evans ink

Many people are aware that a few months ago I migrated from my full-time role in Local Matters, and began working on the “next new thing”.

I guess I’ve reached that inevitable point of self-admission to being a serial entrepreneur, forced to work on things that get stuck in my head, and get me out of bed @ 4am.   I. just. can’t. seem. to. help. myself.

I have great memories from the last few years taking a business from concept through multiple cycles of growth. I’d be lying to not say I am also disappointed by some of the choices I led us through along the way.  And, like many (most?) companies do in the face of the dramatic shifts in market structures and valuations of 2008-09, we had to triage through a reinvention phase.  Thanks to an amazing team (employees, board members, clients and investors), this has advanced very well; I am very impressed with the clarity that the company now has going forward.  I sat at the last Board meeting witnessing a business that has matured and evolved very well under the new leadership team in 2009.  It’s a first class business with a bright future, powering the strategic progression of Yellow Pages businesses, globally.   I only hope the industry lets it unleash the potential underlying the impressive technology and team.

I’ve now confidently moved on to what I know I LOVE to do – creating a new business.  My passion is for opportunities that lie JUST ahead of the horizon.  I love to work in market spaces where the structures of consumer-to-business interaction are inefficient and capable of being dramatically overhauled with online and mobile models.

So, my next target:  Direct Marketing.

I’ll be announcing my newco when it’s more ready for public consumption.  I was initially intrigued with the idea of blogging my way through the experiences and challenges associated with start-ups, but I’m not going to do that.  There are enough quality entrepreneurs out there doing that, and adding more of the same just feels kind of pointless.

Perhaps I’ll return to my blog in the coming weeks, as I ruminate over the new space I’ll be occupying, we’ll see how things progress.   For those looking to stay connected, I’d suggest you follow me on Twitter;  140 character micro-blogging just seems to fit with where my life is at right now.

It feels like everywhere I turn there is yet another media company paying writers to crank out search engine friendly content, in thinly veiled attempts to please the google bots.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years looking into the content gaps in converting local to an informed and useful shopping experience. The quest for deeper local content is on the order of a holy grail epic challenge.

The standard by which most publishers currently seem to be approaching their content strategy is “whatever the google bot rewards”.

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For those of you who thought there was no business model behind twitter…

beware, clicking on the link will take you to an infomercial!

Spam “validation” aside, this AdWeek article by provides an interesting discussion on how the ecosystem of Twitter is working to uncover and build business models from the platform.

Kudos to the Denver Post for having the gonads to ask consumers about the value proposition of micro payments. This kind of transparency is refreshing.

While consumer research like this can’t be relied on for detailed forecasting, the sentiment is overwhelming.  Sorry, newspapers, this math don’t hunt!

You’ll just have to innovate like the rest of us.

On Thursday, Twitter launched it’s search box universally throughout the twitter service.  Quoting from the Twitter Blog announcement.

With this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important—a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now. (emphasis added)

Twitter, the business, is making important intentions known.  Search is core to their evolving model.  It’s rapidly stepping up from the original founder’s concept of people updating each other with status messages into a role as a dominating force in the evolution of the live web.

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Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself – to not take the opportunity to badly mix a metaphor with the “pig + bird” mashup would just be out of character!

The hot news of late has been along two intersecting themes – the staggering (dare we say) viral growth of Twitter, and the impact of this exploding conversation machine on the popular news topic of  Swine Flu.

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We’ve all done it, we’ve googled our name.  And, in the process, we’ve found all the other Perry Evans’ of the world.  There’s Perry Evans in Hollywood, Perry Evans the gospel singer (my favorite alter ego) and Perry Evans the family practice physician in Cleveland, and so on.  This practice has even been the subject of an indie documentary film named, appropriately “Google Me“.  Problem is, all name matches are “correct search answers”, but the consumer isn’t well served for meaningful people search on today’s Google.

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Denver, CO April 14, 2009 – A spokesperson for the US airline industry today announced that the Inter-airline Technology Standards Committee has paved the way for solving a congestion problem that has plagued the industry for decades.  “Consumer frustration over the inflight contention for open restrooms has been mounting.” Our Restroom Contention Task Force met with our Social Technology Platform team, and eureka!,  we discovered the perfect solution, building on our new WIFI plans – Twitter!” stated Sally De Bain, industry spokesperson.

