Tech IT Easy » Networks

Liberating Leadership, intrinsic equality and world-class businesses

ceciiil — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 13:25:23 +0000

Many thanks to @flapinta for pointing this one to me (french link). What a revelation !

Isaac Getz is is a professor of Idea, Involvement, and Innovation Management at ESCP Europe. He has been Visiting Professor at Cornell University, Stanford University and at the University of Massachusetts. He graduated in Computer Science, then obtained a M.Sc. in Management Science, a Doctorate in Psychology and a post-doctoral degree (HDR) in Management.

I usually don’t spend too much time providing information on the business thinkers I quote, but considering the content, I just wanted to make sure Isaac Getz is not mistaken with some kind of hippie smoking ganja on a beach in Goa.

With Liberating Leadership : How the initiative-Freeing Radical Organization Form Has Been Successfully Adopted (pdf) Isaac Getz received the accolade of French Management Union of engineers (SYNTEC) with the Academic Prize of Management (french link again).

This 26 pages essay provides us with further evidence that methods of management that arose in the 50s (Chris Argyris and Douglas McGregor), have been successfully applied by dozens of world class companies and market leaders in their area (Toyota, Southwest Airlines, USAA, Avis, WLGore, QuadGraphics, FAVI in France etc …) to foster employees engagement. The amazing thing is how they align with the management principles that are consubstantial to Enterprise 2.0.

In a time where leadership has never been so critical for businesses, some lessons to remember from this essay :

The key to F-Form organisations

Chris Argyris and Douglas McGregor researches converge in the 50s to the conclusion that traditional organization forms (organisation silos, command and control type of management) lead to failure.

In the 90s many companies such as Southwest Airlines or Toyota illustrated successfully Argyris and McGregor preferred organisation type : what Getz calls the F-form. In F-form organisations, employees have complete freedom and responsibility to take actions that they (not their bosses) decide is best.

Getz decided to study these companies to answer this obvious question : how come this type of organisation, yielding impressive economic results, have not been more generally adopted throughout the business world ?

What he found out : there is a common factor in all the companies where F-form of organisation prevail : liberating leadership. Enterprise without this type of leadership just can’t adopt this type of organisation.

All studied leaders understand the defining function of the organizational form they were building, to allow complete freedom and responsibility of employee’s action.

Nourishing people three universal needs

McGregor redefined the How to motivate people ? conundrum into a “How to build an environment where people self motivate themselves“.

Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan studied organisations and proposed a self-determination (wikipedia) and work motivation (pdf) theory. This identifies a framework of non controlling environmental factors required for self-motivation : relatedness, competence and autonomy.

Beyond these environmental factors, they identified three universal needs that, once fulfilled, lead to self motivation :

need of being treated intrinsically equal,
need of growth
need of self-direction.

Creating an environment for intrinsic equality

Robert Townsend (CEO of Avis) published the Up the organisation best seller in 1967. Motto : once you’re in charge, remove everything you didn’t like as a subordinate and implement what you missed.

Robert was an admirer of Management Theory Y by Douglas McGregor. Alike other liberating leaders, he proceeds in what could seem to be an empirical fashion, adopting work practices that help treating people intrinsically equals and removing the ones that does not.

Principle thoroughly adopted for instance by Cristobal Conde, CEO of SunGard :

How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment? The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart

It’s all about listening

This is a very strong and common trait of liberating leaders : stop controlling and start listening. There are some telling examples in Isaac Getz essay but the most impressive I know of probably is Paul Chambers CEO of Cisco (though not in the essay) :

I had to move from a command-and-control leader to a collaborative one.” Collaborative leadership means “letting go” by involving others in decision making, listening to ideas.

The are good reasons behind the listening key. Jeff Westphal CEO of Vertex provides the Wisdom of Crowds one in Getz’s essay. But the main one is that when people genuinely are listened to, they feel intrinsically equal.

Creating an environment for people to grow and self direct

With all the studied companies and organisations, Getz’s team has witnessed a strong focus on making sure the company encourage self-direction. Among other examples, the essay explains how USAA (insurance company) does not measure the performance of the call center on the number of calls handled per hours but on the number of customer problems solved during the first call.

What really is interesting here is that the company provides the guidance (take care of the customers by fixing its problem in one call) rather than the control (count the number of calls addressed by employee). This did not prevent USAA to top Business Week 2007 and 2008 (2nd in 2009) customer service ranking US wide.

Fostering culture-keepers

Another common principle with liberating leaders : they are the culture keepers. There is a strong will to foster this. We live the culture (Terri Kelly CEO of WLGore – link to her video).

And there is a will just as strong to make sure nothing can damage it. Getz gives the example of FAVI, an amazing french company building brass gear forks auto parts. This company has experienced a 3 decade long double digit free cash flow and solid margins, moving from 0 to 50% of market share in an industry where its European competitors are, at best, at a loss, and in most cases has disappeared.

In the 25 years of the company, Jean François Zolbrist (great french blog post by @pmeance including a video of JFZ explaining FAVI principles) didn’t dismiss people whose job became useless. But he did promptly fire 3 people for malfeasance as they were not treating people intrinsically equals.

This brings us back to how Brad Bird protects innovation in Pixar by getting rid of passive-agressive people.

Main values

All the leaders of the studies company share the same values :

Freedom and responsibility values. As Bil Gore said : “Freedom is is the great motivating power of individual human beings”.
Creativity : A survey from IBM’s Institute for Business Value shows that CEOs value one leadership competency above all other : creativity. One of the observed main feature of their creativity, is the ability to rephrase problems to find solutions more easily.
Wisdom : The ability to contextualise and the reluctance to fundamentally attribute errors to individuals

Be nice

Last remarkable trait of Liberating leaders, they make sure their F-Form organisation are considerate not only with their employees but also with their suppliers, customers and partners.

This brings us back (again !) to E. Goldratt definition of any company goals : be profitable, take care of the customers and take care of the employees.

By doing so, the F-Form companies develop trustful long term relationships.

A remarkable essay which sheds a great light on the “mysteries” of many successful and exemplary companies. It perfectly complements Gary Hamel best seller The Future of Management.

Now the questions : have you witnessed such type of leadership ? Have you experienced it ? How to implement such type of leadership in an organisation ? (My hint : it starts with E and finishes with 2.0). Let us know.

The value of Twitter vs. the value of Facebook vs. the value of having Neither [weekend ramblings]

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 14 May 2010 20:17:31 +0000

I think a value should always be weighed against the value of not having it, particularly when it’s hard to put a numerical value on something. This something is clearly Facebook and even more clearly Twitter, which still doesn’t compute for 100%. Why I love Twitter would be like saying why I love my dog or my Bengalese tiger, it’s hard to place a value on love. Not to say that I love Twitter, but there are few things that bother me about it. I tolerate it and it has nestled in a comfortable (but small) place in my life.

There are again ramblings against the status quo, or rather the status pecunia—the status of wealth. A few years ago, it was Twitter which seemed to show the Fail Whale more often then the “what are you doing now?” page. It lead to Friendfeed and various other me-too services that were dropped as soon as Twitter got its act together. There are again ramblings about evicting Facebook from people’s lives, though I’m here to tell you that if you want to have any kind of social life online, you’re probably better of keeping that account, though perhaps with less naked pictures or whatever you are worried about losing.

The value of Facebook is that it allows for richer connections between people that do not see each other every day. I care for my high-school friends that live in the UK, France, or Brazil, but since I can’t see them everyday, it adds value to my life to know that they are getting a kid or getting married. It does not add value to my life if people choose to leave Facebook, like some of my friends did at first when they were overwhelmed by all this publicity (something blogging prepares you for). And I’m really glad Facebook doesn’t delete accounts permanently as when people change their mind (they usually do), their friends are again there waiting for them (life is too exhausting to be-/de-/re-friend friends like most of the internet forces you to do).

The value of Twitter is like that morning coffee that adds a little (but not everything) to the quality of the moment you’re experiencing. No, NO, let’s not equate the value like that. The biggest value of Twitter to me is actually pretty much the same one as Facebook’s. I met up with a friend in Denmark a few weeks ago, who is also on Twitter, and I was able to finish his sentences because I read about his experiences ON Twitter. To me Twitter is more like a Second Life than Secondlife(tm) is. It allows for quick streams about people you care about or you “follow” because you respect them. If I had intelligent displays running Twitter on my sunglasses, I would wear them all the time while walking through life, that is how second life Twitter has become to (some of) my relationships. My business partner is going to China this week and I would love for him to update his Twitter-account while there to keep me informed of the cool stuff he’s researching for us (mobile operators better start catching up to this dynamic).

