Business Social Networking and BuDuRu

Today I was following a conversation on LinkedIn about Business Social Networking and wanted to comment. Social Networking in Business happens to be one of my favorite subjects. Personally I love LinkedIn and what it has attempted to do and the technology behind Facebook is really cool; however, being first a businessmen and second a professional technologist I realized pretty early in these social networks product lifecycles that there was a few crucial drawbacks that made them impractical for use in daily business outside of Hiring, Marketing and general networking. Here is my list of issues I have with pretty much all the social networks when it comes to trying to marry our business requirements with the mostly open nature of Social Networks in general.

• People spend too much time on these sites. - Let's face it they can be addicting and in business that time is real money. Want to play Mobster, do it on your time.
• Profiles for self-promotion. - Other than being mostly tacky the question is what are we trying to sell here, my products or your moonlighting services.
• Old friends. - Specially the ones you were glad to be rid of. Are your old friends going to help our bottom line? (maybe) However, I don’t need my employees compromising our company by have their personal friends linking up with my employees “Business” account (they can see your customers).
• Bullying. - Lying, Rumors and fictitious accounts. At least I have some control over the break room or smoking area.
• Identity theft. - Let's face it people are posting entirely too much of their personal information and for some reason they honestly believe that they can trust the people in their online groups.
• Security. - There really isn't any, from a business perspective try and get a Sarbanes-Oxley or ISO Compliance on your Facebook content.

These along with a few other pet peeves are the primary reason I because involved in the BuDuRu Network http://buduru.net, BuDuRu is a private network that applies the demands of businesses with the principles of a LinkedIn or Facebook. Technically anyone can join BuDuRu; however, there is no such thing as open networking outside of the companies you do business with, so without a formal request from another member you will get really board quickly. Also BuDuRu is in it's infancy so the occasional "undocumented feature" is to be expected. Just my 2 cents, enjoy.

My Geek IQ

Ok I'm a 15 year veteran of the IT industry and I architected some of the worlds largest EDI data processors; however, even with my back ground I have to wonder exactly how long will the information I have in my head be applicable to the industry and to business in general. For me that is a rather large paradox because I am somewhat of a visionary and like to think thoughts on a larger scale. Like with BuDuRu, where the question was how could we streamline the communications between businesses on a global scale? So the other day while out doing industry research I came a cross a link to test my Geek IQ at InfoWorld. Naturally being the old geek that I am I figured that the test would be fun; and considering that I remember working my way around the original ARPANET from a terminal I should naturally score rather well. Boy was I wrong, I scored a 35% :). Do the word "You Sucked" come to mind? The funny part was the test actually recommended that I stop by the Men's Warehouse while I quickly and quietly left the IT Department. I have to ask, how many other professionals have taken this or similare tests? And secondly, how did you do? Come on man, I would like to see if the CIO at the White House knows how many ports a single IP address can have without a Google search.

Touching the Past

2009 seems to be turning into the year I will get back in touch with all those friends and family I had all but forgotten about over the years. So far it is turning out to be one weird and awkward year; however, I'm not complaining, it just wasn't what I expected when I sat down and said this will be my year. So far during this year I have managed to met up (on-line) with Morgan Gillette and Ray Knouse, both were friends from Grade School and Junior High School. I must admit I really have missed these two over the years. Eli (my brother I haven't seen in almost 15 years), and Michael (the apparent son I never really knew I had other than the occasional small town rumors from a place I haven't see in over 20 years) The good news is that everyone appears to be doing well, Morgan and Ray are both married, Eli is on the rebound and has a positive attitude about the future and Michael is living with his Grandfather and doing what all 23 year old boys (and girls) do (day dream about the future).

Let’s end this economy

Ok this has been an interesting few weeks since my last post. A lot of things moving and to be honest I'm just not sure yet which way they are moving.


