Ford CEO, Alan Mulally, announced yesterday that Ford earned a $2.7 billion profit in 2009 and will be solidly profitable in 2010. The company did this without receiving any US Federal aid and without entering bankruptcy court. (See: “Ford Earns First Annual profit in Four Years”).

How did they do this?

Mulally, a Boeing veteran, focused on business fundamentals: good products, cost efficiencies, better selling practices, pricing strategies, and efficient use of capital. He and his team have shown that America can still build cars and be competitive. Admittedly, Ford is not out of the woods; Mulally went to the debt markets after joining the company and amassed a huge debt load to transform the company. 2009’s earnings are a result of the restructuring; their “uncompetitive balance sheet” is as well. The debt will need to be repaid and will be a drag on future earnings.

However, Mulally and his team are to be commended for doing the right things, and doing them well. Way to go Alan!

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Forbes publisher, Rich Karlgaard, made “Twenty Predictions for the 2010’s” on Friday January 8th.

9th on the list: One Cloud Company (Or Another) Becomes the Most Valuable Company on Earth.

This is one very BOLD and BULLISH prediction as the underlying concept of cloud computing was first conceived in the 1960’s and the first cloud-based applications did not emerge until the mid-1990’s. If Karlgaard’s prediction is realized, this will be the result of a great disruption in how companies use utility computing and it is, and will be, a great creator of wealth for entire ecosystems.

Karlgaard asks a great question, and it is one worth pondering: “Who will own the giant fog machine? Google? Cisco? Microsoft? Amazon? Huawei?”

Interesting question indeed.

I previously discussed mobility and its role in our future in a previous post titled: “Apparatgeist – the Soul of the Prolifiq Mobile Machine”; in this post I talked about groundswell shifts that will affect our users and our design strategies.

Gartner Group recently forecasted that mobile access to the web will surpass traditional PC web access by 2013 and this migration will change information consumption patterns dramatically.

First, they predict that most websites will need to be redesigned to minimize the number of “clicks” required for a user to access information and to optimize presentation for a small screen. Second, they talk about a dramatic shift from “pull” based access (indicative of PCs and traditional websites) to more “push” based access predicated upon information being delivered to individual users. Third, they talk about how critical “context” will be in determining what information is provided to whom, where and when.

These implications are huge – for every business. We are not immune to these groundswell changes. In fact, Prolifiq’s website is in the midst of an upgrade to enhance mobile users’ experience, and we are investing heavily in additional mobile product capabilities for our customers. I will be writing more on this subject in the future, so stay tuned.

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The Primanti Brothers’ sandwich is to Pittsburgh what the cheese steak is to Philadelphia. The sandwich provides a full meal in a sandwich: meat, cheese, french fries, tomato, and cole slaw – all between two thick slices of Italian bread. A staple of the late night crowd (and now stadium goers at Heinz Field and PNC park), my favorite is a hot (hot sausage), egg and cheese.
 
Louis Sullivan the creator of the skyscraper and “father of modernism” is credited with coining the phrase: “form follows function”. His precept – however obvious to us now – was that a building’s purpose would define its shape.

The Primanti Brothers’ sandwich is a gastronomic example of this principle – in the 1930’s, the sandwich was created to provide the produce truck drivers with a balanced (albeit high calorie) meal that could be eaten with one hand while still driving.

The form follows function law (or axiom) also applies to software design. An application’s intended use defines its’ design. The simpler the use, the simpler the design – the more complex the use, the more complex the design. Like buildings, software requires foundational decisions be made early in the process (open source vs. proprietary systems; client server vs. web-based; premises deploy vs. cloud computing; etc.) and all subsequent decisions build on this foundation.

Some of these decisions can offer very high-quality code yet be very constricting for future enhancements. Some decisions can offer great flexibility and speed at the expense of quality and possibly security. There is no “one size fits all strategy”, so “architects” must manage trade-offs when designing applications.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a very sophisticated form of “plug and play” capabilities for enterprise software. Using SOA, enterprises can let workflows define application connections so that many “functions” can manifest many “forms”.

Pandian walked me through a QA test matrix today that crystallized this blog entry for me; here is part of the table he showed me:

This “form” is the direct result of our “function” – connecting thousands of users to millions of pieces of content so users can talk with an audience of one. I discussed this in a previous post; see: “The Spirit of the Brand”. We are successful doing this because of our architectural design.

Our application has tentacles throughout an enterprise so we can meet our users where they spend their time. The design strategy has evolved as we have served our various customers in high technology, digital media and life sciences – the SOA approach we adopted in 2002 is what enables this evolution.

If SOA is as successful as a Primanti Brothers’ sandwich, none of us will be hungry.

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I applaud Google CEO Eric Schmidt for his recent decisions regarding Google’s business activities/operations in China. Given the revenue and profit potential for Google in China (ad revenue, Google Docs, Corporate search appliances, cell phones, etc.) this had to be a gut-wrenching decision.

Google is a United States based corporation, and as such it embraces the basic principles enshrined in our Constitution – including: Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness, the right to Privacy, and respect for Intellectual Property.

