(This was originally written for Daitan Blog)

What is WebRTC? Why is it Relevant to Customer Service?

WebRTC is an emerging standard to enable real-time communications (voice, text, video, data) directly on a web-browser running in any machine or mobile phone. It is like having ubiquitous Skype, but without the need to install any proprietary application or browser plugins.

With WebRTC, web developers can easily embed rich voice/video/data applications into web pages or apps using nothing more than  HTML5 and JavaScript. They can quickly develop new communication applications without owning media pipes (once connection is set, data flows peer-to-peer) and writing just a few lines of code.

Skype, Google Hangouts, and other stand-alone communication applications are changing how we communicate using our laptops and smartphones. WebRTC integrates that change to web services and mobile Apps.

WebRTC and Customer Service: Transforming Customer Communications

One of the greatest challenges for Customer Service today is to keep context independent of channel. A conversation that starts on the website via chat can turn into a phone call and then transition to Twitter to be eventually resolved by email.

The promisse of WebRTC is to be the single channel of real-time communications enabling the seamless transition between data, text, voice, video sharing. For example,  ”Click to Call” buttons become trivial and independent of platform or type of client device.

So what we see in the horizon is a future of no more traditional phone lines, no more proprietary web widgets for chat, and a seamless, integrated channel for real time communication that will both make current problems irrelevant and create a new set of challenges for Customer Service organizations.

Where is WebRTC today?

WebRTC is a standard driven by the IETF and W3C. It is in draft mode and is currently supported by Google Chrome, Mozilla and Opera Browsers. Safari and Internet Explorer are not yet supporting the WebRTC standards, although plug-ins are available for both browsers.

A good gateway for additional information can be found at http://www.webrtc.org/ (which is maintained by the Chrome Browser team).

(originally written for Daitan blog)

In the past decade or so the software industry has moved from waterfall to Agile Software Development methods.

In waterfall development, marketing and engineering signed a “contract” based on a fixed scope of work (the “Product Requirements Document”) and embarked in a long project based on engineering estimates of execution complexity. That provided a false sense of predictability and risk management. The problem is that requirements change and estimates are proved wrong as soon as developers start writing code, resulting in delays, budget overruns, and mismatch between product capabilities and user needs.

The idea behind Agile is that both marketing and engineering teams develop a relationship of trust and share common goals and responsibilities. Both sides agree that plans are subject to change and work collaboratively, managing schedule, scope and cost,  continuously making plan adjustments often. The result is more efficiency and better products.

Is Your Software Development Agile? Think again

Another trend in software development that has only increased in the past decade is the use of external development teams (outsourcing). It is about cost and risk management and accessing skills where they are readily available.

If you do or plan to use external teams for software development, you must transform your thinking on the relationship with them to materialize the efficiency advantages of Agile development. The interface between product developers and traditional outsourcing providers has not yet caught up with the level of transparency and collaboration required for Agile methods to work.

So, what do you need to look for when working with a software development partner?

Here are the top 3 Requirements for Agile Outsourcing:

1. Cost Efficiency.  Yes, there are other good reasons to outsource, but managing development costs is still an important driver. The common mistake is to focus in hourly cost per developer. You need to think cost of results and development organizations working in Agile with more capable developers should be able to deliver a lot more than just low cost per head.
2. Technical Capabilities.  In an Agile development team, every member must interact with others and contribute their ideas. If external developers are seen as second-class contributors, you are on the wrong path. They should be as capable as the internal team and bring their previous technical and process experience in similar projects to add value to the relationship.
3. Collaboration and Communication.  Since outsourcing often involves teams in different countries, factors such as language, time zone, cultural differences can be a challenge. Before starting a project make sure you can trust your partner and that the communication infrastructure is adequate and that there is a good match of culture, language and capabilities to communicate in real time. Joint development is not a transaction, it needs to be a trusted relationship between teams.

A couple of days ago, Simon Allen, a friend in the UK got a “Neutron walks into a bar…” joke from Carla (from Oxford High School) and posted it in his Facebook timeline:

This neutron walks into a bar, orders a drink, opens his wallet to pay when the barman shakes his head and says………. “for you, no charge”

Physics, Humor and Language always catch my attention, so I thought for a few seconds and I replied with my own “Particle walks into a bar…” joke:

The Neutron walks into a bar. He was positive he had forgotten an Electron at home.

