Here’s a list of signals a startup might want to send out (I will discuss these further below):

1. The quality of your idea/prototype/product (the whole range of what your startup is centred around)
2. The quality of the team
3. The quality of your associations
4. Your legal status as a company
5. Your financial situation
6. The satisfaction-quotient of your customers
7. The speed of growth, which is really a component of ‘quality’
8. Your location & office

I kind of threw a few in there, as you can perhaps tell, because for instance some signals can be bundled together into tangible vs. intangible signals, as well as technology, people, financial, legal, etc. You can of course also split op signals into external—to the outside world—and internal—to your co-workers or board.

Why does any of this matter? On a basic level, because we all care about showing signs of being good at something (and starting a business is a highly personal thing in which individuals determine the direction such a venture takes), and more practically, because startups are about bringing ideas to the world that do not exist yet.

Signals are about increasing your worth in the eyes of someone else. To go back to the list, the first one, product, should be obvious: either create a kick-ass product or find a kick-ass customer that really needs your product (the latter is more realistic).

No. 2, the team, is trickier, though still crucial. It’s about getting the right mix of people in a company; people that have different educational backgrounds, possibly different genders, different ages, different networks, etc. It’s tricky because any relationship risks becoming a liability if people don’t match (that’s a big IF). And because getting quality people doesn’t always come easy, either because you can’t afford them or because the type of quality you need cannot be measured on paper or elsewhere.

Three, associations are pretty straightforward. If I have a board-member that has a good reputation, that opens doors. If I have partners in a market that is my target market, that kicks ass. If I can stamp logos of companies on my product that already have a name, that’s great marketing. It’s not rocket-science and the only thing that is required is to make these kinds of connections happen, usually through the quality of your pitch, your product, and your team-members, each of which comes with their own network.

Four, legal status, is not so straightforward. For many companies, having LTD written next to their name is a sign that they reached a certain stage. But in of itself it means nothing, only if it actually makes sense from an accounting point of view. So this is actually something that I don’t think should be up to the entrepreneur, but to an accountant and tax-lawyer. Having LTD or equivalent next to your name is still sweet of course (though not if it costs you 1000s of dollars/euros to set up and you haven’t written your business-plan yet…). Another legal status symbol is having a patent or a trademark. Both are valuable only in certain situations and require a serious strategic analysis beforehand, not least because it is so expensive to maintain (between 6000 – 100,000s for a patent & that doesn’t include the legal cost of going to court over a dispute), but because if you haven’t done your homework, you could be spending money on protection that isn’t worth a damn. Legal signals always require the help of experts, which is why lawyers will, for better or worse, always be around.

Five, the finances, has consequences on so many things that it’s impossible to summarise it well. What kind of company do you have if you can’t pay your employees, if the effort you put into it isn’t generating any cash-flow, etc.? The answer is simply a bad one. Other positive signals here are having a high profile investor on board or, preferred by most companies, a high paying customer or 100.

Six, your customer, should really be number one. Again, what kind of company do you have if you don’t have happy customers? It’s not impossible that this is the case at the start, but there should always be room for making customers happy—interesting story about how Zappos decided to sell to Amazon because its stakeholders thought Zappos was investing too much time/money in increasing customer satisfaction. There will always be conflicts in regards to customer satisfaction vs. financial satisfaction. Another often underestimated problem is that one happy customer doesn’t translate to another. This is the topic of a little book called ‘Crossing the Chasm,’ which is about going from early adopters to the mainstream, different types of customers with very different values and expectations!

Seven, speed, is one that I don’t like, but became aware of through my studies of entrepreneurship. It’s crazy how much media-attention fast growing companies get, as well as how much government-attention. If you can grow to 20+ employees in 2-3 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if politician X gives you a call to thank you for the good you’re doing the economy. If you grow to 1000, the queen/president will probably shake your hand. On the other hand, there are plenty of situations, the internet boom & bust comes to mind, where speed is actually a detriment and it would’ve been better for the entrepreneur(s) to take better care of the foundations of the company (you know, building a profitable business), rather than focussing on the status of having a ginormous team. A debatable point, I know…

Finally, location, well who doesn’t want an office looking out at Manhattan or, in my case, some tropical beach somewhere (I don’t really need the office…)? Who doesn’t want to be able to invite clients and show them your shiny office, with plants, fountains, and beautiful people everywhere? As I hopefully made clear, sending out signals is fine and good, but it should always be weighed against what you give up and if you actually need it. Kind of the same thinking that should be employed when deciding whether to get a new Apple product or Aston Martin—will those shiny objects really make you more desirable to the opposite sex? Well, maybe a little

That was a little braindump. Hope you enjoyed it.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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2. 37 Signals : Digital Natives Leadership in action
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4. An e’diary part 2: what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur
5. The Dynamics of Blogging and the Dynamics of Doing Business

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.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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1. On making Global Package Delivery a little better [Weekend Ramblings]
2. Why Facebook will eventually fail
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5. My favourite Facebook-app

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.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

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2. The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers
3. What would an Always-On Device look like? Do we even want it?
4. Please welcome Anand Kishore Raju, a new blogger on Tech IT Easy !!!
5. Thoughts about Tech IT Easy, inspired by my time in Paris

Every startup starts great, I think. You (and your team, if applicable) feels a sense of elevation, of engaging onto a route that brings rewards, wealth, and joy to future customers (of course the entrepreneur is usually the 1st customer). This hazy phase is necessary to get the necessary adrenaline for the rest of the trajectory. It’s like a warming up, the important difference being that the more you structure your plans during that phase, the more strategically you can dedicate energy to different steps & actions.

