Daniel Eran Dilger

Morgan Adams, an interactive content developer who knows a lot about building Flash, wrote in with an interesting perspective on Flash and the iPad. The remainder of this piece is his comments on the subject.

Inside Apple’s iPad: Adobe Flash
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I’m biased. I’m a full-time Flash developer and I’d love to get paid to make Flash sites for iPad. I want that to make sense—but it doesn’t. Flash on the iPad will not (and should not) happen—and the main reason, as I see it, is one that never gets talked about:

Current Flash sites could never be made work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, or magical new hardware.

That’s not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It’s because of the hover or mouseover problem.

Many (if not most) current Flash games, menus, and even video players require a visible mouse pointer. They are coded to rely on the difference between hovering over something (mouseover) vs. actually clicking. This distinction is not rare. It’s pervasive, fundamental to interactive design, and vital to the basic use of Flash content. New Flash content designed just for touchscreens can be done, but people want existing Flash sites to work. All of them—not just some here and there—and in a usable manner. That’s impossible no matter what.

All that Apple and Adobe could ever do is make current Flash content visible. It would be seen, but very often would not work. Users would hate that broken promise much more than they hate gaps in pages, missing banner ads, and the need to download a game once from the App Store instead of re-downloading it every time they visit a Flash game page.

Mouseover examples:

* Video players where the controls appear on mouseover and hide otherwise. (This seems to be the norm, in fact. Whereas a click on the same video does something different: usually Pause. Try Hulu for instance.)

* Games where you steer with the mouse without clicking (extremely common).

* Menus that popup up subpage links when you mouse over a main button, vs. going directly to a main category page when you click.

* Buttons that have important explanations/summaries on mouseover, which you need to understand before deciding what to click.

* Functions that use mouseover to preview and click to commit; such as choosing hair colors for an avatar: you mouse over the colors until your character looks the way you like, and then you click to commit.

* Maps and diagrams that don’t use click at all, but pop up info as you mouse around.

* Numerous other custom mouseover functions that “just work” with a mouse and need no explanation.

None of these things can work right with a finger (or traditional stylus) because on a touchscreen, pointing at something without clicking isn’t a mouseover: it’s just holding your finger vaguely in the air. The device doesn’t even know it’s happening.

In addition, some Flash sites rely on right-clicks (such as for security settings), and many rely on a physical keyboard. Especially games, which are the main kind of content people want from Flash. (I’d say video, except video can easily be done without Flash, and sites are increasingly doing so. Much of the video missing from your favorite Flash site is probably easily found on YouTube anyway.) Games often use realtime key control, requiring a distinction between a single press and a long hold, and including the need for chording. For instance: holding right arrow continuously to walk, while simultaneously hitting the space bar to fire, and either hitting up-arrow once to jump or holding up-arrow longer to jump higher. A touchscreen keyboard can’t handle these kinds of rapid, precise combinations well. And the keyboard would block the game view, too. Games on a touchscreen need controls suitable for a touchscreen (and/or tilt).

The only potential “solutions” to the mouseover problem are terrible ones:

A) The best case: every Flash app on every site is re-thought by its designers and re-coded by its programmers (if they’re even still available), just for touchscreens. They wouldn’t use mouseovers any more—or else they’d have dual versions of all Flash content, so that mouse users could still benefit from the mouseovers they are used to. That’s a ton of work across the Web, for thousands of parties, and just isn’t going to happen. Plus, with many sites, mouseovers are so fundamental that the very concept of the site would be altered, creating a whole different experience that would annoy and confuse the site’s existing users. (And would this be any easier than simply re-designing without Flash at all? Not always.)

B) Gestures, finger gymnastics or extra physical buttons are created that simulate mouseover—which is absurd since mouseovers, by their nature, are meant to be simpler than a click/tap, not more complex. And meant to be natural, not something new to learn. Not a whole set of habits that violates our desktop habits. And any additional complexity is unworkable when it comes to games: you need to react quickly and simply, not remember when to hold the Simulate Mouseover button, or use three fingers, or whatever. The game itself is enough to deal with. Anything on top of that takes away fun.

C) Make clicking itself—the fundamental, constantly-used action—MORE complex. Such as requiring a double-tap or two-finger tap before anything is registered. (Two taps is how Mobile Safari does JavaScript popup menus: the first tap pops it up, the second selects.) But many Flash apps and games already use double-click (or rapid-fire clicking) for other things. Extra taps only make sense for certain limited situations (like menu popups). And it’s not just clicking: you have to allow for movement: dragging vs. a moving mouseover. And even if a system could be created that was quick and simple enough to do all this in the middle of a game, how would the user know which parts of a web page played by these special rules? One part of a page (the Flash elements) would do fundamental things like scrolling or link-clicking differently from the rest of the page! (Not to mention the rest of your touch-based apps.)

D) Have a visible mouse pointer near your finger, and not interact with things directly. Use Apple track-pad style tap-and-drag gestures, as seen in some VNC clients. This kind of indirect control violates the very principle of direct touch manipulation. This is making the touchscreen be something “like a laptop but worse” and has little reason to exist. And again, you’d have to keep remembering whether you were in direct touch mode or “drag the arrow” mode, and which parts of the page behaved in which way.

E) Require extra force for a “real” tap. So you’d have to learn habits for a light tap vs. a hard tap. This extra complexity is non-intuitive, cramp-inducing, and easy for the user to get wrong (even with click feedback, as in RIM’s failed BlackBerry SurePress experiment). This complicates the whole device just for the sake of one browser plugin, and makes it more expensive to build.