Since them I have wasted precious minutes (hours?) thinking of other smart particle situations (and involved other people through Twitter and Facebook). I knew I would not be able to stop unless I put all of them in a single place.

So, here it is. The most comprehensive set of “Particle walks into a bar…” jokes  documented in history. Credits to Simon Allen, Roy Atkinson, Allan Berkson, and the public domain (I am sure a few of them are stolen).

They are presented in no particular order.

————————————–

An Electron walks into a bar and order a drink for the proton. He found her very attractive.

A Neutron walks into a bar and order a double scotch. Barman: “What is the matter?”. Neutron: “Not the matter, the anti-matter”.

A Proton walks into a bar. Barman: “We only sell to protons, are you sure you are a proton?” Proton: “Yes, I’m positive”

Plutonium Atom walked into a bar. Barman thought he was very unstable.

An Electron walks into a bar. Another Electron walked in to a bar to meet the first Electron. That is repulsive!

A Proton walked into a bar order a double. The barman asks “What is the matter?”. Proton says “Two good friends were in a collision yesterday…”

An Electron walks into a bar… Barman: “What is the problem?”… Electron: “It is the foton. I wish I was as brilliant as him.”

An Atom walks into a bar and orders Diet Coke. Barman “Trying to lose weight?” Atom: “Yes, after Thanksgiving dinner, I am a few isotopes too heavy.”

Nos últimos anos, encontrei centenas de empreendedores brasileiros visitando o Vale do Silício. Quando pergunto “qual o seu objetivo nessa visita?”, invariavelmente ouço “tenho uma startup, vim procurar um VC e tentar pegar um investimento”.

Nesse post, eu o convido a visitar a California, mas também explico alguns conceitos básicos de investimento em startups e mostro que “pegar um investimento” não é um objetivo realista para a grande maioria dos empreendedores brasileiros visitando o Vale.

Empreendedor, Angel and Venture Capital

Empresas podem nascer, crescer e morrer de várias formas, mas durante as últimas décadas o Vale do Silício na California desenvolveu um modelo de empreendedorismo que parece maximizar a eficiência do ecosistema empreendedor.

No estágio inicial, uma startup é financiada pelos próprios fundadores (economias pessoais, investimentos de amigos, empréstimos bancários, suor e trabalho). Bootstrapping é o processo no qual a empresa desenvolve o produto e gera receitas para pagar as contas e crescer sem capital externo adicional.

Embora bootstrapping possa ser o caminho para a sua empresa, no modelo padrão existem dois tipos de investidores que fornecem o capital para a empresa crescer. Isso permite planos de negócios com riscos e objetivos mais agressivos.

Angel Investors são indivíduos ou grupos de indivíduos que investem capital próprio. A decisão de investimento ocorre por “gut feeling”, envolvendo experiência no mercado, relação de confiança com fundadores, e paixão pela tecnologia. Normalmente Angels investem cedo na evolução da empresa e, nos EUA, fornecem USD$100-$500k.

Para receber angel investment, uma startup precisa ter um protótipo do produto/serviço e alguns usuários ou clientes. O empreendedor precisa mostrar que conhece o mercado e o problema, sabe o caminho para uma solução viável, e consegue executar. O investimento normalmente é utilizado para completar o desenvolvimento do produto e validar o modelo de negócios.

VC Investors são fundos administrados por profissionais. A decisão de investimento é baseado em análise, já que o VC precisa justificar o aporte para os investidores e manter o perfil de investimento do fundo. Normalmente VCs investem mais tarde na evolução da empresa e, nos EUA, fornecem USD$1-5M em uma rodada inicial.

Para receber investimento VC, uma startup precisa ter um produto no mercado. Para um serviço de Internet, ter 100k’s usuários e taxas de conversão/retenção boas.  Para um produto corporativo, precisa ter vários clientes com validação da proposta de valor e a recomendação de analistas de mercado independentes. O empreendedor precisa mostrar que o modelo está validado e que capital é o último fator necessário para escalar o negócio.