I guess I should start with the sad news and get that out of the way first. Our neighbors whose 5 year old boy is best friends with our 5 year old son Joshua, the father has been battling cancer (in the brain) for most of the year and has lost a large percentage of his vision, and apparently is also loosing the battle. Last week as an ambulance was carrying him to the hospital we learned that the husband (36) is dieing and has only been given about 30 days or so to live. I don't even know what to say to that. Normally I'm pretty composed, but this almost brought me to tears, their son has been over at our house almost every weekend over of the past 2 years and is like a second son to me. And now the thought of this child being without a father is gut wrenching to say the least. Every time I look out the back window I hope to see the boy playing. After my wife's fight with cancer 3 years ago the subject is very personal to be.


BuDuRu: A few weeks ago I updated everyone about my first encounter with Todd who was visiting Portland for “VAN Summit 2009”, well I demoed BuDuRu for him which he absolutely loved and appears to be pushing for me to demo it again (after a few bug patches ;) ) but this time to a few of his partners. The cool thing is when Todd (being the visionary type also) and I start to brain storm, some really cool things come out and one of them will potentially change how the internet works. Only time will tell. As far as a product update goes, we are patching our butts off to try and bring this product to market. The good news is that our mail server has been setup and now I'm just waiting on the MX information to take affect.


Economy: Ok I'm tired of watching my friends and business associates loose their jobs and their homes because of this economy. As a consultant, I'm always out of work and hunting for the next gig. So just like the past 200 other times I've been without a job, I take a few hours to gather my thoughts and then get on the phone and start creating my own economy by dialing for dollars. However, this time I don't need the job, my friends do. And in a strange twist of fate two business associates (Reha and Michale) both lost their jobs within one day of each other. Reha and Michale are what we in the industry call professional head hunters and both are really good at their jobs.


So in light of this strange twist I offered to let Reha and Michale utilize my company EDI Associates, my network and computer system to start making placements. Here's the deal, most major placement company's such as Oxford, Oracle, SAP, etc generally have a 70% – 100% markup or more on their consulting services. Sterling Commerce once paid me $60 per hour on a contract I later learned was billed at $220 per hour. Our goal is simply, just get people working again. If our markup is only 1% then so be it, the larger picture of getting people back to work and keeping a roof over their heads is much more important than the bottom line at this point. So with that in mind I hit a few of the larger users groups on Yahoo today and started asking for resumes for all things technical (EDI, SAP, Oracle, i2, developers, analysts, etc), basically everyone under the sun and so far it's 10:30pm on a Friday night and just about 6 hours after I started all this and so far I have received about 15 resumes. Not a bad start; however, considering the doom and gloom the TV keeps broadcasting I was actually expecting to see worse. I will see what happens over the weekend.


Texas: Monday I'm off to Texas to sit in on an SAP upgrade planning meeting to be held on Tuesday morning. I'm already pretty certain I have the contract for the EDI segment of the project, which based on the scope, should employ 2 or 3 people for about 3 months. Basically I've been working with this company for many years and I'm really hoping to be able to secure an additional requirement or two in the hopes of getting another professional off the bench and out on a project.

VAN Summit 2009 and BuDuRu

Ok this week was VAN Summit 2009 here in Portland, OR and for those of you not into this type of thing VAN stands for "Value Added Network" and this week was a meeting of the minds that keep the industry ticking along. For those of you that know me I have managed my own boutique VAN service for the better part of the past 5 years and have consulted to the industry for over 10 years. So as you can imagine I really wanted to go, you know the opportunity of a lifetime to rub elbows with the who’s who of an industry I really have grown to love over the years. So as you can also imagine how upset I was when I found out it was over $150 per ticket and I was broke.

God bless webinars, as it happens I heard through the grape vine that Todd Gould (CEO, Loren Data) would be broadcasting the Summit on Webinar and anyone interested could connect up and listen in. So I sat at my desk, worked and listened to Todd and a few other presenters give a presentation about a VAN service for VAN services, or a central command and control structure that would allow just about any VAN to lookup on the fly almost any Receiver ID from a central database and see which VAN Service they are on and the route needed to get the data to them. The cool thing is that a lot of the stuff they were asking for sounded a lot like BuDuRu, my pet project over the past 3 years.

