The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

When you think of "the best thing since sliced bread" what do you think of? I'm not sure what immediately comes to mind for me, but it's an interesting thing to ponder.

Earlier this month I came across an article about some Search Engine Optimization insiders who called Mozenda, a software program that enables users to harvest and structure Internet data, "the best thing since sliced bread." I saved the link because I thought the sliced bread story was interesting and might make good food for thought. Maybe by adding a few fixin's we can turn this into sandwiches.

The most interesting factoid here wasn't that sliced bread is less than 100 years old, which did surprise me. Rather, what most surprised me was that it still took another 15 years to catch on. In other words, here was this great idea and for fifteen years people said, "So what?" Here's the intro to the article:

Otto Rohwedder invented the bread slicing machine in 1912. While sliced bread is considered the benchmark of good ideas, sales did not take off for Mr. Rohwedder for another 15 years. Why did it take 15 years to convince people that sliced bread is a good idea? Perhaps it was the method of delivering the idea.

Just two months ago Will Critchlow went to a London pub and like many pub conversations for Mr. Critchlow, this one centered around marketing and technology. It was on this night that he was told of a small Utah-based company that was structuring Internet data. To most of us, hearing the words "Structured Internet Data" would glaze our eyes over, but to Will this was very sexy. His thoughts quickly turned to, “What could I do with all of the Internet's data at my whim?”

The rest of the article is about how Critchlow shared the capabilities of Mozenda in an article called Data Visualization Techniques and then at a conference in London, closing with a question as to whether today's social media could have accelerated the acceptance of sliced bread into the popular culture.

Do you know why sliced bread didn't come about sooner than the 20th century? I think that without modern packaging and preservatives, sliced bread would dry out or get moldy too fast.

While briefly researching this sliced bread story I also learned that during World War II the government temporarily banned sliced bread. Why? Because the raw materials used to wrap the bread were needed in the war effort. It was believed that if the paper got too thin the bread would get stale too quickly. Someone made an executive decision and that was that.

Anyways, my question still stands: What would you call the best thing since sliced bread?

Toward Ever Greater Efficiencies

It really is a whole new world out there. Yesterday I was talking with a friend about the efficiencies the Internet offers. Instead of driving to the bookstore and looking for a book, I can go to amazon.com and read reviews, buy it used or new and never leave my office. The retailers who have “pure” eCommerce businesses never concern themselves with a dressy showroom floor, sales staff standing around waiting for customers or any of that. They have shelves and a warehouse, servers and tech people keeping the show running. Efficiency is the name of the game.

Well, salespeople are learning about efficiencies, too. Instead of platte(sp) books and trips to the library or County Office Building, they have been discovering an increasing variety of web tools to help generate leads, reduce time preparing contact lists, etc.

Here’s an interesting story about a guy in real estate, Justin McClelland, who found a screen scraping tool for harvesting data and organizing it. The product he found is Mozenda and the amazing thing for Justin was that he could do it for two weeks on a free trial basis. What I found interesting is how quickly he learned it, and also how quickly he was eager to share this “secret weapon” with others. He even made a YouTube video to show how easy it is to use.

Evidently the program is so easy to use he didn’t even need to call tech support, though he acknowledges that he has a small measure of programming or computer-related experience.

McClelland’s business is called Schwaps.com and to my surprise I was able to find and follow him on Twitter under the handle Schwaps if you want to follow him.

Maybe you know a few efficiencies yourself. Certainly Google has helped make finding information easy. I routinely found myself calling the library help desk to verify information earlier in my writing career. I can’t remember the last time I called the library help desk.

Efficiency isn’t everything, but it’s something. It helps companies remain competitive in a fast paced world. In Orson Welles’ film adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial the main character works as an accountant at a company in which there are more than eight hundred accountants sitting at desks with ledger books and adding machines. That room full of adding machines has been replaced by a computer today.

The human cost of progress is a major challenge for business owners when it comes to the efficiencies of automation and technology. This was my friend's concern. How far should we go in the adaptation of technologies that replace jobs? On the other hand, in a global economy, to what extent do we have a choice as other countries produce goods with increasing ease and reduced costs?

That was the real discussion yesterday. He said that business consultants are now reading Seneca, the Roman stoic philosopher, in order to have a more humane approach to decisions affecting employees. My feeling is that failing to incorporate efficiencies into a business model is a sure way to doom it so that all your employees' jobs are imperiled.

If I get a chance, I might examine Seneca, but the Golden Rule is pretty good guidance, too, when it comes to treatment of employees: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." And as for efficiency, it is one part of the equation for success that keeps us competitive, helping us to leverage our time so we can do the real work of closing deals, providing good service or producing products needed in the marketplace.

Ask Justin McClelland. Would he rather spend four hours or four thousand hours assembling a list of prospects for his business?

Looking for a Job? How To Make A Parachute

In the early 1980’s when I had returned from a year in Mexico I needed to find a way to plug in to the job market. A book that was exceedingly helpful to me that year was Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute? Peter Drucker praised it and so do I. The sub-title is A Practical Manual for Job Hunters & Career Changers.

