Early Strategies has just released a fresh an extremely useful report on Enterprise 2.0 and the current level of adoption.

This international (FR, UK, NE, US) survey (summary) was conducted between November 2009 and January 2010, targeting Multinational Companies (MNCs) and international organizations (France-Telecom, Cisco, AT&T, Amadeus, IBM etc …). The clear intent was to study change execution.

This report sheds a bright light using real life examples on favorite topics of the Enterprise 2.0 Activists community : cultural values, strategic reasons, change agents, executive champions, management inducements etc …

This analysis is precise enough to distinguish different results depending on the type of company business (B2B, B2C). It’s pretty interesting to see the consequences this difference creates in companies adoption strategy.

The results and conclusion on strategy, maturity, change, policy but also on people daily work and perceived usefulness have priceless value for anyone wishing to embrace the subject of Emergent Social Software Platforms (ESSP) adoption.

Last but not least, the report addresses the ROI issue, the one most E20 activists are the least comfortable with – Andrew McAfee included. Early Strategies approach differs as it distinguishes tangible from intangible ROI. thus provides a completely different perspective on the whole thing.

Together with McKinsey’s and Cisco, probably the most insightful report on the topic I’ve read so far.

Tech It Easy has been lucky enough to have the opportunity of an interview with the person behind Early Strategies : Cecile Démailly. Impressive professional background, real enthusiasm and insight on the ESSP topic, and a charming person : Tech It Easy readers deserve no less …(Note, I’ve bolded+italicize most interesting and valuable parts- there are quite a few). Read more »

Emergent Social Software Platforms (ESSP) are now at the doorstep of the enterprise. The question one may ask is : how does it fit alongside the already existing Enterprise IT systems.

Companies have spent a fortune during the last 10 years implementing business critical Enterprise wide systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) or Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Yet another system could be seen as a risk for the balance of the whole company IT strategy.

In his enlightening book on PLM (Product Lifecycle Management, Driving the Next Generation of Lean Thinking) Michael Grieves proposes a map to illustrate the positioning of PLM together with the main business critical IT systems.

This blog post extends this map and propose a perspective on Enterprise 2.0 platforms positioning.

Read more »

I live in a funny world. My company, which is composed of several disciplines in the manufacturing, industrial design, and, yes, programming space, is one factor. I sometimes see people screw together contraptions in our workshop, and I see coders banging away at their PCs and Macs, and I wonder what the hell I am thinking calling programming low or high tech. There are different degrees to everything and just like metal and a few screws can lead to an amazing creation, so lines of code produces the amazing virtual reality I interact with most of my days.

This will be a short post. I think that the Internet has proven to be a two sided coin. It brought us freedom of information, but bits are also information, which makes it hard to gain value from them. Looking at it through a business lens (a flaw of mine) I can’t help but wonder if programming is a worthwhile direction to take, if you want to make money at least.

The other side is what I wrote about in paragraph one. Code produces wonderful things and I am grateful everyday for the fruits of that labour. So I sincerely hope that my world, the business world, will continue to allow for “the code” to reign free, and for those that produce code and its products, to reap the rewards and continue to do what they love.

So I apologise for whatever I wrote previously, namely that software is not high-tech, i.e. innovative, because it simply does not apply to all code (just to the 100s of 1000s of me-too apps and websites out there, which ruin it for the good ones).

This post was inspired by Fred Wilson’s post “Code As Craft” and by one of our interns producing “beautiful code.”

This is just a short list of challenges that I faced with my current business. Feel free to suggest other things in the comments.

