Another day, another mistake, this time with LinkedIn
One of my heroes, Esther Dyson, likes to say that one should always make new mistakes. I follow her advice every day but today I thought I would share my latest mistake in case it helps others.
There are lots of articles praising the ability of LinkedIn for reference checking. The company even has a dedicated tool for this. So I merrily used this after interviewing someone. I did this in a hurry because I really liked the person and wanted to reference check quickly. And I only spoke to the people who had publicly added positive comments about the person’s LinkedIn profile.
But I did not ask that person in advance if this was OK to do.
I know that venture capitalists do this all the time as part of due diligence. But there was no need for me to make the calls before checking with the person, especially as I liked him.
Fortunately, he is such a class act that he called me afterwards and explained to me why what I did was wrong. He appreciated my need to check, but my unannounced calls made it look like I either did not trust him or he was disorganized. Neither is true.
As it happens, all his colleagues mentioned how honest he was; that he would calmly and honestly speak his mind if he saw something wrong. He demonstrated this in spades when he spoke to me and now I want to work with him even more.
Notes on Nursing
Book cover for Notes on Nursing
In my opinion, England’s greatest contributions to medicine were the creation of the nursing profession by Florence Nightingale, the invention of the hospice by Cicely Saunders, and the discovery of antibiotics by Alexander Fleming.
The main reason I include Fleming is that his discovery was only possible because he was so sloppy in his lab work, giving me hope that I too can one day do something useful. Saunders started as a nurse, trained as a doctor so that her reforms would be accepted, and eventually became Dame Sicly in recognition of her work. But if I understood correctly Nightingale was vilified by anti-feminists in her lifetime.
So it is with great delight that I finally sit down and read Notes on Nursing by Nightingale. The Univeristy of Pennsylvania has the complete version on the web, nicely hyperlinked, but I am reading the Kindle Edition of course. I usually highlight interesting and noteworthy sentences on the Kindle but I find myself highlight almost every sentence within the first few pages.
This is a charming book and I recommend you read it.
Here is my favorite quotation so far, a footnote about the fact that “one in every seven infants in this civilized land of England perishes before it is one year old? That, in London, two in every five die before they are five years old? And, in the other great cities of England, nearly one out of two”.
Upon this fact the most wonderful deductions have been strung. For a long time an announcement something like the following has been going the round of the papers:–”More than 25,000 children die every year in London under 10 years of age; therefore we want a Children’s Hospital.” This spring there was a prospectus issued, and diverse other means taken to this effect:–”There is a great want of sanitary knowledge in women; therefore we want a Women’s Hospital.” Now, both the above facts are too sadly true. But what is the deduction? The causes of the enormous child mortality are perfectly well known; they are chiefly want of cleanliness, want of ventilation, want of whitewashing; in one word defective household hygiene. The remedies are just as well known; and among them is certainly not the establishment of a Child’s Hospital. This may be a want; just as there may be a want of hospital room for adults. But the Registrar-General would certainly never think of giving us as a cause for the high rate of child mortality in (say) Liverpool that there was not sufficient hospital room for children; nor would he urge upon us, as a remedy, to found an hospital for them.
Her grasp of what to do with statistics is better than that of most doctors. I see from the Wikipedia article about Nightingale that she had “had exhibited a gift for mathematics from an early age and excelled in the subject under the tutorship of her father and later the tutorship of mathematician James Joseph Sylvester“.
I am struck by two other ideas from the beginning of the book. First, she keeps on putting forward the view of disease as a reparative process
disease, at some period or other of its course, is more or less a reparative process, not necessarily accompanied with suffering: an effort of nature to remedy a process of poisoning or of decay, which has taken place weeks, months, sometimes years beforehand, unnoticed, the termination of the disease being then, while the antecedent process was going on, determined?
It took me a few repititions before I understood what she meant because I was still in the mindset that disease is a pathological process that doctors treat. Instead her thinking is of diseases as the manifestation of the body’s attempts at healing, attempts that nurses try to help along. This reminded me of a program to help the elderly look after themselves during the winter months as so many die from hypothermia. The social workers tried to teach that, since 25% of heat is lost through the head, wearing a hat indoors is a good thing to minimze heat loss. Few wore a hat. But when they rephrased this as 25% of cold gets through the head, and that a hat prevents entry of the cold, many more of the elderly participants put their hat on.
