No, this isn’t a spin on “Take my wife, please.”

Rena Reich

Today’s Answer of the Day informed me that it’s Ada Lovelace Day, the day to honor Ada Lovelace by pledging to post a tribute to a woman in technology today.

Ada, the daughter of Lord Byron, worked with computer pioneer Charles Babbage. Men had already figured out how such machines could be used for math. Ada’s insights were in ideas of how such machines could be programmed for other applications such as composing music and creating graphics.

So I’d like to recognize Rena Reich today. She taught herself programming, wrote functions to integrate dictionaries and encylopedias into Answers.com,  and eventually founded her own wiki company, starting with The Pet Wiki. Doing some programming herself and working with others she put together a great site, and she shares her experiences and learnings on her blog.

Ada Lovelace didn’t invent the Analytic Engine, she figured out clever ways to apply it to enhance the human experience. That’s been Rena’s goal. I wish her continued success, and I wish all of you, especially the women developing and applying technology, a happy Ada Lovelace day.

I’m making my SMX speaking debut on Sunday at SphinnCon. And next month I get to present at SMX Toronto.

Speaking at SMX Toronto

Just learned that a perk of speaking and blogging about it is I get to share a 15% discount code to SMX Toronto, so just use REICH15 when registering.

Vanessa Fox, who was named Best Moderator in Best of PubCon, will be moderating my SphinnCon session. A few hours ago she finished wrapping up SMX West in San Jose by speaking at a similar session on  Social Media, Search, and Reputation Management. Our session is Online Reputation Management and I’ll be joined by Sam Michelson, Shira Abel, and Dan Gerstenfeld.

At SMX Toronto, I’ll be speaking at the Real Time Search, User Generated Content and Social Networks session. Jeff Quipp will moderate, and I’ll be with Barbara Coll and Rob Garner.

My presentation will be about Using Q&A sites to Grow Your Business & Reputation. I’m looking forward to it! Quite nervous, though. I think my biggest challenge will be keeping my speaking speed under 200 words per minute. Though I wonder. Would that be a good gimmick? Doing a minute of the presentation at my full speed? Would be fun, like those old FedEx commercials. Only downside is nobody would understand a word I’m saying. Though sometimes that’s a good thing. :-)

Post Script: The SphinnCon presentation went pretty well. Quite nervous at first, and apparently I was too loud. But one of the other speakers told me how happy she was that she didn’t have to follow my presentation, so I thought that was a pretty cool compliment. Now I can learn a few lessons and give a better presentation in Toronto. The video of My SphinnCon presentation on YouTube, thanks to Lea Aharonovitch.

It's not about you

I got the following e-mail (names have been replaced):

Subject: Meeting with Joe – Discuss our award for Best SuperWidget

I wanted to share the news that AcmeWidget is the 2009 QTZ Award Winner for Best SuperWidget.  I’d like to schedule a call with you to review some of the successes we’ve had in 2009 and how these lessons might be applied to your business.

Let me suggest a rewrite:

Subject: Meeting to discuss how our award winning SuperWidget can help you

QTZ just named AcmeWidget the Best SuperWidget of 2009 because of how companies used it to grow their social networks. I’d like to schedule a call to discuss how AcmeWidget can help you grow your business.

The first rule of relationship building is to focus on your potential partner.

We actually met this company last year. They came to a meeting with a bizdev guy itching to do a deal and their founder who was itching to brag. Several of us sat in the room stunned as the founder hijacked the meeting to repeatedly tell us how awesome his company was. The meeting might have ended with us getting close to a deal. Instead it ended with us swearing that we would never get anywhere near this company again, partially because we didn’t trust them to be considerate of our interests, and partially because we never wanted to be stuck in a meeting with him again.

If you need to talk about yourself, get a therapist, or a dog, or a blog that you don’t care about. Don’t sabotage your business because you can’t control your ego.

What do you think?

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/ / CC BY 2.0

Oracle Rapid Rise

Fantastic post today by Joel Spolsky Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

I could feel Joel’s pain. Essentially he was jettisoning the basic premises that had guided him for a decade. Joel came to the painful conclusion that there was only room for one big company in his market, and that if he continued only growing by a responsible and impressive 50% annually, his competitor would take the market.

For the longest time, I smugly thought: We’re profitable, our sales are rising, we make terrific products, and our customers love us. So what do we have to worry about?

Then I came across a quote from Geoffrey Moore …  in Inside the Tornado, Moore writes about the great battle between Oracle and Ingres in the early 1980s. The winner of that battle is well known: Oracle now has a market cap of more than $100 billion, and I’ll bet you’ve never heard of Ingres.

“What set Oracle apart from Ingres,” Moore writes, “was that [CEO] Larry Ellison drove for 100 percent growth while Ingres ‘accepted’ 50 percent growth.” Executives at Ingres meant well. According to Moore, they felt that the company “simply cannot grow any faster than 50 percent and still adequately serve our customers. No one can. Look at Oracle. They are promising anything and everything and shipping little or nothing. Everybody knows it. Their customers hate them. They are going to hit the wall.”

Of course, Oracle overcame those concerns and eclipsed its rival. And this got me worried. Were we Ingres?

Not every market rewards the fastest company to critical mass. And sometimes the company that reaches critical mass first (Geocities, MySpace) can’t hold it. And I think Spolsky is panicking a bit and reaching some uncharacteristically (for him) mediocre conclusions.

In the post Spolsky was talking about his excellent FogBugz software, which we use and enjoy (as much as one can enjoy bug tracking software). But I wonder how this point applies to his niche Q&A sites like Stack Overflow. Will there be a winner in the Q&A space? Will the Oracle (and I’d say Wikipedia) model hold there? That is, do you achieve critical mass with high quantity and keep working feverishly to get the quality to catch up? Or do you grow slowly with high quality working in tight knit communities? Will the Q&A space always live according to Spolsky’s “Google is our site’s homepage” rule, and if so, does that make it easier for many players to co-exist?

Spolsky’s post is provocative. If it’s true, the winning move in the Q&A space is to continue growing as fast as we can, while killing ourselves to keep increasing the quality.

What do you think?