1. your relationship with the company & people you’re starting with: coming out of a position that involved reading a lot, a lot of contracts, I’m kind of particular about how to phrase them. I like the idea of contracts if they very clearly state the boundaries of your position and the relationship you have with others. It should also clearly state the deliverables that have to be met, though that can also be included in a separate “action plan.” A good contract should leave no room for misinterpretation, which is why it took about 3 weeks and 8 draft-revisions to get it just how both me and the company wanted it. Of course, a 1 person business doesn’t have to do this, nor someone that doesn’t get paid, though both in “hobby (that become) startups” situations and multi-team startups, it’s good to have a thing on paper that states a number of things including responsibilities & shares, as well as, if possible, time-frames for carrying out the job. You don’t need a lawyer for this, it’s best to start with a simple list of what you want to achieve and work from that. Very important is to mention what national law this contract falls under (e.g. Dutch law or French law), full names & addresses, etc.
2. your intellectual property: I’m kind of running up against something like this now, which is why I think it’s worth mentioning. IP has different values in different industries of course, but in my industry, a high-tech non-software one, it plays an important role. Not only is it important to dedicate certain resources at protecting your IP, you also have to watch out that others don’t lay claim on it, just because you spoke to them once or twice (or worked there at some point. The Mattel vs. Bratz case is an interesting one to follow for that.). IP protection also plays a part when talking to outside parties like investors. Last but not least, it does protect you against copycats, though, as mentioned, the value of patents or similar varies from industry to industry.
3. your own finances: They say that you should have enough saved up to not have to work for 1 year. I’ll just say that I made sure that I do have a comfort zone, though not so much that I won’t stay hungry (lesson 101 in entrepreneurship and raising (rich) kids: instill a hunger for success).
4. the company finances: at my last company, my job was to handle certain business affairs for companies that have their legal address with us. Company finances are a complex affair, and plenty of swindlers out there try to get out of taxes here and there. Not that I don’t sympathise, but be careful of not signing something that makes you responsible for someone else’s problem. Something similar occurred last year, where someone signed something that nearly (!) made him responsible for ca. 1 million euros in unpaid taxes. Let’s just say that the lesson was to have complete transparency from the start and not sign if it doesn’t exist. Preferably this should be specified in the contract (point 1) also. The other side of the coin is that the company has to become a financial vehicle for the people working there. That means that managing its finances (income and expenses) is vital to making sure that there’s also enough money to pay all the costs.
5. staying organised: Kind of obvious, a chaotic entrepreneur doesn’t make for a good entrepreneur. As I have about 12 different jobs, I have to make sure that I don’t forget what needs to be done, to prioritise the important things at the right time, and to delegate those tasks that I have no time for or someone else is better suited for.
6. staying healthy: I’ve seen three people pass away that I’ve had a professional relationship with. One was of an advanced age, one had a deadly disease, and the third passed away at a very young age of medical complications. Two of these were entrepreneurs, and both let themselves get carried away by stress. Stress means: less sleep, eating crap-food (my new term for fast-food), and not taking the time to exercise. It is not where I want to end up, I want to do a good job (it is just a job) and live long enough to reap the rewards (preferably, I’d like to live forever, but that’s a future startup).
7. staying connected to people: as a first time CEO, I have a lot of questions and the best way to have them answered is to ask them to people that are smarter than me. Luckily, there are many, many smart people out there, and people love talking about that which they know.

That’s it for now and all I could fit into 30 min. of writing. All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

Both ‘startup’ and ‘entrepreneur’ are terms that immediately evoke an often false reaction from an audience and I would personally prefer not to describe my work using those words. In the following post, I write about three associations in regards to entrepreneurship, one positive, one negative, both somewhat false, and one what I see entrepreneurship as really: just a job. As usual, these diary posts, which I try to write in a short amount of time, are produced with minimal editing. I hope it makes sense. All my entrepreneurial diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

The popular associations
The word entrepreneur has two popular and a third upcoming association. One association is negative, that of a risk-taker and in some ways a loser—this would be more in a European context where job-security is highly valued. The other is positive, that of a potential Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, i.e. the smart entrepreneur who sees a big opportunity and has the drive, intelligence, and access to other resources to make it very big.

Of these two, the latter is what we are all aiming for, but realistically that applies to less than 1% of entrepreneurs today (using the very broad definition of someone that starts anything from 1-man webdesign company to an ambitious cure for cancer). The first association is also a misunderstanding of entrepreneurship, as entrepreneurs are not blind risk-takers, or at least they shouldn’t be. I would say and hope that it applies to a minority of entrepreneurs also.

The third association: a career-choice
The third association is that of an upcoming trend: entrepreneurship as simply a job. You’ll find plenty of job-adverts with “entrepreneurial attitude a plus” or similar in the job-description, a term I hate just as much as the often mis-used “business development,” standing for just B2B sales.

Added to the job-description part comes that there are plenty of entrepreneurial courses and full academic programmes available to the public, one of which I enjoyed, though I know from personal experience that that doesn’t make a person an entrepreneur.

A third factor contributing to the ‘entrepreneurship is a job’ association is easier access to the marketplace. I’ve had some online discussions with Cecil Dijoux on this blog about today’s technology culture in the context of enterprise software development, and there is as much a democratisation of software-/web-ware development, as there is of other increasingly “low-tech” industries. (As a side note: My definition of low-tech is a technology something has very low barriers to developing it.).