A Startup Brasileira e o Silicon Valley

Para quem me conhece, eu sempre falo que é quase obrigatório para um empreendedor planejando jogar pelas regras do jogo acima visitar o Vale do Silício e passar algumas semanas aqui. Escrevi sobre as razões disso em um post anterior e outro.

Mas vir para o Vale para “tentar um investimento” não é realista porque esse ecosistema é altamente local. Por motivos legais e logísticos, é raro para um investidor Angel ou VC investir em uma empresa brasileira trabalhando o mercado local. Mesmo quando ocorre, o aporte exige que a empresa se estabeleça nos EUA. Então o dinheiro do Vale (1/3 de todo o capital de risco no mundo) não é diretamente acessível ao empreendedor Brasileiro.

A boa notícia é que esse mesmo ecosistema está se formando em outras partes do mundo e o mercado está respondendo à onda de empreendedorismo ocorrendo no Brasil. As incubadoras e aceleradoras estão se multiplicando (com as boas e más consequencias da expansão rápida). Fundos Angel (como a própria IVP) e VC estão se formando (com capital nacional e daqui do Vale).

Mas e a história do empreendedor que recebeu $5M do VC somente com um PowerPoint? E o Instagram que teve um exit de $1B sem ter um modelo de negócios? Sim, mas essas são as excessões que aparecem na mídia e criam a ilusão que é fácil pegar investimentos sem um negócio viável. Para os 98% de startups normais, as regras se aplicam.

Então me siga no Twitter venha me visitar aqui no Vale do Silício (tour), mas não porque você ache que dinheiro para startups cresce em árvores.

This week is the time of the year when we in the US take a break from our busy lives to express Gratitude (and eat, shop, etc).

Gratitude is a positive emotion we feel in acknowledgment of a benefit we have received. Saying “Thank You” is the way to express that emotion which is the basis of life in community. It recognizes that we depend on one another to live, to be ourselves.

We get used to say “Thank You” as a matter of social protocol. This is the time to bring its meaning back to consciousness.

I grew up in Brazil and my native language is Portuguese. We say “Obrigado“, which is not my favorite expression because it equals gratitude with indebtedness. Literally, it says “I owe you something”.

In my travels around the world I have always taken interest not only on the local word to express gratitude, but also on its literal meaning and the social attitude behind it.

My favorite form of “Thank You” is the one used in Malaysia. “Terima Kasih” sounds very friendly and it literally translates to “Receive Love”.

I am no historian or linguist, but I theorize that words equating gratitude and indebtedness have roots in a period in history where gratitude was used as social currency between levels of hierarchy, where favors were exchanged for political loyalty. Words that equals gratitude with love reflect a more equal exchange between peers.

As we shift towards a business environment where stronger relationships are more people-to-people and less customer-to-company or people-to-expert, in Social Business, gratitude has to be more like love and less like indebtedness.

With that in mind, I would like to say Thank You for reading, agreeing or disagreeing, providing feedback and teaching me through interaction in 2012.

Here is a list to say Thank You in other languages.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Having just completed a cycle in my professional journey, I am now looking for a new job or project, new directions. Thank you for visiting this page and the willingness to read about me and help in the search.

What I do next is as much the opportunities that emerge when I ask friends as it is what I deliberate introspectively. Life is not what we do, but the people we touch along the way.

In my history, I have stayed with companies for many years so these moments of disruption and redirecting are very few. I can afford the time and reflection to find a new pursuit. We are not in a hurry…

What can I do?

You can check my LinkedIn Profile for more structured detail, but if we throw my résumé and professional profiles into a blender, you get something like this:

I can also climb mountains, take nice photographs, play chess, be a good friend. But I digress.

What am I looking for?

Wherever I land, I want to be in an environment where I  can interact with smart people, in an open environment with collaboration and transparency.

Being more specific (but not much), here are a few possible scenarios:

• Head of Technology, Marketing, Strategy in a small to mid-sized technology company
• Product, BizDev, Marketing, or Engineering Management in a larger organization
• Partner in a technology startup, consulting or analyst firm
• Independent consultant in anything I can help with

As for domain knowledge, I’ve worked 15+ years at vendors of Networking/IT Systems and the past 3 years involved with Social CRM and Social Media Marketing.