When a company has to subjugate these “principles” to accommodate local cultural norms or laws – they step over a very dangerous line. Google and other search engine companies have in the past received harsh criticism for censoring search results in order to do business in China. This may have emboldened those who believed it was then okay to conduct targeted hacking activities on Chinese dissidents.

Eric, you got this one right: principles ARE NOT flexible.

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I am in the middle of reading a coffee table book my brother and his family got me for Christmas, “Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: “Running down a dream”.

In the book, Petty discusses in detail how the Traveling Wilburys came to be. This was a late 1980s super-group of stellar musicians that included: George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty. In addition to being commercially successful, Petty shares how he views this period of his life as being the best time of his life and his most creative. All of the members credit the creative spark that existed with heightening their careers.

Prolifiq’s “Wilburys” came together in 2002 and I am honored to have been welcomed by the rest of the “band”. Our creative spark manifests itself in what we deliver for our customers and has been recognized by the US Government.

On December 15, 2009 Prolifiq Software was awarded United States Patent No. 7,634,556 for Electronic Message Management. The patent’s authors are: (left to right, in photo below ) Neil Marshall, Anh Huynh, Jeff Farnsworth, Hemingway Huynh, and yours truly; this patent defines the core messaging application upon which Prolifiq is built. Here we all are with our patent:



So, to paraphrase Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty, “…The future [is] wide open….”
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Many email marketing and marketing automation providers talk about the power of their platforms and their ability to have 1:1 conversations with customers. Their promise is they provide more efficiency in the selling process at lower cost than traditional selling conversations can.

We believe NOTHING can replace the customer intimacy that is created and sustained by a trained professional salesperson. This is the basic tenet upon which we have built our platform and our business strategy – it is our brand promise (see: “The Spirit of the Brand”). We make sales people more effective in establishing and nurturing customer intimacy by using highly relevant, compliant content in their daily communications.

In 2002, we commissioned creative agency NonBox to create a campaign to tell our story and leverage our video delivery technologies. They created a series of “day in the life” videos of Bob, a sales guy for an advertising agency. They nailed it; you can see one of the videos here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcjfVhbML-M.

So, on Tuesday of last week, I was highly amused that none other than Seth Godin validated our value proposition with his “Bullhorns are overrated” blog post.

Thanks Seth; but, in all candor, we said it better – seven years ago.

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Prolifiq’s mobility capabilities began with a very simple question in 2005: “How can I use your stuff on my smart phone?” We fielded this question on a Wednesday; the application was live the following Monday for the CTIA trade show and the introduction of the Palm Treo 650. What we delivered was so radically advanced we used metaphors to explain: “Think of your smart phone as a remote control for a digital filing cabinet. You can pick, pack and ship digital content to anyone, from anywhere, at any time.” Since then, we have successfully deployed the Prolifiq application on BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Motorola devices.

On December 30th the Economist published an article profiling the vast differences in mobile phone culture throughout the world and used the term “apparatgeist” to describe these differences. James E. Katz PhD, a communications professor at Rutgers University, and his collaborator Mark Aakhus, created the term “apparatgeist” to describe how people interact with technology and how this interaction is affected by societal influences and vice versa.

Prolifiq’s apparatgeist is making it simple for individuals to use multi-media content in their daily communications. What started as a simple objective in 2000 – allowing PC users to capture video on web cameras and embed these streaming videos in email messages – has evolved into a very robust cloud computing application that allows a company’s employees to access content libraries and embed this content in their daily communications. All of this is governed and managed “behind the scenes” to make the application simple for the average user.

Today, only 13% of mobile devices shipped worldwide are smartphones. By 2015, the industry expects all mobile devices will be smartphones. This is truly the “Telecosm” that Forbes Columnist George Gilder predicted.

The revolution will be just as dramatic to this decade as the internet was to the 1990’s ― as these devices proliferate and become more powerful, as the cellular networks become faster and more reliable, as employees become less tethered, as companies develop more robust digital content, and as global employees begin to universally adopt best practices more – mobile devices will become the primary means of electronic communication.

This trend is at the core of our Life Sciences and High Technology market strategies and we will continue to evolve ways of delivering managed, compliant content to and from mobile devices. In other words, we will make the users of these devices “Prolifiq”.

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I’m often asked why “Prolifiq”.  Merriam Webster defines prolific as:

adj., : marked by abundant inventiveness or productivity <a prolific composer>.

We chose the name because our mission is to help people communicate with content: images, video, audio, documents – we make plain text the stone tablet of the modern era.  The “iq” reminds us our job is to make our users look smart.  With Prolifiq it’s simple to create impactful communications.  This is the “spirit” of our brand. This image is taken directly from the deck Neil used to educate our creative agency:

 
Our users, sales people, need to cut through a lot of noise to be effective; they have stories to tell. The more complex the story, the more content is needed. The more content needed, the more difficult to manage. The more difficult for sales people, the less likely it’ll happen.

We solve this; we make content available to sales people where and when they need it ― at the moment of truth. This makes sales people smarter, faster and more productive. They are more effective.

I’ll know we’ve arrived when I see this t shirt on the street:
 

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