Outside Innovation

Edward Snowden’s Call to Action

Edward Snowden has mobilized the Tech and UX communities to improve and to rescue the Internet. This is a watershed event. It’s an irresistible and catalyzing challenge that I believe WILL produce results. This week, Snowden threw down a gauntlet: Save the Internet by designing easy-to-use end-to-end encryption.

I believe this challenge will not go unheeded. I expect thousands of motivated user experience professionals and cryptographers to partner in creating the next generation of communications tools for the Internet and for mobile devices. These tools will not only be more secure; they will also be easy to use. Today, if you want to keep from being surveilled, you have to become a techno-weenie. That’s not right, according to Snowden. We should all have the right to be protected against unlawful seizure and search.

Edward Snowden is, of course, the most famous whistle blower in history. He leaked documents from the NSA to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, documents which have proved that the U.S. “domestic” security agency has been collecting, seizing, storing, and analyzing all the email and phone traffic that takes place on the Internet. Snowden spoke at an ACLU-sponsored event at the South by Southwest SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas on March 10^th via Google+ video link through seven Internet proxies. You can watch the conversation between Ben Wizner and Chris Soghoian of the ACLU and Ed Snowden here:

Ten Years of Covering Customer Service Software Companies!

With this week’s report, the 4Q2013 Customer Service Update, Mitchell Kramer completes his tenth year of quarterly updates on the leading suppliers and products in customer service. That’s a pretty impressive accomplishment! What other analyst firm do you know that has provided the consistent, in-depth, objective analysis that Mitch Kramer has been doing for over a decade?

Of course, Mitch has covered many other technologies for us over his 25-year tenure with us, including relational and object-oriented databases, application development tools, business intelligence tools, campaign management, e-commerce platforms, and content and knowledge management solutions, but customer service is his first and most lasting passion.

Mitch has mastered the art of creating detailed frameworks for analyzing complex software products. He uses and evolves these frameworks to produce in-depth, objective analyses of competing products. His analysis saves decision-makers time and reduces their risk.

In addition to providing in-depth product reviews, Mitch decided over a decade ago that it would be useful to track the trajectory of each of the suppliers whose products he covers. How well are they doing? What new products have they announced? Are they gaining new customers? Are they hiring?

He does this every single quarter. And he’s been doing these quarterly updates in the customer service market for a decade. That’s a lot of monitoring and analysis!

Learning from Revolutionaries: Doug Engelbart & John Seybold

My thoughts and prayers have been with Christina Engelbart over the past couple of weeks because her beloved Dad, Doug Engelbart, passed away on July 2, 2013. Christina and I have a lot in common, and we’ve stayed in touch over the years. We both are the daughters of visionary revolutionaries in the computer age. We both worked very closely with our respective Dads. Both of our brilliant fathers had Alzheimer’s disease in their later years. It’s always sad to lose a parent progressively as their mental faculties slip away. It’s particularly tragic to lose the minds of such brilliant men to that dread disease. The only consolation is that when they actually die of physical ailments—my Dad in 2004; hers this year, both at the age of 88—you aren’t as devastated by grief. The loss already occurred, albeit gradually and sadly.

 

Douglas C. Engelbart
(January 30, 1925 - July 2, 2013)

I had the privilege of sitting at both men’s feet. My father, John W. Seybold, revolutionized the electronic printing industry—bringing us electronic newsrooms, electronic hyphenation and justification and pagination, and the precursor to HTML, standardized mark up. Like Doug, my Dad was a visionary—someone who could recruit people into his vision and who actually developed and deployed software and systems to make it possible for people to do things they couldn’t have dreamed of before. The idea of writing our own documents electronically and publishing our own content was a glimmer in my Dad’s eye when he and another visionary, John Tuohey, designed the first electronic newsroom for US News and Word Report back in 1969, giving birth to the Atex system, which became the stalwart in the newspaper publishing industry.