Space on my bookshelf is limited to books of importance to me, books that I reference often, and a few special books like first editions.  Still, I have boxes and boxes of books that could be more useful if they were on my PC or tablet.  While I would be happy to subscribe to a Netflix Instant Streaming-type service for books, I don’t think we will see a service like that in the next few years (Google books anyone?).  So in addition to donating most of my books that I will never read again, I want to fair-use digitize a few books in my book library that I will continue to use.  My approach, however, will result in destruction of the book binding.  My nicer books will be spared from this fate though freed-up shelf space.  Here’s the first approach I’m taking…

The Tools

• A box cutter or industrial stack cutter. Alternatively, print shops have hydraulic paper cutters than can make quick work of your books. Supposedly, an electric planer will work, and I will try this as well. In the US, Harbor Freight Tools sells an inexpensive planer.

 

• A sheet-fed scanner that scans 2-sides of each page.  Fujitsu makes the ScanSnap S1500 series for both Windows and Mac

 

• Post-Processing Software: There are a few options for this.  Scan Tailor is a favorite of the DIY Book Scanner crew.  Someone has been kind enough to package it for Mac OS X

The Process

Here are two neat videos that show how to scan books

Scanning a book – part 1: The Scan Process
 

 

Scanning a book – part 2: Processing with Acrobat Professional
 

 

Non-Destructive Book Scanners

ion book saver – a consumer, non-destructive consumer book scanning solution.

DIY Book Scanner -

Things to do with books you no longer will read

WhatsOnMyBookShelf

BookMooch

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I was reading my Quora stream and read a comment by a smart guy that I follow, Scott Berkun, author of three excellent books, Making Things Happen, The Myths of Innovation, and Confessions of a Public Speaker..

Scott answers the question “Why has Microsoft seemingly stopped innovating” is his usual, very insightful, no-BS way:

I was at MSFT ’94-’03 – worked mostly on IE in the early days v1-5)

The word innovation is a red herring. Apple did not invent digital musical players, the GUI, the cell phone, or the tablet. But they made the best versions of these things, and after the fact they are labelled as innovative.  The word is mostly useless as its too common for us to confuse making a great product with developing the early ideas for the concept of the product. The people who develop the early ideas rarely succeed in business, and rarely get recongnized as innovators. I write books about Innovation, yet in practice I try to use the word as little as possible. It’s often about as useless a word as ‘cool’.

Microsoft (Post Win95) has almost always failed to manage its perception among the cultural elites, both in and outside the tech-sector. There is a reasonable history of Microsoft being first to try new things – Bob, Clippy, CD-ROMS (Encarta), Expedia, Citysearch, XBOX, Tablet PC and on it goes, but Microsoft has always had extremely conservative marketing and brand advertising, allowing it’s geeky, IT, conservative perception to dominate how even its new products and ambitious risks are perceived. Bob was a big risk and had some interesting ideas, but was a PR disaster both in how it was presented and who it was presented too. But since no one ever did the talk on “What we learned from Bob” the same mistakes have been repeated many times. My favorite tragedy about nearly everything at Microsoft is how poorly lessons from the big disasters at Microsoft were shared across the company – so they’ve been repeated many times.

The real tragedy is it takes great products to be labeled an innovator by the mass media and consumer culture. Edison did not invent the lightbulb, but he made one that worked well enough to be used by most people, that’s why he gets all the credit. Same for Ford. Microsoft has never been led as a products company – It’s a technology and platforms company. With that kind of strategy middle-management and design-by-committee dominates, making the kind of design vision and clarity of focus required to make a great product (or a great user experience) very difficult culturally. The result is products that are often mediocre to experience, but have secondary value that enterprise and corporate customers respond to. This doesn’t work as well for consumers, and consumer drive the perception of who is innovative and cool and who isn’t.

Lastly you have all of the Innovator’s dilemma criteria in full effect. Christensen’s book (The Innovator’s Dilemma, http://www.amazon.com/Innovators…) was everywhere at the company in 95/96, but when I left no one was reading it anymore. It’s a big and fat company. There are lots of wealthy middle-managers who have checked out, or were simply not very useful in the first place despite how long they’ve been at Microsoft. It’s fairly hard to get fired at MSFT and this is a kind of corporate death when dead weight accumulates at the middle layers. The age and lack of understanding among many for how to develop new ideas into good products means the first move to solve any competitive problem will be to rely on the strategies of the past trying to extract every last ounce of value from them, making it harder and harder for someone to take the risks necessary to lead.

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With hundreds of thousands of mobile apps only compelling 47% of North American cell phone users to use them, are we missing something so obvious?  I wonder what it will it take to get 100%.

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The Cloud ... it's mostly vapor

Intel has announced their AppUp Hybrid Cloud for Small Business program.  When I read the headline, I thought “ok, Intel is making a cloud storage gateway for small business.”  Then I read the press release, and the product has little to do with cloud computing.  It is an on premise, remotely-managed leased hardware and software combo.

