Twitter and SaaS

So I'm several months late to the game on twitter but I have finally setup an account.  What's the big deal?  I guess if I had a following this could be of interest, but honestly I'd rather use facebook to update my status than constantly update twitter and facebook.  These mobile social apps are getting ridiculous... there is obviously some niche to twitter I'm not appreciating yet.  I'm perplexed that twitter itself doesn't create blackberry apps, it seems rather that they've exposed an API for everyone else to build apps - so there's multiple solutions.  I definitely prefer the facebook approach to this.  I'm already disenchanted with my first download - twibble.  I'm uninstalling that from the blackberry until I get a better understanding of how to use this service. Since SMS updates are possible I don't see a reason to have a separate application.  Speaking of SMS updates, the gmail ability to SMS people is pretty sweet - however they have yet to grace my lowly account with this labs feature.

In other more pertinent news.  I finished watching a video from a former luminary at the company at which I am now employed.  This entrepreneur made a presentation several months ago at MIT on SaaS and startups.  There were a lot of interesting points, particularly given his background in my industry.  

The biggest single takeaway I got was the value of the ability to collect analytics on applications distributed via SaaS vs. enterprise installations.  This is definitely true for us - there's no way we can get user logs or other info from our large fortune500 clients to help us improve our software.  However, if we hosted our software all in ASP we would have the ability to monitor what parts of the apps were used and how our clients use them.  The potential for tying this back to development projects and marketing decisions is pretty exciting. We have a regular Change Control Board meeting for my product where we rate features and determine the perceived value to our clients of implementing them.  It would be awesome to be able to rate these features, develop them, install them, and then monitor their usage in such a way that we could *actually* derive what the value to our clients is.

Other keys, I learned a couple new terms - CoCA and CHI.

CoCA - Cost of Customer Acquisition

CHI - Customer Happiness Index

Making accurate CHI measurements requires strong product usage analytics.  Kudos to whoever came up with the play on words for the CHI acronym.

Utility Poles & Google Maps

So this weekend the power was out in our neighborhood because the top spontaneously snapped out of one of our utility poles.  This sorta thing doesn't happen very often, but across the nation as a whole I bet it's not an infrequent occurance.  What does this have to do with software?  Well, I read about an interesting company today called Alden Systems that creates software for inventory tracking of utility poles and attachments to those poles.  In speaking with friends that work for AT&T I've heard mention of the largely unknown world of utility pole resource management; now I've come to see there's a company dedicated to helping the utilities manage these valuable assets. The software is pretty cool and includes the ability to upload GPS coordinates and pictures of individual poles overlayed on what appears to be a google maps interface.  This is all important because utility companies "lease" the right to attach lines to their poles.  So, if Comcast throws some cable up, they are supposed to report it and pay an annual lease for attaching their wires to AT&T's pole.  The Alden JRM software allows this to be tracked in an efficient manner.

As it turns out, Alden also offers services for analysis on the condition of wood poles.  Poles aren't cheap and there's treatments that can be applied to prolong their life.  There are a number of drilling and analysis methods for determining the condition of a utility pole - at least two of which include bluetooth integrated electronics to transmit the data into Alden System Software!  Crazy stuff, but the optimization of assets and overall efficiency gains Alden provides for it's half dozen or so telecommunications clients is very cool.

ChaCha

So here's a question, how can 130million people in America be using something I'm just now getting wind of?  I would say I am somehow out of touch except that a younger friend of mine working out in Silicon Valley is just now hearing of them for the first time... I'm a little frightened by the prospect of not being in the first 100million or so of people to use ChaCha.  Either way, I now have used the service and find it pretty cool.  It's a great way to provide valuable data to non-web enabled mobile phones.  

While chacha is cool for generic questions, I question if this model has much value for acct specific type questions.  For me in the financial services software industry, it'd be kinda cool if I could create an app that allowed people to text in to get their 401k balance... oh wait, no it wouldn't.  There's far too many security concerns around this sort of data.  Just because you lose your phone or lay it down while you run to the bathroom you can't have all your friends knowing how much you put aside for retirement!

So, thumbs up chacha for providing a reliable way to get handy answers to text messages... chacha would've been a great lifeline on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," a lot better than many  peoples' 'expert' friend advice.