“We envision connecting bathroom sensors to Twitter – passengers simply follow the #flightnumber to be alerted when a restroom is available.  “We’re still discussing whether to trigger the alert when the door is open, when the toilet flushes or when the sink is activated.  Before launching the beta trial, we need to determine how we support premium flier models (code named “Royal Flush”), such that alerts from toilet flushes go to frequent fliers, ahead of door alerts for  economy passengers.”

heh – hey, it could happen!

The industry buzz is rapidly forming with the possibilities for Twitter to be the real time alert engine for just about anything and everything that changes state.

If you haven’t seen the marquis local small business example it’s worth a quick read.  Bakertweet profiles a London-based bakery that worked with their creative agency (located across the street) to apply Twitter to alert followers as fresh baked goods come out of the oven.

My point with the tongue-in-cheek airlines example is to point out two emerging realities of the rapidly morphing Twitter ecosystem:

1. Twitter has a meaningful shot at become the “alert engine” for a plethora of trigger events – theoretically, whenever you have a group of people who have an interest in immediate knowledge of an event, and
2. The signal-to-noise problem potential gets staggering.

I don’t have time now to really dissect the latter, but it’s near and dear to where my head/passion is these days.  Filtering and tagging of streams of conversations and alerts is a VERY BIG THING.  Both in terms of scale of problem and potential of opportunity.

In the meantime, I’d point you to a thought provoking post by Twine CEO Nova Spivack, and the ensuing debate stimulated in the comments. Clay Shirky’s astute comment also rings very true: “the problem isn’t information overload, it’s filter failure“.

Twine Blog Post: Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?

So, fasten your seat belt, there’s some potential for turbulence in Twitter’s open blue skies!

I’m not sure if John Battelle started the momentum with his “Twitter=YouTube” prognostication, but that catchphrase now sits alongside dozens of high profile blog posts hailing the arrival of the new 2.0 messiah, suggesting even a fundamental threat to Google.  So, is this just more valley wagging or something more?

twitter: much (much) more than “what am I doing now”

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It’s too easy to be dismissive of Twitter as simply an extraction of the “status update” that became the backbone of social interaction at Facebook. While the concept originated with this, it has rapidly evolved into THE place where an increasing flock of consumers AND publishers post real-time information (over 6 million users, currently).  More importantly, it’s the place where consumers congregate to consume and converse around this eclectic treasure trove of real-time information. It’s a noisy, disorganized commons, yet it feels very much the place to be.

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The more I immerse myself into the world of conversational technology, the more clear it seems to me that it best exists on a different plane from Search.  I’m increasingly convinced that Google wants to treat conversations as a means of parsing and ingesting conversational questions into a search answer. Converting right-brain exploration into left-brain challenges of synthesis and order – as if the entire point of a conversation is to derive an answer to a question.

Perhaps we have the proverbial nail-hammer mindset in action.  I’ve characterized Google in the past as the awkward nerd at a party.  You know the type.  A tad desperate to fit in socially, invariably trying too hard to win over the guests with encyclopedic interjections.   The conversational nerd rarely fits in, as he tries to complete every conversation with a “best answer” completion of a dialog, versus a participatory comment.

The beauty in conversations revolves around serendipity and discovery – free-wheeling dialog where questions are often answered that were never really asked.  A tremendous amount of knowledge is developed through collaborative discovery; conversational technology seems to hold the unique promise to ignite this knowledge development.  However, the phraseology of search seems ill-fitted to the party. It’s damn frustrating for someone who generally knows more to step back and let a conversation meander.

Yet, how often does the conversational nerd get invited back?

After just reading a GoogleBlog post from the SVP of Product Management, I couldn’t help but to add-on to this post, with a few select quotes that continue to build a profile of how Google looks at conversations.  I’m not one to quote ValleyWag, but their title “The Height of Google’s Hubris” seems very fitting.

From this “state of the world” posting from Google Senior Management.

…We won’t (and shouldn’t) try to stop the faceless scribes of drivel, but we can move them to the back row of the arena….

…No one argues the value of free speech, but the vast majority of stuff we find on the web is useless. The clamor of junk threatens to drown out voices of quality….

…Putting the power to publish and consume content into the hands of more people in more places enables everyone to start conversations with facts. With facts, negotiations can become less about who yells louder, but about who has the stronger data. They can also be an equalizer that enables better decisions and more civil discourse….

To me, this seems to reinforce the way Google views mainstream conversational media: the majority of what everyday people have to say is “drivel” that deserves to be sent to the “back row of the arena” while “voices of quality” are pushed forward.  Pretty illuminating commentary from the guy in charge of products.