I am just finishing The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Friedman. By flat world Friedman means that we are part of a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows us to collaborate in real-time, without regard to geography. The flat world means global collaboration has been made cheaper, easier, more friction-free, and more productive for more people from more corners of the earth.
Collaborating with Windows Mobile experts and vendors
A fascinating read, the book provided a context for much of my work in recent years as CEO of Thaddeus Computing. For example, thanks to the Internet, we have been able to partner with 160 Windows Mobile experts and authors of Windows Mobile software. These experts and developers reside in Siberia, Tokyo, Hanoi, Czech Republic, Moscow, Kansas City, and many other locales. We partner with them, few of whom we have personally met, from the small rural town of Fairfield, Iowa.
The experts, whom we learned about from Web sites and support forums, work with us in our annual Best Software Awards. We have communicated with over 90 expert judges this year via e-mail and an Internet system. The system lets judges sign up for, nominate, vote for, and comment on software. The Judges' Home Page contains links to FAQs, judging criteria, a private judges discussion forum, worksheets, and much more. Internally, we have a backend of Web tools to manage the whole process efficiently and effectively. Without this collaboration we simply could not properly select the top software from thousands of products in 125 categories.
Perhaps even more impressive, within a period of two months we formed legal partnerships with 70 small companies in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Our agreements allowed us to package a collection of software from last year's Award winners and finalists as a demo CD and as a retail software package. Our Best of Everything CD and Best of Everything Software Package provide users the opportunity to test and use top Windows Mobile software without having to hunt all over the Internet. Again, an Internet backend played a fundamental role in creating the demo CD and software package. The backend allowed our vendor partners to electronically agree, supply product marketing descriptions, tell us how customers could register their product, upload their demos, and track their customer and accounting information. We used that same Internet system to market the software on-line and allow package purchasers to register their software (www.pocketpcmag.com/viewcd). This system allowed for orderly communications in a new, complex, business proposition with partners of different cultures and languages from every part of the globe, most of whom we had never met, all in a few months. Remarkable!
Good will and trust in the flat world
Both the award judging and CD project are based on trust and good will, mostly among people who have met only on the Internet. Our volunteer experts spend many hours nominating, judging, and commenting. We provide them some publicity (see list of experts, but these experts help out because of their interest in testing new software and their desire to share their expertise. Our CD partners were willing to partner with us based on an untried idea. Trust and good will are the foundations that make such collaboration possible.
Collaboration with our readers
The majority of articles written for Pocket PC magazine are written by expert volunteer readers, and we are all in their debt. Our editorial philosophy has always been that true experts are real users, and not necessarily professional writers. Our internal editors, Rich Hall and Duncan Brown, assist authors with their writing, resulting in clearly written pieces. If you are interesting in submitting an article, please see our guidelines found from our About Us page, at http://www.pocketpcmag.com/submissions.asp.
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