It seems there are only three ways for a publisher to get paid. One, get money from the person who will read the manuscript (or the magazine / watch the TV show, etc). Two, distribute the thing around town for free, but charge the baker / tinker / taylor, etc a fee for mentioning them prominently on the top of the parchment scroll. Whatever.

No other way to get paid?

Some publishers can only operate as a cost, owned by a government, university or other large animal with deep pockets.

Today, browsers and mobile devices ought to allow new and imaginative mechanisms to get shekels  into the publisher’s pockets.

What would it take for a think tank made up of sufficiently influential persons or bodies, that a new suggestion could bet tested out and potentially slowly creep into our daily lives, such that traditional media companies actually start to reflect, digest, adjust and adopt?

Here’s why this is important today. Traditional media companies (TMCs) have run out of optimism, patience, imagination. They can’t handle the social media layers harvesting their content, free, and using it to glue their hundreds of millions of members’ to their ipads, droids, iphones and laptops. It’s unfair.

Is it? Social media at least is innovative, and one would argue, is willing to pay for content, or share the revenue, if forced to. TMCs aren’t able to think up a way to play that actually works.

The New York Times wants me to pay $40 a month, to read the news. Are you shitting me? That just tells me that even the fanciest digital newspaper is terrified of the future and has no idea how it’s going to reach its readers profitably next year.

I believe the think tank would propose a toll booth.

A digital toll both, that connects the social reader’s identity with a media clicker that accumulates points. Yes, points – not dollars. Then, points are traded on a stock exchange. No I’m kidding. You rack up 7,592 points this month, and that’ll cost you $7 on your Mastercard, thank you. The content providers are connected at the other end: Google served 43 billion views of a Glee episode, each at 2 points. They collect half. Glee collects half.

This is a jobs creation plan for a) smart kids who have no job today, b) lawyers (sorry), c) advertising executives, d) digital publishing professionals recently laid off by newspapers, TV networks, etc.

The toll booth also solves the imminent war between social media technologies and traditional media companies: they count up the beans and share out the money.

Bonus: advertisers can award points for views of videos, click-throughs on banner ads, like-clicks, T-clicks and F-clicks. This makes it cheaper for cost-conscious readers, who can rack up lots of cost points, offset by lots of ad points, possibly incurring zero toll booth charges.

What would it take to make it real?

My reply: “Actually, I think the CIO needs to risk it all, including risking getting fired. I am like a doctor who has a low opinion of the healthcare industry: for 20 years I have worked in an industry for which I have ever declining respect. Large software companies cause me to fail. Project management best practices prevent me delivering value to business. Aging workforce protects the status quo, thereby preventing adoption of better technologies. CIOs are chickens, afraid to take bold innovative approaches to the problems they face. Business is right in rolling their eyes “ugh, that same old IT story, again”.
Here’s my blog, a recent post, describing bold innovation, risking it all.http://wp.me/pxOmo-2E
Go watch “Revenge of the Electric Car” for some inspiration and courage. Remember: doing nothing will lead to getting fired.”

So you’re running systems etc for a small company – say, a startup with 50 people – your job is multiple hats, I’m sure. Operations, facilities, networks, laptops and oh: systems. You decide to avoid the pitfalls of old school IT: forget the corporate imaging of laptops. Instead, you buy blank laptops direct from a distributor or two (need to offer MacBook Air or you’re super unpopular). welcome to [cool company] here’s your laptop it’s still in the box.

You decided to put in a hosted VOIP or at least to outsource it, so you don’t spend your life fixing phone problems. Well played.

You realized there’s only one CRM solution on the market, so you got Salesforce up and running. Now it runs itself and people love it. Duh.

Then you needed financials. Tricky. You put in QuickBooks to tide you over, buy some time. Then you got a financial solution in the cloud: who wants to put a big clunker in the datacenter and hire DBAs, sysadmins and PL/SQL wonks just to keep the CFO from flipping his lid? FinancialForce, or NetSuite or Workday Financials or Intactt, or other. In the cloud. Now the people you hire for that solution are directly visible and delivering value to business: business analyst, project manager, reports and dashboards expert. You’re off to the races.

You also solved your multi-cloud problems: you put in Okta so your users can log in once and then be one-click-you’re-in to most of their popular business apps. Genius. Well, actually may make you look smart but it’s pretty simple. You realized the apps are useless until you can connect them together for common shared processes. Enter SnapLogic (there are others – this was my choice). Now you can quickly and easily build connectors between apps so new customers in salesforce get pushed to your order management app, and new employees in Newton get pushed to Payroll, plus dozens of other connections you hadn’t known were needed.

