NevOn

The Quaero oxymoron

If you've been following the story of the Franco-German Quaero project - a planned European multimedia search engine, the answer to Google and brainchild of the French government - you'll know that European politics have contributed to the mire it's been in for some months.

The Quaero website used to be online and provided useful information on the project. No longer is it online. Or, rather, you now need a user ID and password to access the site. Try it and see: http://www.thomson.net/EN/Home/Quaero/

News yesterday in the Financial Times that things might get moving again with German media conglomerate Bertelsman close to signing up as the German leader of the project. The FT's article has a good summary of the project and where things now stand:

[...] It is part of an attempt by French and German governments to mobilise public and private resources to close the research and development gap between Europe and the more innovative economies of the US and Japan.

Funding on the French side of up to €150m will come from the new Agency for Industrial Innovation, set up on the recommendation of Jean-Louis Beffa, chairman of Saint-Gobain, the glass and ceramics group. Thomson, the media services and equipment group, will lead the French team, along with the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

The formation of the German team was stalled by the German elections but the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology on Friday will assemble potential members to a meeting in Berlin. Heinrich von Pierer, the chairman of Siemens who is close to Angela Merkel, German chancellor, is playing the same co-ordinating role on the German side as Mr Beffa.

The most striking proposal seeks to create a search engine for the general public that can sort through audio, images and video as well as text. Current multimedia search engines rely on written descriptions of audio, images and video, which lead to inaccurate results.

Quaero would incorporate techniques to transcribe audio automatically as well as image and video recognition.

The idea of Quaero is a terrific one. Yet I can't imagine anything more oxymoronic than "government-backed search engine."

Financial Times | Bertelsmann set to head Quaero web project (paid sub)

Related - Seek and you may not find from the FT also yesterday. An analysis of the history of Quaero as well as some commentary on additional ideas for Quaero (it's more than just about the internet). My favourite snip from that article:

[...] "There is already a good French search engine – it's called Google.fr," jokes one blogger. The French satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné has also poured scorn on Quaero: "Compared with Microsoft's €30bn [£20.4bn] profits or Google's €100bn capitalisation, Chirac's announcement is really going to spread panic in Silicon Valley."

True, any panic has thus far been taking place in Europe. The continent's fears about its lack of progress in research and development, faced with the challenge from the US and Japan, are felt acutely in France and have played a part in the setting up of Quaero.

Biz-Tech-News: Headlines 13-Jan-06

• A JotSpot For Excel
• Apple's New (Corporate) Tune
• Body scanner unveiled at station
• Disruption in mainstream media but where is the disruption in the mainstream PR industry?
• Europe's 'Google killer' goes into hiding
• Google offers personal home page for mobile phones
• How Brands Evolve, Visually
• Invasion of the privacy snatchers
• New PR blogs (a bunch of them)
• Nikon to stop making most film cameras
• Not working can really ruin your retirement
• Posting from Word to MovableType
• Rolls Royces to come with lifetime Sirius subscription
• SixApart Launches Affiliates Program
• Sky launches first ever news video podcasting service
• Skype, The Bandwidth Hog
• Sneak Peak at FeedDemon 2.0
• Symantec Caught in Norton 'Rootkit' Flap
• The Heat Rises Under IBM
• what comes after the cluetrain?

(Post quickly created from RSS feeds in FeedDemon.)

Clueless BrandWeek magazine

Are blogs a waste of your time and that of your business or clients? Indeed they are, according to BrandWeek magazine in the US:

Blogs provide almost no new information. They’re frequently inaccurate. They contribute to the hysterical polarization of our nation’s political discourse. And they’re often written by people who can’t, you know, write. So naturally marketers have flocked to associate their brands with them. Seriously, it’s not entirely clear why so many marketers have rushed to get themselves name-dropped in one of the most unreliable media environments yet invented.

What a credibility-sapping commentary in an otherwise entertaining and well-written special report on the "Best and Worst Marketing Ideas of 2005" (PDF; see #23 on page 5), published by BrandWeek last month.