I think that the abundance of resources (not just) in regards to programming, to very well developed (internet) distribution methods for getting products, tangible or intangible, out to customers, as well as more-and-more programmes for funding/assisting startups, means that entrepreneurs have access to a better developed funnel where it comes to their profession of gathering resources and marketing their products.

That doesn’t make it easy, and actually brings other challenges like being one tree in a very large forest, but it does mean that it can be seen as a type of job.

Now, what is there not to like about the word ‘entrepreneurship’?
Maybe it’s a personal thing, but I feel very uncomfortable telling people I meet that I’m an entrepreneur. One, I do see it like a job, a job that I have to do well, and nothing special really. The term ‘entrepreneurship’ makes it sound fancy, which it is not. Two, I’m a European and I do feel the same association that many Europeans have to the word, which is that it’s “less than a real job.” Rationally, I don’t think that’s true, but emotionally I have found myself feeling the following initial reaction more than once when someone comes up to me and describes himself as an entrepreneur:

“Get a job, you hippie!”

Add to this that a startup is not a company until it makes money, and an entrepreneur is not an entrepreneur until he makes money doing what he does.

So I think the term ‘entrepreneurship’ is glorified, perhaps invented to make entrepreneurs feel like they’re doing something special, same as the term ‘Artist’ or ‘Inventor.’ Art isn’t art unless the audience considers it so, and people have invented plenty of mousetraps that are now collecting dust in a garage somewhere.

Suggest something new please
I’d like a new term for what I do and maybe you can suggest one. It should perhaps be related to a startup, which immediately summarises what is happening: A company that is starting up and isn’t there where it wants and needs to be yet.

The problem is that an entrepreneur is not always in the same class as a startup. He can be 50 years old and have a long and successful career behind him. Would you call him a “starter,” a term often used for people fresh out of college applying for a job at Consultant X or Multinational Y? Generally, entrepreneurs are responsible for the activities that happen in a startup in order to make it a success. Their chances of success increase if they have prior experience, resources, and networks to build upon, that make it easier to access the three pillars of “starting up,” as I’ve summarised in the picture above.

In regards to the above, I personally like to describe my work as “I’m running a small company and we’re developing a new product X,” but that is also a bit of a mouthful.

The other side of the coin is that entrepreneurs are in (desperate) need of marketing, where glorification does play a part. I read somewhere that entrepreneurship can be described as the process of developing something irregardless of resources currently in possession. That suggests a pitch is necessary, and perhaps already being termed an entrepreneur helps getting a foot in the door. I doubt it and it would personally bother me if that’s all it took, but I’m smart enough to realise that we “entrepreneurs” need to do whatever it takes to acquire resources, as long as it fits our code of ethics of course.

So, entrepreneurship, yes or no? I don’t like the term, but I may be stuck with it. If I come up with something more apt, I’ll let you know. And same for you please!

After reading the excellent Andrew McAfee Enterprise 2.0 book, I was wondering if there was any point for Heavy Mental to publish yet another review. There already are plenty around with Venkatesh Rao’s on Enterprise 2.0 blog and Gil Yehuda’s probably being the most interesting ones.

It might be more valuable to offer a perspective focussing on the Adoption part of the book. By and large, the adoption topic has been the one sparking off most of the conversations and thinking on the Enterprise 2.0 topic. The idea is to confront McAfee work with a reference on the topic of adoption of innovation : Diffusion of Innovation : by Everett Rogers.

In all fairness, I haven’t read Diffusion of Innovation. I only know it through Scott Berkun presentation on innovation (already mentioned in a post on the subject). Scott quotes Everett Rogers work :

The diffusion of innovation is based more on sociology and psychology than on technology. Here are the things technologists hate : whenever they come with innovation, the main forces against the innovation adoption are sociological ones : ego, envy, fear, pride, politics, security etc …

These are the factors according to E. Rodgers to evaluate how likely your solution is bound to be adopted :

• Relative advantage : what value does it bring ?
• Compatibility : how much effort to transition to this innovation ?
• Complexity : how much learning is required to apply it ?
• Triability : How easy is it to try the innovation ?
• Observability : How visible are the results ?