So, what, WHAT, could possibly be the value of Neither? Such a leading way to pose that question, as I’m clearly not on that side of the fence. I’m sorry that many of my friends decide against Twitter accounts because they don’t see the value of it. Those are usually the people that I see once every 6 months and our conversations are less deep because, well, we still have to get through the superficiality of “how was your day? What are you up to?” Questions that Twitter & Facebook both ask. And I’m sorry if my friends decide not to use Facebook as it not only allows them to post their thoughts, but pictures of their Bengalese tigers or their latest trip to hell, and even status updates about Farmville, which I previously stated, was an imperfect way of showing of your virtual garden to your friends.

The value of Neither is a type of emptiness that may be good for meditation, but it is no longer how the world works. It’s like seeing my parents struggle with emails or internet banking when no one sends snailmail or goes to a physical bank anymore. The world without Facebook or Twitter no longer exists. I don’t care about privacy issue 1 or 0, because it’s really your business what you put on the internet and what you don’t and you should never put stuff on there that you don’t want people to know about. I care about connections and about the empowerment that they bring to interpersonal relationships.

I have met 80 people on Facebook that I never expected to see again after graduating from high school, from university, or from leaving the coolest job I had as a tween. I am so grateful to the site for that that if Zuck were here, I could kiss him. Facebook isn’t perfect, and we should protest against these imperfections until they are fixed. Whether we should leave social networks and abandon all the possibilities they have brought us, that is like starving yourself in protest against war: Nobody cares!

This post was brought to you by TigersInPoolsHellYES. Donate via the paypal button on the right.

On making Global Package Delivery a little better [Weekend Ramblings]

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 08 May 2010 13:12:39 +0000

I’m currently on a tirade against two things. Global package delivery, which, every single time, seem to have me waste my time waiting for a doorbell to ring. And software-updates, which for some reason are a pretty fragmented affair.

OK, there’s nothing to do about software updates and I already give up.

Global package delivery, on the other hand… UPS was founded in 1907. That’s right, gentlemen & ladies, it is over ONE ZERO ZERO (purposefully emphasised) years old! That means that people have been carrying UPS parcels around on horses, then on Fords, on ships, on aeroplanes, and will most likely carry them to space also. Unlike regular mail, the Package Industry is here to stay as well, ladies and gentlemen, all thanks to you for ordering from places like Amazon every single day.

Now, I don’t mean to pick on UPS. I actually have a problem with FEDEX (founded 1973) this week and with DHL (a German company, founded 1969), both of which like telling me things on their website that aren’t true, or are true, but so incredibly late to publish that truth that it’s just a false truth.

Dear companies that I just mentioned: we are in the age of real-time. When my best friends go to the bathroom, I know about it 5 min. before they even think about it, that’s how quick Twitter is. Sadly, that doesn’t bring a hot new gadget into my life, like your great service does. I appreciate your service, it allows me to be lazy and order to Visa’s delight. But it’s meant to be a service of convenience, and I don’t consider having to drool over my doorbell-phone by any kind of definition, “a convenience.”

Here’s what happened with DHL: Package shipped on the 6th out of Germany. On the 7th, at 4:30 a.m., package left Germany heading for the Netherlands. I sent them a mail asking whether if it doesn’t arrive today, they ship on the weekends. No reply! At 20:00, I found out, that package has arrived for sorting at a sorting centre at 17:42. I decide to call the next day to ask whether they ship on the weekends. The kind person at DHL the Netherlands informs me that a. he has no idea where my package is and b. they do not ship on the weekends. 2 hours later, the doorbell rings. It’s the mailman, who works for TNT (the Dutch equivalent to DHL) with the package from DHL. Status on the website on the 8th: “7th of May, package has arrived for sorting at a sorting centre at 17:42.”

Here’s what happened with FEDEX: Package shipped on the 5th from the US. Paris then somewhere in the Netherlands on the 6th. Estimated delivery: on the 7th at 6 p,m. I’m home at 3:30 p.m. At 20:00 I get a message that FEDEX passed by my house at 14:55 p.m. and no one was home. Status: sadly FEDEX does not receive phone-calls on the weekend.

We need a change, we need that thing you do with the tracing, not to be restricted to when it arrives in parcel sorting centre 42. We need it to have an RFID chip in the parcel, which is connected to a GPS device in the truck, which at all times tells a satellite to send me a tweet of where exactly you are at what given time. And when I’m not home, I can tweet back to said truck to give notice, to save fuel, to save the planet, and/or to change the address to my work-address. Saves your time and mine and the planet’s.

This is not rocket-science. GPS exists (globally since 2000), RFID exists (required by Wal-Mart since 2005), real-time web exists (Twitter since 2006). Yet for some reason, in 2010, I still have to wait 10 hours for an update about something REAL & RELEVANT that happened 10 hours ago. Sigh.

OK, all ranted out now. Now go fix.

Theory of social networking [2Long4aTweet]

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 04 May 2010 08:40:32 +0000

We should auto-follow the whole world but it should be hidden by default.
Relationships are too dynamic for an explicit follow, de-follow, re-follow relationship.

- – Vincent van Wylick (too long to fit into a tweet)

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Bit Bang – Rays to the Future now online

Kari Silvennoinen — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 07:45:27 +0000

A quick note letting you know that the book I was involved with is now available online for free as a downloadable PDF.

If you’re interested in what’s in the pipeline technology-wise in the coming decades be sure to read this report. As previously mentioned, this report is a compilation of articles written by the PhD students of Aalto University (previously Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology and University of Art and Design Helsinki).

The topics include

Future of IT and hardware
Future of Telecommunication and Networks
Printed electronics and nanotechnology
Future of Media
Future of Living
Future of Globalization
Robotics and artificial intelligence

Also, in the appendix is a small diary of our meetings in Silicon Valley.

Normally these kind of reports would cost thousand of euros, but thanks to the Finnish educational system you can get the report right here for free (PDF; 2MB).

CeBit 2010: On 3D technology and its commercial potential

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:21:54 +0000

This year, I had the chance to visit CeBit 2010 for the very first time. It was an anticlimactic experience. Being raised with reports of CESs and Macworlds, you can’t help but hope to stumble on the next big thing, but what I was confronted with what had the air of a dusty town ripped out of a Western movie after all the gold diggers left for fairer grounds. In this case, the gold drought is the recession, and the aftermath (to me) appeared as a number of very empty spaces and the remainder seemingly under-budgeted, not “2010 innovative” but 2007 innovative, and with a big sticker on their back saying: “I’m under-confident, please buy something!”

To me, the most interesting technologies were 3D and a massage chair that took me under for 20 min. The biggest news story, however, was USB 3.0, a sad state of affairs if 2010 is marked by a tiny, soon to be in every computer, plug (no matter how fast that damn thing is).

Ignoring the massage chair, which I can’t recommend enough, 3D was the hot topic, inspired by, of course, Avatar. Everybody, from Nokia to Nvidia, appeared to have something related to 3D. They mostly had excuses for it—Nokia was pimping its high bandwidth infrastructure for 3D content aimed at TV & telephone providers; Nvida was pimping its 3D shutter technology for consumer PCs; Frauenhofer Institut was pimping its glasses-less 3D technology; and more and more and more—but my end-conclusion, also after trying to explore the potential for a revolution that was Avatar, was that 3D is an excellent gimmick that will draw a crowd to your stand or cinema, but will leave you disappointed 2/3 times.

Ironically, Nokia had the most impressive display of 3D, showing it off on a 15,000 euro JVC flatscreen. When asked for details, however, all they could tell me was the price of the TV and that their bandwidth technology was not for sale to the “likes of me.” Very arrogant, those Nokia folk and it wasn’t just the 3D guy either… Nvidia’s shutter glasses also worked well and I see a real potential for 3D gaming. Frauenhofer’s glasses-less 3D-TV… pah! The problem with 3D is that it’s so easy to do it badly and 3D without glasses is far from ready. 3D with glasses is far from ready!

