When you think of mouth watering spicy rice dishes with lentils and sambles, what country comes to mind? Is it India or Pakistan, well for me its Sri Lanka. A few kilometers from where we live in the culinary city of Melbourne is the huge architecturally spectacular convent building of Abottsford Convent. Breaking out onto a courtyard of the Convent is a small restaurant which serves Sri Lankan breakfast, lunch and dinner and also cups of the best Arabica coffee and Indian spiced Chai you could have. The service is good and the presentation very professional.

Now what sets this restaurant apart is that you pay for what you feel the meal is worth. You don't even have to tell the staff how much you are paying, as there is a donation box or piggy bank in the form of an old treasure chest which you slip the notes and coins into after your meal. It's up to you to work out the value in monetary terms you feel the service and food encapsulates. Strangely enough I have noticed the restaurant, which by the way is called "Lentil as Anything", is hardly ever full except on weekends. Believe you me it's not due to lack of friendly faces that bring copious amounts of healthy steaming tasty food and lay it out before you. It's not the surreal surroundings steeped in gothic culture and crumbling buildings with ornate window boxes. To be honest I'm not entirely sure what it could be other than the fact that a potential clientele may be caught in the barrier of price making. Possibly the discussions which develop at the end of each meal, or the mental dilemmas posed between couples as to what notes or coins to drop into the box may stifle entry. One other thing I have noted is that parents tend to make it the children's job at the table to go and drop the cash into the slot. Why might this be? It could be totally innocent for all my knowing.

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SAAS is a tight margin business with vendors relying on low cost of sale. Often what gets missed is that hand holding experience which a lot more traditional vendors still provide. Quite a few SAAS vendors also focus their marketing message on the mid to upper market, especially in times of a tougher economy. It still takes time to develop a SAAS sale (believe it or not) whoever you are selling to large or small so I understand where the vendor is coming from. I had a prospect contact me just yesterday saying that they felt one SAAS solutions we offer looked like it would be for a large company. They were a 50 - 60 employee operation who would have been perfectly suited to the SAAS solution. The message the vendor gives is key and trust is essential. Focus on building trust and small business will adopt SAAS but it comes at a price. Can the vendors afford to pay the price?

It's a know fact that most health practitioners, lawyers and accountants tend to get business by way of personal referrals. This would obviously imply that unless they continued to do a good job that they would go out of business. Without perfect information flow this is not  the case and we all know that there is no such thing as perfect information flow.

The other thing we need to take into account is that professions do tend to protect themselves wherever possible which further stifles the flow of perfect information.  I have also noted that in certain countries there are professions where the blatant public (web) qualification of individuals is prohibited by law. These laws are in countries which promote free speech and equal opportunity no less.

With the new web there are certain Web sites which are gaining traction allowing you to view and give ratings and comments about individual practitioners in these fields.  Here is a site where you can rate a doctor for example: http://www.doctorrate.com/ and there are others.

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In light of the concepts outlined in the Book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. I decided to go ahead and develop a product based on the idea outlined in the book as Peer Production. The final chapter of the book (The Wikinomics Playbook) was developed in a unique way by contributions from anyone who wanted to participate. Its this participative engine which creates innovation and my contribution is just one more cog in the giant wheel of the Economy2.0

http://www.wikinomics.com.au/component/attachments/download/1

You will need to register to download but that is simple and your details will be kept simply to know who is part of this download community.

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Last night I was invited to contribute to a new business brain storming session. I was sourced due to my understanding of the new economy and the technology associated with it. The product if it does go to market is intended to revolutionise the medical profession giving power back to the patient by keeping them informed. It's a simple product and I was happy to say it ticked all the right Wikinomics boxes. The group's main dilemma during this initial session was who would pay to have it developed and what would the pricing model be. I was disappointed to see that most initially felt we should go to the big Corporates who stood to gain from future statistical information on stake holders, to ask for funding.

Two things needed to be made clear from the outset to the group in relation to Wikinomics.

Firstly the NetGeneration can see internet exploitation from afar and can qualify an internet scam at lightening speed. Its practically part of there genetic makeup. In the recent Olympic ticked scam what percentage of those caught out do you think were NetGeneration. Practically none!

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I have been preparing a series of interviews with the Linkedin Wikinomics group members. Here is the first of this series which is with DD Ganguly the CEO of   DimDim, the up and coming Open source Webinar collaboration tool.

