Image via CrunchBase

It seems that most of the mainstream press is befuddled about him and exactly what business  Yahoo! is trying to be. Is it a media company? Is it a bulletin boards company? Advertising? Mobile? Marketing? No, not search.

It is a company that has a rapidly scalable identity and a huge community of users that it can rapid test ideas on, as it builds off what it used to be and turns into the next big thing.

This makes Yahoo! just like a start-up, and Thompson just like a budding entrepreneur, except he has skillz.  Let me boldly proclaim that Thompson’s role as CEO at Yahoo! will move the company in the direction of social, community-centric e-commerce solutions. Watch out, Jack Ma, Yahoo! is coming for you!

Yahoo! is going to become the first huge scale media content company that is actually an e-commerce company. Think of it as a giant tupperware party where content and e-commerce are mashed together to form a new type of selling content, or a live advertising model where product, seller, consumer, and community are all mashed up into one.

Wal-Mart, but with a huge media engine.

Because I think of things differently, and can’t always depend on people understanding what I am saying, I asked the question to the Quora community — Will the Scott Thompson hire move Yahoo! towards e-commerce and away from content?

Here’s what Edgar Alverson, a writer in Atlanta, said:

Yes. Or at least that certainly seems like what the board wants. I think Thompson’s background and the fact that he was selected at this juncture indicates that his mandate is to move Yahoo! toward e-commerce and away from content.

I think Yahoo! will continue to generate a great deal of content, but Thompson will be tasked to streamline it and focus on the strengths. I, like many of Americans in my younger male demographic, see Yahoo! as an ESPN alternative. It has a decent syndicated sports radio network, excellent sports fantasy hosting capabilities and lots of unique sports content. I doubt Yahoo! backs off on its press to compete with ESPN, and I’m actually surprised that it has not started broadcasting games on the web like ESPN3. However, less successful Yahoo! content ventures (and maybe even sports) will quickly disappear under Thompson.

Some of the most interesting companies today operate from a community-first approach. They take a gap in an existing market, and seeing the deficiencies that market leaders in that market experience in trying to scale their already swollen business model, they jump at the chance to do an end-around, inviting people to be greater and more prolific consumers of that economy through participation as a community.

In a world that is rapidly turning mobile, where companies are growing up around communities, and where traditional forms of payment like credit cards are losing out to mobile and e-commerce solutions, Yahoo!, a huge content and advertising engine, could be set to make a pivot towards being a kind of consumer-generated social e-commerce solution.

Look At Precedent

Airbnb is a huge success in this model. They figured out that the same people who might be wanting to rent a place to stay smoewhere in some city might also be the same peole willing to make more money on their current residence.

Instagram has done this too. Instead of trying to come up with a new camera technology, they decided they arlready knew one thing about camera consumers. They like to take photographs. So, let’s make it easy for a community to form around the avid interest to take great shots, and forget the camera. Just use the phone. The same phone you can use to track, link to and engage with a community.

Do I need to go on?

Okay.

Look at Fivver, where communities are formed around doing work for five bucks, where many of those people go on to be individually-run companies that hire out their services based on their interaction in a community that consumes their content.

Look at Soluto, which is trying to put the social into the world’s most anti-social profession, IT.

And consider that shopping is often a vacuum for people who are actually shopping to have their emotional needs met, not their consumer goods needs.

Sales depends on the growth of emotional discovery. Companies that enable this growth enable more sales. It’s the backbone of the Social CRM model being espoused by people like Jon Ferrara, the founder of GoldMine and his newest venture, Nimble. Nimble just got $1 million in funding in an investment round headed by lead investor Mark Cuban.

Where Does This Context Leave Yahoo!

I’d say it leaves them at a great starting off point. E-commerce is the new content.

And content will feed the consumers hungry to do commerce on the phone.

Look at the numbers for Yahoo! in Indonesia, one of the fastest growing mobile audiences on earth, and the country with some of the most prolific social media users through the smartphone.

And in Singapore

Yahoo! have a younger audience, growing in income, who want media. They have a community that is global.

They have a wickedly smart CIO / CEO / CTO hybrid in Thompson, who can help the company rapidly innovate and pitch out new products and service suites to millions of people. Imagine split testing all of that stuff, and then incorporating that knowledge of e-commerce Thompson brings.