Enterprise 2.0 represents innovative ways to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge among distributed teams in the organizations. So let’s see how Mc Afee writings answer these questions …

Read more »

This post is part of a series, a diary of starting a business if you will. It follows part 1, the decision of becoming an entrepreneur.

One thing I found out is that it’s hard to put your responsibilities down on paper… there are so many!!! There is of course a basic job-description, which more or less sounds like that of a project manager/pull-the-rabbit-out-of-the-hat magician: “make it happen that we go from this thing on paper to the product in the hands of customers.” “Make it happen” is a super-loaded phrase, which can mean countless things.

There is a continuous struggle between micro-management and keeping the overview. Micro, because it is your responsibility that every (little) thing is carried out by your employees (if you have them). Overview, because You the entrepreneur are The Organisation. There is a third struggle that shouldn’t exist really, that between your professional life and your personal life. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to do this thing well is to focus on it exclusively. Friends, family, love, …blogging… it’s a nice luxury to have, but it comes second place.

The responsibility of an entrepreneur are thus: have a goal and make sure that everything is executed to get to that goal.

In a technology company, there are matters of technology and business (really, in what business except for strategy consulting isn’t there a mix of “technology,” which can mean anything from cooking to software development, and the commercial side of things, which is meant to pay for everything?). What I found was that as someone with a business background, who sort-of-kind-of has an idea about product development, and has a better grasp of business development, I still can’t let go of the reigns of product development entirely.

Product development ties in directly with business development. People are unwilling to pay for something that doesn’t exist and similarly our budget is supposed to last us until we have something worth paying for or investing in. Therefore, as an entrepreneur I have to make sure that product development stays on track. The absolute best way to do this is to have a capable product development manager in charge. The truth of it is that startups by their nature are resource-poor, which includes tripple-A product development managers (probably employed at multinational X or Y somewhere), and there is a lot of learning/training on the job. Learning/training means that the (hopefully) existing product development manager (in our case yes) still has to be managed, through schedules and regular meetings. In any case, product development is in its conceptual stage a very brainstorm-friendly activity, which means the more the merrier. But ultimately, a startup must get beyond this stage, respecting the entire resource-poor situation that a startup usually faces.

So, responsibilities of an entrepreneur as far as the technological product development is concerned: If you have a product development manager, you have to make sure that he works under the realities of the business. If you don’t, which I imagine many 1-person software startups operate under (as well as those lucky strategy consultants), well then you have to do the job of product development as well, keeping a close eye on the business realities.

OK, the business part of things. My role is fairly well-defined here as I come from a business background and approach startups from a business perspective. Assume that role 101 is having a firm grasp on everything that goes on, which can be phrased as “where are resources (people, time, money) being expended at and is it wise to do so.” This entails having a good budget plan and sticking to that.

Role 102 is to build the business, which I call business development, but that often gets confused with sales as that that is what it says in job adverts. Business development is the building of the business, which includes sales, but also includes building the company and all that entails.

So, we are trying to get from point A to point P, how do we go about it? If product development is about turning an idea into a product, business development is building a business plan into a business. Business plans are total BS unless they contain validated information. Some key-chapters in business plans are the market overview, the market approach, the time-line, and the financial need to meet all these objectives. Business plans can serve as a. cannon fodder, b. a plan of approach, c. one of several signals to attract investment. For c. no investor will take a look at your business unless you have a plan of approach (b.). On that plan, there should be a time-line, which you are following (predictability!) and there should be a goal: the market you are targeting and your approach.

The market section of the business plan presents a big problem for technology entrepreneurs. Because (non!) customers often don’t know what they want. I can ask a target group “what kind of air do you like to breathe?” and it wouldn’t surprise me if a significant number of responses would say: “I like to breathe air that smells like perfume.” OK, that’s a terrible question, but what I mean is that people sometimes make up answers that have nothing to do with reality (that said, both the perfume business and the fast-food industry have made lots of money from essentially selling air that smells good. Scent is also plays a very important part in memory, but I digress…)

What I’m a big fan of is validated market data, which is data gathered from actual customer experience with your product or part of it. That brings forth another problem of a bias towards early (and over-excited) adopters, something which the book “crossing the chasm” deals with, but is really not something that I think is realistic to address at an early stage, except that validated market data can also come from experts in the markets you are targeting.

