Intrinsic Strategy

Bad customer service is annoying. Stupid customer service is inexcusable.

Yet the latter appears to be the category Hewlett-Packard has put itself in with its handling of a proprietary — and required — accessory for HP Mini owners. “Required” in that if you want to connect an HP Mini 1000 series netbook to any external VGA monitor or projector, a common task, you have to own it.

And yes. I’m one of those owners, having purchased an HP Mini 1151NR through Verizon Wireless (and still under a two-year contract with Verizon as a result). Yet I can’t use my Mini for my upcoming keynote presentation at the EDVentures conference. HP apparently only sporadically made available, and now no longer sells or acknowledges at all, the needed and very proprietary adapter cable.

My experience spawned an email to HP’s CEO and turned into an open letter, as it illustrates a larger issue with computing technology industry practices. Read “A plea for independence from bad accessory support” on GeekWire.

So what happens to old mass media when they start falling out of favor with the masses, or face a new challenger for king-of-the-media-hill status? I explore that, both currently and historically, in my latest Practical Nerd column for GeekWire.

My case in point: Classical KING-FM Seattle, a station with the dual challenge of an old medium combined with old content. Yet KING-FM is a radio station that has aggressively reinvented itself in the digital age while moving from advertiser to listener support.

As someone who spent part of his career in broadcasting, I think there are lessons to be learned by many in mass media. And by many who keep trumpeting its demise. It’s all a matter of perspective, and perception of what “old” media are: At a recent Social Media Club Seattle event, someone asked the panel if they now get all their news from Facebook and Twitter, or from old media … like blogs.

Read “When content is KING-FM” at GeekWire.

It appears to be a banner year for interest in educational technology and digital learning. Close to 400 education and technology execs attended the Software and Information Industry Association’s 2011 Ed Tech Industry Summit in San Francisco in late May.

As one of several people live-tweeting Summit sessions, I developed a set of notes covering highlights of the Innovation Incubator Program, three keynote talks and five panels. In addition, I offer brief thoughts on why there’s increased interest in the field, industry concerns about Open Educational Resources and the influence of consumer digital preferences on education.

Download the SIIA 2011 Ed Tech Industry Summit notes in PDF, or visit the complete Intrinsic Strategy Conference Notes archive.

Call it the digital classroom nobody (or few outside the industry) knows. In my latest GeekWire column, I take my vocation — consulting largely to companies in digital learning and education tech — and identify three important trends that were woven into the annual Software and Information Industry Association Ed Tech Industry Summit in San Francisco. And make them understandable to, uh, mere geeks.

Because these three trends differ from what is happening in digital consumer and business markets. Yet they can be very important, due to the number of people K-12 education touches.

As someone who’s on the Education Division Board of the SIIA, it’s easy for me (and others in the industry) to assume a level of understanding about digital changes and drivers in schools among the general public that doesn’t necessarily exist, unless, of course, that member of the public also happens to work in an education institution or company. This essay attempts to bridge that gap.

Read “Three ‘secrets’ of the digital classroom” at Geekwire.

Update 8/5/11: The three trends have been expanded upon, with newer information from the Association of Educational Publishers’ Content in Context Conference and ISTE 2011, in the in-depth essay “Three drivers of the digital classroom” published in the Strategic News Service newsletter and archived here.

Over at GeekWire, I take on the sometimes understandable problem of people misdirecting their personal and confidential email. But where it ceases being understandable is when they purposely do it — and assume there’s no one at the “made up” receiving email address to read it.

In the past 18 months, I’ve received so much private info by misdirected email that I could easily cancel others’ travel reservations, close web-based service accounts and track down real physical addresses.

Curious? Read “Privacy vs. stupidity, a case study” at GeekWire.

Over at GeekWire, I’ve started a new regular analysis and commentary column, Practical Nerd. The name is a nod to my take on technology developments: a little skeptical, a little sardonic and a lot interested.

My first essay is a look at the evolution and current generation of Alaska Airlines’ once-unique inflight entertainment device, the digEplayer. Read “Alaska Airlines’ digEplayer enjoys a long flight to obsolescence.” (Don’t miss the comments, in which Alaska responds.) I’ve also documented how the future of technology looks when seen from a well-known science-fiction convention in “A Norwescon vision of tomorrow’s tech.”

I’m pleased to join Todd Bishop and John Cook, GeekWire’s co-founders, in their new venture (earlier, I’d been a frequent guest commentator when they were at TechFlash.com). For those keeping track, this is my fourth regular tech analysis and commentary column in the past two decades, starting with Byte Me in Seattle Weekly & Eastsideweek, a revived Byte Me on KCPQ-TV Seattle’s Q13.com, and Ctrl-Alt-Frank in the Puget Sound Business Journal.