After hearing the entire webinar and hearing the presenters come out on stage asking people to start thinking of ways to correct the issues of the industry I decided I would at least tell them what I have created and see what they think about it. So I did a little research and came up with Todd’s email address and sent him a short note thanking him for the webinar and inviting him to coffee while he was still in Portland. Todd agreed to meet me at Powell’s World of Books on Wednesday afternoon. So on Wednesday I dug into my change cup and got enough money for the bus fare to Powell’s and jumped the bus.

In short I learned many years ago, getting your foot in the door is almost always about who you know, so never pass up an opportunity to meet with someone new and especially someone that has influence in your chosen industry. In short I wanted to hear what Todd had been developing and then fill him in about BuDuRu and see what he says. After giving Todd my BuDuRu spiel it seemed like Todd was about to fall out of his chair. The rest of our meeting was great, talk about a brain storming session of like minds. Todd would toss out ideas and issues and I’d through out potential ways of doing it in BuDuRu. The cool thing was at the end Todd asked if I was interested in taking on equity partners, if so how much would I need and when would we be ready.

At this point all I can say is I’m excited and a little apprehensive, basically I’m not sure what to think. Next week I’m to demo the product for Todd. It’s not the money; BuDuRu is going to go live in February anyway with or without it. For me it has more to do with the fact that a major player and a visionary to the industry has accepted my idea as valid and has taken an interest in seeing it progress. However the investor side I liken to a car. I have this car; it runs and barely will seat 2 people legally. I’m standing at the fuel pump and it’s about 80% full of fuel and we are about ready to go. Sure the car could use tires, tune-up, alignment, some working seatbelts and a really good cleaning; however, that doesn’t stop me from leaving on my trip. I’ve heard way to many horror stories about VC and Angle Investors just walking in an demanding the world. What I’m afraid of is someone just running in thinking they can just snatch up 80% of my company and product and then just coast their way across the finish line on our effort alone. I’m not a greedy guy and I have offered to share anything that comes of my idea with some 15 people over the years; however, I have one barrier for entry, you have to show up and you have to contribute and based on that alone the team consists of only three (David, Alex and I) people. There will be more to follow as next week progresses.

HID and my trip to Irvine

Ok, this last week I was in Irvine, California on an eCommerce project for HID. Pretty low key stuff actually and unofficially this project could go on for a few months. My part in this project is minor I’m just setting up and mapping their customer connection with Siemens in and out of Oracle. No real secrete really when you go to Siemens website your able to order HID card readers and cards, my work allow them to pretty much integrate that order into a rather seamless process which can save both companies $100k’s per year in manual processing and error correction time and costs. My favorite story has to do with a major pharma company in Illinois where we were able to boost their electronic processing of orders and invoices to over $30M per day. This allowed the company to restructure and reallocate from 80+ call center employees to 20.

Ok back to Irvine, if you don’t know HID I’m sure you are familiar with their products. HID makes the security cards and readers that most companies use to control access to entry ways and data centers. For me because I do have a data center, personally I think the idea of doing a project for the company is really cool, as I do with any company whose products I use almost daily. Historically I’ve done projects with Justin Boots, Linksys, Nike, Oakley and Gateway; all companies whose products I use. Now by far the best tasting project was the Lindt & Sprungli Chocolate factory in New Hampshire; I walked out of there with over $200 in Truffles and that was with the employee discount. I was giving chocolate gifts away for months after that project and I don’t think I’ve eaten a single Truffle since.

On this trip I met with a number of really good friends whose friendships I have come to cherish over the years. If it wasn’t in part for their efforts I would not be nearly as successful as I have been over the years. Friends like Reha Duzel, Steve Rockey, Sean Chawla and Manoj Dhruve just to name a few. Being rather a business fanatic by far my favorite meeting was breakfast with Rockey and Reha at the Knowlwood restaurant.