So it’s not just that Apple has refused to support Flash. It cannot, logically, be done. A finger is not a mouse, and Flash sites are designed to require a mouse pointer (and keyboard) in fundamental ways. Someday that may change, and every Flash site could be redesigned with touch-friendly Flash. But that doesn’t make Flash sites work now.

Even if slow performance, battery drain and crashes weren’t problems with Flash (and they truly are), nothing can give users of any touchscreen, from any company, an acceptable experience with today’s Flash sites. The thing so many complainers want is simply an impossibility.

By the way, imagine my embarrassment as a Flash developer when my own animated site wouldn’t work on the newfangled iPhone! So I sat down and made new animations using WebKit’s CSS animation abilities. Now desktop users still see Flash at adamsi.com, but iPhone users see animations too. It can be done.

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Classifying CRM as a pure IT issue will result in stale thinking and an obsolete approach to customers in short order. It will also minimize the return you can get for your CRM investment, since a failure to connect business problems with the capabilities of a CRM application often results in ignored features — or, worse, the acquisition and integration of other software to solve problems that the CRM application could have solved.

ne of the misconceptions that has bedeviled CRM has been the idea that it is simply a technology you buy and implement, thus solving your problems. Technology is a part of scaling your processes for managing customer  relationships, to be sure, but in reality it’s a link in a chain of decisions and activities that form your business’ discipline around CRM. Any weak links will cause the whole chain to fail.

1. The Tendency to See CRM as Technology

This myopic view is hazardous for a number of reasons. First, it tends to punt responsibility for CRM into the realm of the IT department, making it once removed from the business problems it needs to address. Second, it also can create a perception issue in which, in managers’ minds, the individual customers become disassociated from the aggregate data about them.

This leads to a number of problems. You can’t treat CRM as another IT project; most IT projects have distinct ending points, but CRM is an eternal work in progress. Since your customers and your business conditions are always changing, CRM needs to change as well.

Classifying CRM as a pure IT issue will result in stale thinking and an obsolete approach to customers in short order. It will also minimize the return you can get for your CRM investment, since a failure to connect business problems with the capabilities of a CRM application often results in ignored features — or, worse, the acquisition and integration of other software to solve problems that the CRM application could have solved if only sufficient attention had been paid to its capabilities.

The perception issue is even thornier. Unless managers are prepared to dig into customer data, they can make false assumptions about customer desires and behavior. The highest level of reporting is great for taking the pulse of your business’ collective efforts, but it’s not good for taking the pulse of individual customers. In order to succeed, managers need to dig deeper and make sure their employees do the same.

2. The Fallacy of Viewing Adoption as Optional

When your business is doing well, it becomes easy to accept employees’ complaints about CRM and to allow adoption and utilization rates to slacken, especially from sales. What this really does is to distort the picture you have of how your sales operation works, since much of the intelligence you can use to segment buyer types and make assumptions about their behavior is now hidden.

Adoption is the classic barrier to CRM success, but it’s becoming a lower barrier to cross. The recession has turned many resistors into users, because the need for performance improvement has come to outweigh the resistance to change. We’re also entering a time of significant change to the user interface; rather than forcing users to alter their work processes to the application, next-generation applications are allowing users to easily adapt the way the application presents data to reflect how they work.

In some cases, it boils down to issuing an ultimatum about CRM. But adoption has to be uniform and universal — exempting some employees from it creates the conditions for confusion, resentment and restricted visibility.

3. The Need to Hire CRM-Minded Employees

This is the most basic obstacle that derails CRM — employees who aren’t really invested in the customer. If your staff has this attitude, it doesn’t matter what kind of data you supply them with — it won’t be translated into actions that maximize sales and stimulate loyalty unless you, as a manager, provide them with exhaustive and meticulous directives — an effort that will ultimately collapse over time.

Technology can’t fix this problem. While many CRM problems develop around the interface between technology and people, this is purely a people problem. Heading this off requires a few critical actions.

First, you must embark on the hiring process with the idea of customer focus as an important criterion. Hiring for attitude is as important as hiring for skills. Second, you have to make sure your management embodies the idea of customer focus and reinforces it on a regular basis.

Third, it’s important for managers to explain what they consider to be critical data culled from CRM to help employees see CRM as the critical tool to help them excel at their jobs. In other words, if you want your employees to partner with your customers, then you as a manager need to partner with your employees.

These ideas seem simple enough, but the deeper you get into CRM technology, the more difficult it can be to remain focused on these non-technological issues. CRM is a discipline that encompasses technology, people and processes; two of these three things involve humans. While managing technology can be tricky, managing people is harder — but it’s a critical part of making CRM work.

While the technology decisions are often scrutinized, the most frequent weak link in the chain is not technology. The technology almost always does an acceptable job of collecting, collating and providing reports on the data.

The weak link is too often the employees who must then take that data and translate it into real-world reactions to what it indicates. From there, managers must then direct their employees to take advantage of that data.

That is all far more easily said than done. There are three serious obstacles to overcome in order to translate the insight CRM provides into actions that improve sales, marketing, service — and, ultimately, your customers’ experience with your business. Luckily, once you can spot these obstacles, they become inherently easier to overcome.

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The evolution of open source adoption at the federal level should be a plus for commercial providers. “We see this progress as an endorsement of our development model that is suited to these applications,” said Red Hat Chief Technology Strategist Gunnar Hellekson. However, he also expressed disappointment that many agencies haven’t generated the legal guidance necessary for their procurement departments to go after open source options.

