What I Learned from Watching a Baker in Brooklyn

I learned a tiny bit about what it takes to run a great bakery this morning. And not just any Bakery. I am sitting at Bakeri at the corner of N 8^th Street and Wythe Ave, in hipster infested Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Yet, in spite of a clientele that must exceed the national average of tattoos per square inch by a significant margin, walking into Bakeri is like stepping into a time capsule from a different era.

Try to imagine what having a sensual bread and pastry fantasy dream would be like? Bakeri, which in full disclosure was conceived and is owned and operated by my sister Nina, is that dream.

The beautiful marble counter, antique furniture and décor has been brought to Brooklyn from Argentina by Nina and her husband Pablo. The space is just small enough to be intimate, but not so small that it feels crammed. I saw people waiting for their latte for ten minutes, all the time with a smile on their faces.

As I sit by the door watching customers walk in, they stretch up on their toes a bit, peering to get a look in the counter at today’s selection from the baking elves in the basement. Their faces are filled with wonderment and eager anticipation. Yet their expressions reveal something else too. It took me a while to figure it out. Then I realize that it is a simple look of happiness. They are happy the way young children are happy and delighted when you bring them their favorite meal on their birthday.

Bakeri it turns out, sells happiness.

I visited Nina in the basement this morning and witnessed the toil and care that produces cinnamon rolls that taste like your grandmother could have made them and savory bread puddings so tasty you don’t want to eat them due to the inevitable truth that every bite will fill you up while causing the pudding to disappear. For me though, the all time favorites are the “bolle med sjokolade” -- baked bun with chocolate -- and the “skolebrød” made with the same cardamom spiced dough as the “bolle”, but filled with vanilla custard. Even better than the ones I had as a kid growing up in Norway.

I don’t drink coffee, but the New York Times recently rated Bakeri as one of the top places to get your morning java fix in all of NYC. I hear it’s really good.

I am nibbling on a baguette that any French baker would be proud to call his own when some questions pop into my mind. How do you make a “product” that consistently pleases and even makes people happy? How do you create something that causes people to wait with eager anticipation to discover the delights of your hard toil?

I’ve been in the “product business” most of my life. I don’t bake artisanal breads. In fact I don’t even know how to make a good cappuccino, but I have developed many software products over the years. Sitting here today, I realize that what Nina is doing to make Bakeri stand apart, what gives it a special flavor that the guy next door simply cannot copy, her secret sauce if you like, relies on the same ingredients that all great products are built of.

So what are these ingredients? Simple: vision, commitment, drive, focus and accountability. In order to bake a standout product Nina is a hands on product owner involved in all the issues that affect her business, small and large. Yet she has also assembled a dedicated team that has ownership and responsibility to take the ingredients and mix them in a way that meets daily demand and to respond to customer feedback in real time. Most important, the product evolves and improves over time in response to seasonal, team and customer influences. Bakeri is an agile operation in the truest sense.

It’s not clear that Nina could scale Bakeri to become a big business. More important, it’s not clear that she wants to. She knows who her customer is and she is true to the quality of her product. The recipe that Nina is following to make Bakeri a high quality product, is creating strong customer loyalty, is causing the word of mouth to travel fast and has made the New York Times write about them several times in their first few months of operation.

I doesn’t matter whether you are a Fortune one hundred corporation or a fifteen person operation in Brooklyn, the recipe, ingredients and organizational structure you need to create great product are the same. Loose track of this and your product will become stale.

Acceleration and Tolerance - 01022010

If you enjoy reading predictions and reflections at the beginning of a new year, like I do, then Twitter is your friend. During the first few of days of this new decade, people I follow are tweeting and re-tweeting overwhelmingly pessimistic reviews of the past ten years and a mix of generally optimistic predictions for the next ten.

As I sit down to write my own new year predictions I have iTunes – surely one of the winners of the past decade – on auto shuffle. And what starts playing, if not my current favorite Norwegian artist Thomas Dybdahl chiming in with “Honey I told you, these things never last. One of these days now, you’ll start dreaming of the past.” That kind of sums it up.

