I cannot recall ever seeing such a universal chorus of “good riddance” to the end of a year as I have seen with the closing of 2008. Hardly surprising I suppose given the apparent near collapse of the global economy (the jury is still out on that one) and the shock factor of plummeting house prices, spiraling unemployment and general gloom.

I am more upbeat than ever though. I think 2009 is going to be an exciting year full of opportunity, at least in the world of technology start-ups. Even leaving aside the obvious global scale of this downturn, on the tech start-up side it is quite different to the down cycles we have seen in the last 20 years. Investment has largely dried up but it has never been cheaper nor have better tools been available to start a new web company than they are today. I am convinced many of the next wave of great startups will be born during this downturn.

To be sure, many folks will attempt a start-up during this period with neither the passion nor the fundamental skills to make it work, and for them it will probably not be the wild but fulfilling ride it is for many (even those who fail.)

A great way to test whether you are ready for this or not is to read the recent article “Why your web startup will fail“. If you read it and find yourself sobbing softly to yourself or getting up and wanting to run out of the room, stick with the day job.

If, on the other hand, your response is “Bring it on!”, then go for it. Whether you succeed or not, you were born to be an entrepreneur and will never be truly happy doing anything else.

For me, 2009 will see a new start-up we have been working on for most of 2008 finally get its public unveiling. It is the most exciting idea I have been involved with in a long time. Perhaps ever. It will be great to finally be able to talk about it and share it with the world. That’s what start-ups are all about.

Bring it on!

Much has been written about the Facebook Generation, most of it quite negative. They represent a tempting target for those of us of older generations (even if not by much). I can’t help but feel that this is often a 21st century reinterpretation of the age old “back in my day things were different” scenario (cue a Monthy Python sketch or two…)

Despite never buying into that cliche (I’ve been a believer in the digital native versus digital immigrant distinction for about 10 years), I did not honestly expect to find much new material in Don Tapscott’s new book Grown Up Digital.

But I was wrong.

Often technology business books (is that a Dewey Decimal classification? Probably not.) are written, perhaps understandably, for a decidedly non-technical audience. While not quite leading to a dumbing down of the subject, a lot of basic material is covered that is really of no interest to anyone who knows the area even a little.

A key case in point is Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, a book based on a Wired article by the same author. While I love the concept and enjoyed the article, the book was ultimately disappointing because after the first two chapters, at least for me, the remainder of the book was just a rehashing of the same basic premise. It might have been more valuable to someone who had very little experience of the Web as it exists today, but for me, not so much.

Anyway, despite the fact that I am submerged in Twitter, Facebook and the rest of Web 2.0, I am really enjoying Tapscott’s new book. I am only a few chapters in so it may ultimately lack the payoff, as in the case of The Long Tail, but so far I am finding 3 things about it I really like:

• A lot of little examples I had not heard of that are good additional anecdotal evidence (such as the Indian multi-player dance game – who knew!)
• A lot of data from a big study on patterns of usage – especially of interest is the data from outside the United States.
• A good high level weaving together of what the trends mean.

Its the overall coherent picture that Tapscott paints that for me is making it a worthwhile read. I have not seen it done as comprehensively and with the hard data to back it up as he manages here.

If your business (current or planned) is going to employ, sell to or otherwise interact with anyone under 30, then I recommend this book as a must read. Especially if you yourself are not under 30.

While the cool kids like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube get most of the attention when we think of how the Web has changed over the last few years, I was reminded this week of what is in many ways a more important but much more subtle change that has emerged in the form of personalization.

It is subtle in the sense that it has become so mainstream that you often don’t notice it, but when it is missing you certainly do. Almost single-handedly Amazon is probably most responsible for this shift in how we interact with web sites. Anyone who has made a purchase on Amazon has had the experience of the site not only remembering your credit card and shipping details but even making recommendations on other purchases. One of the interesting aspects of this is that while the recommendations clearly have a selfish purchase (to get you to buy more stuff), I find their recommendations often highly relevant and have made purchases I would not have otherwise.

This notion of marketing actually being useful to the consumer is something we would have laughed only recently, writing it off as something marketing types in power suits thought was a good idea after their third Martini. Yet it is becoming more common on the Web. How often have you searched for something on Google and found yourself clicking on the ads instead of other links. Indeed I often find the ads more relevant than the search results. Not always to be sure, but often.

This is all well and good but the subject of this post is how all this personalization has shifted user expectations. Due to services like Amazon, Google and others, users of a service now expect it to tailor itself to them. This might be as simple as remembering your login details for a few weeks in the form of a cookie (assuming its not a site that needs high degrees of security such as a financial site of course) or noticing what features you use and adopting the interface to those usage patterns.