Show this commentary to someone like Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems and ask him what he thinks. A waste of time? He says otherwise. Or just look through the blogs of any of the 100+ companies listed in The New PR Wiki corporate blogs list or any of those in the new Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. Do they think it's all a waste of time? Hardly.

Looks like the BrandWeek author is more of a Forbes reader than a Business Week one. Glass half empty type of approach.

A clueless commentary.

(Via Blog Business Summit.)

So what's wrong with ghostwriting an executive blog?

I've been thinking about an item in a recent survey that says only 20 percent of senior business executives write their own blogs.

The survey was conducted in October by PR veteran David Davis who published the results last week. Shel and I talked about it last Thursday in show #100 of our biweekly podcast.

While I take this survey overall with a little pinch of salt as apart from geographical facts it doesn't provide any detailed information breaking down the survey group, nor say how many actually sent back responses, the item in question about executive blogging is quite interesting as I think it shows the tip of an iceberg as to what is already happening in some organizations.

Let's look at the specific survey questions re executive blogging and the posted results:

1. Do you write your own blogs without advice?
   - Yes 17%
   - No 83%
2. Why don't you write your own blogs?
   - Too time consuming 48%
   - Difficulty in expressing themselves in writing 39%
3. How would you describe a 'ghost written' company blog?
   - 'A sham' 8%
   - 'Totally misleading' 5%
   - 'Marginally misleading' 43%
   - 'Acceptable' 44%

The answers to questions 1 and 2 don't surprise me a bit. This would be broadly in line with what you'd expect in many organizations where senior executives don't produce their own communication material. That's one of the reasons why those organizations have communicators!

Communicators devise, plan and write the content and messages that CEOs and others will use and deliver. Press releases, speeches, presentations, etc. Why should an executive blog be different?

Before you say "Yes, but..." in relation to those phrases we hear all the time about blogs (authentic voice, personality of the author, etc), let's look at question 3 - the interesting one.

The answers are quite telling and, in the absence of any other detail, must be based on one crucial assumption - that there is full and clear disclosure somewhere as to who the author is. I cannot really imagine that the 44 percent of those senior executives who say it's acceptable to do this would have said that otherwise. On the other hand, this view is countered by 43 percent saying it's marginally misleading (although I'm not sure what the word 'marginally' means - it's either misleading or it's not).

Let's be clear on what we mean by 'ghostwritten.' Consider this definition from Wikipedia:

A ghostwriter is a writer who writes under someone else's name, with their consent. Ghostwriters are often employed by celebrities to write autobiographies in situations in which the celebrities themselves may not be talented writers, or are too busy doing other work.

Other writers are also employed, with proper billing, by authors whose names alone will sell a book, such as Tom Clancy, many of whose recent works bear the names of two persons on their covers -- Clancy's name in larger print and the other author's name in smaller print. Sometimes a professional writer will receive partial credit, signified by "with" or "as told to". Credit may also appear as a "thanks" in a foreword or introduction. Strictly speaking, if the less famous writer's role and name are clearly acknowledged in the work as published, this is not ghostwriting but collaboration.

Just because a book is ghostwritten does not necessarily mean that the credited author did not make a significant contribution to the work; a ghostwriter is often employed to polish and edit existing material, or to work directly with the credited author to shape the book from start to finish.

You can simply substitute 'blog' for 'book.'

So with clear disclosure, I don't see any problem at all with an organization having someone write a senior executive's blog. I'm willing to hear any persuasive argument to the contrary, though.

Today, via Josh Hallett, I read Steve Warren's article in which he talks about hiring bloggers to write the content for corporate blogs.

A trend, Steve says. I agree. I think the picture he paints is something we will see much more of.

How Google could be the world's most valuable company

Google's share price could rise to $2,000, says the Daily Telegraph.

The Telegraph quotes Caris & Co, a US stockbroker, saying that Google shares had the potential to climb faster with the launch of digital services. Those shares closed at $465 on Friday after the company announced its online video library.