Major federal agencies in the U.S. are gradually getting the hang of dealing with open source technology — a situation that bodes well for commercial open source providers.

In a recently released “report card,” Open Source for America (OSFA) says that a handful of top level cabinet departments have achieved a high level of success in adopting the technology, and that other departments have at least committed themselves to pursuing appropriate open source options.

“The results show a solid commitment to transparency and public feedback, as well as recognition and growing use of open technologies within the federal government,” notes OSFA. OSFA represents business, government, and related organizations involved with open technologies.

OSFA analyzed the activities of 15 cabinet level departments and agencies in meeting the objectives of an Open Government Directive issued by President Barack Obama in December 2009. Those departments were required to begin meeting the directive last April. OFSA surveyed the agencies three months after they had launched programs to meet the directive.

In the report, OSFA assigns a percentage grade to 15 departments and agencies related to the use of open source technologies, open formats, and technology tools for citizen engagement. The highest ranking agencies: the Department of Defense (82 percent); theDepartment of Energy (72 percent); the Department of Health and Human Services (55 percent); the Department of Homeland Security (55 percent), and the Department of Transportation (53 percent). All the other departments scored above 40 percent except for the Interior Department at 37 percent.

Insufficient Legal Guidance

“Overall, we would have to say we’re encouraged by the results, given that this is the first year under the directive. But we intend to measure progress on an annual basis,” Gunnar Hellekson, chief technology strategist at Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), told the E-Commerce Times. Red Hat is a member of OSFA.

The highest-scoring departments, such as Defense and Energy, have published agency-created software code as open source, and also have provided clear guidelines identifying open source as a permitted procurement option. All agencies have published at least some forms in open file format standards and accept files from the public in multiple document forms, according to the report.

Despite the progress, all departments still have much room for improvement in taking full advantage of open source capabilities, OSFA concluded.

“One disappointing note for me was that while the legal groundwork for using open source versus proprietary programs has been prepared, many agencies still have not generated the legal guidance that procurement people can use to pursue open source technologies,” Hellekson said.

“On the plus side, as the report points out, this analysis represents only the first year that U.S. agencies have been operating under directives to increase consideration of open source options, and still some agencies, such as the DoD and DoE, earn high marks,” Jay Lyman, senior industry analyst at 451 Group, told the E-Commerce Times.

“I also think it’s good to see wider use of open file formats and increased transparency on budgets and other public information,” he said.

“Conversely, the scorecard indicates that most government agencies failed to effectively produce policies and procedures that increase their open source consideration and options. I do believe this is beginning to change, but it will probably continue to be the case at a number of agencies for years to come.” predicted Lyman.

The Defense and Energy departments have taken a balanced view of open source, he observed, and are embracing it for some functions while taking steps to ensure that the technology is used appropriately.

The evolution of open source adoption at the federal level should be a plus for commercial providers. “We see this progress as an endorsement of our development model that is suited to these applications,” Hellekson said.

“There’s no question that open source-focused vendors are doing a better job adapting open source software to government procurement policies, which have historically been a mismatch,” added Lyman.

The Federal Buzz: Notes on Government IT

Cloud Deadlines: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is seeking comment by Feb. 28 from both the public and private sectors on two draft documents dealing with the implementation of cloud technologies at the federal level.

Responding to a directive from Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra to help accelerate the federal government’s secure adoption of cloud computing, NIST is leading efforts to develop related standards and guidelines in collaboration with standards bodies, the private sector and other stakeholders. NIST has been researching cloud computing for several years, and has been documenting the development of a definition of “cloud computing” on its Web page. NIST has now published a definition of “cloud computing” and is looking for feedback to determine if this definition remains valid or needs modification.

“Cloud computing is still an evolving paradigm. Its definition, use cases, underlying technologies, issues, risks, and benefits will be refined and better understood with a spirited debate by the public and private sectors,” state Peter Mell and Timothy Grance, co-authors of the NIST document.

NIST is also seeking comment on another document, “Guidelines on Security and Privacy in Public Cloud Computing.” The document presents an overview of the security  and privacy challenges for public cloud computing, as well as recommendations that organizations should consider when outsourcing data, applications and infrastructure to a public cloud environment.

Internet Caucus: Rep. Anna G. Eshoo, D-Calif., who represents the Silicon Valley area, has been appointed to one of four co-chair positions of the Congressional Internet Caucus. The caucus is a bipartisan and bicameral group of over 150 members of the House and Senate. The mission of the caucus is to educate fellow members on the promise and potential of the Internet.

Eshoo joins Rep. Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., as co-chairs of the caucus. Eshoo will also become the ranking minority member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.

In a recent op-ed article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Eshoo expresses support for expanding access to the Internet and for creating permanent tax breaks for technology investments.

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By Paul Bates
E-Commerce Times
02/12/11 5:00 AM PT

Listen to your customers. Mobile is a driver for consumer satisfaction and enterprise revenue growth, but the consumer is expecting to be treated with a bit more respect: “If you let me make take control, offer me choice, and make relevant offers, then I will buy from you. Otherwise, I will opt out.”

A strong candidate for mCRM solutions is the retail industry — an enormous business worldwide that includes apparel, restaurants, department stores, pharmacies, grocery, home and hardware, discount and speciality stores, hotels, malls, airports, convenience, and even telecoms. Telecom companies are among the biggest owners of retail space on High Street. One American guide claims a database of 698,000 retail chains in the U.S. and Canada. There are more than 4,000 in France, and similar numbers in all of the major European countries.