Now when I discovered this book, the advice I was urged to follow was this: skip the book and do the exercises in the appendix. Sure enough, this was superb advice at the time because those exercises helped shape and affirm a strong sense of self-concept that proved to be the real key in my career success.

Like the Oracle at Delphi, whereupon the wise counsel “Know Thyself” was inscribed, Bolles directs us to the only valid start-point in a career. Who am I and what can I contribute? Without clarity here, the whole process of interviews, resumes, applications gets pretty grainy.

A recent BusinessWeek story (April 30, 2009) stated that there are 3 million job vacancies in the U.S. right now. This is fairly significant mismatch, in part due to some unusual factors. The housing crisis has made it challenging for many people to sell their homes and move to where the jobs are. Another problem is that a lot of today’s unemployed are untrained in areas where there are needs. Experts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are not easily found amongst the ranks of the hammer-and-nail construction layoffs.

The advice that follows may not apply to everyone, but it is something that worked for at least one fellow in the tech sector, formerly employed by Yahoo!, named Jeff Scott. What do tech people do for fun? They go to places like Mashup Camp and play hacker games, among other things. Networking, learning new skills, new tools…

Mashup Camp is a production of Techweb’s Aleternative Events Group which aims to bring Internet developers and attendees into close proximity in an unconference-style event. The first Mashup Camp took place in February 2006. The highlight is a competition to see who can develop the best mashups. (A mashup is a web application that combines data from multiple sources.)

Jeff Scott not only won a Dell E248WFP 24-inch Widescreen Black Flat Panel LCD Monitor, he landed himself a job by means of a mashup he created titled I NEED A JOB. Using Mozenda data harvesting technology Scott essentially sewed his own parachute. The net result: Scott is now publisher and editor of 148Apps.com, an iPhone App News and Review blog launched in 2008.

A PRWeb story explained. Scott designed his Mashup to help people who are now or soon will be out of a job. The mashup takes the text from your resume or a URL pointing to your resume or Linked In profile and processes the text through Yahoo! Text Extraction to get key terms about you, your skills and job experience. Then it processes over 50,000 Craigslist.org listings all scraped from the Craigslist site by Mozenda looking for the best matches for your skills. It then ranks, by city, the best places for you to look for a new job possibly giving you some options you wouldn't have considered previously.

According to Scott the speed with which one can get set up setup for creating, testing and scraping templates with Mozenda was most impressive. “The quick setup and testing is the killer feature,” said Scott. “What Mozenda does isn't unique, it's the way they do it that rocks.”

As they used to say in the old days, there's more than one way to skin a cat. I don't know if they skin cats anywhere these days, but for sure there are a lot of people in need of good parachutes. I wonder if there's money to be made in writing mashups for job hunters. Or maybe those Mozenda folks can help you write your own. Nowadays parachute makers weave code instead of fabric. The goal, in either case, is a soft landing.

Jon Thralow, Revisited

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." ~Arthur C. Clarke

At the end of January we interviewed Jon Thralow on Internet entrepreneurialism and especially eCommerce. It seemed we'd only scratched the surface so I met with him yesterday at the Red Mug to do a little more probing regarding his work.

Though now primarily doing consulting work, Jon used to manage a team of programmers. As we compared notes from time to time these past few years, I found it interesting to learn that programmers and Internet developers can have temperaments like artists. Those who do the best work may not fit neatly into your standard corporate cubespace. Jon, though a technical wizard and programmer himself, understood this art-heart-spirit of his team. They consequently achieved remarkable things together.

Here, for a few moments, we explored the meaning of Web 2.0, the explosion of web content and at least one solution for dealing with the tsunami of information that is washing across cyberspace.

Ennyman: I have been hearing a lot of numbers thrown around regarding how fast the Internet is growing. What kind of numbers are you seeing and where do these numbers come from?

JT: As for sales growth the Internet is one of the few bright spots for the economy, but the larger growth is happening in content My best guess is that in pure data being uploaded is growing so fast with YouTube, and social media sites that the number of gigabytes online is at least doubling every other year.

Ennyman: The Internet has brought a lot of new terminology into existence. Here are a couple that the average person might be hearing that need clearer definitions. What is “Web 2.0”? What is the “deep web”?

JT: "Web 2.0" refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design that aims to facilitate communication and interoperability on the World Wide Web. Some concepts that have led to this evolution are web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, and blogs. As all of this new content is quickly being added search engines like Google are having a hard time keeping up and indexing this information. The amount of information that Google is able to index is a small fraction of the entire Internet. Everything that is not indexed by search engines is called "deep web".

Ennyman: You have helped develop a number of successful eCommerce companies and are currently consulting in this area. What is it that so turns you on about eCommerce?

JT: I am not really sure. I like science and I like doing things that people tell me not to. When I first went into eCommerce, it was more of a feeling like, “What is this? It is going to go away in a week or two and will it even work if more people get online?” I was just too curious to leave it alone. One of the parts that I liked best was the ability to marry marketing and science. Knowing exactly what each dollar did and how much that dollar turned into…

Ennyman: You are also involved in a company called Mozenda which helps eCommerce companies efficiently gather data from the Internet. Why can’t people just do this with search engines like Google?