More from the Telegraph:

[...] Google floated two years ago at $80 a share. If its stock does rise as Caris forecasts, it will be worth $400bn (£225bn) and overtake General Electric to become the most valuable company in the world. Mark Stahlman, an analyst at Caris & Co, said: "We believe Google's addressable market has a chance to become much larger, more quickly than initially anticipated. . . [it will be] perhaps a $100bn annual sales company over time."

Goldman Sachs last week raised its share price target for Google to $500. Google pays no dividend and at current levels its stock is rated at 100 times earnings.

Google has its fingers in many pies (and check out what's in the lab).

Does anyone think Googlezon is pure imagination?

How to deal with too many choices

Whenever I travel to the US, I get apprehensive. Not about the travel or why I'm visiting the States. No, it's all to do with breakfast choices.

Here's the scenario. It's breakfast time in my hotel. I sit and the ever-so-friendly waitress asks me for my order. Apprehension starts if I request eggs. Before I first visited the US some 20 years ago, I never knew how many choices there were for eggs. Scrambled. Fried. Boiled. Poached. Sunny side up. That's just to begin with. Then the sub-sets - easy, soft, medium, etc. And let's not get started on the choices for toast. Or juice.

With so much (too much) to choose from, I tend to take the cowardly route and either not have breakfast at all, or order it in my room using the tick-box card you hang outside your door.

So reading a feature in the Financial Times about the agonies of too much choice makes me realize that this is actually a bit more complex:

[...] The most obvious downside of too much choice is that people feel overwhelmed and make poor choices – or even none at all. In a study carried out in a California supermarket in 2000, Professor Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Professor Mark Lepper of Stanford University set up a tasting booth offering different types of jam.

When an impressive 24 varieties were on display, about 60 per cent of passers-by stopped at the booth – compared with just 40 per cent when six types were shown. But when it came to finally choosing a pot of jam to buy, the proportions were dramatically reversed: just 3 per cent of the visits to the 24-variety booth resulted in a purchase. Meanwhile, 30 per cent of those who visited the smaller display made a purchase, making its more limited selection far more effective at converting visits into sales.

The FT article goes into some detail about choices with other examples embracing financial planning and mobile phones. It concludes with how you can choose to make better decisions yourself by following some rules of thumb scientists have devised for making choices:

• The "Take the Best" algorithm: when faced with choosing between two options, each with its pros and cons, search for the characteristic you think correlates best with whatever is most important to you, and choose whichever option wins out according to this criterion.
• Collee's Rule: when choosing between various options that cannot be accepted once rejected, do not accept the first one. Instead, use it to set the baseline of quality, and then accept the next offer that beats it.
• You can't win them all: while such rules of thumb have been proved to increase the chances of making the right decision, they will not succeed every time. So accept the occasional hit in return for being right more often than not, and do not be discouraged by bad luck.

There's my lesson for hotels and breakfast on my next trip!

Financial Times | The agonies of too much choice (paid sub)

Transforming corporate identities beyond the razzle dazzle

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas certainly was the place this week for many companies to announce a dazzling array of new tech products, alliances and ventures.

The best place I found to keep up with what was going on was the excellent Engadget CES blog which had a non-stop stream of posts. Another good resource - CES Blog 2006 from VNU. Certainly far better efforts than the CES' rather lame blog.

Amongst all the new products and cool things being talked about, I found two corporate announcements of particular interest, one from Eastman Kodak Company and the other from Intel Corporation.

A press release (reg required) on Thursday afternoon from Kodak has Antonio M. Perez, Chairman and CEO, talking about the future of digital imaging and a new alliance with Motorola. Buried down in the body text is this small paragraph:

[...] Perez also unveiled the latest evolution of Kodak’s brand logo. This new look moves the Kodak name out of the traditional yellow box; giving it a more contemporary design, a streamlined rounded look and distinctive letters. This introduction is the latest step in the company’s broad brand transformation effort, which reflects the multi-industry, digital imaging leader Kodak has become.

And here's that new logo alongside the one that's familiar worldwide.