There are three main drivers for an enterprise  to invest in mobile: Generation Y; the search for revenue growth; and cross-channel marketing.

Generation Y

It is not a new Generation Y; rather, it is the same generation with an increased percentage of people who are used to using their mobile devices in ever-wider circumstances. Older age groups have significant percentages adopting mobile as a medium for research and purchase.

Currently, more than 36 percent of this age group are using smartphones for in-store shopping and real-time cross channel offers and are heavily influenced by social networks and peer marketing recommendations of friends.

Drive for Retail Revenue Growth

Fifty-seven percent of retailers are seeking new sales and services channels, and the consumer’s mobile phone has emerged as a “channel growth” opportunity that offers customer engagement potential and incremental revenue options for retailers, according to the Aberdeen Group.

Of the 129 retailers participating in a 2010 Aberdeen survey, more than 38 percent were at some stage of employing mobile retail technology or mobile channel adoption, compared with 18 percent at the end of 2008. Fifteen percent of all retailers were looking to adopt mobile solutions within the next year. More than 22 percent of retailers were increasing their mobile marketing initiatives as part of their overall marketing mix.

Cross-Channel Marketing

One of the big talking points in the industry is mobile and the opportunity to manage cross-marketing initiatives beyond physical bricks and mortar. Mobile removes the physical barriers to retail sale and promotion of goods. Cross-channel, in this instance, is strongly connected to the “Reserve and Collect” or “Research and Collect” activity in which consumers are encouraged to come to the physical store  to collect their goods — where additional up-sell and cross-sell opportunities exist.

This is in fact not a difficult thing to achieve, as many shoppers prefer to collect goods than have them delivered. Typically, this is the case for families in which both parents work and are not at home to accept deliveries, or for single working young adults who are not often at home.

“With consumers continuing to be more careful with their dollar as their cross-channel shopping expectations rise, retailers will find that a seamless cross-channel experience will be critical in capturing wallet-share,” said Jim Bengier, global retail industry executive for Sterling Commerce. “Retailers who have their order management and inventory visibility processes in order will be best positioned to incorporate the mobile channel into the consumer shopping experience to take advantage of the growing consumer interest.”

• Eighty-four percent of respondents want to have the ability to buy an item online and return to a physical store, while 67 percent want the ability to order online and pick up in a store.
• Fifty-six percent of in-store shoppers have gone online to do research or look at an item before purchasing it in a store. For consumers with household incomes above US$75,000, the number rose to 73 percent, and college graduates were at 76 percent.
• Women were more likely to exhibit cross-channel shopping behavior, with 59 percent of female respondents saying they had researched an item online before purchasing. Forty-five percent had an item delivered to their home, and nearly one in 10 women surveyed reported they had returned an item purchased online to the store.

The capabilities these retailers are looking for include the ability to measure the success of the mobile channel, with 68 percent advocating the need for performance metrics. This, of course, plays straight to our simple proposition of being able to “Connect Promotion to Purchase.”

This key message rings volumes with all the retailers I have spoken to, because it allows them to measure their success and to be accountable for their marketing investment. With this in place, all of the other benefits of mobile — in your hand, always with you, interactive, cost effective, personal, etc. — now have a positive impact.

The law about Internet sales taxes has been treated like the law regarding mail order purchases — remember those days, before the Internet? No sales taxes were due for mail order purchases unless the seller had a presence in the state where the transaction occurred. However, a single online purchase today can involve activities in several different states — it’s not always clear where the sales event occurs.

In 1998, Congress enacted the Internet Tax Freedom Act, effectively banning sales  taxes on sales on the Internet (the Ban), with some exceptions. Its purpose was to encourage and foster the growth of Internet business.

Internet sales totaled an estimated US$155 billion in 2010 and will reach about $250 billion in 2011, according to Forrester. Given these numbers, and the state and local budget crises, many states and the U.S. Congress are now considering reforming the Internet Tax Freedom Act to allow for Internet sales taxes.

While serving as mayor of Dallas, my former law partner Ron Kirk (currently U.S. Trade Representative) was on the Advisory Commission on Electronic Commerce. Ron advocated for eliminating the Ban on Internet sales taxes. Ron wasn’t successful, and each time the Ban on Internet sales taxes was considered by Congress over the years, it was renewed.

One exception to the Ban on Internet sales taxes applies to companies with operations in a particular state (and city). Such companies have to collect and pay Internet sales taxes for purchases by citizens located in those jurisdictions. Actually, the sales tax is the obligation of the buyer, not the seller, although sellers are generally required to collect the sales taxes from the buyers.

Where’s the Internet Sales Transaction?

From my computer in Dallas, Texas, I recently purchased a book fromAmazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), which is located in Washington state. On the surface, this purchase does not seem to have created a sales event in Texas.

I don’t know where the particular Amazon server was that handled my transaction, but for discussion purposes, let’s say it was in California. So far, there should be no Texas Internet sales tax.

The book I ordered shipped from Kansas — still no connection to Texas. So, where exactly did the Internet sales event occur? Texas, Washington, California or Kansas? There’s no clear answer concerning this specific purchase from an Internet-only business. There was no sales tax charged by Amazon on the invoice.

Another Internet purchase I made was a sport coat from Jos. A. Bank, a company headquartered in Maryland. Let’s assume the server was also in Maryland. The coat actually shipped from California, but I was charged the Texas sales tax on this Internet purchase because Jos. A. Bank has retail outlets throughout Texas.