I don’t get the obsession with not wearing glasses either. First of all, they’re roomy, which means that you can wear them over existing glasses, they won’t make the claustrophobic more claustrophobic, and they’re disposable. Putting on glasses in the living room is kind of like turning off the light when watching TV.

Last, but not least, I liked lcReflex, which developed an interesting, if not very portable contraption, that makes applications on a computer screen three-dimensional. It involves something they call a Stereomonitor, two screens joined together at a 90 degree angle (one front-facing, one on top facing down) and a semi-transparent mirror in the middle. Put on glasses and you can manipulate an image of brain in 3 dimensions, which should be very interesting for, eh, brain-scientists and playing 3D Tetris.

What’s fairly clear is that we are very close to having 3D in our living rooms, whether it’s for playing games or for watching (selected) TV-shows and movies. But 3D has the same problem that HD-DVDs and -TVs have, which is that it’s insanely niche. You can’t play everything on it and you need some pretty expensive equipment to play it. That combination doesn’t justify much of an investment in it.

The best chances for success belong to companies like Nvidia, which produce consumer-priced solutions for consuming content. Add to this that it is (relatively speaking) fairly easy to convert digital content from 2D to 3D. I very much see the next stage of gaming to becoming 3D.

I’m much more bearish on video-media. Great that cinemas have found a new revenue stream to subsidise their troubled existence. Great that 7 out of 10 filmmakers are considering to make their next film in 3D. I don’t think cinemas have to worry about living rooms competing with them on that level anytime soon. While the need for a big screen to enjoy 3D is a myth well-worth breaking (and it soon will be in gaming), it is still a powerful way to experience a movie and something you can sell at €/$ 15 a pop. Home-entertainment still has the expensive technology problem and the fact that BluRay DVDs simply aren’t selling to anyone except Playstation 3 owners.

As mentioned, 3D’s gimmick power is strong, but that will wear off after having 3D technology in your living room and hardly any media to consume on it. It’s much better off in cinemas where the growing few pay a few bucks more to see space debris floating above their heads, or on consoles where the price of a 3D add-on is hardly more than buying a Guitar Hero guitar.

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E’ship diary part 3: Why I don’t like the term ‘entrepreneurship’

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:00:56 +0000

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!

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Pomplamoose : social networks, video-songs and disintermediation

ceciiil — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:03:32 +0000

Pomplamoose Pas Encore

Internet IS disintermediation. It removes boundaries between services/product producers and consumers.

Which means that if your business model consists in standing between them, as a gatekeeper, then you have a positioning problem. Record companies have been learning this the hard way during the last decade.

We all know about Myspace and how musicians made their work popular before signing a contract with a record company (think Lily Allen and Arctic Monkeys).

It looks like even this time is over : the music industry business model is now getting a step further towards disintermediation with the smart, cheap and beautiful Pomplamoose.

Video Songs from Standford.edu

Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte met in Standford University. They both come from a family where music is all around the house and both started playing instrument and singing very young.

The video song concept is inspired by the mid 90s Danish Dogma 95 avant garde film making movement. The idea is a) do it yourself approach b) shoot the musicians while recording and c) edit the music and video so that e) all the sources of sound are displayed on a split screen during the clip.

Pop covers

They’ve been doing both covers (Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Earth Wind & Fire -see below- etc …) and own material (Pas Encore the video above).

There are many musical influences, though all pop and elaborate, their choices say it all. Nataly voices sometimes reminds Stina Nordesntam for the background vocals arrangements, but the main influence is Feist (whose The Reminder album is a masterpiece of quiet and intimate pop songs). Their cover of Gatekeeper from the latter is quite evocative of the voice similarity.

With their video songs (editing, images), one can see the influence of Lasse Gjersten, another Youtube star and symbol of the internet culture.

Dongle and crowdsourcing

This fresh, arty and DIY approach made them superstars on Youtube (hundred of thousands views) and they decided to sell their stuff on iTunes and on home made Pomplamoose dongles.

For their music artwork, they decided to crowdsource it. And as usual with any band event, they announced the result on another youtube video.

Who needs a record company ?

So far they’ve sold about 20,000 songs on iTunes and according to the Wall Street Journal blog they declined Major Labels (Warner, Sony, Universal) proposal and remain free of any record company contracts. Instead they decided to carry on and only use Youtube (their pomplamoose channel) as a mean to communicate and exchange with their fans.

Derek Sivers has seen it coming and made a handy lifehacking book on the topic : How to call attention to your music.

It used to be that, as a musician, only 10% of your career was up to you. “Getting discovered” was about all you could do. A few gatekeepers controlled ALL outlets. You had to impress one of these magic few people to be allowed to present your music to the world. (Even then, they assigned you a manager, stylist, producer, band, etc.) As of the last few years, now 90% of your career is up to you. You have all the tools to make it happen.

Disintermediation has lovely green eyes, a heartbreaking voice, mischievious musical arrangements, and engage in casual conversations that are fun to watch on youtube.

Pomplamoose September

Please welcome Anand Kishore Raju, a new blogger on Tech IT Easy !!!

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 13:20:14 +0000

Dear everyone,

I am extremely happy to start off this new year by introducing a fresh face on Tech IT Easy, Anand Kishore Raju, who will be blogging with us in 2010. His main areas of focus as a blogger will be greening the internet, carbon footprints, energy and power figures of the internet and web2.0.

Anand is currently working as a Research Engineer at Telecom ParisTech (ENST). His area of research focuses on the Energy aspects of the Internet, what the scientific community calls “Green Networking”. His efforts are directed towards making Computer Network Science aware that processing, moving and storing bits has a cost in terms of energy and in terms of the Carbon Emission Footprint.

In the past, Anand had also worked at Collaborative Systems Group (ColSys) at Bilkent University, Turkey, where he developed a taxonomy for user properties, influence factors for feedback quality in web 2.0, existing and novel models for deviation types and their detection. He also holds a degree in Computer Science and Engineering and aspires to join HEC in near future.

Anand joins a smart team of collaborators, some of which also work in green computing and many of which share an interest in this important topic for sure. As such, please join us in welcoming Anand to the team and I hope you enjoy reading his words on Tech IT Easy!

Happy New Year,

The Tech IT Easy team

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The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:17:21 +0000

I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible.

Sarah Lacy writes about SMSONE, a ultra-local news provider in India similar to Outside.IN, a Union Square Ventures funded US-only company that provides news updates via the web. SMSONE does it, as the name suggests, via SMS. And it spreads through a franchising model, working with local entrepreneurs that pay a franchise fee and also collect a share of the advertising revenue from locally focussed businesses. It is able to do this because of something that apparently doesn’t exist in the US (but does in Europe): receiving an SMS in India doesn’t cost the recipient anything.

When reading about this, I was immediately reminded of a similar business model employed by a Dutch entrepreneur in Russia, Ms. Annemarie van Gaal, founder of Independent Media, a company that distributed Russian versions of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire en Good Housekeeping (source). When she spoke at the Star entrepreneurial seminar in Rotterdam a year ago, she told us about how she differentiated herself from the competition (paraphrased as I haven’t got my notes with me):

The trouble with getting your magazines distributed in Russia was that you had to pay quite a lot of money (some would call it bribes) to companies that would then take care of it… badly. Instead van Gaal decided to do it differently. She would hire street kids to distribute her magazines, similar to the gold days of newspapers: the newspaper boy.

If you read Sarah Lacy’s account on Techcrunch, you’ll see that SMSONE does it similarly, hiring local kids, often without much education, to take care of distribution. Doing it via official channels is likely a nightmare over there, and centralising distribution kind of defeats the purpose of micro-news.

It’s a different way of thinking, which many of us westerners don’t have. I mean, would you entrust your products to a beggar on the street or to a street musician? Not only is it probably against the law (except if the government does it), we pride ourselves on our super-organised infrastructure, where anything from temp-workers to interns are there to provide companies with a flexible workforce, and anything from printing presses to mobile internet exists to produce and distribute your stuff.

Of course, I wouldn’t just leave you with these two examples. In the beginning of 2008, Boston Consulting Group published a study of “local dynamos”— domestically focussed companies, which use creative business models to capture value from emerging markets that are filled with challenges, like lacking infrastructure and low-income consumers. The map below shows how widespread these companies are.