Second, I am fascinated by her insistance on good ventillation
The very first canon of nursing, the first and the last thing upon which a nurse’s attention must be fixed, the first essential to a patient, without which all the rest you can do for him is as nothing, with which I had almost said you may leave all the rest alone, is this: TO KEEP THE AIR HE BREATHES AS PURE AS THE EXTERNAL AIR, WITHOUT CHILLING HIM. Yet what is so little attended to? Even where it is thought of at all, the most extraordinary misconceptions reign about it. Even in admitting air into the patient’s room or ward, few people ever think, where that air comes from. It may come from a corridor into which other wards are ventilated, from a hall, always unaired, always full of the fumes of gas, dinner, of various kinds of mustiness; from an underground kitchen, sink, washhouse, water-closet, or even, as I myself have had sorrowful experience, from open sewers, loaded with filth; and with this the patient’s room or ward is aired, as it is called–poisoned, it should rather be said. Always air from the air without, and that, too, through those windows, through which the air comes freshest. From a closed court, especially if the wind do not blow that way, air may come as stagnant as any from a hall or corridor.
Her book was published in 1860, so soon after Pasteur was forumlated germ theory and a year before Semmelweiss lost his sanity from trying to explain to doctors how germs spread to patients. (Hint: it’s was iatrogenic.) This was a wonderful woman, well ahead of her time.
Wiki best practices
I am on the excellent Refresh Cambridge mailing list and another member asked for advice about wikis. I gave a long reply and a few people recommended that I share it with others.
First, there is the question of which wiki to select. I have a strong preference for open source wikis to minimize vendor lock-in. If you ever do decide to migrate to another wiki vendor in the future you are more likely to succeed if you began with open source software.
MediaWiki is charming but the user interface is too uncomfortable for most people, especially the subject matter experts you want to do the most writing. The advantages of open source are outweighed by the usability issues. On the other hand, I have heard someone cheekily saying that the reason the Wikipedia is still high quality is that its MediaWiki software puts off authors below a certain intelligence.
Socialtext is a brilliant open source wiki, but installing your own version is hard and pricing is for enterprise customers. So I personally like Deki Wiki because although it is open source, the user interface is Microsoft Word-friendly and administering the software is very easy with their hosted version.
By contrast I hate Confluence because it is a massive proprietary content management system, and because its user interface encourage each author to make a large stand-alone office document rather than richly interconnected web pages. This habit is pernicious and difficult to reverse so you must be vigilant early on in a deployment to teach everyone the value of interconnected web pages.
At any rate, I regularly use all four of these wikis and I know that I am in the minority in my aversion to Confluence. I would never choose it, but I can see that great results are possible with.
So how do you get great results with a wiki? Here are nine tips from my experience:
- Everyone in the group must commit to using the wiki, and to the wiki being the version of record. It is dispiriting for junior people assigned to write on a wiki to see the real decision makers discussing elsewhere and to understand that none of the seniors will use the wiki.
- To get that commitment without a big change effort, it is better to have everyone in a small group of ten using the wiki than it is to have a couple of people from each of five groups doing so. The good folks of Common Craft have an excellent video explaining the advantages of wikis.
- Have your debates about the contentious issues on the wiki, for all stakeholders to see, not in private conversations, and resist the temptation to make private decisions through messages between insiders in your group
- Everyone will have their own excuse for keeping material away from the wiki, often citing “security”. But in general, most people’s bias is towards under- rather than oversharing, so there needs to be a strong champion who has the opposite bias.
- Use the wiki to take minutes of any meetings you hold. Have someone in charge of writing the minutes during the meeting, with the output projected on the screen. A lot of misunderstandings are cleared up that way as people can see straight away if they have been misunderstood and can make correction there and then with the group watching and learning.
- A wiki is not a reason to have no meetings, rather it is an easy way to have a version of record as decisions are made in these meetings.
- The best thing about Socialtext is that it sends everyone a daily update by default. This seems a subtle difference but it really motivates everyone else in the team to see a message of what their colleagues did the previous day. If you use a different wiki, switch to this default.
- To get over the initial period of colleagues who do nothing in the beginning, make sure you write something every day so that your colleagues feel guilty enough to do start doing something.
- Instead of answer e-mail questions and then trying to summarize the consensus on the wiki, write your thoughts on a wiki page and then send the link to everyone else you want to have a consensus.
A final note about my first comment about junior people being assigned to write on a wiki. This is both a strength and a weakness. I like to show juniors that contributing to the wiki is an excellent way for them to learn about the organization, and to show the organization how much your are willing to contribute to its success. On the other hand, if you give out signals that wiki work is of minor importance and that is why you are parcelling it out to junior people of minor importance, you will get an unused and useless wiki.
