I managed to do something that would make both Henry Parsons Crowell and Sharadamma get queasy in their souls. Crowell, a devout Chicago millionaire, founded Quaker Oats in 1901. Sharadamma, my connoisseur grandmother, fed me upma, a quintessential south Indian breakfast dish typically made of semolina. Earlier this morning I was surprised to find a recipe of oats upma (pronounced oop-ma) on a staid-looking box of Quaker Oats. I was more surprised to find myself cooking it, eating it, and sorta liking it.

I'm excited to post my first article on this fascinating blog. I run the platform, product, and marketing efforts for a relatively new company called nGenera. What's particularly interesting about this blog's topic is that our two primary products, nGen Customer and nGen Talent, are very representative of the two New Age Of Innovation concepts, N=1, R=G.

Companies are struggling with what it means to operate in an R=G world, according to our very unscientific outsourcing poll. When almost everything is available from third parties, how do you know what to make and what to buy?

I previously blogged that N=1 isn't just for consumers, and I used my company's software engineering meta-tool as an example of how N=1 can be applied in a sophisticated technical marketplace -- software engineers as consumers of software tools products. I also used the term "meta-vendor," which to my knowledge is new coinage. I'd like to expand on what I mean by that term.

News websites are abuzz with LinkedIn's new billion-dollar valuation and comparisons between it and social networking sites. I thought it might be interesting to view this information in comparison.

Take a moment to view the earth from space. Try to identify a few countries you know; try your best to draw country and state lines in your mind as precisely as possible. If you can do this easily, kudos. If not, you're probably like me, geographically hazy.

Sometimes old technology is the best technology. Consider customer intimacy. Customer intimacy is the cornerstone of any strong company. Without a cohesive bond between your business -- and every process in your business -- and your customer, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful. And believe it or not, in my 20 years of developing technology solutions for IT professionals, I still haven't found a better tool for understanding customers than the phone.

The concept of N=1 is by no means restricted to the consumer level. Take, for example, the marketplace of software engineers as consumers of software tools. One could hardly imagine a market more different from the traditional consumer market. But the same N=1 principle applies exactly: Give the "consumer" (software engineer) the ability to participate in the creation of the "product"(software tool), according to his or her own needs and viewpoint on what the result should be.

I was just asked by my bank and credit-card company this morning if I wanted to take a customer satisfaction survey. Sure I do. You stink! Customer service in America is at an all time low. In fact, so low and sickening it makes me want to be a recluse and never interact with retail people, banks, government, etc. That's harsh, and it should be. What's worse than that? IVR Hell!

The power of N=1, R=G has become very relevant in the Web 2.0 world, where a lot of end customer data is accessible and can be used to customize the experience for every individual visiting an online site, as opposed to the traditional retail model. The R=G part is an ecosystem.