Some very interesting examples are mentioned, like:

Shanda, a Chinese gaming-company, that, in order to combat software-piracy, focusses on providing interactive services through gaming, services that are impossible to pirate. And to overcome a lack of a financial infrastructure to pay for online services, they work with pre-paid cards.
Indian CavinKare, which sells cheap sachets of shampoo through small local retailers, while using educational marketing to teach customers how to use their products.
Goodbaby, which targets the many 1-child families in China, who are both willing to spend more on their child than multi-child families would, but are also in need of education.
Amul, an Indian food-and-beverage-marketing-organisation, which collects and pays for milk locally, while tracking all operations via satellite and uses ERP solutions to make analysis based on the data and gauge whether future supply needs to be increased or decreased.
Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods (Russia), which works extensively with local partners, and has devised leasing schemes for expensive machinery to boost their production and is able to serve 280 million consumers nation-wide.

The BCG, of course, takes the stance of its customers, Western companies, and the study is mainly aimed at how multinational companies (MNCs) can replicate 6 of these dynamo’s advantages, in order to compete with them. They are:

Customising to local needs – which involves first understanding these needs, and then meeting them.
Devising innovative business models that overcome local challenges – a logical follow-up to the last point, how to make money from the info you gained.
Leveraging the latest technologies – meaning that these emerging economies are less burdened with traditional infrastructure and quicker on the uptake of more affordable, newer, and easier-to-spread technology, e.g. mobiles.
Beneﬁting from low-cost labor and overcoming shortages of skilled labor – there’s two ways to look at this; a local workforce will be better equipped to interact on a local level, a highly-trained workforce will be better equipped to run a business. Tough call.
Scaling up fast – Russia, India, China, Brazil, etc. are all giants with the promise of huge rewards when you capture them. Many of these dynamos grow quickly through both through acquisitions and building up their network of suppliers and distributors.
Sustaining long-term hypergrowth without imploding – this kind of follows on to the last point

Some of the Western companies mentioned, which have managed to compete on a local level, include:

General Motors, which has adapted its luxury-liners to meet the demands of its Chinese customers, who are usually sitting in the back;
LG, in China, which has learned that the audio-quality of its televisions is more valued by its customers, who often reside in noisy environments;
Carrefour, which has started to work with local municipal governments in China, as these don’t meddle in their operations like local dept. stores would, and are able to provide access to prime locations;
Perfetti Van Melle, in India, a candle/chewing-gum manufacturer, which has found local means to advertise, interacts frequently with local partners, and has adapted its products to local tastes;
and Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut and KFC, and has adapted its menus to meet local Chinese tastes, started a new food-chain aimed specifically at the market, and uses its international expertise to integrate IT, lean supply chains, and a higher level of food standards into their offering.

It shows the value of out of the box thinking in terms of reaching people, and I believe that traditional “Western” thinking should long ago have been thrown out the door anyway, particularly in light of the troubles that media-, automotive, and financial industries are going through. We are in the flux of disruptive innovation and only those quickest to grasp new technologies and ways of thinking are able to survive another day.

No shortage of lessons on that from entrepreneurs in emerging economies…

Vincent out

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The lowest common denominator online: the written word

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:31:20 +0000

A few months ago, I wrote to you about an experiment I was conducting regarding collecting videos from people that could not make it to a reunion I was organising for my high school. Out of the ca. 300 people that signed up to our Facebook group, only ca. 100 can make it in the end (this weekend). Many of them live all over the world, hence it made sense to try and involve them in some way.

Just like you guys couldn’t offer me much of a suggestion regarding how to arrange this distributed video system, people were fairly unresponsive to my request to send me greetings by video or audio. Even pictures from the good old days were apparently too much to ask for–us “oldsters” used analogue cameras back in the day and no Flickr in sight.

This all changed however just last week when we decided to focus on what I call the lowest common denominator in organised activities like this reunion and also business. Focussing on the simplest possible solution to solve a collaborative problem.

We asked everyone that couldn’t make it to send a short text to say hi, etc. And the responses came rolling in. Within 2 days, we already had 30 and they keep coming.

It just shows you 2 things: 1. really K.I.S.S. (keep it simple & stupid) is the best way to deal with most problems. And 2. we are really not ready for a video-based messaging system. Sure, there’s Youtube and more, but you also need to record, you need to look good on the recording, you need to convert it to flash, you need to upload it, the receiver needs to convert it back, edit it (a super-big hassle!), and then present it in a usable way. Far from K.I.S.S.!

Vincent

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Political & Commercial World Powers and the Dynamics of Education

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:33:38 +0000

As is usual when I take a long break from writing, my blog posts end up becoming insanely long. Take it as you will, but I’ve tried to make it as coherent a post as possible. P.S. this is a post written under de cover of my “leave of absence,” which means I still write, but less frequently. – - Vincent.

A good friend of mine, Zihni Ozdil from the Netherlands / Turkey, Historian Extraordinaire, is now publishing his wisdom online. If history, politics, and culture (“beyond the superficial”) is something you find interesting, I encourage you to check it out. On his site, I found an article entitled ‘the real Evil Empire,’ which, ignoring the provocative title, deals with the interesting topic of the cold war and the ‘demonification’ of Russia and communism at that time.

Yesterday, I had an interesting discussion with some Canadian Swedes that moved to Florida with their kids and had trouble finding a school. The only way, it seemed, to guarantee that their kid ended up in a good one is to have an A-class school in your district (which you can find via a website that profiles attendees according to race and economic background… wow…) and to have paid your electricity bills. It worked out well for them, but clearly suggests the underlying problem of a long-term selection bias.

Last night, meeting the Canadian Swedes, where I was also in the company of a Russian and a Japanese, I noted that it was strange that while both Russia and Japan, being superpowers in their own right, have infamously challenging education systems, which result in some pretty smart people graduating from either country, the US does not seem to follow that pattern, at least not at the high school level, and certainly not across all demographics. Yet, by all accounts, the US is a superpower, if not the superpower of this and the last century.

My post today is not about comparing countries’ education systems, it’s more about the strategic purpose of education. Many people don’t know this about me, but I don’t vote and I don’t generally care about (regional) politics. To me, our planet should be one country, where anyone can move and work anywhere, and services don’t have to be moved just because you physically moved XX km/miles to another country. But I do recognise the power of competition and how that can lead to excellence. Versus a ‘group think’-like mediocrity where everyone just tries to be like everyone else and no one exceeds. So, in a way, I endorse a system of divided regions, because I think it leads to competition and thus excellence.

Education plays a strong role on the competitive advantage of nations, as it does in certain companies. Last year, applying to a lot of consultancy companies and working as one myself, I was struck at the importance that the accumulation of knowledge plays in this industry. If I were to start my own consultancy, continuous education of the staff would most certainly be a cornerstone of the business strategy, because knowledge is your product as a consultant.

I know that this thinking plays a strong part in government circles as well: how to make your/our country as strong as possible, not (just) in military terms, but in the sense of knowledge, mostly measured by the no. of graduates and the no. of patents that are published every year (as well the commercialisation thereof, which doesn’t go quite as smoothly).

I know that the no. of graduates coming out of Chinese universities is tremendous, and the no. of patents coming out of US ones is among the highest in the world also. So clearly, the US, superpower extraordinaire, is doing something right. I don’t however entirely understand why the primary/secondary school system is so abysmal then in the US. My only explanation is that, in academic circles, there are no national boundaries, and a Russian researcher can just as well (if not better) produce patents in the US as anywhere else.

There are other dimensions to the US superpower status as well, of course. It’s a military superpower, it is a cultural superpower (in terms of films, music, and literature), it has a large consumer-base. These three dimensions—safety through military strength, an easily adopted culture, a consumer’s paradise—also have the effect that they serve as an attraction point for outside academic or other talent. And while other countries may have strong educational bases, the other aspects are perhaps ignored just a little too much, still making the US a prime export location for knowlegde.

In the strategic literature, there is the concept of the resource-based view, which stipulates that company strategies are nothing more than a collection of resources, some of which are internalised and some that are not. I think that in the context of the US and education, the resources that must be internalised are those that lead to the commercial exploitation of technological advantage, which sounds abstract, but basically means making sure that the best technology/knowledge is produced in-house and generates economic benefits in-house as well.

But there other resources that must most certainly not be held onto in-house. These include standards, which facilitate the assimilation of knowledge. In education, the standards that we use are the bachelor-master-phd system, which can easily be studied in different combinations and locations. And text-books, which as many students know, are often from US-origins.