People get the wikis they deserve.
The benefits of openness against the demands of negotiation
This is one of the few times in life that I will discuss football. Or sports. In my defense, I hope to make this post boring enough that no sports fan would bother reading it. Here goes.
The only football team I care about is Ebbsfleet United, and that is only because it was founded as an innovative social experiment. The club was bought with funds from fans, it remains completely owned by fans, and the fans are supposed to vote on every decision.
Earlier this week I received this message from the club:
Dear Mohammad,
We know you have followed MyFootballClub and Ebbsfleet United’s progress, which is why we wanted to keep you up to date with some breaking news.Ebbsfleet United have received an offer from a League club to purchase striker John Akinde. This request follows a number of offers, from several different clubs over the last few months. MyFootballClub members are currently voting whether to accept or reject the bid.
The offer, made on Wednesday 27 August, is in excess of £140,000. Ebbsfleet United could also receive further payments depending on performance plus a significant percentage of any sell-on should the player be transferred to another club.
Fuller details of the deal – and the reasons why Liam Daish, the CEO and the Chairman believe that this offer is in the best interests of the football club as well as the player – will be disclosed if the transfer proceeds. (This is to protect Ebbsfleet United’s future negotiating position should the deal falter.)
Liam Daish, the CEO and Chairman are seeking the opinion of the club’s owners, the MyFootballClub members. Members have until 19:00 (UK time) Friday 29 August to decide.
This is quite a dilemma for me. I don’t mean whether or not Mr. Akinde should be sold – it is possible for me to care less, but not by much – but rather by the decision not to disclose full information to the club’s owners, the fans, so as
to protect Ebbsfleet United’s future negotiating position should the deal falter
There ought to be a way to use openness as a strength. On the one hand you have Mozilla’s Firefox web browser which continues to beat Microsoft’ Internet Explorer in quality and features. My brother pointed out to me that this state of affairs is ludicrous. Microsoft could pay for an entire team of programmers to do nothing all but watch the Mozilla team’s work and then copy it. In fact, they could literally copy and paste the code into their own web browser because Mozilla has a very permissive open source license. And yet, Microsoft’s closed work continues to trail Mozilla’s open work. This is the beauty that I see in open source software.
And yet as I study for my MBA I learn about negotiation skills and the importance of restricting information. A key tactic for building co-operation rather than capitulating to competitors in a negotiation is to have gradual, sequential sharing of information. Share a little information. If you negotiator reciprocates with sharing some of his or her own information, you can share yet more of yours, and so on. If you share all of your information at the outset, however, you lose because the person you are negotiating with has all the information while you only have half, and because information is power in a negotiation.
I do not know how to use openness as a strength. There must be a way, but I do not think it has been discovered yet because openness is still a new phenomenon. Even the Mozilla example is not about beating Microsoft because openness overcomes secrecy, but because the advantages of openness in collaboration outweigh the advantages of secrecy in planning against competitors.
But there really ought to be a value for openness in planning against competitors. For example, one advantage that Israeli negotiators have against the Arab dictators is that the Israelis can always say that they personally agree to something, but that The Knesset will never approve it, or at least that the negotiators have to consult with the rest of their people back home. By contrast our “leaders” never get to say that they have to get approval from their populace. And the open societies of the West beat the closed ones of the USSR, and will go on to beat the pseudo-open one of Russia today, because lively public debate minimizes inappropriate decisions made through private negotiations.
I do not know, however, how to apply this in business. I cannot find any books about it, and the few examples like open book accounting are practiced by mavericks like Ricardo Semler. There does not seem to be a body of knowledge showing repeatable best practices that I can learn how to copy.
Semantic wikis
The semantic web is the most important technology development that I wait to reach mass adoption. Even the Economist’s essayists understand this. But mass adoption is still far away.
In the meantime, the technology is maturing nicely, and over the last week I have begun making use of Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) software to document clinical knowledge. Part of the course that I teach at UCL’s medical school this September is to get medical students to populate this wiki.
It is worth reading the Semantic MediaWiki user manual to understand why the technology is so useful. Here is the list of five reasons, modified with my own explanations the clinical benefits:
- Manually generated lists. Wikipedia is full of manually edited listings such the causes of secondary hypertension. Errors are common when a list has to be updated manually. Furthermore, the number of potentially interesting lists is huge, and it is impossible to provide all of them in acceptable quality. In SMW, lists are generated automatically like this. They are always up-to-date and can easily be customised to obtain further information.
