Quantum Art Releases QP7.Payment

This is a reprint of a post from the other blog:

Who said content management is not about revenue generation? QP7.Payment is a transaction capture solution designed to help governments and corporation centralize disparate electronic revenue management functions. For example, say you are a government with 60 different departments. Each of the departments has a specific business process and product categories for generating revenue (Treasurer collects property taxes; Clerk's office sells records, both certified and not; Planning and Zoning issues permits; Parks allows you to reserve facilities; etc.).

Now, integrating all of these items into a single catalog is a major undertaking. Plus, the checkout process will be different for every department. In this situation, does it make any sense to do the integration on the product or the content level? We didn't think so either and architected QP7.Payment to be a web-services solution that integrates these disparate revenue generation sources on the transaction level, thus becoming a transaction capture solution.

The government process I described is just an example. It's actually based on Bernalillo County (NM) that already implemented QP7.Payment. But same applies to sales of, say, digital assets, or an actual product inventory.

QP7.Payment is, of course, based on QP7. All the nice things about the platform still apply.

END REPRINT

Goodbye Blogger, Hello WordPress

The blog has moved to shenderovich.wordpress.com. No more missing features.

Click... and mortal

I was introduced to a new term today: "click & mortal". As opposed to a better known "click & mortar" term, which is the last boom's description of traditional business engaged in e-commerce, "click & mortal" must be describing e-commerce companies that were buried by the bust.

By the same token, the term "brick & mortal" must also exist, but has nothing to do with commerce.

From an anonymous online source:

Throughout the years, we have assisted our clients to transform their “brick and mortal” business to “click and mortal” business. They are happy on the results as thousands of dollars have been saved, the major benefits are reduction in office rental, staff cost as well as advertisement cost.

The "brick and mortal" approach must really be a hit with staff cost reduction initiatives.

Content Management Is Not Rocket Science

Web content management is not rocket science. But web content management and rocket science are a powerful combination. One of Quantum Art’s earliest international customers was the Khrunichev Space Center, the Russian rocket science institution. They are the people behind the Soviet Mir space station and the international version currently under development. So when the scientists needed a way to communicate with their peers or publish information for the rest of us, they realized that they need a solution for managing online content.

The mind of an engineer works in mysterious ways. I realize now that Khrunichev’s problems were not unique, but when they approached us wanting to manage information by types, not by pages, we were simply too excited about our customers sharing the same philosophy as we were on managing online content. It’s not about pages, but about handling your content inventory, reusing information, and managing relations between different pieces of content to achieve a fluid publishing environment.

When we started working with Khrunichev, it didn’t occur to me that the problems we solved would ultimately lead to the idea of a content application server, a solution that for many reasons is replacing traditional web CMS tools. A parallel that I draw now is that to the CERN content management project that started in the early 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee and grew into the world wide web. At CERN it was nuclear physicists that pioneered HTML to create the fabric of the web as we know it today. By a similar token, Khrunichev’s rocket scientists pushed Quantum Art to rethink its product development strategy and deliver an enterprise solution for publishing to the new fabric of the web, the one where information is structured, tagged, and easily indexed.

In short, kudos to Quantum Art’s engineers, who may not be rocket scientists, but who could certainly speak their language and years ago foresee problems that are now becoming commonplace.

P.S. This glance into the past was in part caused by the product development plans Quantum Art’s technology team presented to the management earlier this week. The plans will soon be publicly announced on Quantum Art’s site with a flurry of activity around them. Check back shortly!

The Death of the Letter

Blogs are killers. Not bloggers, by any means – the writers themselves are generally harmless (even if the pen is mightier than the sword), but in transforming communications, blogs are the killers of personal correspondence. Blogs are the death of the letter.

What’s even more curious is that the rise of blogging both signals and facilitates a significant social change. For centuries people confided their personal thoughts, desires, intentions and general feelings to their correspondents. Remember, Choderlos de Laclos' “Dangerous Liaisons”, constructed completely from letters? And how about volumes of Lord Byron’s or Mark Twain’s correspondence?

What about the idea of a pen pal? Do you have one right now? Did you correspond with someone regularly just a few years ago? I certainly did. In fact, this post is a result of me rereading some of the letters I wrote in 2003/04 to Alexei Parshchikov, a Russian poet living in Germany.

Letters to the editor, which are more like “emails to the editor” now, as the electronic form replaced the physical, are still in existence, but have also evolved. They’ve become more of a “forum-around-the-editor”, not direct correspondence. Hell, the whole idea of an editor was really deflated with the rise of blogosphere.