In many ways, the cultural exports from the US—movies, music, literature—are nothing more than the spreading of a standard, that of a language and a way of thinking, which makes assimilation of outside talent easier. And as long as that outside talent is used for the benefit of the US, in the form of patent exploitation, the US benefits, even if their own primary/secondary education system is quite uneven.

As mentioned, I don’t care about politics, country-differences, or governments. But if my logic is correct, I wonder if a metaphor exists for commercial superpowers, i.e. companies that are market leaders and remain so by attracting the greatest talent and finding ways to turn that into economic benefits.

Organisations are not complete economies like governments are and also have the benefit of being mobile—by law they are considered single persons, which have residence, pay taxes, etc. just like everyone else. So, as long as they obey the law, they can choose where they stay and choose to ignore local conditions, much like, I theorise, some governments do, instead focussing on the bottom-line: attracting excellence and turning that into profit, while keeping ‘unnecessary’ expenses as low as possible. Well, at least that is the stereotype of an organisation, while pressures have certainly lead some to adopt a more socially-responsible attitude.

Clearly, the question of talent, whether attracting or training it, remains a vital one for both countries and organisations. But I don’t think there is necessarily a correlation between talent and local conditions.. at all.. though local conditions do play a part in the quality of life, or lack thereof, which affects the talent’s in question desire for a certain location.

Vincent out.

(Picture courtesy of thehindubusinessline.com)

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wireless GOs and killing details

Georgia Psyllidou — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:05:24 +0000

To go from Atlanta to Athens you either drive (Athens, GA USA) or take a few planes (Athens Greece). If you belong to the second category you might feel a bit internet-sick and try to explore your options to connect.

I was like a child in candyshop to discover that in the US you can actually get onflight wireless internet, by GoGo . Prices from 6$-13$ and a subscription predator at 30$. Killer detail: power dependency. Oups! But still impressive and probably can harm only some revenue and not the strass of the idea and its execution.

Because girls often are used to dieting, I waited until landing to JFK where I supposed that I could get some free internet. Spoiled uh? Yes because in Athens Airport you have a net-spa of 45min for free. Not the case in JFK where you can get power for free…but for internet you are serviced by Boingo. Really jealous of their presence (119,801 hotspots worldwide), I opened my eyes wide for precious lessons from their model and how they manage their business. Prices around 4$-8$ and a subscription model for 8$-10$ per month (119,801 hotspots… )

First Impression score for Boingo was 0.5 points.

1 for growth (119.801 hotspots… )

1 for interactivity: very charming welcoming chat at registration, good simulation of natural communication

-0.5 for hope turned into undelivered promise: interactivity only on a hook level, if you don’t agree buying their subscription, the chat machine dumps you rudely, not replying at any other question chatted.

-1 for security: no paypal (ok fair enough but a bit destabilizing) What killed me was having to tap my credit card info which figured unmasked on my page.

Should I write stg about sense of privacy in public places or shall I go talk to the nice guy that came suddenly behind my back and asked me how I connected to the internet?

Georgia

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With Skype, I can now talk to myself. and mom.

Georgia Psyllidou — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:14:15 +0000

Yesterday evening I was cheerfully chatting with a friend, arranging meeting-up.

- Friend : blah blah blah;

- Georgia: blah blah blah;

… when I saw my self posting a thing I couldn’t recognise having thought of. Neither remembering having thought in a previous conversation. chilllll.

- Friend : are you nuts? why are you saying this?

-Georgia : (confused) ehhh, because it must have been this or that or the other thing.

-Georgia : but I am telling you that the place has changed blah blah blah

Ecstatic I was watching myself from a certain distance. crazy uh? It happens a lot to push back thoughts but it was the first time I experienced doing it at real time. It felt like dreaming !

As tech-savvy TIE readers you realize that this is actually a particularity that this this lovely peer-to-peer program has and lets your profile being simultaneously active with different IPs. All it takes to experience this chilling story is having logged in from a different pc. (DIY)

So what’s the blog deal?

Well, it had never occured to me to experience how older people might feel with technology, sometimes. Understand in theory yes, but live it never.
There it goes, now I can discuss with myself on skype and with mom in real life.

no comments please, I am moved.

How, if You Want to “Crowd-Source,” You Need to Keep Your Questions as Simple & Stupid as Possible

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:22:53 +0000

I once asked a friend how one of my clients should improve their sales technique for a technical product, knowing that his company is very successful at what it does. He, himself a “sales engineer” (i.e. a technical sales guy), found the question very difficult to answer.

I had to reshape the question to “so, how do you guys sell your technical products?” And then he was able, with full vigour, to tell me how they do it. It should be mentioned that market plays a strong role here; my friend works in a very niche business, while my client suffers from powerful competition.

I’m starting to loose my naiveté, as far as crowd-sourcing is concerned. This easy-to-communicate world we live in, sometimes makes me forget that, just because we can ask, doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. Technology may have changed, but people’s brains, psychology, and business principles have not, at least not at that rate.

My general stance these days is that, no matter what context you talk in with people, you should always assume a complete lack of imagination. Instead, by either spelling it out, or better, by asking the best interview-question in the world “tell me about YOU!,” and then extracting what you need from that, is much more effective.

It’s as Jeremy advised me to blog when I started here, Keep It Simple & Stupid (K.I.S.S.). Even though I have ignored that lesson at times, it’s a good one to follow in this all-too-unsimple world.

Apart from crowd-sourcing, the same, incidentally, applies to:

selling people stuff: spell them out exactly how your product/service benefits them!
applying for a job: spell them out exactly how you will make them money!
and everything else.

Want to make the world a better place? K.I.S.S. it!

Vincent

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Blogging’s not dead, but it’s pretty damn unrewarding

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:47:29 +0000

In the last two years, I’ve seen more and more people in my social circle starting blogs. Most of which were focussed on a micro-topic, including travelling to South America, to Japan, having a baby, self-help topics, and team-dynamics. All of them with merit, but about 80% of them ran out after a while. What is the problem? How about: finding the inspiration, not getting (m)any comments, balancing it with your actual job, etc. etc. Also, the baby eventually grows up, you eventually return from your trip, and there’s only so much to say about self-help (in my opinion).

But while our perception of blogging has changed over the years, particularly if you listen to early adopters, you could say that in a way blogging has become a mainstream phenomenon. Mainstream not meaning that everyone does it, but that everyone can do it. And the reason for that is I think the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, which is a gateway onto other services (incidentally, not many Facebookers I know that started a Facebook-only blog).

Sure, many companies have entered the game, several blogs have become companies, and many personal blogs have been closed or abandoned. Consolidation and commercialisation often means that there is no more space for the little guy. But, who cares right? You could still set up 10 blogs in the next hour and nobody would stop you. It’s just, nobody would probably read you, unless you write a really good blog + advertise it a bit. But while traffic is clearly a currency of blogging, as are comments, it does not seem to be driving the adoption of blogs in the short-term.

Looking at the current blogging landscape, I can only conclude that blogging is far from dead. But is is perhaps best to be aware that every blog is not the same. Just take a look at the following categories that I have identified, which I am sure is not a complete selection. There’s:

The micro-topic blogs, which get started every so now and then, run out after a while, but don’t discourage others from starting their own.
The small business blogs, for professionals and SMEs seeking to differentiate themselves. Whether these blogs can continue to exist, I think, all depends on whether they can reconcile their short-term profit goals (and needs) with the long term benefits of blogging, which are far from clear (please don’t take 37 Signals as an example that all SMEs should blog).
The small media-blog, which is what the Techmeme 100 is all about and which will never go away, as it’s a low-cost competitive approach towards battling/replacing big media.
The big media-blog, which is really a hybrid of journalism and opinion, neither of which will ever go away.
The corporate blog, which, similar to the small business blogs, still needs to find a raison d’être for itself. Exceptions are companies that already work on the web, like Google, IBM, Microsoft, O’Reilly.
The small and large (web-)celebrity blog, which for some is just ego-stroking and for others is an artistic outlet, both of which are justifiable, not only to the people who write them, but I think is also a big driver for the new blood in the blogosphere.

Clearly, no matter what people may say about the rise of micro-blogging and social networks, the blogosphere has become a complex beast, one that continues to attract attention, whether it’s in the form of traffic, comments (those 2 aren’t correlated on Tech IT Easy), or perhaps simple hype.

Blogging is dead, yay, now let’s get blogging!

