagine the Information Discovery Tools When I go to my local wine store, the owner asks me what I want and we have fun with my standard reply that I want something "incredibly delicious and ridiculously cheap". Investors want the same. Warren Buffett got to be one of the richest men in the world by finding a few of those. When all companies file in XBRL (and some geeks have created some neat tools to help sip more effectively from that firehose), ordinary investors will be able to create really powerful filters to find those "incredibly valuable and ridiculously cheap" companies. They won't find them among the big cap companies. They will find them among the thousands of small cap, micro cap (and yes, even nano cap) companies. When the value surfaces, they can reach out to IR who can them tell their story. Of course, when all this pans out, the opportunity to find the bargains will disappear. That is the price of an efficient market. But the value to all the companies trapped in small cap hell will be immense. They can focus on building value knowing that the value they create will surface. And that will have a great impact on the innovation economy. Photo credit: Chris Whiteside Discuss
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Is XBRL The Key To Escaping Small Cap Hell?
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