Some industry insiders have described blogs and wikis as solutions to the email problem. Of course, there is spam, but as emails are just letters in cyberspace, blogs are out to rid the world of personal correspondence. Blogs become the death of the letter.

In conclusion, letters are private by nature and privacy of thought does not exist in blogosphere by definition (it is paradoxical, as all thoughts in the blogosphere are private). Then again, if letters were representative of a society of individuals and empires, does the appearance of the blogosphere mirror the society characterized by lack of privacy, exploding social pressures, and growing terrorism? Am I making the world a better place by blogging or adding to the downfall of the Western world?

More on hypermodernism

It took a few more brain cycles, but the relationship between physiology and hypermodernity materialized into a somewhat coherent statement:

Whereas postmodernism views simulacra as the building blocks of the postmodern discourse, in a way that genes are the building blocks of human physiology, hypermodernism focuses the discourse on human physiology itself, where humans turn into their own simulacra through physical augmentation.

So in short, mechanization of the human body as a reaction to societal pressures, including information overload, leads to the transformation of such body into its own simulacrum.

I just realized that this thread is the continuation of a post I wrote two years ago in another blog.

You are getting hypermodern

In the summer of 2005, Zach Lynch posted a blurb on a study that discussed the rise of mental illness in Bangkok. Apparently, it rose 900% in just three years, which is an extreme by all measures.

One phrase from the blurb in particular continues to reccur in many of business or social discussions I've had since Zach posted a note on the study in his blog:

"Constantly blasted with images of unattainable lifestyles, people face daily identity crises as they search for meaning in a world of continuously shifting truths."

Both Pavlov and Freud would tell us that for every such natural (or artificial) stimulus, humans would develop defense mechanisms. In this case, just as the stimulus is artificial, so seems to be the the defense mechanism; it is some severe desire and a constant drive towards the mechanization of society and mechanization of human physiology, whether through chemical dependencies or physical augmentation (e.g. RFID chip implantation). In short, to adjust their physiology to the pressures of current reality and the ever-increasing social tempo, humans turn to augmenting their bodies to increase brain processing speed and stamina.

I googled that same phase today and it appeared in its entirety in a scientific article published in 1990. Social and political theorists, Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker, and David Cook referred to this crisis as hypermodernism.

Obviously, hypermodernism follows or emanates from postmodernism. Isolating the physiological aspect (the augmentation of physiology as a reaction to social stimuli), hypermodernism can be viewed as an epiphenomenon of postmodern society. In its article on postmodernism, Wikipedia notes that:

...although a difficult term to pin down, "postmodern" generally refers to the criticism of absolute truths or identities...

Hypermodernism would then be the denial of naturalism and a forced transition towards mechanization. In this light, Mars exploration starts making a lot more sense. It may be time to look for even more planets to move to.

Right Brain Trust

Btw, we have started to publicize the non-profit I founded earlier in the year. Visit Right Brain Trust today. Poetics rule!

Passion vs. Action

France is really amazing. South of France, that is. Because while Paris is burning, Provence is starting to bloom and will be absolutely heavenly in just a few weeks.

But I suppose the French are astounding throughout the whole country. How can so many people be so passionate about inactivity? Not inactivity in the sense of meditation, but in the context of labor, responsibility, and entrepreneurship. Wouldn't protesting responsibility be an act of responsibility? And is the energy spent by hundreds of thousands of protesters worth spending on the topic that is driving them to the streets? Finally, why are the French that care so much about their country are willing to burn its magnificent capital as a result of the government allowing businesses to fire employees under 26 (something that is not even a issue in the rest of the world)?

Imagine the United States in a parallel universe where people are not allowed to work more than 24 hours a week and get taxed through the roof (besides being pressured by high gas prices, rising inflation, budget deficits, etc.). So in this country, the president (any president, not necessarily the current one) signs a law that allows employees to work more that 24 hours a week and receive, brace yourselves, overtime compensation. As a result of this, two million people march down Pennsylvania Avenue, demolishing every road sign, parking meter, police car, and house on their way (including the White House, of course), demanding that their work week is never longer than 24 hours under any circumstances.

Back to my original point, how can so many people be passionate about inactivity?

Candy Cane Revolution

Elections in Belarus are turning out like a comic take on the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. Aleksandr Lukashenko, the country's president with a dictatorial stance and even more dictatorial ambitions, won at the latest polls.

Quite unsurprisingly, given the level of control he has over the country's political processes. People started protesting (yet instead of orange flags, that became symbolic after Ukraine's elections, these striped banners are en vogue). International observers confirmed that elections are not legitimate, but decided not to do anything.