Vincent

P.S. This marks the 5th anniversary of my blogging, which started in the Summery of 2004. How the time flies by.
P.P.S. Picture is of the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and is meant to be symbolic.

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The Right Mix between Idea and Execution

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:40:37 +0000

If I ever succumb to the temptation to blog like I did last night, feel free to shoot me. Now, back to our regular programming…

Last week, I wrote about having heroes in your craft and how I found it noteworthy that some examples are more effective than others in everyone’s path to self-improvement. I attributed it to the vague concept of compatible brain-patterns, but really I think it’s a much more simple idea. The reason that my writing heroes have an influence on my craft is because I practice it. In other words, there is a right mix of idea and execution (I would call it semi-right as there’s much room for improvement).

There are plenty of blog posts about this. Most well-known to me is Derek Sivers’ blog post about the “execution multiplier” that makes ideas more or less valuable:

AWFUL IDEA = -1
WEAK IDEA = 1
SO-SO IDEA = 5
GOOD IDEA = 10
GREAT IDEA = 15
BRILLIANT IDEA = 20

NO EXECUTION = $1
WEAK EXECUTION = $1000
SO-SO- EXECUTION = $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

More recently, Sarah Lacy wrote a post on Techcrunch, entitled “Is Execution More Important than Vision?,” where she differentiates between entrepreneurs that are visionary vs. those that are good at execution. In other words, she categorises people as either fitting in the one or the other.

What is clear from all of these is that ideas unapplied are essentially worthless. Which to me means three things:

That if you have ideas in an area that is difficult for you to execute on, you’re probably better off focussing on areas where you can execute them.
Or, that it is equally important to find the right resources (skills & knowledge, network & team, money & customers) for your idea as it is to have the idea.
That you ultimately need to move towards a system of rapid iteration or rapid prototyping, because, as we all know, ideas are ideas, and the reality will more often than not change your original product idea. The quicker you can test them out and improve them, the better your chances of making a commercial success.

It’s a bit of a leap from my post about writing heroes to executing entrepreneurial ideas, I know, but I think it makes sense.

Vincent

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Is it time for a more responsible internet?

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:39:35 +0000

On Friendfeed, we were discussing the hate that Micheal Arrington has been receiving and what caused it all. My stance was that, while I really have nothing against Arrington and think he’s an intelligent human being, the fact that he writes often opinionated posts on Techcrunch, one of the most well-read blogs on the internet, means that he will be exposed to much criticism.

I called it “many little needles can make for a sharp object,” and it made me wonder about whether it is even possible to avoid doing this to people. Some of use have gotten used to posting much of our thoughts and opinions online, so much so that we may eventually and unconsciously be provoking a powerful reaction that we are not expecting.

In a way, it’s very easy to distance yourself from other people online. On Twitter, you can unsubscribe from people who tweet too much or the wrong content. Same on other social networks. On blogs, you can easily insult other bloggers, or post an insulting comment anonymously. People are, by their nature imperfect, but to manage information overload (my excuse) we seek to find the perfect individual, who will only post interesting content. No such person exists, except maybe as an organisation, but those are few and far between.

On the other side of the fence, I wonder about Arrington’s words today, where he notes that people are starting to become more open about their insults, using their own name (ironic, since his own post could be construed as such). And how a few well-placed insults can quickly lead to a mob-like movement.

Will we eventually reach a threshold? Will something drastic happen that will make us all just shut up? Will the “social” internet implode at some point because someone got fired, or worse, dies? Who is watching the watchmen—the watchmen being you and me, who are supposedly, by our clicks, diggs, comments, and “voices,” regulating who is being read or not; is someone regulating us?

OK, enough insidious posting for one evening, which is, incidentally, not my style at all. I kind of fear getting an answer to these questions.
Vincent

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Where do Good Ideas come from?

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:11:29 +0000

I have hardly any time today, catching up on the week, which is terrible for the creative spirit. So, as a 15 min. therapy, where do good ideas come from? Here are 4 areas that I can think of:

Exploration / Rest: Spending 3 days in Paris and 2 days celebrating the national day of Luxembourg was great for thinking about life, discussing various topics and plans, and brainstorming ideas. It is in a way the anti-thesis of working life, which is focussed on making you into a machine, constantly moving, constantly following a routine, and not breaking out into new creative patterns. Ease of Implementation: Ideas are often abstract and need a lot of work to make them useful.

Iteration: This the primary way that companies innovate, by constantly developing routines, slightly adapting them over a long period of time, until version 2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.infinity, etc. It is why (consumer) products are the way they are. Ease of Implementation: when you actually have new ideas they face the challenge of breaking existing patterns that are cemented into operating companies and more difficult to change. Still, new ideas are often based on practical data and should thus be more easy to implement.

Deconstruction: This is what I call the Sherlock Holmes way or the “where have you last seen it?” way. You are faced with a problem, e.g. finding something you lost or figuring out how an electronic device works. The best way to do it is to break it down into small steps or pieces (deconstructing) and then reconstructing the reality again. In technology, you might also call this reverse engineering. Ease of Implementation: much like iteration, it is based on realities that already exist. Ideas are often better than what came before, because you’re an outsider, taking something apart and throwing away the junk. Ever lost a piece of text you wrote due to your computer/software crashing? I guarantee that your version 2 will be shorter, more to the point, and better.

Conflict: I was discussing this with Jeremy this weekend, regarding the building of teams that can challenge each other. It’s a destructive and constructive process all at once and I think the benefits usually outweigh the risks. Ease of Implementation: It’s difficult to find that kind of talent and the right mix, so I would say that implementation is not easy. It should however be at the top of the agenda of any organisation who wants to be an innovator in its field.

Other ways to come up with fresh ideas? The floor is yours!

Vincent

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What would an Always-On Device look like? Do we even want it?

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:18:47 +0000

It’s funny how our thoughts evolve from one day to the next. Which reminds me that we need to adapt our About page to reflect that a little more, as it’s about 2 years old. My thinking about Always-On Devices comes from a simple pain that I feel when I miss “a moment.” Sometimes I wish that I could… well Andy Warhol in Miraclemen phrases it much better than me.

In Alan Moore’s & Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, Warhol’s existence is not painted in a very colourful light (pun intended). He has been resurrected as a machine into a society where money no longer plays a role and is very depressed. So his ability to record everything is really not very meaningful to him. Having only read this part of the comic last night, already my sentiments about Always-On are changing towards… and what would it accomplish?

I recently visited an Art Exhibition of independent artists in Maastricht and tested out a little what an Always-On Device would look like to me. I used my camera, a Canon 870 IS, as a recording device, which I held in front of me while walking through the crowd.

I managed to capture the people experiencing an exhibition, a piano player who was adding atmosphere to a room full of art, just hypnotically playing a few notes over and over. What actually intrigued me the most, I captured maybe two dozen miniature sets for the Maastricht Opera house. It was very surreal, the sets which were made out of cardboard and wood mostly, were 3-dimensional, and I was floating with my camera device around it and through it even, capturing it all at angles never deemed possible to me before. As if I was my own film-director.

Of course, apart from the disappointing battery-life on my camera, clearly not designed for video-recording, and the occasionally funny looks that I got, the real challenge is to make that data actionable—a big priority in everything I do. It is a matter of transforming the raw footage into a tight package that can be consumed by others, and the question is really, should this be the responsibility of the creator or of the consumer…?

With us having reached and surpassed the age of the mashup, it makes less and less sense to continue to try and re-invent the wheel, rather delegating that task across far more… interested people (in the area of video-editing at least), of which there is no shortage, as long as the tools and the specific community exists. Clearly, that kind of methodology requires a lax attitude about copyright.

To recap, so that it doesn’t seem like I’m entirely floating in thoughts, an Always-On Device would need:

A willing human recorder
A recording device designed for capturing experiences
A way to process that information into “usable bits”
A favourable legal environment
And a willing consumer

I’ll leave the question of “do we even want it?” for smarter people than me to decide. In the mean time, I will continue my search for point 2 and 3 on that list (more on this blog, if successful).

Until after Paris,
Vincent

Why marketeers should STFU (pardon the French)

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:03:31 +0000

Tired of the gazillionth post about 10 marketing tips for social marketeers? Tired of marketing all together? I think there’s a reason for that, it’s because marketing should be invisible!