The implication is also that product development is again completely tied in with business development which leads us down the path of rapid prototyping, another practice that works great in software / on the web, not as easily (though not impossible) with hardware. In any case, the experts in this area most well-known today are:

• - Steve Blank, who wrote “The Four Steps to Epiphany” and is currently hosting the excellent Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminars (btw. Steve Blank also writes a great blog on customer-focussed development, which I’ve only just started reading.
• - Eric Ries, who authors the blog Startup Lessons Learned and has some great articles on responsible (=lean) development.
• - And Donald Reinertsen, who wrote an incredibly dense book called “Principles of Product Development Flow,” a book which is clearly an authority in the field, but which I cannot recommend to any sensible entrepreneur with a 60hr/week schedule. Those principles, by the by, number in the 100+.

As well as of course Toyota and plenty of other experts out there, I’m sure, many of which are referenced by the people mentioned.

I think that it can safely be said that task 3 or a sub-task of business development is working towards the customer, the lifeblood of a business.

There are other tasks of course, which have to do with human resources, legal work, accounting, etc. Some of which can be outsourced, some of which can be done half-heartedly (oh no, I didn’t say that), some of which are really-really important, etc.

All these tasks, however, require a certain authority. The entrepreneur’s responsibility is to either be an authority on a task level or to be sure to work with authorities, either in the company or in an (informal) consulting fashion, so that they are carried out responsibly.

Task 4 can thus be entitled: be an authority on the tasks that need to be carried out or have access to one.

So, a whole can of worms starting a company can be and it is vital that it does not interfere with the single most important thing that you must do as a human being: be healthy! Health is part sleep, part exercise, part food, part love. There is no yin without yang and vice versa. Thus forget everything I said about personal life being no. 2. The best is if it reinforces what you do in your work. Health leads to happiness and happiness leads to optimism: a key-quality in entrepreneurship if there ever was one.

So the responsibilities of an entrepreneur summarised:

• 100: keep your eye on both sides of the court: the goal & the resources needed to get to that goal
• 101: align Product development with Business development
• 102: always validate your market data by staying close to your customers
• 103: be an authority on the tasks that need carrying out or have access to one
• 104: stay healthy and happy.

This was written in a single session with minimal editing. I hope it kind of makes sense. Part 3 of my e’diary will be on the topic of: can you prepare for entrepreneurship? As I have a master in entrepreneurship, I thought it might make for an interesting perspective. All my entrepreneurial diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ By choice, I’m being mysterious about my company. If you have questions, feel free to comment or write to me via the email address on the right.

Picture courtesy of Be The Dream.

(French version)

The pitch: Enterprise implementation of social networks is the third step of a gradual immersion of the enterprise into the internet culture. This immersion occurs because there is the obvious truth : web works with amazing speed on an amazing scale.

I have been lucky enough to witness from the inside the major changes the IT industry have been going through in the last ten years. What is really interesting within the scope of Enterprise 2.0 is that these changes involve the adoption of tools, solutions and approaches that really came from the internet culture.

As Enterprise 2.0 activists, we keep on wondering where to find meaningful experience of internet culture adoption in our company. The IT department is the place to look because they already been through the first 2 steps of immersion ….

Read more »

It seems strange to keep a diary as an entrepreneur, which is thought to be a career that is all-consuming. But I made the resolution to not get lost in my work, leaving enough space for inspiration and reflection, next to all the getting things done.

Inspiration, aka new ideas or thinking out of the box, primarily comes from taking time to have new experiences and meeting new people. It’s too easy to get stuck in a rut when spending 9 to 5 in an office. Reflection comes some time after getting things done and so my words today will be mostly about stuff that happened some time ago, during 2009 in fact.

You’ll often find pre-/post-/non-entrepreneurs arguing about whether e’ship is something you’re born with. I think it’s arrogant to argue either way. E’ship is the pursuit of opportunity weighed against the opportunity cost of pursuing something else. Entrepreneurs are not formed in pre-school, running a lemonade stand, it just makes sense at a particular time and environment. And in this case… it made sense to me.

Flashback December 31st 2008. I received a call from an inventor that had read about a previous experience of mine in a technology business and asked me to help him with the business plan for a new venture exploiting a similar technology. As it was something that appealed to me I said yes. The project turned out ok, we secured seed funding to develop the technology, and I moved to Luxembourg for a job in finance, while staying on as a silent advisor in the tech startup.

Flashforward 9 months. The startup was finally ready to demo the technology which had so far only existed in our heads. It’s an important qualifier, not only for our business partners and investor, but also for the team and myself. While we had discussed something similar before, it was at this point that I was asked and considered to run this company.

