A very thought-provoking post analysing how one particular software startup company failed, and exploring things which might have helped prevent the failure. I’ll need to think more about this.
6 reasons why my VC funded startup did fail | Code Monkeyism
So Dr Pepper were overwhelmed by user interest in a free offer, which brought down a promotional website and led to all sorts of financial and PR problems.
Reminds me of when I worked for a telemarketing company a dozen years ago. At the time giant manufacturer Daewoo were trying to enter the UK car market and decided on an innovative marketing strategy. They took a bunch of prime-time TV ad slots and used them to offer interested customers a free car for a year. There was (of course) some small print, and only a relatively small number of actual cars on offer.
The plan was to get anyone interested to contact the telemarketing company, answer a bunch of questions and have their details “put into the hat” for a free car. Then, in principle, Daewoo would have a ready-made sales call list of potential customers.
What happened? They completely, and very naively, underestimated the customer interest. When the first ad aired they received over 60,000 incoming calls in less than a minute. This completely swamped the telemarketing company, who had less than a hundred phone operators. Worse, it crashed the local phone exchange, preventing any incoming and outgoing calls from any of the businesses in that area for hours. The result was a consumer backlash, legal threats, and a PR nightmare.
Glad to see that the same mistakes are still being made
Some one forgot to ask the critical question… | dancingmango
I had not seen this article by Mary Poppendieck until it was recommended by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, but it offers a compelling analysis and a series of suggestions for managing agile teams, particularly in the thorny area of evaluation and rewards. Well worth a read, and well worth finding a way of getting whoever evaluates your team to read it, too.
An interesting summary of some thoughts on the agile manifesto, it’s place in software development history, and how/whether it should grow or change.
InfoQ: Brian Marick: What’s Missing From the Agile Manifesto
Nice little post highlighting the need for value information along with cost estimates.
Don’t worry about how valuable it will be, just tell me how much it costs?
The world of mobile systems and software is potentially a very exciting place to work, even if sometimes I am so close to the code that it seems just like every other piece of software I have ever worked on. Nice to note that the BBC see some crossover potential, too.
“Cloud computing” is still very high on my list of things I need to get up to speed on. One trouble is that innovation in this area seems to be coming faster than I have time to experiment. Still, this article seems a useful summary of the current state of play.
InfoQ: Comparing Amazon’s EC2, Google’s App Engine and Microsoft’s Azure
Apparently there is to be a push to make the UK a world leader in on-line higher education. I’d love to see this happen, but I have my doubts.
As with so many other attempts at “e-learning”, the emphasis seems overwhelmingly on “learning and teaching resources”. But this is the easy part of the problem. The hard part is institutional change; moving away from the legacy idea of classes and courses to a new model which decouples learning from teaching, and both of those from assessment.
So far I have not found any indication that educational institutions in the UK are willing to step away from the traditional, everyone in one room, everyone being taught at the same time, lecturer as source of all wisdom approach to the distributed, asynchronous, collaborative, multi-sourced model needed for real “e-learning”.
Even the Open University, despite being centred in distance education, still has synchronized course start dates and assessment deadlines, for example. This is not only inflexible for students, but also places a much heavier load on tutors at certain times of the year. As far as I can tell, this sort of practice is done solely because, well, that’s the way it has always been done.
Educational institutions, please wake up. Successful on-line study and assessment should be available to everyone wherever and whenever needed.
A while ago I spent some time banging my head against the needless inconsistencies between US mobile carriers for a project which remained at the prototype stage. If we ever pick up such a project again, the following list of email-to-SMS/MMS addresses could well be useful.
How to Send Picture Mail via SMS / MMS on the iPhone at JAW Speak
This is an absolutely fascinating article for anyone interested in business process and improvement. Read it and you’ll see what I mean!
Evolving Excellence: JKE Day 2: Saishunkan Cosmetics – Customer Care Trumps a Factory
For years Frank Carver has been paying attention to the strange world of convergent technology. During that time he has discussed and researched broad subject areas, come to some surprising conclusions, produced and distributed digital media, scattered ideas and opinions like sparks from a firework, and above all consulted for businesses both large and small to help develop and deploy successful systems, services, and products in this highly complex arena.