The reaction of the Russian government, which supports Lukashenko, was also unsurprising: "It happened already, just let it go".

VP of Content Management

Jovan Marjanovic knows a lot more than I do about enterprise software sales. Not only because he opened and ran Oracle's offices in Russia or continues to run large sales operations elsewhere. He is just a naturally better salesman (he asks two questions almost every time we talk: "How is business?" and "Who is buying?"). Besides the business ties, he has become a very good friend.

A few years ago, we had a discussion about Quantum Art and the content management market. Jovan likes our product and likes our positioning, so in the process of the conversation we distilled a content management problem that Quantum Art addresses better than others. "When an SAP sales guy is selling a financial module," Jovan started, "he is talking to the CFO. When selling the HR module, he is speaking with the director of HR. When the manufacturing solution is on the table, the obvious decision maker is the VP of Product Development. So who buys content management software.?" This really seems to be the dilemma of this market segment.

So we came to a realization that there is no VP of Content Management. Most of the buying decisions are made by coalitions. And since content resides everywhere in the enterprise, everyone wants a say in what solution to adopt and how to approach the implementation. Ultimately, this results in very expensive shelfware or implementation costs that far exceed any initial estimates.

I had a call with a prospect today, which followed these findings to the letter. There were several people from Quantum Art on the call and several stakeholders (all geographically dispersed) from the prospect side. It seemed that everyone on the call had his or her own agenda, and the take-away from the meeting was that we need to meet another time. So I had to share the idea of the lacking decision maker with our primary contact at this large prospect. To my surprise, he responded: "Well, it's even worse. We are being pulled in even more directions." I guess, the representatives from those groups didn't make it to the call.

Finding a decision-maker is hard, especially in a large organization. It's twice as hard for a content management vendor. Luckily for Quantum Art, an idea of a content application server (vs. that of a webpage management solution) speaks to the heart of the IT folks that are the core of Quantum Art's customer base. I suppose, ultimately it boils down to Quantum Art being a technology company vs. a solution provider, thus elevating our products above the playing field and above the need for a VP of Content Management.

Post Chronology

I've never kept a diary in my life. Honestly, I've never even tried and don't view a blog as one. So why am I forced to publish notes in this blog in a diary format?

At least one limitation seems to be technological. I cannot date my posts anything but the date they were published. Moreover, as I discovered with Blogger, it's not just the publishing date, it's the creation date (so if I save something as a draft, then publish several posts, and then return to that draft, it will be posted with an earlier timestamp). The creation date is important, but there are other dates with which a blog can be associated. How can those be formalized with the limited field structure?

Since Google already has the technology for expanding database tables or schemas with Google Base it only seems natural for them to incorporate this technology into personal publishing tools like Blogger. Why aren't we there yet?

Roman Forum?

Last night I was reading late Mikhail Gasparov's essay on "Responsibilty to Understand" (I am translating from Russian here), and ran into a fascinating paragraph (most things Gasparov wrote were fascinating -- this simply seemed very relevant):

"Why did Rome conquer Greece, even though Greek culture was a higher one? Once historian answers: because Romans did not shun from learning Greek, and Greeks did shun learning Latin. Therefore, in negotiations Romans understood the Greeks directly, while Greeks needed interpreters. We know what the result of this was."

So with the pun intended, today's parallel is user vs. geek. Not to say that geeks are a dying breed, just the opposite. For some reason, communications have become better. Technologists have learned that the user is in charge and needs to be understood. Afterall, it's the user that makes or breaks new applications.

This year's PC Forum, which, unfortunately, I could not attend, is devoted to the discussion of this topic. I wonder if the Rome/Greece angle would fly with this year's crowd.

Third time's the charm...

Several years ago my friend Ross Mayfield, who is now the CEO of Socialtext, started a blog. He called me up and said that I should start one as well, so I did. I kept it up for a few weeks and was even invited to the AlwaysOn conference as a blogger (the number of bloggers was fewer then, Technorati did not exist, and a new alternative to traditional media was marveled at). I started to blog out of curiousity then, but was caught up in running Quantum Art, and this exercise in thought leadership ended just as abruptly as it started.

My second attempt at blogging came a year later, when I was preparing for lectures at Universita Cattolica. I wanted to create an interactive environment for students, a kind of interactive classrom, but once the lectures were over the effort once again subsided.

This time, fingers crossed, I will not drop the effort.

There will be several facets to this blog, including information on web technologies, start ups, cultural anthropology, poetics, and whatever else may be appropriate. I'll try to publish often, time permitting, of course, and welcome everyone's comments.