To go back to “what makes an entrepreneur,” you’ll often read about entrepreneurs being a. all-invested in a venture (as opposed to investors, who diversify their risks across multiple investments) and b. Entrepreneurs having to make (relatively) calculated risk decisions. And that is what I did, I made an, as much as possible, rational decision whether I wanted to commit fulltime to being an entrepreneur in this venture. So that was my decision process, which required serious thought, consultation with friends and family, and more.

End of part 1. In part 2, what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur. You can read all my e’diaries from now on under the tag Vincent’s ediary. If you have questions, obviously I’m pretty mysterious about our business, post a comment or mail me via the address on the right.

We have been  reading postings and briefings on all sorts of touch pads and e-Reader recently, be it the Amazon Kindle or much disputed Apple’s iPad. But apart from usability and innovation involved in developing the product one feature that inspired me to write this post is  its long term affect on existing Carbon Di Oxide emissions when adopted and accepted globally.

I still wonder if in a hypothetical scenario when every book and publication is digitized into an e-book and every reader only uses his gadgets to read the digital content instead of having a printed version on a paper. Will this be a much Greener situation to one we have right now? There are  views and opinions prevalent in media which are more of equivocal nature. E-readers aren’t typically marketed as environmentally sound, but their environmental impact is now becoming a topic of discussion and research.

Point of Views : Expert’s View on e-Readers

At least Don Carli doesn’t thinks so, according to him e-Readers aren’t Greener than print (which is a common view held by consumers who don’t know the backstory of evolution of an e-Reader ). Actually few days back I had an opportunity to read an interview with Don Carli on News Media Innovation, Convergence and Sustainability.

As far as print media is concerned it could do a better job of managing the sustainability of its supply chains and waste streams, but it’s a misguided notion to assume that digital media is categorically greener. Computers, eReaders and cell phones all have a cost of operation, cost of manufacturing and cost of disposal. When Compared directly to the book, a Kindle produces 168 kilograms of carbon dioxide compared to 7.46 kilograms for a book.

Making a computer typically requires the mining and refining of dozens of minerals and metals including gold, silver and palladium as well as extensive use of plastics and hydrocarbon solvents. To function, digital devices require a constant flow of electrons that predominately come from the combustion of coal, and at the end of their all-too-short useful lives electronics have become the single largest stream of toxic waste created by man. Until recently there was little if any voluntary disclosure of the lifecycle “backstory” of digital media.

Point of Views : CleanTech Research based on Scientific Evidences.

Another interesting survey report from CleanTech Group which published the report based on life cycle analysis of a Kindle e-Reader. The research and media company drew on existing studies to do a lifecycle analysis and found that the carbon emissions from electronic books are far lower than traditional book publishing.

As reported  in the analysis, “The roughly 168 kg of CO2 produced throughout the Kindle’s lifecycle is a clear winner against the potential savings: 1,074 kg of CO2 if replacing three books a month for four years; and up to 26,098 kg of CO2 when used to the fullest capacity of the Kindle DX. Less-frequent readers attracted by decreasing prices still can break even at 22.5 books over the life of the device,”.

Finding a conclusion to this article seems difficult:

eReaders are capturing media attention and there appears to be significant latent demand for gadgets that can replace printed media, but mainstream adoption still remains years away. E-reader device sales and eReader content revenues are still rounding error in relation to print media revenues. In a survey of attendees at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair 40% predicted digital book content sales would overtake traditional printed book sales by 2018, but over 30% said digital content would never surpass traditional books sales, and 66% said they expect traditional books to dominate the market for the next decade.

With universities like Princeton and six others already testing the technology in a pilot, I hope e-Readers will make their way to schools and workplaces  replacing traditional paper books. Ultimately, it comes down to how an e-reader is used. If a person continues to buy books and print periodicals and doesn’t recycle the product, the environmental impact could potentially be negative.

The following is a draft I wrote prior to the announcement of the iPad, but which I didn’t publish because it was a series of hypotheses based on an as yet non-existing product. It’s a series of thoughts on how an interface of a touchscreen larger than an iPhone might look like. It is inspired by both my experiences with Macs and since recently with an iPod Touch. Here goes.