Sean is an entrepreneur and a very strong and ethical business man that has build a technology company worth over a $100M, I truely value his opinion because I know he as been down a lot of the roads I still have to travel as I look to also build my own.

Rockey has a girth of business knowledge that comes from his many years of building businesses up for people and then helping them sell them. I only hope to be able to master even a small percentage of that some day and as I suspected I was not disappointed. After hearing me out it quickly became obvious why he makes the big money. Rockey's true colors came out in about 3 very specific bullet points, which will be the subject for a future post and I will be pursuing for BuDuRu in the very near future now that I'm back in Portland.

Reha is hands down like a brother to me and the amount of grief he has had to endure over the past few years in reference to a shady real estate deal he got involved in really pains me. In short the builder got his money and walked before the job was finished, now Reha is stuck with a house he can’t live in a rapidly declining real estate market. And in an effort to avoid a foreclosure they have been forced to rely on the generosity of others just to survive. Last I heard was that the home was to potentially short sale, it’s a hard way to go; however, the stress of the past few years will finally be over. Meeting with Reha is always a pleasure and I wish him and his loved ones nothing but the very best.

Dinner with Manoj and his family was great; however, he really needs to reset the clock on his DVD player. It’s the only clock in the room and I kept looking at it to see what time it was, turns out that the clock was almost an hour and a half to slow. I thought I was getting out of there around 9:30, turned out to be almost 10:45, no wonder they seemed to be in a hurry to get me out the door. :) Thanks bud. The curry was great, but boy did I pay for it the next morning.

BuDuRu - The Dream or The Curse :)

Have you ever had one of those ideas in your head that regardless of how whacked out you may think the idea of you actually being able to make a positive impact on the world may be, you just can’t get past the fact that there is true merit driving the idea? I’ve had one of those ideas for the better part of the last 3 years now and it true goal is nothing short of changing the business world for what I hope to be the better.

Over the past 10 years I have averaging between 3,000 and 5,000 miles per week 40 plus weeks out of the year working as a professional B2B systems architect. That aside there has always been a number of things that has bothered me about how companies go about their day to day routines. I hate to say it but even in the age of LinkedIn, UCCNet and D&B, very few companies actually utilize technology to try and streamline their business relationships, other than the age old EDI for moving transaction between partners. The truth of the matter is that companies all over the world really have no clue what is happening with their partners companies until they hear about it on CNN or they call the office looking to talk with the people they were introduced to 3 months ago.

Right off the top of my head I am able to list 3 multi billion dollar fortune 500 company’s that keep track all of their partner contact information in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or Outlook contact book which consequently both are almost always out of date. One company actually hired me for a period of 3 months to do nothing but physically make contact all the companies in their spreadsheet and verify the accuracy of the information. The problem is that over the years I’ve learned that this is was not an exception but the norm and the information that these companies are trying to gather is spread far and wide around the world both in digital and physical form and lastly almost impossible to find even for those people that are IN with these groups (such as myself).

A little history, sure there have been a few attempts D&B for example; however, they are only concerned with your company credit information and you as the company being reported on have no control over the information. Other examples Sterling Commerce, SPS Commerce, GEIS and Inovis to name a few have all tried to make their own partner networks so companies would be able to share their information with their trading partner; however, mostly do to pricing and structure these initiatives have failed miserably because companies happy with Sterling were not leaving Sterling and had no desire to sign another $200 per month VAN contact just to connect with one or two other trading partners. Then came the Enterprise Social Networking club, Jive Software with its ClearSpace product being the most notable. Sure it’s a great company and the product is almost spot on; however they grossly underestimated the scope of the problem. Sure they made fortune 500 status based on the idea; however, lost it very quickly because they missed the scope. Like our economic problems of today, they chose to build a $30k product and sell it to a few needy 800 pound gorillas, just as George Bush chose to give $700B to Wall Street and a few banks almost completely ignoring the fact that the problem is global in nature and even with the money Wall Street and the banks were not about to start lending money again because the fundamental risks that drive these markets were still present.

