One of our senior managers wrote this to our colleagues on Saturday - News Year's Day - "Even after getting a call at 12:30am this morning EST, we got them to the finish line." When I read it I felt immensely proud. It exemplifies the number one principle of WorldAPP's culture - "To Be Of Service". WorldAPP is an interesting company for sure. June 27th this year will mark the 10th anniversary of the day my good friend and partner Stan Liachev and I shook hands and decided to start an Internet company. What a long and winding road it has been. No venture capital. No Facebook, Twitter or other amazing innovation to lay claim to. Just a will and a determination to succeed. Back in those days my partner used to pick up his heavy desktop computer every night and carry it home so he could keep working with our developers in Kiev. (He invented "mobile computing" LOL) Stan knew no other way than to just go forward. I have learned so much from that man. Perhaps the best lesson was the one that allowed us to get version 1.0 out the door. It happened after he "quit" one day because of my incessant changes to the application which kept delaying release. He came back as mad as a man as gentle as Stan can ever be and got me to commit to the concept of "sufficient minimum". Just shoot for "sufficient minimum" he pleaded so that we can at least see if the market wants what we offer. Well the market responded and WorldAPP is a thriving creative enterprise today because of Stan's great efforts. So let me start the New Year by tipping my hat to a great partner and great professional - Stan you are a blessing in my life and the true definition of what it is to be a "gentle-man".

Google Voice solves the voicemail vortex

I am one of those less than diligent people who allow their voicemail to fill up on a regular basis. It causes me mild guilt but still I find it tedious and onerous to attend to it.

Seems like I might be rescued soon however. Michael Arrington reports that Tuesday night, Google is launching a new feature that allows mobile users to move their voicemail away from their carrier and over to Google Voice.

The benefits: your mobile voicemails go into your Google Voice inbox along with other voicemails and text messages, plus you can create custom greetings for callers and your voicemails are all automatically transcribed.

Now I am conjuring up how this portal could also be used within WorldAPP's data collection technologies. There must be a myriad of ways it could enhance one of our customers' IDEAs (Integrated Data Engineering Applications), the deployment of surveys and make it easier to fill in online forms.

Got to think hard on this one.


You can read Michael's article here:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/169118-google-voice-can-now-take-control-of-your-mobile-voicemail

The Wisdom of Crowds vs The Black Swan

I am fascinated by the potential of dynamically integrating data. No surprise here I suppose as WorldAPP's business is focused on developing IDEAS (Integrated Data Engineering Applications).

There are some dimensions to data integration however that are truly unique to this moment in man's history. And it all has to do with the web.

One is the compression of time between events and another is a universally accessible compendium of collective responses. A frivolous example of this would be millions of fans voting on American Idol during the show. A more gripping example, one that I have availed of, are the real time tweets coming in from the streets of Tehran as terrified Iranian citizens are being beaten up by the notoriously brutal Basij militia.

Sitting by the quiet waters of Rhode Island, I now know what is happening on an exact street in Tehran as it is happening.

Creatively integrating such dynamic data into meaningful composites will be the great "game" of this new "Thumbs" generation. Many amazingly fertile amalgams will be happening both across social networks and within business processes.

My interest in all of this does not rest solely at the data engineering flash point, but also at the data validation point. Gathering, integrating and presenting data from multiple data repositories is becoming extraordinarily simple. However, making wise decisions about the "meaning" of this data has not seen the equivalent exponential advance.

Technology is limited here. At the end of the day, computers are still dumb. We are still sniffing our way out of the cave and trying to sense the whereabouts of menacing predators.

Some interesting efforts however are now surfacing to try and leverage this "wisdom of crowds" in order to ratchet down our level of risk. Piqqem being one. Piqqem is an online stock selection service that leverages the wisdom of crowds. Launched last year by early-stage Apple investor Mike Markula and TellMe Networks founder Mike McCue, Piqqem encourages users to make predictions on stock prices with simple graphical icons or using online graphing charts.

Nice IDEA. From such "wisdom", the theory is that we will get qualitatively better stock predictions.

However there is always another side to the coin.

Such an effort would be vocally disputed by Nassim Taleb, author of "The Black Swan." Taleb contends that in such deliberations we will always omit "the highly improbable consequential event". Or more precisely our inability to predict outliers will always imply our inability to predict the course of history. (The current global meltdown would one such example that no one saw coming).

Data being such a beautifully fungible commodity, who is right in this dispute, is probably less important to WorldAPP, and to you, than what is pragmatically the best course of action.

Being a battle-scarred entrepreneur, I tend to side with Taleb, and would advise you don't bet the farm, even if you have conjured up the most elegant IDEA the world has ever seen.