Let me give you a brief example and then I will stfu. For my high school, I’m organising a reunion together with a team of 2-3 people. We started a Facebook group, ca. 140 people from all over the world have signed up. We hold mass-mailing campaigns only to find out what people’s preferences are. We use that data, derived from poll-answers mostly, and design, hopefully, the perfect reunion event.

When the day comes, this September, I’m sure someone is going to say: “thank you for all the work you did.” But that’s b#llsh#t! Because it wasn’t us doing the work, it was everyone filling in what they wanted and everyone designing their own event. All we did was mediate, using the free tools that are available to anyone at zero effort.

That’s the way all marketing should be. Because if you think about it, marketing is about giving customers they want. And how do you do that? You listen to customers, stfu, and deliver.

Vincent

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What I'd like: a spoiler-and annoyance-free web

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:06:14 +0000

I seem to have made some people upset by a comment thread I started on Friendfeed yesterday. My stance was as follows:

The reason being that Friendfeed has become very forum-like with people forming relationships, writing how Friendfeed changed their life, how they just had triplets, etc. etc.… all stuff an a**h*le like me doesn’t care about.

Other “thoughts” were about the super-spammy #spymaster tag…

Apparently this spymaster is the new hot techcrunch-worthy thing on the internet…

…and about the problem of avoiding spoilers about movies when the inter-continental release-date are so drastically different:

I hate, hate, hate it when people spoil movies or books or anything really.

What all of these problems have in common that the web is a fairly unfiltered mess of vocal thoughts, opinions, and of course spam. With user-generated content far surpassing regulated media (you know, the kind where you need a degree and sources to write an article…), it’s nearly impossible not to come across something annoying.

What I’d like:
Simply: an extension for Firefox (I guess…) that prevents you from seeing things that you put on a block-list. It has to be a little intelligent. For instance, if before seeing the Star Trek movie, I’d like to not read about it, it should be able to identify whole paragraphs or blog posts that deal with this topic.

More simply, banning any tweet that mentions the #spymaster tag or otherwise, etc. etc. And more complex, the ability to ban content about babies and all things that evil people like me don’t want polluting their rss-feeds.

Too much to ask? I don’t know. Too rude to ask? Probably… Logical? Definitely.

Vincent

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7 reasons why I'm stopping using Last.fm for music & 4 reasons why I'm starting to use Drop.io + Facebook Connect

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:10:00 +0000

My sentiments about online media aside (I think it’s despicable the way media-companies treat consumers, particularly outside of the US), it has always bothered me to use Last.fm for a number of reasons. Here they are:

Last.fm, apart from being happy to pull my listening data into their site, does not integrate with my listening habits Whats.O.Ever. My method for managing music, perhaps determined by owning an iPod, is entirely dominated by iTunes and the usage of the device itself.

Last.fm does not play on the road (let’s ignore the iPhone radio app and that eventually all devices will be connected to the internet)

Last.fm does not acknowledge that I give different stars (= degrees of love) to songs (instead I have to “love” a song manually).

Discovering new music through Last.fm’s radio does not easily lead me to purchase the actual song

One cherry on top is that Last.fm now wants to charge me for using the radio, even though I add to it by playing my songs.

A second cherry on top is that Last.fm is now, indirectly through CBS, giving information about what we listen to and who we are, to the RIAA, a US organisation that probably also shares that information with other international organisations.

The only use Last.fm seems to have is vanity, in the sense that you can see what songs I loved (when I love them) and I can make pretty graphics of my listening habits (makes for an interesting poster).

So, as of this week, I am deleting my Last.fm account.

That doesn’t change that I am a fervent listener of music and it also doesn’t change that I believe deeply in the concept of sharing music. I like finding nice tracks to play at parties and equally I like finding tracks for some of my friends that I can only connect to online. There is no legal service that allows me to do this. As a matter of fact, in the Netherlands, I should even be paying a licensing fee if I play music in public or for too many people at once!!!

In comes Drop.io, a file-sharing service that recently added Facebook Connect as a way to share stuff only with your friends. Drop.io fills the void that Last.fm leaves in the following ways:

It has an integrated player that is very elegant and can also be accessed and added to via many different devices.

I can restrict access to my files to my Facebook friends only (evil internet lawyers can get lost).

It’s free for using 100 MB storage and charges a very fair $10 per gigabyte per year.

Any loss in statistical “vanity” data can be compensated by using iTunes and starring / sorting your files accordingly.

That’s it. Of course I will not be sharing songs that are copyright protected (and, of course, if we’re not Facebook connected, you will never know for sure )

Vincent

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Why you should invest your time & money into space technolology

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:33:02 +0000

Depending on where you stand, this is going to a long boring blog post or an interesting one. While I didn’t write much about it, my last consulting project as a freelancer was to help get a startup into the European Space Agency Incubator (ESI)… successfully, I’m happy to say. I wanted to write a post about how interesting it is, I think, to invest your time and money into space technology businesses, particularly because it’s about spinning space tech off to applications into the real world, but realised that this interview with Bruno Naulais, ESI network manager, would probably do the trick.

I conducted this interview in the summer of 2006, as part of my thesis. It was previously published on my personal blog, but it [the whole blog] has since disappeared into MySQL “does not compute” hell. Here goes.

The Interview

VvW: What is the ESA Incubator all about?

BN: It is actually called ESI, the European Space Incubator. It is part of a network, called ESINET, and consists of 35 incubators, spread across most of ESA member-states and some Eastern European countries (eg Ukraine, Bulgaria).

The ESI business-model, in a large part conceived through Niels Eldering’s thesis [a fellow Rotterdam School of Management graduate] and BN’s Business Plan, could be described as consisting of three dimensions. These are the start-ups, the stakeholders, and the supporting services.

1st Dimension: The start-up

The start-up is seen as a place where fertile (space) technology meets an individual or a team of people. They in turn go through an incubation process (at the ESI) and finally come out as a company to do business.

2nd Dimension: Stakeholders

This doesn’t apply to all incubators in the network, but in the Netherlands, the two main stakeholders are the ESA and the Dutch ministry of economic affairs (EZ). Both naturally want to promote employment, economic growth, and entrepreneurship in the Netherlands. Furthermore, ESA has the objective to improve the image of space in the eyes of the general public, of investors, and of businesses.

The latter is of particular importance, as space is still perceived as expensive, dominated by large players, and generally irrelevant to the lives of Earth’s citizens. What the incubator aims to do is to show to it’s stakeholders and to the general public, that space-technologies and space-systems can be benefited from in everyday life.

3rd Dimension: Support

This happens both through 3rd parties, something called Key Innovation Business Services (KIBS) and in-house. Through this, the aim is to prepare the start-up for doing business in the real world, and to receive further investment. The latter of course depends on the ambitions of the founder. Some are pretty limited in their targets. They only want to set up in their country, or perhaps the Benelux. Others want to go cross-continental or even global.

VvW: Exploring the “Support”-angle further, how does the ESI assist it’s starters in finding private financing?

BN: First, it is necessary to assess the type of start-up. Depending on the type of product/service and the market, an advice is given as to what the growth-strategy should be. This doesn’t always need to be angel or venture financing. In many cases, the advice is to consider a strategic partnership. In this case, there’s a larger company already active in the market/industry that the start-up is targeting, and has an interest in taking a stake in the company, with the option to acquire it at a later stage. This requires there to be a kind of fit between the partners. So far, the ESI has had two start-ups taking that option.

Then there is also the option for a joint venture, an equal partnership between two starters in ESINET, or a starter and an existing company. One ESI start-up has done that.

For private financing, like a business angel or venture capitalist, start-ups usually still have a way to go. Usually, they first attract financing from the 3 F’s: Friends, Fools, and Family. This can happen before or during the incubation-phase. More experienced investors usually require the company and idea to be more mature. With a proof of concept, you can attract a business angel. When you are ready to sell a commercial product, you can approach venture capitalists. There are some exceptions to this of course, but this is the way it usually works.

The aim is to ultimately have a core group of business angels that are allied with the incubator. To a degree, this is already the case with venture capitalists, of which a group is being made aware of the inner proceedings of the incubator-companies. The idea is that the start-up does not need to educate these people on space or their idea, the incubator is already doing that for them. And the incubator will basically give residing start-ups feedback on their stage of development and, depending on that, the availability of pots of business angel- or venture capital.

VvW: What are the advantages of a start-up approaching investors through the incubator, rather than going at it alone?