The word “cloud” is (ab)used for everything hooked up to a network these days that I wasn’t sure what it means anymore.  So to check up, I read Twenty-One Experts Define Cloud Computing and read, perhaps more importantly, What cloud computing isn’t.

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One of the projects I’m working on at my job is implementing an electronic document and collaboration solution for my company’s Board of Directors.  It has been a neat journey into a niche market, and little has been written about the technology from an IT perspective.

If your company is considering an implementation of a Board of Directors portal, I encourage your IT team’s close involvement in the project in partnership with your Corporate Secretary.  This is one of the few opportunities that your IT department can showcase itself to the team that writes the checks for your technology projects.  In our case, our Corporate Secretary is very involved in the leadership of the project, and IT is leading the business analysis and technology efforts.

If you are not familiar with board of director portals, some basic features offered by companies in the market include:

• Document and Agenda compilation – an administrator uploads Microsoft Office, PDF documents, and sometimes multimedia files, where it is then compiled into a single electronic board book package.  That electronic package then allows the creation of a board meeting agenda with hyperlinks to relevant portions of the electronic board book.  Once the agenda is created, the package is included in a discrete, time-bound “meeting” object.

• Role-based Security – Not all documents in the meeting packet need to be accessed by board members.  For example, board committees may want to grant access to their material only to committee members and not the larger board.

• Directory – This is more than just a simple contact list.  Some board portal vendors are offering “Follow” functionality that publishes activity feeds of individual board member activity.

• Collaboration – Discussion threads, document comments, and other things typically included in team collaboration software.

• Voting and Approvals – polling, surveys, and recorded votes

• Mobile support – basic document reading, and sometimes collaboration features, are available on a tablet devices like the Apple iPad.

I don’t want to reveal too much about our direction, but here are some things you want to keep in mind for your Board Portal implementation

• Usability- Know your board.  How are board meetings conducted today?  How does the board member use technology in his or her work?  At home?  Does the board member own an iPad?  Does a member of your board already use a board portal?  If so, what features are used?  How could the experience improve?You want the administrative and end user interfaces of your board portal to be both simple and compelling, yet not all vendors I surveyed meet that expectation.  The Apple iPad has been a significant development in this market, as the experience of reading the board book has become enhanced over paper. Hyperlinks to notable pages in the board book can be placed in the agenda.  The board book is searchable, and annotations can be made and shared with other board members.

• Security – As NASDAQ OMX learned the hard way, there exists an Advanced Persistent Threat of hackers targeting board portals seeking an insider trading advantage on public North American companies.  Most vendors of board portal solutions offer their solutions almost exclusively as Software-as-a-Service.  How sensitive is the information in your company’s board book?  Are you comfortable hosting perhaps your firm’s most confidential information on another company’s assets, managed by another company’s employees?  Can your board portal provider view your company’s board meeting material?  Are you confident in the enforcement of the vendor’s data retention policies?  In the world of corporate governance, the more information a board member leaves behind after viewing documents (think system logs, cache, etc), the more information is left for discovery.  Do you know what is being logged?Most of the vendors in the board portal market are offering what amounts to a document repository, where board information is uploaded in, for example, a Microsoft Word document, transformed into a PDF, and downloaded again without additional security controls.  While this may be nice from a portability standpoint, I view this as a significant deficiency in security and discoverability.  Two solutions in the market, BoardVantage and Diligent Board Books, offer an online document viewing experience that does not rely on any downloading or desktop clients.

• Mobility – The duties of today’s board members extend beyond the quarterly meetings.  Your board members are among your company’s best advocates.  Not only do your board members want updates on a more frequent basis, but they want the information they need from anywhere.  As mentioned earlier, the Apple iPad and other tablets are a significant development in this requirement.  An app that securely stores board documents for viewing at any time, even offline, has been an important requirement for us.

Here’s a list of products our team has surveyed, along with some comments of mine, that you may want to check out:

BoardVantage – Offers a feature-rich platform for executive document publishing and collaboration, secures documents with client-less viewers, and features a very nice iPad app.  Offered in both Software-as-a-Service and On Premise deployment.

BoardEffect – Positioned for non-profit organizations.  Offers a Sharepoint-like experience and an iPad app for document reading.

Diligent Boardbooks – primary competitor to BoardVantage.  Offers an iPad app for document viewing and annotations.

IntraLinks – while not a Board of Directors portal, IntraLinks is a hosted team collaboration platform for secure collaboration with external partners.  Think document sharing for mergers and acquisitions.

NASDAQ OMX Directors Desk – Suffered blows after a well publicized breach of their system’s security.  The portal is accessible to tablets via online browsers, so no offline document viewing support, and the document reading experience leaves much to be desired.

Thomson-Reuters BoardLink – Comprehensive content management features.  Requires an RSA SecurID token, which is inconvenient and frustrating to a number of executives I have worked with.  Offers an iPad app.