I’ll let you think about that for a moment.

All Yahoo! has to do is convince the talent that has stayed to believe in themselves as entrepreneurs, and then bring in e-commerce MVPs that enable people to sell to one another. Maybe they get into a partnership with Square. Maybe they team up with American Express. Maybe they team up with Foursquare. Whatever they do, they feed on existing technologies and communities that will expand their ability to grow in e-commerce at scale.

Yahoo!, Where Every Consumer is the Home Shopping Network

Image via Wikipedia

I give this company 18 months, and in 18 months, they will be a new kind of social shopping giant. You’ll wonder what hit Yahoo!

And in closing, keep in mind what current Yahoo! employee and Quora user Gil Yehuda says about Thompson’s character:

I’m sure he was not hired on charisma alone. He has a track record of success. And he led his last organization to compete against some of the largest, oldest, most entrenched, and heavily funded companies in the world. That took guts and a team of people who thought outside the box, delivered fast, and kept customers happy by delivering great products that worked well, internationally, and at internet scale. He lacks certain key experience in some of the most important aspects of Yahoo!’s business. This means that he’s going to have to rely upon the existing senior leadership for their experience. And he’ll be in learning mode. In a sense this is a good thing, it will ensure some degree of continuity in the second and third levels of management. And yet, I don’t expect his first “100 days” to be quiet or uneventful either. As they say: “Always expect change, expect from a vending machine.”

The most successful entrepreneurs have always been the ones who didn’t know enough to worry, and who  knew enough about their vision to care.

This is Thompson. Yahoo! is about to be the perfect storm.

Image via CrunchBase

Is there any value to joining LinkedIn? Charlie Spencer asks this in his comments at Inc. magazine, where Marla Tabaka has written a thoughtful post about how to maximize your use of LinkedIn to, in some cases find a job, but in most cases network with others.

Often asked as a question, the query about whether there is any value in a social platform is actually a statement of frustration from people who don’t seem to understand that a social platform like LinkedIn is not a vending machine.

Neither is a business in which employees put in 9 hours of work each day in return for a salary, health benefits, and — this is ironic — access to a vending machine.

When my father would take us to work on the weekends, he definitely had work to do. Yes, there was a vending machine quality to the mission. He had to sort “x” amount of work for ”

Image via Wikipedia

“x” amount of hours to get a “y” result, usually routing trucks to do “hot shot” deliveries of Pepsi to stores that had a sale on Pepsi and lost product faster than they could replenish on a regular route cycle. As a kid, I didn’t pay much attention to that aspect of his work, but I did pay attention to what went on while we were there.

Lots of socializing. My father was a manager. He had to manage other sales personnel, who were also there on the weekend. What I noticed at an early age is that the sales staff at the Pepsi plant were doing more than just fulfilling “x” amounts of work to get a “y” outcome. They were showing up for my dad. They knew he was in a position of influence and could help them with their careers.

These were sales people. They worked by the force of their rhetoric, their logic, and their ability to hustle and solve problems. It was clear that by putting time in for my father, they were also representing themselves as people who could be trusted, who supported his efforts and had enough ambition to see the job through.

Today, when many of us work remotely, and, if you are like me, you work for clients you see face-to-face intermittently, you need to show up for them. That’s why you would go to a platform like LinkedIn, for example.

You can communicate there. You can recommend clients to others there. You can get your work done, and you can get other people’s work done. That was the subject of my radio show talk last night with Soluto’s Tomer Dvir.  We are in this game to win, but we want to win with others. We want and need to help others in the dynamic, and chaotically changing structure of capitalism these days.

So when Charlie Spencer writes something like this, let’s pause:

If I’m not in marketing or looking for a job, is there any value in LinkedIn?  I’ve joined for the second time, but I now recall why I canceled my first account.  I don’t know how to get any value from it.

I’m an IT tech for a medium-sized business.  I don’t interact with our external customers or vendors.  While I am aware of the current economic issues, we’ve turned the corner and I expect to remain employed here until I retire in a decade or so.

I don’t participate in other social networks, so that may be hindering me.  I don’t understand the Barbara’s use of the word ‘conversations’ or how to conduct one.  (I have the same problem with my attempts to use Twitter.)  Most of my contacts are co-workers.  I don’t have a ‘real world’ network.