The law about Internet sales taxes has been treated like the law regarding mail order purchases — remember those days, before the Internet? No sales taxes were due for mail order purchases unless the seller had a presence in the state where the transaction occurred.

So, when I bought running shoes from a Wisconsin mail order company, there was no sales tax, because I was in Texas and the mail order company did not have any operations in Texas. If I bought a Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) computer by mail order, though, there was a sales tax, since Dell was located in Texas.

Amazon’s Tax Dispute With Texas

Remember my Amazon purchase? Well, it turns out that Amazon opened an office in Texas in 2005, but Amazon has not collected or paid Internet sales taxes in Texas. For some reason that defies explanation, the Texas comptroller of public accounts did not try to collect any Internet sales taxes from Amazon until September 2010, when the comptroller demanded that Amazon pay a whopping $269 million! Since the tax bill was presented, apparently Amazon and the Texas comptroller have been going back and forth over the Internet sales taxes.

Apparently, when Amazon asked the comptroller for the Internet tax audit, the comptroller refused, claiming that the Internet tax audit was protected by attorney- client privilege, since the Internet tax audit was prepared by an attorney for the comptroller.

So there was an appeal to the Texas attorney general as to whether the claim of attorney-client privilege was proper. In mid-December 2010, the Texas attorney general issued an opinion that affirmed the comptroller’s assertion of attorney-client privilege.

In January 2011, Amazon sued the comptroller to get the Internet tax audit. The case pends while I write this column, but we should all stay tuned to see the outcome.

Privacy Issues on Internet Sales Taxes

The U.S. Constitution protects against the disclosure to the government of what citizens read and view, in spite of the North Carolina Department of Revenue’s best efforts. U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman granted Amazon’s summary judgment that precludes disclosure of Amazon’s “customers’ names, addresses or any other personal information.”

The order states that “Amazon has conducted nearly 50 million transactions with North Carolina residents from August 1, 2003, to February 28, 2010, apparently without collecting or remitting North Carolina sales and use taxes.” As result of these sales transactions, there was a sales tax dispute, and Amazon has already provided “order ID number, seller, ship-to city, county, postal code, the non-taxable amount of the purchase, and the tax audit record identification.”

Because Amazon’s records contained personal information, Amazon filed its lawsuit in Washington state to avoid disclosing the customer personal information, and the American Civil Liberties Union joined Amazon.

Where Are We Headed?

With the state and local revenue shortfalls, I suspect we will see more state governments demanding Internet sales taxes. Since the original Ban on Internet sales taxes was to foster the growth of the Internet, that mission seems to be completed.

That may mean that we, as consumers, will eventually find everything more costly on the Internet, as Internet sales taxes are permitted and sought on more and more transactions.

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Groupon wanted to do something different for its Super Bowl ad campaign, and in that, the deal-a-day website achieved spectacular success. What’s not clear, though, is whether all the negative attention its ads received will actually help the causes Groupon says it supports but appears to trivialize — or, for that matter, whether it will hurt the company. No one seems to be asking “What’s Groupon?” any more.

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason released a statement on Monday regarding his company’s Super Bowl ads, in response  to a lot of flak from critics and the general public regarding Sunday’s commercials.

The ads start out appearing to be seeking support for humanitarian causes, but then switch up, revealing a tongue-in-cheek plug for deal-a-day website  Groupon. The company works with local markets to give members a new promotion everyday via email.

Many considered the ads offensive. The one receiving the most attention touches on human rights issues in Tibet. Joking about Tibet upset many Chinese viewers, in particular. Twitterand Facebook were alight with raging opinions during the game.

Making Fun of Groupon

Mason defended the campaign in his post, emphasizing his company’s philanthropy and insisting the ads were meant to support the causes. He encouraged readers to make a donation at SaveTheMoney.org, which Groupon would match.

The ads themselves, however, mentioned no charities.

Mason said the ads were meant to make fun of Groupon and to compare the “often trivial nature of stuff on Groupon” to bigger issues.

“No one walks away from our commercials taking the causes we highlighted less seriously,” argued Mason. “Not a single person watched our ad and concluded that it’s cool to kill whales. In fact — and this is part of the reason we ran them — they have the opposite effect.”

Many viewers did not get the point, and Mason’s defense of the ads seemed to make a bad situation worse, since it came without an apology.

Groupon did not respond to the E-Commerce Times’ request for comments by press time.

Too Risky for a Large Audience

The choice was a tad risky, especially for such a large audience as the Super Bowl crowd.

“That’s getting a lot of slow-burn play around the Internet because it looks rather clueless,” Steven Savage, technology project manager and Geek 2.0 blogger Steven Savage told the E-Commerce Times. “It brings into question the choices of the ad agency and the company. First, the ads themselves are based on a kind of humor or parody of the kind I’m not sure plays well with the very broad audience of the Super Bowl. There’s a tactical decision here that’s questionable.”

The controversial nature of the ads does not fit Groupon’s universal business model.

“The ads themselves seem to be meant to generate controversy or be talked about,” said Savage. “That can work, but what Groupon does is so noncontroversial, there’s no gain. Groupon is not edgy, Groupon is practical — and you can’t change that.”

Everyone is focusing on the ads and not Groupon’s service.

“This controversy overshadows what Groupon is about,” said Savage. “End result? Bad decision that probably doesn’t do the company any long-term favors, but does no direct long-term damage. However, it indicates Groupon has a way to go understanding the kind of promotion they need, and this will have the effect of making people inside and out question their publicity choices.”

This could make Groupon’s competition against LivingSocial and the upcoming Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Offers tougher.