Oh, you needed a BI solution too? OK so you got GoodData to run a low price proof of concept for you, that was met with a resounding approval vote from your more data-hungry business users. Now you have a BI layer over your multi-cloud ecosystem. You’re looking like a winner. (By now, the engineers hate you because you did all this in the time they built one widget for your users to book conference rooms).

You also implemented – from day one – an agile / scrum approach to everything you do. No more large projects that take people and budgets of the map for many months, only to come in late and over budget. Every 30 days or 14 days you deliver a bunch of stuff to the business. No big bang Mondays – they’re history. Now you are moving into magician territory. People are wondering why you’re not sweating and popping heart pills like the other IT managers they knew in previous lives.

Now what?

The next thing is to tell the business that IT is going out of business, and is handing over the keys. It’s called Citizen Developer. The old school monopoly of large IT groups must be dissolved. You tell the business they can talk directly to your developers, and that they can drive prototypes, change their minds anytime, and have crazy ideas about how to solve the next business problems. It’s like Arab Spring, in the IT world. You don’t want to run a monopoly – you want them to share in the brilliance. It’s like your doctor telling you to run your own MRI and decide what to do – it’s craziness, right? Actually it’s the only way you’ll stay alive in the new world. Do it.

When you’ve shifted power lines to give business enough confidence and freedom to act autonomously, you’ll face some new and interesting challenges, while also receiving some novel recognition for your courage and confidence.

Firstly, the business really wants to manage its own destiny with systems and tools. You’ll find that the appetite is there, and the skills will come as they hire their own “smart people” to design and build stuff. Now, you have to draw new lines in the sand, like who will deploy to production, who will make a minor setup change in a workflow rule, who gets to be a sysadmin in production, who can bring in a developer resource from outside, who can install a layered app over Google Apps, or Salesforce, or Box.net? These are fun questions to resolve. Don’t be a control freak. The more you hand over, the more your company can move fast and remain competitive.

Next, you’ll see there are limits to all this do-it-yourself festival. Pitch in to help manage the company’s compliance and SOX / security initiatives. This gives you legit reasons to withold some critical responsibilities that simply must not be federated out to business silos: security policy, user accounts and ID management, technology selection, and integrations solutions, are a few obvious candidates. Manage these well, and let the other stuff go silo. You’ll be OK.

Hire super smart people. become the guru group. By staying ahead in awareness of emerging technologies, pure technical know-how, and by hiring the smartest people you can find, your group will naturally remain relevant and create a gravity effect where you know more and can solve more complex problems than any business unit and their more tactically focused systems groups. You’ll need to fight for budget to stay in the lead….

Attend lots of industry events. Send your smartest team members to lots of seminars and workshops. Develop technical skills like you pay into your 401K – this is very important. Do it. Even when you’re all screaming busy.

Last, you gotta be a politician. You must sell your team’s value to the business, constantly reminding your leaders and execs of the coherence of your strategy. Despite any semblance of randomness and “do it fast, do it now” agile scrum delivery, it remains true that you have had a vision from day one, and that this vision has been unfolding almost exactly to plan since you started. You’re not done, but you’re on plan.

Oh, by now hopefully your company isn’t 50 people anymore….

Appendix:

At my company we run 29 (and counting) SaaS apps, including these:

• Salesforce
• FinancialForce
• Box.net
• Okta
• GoodData
• SnapLogic
• Google Apps
• Coupa
• Operative
• DoubleClick (DFP)
• Yieldex
• Xactly Incent
• Rearden/Expensewire
• EASi Stock
• Anaplan
• Echosign
• Balsamiq
• Gliffy
• SmartSheet
• Webex
• Jigsaw
• Hoovers / D&B
• Time-off-Manager
• Newton
• Doodle

Europe is already a good way into smartphone commerce – it’s not even new anymore.

Your credit card won’t disappear, but part of it will live in your iphone / droid. Your fastrak transponder may eventually disappear, as may your proximity card that gets you into your office / store / apartment building. Your phone can do all of this, starting early 2012.

