B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

I was happy to read that Talend secured $12 Million in funding. We’ve long been a proponent of Talend, beginning in early 2008 completely gutting home-grown ETL and Middleware applications and processes by leveraging the open source tool. With quotes on ETL software from the big boys coming in north of $200K, the open source investment (we essentially pay for a “pro” version of the server along with enterprise support — substantially less than $200K).

There is a place for open source in the enterprise. As development shops seek to be more agile, budget-conscious, and innovative this year, the ability to move quickly and without the sometimes bureaucratic-funding-approval-process is important. “Do more with less” remains an important mantra in ‘09 in IT just as it did in ‘08.

As a user/subscriber of Plaxo services, one thing missing from their arsenal is 2-way syncing with Google (as of this writing, Plaxo only supports a 1-way download from Gmail — it won’t update Gmail contacts with my information on Plaxo). Today in my inbox I had an email from the Google App team announcing Google Sync for Blackberry:

As someone with a MacBook Pro (for business) running OS X and VMWare Fusion for Windows XP & Windows 2000, an iMac (for home), Blackberry (Business & Gmail access), and random access to the Internet anywhere else I go, it only takes one instance where you’re on a device without your latest and greatest contact information. My Gmail contact list was the last missing link in the plethora of address books spread across all of these devices.

I bought my wife a MacBook for Christmas this year and with it comes the embedded iSight web camera. Mac OS X comes with iChat which natively supports audio & video chatting with the built-in iSight camera. With our new arrivals of twin babies earlier this month, video chatting is becoming a hot commodity in our household between her and I as well as extended family who all live out of state.

Adium out, iChat in

Previously, I used Adium, which is a nice IM client for Mac OS X which allows you to log into virtually all IM platforms with a single application. The biggest downside with Adium is that it doesn’t support video. I always found myself having to quit Adium to use iChat when I wanted to video chat with friends/family. This was acceptable for me, but not as convenient to teach to my wife who is not as tech savvy and has multiple IM accounts on AIM, Yahoo!, and MobileMe.

I’d prefer to keep things like IM simple for her so she can worry about figuring out other things on her new computer — plus, the convenience of having one IM app that handles text, audio, and video chatting across all IM services is very convenient.

The Challenge: iChat doesn’t natively support Yahoo! Instant Messenger

iChat out-of-box supports AOL Instant Messenger, MobileMe, Mac.com, Bonjour, Google Talk, and Jabber Instant Messaging services:

Using a Jabber account, you can log into Yahoo! IM via iChat

Jabber is a free IM service and functions much like email service. You must find a Jabber provider and setup a Jabber account with them. Once you have a Jabber account, you can communicate with any other Jabber user.

The unique thing about Jabber is that it supports “transports.” Transports enable Jabber IM servers to communicate with other IM services such as Yahoo! IM, MSN, IM, AOL IM, Google Talk, etc.

The key, which was not obvious to me as I searched online for tutorials on how to do this, is to find a Jabber server that has Yahoo! IM transport capabilities. There are many Jabber servers out there which do not have Yahoo! IM transports.