So as you can imagine it didn’t take long for companies to realize that all they were really getting was an Outlook address book that was reluctantly but almost always up to date. The funny thing is that Jive inadvertently created a whole new industry of employees that do nothing but run around to these wonderful private company social networks updating and verifying information and one company was actually willing to pay me $65 per hour for 3 months to do exactly this task and I hadn’t been the first consultant brought in for the task.

The idea: An Enterprise Social Computing network that blends little peaces of the best successful social networks on the market (basically a LinkedIn or Facebook for companies and consultants that do business with other businesses). Yes it is a members only network and yes you have to be accepted to link into at least one company or organizational network to maintain an account here; however, the price is nominal, less than $50 per month and is only there to offset the operational costs of such a global network and allow for the growth and development of future improvements. The other option which I really didn’t like was to bombard the users with advertisements on every page (commonly known as the Google model); however, at that point I would be stepping into something I know little about and actually find myself rather firmly against. I have a hotmail account that keeps showing my ads for weight loss and dating sites and neither are services I have a need or interest in.

This idea now has a name “BuDuRu™”, and the idea alone has spawned a rather large following of companies and organizations that are very interested in seeing the product once it’s released. Based on just our initial conversations with potential businesses and organizations we currently have enough interest that I can honestly say that our 25 company cap for the beta release has more than been met. The beta is to be released in Feb and I will follow up more on this subject as issues arise.

Sun and the Big Interview

First off today is Sun’s Birthday, Happy Birthday… Sun is truly one of the lights of my life. Yesterday was her first ever "official" job interview; she is at that age where it is truly cool to be Dad. Something I’ve learned over the years is that when your kids gets into their mid 20s and life is starting to push them around a bit, you will find you suddenly are able to associate with the questions regardless of the gender and age gaps and trust me I know a thing or two about interviewing for a job.

One of the things that sucks about consulting is that you could do the same job for a different company every day for the next 5 years, publish 2 or 3 books on the subject, conduct seminars with 1000s in attendance and be called "a god to the industry" by Business Week; every single door you walk into will have a manager that really has no clue what you do sitting there ready to interview you. The funny thing is that it’s the same questions over and over again. I even had an interviewer once ask me "Why would you like to work at X, Inc.?". In the back of my mind I'm asking "What kind of question is that for a consultant?" Oh well to the question I said "I don’t." Yes I did pause just to witness the look on his face, it was obvious no one had told him why I was being interviewed, then I continued with "I’m only here to setup and map your EDI link with Home Depot, I'll be gone in a few days." Turned out the company actually had an official interviewer and that was all he did was sit down with every potential employee and ask the same block of questions. Now there is a job with "Promotion" written all over it. As they say "If you can’t be fired, you also can’t be promoted", look like they have themselves a future CEO there. Go figure.

Just Starting Out

I'm not sure how long I will keep this up. I will admit I almost always have something to say; however, I generally am to busy to find time to say it. What are a few of the topics you can expect to read about here, well for starters you may find a post or two about my wonderful family. I can not stress how blessed I feel every time I see all of them together. Secondly, I'm a visionary technologist and a chronic entrepreneur(short for I spent all the money I was suppose to give the IRS for another developer, screw it you only live once and they can't stop you from dieing), so some of the stuff I'm working on may find it's way into this blog.

Well I think this should be good for a first time blogger. Besides all those entrepreneurial visions cost money and in order to make some more money and keep my over seas developers happy I need to haul my happy ass down to Irvine, CA on Monday to work a project at HID. Actually words can't suggest how cool I think it is to spend time working at a company who's products I actually use on a daily basis. Only problem is the true geek comes out and I start asking questions. Oh well that is for another post.

Also I would like to wish my wonderful daughter (Sun) Happy Birthday (Jan 17th).