Financial Services DirectorAccess – Competitive feature offering, offers on-premise implementation in addition to their Software-as-a-Service offerings.  Mid-market customers.  iPad app only offers basic document viewing functionality.

EnvisionIT – offers SharePoint customization for Board of Directors, and a SharePoint plugin that makes authenticating external users much easier.

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Forrester analyst Nigel Fenwick asks, “When Did Marketing Become A Dirty Word?”

“…today’s marketers focus on creating an effective process to identify changing customer needs and deliver customer value (in most cases at a profit). That’s something CIOs have been trying to do since the first data processing groups were established in the 70’s. “

I feel the same way.  Today’s marketing requires much more than creative thinking and focus groups.  That which isn’t measured can’t be managed, and nearly all decisions in today’s marketing organizations are made with analysis from a sea of data.

IT has a key role in this process beyond simple infrastructure support.  IT can help marketing departments identify and understand the role technology plays in the rising expectations of customers.  Once these expectations are identified, the processes involved to meet these expectations often require a disciplined approach in implementing a solution that ultimately that reduces waste, improves efficiencies, and creates an outstanding experience for the customer.  I do not know of a better job description for IT.

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The inflationary costs of American higher education are not sustainable.  The Atlantic has a story about the potential for colleges to open their content and use the free things the internet has to offer.  A next step of what Open Yale Courses and MIT OpenCourseWare have done.

From the Article:

Colleges rarely think about efficiency, because all the signals tell them to spend more money on fewer students. Theoretically, the most efficient school would give the highest quality education to the most people for the lowest price. In reality, national rankings reward universities for rejecting the highest number of applicants, teaching the fewest number of students per class, and spending the most per capita on resources. That doesn’t mean colleges are failing. It means the system suffers from an incentive to be inefficient.

One particular reader comment on article stood out to me, “At the best universities, professors are rewarded (tenured) for their publications and not at all (really) for their teaching.  But the institutions are funded by tuition.  The students do not profit from arcane articles read on average by 7 people (I have read).  But this is what gives a university its status.  These are perverse incentives from a teaching standpoint.”

If research institutions are funded by tuition, then it seems reasonable to scale the university enrollment to drive down tuition and increase research funding.  The universities may lose a sense of quality through exclusivity, but I imagine a future where the world’s most prestigious universities offer courses, not just content, to everyone.  A future where I can chose courses from multiple universities, and show my credentials to the world, and still fund university research programs.

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Its because we live by them.  Anyone who contributes to our R&D projects is in a position to observe the day to day actions of the team and to judge its accomplishments.   You can see the proof of adherence to the rules and interpret the R&D process in light of the rules.

So what are these rules?

1.  Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing

I learned this rule from Jim Barksdale of FedEx and Netscape. Jim is a talented executive and frequently has great quotable sayings.   Jim was pointing out that in the course of developing  an “insanely great game changing” project or product, it is natural for other “insanely great game changing” things to rise.  After all, it’s a new game in the new reality of the new project.
While simple in phrase, this rule can be applied to many applications.  One manifestation of this rule is to not let a derivative goal eclipse the original goal.    All too frequently, the derivative can take precedence over the main effort.

To prevent this pernicious effect as projects are developed, I usually deliver a historical review of “why we are, where we are.”  The review sets the context for the meeting and reminds the team of the preceding developments to the current status in relation to the main thing. This review also helps keep the team focused on the main thing.

In future blog posts, we will revisit this rule.  But to be brief, I want to introduce the other two rules for the next blog posts:

2.  Little Steps for Little Feet.

3.  Scope Creep Kills the Medic.

And a look to the latest patent filings – and what has my attention – check out it out

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A recent crop of offerings from Square and Google for retail payments has caught my attention.  Square may have a winner with Square Register, as small retail shops can cheaply easily accept credit card payments and generate sales and inventory reports without the investment of a pricey point-of-sale system.  The only hesitation I have is that handing a customer an iPad (or any device for that manner) is quite awkward.  Unfortunately, for lack of a better solution, my own company shares this problem with so many other merchants.

That is where online mobile wallets and mobile identity hold promise.  Among the many technologies in this space, near field communication has picked up steam, having been implemented in Google and RIM smartphones.  If you believe the rumors, Apple will implement the technology in the next releases of their mobile hardware line.  Wouldn’t it be cool if I could use my phone to securely prove my identity and pay for things instead of carrying my wallet?

I think so.  But NFC faces significant challenges to wide adoption due to the multitude of stakeholders, the complexity of the antiquated payment card system network and process, and the weakness of standards in the payment card industry.  While near field communication enhances many of the security flaws in today’s world of plastic payments, there are still significant security challenges to face.  Most of the security burden will be on the consumer to secure their device, usually at the cost of usability and convenience.  Trading one problem for another is why I’m skeptical of this, for now, but let us see what progress is made toward the mobile payment vision that so many consumers share.

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