Said differently, if something seems too good to last, it won’t. Things are never as bad as they seem and they’ll look better at a distance and in the past. The future is a pretty blank slate and ours to screw up. In summary: life isn’t what it used to be, and it probably never was!

I know no more than you average reader of the New York Times, Wired, the Economist and blogs, blogs, blogs about green technology, energy and transportation infrastructure, biotech and bioinformatics, economics, climate change, politics, cultural trends, architecture and design, and many of the other topics that will shape our next decade. So I’ll constrain myself to sharing a few thoughts and observations about trends in the area that I spend much of my time obsessing about, namely how we make computers and phones become more social communications devices.

Moore’s law tells us that the long-term trend in information processing is on an exponential curve. Every two years capacity doubles – storage capacity, compute power, etc. – while the price stays the same. This trend has held up for the past couple of decades and it will probably continue to be a primary driver of the rate of change in all areas of our lives in the foreseeable future.

For instance, twenty years ago mobile phones where still an anomaly in the form of big, heavy built in “bricks” tethered to cars. Ten years ago, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, there were four hundred million mobile phones in the world. Today I believe the number is 4.4 billion. And the phones we buy today for a few hundred dollars are as powerful as the laptops costing a few thousand dollars a decade ago. Try figuring out where that curve takes us in the next ten years. It’s daunting.

Everything continues to accelerate. I predict even greater rates of change and here are my trend picks:

All about people – where do you get your information these days? Who answers your questions? If your answer is Google, Twitter and Facebook then you’re a part of the future. If not, then it soon will be. “Normal people" will become a greater and greater part of the fabric of how we engage with information, news, entertainment and commerce. Bottom up distribution and openness will define how we discover and choose our news, eat our food and consume our entertainment. User reviews based on earned reputation, overlapping open and closed networks of people sharing real-time advice, feedback and input and a long-tail of user contributed information will become the core fabric of how we learn and consume.

A return to intimacy – after a decade of putting it all out there, this decade will see a return to intimate, personal and private dialogue and sharing. Public sharing and self-expression is here to stay. BUT, it will be complemented by more private means of engaging with the people we really care about and trust. Private sharing and conversations will emerge as an important layer on top of the public sharing ecosystem. Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and many others have been built on business models that encourage openness and information sharing. The emergence of social networks and smart mobs – where random groups of people (the mobs) contribute and collaborate openly to answer questions aka Wikipedia – were important developments of the last decade. Yet, what has been lost is the private dialogue with room for intimacy and greater personal disclosure. Intimacy will re-emerge through new forms of expression supported by new tools and new business models in the next decade.

Communication, not computing – if you think that the "desktop" interface and computer model is the future, then the coming decade will prove you wrong. Shrinking the computer and calling it a smart phone is fine, but we’ll do much better than that? I have maintained for many years that all computing is all about communication. Whether we’re talking about super computers, laptops, video game devices or mobile phones, all have one thing in common; helping people connect with – communicate with – information, entertainment and other people. When we use Facebook and Twitter, we don’t think about computers, we think about people, information and entertainment. We think about connecting, learning, having fun and sharing. When we put together a spreadsheet we’re communicating information. When typing a search query into Google, we’re looking for information that somebody else is trying to communicate to us. When was the last time you did something that involved a computer that was not about communication and entertainment?

Computers will become less and less visible while information and people will be at the center of everything we do. Even today the computers that power the Internet are in the proverbial “cloud”. When was the last time you thought about what kind of computer powered your favorite web sites? All you see are web pages that can be displayed anywhere. The devices you will use in the next decade will become entirely focused on conversations (people) and experiences (information and entertainment).

Sensors that “see” everything – with the growth of the Internet of things, sensors embedded in the things and devices we use every day will become a rapidly growing, often automatic, input mechanism that fuels new dimensions of the real-time infoscape. For instance, imagine every bicycle connected to the net. (Not hard given that more and more people using a bike have a “phone” in their pocket.) Imagine stepping outside and unlocking a bike from a public bike-stand with your “phone” so you can ride to work. Imagine your bike tracking traffic patterns and the outside temperature. Want to see what parks and beaches are getting crowded, just log on and check with the bikes… Imagine location, orientation, acceleration, speed, temperature, humidity, ambient sound always available from every person with a communication device in their pocket. Then what happens? I sure don't know, but rest assured that the way we think about planning and navigating in our lives will change as much due to ubiquitous sensors as online maps and weather forecasts has changed how we plan trips and travel. Entirely new services and businesses will emerge enabled by public, aggregate real-time data, data and more data.