Every Spring, Seattle hosts one of the best literary-focused regional science fiction and fantasy conventions, Norwescon.

I was a fixture at many early Norwescons when I was actively writing science fiction and was the secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America. I also was a panelist  at Norwescon years later when I was doing a lot of media commentary on technology trends. I’m pleased to have been invited back again this year to speak, this time about media, technology and/or education. Norwescon 34 is April 21-24, 2011 at the Doubletree Hotel Seattle Airport.

My panel schedule follows. (The descriptions are Norwescon’s; I quibble slightly with an assumption in the first one, but it’ll make for a more lively panel.) To see the full schedule, speakers and registration information, visit the Norwescon website. (more…)

Over at EdNET News Alert, I’ve had some fun (thanks to the calendar) with what the program for an education or ed tech industry conference might look like at the start of the next decade in “The Very Preliminary Agenda for EdNET 2020.“

There was a lot more I could have included — for example, internationalization of education was suggested by one reader, and you can probably think of your own additions — but in any essay like this, it’s important not to go on too long.

Still, occasionally some truth resides in humor. You can decide for yourself at the EdNET News Alert site.

Remember Pluto? The brontosaurus? Starfish? If so, the accuracy of your childhood science memories are now, well, wrong. According to science itself.

O’Reilly has kindly posted my Ignite talk on the subject from Ignite Seattle 11. For those unfamiliar with the Ignite format, each speaker gets five minutes and 20 slides – the slides auto-advance every 15 seconds, and the speaker is not allowed notes on stage. It’s a wonderful, terrifying event.

Here’s the talk, How Science Is Destroying My Childhood. Judge for yourself:

And if you’re tempted to try your own Ignite talk, read my tips for success. Or, at least, not abject failure.

Over at TechFlash, I opine on a topic I usually reserve for other venues — education technology,  specifically edtech companies’ oddly low profile in Seattle. Odd in that you’d think their presence on the Gates Foundation’s home turf would lead to the opposite result.

I suggest three reasons. Plus a potential fix or two. (And yes, I know I left out several Seattle-area edtech firms, such as SchoolKiT and TeachStreet, and local operations of Apperson Education and Promethean’s ActivProgress division. It wasn’t a lack of love, just space.)

Read the full commentary, “Seattle’s Invisible Tech Industry,” at TechFlash.

The dreary gray depths of winter are a good time to reflect on the internal state of the education technology industry. (Not for navel gazing over a hot adult beverage. To plan for the rest of 2011.)

Having attended MDR’s EdNET 2010 in late September and the Software and Information Industry Association’s 2010 Ed Tech Business Forum in late November, live-tweeting both conferences as @FrankCatalano, I thought it could be useful to create a combined set of notes. They chronicle commonalities in three industry areas: policy and funding issues, customer needs, and product and company trends. Plus the ever-popular overheard off-hand quotes.

You can download the combined EdNET 2010/SIIA 2010 Ed Tech Business Forum notes here. And visit Intrinsic Strategy’s Conference Notes page for an archive of all 2010 conference notes: SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit, Association of Educational Publishers Content in Context Conference, and ISTE 2010. They’re free and fully available to share. Beverage not included.

Over at TechFlash, I’ve opined about privacy and why we seem compelled to give up increasingly larger chunks of personal information for what appears to be free stuff. No longer is the classic New Yorker cartoon (“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”) true. Now marketers know you’re a dog, what your breed is and that, when stressed, you pee in the corner.

Yet as consumers we have leverage in our dealings with marketers like, uh, me. And it starts with knowing that our personal information is worth something. Read the full guest commentary “Bartering in the Personal Information Economy” at TechFlash. (It might have equally belonged here since it’s about both tech and marketing. But privacy is such a hot button issue these days, it’s as much news commentary as it is marketing observation.)

Thematically, this commentary is a sequel to, and has its roots in, an ad hoc talk I gave at Gnomedex 10 in Seattle in August. Chris Pirillo, who kindly posted the video of my Gnomedex rant, gets credit for getting me thinking even more about this important topic.

If you just visit my blog, you’re only seeing one-third of me.

That is, you’re only seeing a third of my professional online presence. In the old days of new media a company’s entire public online presence could be summed up in a website. But with the proliferation of time-sensitive web communications tools over the past decade (including the broadly defined “social media”), that thinking has changed.

A true web presence is now an integrated whole of parts that account for public persistence, information depth and audience reach. If you’re only using one tool and you’re a business, it’s like expecting a nutritious meal from only the milk food group (and no, there is no web version of Ensure).

The best way to explain the new integration is to start with an Intrinsic Strategy example — though the underlying concepts scale to any size business: (more…)

If there is a defining interest throughout my career, it’s science and technology. I’ve written science fiction for magazines, reported on new science and tech developments for radio, television and newspapers, and consulted education and consumer technology companies.