A couple of thoughts I had last night (written on 13.01.2010) about interfaces, the current state of development for the iPhone OS, how Apple could build a hybrid of Mac and iPhone OS, and how the company could build multi-tasking into its rumoured tablet. My thought were the following:

a. A new category: I don’t think the iTablet, if it exists, will be either a Mac or an iPhone. My super-superficial reason: it doesn’t fit in the Mac line-up depicted on the online Apple Store (see pic), but a more underlying reason is that I don’t see space for it in either a Mac-category or a Mobile phone/media player category. Which is not to say that it won’t do either well, but I think it will more fall into the class of Netbooks, though of course with the purpose of bombing those low-tech, low-innovation devices out of the water… just like Apple did with MP3 players and with Phones. Note from today: as it turns out, the iPad is depicted below the iPod, iPhone, and Mac lines, but time will tell where it will be once it’s on sale.

b. The Keyboard: I think that any 10″ screen will demand more connectivity to secondary (Apple) devices than the iPhone allows for. That means, an external keyboard and mouse, which transforms the tablet into a desktop. I have less complaints about the software-keyboard now, after working with a Touch for a while, but I still don’t see it as an alternative for longer texts, which a larger screen would warrant. Some months ago, I made a stupid mock-up of the iPhone + a keyboard (see pic), which is how I envision it looking (only better).

c. The App Store: 3 Billion Apps downloaded, Apple just reported, which also suggests a kind of lock-in. For better or worse, developers have accepted the App-store and I think it works for several reasons for both, namely more protection from pirates, more predictability for developers when developing for the black hole that is Apple, and more control by Apple, which is what Apple likes, not to mention new income streams for both. I think the App Store will continue to exist and will present new challenges when talking about a larger screen. Note from today: I don’t believe that what we will get to see in less than two months will be that what people were playing around with after the Apple keynote. iPhone apps inflated to a larger screen, come on?

d: The User Interface: I’ve written previously about Quick Look in Snow Leopard and how I also dug its slight innovation in terms of in-icon playing of media. Previously, OS X also introduced Dashboard into Tiger (I believe), whose interface, on the surface at least, resembles the iPhone. My view is that Apple will give developers the option to just keep the same resolution apps as they have offered before, though not exclusively of course. But imagine “Quick Looking” an app and still having it run inside its “Icon,” while the user does something else. For the rest, I of course think that full-screen Apps will exist, which is where Dashboard comes in, or at least a type of Dashboard. (Note: that was wrong. More below.)

e. Integration with the Mac: One of the most underused interfaces, at least on my Mac, is Dashboard, which allows people to have continuously open widgets on anything from news, to games, to radio, to system monitoring. It’s useful for those purposes, but not really something i spend more than a few minutes at a time with. Yet the first thing that came to mind when thinking of a “Tablet,” using both iPhone and Mac interface components, was Dashboard. It creates a new layer on top of a traditional desktop, allowing for user-input and information display. When I envision someone running the apps that would work on the “iTablet” also, I think of it either being that you open up a new layer on your Mac and run the very same apps on it through something like a Dashboard-like interface. Or, and the simplest solution is usually the best, through having the Tablet sync through iTunes with regular applications on the Mac.

Note from today: well, obviously this was wrong, but there have been several theories aired of having a type of Dashboard on the iPad for apps like calculator and weather, which don’t at all make sense to run in single focus on a larger screen than the iPhone.

Further thoughts from today: I do think that we will see a new OS update for both the iPhone and iPad before the release of the iPad. This will address the concerns that people have about it just being a larger iPod Touch. For the rest, to me the only downside to this device is the lack of a front-facing camera for video-calling, and some minor things. And I also think it’s the perfect “parent device!” What the Wii was to gaming, the iPad is to computing, addressing a very very blue ocean.

As previously stated, I’m still in line to get one this year, though only after trying one first.

Vincent

As I argued in the comments in Vincent’s post about FarmVille, FarmVille is a role playing game (RPG). And pretty bad one at that. Like most RPGs, you don’t actually need any skills or develop any skill playing it yourself as your success is solely dependent on the amount of time you sink into it. You can get pretty good at FreeCell, but no matter how much time you spend in FarmVille, you won’t get “better” in it. But what most RPGs have at least is a story – even if most these days have left the ending pretty open. Contrast this to FarmVille which isn’t trying to tell you any story. In this sense it resembles a simulation, but that genre is usually characterized by depth and strategy which are nowhere to be seen in FarmVille, unlike, say, in SimFarm from 1993.