Experiences and design – many more products and services will emerge built around experiences and design. On-demand customization and personalization will become the expected norm. I have predicted mass customization for a long time. And I will predict it again for this coming decade. Our communications devices, our information portals, our clothes, our carrying cases, our notebooks, our furniture, our transportation devices (cars, bikes, skate boards…) will all be configured and designed to reflect who we are and to meet our individual needs and styles.

Web as platform – the web has become a platform and it will keep on growing in every dimension – ubiquity, speed, storage and breadth of services. I’ll resist the temptation to make another Moore’s law reference and simply remind you how big your hard drive was ten years ago. While the web became the technology and platform of choice for most software developers in the past decade, the same technologies will invade our “peripherals” during the next decade. Web technologies will run on and in everything from hand-held devices, to household appliances to bikes and cars. The Internet of things is the Internet of the next decade. A key enabler will be web technologies.

These are some of my quick reflections. Interested in more? Thanks to some of the people I follow or am “friends” with I came across a few other worthwhile musings and predictions. Read them and laugh:

Five Tech Themes for 2010 - The New York Times Bits Blog’s trend predictions.

Predictions 2010 - John Batelle’s contributions. He’s actually takes a flier on a few such as Apple’s rumored “tablet” computer being a flop. Oh, and he goes back and rates his performance from previous years. Refreshing!

Trends for 2010 - J.D. Meier’s Blog offers a very nice, pretty comprehensive summary of upcoming trends. Includes a comprensive list of references. A very good read!

A VC - Fred Wilson a NYC based Venture Capitalist shares his thoughts about where he’s going to focus this year.

2010’s hottest contenders: 8 products to watch - VentureBeat's contribution. A good, thoughtful roll-up of web services and software products that will make a difference in the next year.

Google’s To-Do List for 2010 - Kevin Kelleher takes a fresh approach on GigaOm and gets the "best prediction quote" award with "Predictions are like Christmas toys — they come tumbling out in late December, only to be cast aside and forgotten a few weeks later.”

This Week On TechCrunch: The seventeen best ‘best-of… …of the year’ (and the decade) lists, of the week - Tongue in cheek roll-up of best-of lists.

Top Ten Digital M&A Deals For 2010 More TechCrunch Silicon Valley navel gazing.

NYT Op-Ed Guest Columnist Ten for the Next Ten - Rock star Bono makes his top ten predictions too. With humor!

Let me end with a wish and plea for some old fashioned, low-tech tolerance.

Diversity, openness and transparency are powerful forces. When matched with tolerance they become unbeatable. I hope that this emerging decade will be one that we can look back on as a decade of openness, acceptance and increased tolerance. Our technologies can and I hope will, fuel openness and transparency and they will connect us to each other and to information like never before. And once we're connected lets recognize that we all have a voice and a choice how we use it. Let's use it to practice tolerance.

Tolerance is something we can all practice in our daily lives. Tolerance does not have to mean acceptance. It simply means making room for points of view and perspectives other than your own. Stay open to influence, integrate a broader range of people, entertainment, information and experiences into your life. It may even make you a happier and more fulfilled person than if any of the above predictions came to fruition.

Nokia to Acquire Plum

Today it was announced that Plum has been acquired by Nokia in an asset sale. We will join Nokia’s Social Location unit.

Margaret Olson and I started the company in early 2005. It's been a lot of work and a very fun ride. I have learned more from the past four and a half years than any other period in my life. More to come on this shortly.

For now, very excited to have 110,000 new colleagues at Nokia and to move to Berlin in the fall to join the Social Location unit there.

Not so social networking

Kara Swisher posted an interview with me: Plum’s Hans Peter Brøndmo Speaks About the Less-Social Social Network! on her Boomtown blog on Friday. I like the "less social social network" angle. It captures what we are doing quite well. Here is the video interview she did with me a few weeks ago at our "swanky" SF office.