If you have product ideas waiting for execution, perhaps I can help. I have a few ideas myself and if you think we could work together, let’s talk.

The world is small these days, but if location is still important, my home is in San Jose-CA, USA. I can travel. I’ve had broad international exposure though business and personal background.

What can you do for me?

You have already done it. Thank you. After having read this, I am sure you are thinking of something.

I am taking this unusual action of writing about my job search publicly to increase the probability of connecting with the right person through my personal network. So, if you know someone, feel free to forward…

Need links? LinkedIn Profile – Personal Website – Google Marcio Saito - Twitter

The whole is above and beyond the sum of its parts. ~Aristotle

(this article originally written for Ledface Blog)

When we observe large schools of fish swimming, we might wonder who is choreographing that complex and sophisticated dance, in which thousands of individuals move in harmony as if they knew exactly what to do to produce the collective spectacle.

So, what is “Emergence”?

School of fishes dancing is an example of “emergence”, a process where new properties, behaviors, or complex patterns results of relatively simple rules and interactions.

One can see emergence as some magic phenomena or just as a surprising result caused by the current inability of our reductionist mind to understand complex patterns. Whichever way we think, examples of emerging behaviors are abundant in nature, science, and society and are just a fact of life.

Humans can do it too

We humans have even built artificial environments that allow for collective intelligence to express itself. For example, in global financial markets, we are able to track and analyze millions of variables (e.g. weather patterns in India, political tensions in the middle-east) to price thousands of commodities and more complex financial instruments in real-time.

Each and every actor in the financial markets has no significant control over or awareness of its inputs. They are just trying to follow a very simple set of rules: buy low, sell high, maximize profits. Regulators try to enforce the rules to keep the game fair, but there is no central coordination in the computation of prices. Commodity prices results from the interaction among investors, not directly from their individual knowledge.

As any economist will explain, the financial market works best when there are enough participants so that no individual has meaningful influence over the aggregate result,  everyone plays by simple transparent rules,   there is low friction in the interactions, and each participant is autonomous and responsible for its participation.

Can we transpose it to other domains?

When it comes to other areas of human knowledge, because spoken or written language has not been a tool as perfect as buy/sell in an exchange or the intuitive reactions of a fish observing its school mates, we have resorted to structure to create productive patterns (as in a group of soldiers marching at the beat of a drum).

Digital Media is still far from frictionless, but it getting close to allow millions of people to interact more or less freely. Environments like Wikipedia and primitive Q&A sites are the initial samples of that.

Nobody can single-handedly create “collective intelligence”. But Ledface is building an environment that empowers individual knowledge and aggregates it (like Wikipedia), but also provides the mechanisms for interactive co-creation (differently from other Q&A sites) so that, maybe, the conditions are right for the emergence of true collective intelligence.

Too remote of a possibility? If fishes and economists can do it…

[This post originally written for the Ledface Blog]

Enterprise Collaboration Tools can improve the productivity of organizations by reducing the friction in the flow of information. This post argues that the application of Crowdsourcing techniques in that context is the next step in blending the best of traditional functional segmentation with the benefits of open collaboration.

The Organizational Intelligence Problem

Most companies today are structured as a hierarchy segmented in business units, then in specialized functional areas (sales, operations, engineering, marketing etc), then into recursively smaller groups responsible for a portion of the big problem. For every single issue that emerges, there is an unequivocal “expert” in the organization, an individual who is accountable and (supposedly) knowledgeable to solve it.

Here are two common challenges:

• Analysis imperfection. Real-life problems often cannot be broken perfectly along designed functional lines. They require multiple people to work together and inter-dependently to solve them, which goes against the personal accountability paradigm.
• Expert fallibility. While it is generally good to have a person assigned as the primary responsible for issues in a specific area, nobody can be expected to know everything, even if it is in a very narrow domain of knowledge.

Cross-functional project management, collaboration tools, external consultants have been applied to address those challenges. But there is more help on the way.

Social Collaboration Tools and their limitations

Enterprise social collaboration tools employ some of the same mechanisms brought to us  by consumer social network platforms and have been successfully introduced in large commercial enterprises to bring a collaboration overlay to current organization.

