antonybrydon

Solving the passive vs active contribution problem

I've been wrestling with this problem for a few years, I'm curious to see how Adaptive Blue's new Glue product tackles it. The problem focuses on how to adequately manage privacy concerns when user information is passively contributed to a community or social network.

In active contribution, it's pretty straightforward. I may actively bookmark an article on delicious, actively share a post on friendfeed, actively add a connection on LinkedIn, actively post my whereabouts on Twitter. The systems have different privacy options (keep private, restrict to your connections, make public, etc), but since this functionality is often difficult to understand, and often keeps changing (along with privacy policies) the general rule of thumb seems to be to only actively post what you comfortable being public.

The customer service list

The consistently poor levels of customer service in the U.S. have astounded me for 10+ years. The ingredients seem fairly consistent:

Start with long hold times, a painful phone tree, the requirement to key in dozens of digits, or a painfully inaccurate voice recognition system. Introduce a underpaid and undereducated customer service representative who's thinking ability has been compromised by a set of scripts and screen pops, without any creative problem solving skills and without the autonomy to go off script.

Can communication patterns offer sales insight?

We spent a lot of time at Visible Path building tools that helped individual sales reps sell more effectively. Lately, I've been working on determining what, if any, critical insights can be drawn by analyzing different communications patterns inside and between companies. Here's a quick survey for folks in sales management...

Updated investment criteria

I like Eric Ries' recent post on pitch hierarchy, and have used it to refine my investment criteria:


Specifically, I'm targeting ventures that are already showing product market fit via promising results, making it likely that they will close a venture round (even in these tough markets). These investments have less risk and I'm comfortable making them at arms-length and in industries where I have less experience. One example is an investment I made in Fotolog, a photo sharing site subsequently funded by BV Capital and 3i and acquired by Hi-Media:

What's an idea worth?

Hank Williams has a fun post on his blog asking what is an idea worth?, a favorite topic among folks that have too many ideas and not enough time or leverage to pursue them all.

The way I like to think about this is to frame the question in terms of equity and ask "what would I pay for a great idea?" Here's the scenario:

Your colleague asks you to sit down and discuss an idea for a new product and company that he is thinking of launching.