The fact is this technology is safer and more fraud resistant than credit card transactions. However, it further pushes back personal privacy and the intrusion into our personal lives by our phones, phone carriers and marketers who would just love to access all our location based activity as available through our phone usage.
Who’s on the consumer’s side?
Phone manufacturers, app publishers, and consumer advocacy groups. Well, except that some consumer groups promote fear and misunderstanding around privacy concerns.
Who doesn’t have our best interests at heart?
Phone carriers. They resist innovation, hiding behind FCC and other bureaucracies, and generally get dragged kicking and screaming into every new chapter of mobile technology. They also fail to protect our data from predatory marketers’ sometimes dubious methods. Also, data peddlers, who will continue to find new and better ways to sell highly targeted consumer data to marketers; you can’t argue with location based ATM information linked to a consumer’s phone number and email: “please give me all the people on Madison Avenvue right now, with household income >$200K, who have bought something in the last hour from Macy’s/Bloomingdales/etc purchase price $>200. Push to their phones an ad for Brunch at Henry’s”.

This is fascinating stuff and no doubt wrapped in some red tape that still needs to be cleared, and still faces some consumer hesitancy, but I think we’re ready.
And why hasn’t Paypal taken over the world via Facebook? Why do I still write checks to friends, my equestrian trainer, by tennis coach and my maid? I should ping them instant cash over Facebook to their Paypal account. I should never write another check. But that’s the financial sector = slow….

Whitney opened the morning session with a fireside chat with Marc Andreessen, who was eloquent and insightful in his description of “old software” as it is nicely consolidated into 2-3 companies, and rapidly becoming irrelevant. He also spoke encouragingly about “the bubble” and why this one may not be as much of a downturn worry: the stuff works now. He’s right, but that doesn’t prevent an error by the financial system, making too much capital available, causing lending errors that inevitably lead to overvaluations, then a bust. He influences a lot of people, but he can’t control a Wall Street dumb ass who doesn’t understand technology.

Okta CEO Todd McKinnon joined Aaron to announce a new collaboration between Okta and Box that will make deeper more meaningful authentication the key to smarter folder sharing and more secure management of share status – great to see these two game-changer companies linking arms to conquer more good stuff together. The investor session was also very useful – the VC partners in the room echoed clearly the message that their investments are performing extremely well and will continue to do so for some time. The combined disruption they’re bringing, is shifting traditional tech companies ever further from relevance and any ability to play catch up: if you have a cash cow, you aren’t going to kill it. So you can’t get your stuff to market quickly  because your delivery method is stuck in the past.

The event had over 300 people I would guess, and the vibe was extremely positive, with most attendees clearly “getting it” though they all came from vastly different organizations. From the CIO of a large CA university to the director of “storage” at an extremely large Fortune 100 company, and everything in-between, all speaking positively about their achievements to date with Box.net and their ambitious plans for the coming few months. I’m very excited to be a customer of several of this new generation of technology providers: they help my company’s IT strategy to come together, providing the glue without which we would have just a bunch of disconnected websites.

I’m also very fortunate to be allowed to be an early adopter in these times: I know several so-called cloud companies that internally made some rather antiquated conservative choices for systems and tools for their employees. It was enlightening to hear the Andreessen Horowitz guys repeat the statement: “none of our portfolio companies run Oracle”. Wow.

1. Mobile payments. we’re lagging a wave of change that makes your cellphone a fully robust and reliable payments mechanism – both on the move at point of sale locations but also on social sites and at airports etc. Get ready for the disappearance of Fastrak transponders and other purpose-specific payment tools – your phone will handle this stuff.

2. Automobile-and-mobile advances. Expect your car and your phone to get to know each other much more intimately. Right now you can Bluetooth your music and your phone through the car, and higher end models allow you to control the music and calls from the steering wheel. Next, get ready for car alarms to talk to your phone, possibly texting pictures 360 degrees to you instead of disturning the neighborhood. Possibly allowing you to read telemetry and diagnostics that were reserved for your car dealer’s systems. Possibly locating your car anytime, anywhere, allowing you to disable it remotely, and definitely turning on a solar powered AC or starting the heater before you go out to your car.

3. Television. Let’s face it – it’s over. People will always watch TV, but the delivery vehicle and the advertising mechanisms will be web-to-mobile, and web-to-big-screen instead of cable. More importantly, identity management on the new channels will allow much more targeted advertising. Your teenager watching the same show in the other room will get different ads. The show may look totally different – shows may look more like Facebook pages with live video in the content area.