Beyond the file sharing systems of the past, they let interaction happen directly, in real-time, across functional lines. Information flows with less friction and interactions are more spontaneous.

But they also create two new potential problems:

• Low signal/noise ratio – In an extreme structured environment, you are afraid people don’t have the information they need to do the best for the organization. In a totally social environment, you worry about people being overwhelmed with too much irrelevant data.
• Ego - If my value to the organization is determined exclusively by my expertise on a narrow subject, I might be reluctant to seek help from non-experts who might have the answer to a specific problem. We need to create environments where that informal collaboration can happen without threatening the position of the domain expert.

Crowdsourcing: The Next Step in Enterprise Collaboration

Trying to use social communication tools to solve the entire problem of cross-functional collaboration is akin to trying to se email as the single technology to implement structured business processes.

Crowdsourcing is usually thought of as a way for companies to get some work sent outside its boundaries. But the same set of technologies enabling it can be applied internally to an organization to greatly improve the signal/noise ratio in social media by intelligently routing information from and to the right people. It also lets each person  filter what they want to see, focusing research of the collective intelligence.

Crowdsourcing in the context of a hierarchical organization can also reduce the threat the domain expert feels when he/she shares problems and seeks help from the internal or external community. It can do that by facilitating collaboration among peers without specifically assigning individual credit for the co-created solution.

Technology providers such as Ledface, are creating environments where social collaboration generates less noise and co-creation happens without ego, promising a brighter future for enterprise collaboration.

]]> http://marciosaito.com/2012/03/20/crowdsourcing-the-next-step-in-enterprise-collaboration/feed/ 0 marciosaito Flowchart on a chalk board http://marciosaito.com/2012/02/17/gamification-for-kids-collaboration-for-grown-ups/ http://marciosaito.com/2012/02/17/gamification-for-kids-collaboration-for-grown-ups/#comments Sat, 18 Feb 2012 05:22:51 +0000 Marcio http://marciosaito.com/?p=1558 Continue reading →]]>

[This post originally written for publication in the Ledface Blog]

Next time you are at a cocktail party, take a step back and observe. What do people talk about? How conversations evolve?

When people meet for the first time, they exchange facts. They look for coincidences, they try to establish connections. “Did you grow up around here?” “How did you meet this group?”

Then, they engage in social gaming, trying to position themselves within the group, competing for attention and admiration. “Last summer, we went to Hawaii.” “I developed this software at work that…”

Once Trust is in place, people share effortlessly 

You then see groups breaking into smaller ones as people find their circles and conversation deepens. “I should introduce to this person, I think she will be able to help you on this.” “Can I ask you about your trip? We are going to Hawaii next month.”

Social relationships in the real world are built on identification and trust.  Once relationships are in place, we are wired to share information, collaborate, and help each other.

Do we help others expecting reciprocity?

It is easy to rationalize that we help others to get help from others through reciprocity, that living in society is a game of giving and receiving. But that is only a typical analytical inversion of cause-effect.

It might be true that reciprocity is at the very core of life in society, but we don’t trust, share and collaborate to get something back. Living in society is more efficient and effective if we collaborate, so we evolved (in the Darwinian sense) that way over generations.

Social Media let natural collaboration instincts flourish 

Social Media is ”social” simply because it can better support some of the social behaviors we display in real life. Classical media (print, broadcast, etc) force us to be analytical, linear, introspective, independent.

Being more open and symmetrical, social media let people establish relationships and trust. As the medium evolves, we should expect that people exercise the natural pleasure in sharing knowledge and helping others as they do in real life.

Ask anyone about their passions and they will share knowledge, dispense advice, and talk about it for hours for the pleasure of an audience, without the expectation of tangible reward.

Look at Facebook or Wikipedia. Why do people share information with others? There are no extrinsic incentives to do so. The same way we search for connections, talk about ourselves, share knowledge offline, people are social in Facebook because computer networks created an environment that emulates the social environment.

Ledface and the essence of Crowdsourcing

When I talk to people about Ledface or other Crowdsourcing projects, a common question is “Why would people want to help others? What is the reward? Is there a gamification mechanism?”.