“It’s a black eye to a company that so far has been untouchable,” said Savage. “This might be Groupon’s welcome-to-reality moment — as all companies go through.”

What Joke?

Many viewers simply didn’t understand the intent of the ads.

“To me, the ad seemed like an incongruous juxtaposition of thoughts,” Al Hilwa, program director, applications development software at IDC, told the E-Commerce Times. “When I first saw it, my initial reaction was, are they serious?”

With the humor a miss, Groupon’s ad just didn’t work for Super Bowl viewers.

“Of course, it did occur to me that there is an element of tongue-in-cheek,” said Hilwa, “but I felt it was way too subtle for a Super Bowl atmosphere, and there wasn’t enough time to explain things in a 60-second commercial. It was misunderstood.”

The damage-control effort in Mason’s blog post seems fairly weak.

“I see what they are getting at in their apology,” said Hilwa, “but I think if they don’t get ahead of this much more aggressively and decisively, it may damage their relatively new and young brand really early in the game.”

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By Dana Gardner
E-Commerce Times
01/29/11 5:00 AM PT

The latest offering from Platform Computing, Platform ISF 2.1, is targeted at enterprises that aim to build and manage private clouds. “Enterprises looking to take advantage of the cloud do so for many reasons, but one of the key ones is to enhance their agility in response to changing business dynamics,” said Cameron Haight, research vice president at Gartner.

latform Computing last week released Platform ISF 2.1, which improves ease of use and automation for building and managing enterprise  private clouds.

Platform’s cloud management software helps enterprises transition from internal IT to more productive and efficient private cloud infrastructure services that support multitier applications.

New in Platform ISF 2.1 is a dynamic “single cloud pane” for cloud administration; expanded definitions for support of multi-tier application environments such as Hadoop, Jboss, Tomcat and WebSphere; and enhanced business policy-driven automation that spans across multiple data centers.

Play It Cool

By automating delivery of complex enterprise infrastructure and production applications across heterogeneous virtual, physical and public cloud resources, Platform ISF also helps reduce electricity and cooling requirements while freeing up capacity in data centers. The management layer provides improved monitoring, policy management and workload management across multiple and heterogenous cloud and traditional IT stacks. By capturing corporate standards and business policies within the automation engine, companies can improve both compliance and security, said Platform Computing.

Via the single-pane administration capabilities, what Toronto-based Platform calls a “cloud cockpit,” users can self-select approved services to support a wide variety of applications. Enhanced end-user portals are also new, including drag-and-drop portlet-based dashboards and customizable application instantiation pages.

What’s more, the applications be can monitored from both private and public clouds, such as Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) Web Services (AWS). The degree of management allows for future planning and capacity management, to help exploit hybrid computing benefits and cut the total overall costs of supporting applications.

Enhancing Agility

“Enterprises looking to take advantage of the cloud do so for many reasons, but one of the key ones is to enhance their agility in response to changing business dynamics,” said Cameron Haight, research vice president at Gartner (NYSE: IT). “This means that the technology used to manage cloud environments should be similarly agile and act to facilitate and not impede this industry movement. IT organizations should look for tools that can address the various cloud usage scenarios without demanding excessive investments in management infrastructure or staff support.”

Key capabilities in Platform ISF 2.1 include: self-service and chargeback, policy-based automated provisioning of applications, dynamic scaling of applications to meet service level agreements (SLAs) and unification of distributed and mixed-vendor resource pools for sharing. A unique “Active-Active” multiple data center supports higher availability and scalability by leveraging Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) GoldenGate.

Delegating Duties

Ease-of-use benefits in the new release, which is available now, include account management and delegation based on applications or business processes. Such delegation can occur for such cloud-supported functions as Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and hierarchical applications and their supporting components and services. Also included is self-service hierarchical account and resource management (including Active Directory for 10,000+ users) supporting an unlimited number of organizational tiers.

Business benefits include less downtime for applications, even as they are supported by hybrid resources, SLA-driven shared services, less need for specialized administrators, higher availability and creation of richer applications services catalogs. Use of Platform ISF 2.1 for private cloud activities clearly puts the users in a better position to use, exploit and manage public clouds, and to move quickly to the hybrid computing model. The goal is to manage the heterogeneous applications lifecycle, not just multiple cloud instances, said Jay Muelhoefer, VP of enterprise marketing at Platform Computing.

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News Corp.’s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, will be officially unveiled next week. Readers will pay 99 cents per day to access its content. The Daily puts an unusual twist on digital news delivery with its iPad-only rollout, and the amount it will charge is considerably less than paywall pros like The Wall Street Journal and possibly the New York Times if it enacts its own paywall plan.

The classic newspaper may finally gets its 21st-century update. News Corp.’s (Nasdaq: NWS) iPad-exclusive newspaper, The Daily, is set to launch on Feb. 2. A weekly subscription will reportedly cost 99 US cents. Issues of The Daily will be delivered automatically throughApple (Nasdaq: AAPL) once users sign up.

News Corp. told the E-Commerce Times the company cannot offer more information before the Feb. 2 announcement.

The launch will be held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was slated to appear, but will not because of health problems.

Building a Paywall, Brick by Brick

News Corp.’s plan to charge readers for access is the latest gambit in an industry wrestling with the question of how to get readers to pay for the news they access. There is a vast amount of news available online  for free, most of it sponsored purely by advertising, so it may be difficult to get readers to pay out of their own pockets.

The Wall Street Journal, another News Corp. property, is a rare example of a major publication to successfully institute a pay wall.The New York Times is mulling turning its digital version into a paid subscription model, which will reportedly cost less than $20 per month.