4. Healthcare. Probably should have put this first. How can this dinosaur not change – it may first collapse, then be reborn as a lean mean doctor machine. Or not. It could change in bad ways – further cheapening the doctor’s value in the equation, maybe allowing remote outsourced medical professionals via video conference to diagnose your stomach pain or lower back pain from Bangladesh. As a smarter direction it could centralize medical records in the cloud and consolidate 75% of health insurance bureaucracy with a giant health cloud in the sky. Doctors would spend more time on patients and less time slaving on insurance paperwork. Providers everywhere would link in and out of a patient’s treatment in real time. You could be diagnosed and treated sometimes from home via web conference with several experts there together, instead of all those separate trips and appointments and long waits. You would never have to be the secretary who fill out claims and asks for reimbursement. This all depends on factors beyond technology alone – patience grasshopper.

5. Automotive technologies. The car industry wants us to think of it as high tech, sleek and innovative. In fact there’s a five year cycle from idea to street availability. Auto executives are dinosaurs and they know it. We don’t need rear view mirrors: cameras could replace them today. We don’t need annoying car alarms: video and image transmissions could deter a thief better than loud noise. We don’t need to get into a steaming hot – or freezing cold car: solar panels could power the thing that keeps your car comfortable and keeps the pet safe inside your car outside a Texas shopping mall in August, or a Helsinki driveway in February. We don’t need to plug phones into cars or connect them via Bluetooth: the car can have its own network and be its own mobile hotspot, today. Your account is what glues it all together – whoever steps into the car and hits the [Connect] button, activates the hotspot and merrily talks, maps, texts and emails all the way to their destination. Oh, you’ll need heads-up display and voice controls that work – that too, can be done today.

6. Advertising. Hell yeah. Ads may seem innovative as they find new places from which to jump out at you, but honestly their ideas move slower than you and I adopt new stuff in our lives. My T-shirt has been viewed more times than this blog – and that’s true. So how about LCD ads on your car’s rear window, or your home’s front door? Sounds awful, but if it helps people pay for car insurance or mortgage, it may take off. The challenge until now has been verifying impressions – not anymore.

7. Security, surveillance and civil liberties. Ouch, touchy subject. But inevitably we’ll be ever more easily identified as we move around, by our car ID and our phone ID or our online identity. Why would we think the surveillance industry won’t be able to catch a burglar linking his mobile UDID when he broke into your home, with his credit ATM transaction where he deposited the $500 he got by selling your jewelry to the pawn shop. What does this mean for the industry? Big money in analytics, data collection and investigative services.

Other observations – “Facebook is eating the internet” is a  commentary I’ve heard more and more. While it’s bad for one company to control an industry, it may yield some great advances for a couple of years if Facebook becomes the skin through with we do almost everything. It could become our identity management for online banking and shopping and buying and selling on Ebay/Amazon/Craigslist, and it could become our phone number, email address and credit card account number. I wonder if broadband carriers will mutate into tech companies, and how long they can oppose device makers and our endless thirst for mobile bandwidth.

I’m off to watch Minority Report again.

I’m glad we decided to opt for agility in absolutely everything we do. This means choosing vendors, systems, solutions and hiring people with one question front and center: “will this decision help us go faster?”

No? Keep shopping.

We can move only as fast as our slowest component. In these times it’s important to be a winning IT team. Too many companies have settled for old school, slow, bureaucratic and risk-averse IT culture. They pay the price: disgruntled managers, defensive IT people, excuses and recriminations.

I’m so tired of dealing with defensive IT people who hide behind SAS70 or HIPAA or some other irrefutable piece of legislation, to tell us we can’t have what we want, quickly, and without a big fuss. It’s my mission these days to deliver technology solutions as fast as the business can absorb them. If the lawyers and the marketing people can move fast, then my team can too.

Here’s a sketch of our ecosystem, and a deck we presented at Dreamforce 2010 describing our approach to integration – frequently the slow boat in any SaaS architecture -and why we chose SnapLogic. So far, we have been very successful, though a rapid pace of delivery can also bring its own problems. Regardless, this is always better than regressing to old school IT with its bureaucrats and go-slow excuses. We’re having a great to at work.

SnapLogic-Pandora-in-Dreamforce.final

Okta.
Soon your company has 40+ cloud services in production. People are spinning – they forget URLs, passwords, they start sharing userIDs (yes, they do) and they tell each other their passwords. Nooo! stop this. There’s a better way.

