This blog has been quiet for several reasons.  For starters, as a company we’re busy with fundraising activities, writing code like crazy, third-guessing our UI development and getting our product in the hands of a few select customers.  On the personal front, I’ve been moving house, which is a charmingly disruptive event at any time, never mind during the whirlwind of launching a new product and company.

Being a thrifty entrepreneur type, I did a "you load, we drive" move, which worked out pretty well for the most part — U-Pack / ABF Freight did a great job.  The only glitch was that Phoenix temperatures shot up to 104 on the day we had to load the truck.

As I was loading boxes of books, furniture and other oddly heavy items, I was struck by the wonder of the dolly.  The wheel at its finest.  Saved a lot of pain and time.  Load up the dolly, push it up the ramp, unload and repeat.  All very effective.  From a previous terrible move where the driver was apparently a part-time Indy500 wannabe, I learned to brace and tie down everything…  Life was good.

Fast forward to the new house in Raleigh.  Truck and dolly in hand, and everything apparently in good order.  But here’s the thing.  Unloading has a fundamental difference to loading: gravity is now your friend, not your enemy.  And what an eager to help friend he/she is!

About 3 seconds into wheeling the first heavy box down the ramp, I felt a sudden and very strong urge for a dolly with a BRAKE.  Some serious shoulder cramps later, I was really thinking seriously about ways in which a brake could be built in to a dolly, thereby making the world a better place.

That night happened to be one of those dog-tired-but-can’t-sleep nights.  As my mind was wandering, it occurred to me that the wheel and the brake actually were a good metaphor for the basic big steps in the development of any technology… 

First comes the wheel — everything changes, life is good, things happen faster, better and cheaper than ever before.  Lots of things can be done with a wheel, and you can make all kinds of improvements to it (bigger wheels, multiple wheels, pneumatic tires).  But after you use the wheel for a while, you realize that as amazing as it is, it is missing something… 

Then some very smart guy (or gal) invents the Brake and  everything changes again.  People who had decried the wheel now find a use for it.  The people that did use the wheel now find new and varied uses for it.  The world changes again.  There are plenty of opportunities for more refinements (engines, suspension etc), but starting and stopping fundamentally enables everything  else.

I think an awful lot of the technology on the web is in "Wheel" stage. 

For example, I’ve been hearing a lot lately from people with Wiki-fatigue.  I have nothing against Wiki’s — they’re a great piece of technology.  But I’ve heard a common theme lately.  The first few months after setting up a corporate Wiki are wonderful.  Suddenly everything is in one place and people love it.  But fast forward a few months and the Wiki has become yet another data black-hole within the organization.  Wiki’s need their phase 2 development — the "brake" stage.

Same thing with email.  The number of people using email as a data repository is HUGE, but the tools to manage that data are pretty weak.  No brakes.  Corporate Intranets have this problem too…

I think of the negative things I’ve heard from users of document and content management systems, and I wonder if some of the issues are due to that technology being in the wheel stage…

Some of the "Web 2.0" products I see definitely look like brakes.  I think what we’re doing at disruptorMonkey qualifies as a "brake" technology. 

Wheels and Brakes — that’s the basics to get everything working.  I’ll be curious to see what technologies  are the next to get brakes over the next 12 months…

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Time for a longer discussion of our thinking about data superabundance, data management and what we’re up to…

Findability is driven by the frequency with which data gets used.  The more you use something, the easier it becomes to find.  Even sophisticated search engines like Google follow this model.  The legendary Page Rank algorithm primarily looks at who links to you.  The more popular a site is based on links, the more findable Google makes it.  So over time, findable data becomes more findable (or if you prefer "the rich get richer" — thanks Todd!).

And don’t get me wrong, Google works great.

But here’s the thing.  Thanks to the crazy year over year increase in data (zetabytes by 2010) more and more data is being used less and less.  "Huh?" I hear you cry… 

Look at it this way.  The amount of data that any individual can use frequently is pretty fixed — there are only so many hours in the day.  Time for a flashback to High School with a scary Venn diagram:

So the green dot represents the amount of data you use frequently.  The red circle is all the data you ever use.  Now let the calendar roll forward a bit.  The overall amount of data has increased significantly, but the amount of data you can use frequently is about the same.  And that picture looks like this:

So as a percentage of all the data, the stuff you use frequently is now a much tinier piece.  In other words, more data is now used less.  As data superabundance continues its merry march, frequently used data will continue to be an ever smaller piece of all the data that exists.  And that’s going to cause all kinds of problems…

And now for part 2 of PTOTD (pet theory of the day)…  The long tail.

If you take all the data inventory contained within a company, assess the frequency with which each piece of data is used, rank them in order and plot a graph, I think you’d see some kind of Power Curve.  This is also known as a "Long Tail" graph.  If you haven’t read the excellent book by Chris Anderson, you really should.

So what?  Well here’s a graph to stare at:

Chris’s book focuses on the long tail for goods.  Most retailers focus on the tip of the long tail — they stock only the most popular items and they sell a lot of each one.  He makes a great argument for focusing on a huge number of less popular items and selling just a few of each one.

The big guns in data management (ECM, CMS, data warehousing etc) are like retailers.  They focus on the tip of the graph — the top 5% or so of a company’s data.  But 80-85% of a corporation’s data is in the "Long Tail" part of the chart.  That data is hard to search and mostly unmanaged.

Now maybe your inner skeptic is thinking that less frequently used data probably doesn’t have much value.  But there’s not much correlation between usage and value.  Less frequently used data just tends to have variable value driven by circumstance — it’s data that may not be needed today but will be vital tomorrow.

disruptorMonkey is building tools to manage the "Long Tail" of data. 

Based on the response from those that get what we’re doing, this is going to be an interesting ride!

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Well fame anyway.  Well okay, modest recognition would be more like it

The folks at the News and Observer did a great piece covering our activities during CED’s Venture 2007 Speed Dating event.

Take a look here for the full story:  "Going on a Date… With Investors"

There’s a lot going on for us right now, so this blog may be a little quiet over the next few weeks. 

Categories: Old Posts
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