As new technologies change the way people get their news, news organizations are experimenting with various monetization strategies.

The beauty of reading news online is the access one has to multiple sources and perspectives. News aggregation services such as Google(Nasdaq: GOOG) News organize articles from many different publications. Readers may agree to pay for access to certain favorite sites, but questions remain about delivery, and setting a price will be a tough balancing act.

Changes in How People Get Their News

People have grown accustomed to getting digital news for free. “I think paid news is a tough market,” Carl Howe, director of anywhere consumer research at the Yankee Group, told the E-Commerce Times. “For the foreseeable future, I see app-based news as a freebie to be bundled with a paid print or online subscription. It’s a way for people already engaged with the news brand to consume their content in more ways, not as a way to gain lots of new subscribers.”

Apple will have to adjust its apps model to accommodate an ongoing subscription. “I think for a paid iPad news app to succeed, it has to allow the user to buy a subscription,” said Howe. “At present, that’s not allowed in the iPad app store, only one-time purchases.”

Choices in mobile news — whether on a tablet or smartphone — increase every day. “TheNew York Times already has an online iPad app, which I use quite a bit,” said Howe. “It will soon become a separate product, bundled free with print subscriptions, but also available separately. My guess is that The Daily will break the subscription restriction in the App Store, and that the New York Times will then be able to exploit that new-found freedom. All that said, though, it’s going to be a long, slow slog to get app-based news to approach the consumption rates of Web-based and print media.”

E-readers present a new way to deliver news, and their use is on the rise. “One of the things that will help this market develop is the increasing use of e-readers,” said Howe. “The more people who have e-readers, the more interested the general population will become in getting other forms of content other than books on those readers. So this market won’t be stalled forever — it’s just not there yet.”

Mobile Content – New Arena for News Sites

News sites are striving to find an effective balance between what people are willing to pay for and what they expect to get for free. “Digital does not mean free,” Al Hilwa, program director of applications development software at IDC, told the E-Commerce Times. “While modern media has been in the process of adjusting to the digital age, the mix of paid versus free news has certainly been in flux.”

Content delivery on tablets and mobiles will be a battleground for news organizations.

“It makes sense to me that there may be a tier of news and analysis that has to sit behind paywalls,” said Hilwa. “The tablet form-factor opens up more opportunities for experimenting with the structure of this paywall. Content-based applications as a category is definitely one of the more exciting new things going on tablets today.”

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Opening a “social PR” channel to address customer complaints on Twitter, for example, is fine. But what’s better is to get the entire service mix right so there are fewer frustrated customers, period. The dawn of the social service age is an opportunity to blow up your set of service processes like the outmoded structure it probably is and rebuild it from the ground up with the customer of today in mind.

Wouldn’t it be great if customers who had questions about your products could get the answer from other customers? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if customers brainstormed on ways you could improve your service processes? Wouldn’t it be tremendous if you could see trends in service needs and adjust your processes to meet them earlier and more effectively?

Here’s another question: Wouldn’t it be great if more businesses realized that all this — and more — is already possible if they just cared to investigate it?

The groundwork has been in place for a “social service” revolution for several years now, and while service certainly commands more attention now than it did before the recession, business has yet to fully embrace the power social media could provide it. Even well-publicized, halting steps into social service — like the “Comcast Cares” initiative that keyed on the use of Twitter — have not fully incorporated what is possible with social media into useful data to improve service.

A Step Beyond Social PR

Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSK) Cares is an example of what CRM Essentials President Brent Leary deemed “Social PR.” Although the use of Twitter helps the company respond quickly to customer issues, it’s not part of a larger effort to integrate social channels into a revamped service strategy. In other words, people complaining on Twitter get attention faster and better than customers using regular service channels.

Rather, because Twitter has the potential to reach many other customers, it’s important to Comcast to address Tweeters’ problems quickly to reduce the amount of negative noise about the company. While that’s a good thing, a better thing would be to get the entire service mix right so there are fewer frustrated customers and, thus, less of a need to grease squeaky wheels on Twitter or any other social media channels.

And therein lies the challenge and the opportunity represented by the dawn of the social service age. It is an opportunity to blow up your set of service processes like the creaky, rickety, outmoded structure it probably is, and to rebuild it from the ground up with the customer of today in mind. That doesn’t just mean streamlining what you do now — it means incorporating social media to facilitate peer-to-peer service, adding a listening component to your service efforts to predict and anticipate service issues and improve service processes, participating in discussions of service issues that affect your business, and to feed issues raised in online  forums and discussion sites into service for proactive action.

All of that has the potential for exciting new ways to improve service and use it not strictly as a patch when things go wrong but to employ it to improve the customer experience. It also has the potential to deliver a greater degree of service without a proportional increase in costs.

Sooner’s Better Than Later

But just as with Social CRM, it’s crucial to have the basics in place before you make the jump to a more socially driven service approach. Without a uniformly effective set of service practices, savvy customers will shift to the channels that get results — not the channels they prefer to work through. That will erode your ability to build loyalty through your service efforts, and it’ll hamper your ability to take advantage of the customer information that’s out there waiting to be tapped. The addition of new functionality and new ideas also represents a chance to examine your service processes, fix what’s broken, streamline what’s clunky and pare away what your customers have outgrown.

Standing between the service structure you have now and the service structure you need for the future is the daunting prospect of a top-down re-design of how service operates in your business. But customers are becoming more social, not less; they expect better levels of service, not the same levels; and they are already talking online about issues that could impact your bottom line, both for better and for worse.