- Searching information. Much of Wikipedia’s knowledge is hopelessly buried within millions of pages of text, and can hardly be retrieved at all. For example, there is no list of diseases that present with coughing and weight loss in Wikipedia. A SMW query would be much more effective than a text search is.
- Inflationary use of categories. The need for better structuring becomes apparent by the enormous use of categories in Wikipedia. While this is generally helpful, it has also led to a number of categories that would be mere query results in SMW. For some examples consider the category deaths from leukemia lists people who have died from the disease, but the disease itself is absent from the category vascular disorders, which only includes Migraine, cluster headache and reflex neurovascular dystrophy. The contents of the categories could easily be replaced by simple queries that use just a handful of annotations, for example Category:Disease, Property:body system, Category:People, Property:death from, and Property:date of death would suffice to create thousands of similar listings on the fly, and to remove hundreds of Wikipedia categories.
- Inter-language consistency. Apart from overcoming the differences between hematologists in the USA and haemtologists in the UK, you can ask for the incidence of leukemia (or even lukaemia) in the Chinese Wikipedia without reading a single word of this language. This can be exploited to detect possible inconsistencies that can then be resolved by editors. For example, the classification is slightly different for leukemia in the English Wikipedia and leukämie in the German one.
- External reuse. Some desktop tools today make use of Wikipedia’s content, e.g. the media player Amarok displays articles about artists during playback. However, such reuse is limited to fetching some article for immediate reading. The program cannot exploit the information (e.g. to find songs of artists that have worked for the same label), but can only show the text in some other context. SMW leverages a wiki’s knowledge to be useable outside the context of its textual article. Since semantic data can be published under a free license, it could even be shipped with a software to save bandwidth and download time.
The last reason is crucial for me. The development of decision support systems is stymied by each provider trying to create their own, text-based, proprietary system. The semantic incompatibility of these systems means that creators of electronic medical records cannot integrate the work of decision support systems providers.
It remains to say that I learned about the semantic wikipedia by attending HealthCamp Md, which was organized by the very wonderful Mark Scrimshire. Aside from inspiring me to try Twitter (I am still waiting for my new smartphone to arrive in the UK) and to start HealthCamp UK, he allowed me to meet Melanie Swan and Mike Cariaso. As a bona fide futurist, Melanie had already had her DNA analysis back from 23andMe and gladly shared the data with Mike. Mike ran these through the tools he had created at SNPedia. Within a couple of hours he was able to give Melanie an explanation of what was known about her DNA sequence, using the latest information documented in the SNPedia semantic wiki.
I was shocked and awed, and wanted to create something similar for doctors to use.
There is no money in change management
I really enjoyed the interviews with senior staff at The Advisory Board Company back in 2006. I think they decided to hire me after I said that “the early bird gets the worm, but only the second mouse gets the cheese”. Before that, I think they knew that I knew about IT and healthcare, but they worried that I was evangelical the use of IT in healthcare, and that I would not help hospital CXOs make the correct business decision.
Authoritas by Aaron Greenspan
I thought of this quote many times while reading Authoritas by Aaron Greenspan. I bought the book because I had heard that Mark Zuckerberg had stolen the Facebook from Aaron while they were both studying at Harvard. He did, and it is a juicy story, even though it only takes up the final fifth of the book. The price of the book was worth it just to understand how frivolous Mark is, and to read that he rejected Aaron’s full-featured site because it was “too useful”.
But if you are a change agent, please buy this book. It shows you why there is no money in change management.
Aaron does not seem to have any cunning or guile in him. He seems to be a really nice guy, just trying to do the right thing. I feel safe in saying this because he includes so many conversations that make him look really stupid. I have done many stupid things in my life, but like most people, I hide them from myself and from other people. Aaron just writes down, in detail, what he remembers happening.
This kind of writing is what I call the “dark matter” of research material. Most accounts of change management are by or about people who succeeded in bringing about change, and whom society has recognised and rewarded for these changes. But society fails to recognise most people who try to improve, and instead these unreasonable people are crushed and never get to write their story, much less have it read. We should be grateful that these people exist, irrational on their insistence for a better way, and irrational in their persistence against society’s irrational rejections.