Sadly many sites seem not to be learning these lessons and are probably losing customers left, right and center without even realizing it. I frequently encounter a new site where the buying process is just tedious.

Examples include:

• Requiring me to go through a laborious registration process to set up an account to buy an item that costs less than $10 from a site I will probably have no need to visit again.
• Showing an items availability as “Please call”. Call?! If I wanted to talk to a real human being I wouldn’t spend 12 hours a day in a dark room staring at a computer screen now would I? Think people.

The really silly thing is that building things the right way is not hard. All you have to do is look at how Amazon does it and unless you can come up with a really strong reason for not doing it the way they do, you’re done. (Except customer service. Amazon’s customer service pretty much sucks if you have the unfortunate need to actually contact them about something.)

It struck me this week that this shift in expectations is also transferring to the real world, at least for me. My local pubic radio station has been running a fund drive all this week. Now I am well known among family and friends as a great procrastinator. Why put off until tomorrow what you can put off until next week? (David Allen would be rolling in his grave. If he were dead. Which he is not.)

Anyhoo, in an unusual mix of caffeine withdrawal and Catholic guilt, I actually made a donation on Monday, the first day of the fund drive. I then found myself getting increasingly annoyed as the week wore on and I had to continue to listen to all the pleas for money. For hours. Every day. What are you people thinking? Don’t you know I have already paid? Oh, that’s right. They have no idea. Or at least no ability to easily connect the fact that I am the guy who made the contribution and certainly no technology to allow me to get back to regularly scheduled programming.

This is a huge challenge for big media companies. It is one thing for users to be interested in getting access to their favorite programming over the Web or on mobile devices. It is a whole other deal if in addition to that they begin to get annoyed with the old ways of doing things. Hulu is great and all guys, but don’t pat yourselves too hard on the back – you’ve got a long way to go.

If media companies continue to take baby steps and attempt to delay the gut wrenching change it will bring to how they generate revenue, they will end up, like the music industry, curled up in a little ball by the side of the road, drinking too much and mumbling lines from On The Waterfront.

And it didn’t have to be that way.

Colleague Pierre Khawand was recently rounding up links to hard data on e-Learning effectiveness and I contributed a few based on my own past experiences with LMS and LCMS deployments. Pierre has now summarized his findings in a blog post and its well worth a read.

Getting hard numbers on e-Learning effectiveness is notoriously difficult and often case study presentations at conferences are the only ones you can find but no one really collects and publishes these numbers in one place. Partly this is a result of companies being a little hesitant to release this data (though in practice it tends to have a positive impact, regardless of what the numbers themselves show.)

It is also partly due to the somewhat bizarre issue that companies seem to not be too interested in seeing data on e-Learning effectiveness. Some believe it is inherently difficult to interpret the numbers (partially true no doubt) and some are perhaps concerned that negative results will impact their ability to get projects funded. This is unfortunate as any numbers I have ever seen show how powerful e-Learning can be and negative numbers tend to highlight bad practices rather than condemn the entire field of e-Learning.

I have been thinking about writing about Apple Stores for a while now. I think there is so much to learn about how to interact with your customers and what it means to market to them in the age of the Web. I have resisted because I am, as many people know, a self-described unabashed Apple bigot and therefore people might on occasion, and perhaps with some justification, question the objectivity of my views.

The main point I was interested in writing about is the general buzz (and buying as far as I can tell) that seems to be going on at any Apple Store I have been in. Although most people cannot articulate it, there is general agreement that the experience in an Apple Store is both very positive and quite unlike any technology or gadget store they have ever been in. There are great lessons in how to really focus on customers, treat them as intelligent rather than stupid and still makes gobs of money doing it. (Apple Stores sell everything at full retail prices and, much to my amazement, people pay it even though they could go home and buy it from Amazon cheaper with no tax and free shipping.)

Today (via Gruber) I came across this great two part article by a non-techie of his experiences in an Apple Store. It indirectly covers pretty much everything I wanted to say.

Secondly the ferocious reaction to it by (one assumes based on the content) PC fan boys is hilarious and also answers the fundamental question of why Dell and everyone else don’t just copy the Apple formula (Its not like its a secret.)

Answer: Its simply not in their DNA. They think providing something that is technically or functionally equivalent is all you need to do. They don’t understand how their customers think or pretty much anything to do with the concept of customer experience. Sure is fun to read though.