Taking the initiative now and joining the revolution is the logical and lucrative thing to do. The alternative is waiting until the pain of being left become behind becomes too much to bear.

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Salesforce’s developments and offerings provide a prime example of how social collaboration, mobile and cloud reinforce each other, spurring on adoption that fosters serious productivity improvements that then invite yet more use and an accelerating overall adoption effect. This is happening not at what we quaintly referred to as “Internet Time,” but at far swifter viral explosion time.

ack in the mid-1990s, then Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) CEO Bill Gates offered a prophetic observation.

The impact of the Web, he wrote, would be greater than most people thought, but would take longer to happen than was commonly supposed.

Turns out, happily for Microsoft, that he was right.

Yet now, perhaps not so pleasantly for Redmond, the confluence of mobile computing, social online  interactions and cloud computing are together supporting a wave of change that will both be more impactful than many think — and also happen a lot quicker than is expected.

More evidence of this appeared last week, building on momentum that capped a very dynamic 2010.

Startup Bitzer Mobile Inc. last week announced its Enterprise Virtualized Mobility solution (EVM), which makes a strong case for an ecumenical yet native apps approach to mobile computing for enterprises.

Bitzer Mobile is banking on the urgency that enterprise  IT departments are feeling to deliver apps and data to mobile devices — from BlackBerry to iOS, Android, and WebOS. But knowing the enterprise, they also know that adoption of such sweeping change needs to be future-proofed and architected for enterprise requirements. More on EVM later.

Another hastening development in the market is Salesforce.com’s (NYSE: CRM) pending release the first week of February of the Spring ’11 release of its flagship CRM SaaS applications. The upgrade includes deeper integrations with Chatter collaboration and analytics services, so that sales, marketing and service employees can be far more powerful and productive in how they innovate, learn and teach in their roles. The trend toward collaborative business process that mobile-delivered mobile Web apps like Salesforce.com’s CRM suite now offer are literally changing the culture of workers overnight.

Advancing Cloud Services

Last month, at its Dreamforce conference, Salesforce also debuted a database in the cloud service, Database.com, that combines attractive heterogeneous features for a virtual data tier for developers of all commercial, technical and open source persuasions. Salesforce also bought Heroku and teamed with BMC Software on its RemedyForce cloud configuration management offering.

Salesforce’s developments and offerings provide a prime example of how social collaboration, mobile and cloud reinforce each other, spurring on adoption that fosters serious productivity improvements that then invite yet more use and an accelerating overall adoption effect. This is happening not at what we quaintly referred to as “Internet Time,” but at far swifter viral explosion time.

As I traveled at the end of 2010, to both Europe and the U.S. coasts, I was struck by the pervasive use of Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPads by the very people who know a productivity boon when they see it and will do whatever they can to adopt it. Turns out they didn’t have to do too much nor spend too much. Bam.

I also recently fielded calls from nearly frantic IT architects asking how they can hope to satisfy the demand to quickly move key apps and data to iPads and the most popular smartphones for their employees. My advice was and is: the mobile Web. It’s not a seamless segue, but it allows the most mobile extension benefits the soonest, does not burn any deployment bridges, and allows a sane and thoughtful approach to adopting native apps if and when that becomes desired.

Clearly, the decision now for apps providers is no longer Mac or PC,Java or .NET — but rather native or Web for mobile? The architecture discussion for supporting cloud is also shifting toward lightweight middleware.

I still think that the leveraging of HTML5 and extending current Web, portal, and RIA apps sets to the mobile tier (any of the major devices types) is the near-term best enterprise strategy, but Bitzer Mobile and its EVM has gotten me thinking. Their approach is architected to support the major mobile native apps AND the Web complements.

IT wants to leverage and exploit all the remote access investments they’ve made. They want to extend the interception of business processes to anyone anywhere with control and authenticity. And they do not necessarily want to buy, support and maintain an arsenal of new mobile devices — not when their power users already possess a PC equivalent in their shirt pockets. Not when their CFOs won’t support the support costs.

A Piece of Mobile Real Estate

So Bitzer Mobile places a container on the user’s personal mobile device and allows the IT department to control it. Its a virtual walled garden on the tablet or smartphone that, I’m told, does not degrade performance. The device does need a fair amount of memory, and RIM devices will need an SD card flash supplement (for now).

The Bitzer Mobile model also places a virtualization layer for presentation layer delivery at the app server tier for the apps and data to be delivered to the mobile containers. And there’s a control panel (either SaaS or on-premises) that manages the deployments, access and operations of the mobile tier enablement arrangement. Native apps APIs and SKDs can be exploited, ISV apps can be made secure and tightly provisioned, and data can be delivered across the mobile networks and to the containers safely, Bitzer Mobile says.

That was fast. It’s this kind of architected solution, I believe, that will ultimately appeal most to IT and service providers … the best of the thin client, virtualized client, owner-managed client and centrally controlled presentation layer of existing apps and data model. It lets enterprise IT drive, but users get somewhere new fast.

Architecture is destiny in IT, but we’re now seeing the shift to IT architecture as opposed to only enterprise architecture. You’re going to need both. That’s what happens when SaaS providers fulfill their potential, when data and analytics can come from many places, when an individual’s iPhone is a safe enterprise end-point.

And so as cloud providers like Salesforce.com provide the new models, and the likes of Bitzer Mobile extend the older models, we will see the benefits of cloud, mobile and social happen bigger and faster than any of us would have guessed.

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