We are all obsessing about how we can blurt out anything about everything in increasingly small and public chunks. We can follow Opra, Ashton Kutcher and and now the White House on Twitter and have thousands of friends on Facebook. While, all this is fun and useful, it's such a small part of how we actually share and communicate.

Personal sharing and personal communication whether with family, close friends or co-workers is a critical part of my everyday life. Plum Groups has become the main way I have private, contextual, ongoing, social exchanges with the people in my real life while Twitter is where I get bombarded with the fun, funny, interesting and trivial status updates of people I've deemed worth paying attention to.

Breaking News: Norway to acquire Plum

Check it out, it's official: Norway to acquire Plum in asset sale

Really excited to be moving back to the 'ol country this summer. It will be a Plum assignment.

Who owns my address book?

There is a simple answer to that question: I do. I own my address book. You own yours. The question should really be: "Who will control my address book?"

I am speaking tomorrow on a panel at the ThinkMobile conference in NYC. The title of the panel is - you guessed it - Who owns my address book?

This is an interesting subject. As Facebook just announced Facebook Connect for iPhone and Twitter announces Open Authentication (OAuth) support it is pretty clear that there is a battle for my identity.

And that's really what this is about. It's a question of who controls my identity. A part of my identity is who I am connected to. My address book, or to use social-web speak, my social graph, is an important part of who I am. This is really just the beginning though, because the really interesting data turns out not to be who is in my social graph, but who I interact with.

Therefore step one in the social graph wars is controlling my identity. Once you control my identity you become my passport (MSFT pun intended) for signing in. Next you become my social coordinator, helping me stay in touch with my friends from anywhere. And finally you become my event coordinator and activity tracker. At this point you know who I am, who I know, who I talk to where I go (on the web and in real life) and presumably where I live too.

If that's not the holy grail of marketing information then I don't know what is. Check out my February post Who owns you(r electronic soul)? for more thoughts on the subject.

More during my panel talk tomorrow.

When the conversation gets too big

Is there such a thing as a "big conversation"? I think the answer is "Twitter" -- a conversation with a lot of talking, some listening and a falling signal to noise ratio.

A common objection I hear to Twitter is along the lines of: "what's so interesting about knowing when people are putting their kids to bed or eating dinner". And yes, there is a lot of fairly meaningless or trivial chatter in the Tweetsphere. Yet, the bigger challenge for the social utilities and microblogging sites like Facebook and Twitter is not handling the trivia, it's about how to keep the conversations from getting "too big" and hence too noisy and ultimately irrelevant or useless due to its sheer volume and lack of context.

CNET posted At SXSW, attendees confront Twitter saturation on Sunday and the New York Times Bits blog made similar points here: Social Media Overload Allows Web Apps to Shine. They both raise the question of whether the utility of microblogging, tagging and following breaks down at scale.

What is the value of sifting through tweet, after tweet after retweet from people that you don't or barely know? Information? Entertainment? Awareness? Probably all of the above. The question dujour is when the flow of information starts loosing its value due to its unfiltered volume.

I've been spending more time reading Tweets in the last few months than I spend looking at my Facebook feed. Why? Presumably because I find value in the experience. In fact I do. This shift in behavior is probably the reason why Facebook adopted a more Twitter-like user interface last week.

But the questions being raised about Twitter and the new Facebook interface is mostly about how we manage the overwhelming input. My question is different. I want to know where the "conversations" happen? You know **real** conversations with people interacting and actually listening to each other. Where can I discuss the things I discover in a format that makes sense. Where can I ask for advice and input from people I know?

The tweet spout is an interesting experiment. For the experiment to become a permanent fixture in my life I need to be able to engage in personal conversations with the people I trust and respect. And those conversations have to be separate from the ever growing public Facebook and Twitter flows, or else it just becomes too noisy, too impersonal and "too big".

Can you be social and private at the same time?

Sure you can. Plum Groups launched today and we are making a bet that the answer to that question is a resounding yes.

I'm social when I have dinner with my family.
I'm social when I play soccer with friends.
I'm social when I hang at the proverbial water cooler chatting with people at work.