Setting up a Jabber account to access Yahoo! IM via iChat: the definitive guide

1. Assuming you don’t already have a Jabber account, you must create one. To do so (on Mac OS X), download the Psi application at: http://psi-im.org (as of this writing, Psi version 0.12 is what I used).
2. Install and launch Psi
3. From the “General” menu, select “Account Setup”
4. Click “Add” to add a new account
5. The name of the account can be whatever you’d like — this is used for referencing the account in your account list.
6. Choose a Jabber server from the drop-down list. This server list will populate from Jabber.org’s service listing at http://www.jabber.org/web/Services.
   1. I used im.apinc.org as they were the only one of several which I tried with Yahoo! IM transport capabilities.
7. Choose any login and password you like for your Jabber account. This doesn’t need to match your Yahoo! screen name. Leave all other settings as-is. You may get a certificate validation message — just hit continue (this means that they have not purchased an SSL certificate and are using a free certificate).
8. After creating the account, it will show up in the Psi window. From the “Status” menu, choose “Online” to log into your Jabber account on im.apinc.org.
9. Right-click on your Jabber account name in Psi window and select “Service Directory” and click the “Browse” button on the window that appears. You will see the following window:
10. Right-click on the “Yahoo! IM Gateway” and select “add to roster”. This will add the Yahoo! IM Gateway (labeled as “im.apinc.org”) to your list in your Psi window.
11. Right-click on the newly-added item in your Psi window:
12. Select “Add/Authorize to contact list”
13. Right-click on the item again and select “Log on”.  This will prompt you for your Yahoo! ID and password. Enter them here.
14. You’re all set with the Psi application. You’ve now established your Jabber account and linked your Jabber account to the Yahoo! IM Gateway via the Jabber service. Quit Psi and launch iChat — we must now setup iChat to log into your new jabber account.
15. With iChat opened, select the “iChat” menu and choose “Preferences.” Click the “Accounts” tab.
16. Click the “+” button to create an account. Select “Jabber Account” from the Account Type drop-down menu.
17. Enter the Account name and Password you chose in step 5. Note that your account name will be in the format: username@im.apinc.org  (you must include the “@im.apinc.org” or whichever Jabber server you created your account on).
18. You must now add all of your Yahoo! IM buddies to your Jabber buddies list. Unfortunately, the Yahoo! IM buddies in your Yahoo! buddy list don’t automatically transfer over. To add a new Yahoo! IM buddy to your Jabber list, you MUST enter them in the following format: yahooid@yahoo. In other words, if your friend’s Yahoo! IM username is johndoe, you would enter this as johndoe@yahoo in your Jabber buddy list. The “@yahoo” tells the Jabber server to utilize the Yahoo! IM Gateway for routing instant messages to Yahoo! users.

A couple weeks back we rolled more changes out on Levolor.com, one in particular included the implementation of Google’s hosted Site Search product: http://www.google.com/sitesearch/.

Considering we had never offered site-based search before and nearly every day we heard from our feedback tool that visitors wanted to be able to search, this was a really straight-forward, quick, and easy implementation that I wish we had done it sooner.

Search can help reveal visitor intent

Google Site Search offers several customization options within their interface. Perhaps the biggest thing we’ve learned thus far is what people are wanting to find on the site based on keyword reports. This offers another slice of valuable data to layer on top of navigation/pathing and conversion analytics to better understand the wants and needs for your visitors.

While search will certainly help search-savvy visitors find the products and content that already exist on your site, perhaps the more interesting piece of data is what they’re searching for that doesn’t exist on your site. This data can assist in providing you the necessary insights on what additional products and features to add to your site.

At a minimum of $100/year, the barrier to entry for site search is extremely low

Google’s pricing methodology is very smart — starting out at just $100/year for indexing up to 5,000 pages and offering 250,000 queries. That is very impressive technology and search sophistication that can be added to virtually any site on a budget. This really lowers the barrier to entry for smart, savvy search tools for websites thereby making it almost completely inexcusable to not have search on your site.

What Google Site Search is not

Google Site Search is not a search merchandising tool like the Fast Search and Omniture Site Searches of the industry. One can only hope that over time Google will integrate new merchandising-related features that make it a viable competitor to give these other industry players good competition. What Google Analytics has done for web analytics I imagine it will do for merchandise-based search optimization as their engineers continue to improve the product features and functionality.

This month we launched an industry first: we have built a custom product configurator API. We have teamed with American Blinds, the largest online retailer of window treatments, to put the API in production with the launch of our previously-mentioned custom draperies program.

The B2B benefit

The API allows American Blinds to effectively “shake hands” with our product configurator enabling online ordering of custom draperies from Levolor without having to do any product programming. This enables us as the manufacturer to focus on effectively managing the hundreds of billions of configuration possibilities with our custom product lines while American Blinds focuses on the marketing of the products to their consumers — essentially the best of both worlds.

Here are screen shots of the experience:

The American Blinds Curtains & Draperies landing page:

The Levolor Draperies landing page on AmericanBlinds.com:

Now entering the Levolor.com product configurator:

The completed configuration passed back to the American Blinds shopping cart via the API:

The American Blinds checkout process with a Levolor configured product sent via the API:

The B2C benefit

The benefit to consumers is a seamless experience as they are passed unknowingly from server-to-server with no interruption in navigation. To them, it is like picking up another product sample book in the store. At the time of purchase, regardless of products they have in their cart, they still go through the same checkout line for a completely seamless purchasing experience.