We are nothing without the network. Networks will be our most significant source for rises in income, new job offers, and the rise of what I will call the Freelance Globalist Population, which will work, not for a corporate entity, but in service to many entities, people and missions.

We need to start learning how to use the network, and to utilize the network to feed ourselves.

There is value to a platform like LinkedIn. Without platforms like this in the real world, the dry and mundane aspect of work kills us. It kills our chances for promotion, and it kills our spirits. Ironically, as I was writing this blog post, Charlie Spencer responded with a comment below his first one, noting that he needed to use platforms to improve his social skills and enhance his real world network.

I hope that works for him. We are certainly of the mind here at Re-Wired that we are nothing without our networks.  After all, as we have written before, the new MBA is to manage your business and your team as if you are a social worker.

Nothing in a social web environment exists for the sake of its users alone. Social platforms are not vending machines. They are not vending machines, because you can not, in a digital age, work with the assumption that “x” + “y” = “z”, where “z” is quality of life, and “x” is an input like hours, and “y” is an input like “quality of work.”

We don’t live that way anymore. You cannot put a coin in a slot and get exactly what you want.

You now have to make what you want, and making what you want, creating your vision, starts with starting relationships, building relationships, and becoming partners with people — even complete strangers.

Food for thought: read our latest post on Airbnb and changing your life by changing your networks.

Image by Tomer Dvir via CrunchBase

Today Soluto.com released a new version of its crowdsourced cloud-based IT support network. Soluto is a software program that runs in the background of your computer that helps an IT expert solve any problem you are having in a way that prevents the frustration and the loneliness experienced in the IT help desk industry.

We talked with members of the team in Tel Aviv a few days ago, and here is the radio show, running live now.

The one thing we don’t have right now in the IT profession is a help desk that can be everywhere on every computer, at once.

Tomer Dvir, the CTO of Soluto.com is working with his team to release an update of the social help desk app they created not even one year ago. It’s a way to give thanks, get credit and “socialize” the IT help desk. Dvir says the company wants to create a market for friends helping friends, in order to help the billions of consumers of tech products solve some of their basic — but most frustrating — customer service issues.

The iteration that they release today will allow you to connect socially to experts who know the ins and outs of how your computer, tablet or mobile device work, and you may never have to worry again about the screen freezing, or software hanging up on you.

The point is to make IT help as social and as viral as possible for the billions of people who are your average everyday consumers of tech products.

From their website:

Unless you’re a power-user, you probably don’t know what’s causing the frustrations, those moments where some mysterious process is hogging your PC’s resources. Even if you are a power-user, it can take quite some time to pin-point the causes.

Image via CrunchBase

Today I talked with the CTO and the co-founder of Soluto.com, Ishay Green, and his co-founder and CEO Tomer Dvir. The company, based in Tel Aviv, is getting ready to launch an iteration of their service solution.

Basically, they will offer a free service for the family and friends of early power users of Soluto that allows experts in IT management and solutions, or anyone with any basically great and geeky skills in IT support, use the social web to fix the problem using a very easy to use interface and even crowdsource problems.

The solution could fix a sometimes invisible problem: the products made by Microsoft and Skype are often only really fully understood by the people who make them. You and I don’t care how it works, we just want it to work.

As Ishay said, “I am supposed to be really great at tech, but I have this Mac here, and I’m busting my balls, trying to make it work a certain way.” The companies that make the products are too busy to make fixing any errors easy.

I can’t really reveal the release that’s coming up in a couple of weeks. But I can tell you that Soluto is launching a revolutionary product in their next iteration and it fixes this problem. You should look into how it currently fuctions at www.soluto.com.

I honestly think that Soluto will influence companies as big as Skype or Microsoft to change some of their products. Stay tuned. The radio show will run around December 12.

Soluto CTO Ishay Green points to the 2.5 billion people at the bottom of the pyramid who need tech help, but can't stand the noise

Here is a picture of Ishay Green explaining how Soluto seeks to help the 2.5 billion people who use tech all the time, but who really don’t understand how to fix the problems it has. If you are in tech and can take a look at this, I would love to know what you think of this stage of Soluto’s growth.