BN: To start, a venture capitalist can receive thousands of business-plans during a year. The aim is that ESI-plans land on top of that pile. This is because the ESI, and the ESA, provides a quality label to its’ residing startups, which manifests itself in four ways.

For one, there’s the quality of the work done at the ESA, their procedures and methodologies. The incubator tries to pass those on to the start-ups.

Second, there are the favourable statistics for technostarters residing in incubators. A survey from 2004 [which I still have to read] reports that ca. 87 % of start-ups in the incubation process are still alive after three years. For a standalone technostarter, this figure is much lower, between 20-30 %.

Third, there are the networking-aspects of the ESI. Business incubation does not work well as a standalone function, it has to be part of a network. In the case of the ESA, it is present in 17 countries, as well as active in non-member states, such as the US and Russia. This can be useful as a gateway for the start-up to expand or move to another country. It’s also good for cross-fertilisation—between different ESI-start-ups and -graduates, suppliers and customers, investors, and other companies. Through the ESINET-network, it is also easier to conduct international market-studies.

Last, but not least, there is the access to the ESA technology and resources (experts, labs, test centre, software tools, facilities, etc.).

VvW: Are there examples of venture capitalists investing in any of the ESI startups?

BN: Sure, there’s ThruVision, which received a substantial amount in two rounds of investment [note: I know the exact sum, but am not sure if I can make this public knowledge: I think it's public since it is mentioned on their web site; perhaps you should have a look (http://www.thruvision.com)]. This company has now graduated, i.e. no longer resides within the ESI.

VvW: From your experience with venture capitalists, how do they feel about the companies that are still in the incubation-/seed-stage?

BN: As was mentioned, they prefer more mature ideas to work with. The key-phrase here is “work with.” Venture capital really means two things, investment + support. Along with the investment, the venture capitalist wants to coach, put people in the right place—on the board, as a CEO. For the latter, most of the start-ups in the ESI-program are founded by someone with an engineering-background. A founder is typically someone that understands the technology and how to build a service or product on top of it.

A venture capitalist, on the other hand, looks at the team, the product/service, the market. He or she will look for people that can run the course, manage the growth. The preference then usually falls to someone with a track-record, who has experience doing that. In the case of ThruVision, the founder is now the technical director, and the CEO is someone with an impressive business-cv.

Another statistic from the European Venture Capital Association (EVCA): In something like 95 % of start-ups invested in by venture capitalists, the founder has been replaced as CEO.

VvW: Do venture capitalists also support the incubator itself in some ways?

BN: Not hands-on, no. They do provide access to a network of companies, investors, and people to work with, which wasn’t there before. There will be more, once the ESINET-fund is started.

VvW: What is the ESInet fund?

BN: First a little background. There is obviously a gap between early stage and growth. This was known from the start of the incubator. This is especially so when you talk about space. Investors look at the space-sector with skeptical eyes. They see it as a market for large players like Alcatel and Astrium. They see it as a niche-market. And when you think about satcom, there’s a lot of international competition from the terrestrial systems. The satcom has already lead to a few big-name and big-investment projects to go bankrupt, example of this are Iridium and GlobalStar.

Furthermore there’s a misunderstanding about what the utilization of space-technologies and -systems really means. Utilization means you are using something that already exits. You only need to adapt it to a non-space sector. This means testing, modification, and validation, something that doesn’t need to take years, rather months. Space-systems refer to satellite-technology, for which you don’t need to build the satellite, you need to be able to receive a signal and use it. For space-technologies, we are talking about transferring and adapting applications and materials used and developed for space to non-space sectors.

First investors need to get this picture. But even if a few of them understand, that doesn’t mean they have the needed expertise. Usually venture capitalists are experienced in certain areas like biotech, meditech, telecoms, etc. Space-related technology does not have that many corresponding VC-experts. So the thought was, if investors will be so hard to find, why not start our own fund?

And this is where the ESINET-fund comes from. Its fund managers don’t need to be convinced on potential business development from space systems and technologies (much) and there is funding for early stage ideas. ESA was convinced to sponsor the fund with 5 million Euros and recently selected a management company from 12 applicants to manage the fund and raise more. The target-size of the fund is 40-50 million Euros in total, to be completed by mid-2006. The ESI is responsible for the deal-flow. This will mostly come from ESI-startups, though if those do not fulfill the needed requirements, investment van occur into other ESA-“ventures.”

The fund-management company will act much like a venture capitalist as far as investing is concerned. It will be present during selection of start-ups and have a supporting role in the development of invested-in companies. And it will take shares in the companies it invests in.

VvW: What do you think the effect will be on other investors, to have this fund running?

BN: It’s always a nicer picture to have a fund tied to an incubator. Having a fund will hopefully attract other investors. Many venture capitalists like to invest in syndicated deals, meaning a group of investors spreading the risks between them. In investments, there’s also usually a leader and followers. It is hoped that the fund can fulfill a leading role in the process.

For business angels and the three F’s, there will always be space. For one, they invest much smaller sums, and second they provide the added value that they bring as people. Like many informal investors, business angels are often interested in a hands-on approach, to be involved in their start-ups, which will benefit entrepreneurs greatly.

VvW: What is the investment climate like in the Netherlands, compared to other European countries?

BN: The Netherlands is not so great for finding private capital, except for subsidies. Both the UK and Germany rank highly for private capital. France and Italy have good governmental support.

VvW: OK, back to your start-ups, what criteria do they need to fulfill to become part of the incubator?

BN: During the course of the incubation-phase, they are asked to prepare financial projections, including parameters like Net Present Value (NPV), Return on Investment (ROI), and other ratios. Templates are provided, if needed, and access to third parties that can help. Over the course of the incubation-phase, the incubator-staff tries to follow the evolution of the NPV. In the future, it is hoped that NPV will be calculated at the application-stage, before the start-up becomes part of the incubator. If that’s possible, of course.

Other than that, the number 1 criteria is the market. If they are not able to define it, they will not be accepted. Similarly, a market-study must be prepared.

VvW: How does the ESI feel about teams starting?

BN: Very supportive. On the whole there are both types, entrepreneurs starting solo and finding partners along the way. Or entrepreneurs that start in a team. Generally the incubator encourages partnerships between technologists and business-people. Investors invest in a team after all. The incubator also has good ties with MBA-programs to find people for start-ups.

VvW: Is the staff able to deal with all the demands of the incubator?

BN: The staff has broad knowledge about issues like legal and intellectual property matters. There are specialists that advise on strategy, market, technology, etc. But it is impossible to know everything in depth. For that the start-up can approach third-party specialists, of which they can get the contacts via the incubator.

VvW: Do you compete with other incubators?

BN: Not at all. In fact, collaboration is encouraged and projects are sent to others as well. Geography is also very important to entrepreneurs, they have a life, etc., so it’s not that feasible to draw them away from a more logical location-choice.

Note: If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to post a comment or mail me. If you are interested in applying to the incubation programme at the ESA also, check out this page and also don’t hesitate to ask me about my experiences of working with two tech-startups in the programme.

Vincent

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Good podcast month for entrepreneurial lessons

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 20 May 2009 09:26:33 +0000

If you want to hear some interesting perspectives on the hardware and software business and/or starting businesses in general, check out the Stanford entrepreneurial thought leader lectures held by Jeff Hawking, co-founder of Palm, and Steve Balmer, employee no. 30 & current CEO at Microsoft.

Jeff Hawking is also the author of “On Intelligence,” and describes his development-path of creating neuro-scientific solutions towards interfacing with technologies (which is, I think, the right perspective towards interface-design). He’s doing some pretty interesting things in the field, also through his foundation called Numenta, but I expect also through future hardware coming out (I’m not sure if he’s involved in the Palm Pre, but he was in the Foleo). He describes some crisis-moments in Palm’s past, including how to compete with Microsoft (the irony!). Very worth checking out and I love the title: “Inside the mind of a reluctant entrepreneur.”

Steve Balmer, what a character! I found him to be thoughtful and concise, whilst never forgetting to pimp the universe that is Microsoft and how that is important for startups… He shares a bunch of stories, like why he decided to drop out of Stanford and join Microsoft as employee no. 30, the current economy and its opportunities, the future of computing, and even makes a few jokes about (not mentioning) Vista.

I thoroughly enjoyed both lectures and think you will too.
Vincent

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