Its not all about the money afterall

The process of developing an IDEA (Integrated Data Engineering Application) sounds like such a consummately technical task doesn’t it? Sounds like you might need some client side boffo cranking out an ungodly detailed MS project file that would then mesh with a WorldAPP Statement Of Work eight tomes thick.

Well, yes and no.

I just looked at a video that a colleague of mine, Matt Haney, jabbered over. It’s fascinating stuff. First, it’s on a larger theme that has always entranced me – the subject of how to correctly motivate a workforce.

But there’s more in this pudding than just these raisins.

It also reveals how incentives can become disincentives when the work task shifts from straightforward or mechanical tasks to those that require expansive lateral thinking. (Hat tip here to one of my all times heroes, Edward de Bono, the “father of thinking”.)

In the video, the presenter, Dan Pink, shows how it has been repeatedly proven that the bigger the pecuniary incentive for cognitively challenging tasks, the higher the fail rate. Hmmm…. I hope our CFO, Oleg Matsko, isn’t reading this. This means we should be cranking out IDEAS for our customers with a bunch of lateral thinking mavens from the client’s team matched with a bunch of rag-tag rightbrained geniuses on our side .…AND…if we want it to really work well…the success of the project should largely be uncoupled from its cost.

You can view this interesting lecture at http://bit.ly/F0gJu

Pure genius in data display

I love the challenges we are faced with when customers ask us to develop an IDEA (Integrated Data Engineering Application) to solve difficult business process problems. It’s fascinating stuff. The IDEAs come in all shapes and sizes and often end up inside a sexy data drill down presentation layer using our valued partner QlikView.

But there is one particular technology we haven’t tapped into yet and I am chomping at the bit to see it deployed. It was developed by Gapminder.org and the technology has subsequently been bought by Google (no surprise there).

It’s so amazing; I call it “spawning intelligence”.

The technology displays data over time as it dynamically unfolds along two axis. The video I recommend from Hans Rosling shows how this technology can reveal fresh insights into the relationship between child mortality rates and world population growth over decades of historical data.

The intellectual stimulation from witnessing these variables as they morph through time is a new paradigm of learning and provocation that must be classed as a game changer.

Data is only beginning to have its day in the sun. Pundits and pulpits beware. Facts alone, presented at this level of mesmerizing acuity, are going to rule this new millennium.

You can see Rosling strut his stuff here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

Social Networking - Integrating People Engineering Applications

As you may know, WorldAPP is the originator of IDEAS - Integrated Data Engineering Applications.

But maybe there is room out there for another company to focus on IPEAS 0r Integrated People Engineering Applications?

Sure, it is not nearly as sexy an acronym, but social networking is certainly now the new red hot space. Yesterday over lunch, one of our business analysts was proclaiming how he had just succumbed and become a "Twitter" the previous night. His friend had finally managed to explain to him the value of looking at himself as a "product" and using Twitter to keep those who might be interested in him as a "product" up-to-date – all this in easy-to-digest 140 character bites of information.

Certainly, here at WorldAPP, we are both aware and excited that companies will soon be asking us to integrate relevant information from Linked In, Facebook and other data repositories into their next IDEA.

Data is data after all and it is the quality and value of data, not the database or structure that houses it, that truly matters from a business efficiencies perspective.

Personal Health Records (PHR) may drive data initiatives in healthcare

I just read an interesting article by Pat Speer in Information Management Magazine. The author points out that data integration initiatives around health care are hot topics today.

Certainly it is needed.

According to EMC, fewer than 10 percent of America's 5,000 hospitals and 17 percent of its 800,000 doctors have digitized their patients' records. The smaller the practice, the less likely an investment has been made in EHR (Electronic Health Records) technology.

I find this astounding. How will this transformation in healthcare take place? I believe the consumer (aka the “informed patient”) will be the spark plug that gets this behemoth moving forward. Health insurers, progressive HMOs and technology savvy medical practices will begin to recognize the convergence of easily accessible EHR and PHR (Personal Health Records) as their most valuable opportunity to become a trusted source to their members.

Speer points out that Aetna for example, with over 12 million members, is a poster child for this progressive movement. Aetna's health information management systems and electronic medical records are now fully integrated.

They started this initiative five years ago, according to their head of e-health product management Dan Greden. "At that time” Greden says, “we had 1 million members who had a PHR [personal health record] available to them. With the most rapid increase seen in the last 15 months, today we have close to 9 million members taking advantage of this program."

This is heady stuff. It’s an omen of a huge tectonic shift that’s about to happen around data integration within the healthcare industry. A space I fully expect WorldAPP to play a major role in.

Meanwhile I only have to walk into my local GP and be handed a sheaf of redundant forms to fill out and immediately I can see a whole bunch of IDEAS (Integrated Data Engineering Applications) that would make this fragmented health care process run better.

Can't wait!


http://www.information-management.com/issues/2007_59/health_care_third_party_data_management_warehousing-10015489-1.html