It is way too easy to categorise FarmVille as a “casual” game, but “casual” doesn’t need to mean games where you can’t lose, games which have zero learning curve and games that don’t offer challenge. A good example of “casual” game that always ends in the player “losing” and (hence?) offers a lot of challenge is Bejeweled. If I remember correctly, Bejeweled was the previous title holder to the biggest casual game ever.

The only challenges are achievements – and now collections. But there’s little, if any, social value in achieving them – unless you count boasting about them on your Facebook wall. And, unfortunately, the game doesn’t have level 13 Pig Warlocks.

There’s some irony that the main reason people play FarmVille, boredom, is also a main reason why people quit it. This boredom kicks in at about level 20 or so, where you start to realize that you have pretty much seen everything the game has to offer. The only thing left is the grind.

There are, of course, shortcuts to simple grinding. You can use farm machinery to do your activities faster, but they consume fuel (that, until recently, you could only refill by real money). Also, spending money allows you to get many benefits before non-paying players. And this is a problem, because many people don’t consider this “fair”. Offering players to pay to save time, however, is pretty crucial from business logic. The trap here is that the players who don’t feel comfortable paying start to feel that the only way to progress in the game is to spend real money.

FarmVille follows the RPG formula that the higher you have leveled, the more effort (= experience points) you need to reach next level. Granted, you have access to new things that might increase your “productivity”, but the mean time between levels is increasing. However, and this is the problem, the reward of leveling up remains pretty much the same. At some point, the perceieved benefit/effort ratio falls short. The trick is that at this point, the player has invested so much into the game that they might be more willing to pay real money to make advancing easier… if the rewards of leveling up are worth it.

The business logic of FarmVille dictates that the more you play, the better player you are for Zynga. It’s the curious logic of taxing your good customers, the discrimination for the information age. This is most evident if you look at how the experience points you get from crops depends on their harvest time. The shorter the harvest time (and so, how many times the player “needs” to play FarmVille), the more experience the player can gain in given time. As you can see, the relationship between these two variables follows an exponential distribution with pretty high correlation.

As an interesting side note, the correlation between Harvest time and profit isn’t nearly as high and there’s a lot of variation. This neatly illustrates how the main metric in the game (from game designer’s perspective) is not profit, but experience points which are tightly tied to player retention. This also means that while there’s a wide variety of different kind of crops, there’s only a handful that makes any sense to use as the rest are strongly dominated. Oh, and the trees and the animals don’t make any sense given how scarce the land is and how much more profitable the crops are. The only reason to have either is for achieving ribbons – or self-expression (which you might have already guessed was pretty low on my priority list).

The other thing in FarmVille is that your game progress is also aided somewhat by the amount of friends you have. Whether these friends help you or not, is not necessasry, as only retaining a certain friend amount gives you benefits. The most important of these is access to larger farms. The social aspects of FarmVille can be divided into self-expression (how one designs one’s farm) and a coordination game of sharing gifts and other “loot”. The game design trick of “free gifts” is pretty clear after the player realizes that he or she needs a bigger farm to accommodate all the gifts. Contrast this “social gaming” to the title-holder of “most anti-social game ever”, World of Warcraft, in which (as far as I’ve understood) it is possible to “complete” the game alone, but playing with others is a key element to enjoy the game. In WoW the higher level players can help out lower level players, but in FarmVille the higher level players can gift some items to lower level players that lower player level players can’t gift. So, for some time the reciprocity logic didn’t really work in gifting, but this was recently fixed by introduction of “Mystery gifts” that are pretty much the only thing that makes sense for lower level players to send to higher level players.

So, what you are left in a more competitive sense of “social gaming” is the amount of ribbons you have collected, the level you have achieved and how pimped out your farm is. The element of achievements that you can accomplish as a group is zero.

I’m not entirely sure that Facebook is the most fertily grounds for games, as the dominating functionality seems to be “the social” and exploiting one’s userbase. Game mechanics and social dynamics come second. This is why I believe that to experience “true” social gaming, one needs to invest some real money to buy a game. The “free” gaming model seems to denigrate too quickly into nickel-and-diming, see for example what happened with EA’s Battlefield Heroes – where again some of the players didn’t see the real money elements as “fair” after certain point.

The problem with FarmVille, in short, is that the business logic dictates the game design too much. The revenue incentives of Zynga make the game experience worse for the players, who are looking for more than killing time.