I recently had the opportunity to upgrade to a new BlackBerry 8830. It has several bells and whistles (improved keyboard, GPS, voice activated dialing, etc.) but perhaps most importantly, I now have the ability to use my BlackBerry 8830 as a wireless modem on the Sprint wireless network with my laptop.

Internet access anywhere there’s a cell signal

No more having to pay $9.95 at each airport I sit in for Internet access. I’ll basically have Internet access wherever I have a cell phone signal!

Here’s how:

1. Install the BlackBerry 8800 modem scripts in Macintosh HD > Library > Modem Scripts
2. Pair your BlackBerry with your Mac (I have a MacBook Pro which has built-in Bluetooth functionality). To do this: Apple Menu > System Preferences > Network > Bluetooth and click the “Set Up Bluetooth Device…” button. Follow the prompts to pair your device.
3. For the Sprint wireless network, you need to enter the following configuration information in the Bluetooth settings for Modem connectivity:
   1. Telephone Number:  wap.sprint.com
   2. Account Name & Password fields can both be left blank

Apple just gets it. Today they announced the iPhone 3G, a thinner, faster, and more affordable iPhone. I continue to be fascinated by how they take difficult or time-consuming processes and make them easy. Take for example MobileMe.

How will Plaxo respond to MobileMe?

As a die-hard Plaxo user, MobileMe seems to be a fairly significant threat to Plaxo. In the wake of Comcast’s recent purchase of Plaxo, I would imagine Plaxo will be find itself in a difficult position to continue innovating as it works through the transition to Comcast ownership and business processes.

Apple has quite simply leap-frogged Plaxo in features and functionality that I currently pay $60/year for with Plaxo: Address book and calendar syncing. Plaxo also has other bells and whistles such as contact “networking” features (a la LinkedIn) and Plaxo Pulse (a la Friendster — essentially a “life stream” of your data)…neither of which I pay the yearly fee for. Calendar and contact syncing is where the value is for me.

MobileMe goes beyond address & calendar syncing

Most importantly, MobileMe will also sync email, photos, and files. As I hop between an enterprise BlackBerry, an iMac at home, and a MacBook Pro for work (running VMWare so I can play nicely in the Windows world), the MobileMe synchronization is really the best of everything. No matter which environment I’m in, I’ll have access to my most frequently-used data.

MobileMe could be the ticket

While I’m not about to switch email addresses, the photo and file syncing are very nice add-ons for the $99/year fee with 20GB of storage. Google’s Picasa photo hosting only provides 2GB of storage (it’s free, though) and DropBox (for file sharing) is still in its infancy. Is this enough to convince me to buy an iPhone? Only if it’ll work with Enterprise email. MobileMe however looks to be the ticket when it comes out (with or without an iPhone). I’ll be testing the 60-day trial for sure.

I came across IntenseDebate.com today and am extremely impressed as well as excited about this new service. The service provides blog owners the ability to install a plug-in on their blog which will centralize the storage of blog commenting, streamline comment threading, improve comment moderation, and encourage additional posting.

The problem I run into a lot when reading blogs is while I’d like to take the time to comment, I’m busy, and don’t often want to create a new account to post a simply reply. Plus, when posting in an established community and without “street cred”, it’s hard to feel like you’re adding value to a conversation if you’ve never posted before.

IntenseDebate.com changes this. As an end-user, I now have a centralized account and any blog that uses IntenseDebate.com for their commenting system, I can automatically comment and my profile on IntenseDebate.com will be shown, as well as other posts on other blogs I’ve made via my IntenseDebate.com account. It’s really quite impressive.

I’ll post a few quick comments below to display how it works.

I’m a frequent reader of CIO.com articles — such an invaluable source for eBusiness managers and directors. I’m a big proponent of open source and am finding it to be such a taboo subject within the enterprise. In the article The Challenge of Open Source Presents to CIOs, open source is almost presented as a “problem.” So much of a problem in fact that certain enterprises ban it entirely.

Quick question: Since when it is a bad thing to save money?

Now, I understand it can present challenges from governing the use of open source as it pertains to compliancy issues. However, this is no different than governing the proper licensing of Microsoft products, too. The fact that it’s open source doesn’t make open source a “problem.” If you have problem governing open source utilization, then you have a larger software/infrastructure governance problem.