JT: Mozenda does much more than help eCommerce companies. We have very large companies using this tool.

For eCommerce, a search engine only returns results on the browser while Mozenda gathers the data you want and puts it into a usable format.

Ennyman: What other kinds of companies are currently using Mozenda’s software platform? How are these companies using the program?

JT: There are many different companies including even a couple of DOW-tracked publicly traded companies, one from retail and one from financial. Financial companies will track buy/sell data to predict future stock prices. The retail company is using it to compare its prices to its competitors. Another financial company is using it to gather data from one section of its organization to mesh it with another. Many PR companies are using the program to watch the reaction to the brand by harvesting data from blogs and forums. Other large companies are using the product to learn about potential recalls in their product line before production has put too many out into the marketplace saving the company millions and increasing the product quality.

Ennyman: Doesn’t it seem a little like opening the door to a Big Brother situation here? Can this kind of data acquisition lead to abuses and does that concern you?

JT: Yes, this sure can lead to abuse. I think the analogy might be that Mozenda makes the guns and they can be used for either good or evil fits here. There have been companies that have been taken to court by stealing data from their competitors, but Mozenda does not advocate this practice. The goal of Mozenda is to make the data on the net much more usable.

5 Minutes with Jon Thralow: Internet Entrepreneur

Despite the turbulence of the economy these past dozen years, Jon Thralow has had a remarkable run of good fortune. In 1996 Thralow’s older brother Dan, founder of a Midwest sunglasses business called Peepers, took his first baby steps in eCommerce. In less than three years, with the company listed as one of the fastest growing Internet retailers in the country, they sold out to a New York City firm at the height of the tech bubble. When the bubble burst, the Thralows were able to re-obtain the domain names they’d sold… for a song.

The lessons learned only made them hardier. Instead of developing a mall that batched all their product lines under one domain, the Thralows embraced a specialized market niche concept, recognizing the power of defined domain names. Before long the new company, Thralow Inc., was rolling out niche eCommerce businesses with remarkable effectiveness so that they were once more catching the attention of major magazines like Inc. and Internet Retailer. At the end of 2006 Thralow Inc. sold its 30-plus domains and eCommerce sites to Netshops of Omaha, Nebraska.

Though not the founder of these ventures, Jon has played an integral role in their success. His specialized knowledge in Internet marketing has given him keen insights in how to take advantage of the efficiencies and opportunities offered by today’s cyber-arena.

ennyman: When did you join your brother’s first company and what role did you initially play?
Jon T: I joined Peepers in 1997 as an Intern. My job was to add products to the site and find ways to get us listed on the search engines. At the time Alta Vista, Web Crawler, and Excite had a lot of market share. I also taught myself two tools - Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Front page.

ennyman: What lessons did you learn from the collapse of the Internet bubble that might have value in today’s challenged economy?
Jon T: I went through a year of depression. Everything that I had worked to build was being destroyed before my eyes. I had a hard time sleeping at night. I went from having a million dollars in the stock of Eyecity to having the company become de-listed. Extreme high to extreme low. Looking back on it, I learned that if you keep plugging away things will work out, just never give up. I could not have seen the huge turnaround that was about to come, but if you focus on the core business rules and keep pounding away on it eventually you’ll gain traction which will give you something to build on.

ennyman: You mentioned that you have taken an interest in a company called Mozenda in Salt Lake City. What is it that so captivated you there?
Jon T: Over the years I’ve found that gold lives in the data and the trick has always been learning how to mine the data. In the early days the log files were mined to give a picture of our website's performance. Then I found that by mining our customer database and writing scripts around that you can market to people with the exact products they were interested in. Gathering and manipulating data became one of the biggest factors in growing our company. After the sale of the company I found Mozenda, a company that took this philosophy and applied it to the entire Internet. Mozenda gives people the tool to gather all of the Internet data they could want and store it in a usable method. This company gives its users real value.

ennyman: What is screen scraper software and how is it different from simply gathering information from search engines?
Jon T: Screen Scraping Software allows the user to predefine the exact data on a page that he or she would like to harvest. Most importantly a person can harvest certain patterns of data that repeat themselves on pages. In a way this is very similar to how a search engine works. So there’s a sense in which Mozenda gives you the power of your own personal search engine. You can train the Mozenda spider to follow links and grab the wanted data that you are looking for.

ennyman: What are the two or three most important things internet entrepreneurs need to understand in order to have the greatest probability of success?
Jon T: First, set up tracking mechanisms to measure every marketing penny that you spend. Second, find your niche and don't deviate; stay focused. Third, use the scientific method so that you can test for the outcome. This ensures that you do not make the same mistake twice. For example if you want to test a new layout for your home page make sure you A/B test. This is the only way to know if you are headed down the wrong path.

ennyman: Thanks, Jon. Good luck in all your new ventures.