So it may come as no surprise that I cherish my childhood memories of science — even as science itself is wiping them out, one by one.

Over at TechFlash, I’ve written a guest essay, “How Science is Destroying My Childhood.” It’s based on my Ignite Seattle 11 talk on the same topic but with a few facts I didn’t have time to slip into the five-minute Ignite presentation. No planets, dinosaurs or sea creatures were harmed in the writing of the essay.

This week, I spent two days attending the tenth and final iteration of a tech conference I’d never before attended: Gnomedex. Not only was its emphasis on the intersection of technology, society and culture professionally appealing, the sensibilities that drove the conference overall had a personal appeal that served to reinforce Gnomedex’ mission.

Over at TechFlash, you can read my guest commentary about the event, “The Sense of a Gnomedex.”

I also had the challenge of improvising a five-minute presentation at Gnomedex — on less than 15 minutes notice. You can see the result of my addressing the audience-generated issue, “Why is my digital privacy a marketable commodity,” in glorious web video here.

Over at EdNET News Alert, I’ve summed up a fascinating conference session designed to get teachers to tell educational publishing execs exactly what they want from digital technology in the classroom. Some 300 execs at the Association of Educational Publishers’ Content in Context Conference heard 20 educators tell them directly, in videos they’d submitted, their successes, obstacles and desires for effective digital classrooms. Even if it’s anecdotal, it’s instructive.

Pulling this session together was a group effort: the teacher social network edWeb.net promoted and discussed the video submissions in their Classrooms in the Digital Age community; AEP managed the YouTube video uploads from the teachers in the Teacher Video Challenge playlist; and I had fun selecting the videos to be shown and weaving them together with a 90-minute panel and audience discussion at the conference itself.

You can read the five common themes that came out of the videos on the EdNET News Alert site.

Spring is the longest (conference) season.

That’s the reason I have for not posting for most of the vernal equinox quarter. Spring is rife with industry trade shows and conferences, as it is in pretty much any industry. I’ve been to several.

However, to share what I’ve learned, I’ve live tweeted several events as @FrankCatalano and taken detailed notes, based in part on those tweets, for two conferences at the nexus of education technology: the Ed Tech Industry Summit from the Software and Information Industry Association, and the Content in Context Conference from the Association of Educational Publishers.

You can find my SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit notes here, and my AEP Content in Context Conference notes here as PDF files. For future reference, all notes will be archived on the Conference Notes page.

Now on to summer.

Update 7/8/10: I’ve added exhibit notes from ISTE 2010, in previous years known as the National Educational Computing Conference and now sporting the name of its sponsoring organization, the International Society for Technology in Education.

While the conference sessions at this ed tech event are generally well-documented by others, these ISTE 2010 notes focus on trends and observations about ed tech products and technologies shown in the exhibit hall.

Over at TechFlash, I’ve shared some decade-ending experiences I had trying to find a new home for technology from the end of the last decade. And the futility nicely illustrates just how far we’ve come in personal tech in a mere ten years.

The guest commentary: “Perfect, perfectly useless tech.”

I don’t usually post events where I’m attending and not speaking (since that would create a lot of clutter). But FiReGlobal: West Coast is an unusual event in that all the attendees are participants.

FiReGlobal — or Future in Review Global, a Seattle-based one-day version of the multi-day Future in Review Conference I’ve attended in the past — is the brainchild of Mark Anderson, a noted technology industry industry analyst with whom I’ve collaborated, competed and disagreed with over the  years (in a kind and gentle way apparently unheard of in most contemporary discourse). Yet there is no better thinker on global tech issues than Mark, and I’m delighted to attend this inaugural event in Seattle and to serve on the event’s Steering Committee. FiRe truly has been a cross-disciplinary tech event that has no peer.

If you’re free on Thursday, October 15, I encourage you to join me at FiReGlobal. Or better still — make yourself free to attend. I suspect you won’t regret it.

Washington’s Innovation Summit 2009 hosted a Who’s Who of leaders across various industries and government discussing the importance of innovation — and how to spur, nurture and maintain it.

Now, videos of the plenary sessions are available online, from “intrapreneur” coiner Gifford Pinchot’s fascinating discourse to McKinstry CEO Dean Allen’s conversation with Puget Sound Business Journal’s George Erb. And many sessions in between, including my own brief interview with Rogers Weed (former Microsoft VP and new director of the State of Washington Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development) and Mike Schwenk (VP and director of technology deployment at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory).

Find the program and video links here (look for the phrase “watch video”), or directly go to the Weed/Schwenk “Reflections on Innovation” video here.

Incidentally, all the lame moderator jokes have survived the transition to video. Unfortunately.