For such a major transformation goal, I found it surprising that Kodak revealed their new brand image in such an understated way. Little specific information in their online press center to give you real insight into their strategic thinking and what this means for organizational change other than the corporate-speak in the press release (so you could think it's no more than a bit of razzle dazzle) and a page about the evolution of the logo over the years.

Perhaps this is indicative of Kodak's corporate style and the way they do things. I found much more information in a feature yesterday in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle (where the image above comes from) which gives you quite a bit more insight:

[...] The new mark, based on a customized typeface, is designed to give the company a contemporary look but be flexible enough to apply in new ways and new venues across Kodak's varied businesses - everything from tiny handheld digital cameras to computer software to the letters on Kodak buildings around the world.

The logo is one part of Kodak's larger effort to redefine its brand-name identity, through advertising, public relations, supplier and partner relationships and other in areas. "We want to break out of the box, in a lot of ways," says Betty Noonan, director of brand management and marketing services at Kodak.

While this gives you some more knowledge, it doesn't give you any sense of how Kodak plan to break out of the box or in what ways.

Contrast this approach with that of Intel, who pulled out all the communication stops to get their new message out to the world.

PR blogger says Clinton could be next Microsoft president

This will be one heck of a scoop for citizen journalism if it turns out to be true:

There are some rumors circulating that Steve Ballmer is about to step aside at Microsoft as its day to day operations head to make room for another president.

Bill Clinton.

From a post today by PR blogger Andy Abramson.

No other comment about this anywhere I can see as I write this post. Watching my RSS feeds with keen interest.

(Aside: Shel and I interviewed Andy last month in our For Immediate Release podcast interview series.)

Biz-Tech-News: Headlines 6-Jan-06

• Downloads overtake traditional single sales
• Dutch government has declared 2006 "Year of the e-Citizen Charter"
• Gates sees IBM not Google as top Microsoft rival
• IBM Takes the Cash out of Venture Capital
• Inquisitor Rocks my Socks
• Introducing Our New Gadget Blog
• Is this thing on?
• Microsoft Defends Censoring Blog in China
• Microsoft officially now released the WMF security patch early!
• New cat family tree revealed
• Our only serious competitor is IBM, says Gates
• Pfizer Uses ID Tags to Ship Viagra
• Podtech gets Intel’s CEO on podcast
• RIM legal woes jumpstart wireless e-mail alternatives
• Sony Reader targets book lovers
• The agonies of too much choice
• Web 2.0 Label Lacks Meaning, Magic
• Which is the most innovative country in Europe?
• Zencasts; The New Podcasts?
• Ziff-Davis offers nifty blogger relations tool

(Post quickly created from RSS feeds in FeedDemon.)

A fortuitous move in a boom-and-bust tech business

Wall Street Journal: Seagate Technology has agreed to pay $1.9 billion in stock to buy rival Maxtor Corp. The transaction unites two of the biggest makers of computer disk drives, a boom-and-bust business in which Seagate has long played the role of consolidator.

I've bought and installed quite a few hard drives in my time. In nearly every case, I've always bought Maxtor drives as I've always felt they were the best brand. Better than Seagate, better than Western Digital, better than any other.

No real evidence to prove they were the best, purely perception and then experience with the brand.

Anyway, as the Journal says, hardware is boom and bust, a commodity business today, and the marketplace is a tough one:

[...] Disk drives are in heavy demand to store data in computers and a growing array of consumer products. But competition is fierce, forcing manufacturers to keep boosting the storage capacities of their products while driving down prices.

By acquiring Maxtor, Seagate hopes to drive a larger volume of products through its network of factories, boosting the utilization of those plants and increasing profit margins. The deal is expected to boost Seagate's earnings per share on a cash basis after the first full year of combined operations, they said, though Seagate may not retain all the revenue Maxtor now generates.

A tougher market still for traditional drive manufacturing with flash-based storage gaining market traction. So Seagate's acquisition could be fortuitous, says Business Week. Or maybe not if a differently-focused market assessment from Forbes is any guide.

I think BW has it right.