Our analytical mind believes people only move with a tangible rewards or some sort of ego game playing. But the essence of Crowdsourcing is exactly to set conditions that free people from the industrial revolution training (analyze, segment, create independence and accountability, earn money doing something you dislike so you can spend time doing what you like) and express the natural instincts of collaboration.

Gamification is important, Collaboration is the name of the game

Should crowdsourcing tools and environments use gamification and consider the use of extrinsic rewards? Sure. At a cocktail party, before trust and collaboration develops, you must create a favorable setting and let people find each other. We all do play social games in society, there is no reason it wouldn’t be useful in virtual places.

But that is just how things start. Once relationships grow up, collaboration is the name of the game.

–

Marcio Saito’s (@Marcio_Saito) interest in Collaboration and Co-Creation originates in his early involvement with the Open Source Software community in the early 90′s. He writes about Social Media and Collective Intelligence and is a co-founder and advisor to Ledface, a startup using Crowdsourcing to create a new kind of Intelligence.

]]> http://marciosaito.com/2012/02/17/gamification-for-kids-collaboration-for-grown-ups/feed/ 0 marciosaito iStock_000009239773XSmall http://marciosaito.com/2012/02/13/crowdsourcing-freedom-and-anonymity/ http://marciosaito.com/2012/02/13/crowdsourcing-freedom-and-anonymity/#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:30:34 +0000 Marcio http://marciosaito.com/?p=1517 Continue reading →]]>

[This post originally written for publication in the Ledface Blog]

The Wisdom of the Crowds

When James Surowiecki published “The Wisdom of Crowds” in 2004,  he presented several experiments and anecdotes to note that a diverse collection of independently-deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts.

It is not difficult to miss the importance of  the word “independently” in the sentence above. This post reflects on the need of trust and freedom to create the conditions where individuals can independently contribute to a co-creation process.

Collective behavior is not Collective Knowledge

I have a lot of interest in politics, influence, social media, behavioral economics and other areas of study on how people can influence each other through organizational structures and create patterns of collective behavior. But “herd behavior” is not necessarily a good expression of individual or collective choices.

We buy and sell stocks at the wrong times based on headlines. We spend the week working on things we don’t enjoy so we can earn the weekend to do what we love. We adopt certain behaviors because that is just the proper thing to do. What we decide, buy, do,  or choose is influenced by our social context and that is just a fact, neither good or bad.

Governments, companies, universities, armies and other modern organizations have become very good at creating environments that uses social factors, ego and extrinsic rewards to express organizational patterns, where successful leaders can use power/financial/reputation structures to get groups of people acting in a coordinated fashion.

Freedom and decentralization is requisite for Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is not simply breaking work in pieces for efficiency. It is not organizing and managing people to achieve a stated goal.

Crowdsourcing is about harnessing the human potential in every individual so that we can aggregate and express knowledge that is larger than what any individual can express.

To achieve that, we need to create a trusted environment where people can express their independent opinions. We need to remove the social, organizational, financial pressures to create true freedom of expression for every individual.

The Ledface Challenge

In an ideal co-creation environment, anonymity is one way of  creating that freedom of expression. But it also comes with a challenge: anonymity removes ego from the co-creation process (which is a typical reward for social behavior), requiring the system to offer some other intrinsic rewards for its participants.

This is the challenge the startup Ledface is tackling to create a crowdsource-based personal assistant.

Final Thoughts

Ego (need for personal recognition) and extrinsic rewards (do something you don’t like to earn freedom elsewhere) are two proven driving forces for action, but relying on them will earn you “survival of the fittest” results, not collective intelligence.

While we recognize the value of those systems, we believe that, to achieve true crowdsourcing results, we need to build an environment where co-creation happens with individual freedom, independence, and is driven entirely by intrinsic rewards.

–

Marcio Saito’s (@Marcio_Saito) interest in Collaboration and Co-Creation originates in his early involvement with the Open Source Software community in the early 90′s. He writes about Social Media and Collective Intelligence and is a co-founder and advisor toLedface, a startup using Crowdsourcing to create a new kind of Intelligence.

]]> http://marciosaito.com/2012/02/13/crowdsourcing-freedom-and-anonymity/feed/ 0 marciosaito iStock_000003661335XSmall