The Interview covers off certain fundamental principals of the advantages of OpenSource, off-shoring, Platforms for participation and Collaboration tools.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8238868672991319074&hl=en 

I recently needed some specialized work done to an Internet site and decided to trawl the Ideagoras on the Internet for a specialist. I was amazed to see not only the caliber of skills on sale but also the low prices which consultants in this space are prepared to do work for. Their reference is a star rating and comments on how good the work has been that they had donein the past. No one had to reveal their age or where they had been to school or what grades they had achieved or what country they lived in. This is a true flattening principal at work here.  What more do you need to know than that they had achieved what others had previously asked them to do in the manner prescribed.

I ended up however not using a consultant but instead buying a component which will hopefully do the same as a consultant would have done however with support for the next year (the old build or buy question).

Is the risk of allowing someone you wont ever meet onto your Corporate website to tinker still too high a risk?

I would really like to know who - in bigger companies - is in charge for projects related to e-business. I guess that's mainly the IT itself instead of departments like marketing, communcations or sales. That's the situation I met all the time during my career. I made the shift from IT to communcations by myself and I have - always had - a hard time formulating new ideas in my career coming up against the internal IT department. With the advent of Web2.0 this is all that much more apparent particularly when it comes to the usage of open source software.

Some of the reasons:

• IT input is usually quite high when it comes to these kinds of projects and as such they take ownership.
• Cross departmental systems have high profile across the board. Therefore everybody wants to be accountable for them (and wants to have a say in the budget).
• The usage of open source software - if suggested by any other department than the IT - is often denied by these experts because of its so called security implications. I believe, the reason behind their refusal to adopt Open Source is the lack of skill needed and the fear that the knowledge of how to run this kind of software sits outside the IT department.

And what is the knock-on effect of all this?

• For the IT department, a project is succesful as long as the result is a stable software and ticks the requirement box placed by the business users. Most of the time IT don't even follow up and find out if the desired results have been achieved. They wait for the users to break the software and then blame the Business user.
• Big companies are too slow and dull for succesful e-business. They cant keep up the pace like smaller more agile companies.

Internal IT departments in companies still behave like gods instead of being the experts who are delivering good services.

Scholarly thinking has nearly always preceded the definitions tailored by the software industry. Definition's on terminology are important but will differ depending on what side of the balance sheet the definition now sits. KM is now being defined by the people making money from it and who are being paid to evangelize. The crux of KM comes down to how my company can be more effective and efficient and pay higher dividends to share holders. Staff attrition costs companies millions and is far more prevalent now than it was 30 years ago. That's a paradigm shift! You lose your people you lose your knowledge and often to your competitor. Companies have to get their heads around this and technology has helped. Corporate knowledge attrition is only one aspect of the KM field but I want to relate this comment to it.

By capturing the "deltas" of argument / discussion / creation on a daily weekly monthly basis in systems which relate to the particular "environment" in which they are being captured and then aggregating these, provides a knowledge pool. Web2.0 helps capture the "deltas" as well as creating tools which relate and appeal to the "environment" in which they are used. Systems can then aggregate and provide the ability to search and share experiences to prevent reinventing the wheel and slowing the operations down. The skill will be to present the knowledge pool back to the employees in a way that works for everyone. Dr Martin Porter at Cambridge University helped develop some very interesting Natural Language search algorithms back in the late 90's which disappointingly have still not been incorporated into our favourite search engines.

Aside: Your knowledge is often in the minds of others and this is your extended knowledge pool. Not to be forgotten and Web2.0's ability to maintain and tap ex-colleague relationships extends this and prolongs its useful life. In the future our employers will judge us on the quality/depth/proximity and not quantity of this extended Collaborative/Social Business Network

Recently I took the plunge to upgrade my laptop given the need to do more multimedia work. I looked at all the major computer store chains and none of them could come close to......yes, you guessed it, the world leader in online trading: e-Bay.

I had previously made a promise to myself never to order any electronic equipment over $1000 from e-bay after another rough experience I had a few year ago. On that occasion I had ‘won' a ‘NEW' Camcorder which ended up being used and there was practically nothing I could do about it.

My, how short my memory is. Now with nearly $400 to save by ordering the laptop on e-bay I did it at a total of $1385. The e-bay seller had a reasonable reputation at 98% positive feedback so all was looking good.

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