The transcripts of Aaron’s arguments with Harvard’s faculty are priceless, and the discussions between Dean Jay Ellison are fascinating illustrations of The Social Life of Software‘s descriptions of how restrictive digital communication is. I should add that Aaron hates Jay, but I thought Jay was the most reasonable of the Harvard bunch, and that he was genuinely trying to be helpful, but that they spoke in different tongues. Aaron’s accounts reminded me so many times of transcripts of conversations in books by Deborah Tannen and John Gray. Except the conversations do not illustrate arbitrary differences between how women and men talk to each other, but how change agents talk and stupid people respond.
There, I said it. I think the people Aaron tried to help were stupid for what they did to him. But then again, it was stupid of Aaron to continue trying to help them. This book is not so much a description of Mark stealing from Aaron, as much as documenting how Aaron keeps on being the first mouse that has his neck snapped by the mousetrap while the other mice grab the cheese.
What is interesting to me is that Aaron admires Bill Gates, or Sir Bill, as the Queen calls him. Bill Gates was never a change agent, and is the richer for it. That is why Microsoft continued with DOS for so long, even though it was the first and largest company to develop software for the Macintosh. They fully understood the superiority of graphical user interface, but most people (“business buyers”) were too stupid to understand, so Microsoft continued to sell them what they wanted to buy. DOS. Microsoft and Bill Gates only try to make change after they have enough monopoly power and people have to obey them. And even then, even the mighty Microsoft can be stung, as the Vista debacle shows.
So what is the lesson? It would be a shame to deprive society from the benefits of change, so I hope that reading the book does not dissuade anyone from trying to make change happen. But you really should read the book to understand what can happen to you, and to at least figure out when to quit and protect yourself. Aaron, I salute your courage, and hope only that you can continue your efforts long after the world has moved on from Facebook.
Socializing software
Book cover for The Social Life of Information
I am currently reading The Social Life of Information, another Harvard Business School text that critiques the IT industry. It is annoying me like IT Doesn’t Matter did, but is full of interesting historical background like The Big Switch is, so as a history junkie I am hooked. I guess the fact that I find the book annoying marks me as the techno-jingoist that they are critiquing.
The book’s main thesis, so far in my reading, is that there is a lot more social context around information and its technology than information technology enthusiasts (e.g. me) would claim. Furthermore, that social context is important and overlooked leading to problems in deployment. I will not be cruel enough to say that MIT invents the future while Harvard publishes scholarly critiques of it (oops, but Dan Bricklin’s audience agrees with me).
There are, as you might expect from the strong praise the book has received, lots of good stories and fair points. For example, there is the hilarious account of the attempt by Chiat/Day’s senior management to create the office of the future, documented by Wired News in issue 2.07, and then fittingly recanted in 7.02. The dystopian visionary CEO created office space with no offices, where hierarchy was “eliminated” as each employee had access to any desk at the beginning of the day that they wanted to take.
The reality was the employees had to rush to grab desk. Field staff would arrive in the middle of the day with no idea where the rest of their team had sat. Team members could not sit together, and turf warfare began as senior managers tried to pull rank over junior members of other teams so that they could get their own team members to sit together. These same post-hierarchical managers sent their secretaries to grab desks for them in advance. Amongst all this bullying the CEO would walk around asking people if they were sitting in the same place they had sat yesterday. If they answered yes, he would move them to another place.
And the computers, of course, were a pain to recustomize each day for each worker’s preference. No employee had any personal computer, instead they would pick up a fresh device each day. And it turns out that desks are more than just place on which to pile paper, instead the location of each pile of paper had meaning and value. You get the idea.
By contrast, I was surprised to learn how keenly socially aware Alexandar Graham Bell was with the new technology he invented, the telephone. His investors were dismayed at how useless the telephone seemed compared to the telegraph and tried to sell the patents to Western Union at rock-bottom prices. Western Union turned them down and I recently discovered (see Brunelleschis Patent in the sharing medical techniques post) that these are still the most valuable patents to date.
Instead, Bell tried to get his telephones into hotels and encouraged hotel guests to use the phones to call reception staff. He also put the phones into offices so that office staff would experience the advantages of telephones. Such social interactions must have been great for creating his market of home customers.
It is interesting to me to contrast Bell’s approach with Day’s when thinking about doctors learning and the Department of Health’s plans for modernising education. Six years ago, as I was beginning my residency, Modernising Medical Careers included bold talk of restructed teaching that fit the increasingly unstructured schedules of doctors. As junior doctors worked fewer hours with fewer overlaps with other doctors’ shifts the idea of time- and place-shifted teaching was attractive. Each doctor could watch each lecture alone.
At the time it sounded good and I was heavily in favour of it. But now, after reading this annoying book, I am annoyed to admit that I am rethinking the advantages.