Each one of these happenings, and many, many more in my daily life are private. I have a constant need to have social interactions and exchange information, news and "status updates" with different groups of people.

Plum Groups is built on Plum's social media sharing platform to accomplish just that - make it easy to share the things you care about with the people you care about. Private or public. You decide.

I know I need it. Hopefully you do too.

Small is beautiful – bringing intimacy to social networking

Hanging out on Facebook today is social like going to a party or reunion with 300 people you went to school with is social.

Sure it can be fun. You run into a lot of folks you know or used to know. Some you may be happy to see. Others you say a polite hello to, but you really don't want to hear about the minutia of their lives, see pictures of their kids, learn about the struggles they are having at work.

It's just not all that interesting. Now imagine that the party happens every day. Phuh!
Today's social networking sites are not well suited for intimate and truly personal social sharing and communication. That's because social networks are getting bigger by the minute, and as they grow they are becoming impersonal and turning into directories of people you know, with a a "bulletin board" and an inbox. Or according to a recent article in The Economist:

...people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project

Don't get me wrong. I love Facebook and look to my newsfeed as valuable source of updates of a certain kind. When my “friends” post status messages that are funny or informative or news articles that match my interest it provides great value. The same applies to Twitter and other social utilities. Yet I do not feel comfortable sharing intimate or personal information in this environment because I would be sharing it with almost four hundred people ranging from family, to friends, to high school buddies, to business associates and sundry others. So when I considered where to share photos from a recent family trip, Facebook was not an option for me.

Yet I do want my close friends and family to see and comment on my personal photos. I also want to post status updates and have various other online social exchanges with different groups of friends and colleagues.

There is no good solution for more private, group oriented social sharing today. Sharing is an all or nothing proposition. As I have scoured the landscape I find that traditional online groups services like Yahoo! Groups or Google Groups can be a partial solution to my social sharing needs. Sometimes private blogs or email may suffice. All useful tools, but they don’t support the powerful ability that social networks have to post status updates, post media, comment and easily track all of the above (and more) in an “activity feed”.

We need something new, something I am going to call social networks for groups, or just “social groups”. Social groups are kind of a marriage of the functionality you find in social portals like Facebook and traditional online groups services like Yahoo Groups. Social groups provide a way for groups of people with a real-world connections to engage and share in an environment where they don't have to worry about who sees what. Social groups are for groups of people who already know each other, mirroring “real life” relationships and connecting us online.

Against a backdrop of high unemployment, economic uncertainty and globalism we seek connection, a sense of belonging and community. Social groups can support connection and community by giving people who know and care about each other ways to easily share and stay in touch through private and intimate ongoing and ephemeral exchanges. Why should there only be one place to congregate and “be social”? And does it make sense that all your four hundred “friends” are there every time you want to share something? In real life you belong to different social groups. Some open. Some closed. Why not online?Social groups are a natural evolution of the social net. The future of social networks has to be a future that facilitates sharing and discussing the things we care about with the different groups of people we care about. We will belong to many social groups and they will by their nature be smaller than today's social networks.

Small is beautiful because small is intimate and because small is personal.

FB and T’s bad date

FB: Hey T I’d like to buy you.

T: That’ll be $400million

FB: Now, now, I like you and all, but really! You’re just a status update.

T: That’ll be $450million.

FB: Hmmm, I thought you said $400?

T: That’ll be $500million

FB: You’re pissing me off. I’m the giant in this space you know. I could crush you.

T: Hold on. I’m down.

FB: My status feature is more sophisticated than your entire service. You should really let me buy you.

T: That’ll be $600million

FB: Ok, that’s enough. I’ve been trying to play ball with you and am willing to be flexible, but if I were you I wouldn’t poke a giant gift horse in the eye.

T: That’ll be $700million

FB: That’s it! I’m outta here. You just wait, I’m going to blow your lamo status updates out of the water.

six months later

G: T, you're just a poor man's email system.

T: Email system? That’ll be $1billion.

FB: Now I am more open just like you T and I have celebrities with profiles. I am going to make you wish you weren’t such a twit back then. Just you wait and see.

T: That'll be... hold on, let me think about it for a sec...