Box.net
Fabulous, simple, intuitive way to securely share files with colleagues, outside partners, customers. You can take off your policeman hat – hand to your business and get out of the way – they will love you for it.

GoodData
BI is hard too. It used to take a special team many months to design the perfect BI strategy. When they were done, you realize you’re still better off with Excel. Committees can’t give you good analytics – your need to power at your fingertips and you need IT out of your face while you’re trying to see what these millions of records are trying to tell you. GoodData gets it.

There are more – we’ll be talking about our multi-cloud environment at Pandora, and are happy to share our successes and lessons.

You’re entering the toughest job market we’ve seen in a while, true. Don’t be pessimistic. Companies need you, for two big reasons:

1. The upturn after the recession. Yes, demand is up. Orders are picking up. Companies laid off many workers and will now face the task of re-hiring some of them, while others were non-regretted terminations, and will be better replaced with fresh graduates. Cheaper. Fresher thinking. Healthier, less baggage. Did you watch “Up in the Air”? Precisely. You’re hot property if you’re ready to start at the bottom rung and work hard, learn fast, and prove yourself.
2. Your fresh thinking is critical to regenerate stale industries. Yes – you’re the ones who entered college with ADD and learned how to IM, watch a movie, google-chat x6 at-a-time, talk on the phone and write a paper all at the same time. Your future boss doesn’t know how this works. He o she attends one-hour meetings at work from 7AM to 7PM every day. Then they go home and catch up on email. They’re terrified – unable to breathe, without a single original idea on how to make things better, and no time in their week to think creatively about how to excel. They need you. You will question stupid ideas, old habits, and hierarchical inefficient reporting structures. The boss’ boss’ boss will notice you, and you willl have a future where your boss has none.

How to handle this responsibility?

Be polite, be patient, be diplomatic. Be careful where and when you share your critiques of old diehard processes. Work hard, be thorough and precise – double-check every document / number / image / schedule you submit. Ask questions, and learn, learn, learn. Be careful not to mess up. It will happen, but be careful to keeep errors to a minimum.

Quietly, diplomatically, and yet visibly, begin to evolve small improvements on existing methods. Migrate a shared spreadsheet to Google Docs and share it with the project team. Get a free trial of Box.net so you can share docs inside and outside the company equally well. Research companies at Gartner, IDC, Zoominfo and more. Read blogs about products and services used in your environment. Connect with senior execs on Linkedin, Twitter and Spoke etc. Collaborate with other forward-thinking colleagues and progress-oriented team members.

Choose boring industries.

Several industries attract far less talent than the cool ones. All the cool people go to Google, Apple, Wall Street and NYC ad agencies. Others go to reputable consulting firms and law firms. Why not choose a B-movie where you can be a superstar? Work in healthcare, insurance, or retail banking. Or even a very large retailer HQ. Middle management in these environments are no fun to work for. They’re risk-averse, hierarchical and lack originality. It’s “The Office”, for real. Right here, is where you can outshine your boss, with relative ease, in just a few years. Once on track, you can continue a faster track throughout your career. You could get heavy assist with MBA along the way.

There has never been a better time to come in from college and instantly leapfrog your boss: you know all the cool tools to work faster and smarter. You don’t have kids to take to school and to practice after school. You can work many more hours and in these hours you can research new stuff instead of playing catch-up on email and complex project plans, spreadsheets, RFPs and legal contracts. You can be a swarm of bees around the big elephant, because you haven’t (yet) got bogged down with old school management baggage. If you can keep this nimbleness, and you have a genuine appetite for success, then you’ve graduated at a great time.

Good luck!

The integrations space is key to success of companies like Zuora, Workday, Successfactors and others. Without high quality, easy to use integrations, these clouds become silo clouds and begin to lose their appeal.

IBM was thinking good thoughts here, but may in effect have reduced the credibility of the connector market by making one of its key players disappear into the mothership.

On the other hand:

Could it be that change is afoot at a faster pace than we had imagined, and that over the next 12-18 months, all the surviving SaaS providers will be acquired by Oracle / IBM / Microsoft / etc and that by 2013 there will be no cottage industry left in cloud computing?

I doubt it. The think tanks at the big companies are still confined by traditional belief systems. They still can’t keep up with the pace of innovation coming from cloud developers all around the planet.

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/ibm-acquires-cast-iron-adds-cloud-integration-to-websphere-007475.php