As I read the rest of the book I am curious to see what else it covers. Certainly, the index does not include Google, and it has only one mention of GNU, and thus open source software, a highly social technology endeavour. And as far as I can tell, there will not be any mention of social software as the book was published in 2000, around the same time that web 2.0 began to crystalize. Social software may not fix the social problems that the book describes, but it does provide a variety of social solutions to problems that were previously intractable.
On sharing medical techniques
As happens to most people who visit him, I learned a lot of things from Dr. Eran Bellin when I met him last week. One story he told stayed with me because of a mild obsession I have with the social pressures around sharing information.
The story he told was the one told to him by his father, Lowell Bellin as a medical student. It was about the secrecy surrounding the invention of the obstetric forcep, a tool that would have saved many lives had other physicians known about it earlier.
I am not sure if I have the exact story he was talking about, but a little Googling around led me to the Chamberlen family. For perhaps a whole century only the Chamberlen family knew and kept the secret.
Apparently Peter the Elder was the inventor of the forceps. The brothers went to great length to keep the secret. When they arrived at the home of the woman in labor, two persons had to carry a massive box with gilded carvings into the house. The pregnant patient was blindfolded as to not to reveal the secret, all the others had to leave the room. Then the operator went to work. The people outside heard screams, bells, and other strange noises until the cry of the baby indicated another successful delivery.
Eventually, different members of the family sold the secret to other people, and then someone leaked the secret to the public.
What is interesting to me is how late the dates are: the 16th and 17th century, well after patents had become common in Europe. Dr. Bellin’s mention of the story, and its implicaitons for patient care, inspired me to scan two articles I have that cover the invention of patents in 15th century Florence (Brunelleschis Bargain and Brunelleschis Patent). The idea was to give inventors a way to make more money from sharing their inventions rather than they would from hiding them.
Fillippos Brunelleschi, the architect of Florence’s remarkable cathedral, won the world’s first patent for a technical invention in 1421. Brunelleschi was a classic man of the Renaissance: tough-minded, multi-talented, and thoroughly self-confident. He claimed he had invented a new means of conveying goods up the Arno River (he was intentionally vague on details), which he refused to develop unless the state kept others from copying his design. Florence complied, and Brunelleschi walked away with the right to exclude all new means of transport on the Arno for three years.
The reason that Dr. Bellin mentioned the forceps story is the same that he had created Clinical Looking Glass software and joined the Emerging Health Information Technology company. He wanted doctors to learn from each other what works, and then to use what they learned to help patients. For that I congratulate him.
But the story of Chamberlen family saddens me, and I would go further to say that a doctor doing this today would be acting unethically. I hope, at least, that there are enough incentives that such a doctor would also be acting foolishly.
Update: Dr. Bellin kindly corrected a couple of mistakes I made in this post. First, he heard the story about the Chamberlens not as a medical student, but from his own father, also a physician committed to the duty of physicians to share knowledge. And second, Emerging Health Information Technology was created by its current CEO, Jack Wolf, who in the words of Dr. Bellin “had the vision to realize that the only way to afford cutting edge technology in the health care sector was by creating virtual cooperative communities of hospitals sharing infrastructure costs through a trusted outside entity”.
Starbucks committee meeting
Last week I went to Seattle and saw, amongst many other interesting sites, the original Starbucks coffee shop. Apparently, this is the only Starbucks that still has the original logo:
You can click on the picture to see the details. Compare this to the more discrete current logo:
Can you imagine the committee meeting in which they discussed why they were switching to this logo?
Advertising on GMail – not a bug, but a feature
About a year ago I began forwarding all my work e-mail to my GMail account. I did this for archiving purposes (unlimited e-mail rather than the 100 MB inbox my company’s Microsoft Exchange server allows), for quick searches (it takes too long to find an old message in Microsoft Outlook) and because the user interface provides threading of messages (also missing in Outlook).
What I really did not expect is the advantage of the advertisements. These appear at the top and to the right of each of my work messages and their targeting is based on the words in my messages.
This turned out to be one of the best ways to find innovative startups. For example, I am part of the research team working on data warehouses and we know that the extract / transform / load (ETL) process is a painful one. We all searched around for tools that help CIOs deal with this problem, but only I had an advert around their messages about data warehousing.
I clicked and got to Talend, and open source software ETL provider that looks really good. We are now arranging an interview with their CTO, Cedric Carbone.
Advertising on GMail – not a bug, but a feature.
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