Continuing with the analogy of a run, we have reached the marathon phase. We’re running on the limits of our “bodies,” which contain what energy we have pumped in before, what survival strategies we researched, and what supplies we managed to take with us. Both in a marathon and in a startup the vision of the destinations should be strong. It starts with much socialising with other runners, perhaps with some personal trainers during the preparation stage. But eventually, we realise two things: there are lonely routes to run during that marathon. And eventually, it’s a race too and only a selected few can win.

So what am I learning during this marathon?
I may have mentioned this before, but I envisioned my role in the company as different then it is now. I drafted a contract for myself with a set of deliverables that relate a vision outlined in our business plan. One deliverable is keeping that business-plan updated as I know that these plans hold little value as static documents. But essentially, it’s about getting our product to a certain stage and our company to a certain stage, and that’s how I phrased it in my business-plan.

As a CEO, an important part is learning to let go of the definition of a “job” (singular). A CEO must be a generalist and be able to do a number of “jobs” (plural). Not to a great depth, but enough to get each member of the team to do their job well. That means that, in my company, I have to understand how our products are built and help build them. I have to understand design and help my designers. I have to understand marketing and help my team there. In the end, there’s three things to realise about being a CEO: a good percentage of your time is spent on people management and you have to learn to delegate a lot of things. And last but not least: the final responsibility is always yours! You can fire an employee for doing a bad job, but you are always to blame for the outcome. So there’s no excuse, ever!

A runner’s most important asset is his brain. In regular intervals, he has to observe his body and his environment and make a decision about what the best actions are at that moment. Going downhill = move faster. A long road to the next water-source = conserve your supplies. A runner close to you = know his and your strengths and weaknesses and decide whether to run faster, slower, or at normal speed.

The startup’s most important asset is leadership, which fulfils the same role as the brain during a marathon: evaluate internal resources and the environment and decide what step is best to take when.

I hope to have a few more general blog posts on entrepreneurship left in me. But for now, the sun is shining and the future looks bright. But we also need to conserve our supplies to the next water source, and run at sufficient speed to meet both our milestones and reach the finish.

All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. E’Ship Diary Part 4: what to pay attention to when starting a business
2. E’ship diary part 7: Gut Instinct vs. Calculation, or On Managing Uncertainty
3. E’ship diary part 5: project management and vision development in the face of ambiguity, technology and market risks
4. E’ship diary part 6: on the important matter of product design
5. An e’diary part 2: what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur

Marketing aside, it’s hard to write about something that continues to evolve. What is a permanent truth is that you get presented with a lot of information, challenging problems, and Choices (with a capital C) all the time, and I wouldn’t exchange this period for anything (except for a bit more sleep).

The Uncertainties
Today’s post will be about managing uncertainty, which is really at the core of my job description. I wrote about technology, market, people, and other risk before, which is a way to abstract what is happening.

What really is happening is that you have multiple people in a company, each has their own job, not each does it in the same (predictable/independent/insert apt term here) way. These people have to build or build upon often multiple technologies that may or may not exist yet. All of that needs to happen before the project runs out of money. You need to involve external parties who have to like what you’re doing, enough for them to give us stuff for free, invest in our stuff, and/or buy our stuff. Risks from all angles but oddly enough it feels fine.

Lilypads allround
In a draft I wrote a few days ago and don’t want to bore you with, I compared it to the following:

Entrepreneurship is different. You may love doing a certain activity more than others, but doing so may very well come at the price of success. If I were to try to describe the feeling, I would say it feels like jumping from one lilypad to the next and keeping them all floating in the same general direction. I can spend more time on one lilypad because it houses a nice frog I like or because the sun’s shining on it just right. But eventually, the pressure would push the leaf into the water and I would drown. Or something to that (slightly nightmarish) effect.

This isn’t that bad, of course, or rather if you think it’s bad, believe me: you’ll get used to it! I wasn’t prepared for this, but I knew it would be hard and now it’s just an everyday thing.

The best way to deal with all these lilypads is to learn to be efficient and to spread the love around equally.

Gut instinct vs. calculated risks
During the early days of my master in entrepreneurship which was supposed to teach me all this stuff, we tried to analyse “the entrepreneur” from the psychological, sociological, and economical perspective. The most frustrating part about it was the psychological side because every academic paper and article seemed to compare the entrepreneur to a superman. It probably didn’t help much that plenty of those articles were written during the .Com days where we all worshipped entrepreneurs many of which later turned out to sell very good smelling air.

One thing that struck me, however, was the concept of “calculated risk.” Entrepreneurship isn’t a risky venture, it is an exercise in calculated risk. I didn’t get what that meant until very recently.

As mentioned, our company is composed of several people, all of whom are different and work differently. I have people that need structure, people that hate structure, and people that seem to jump from one lilypad from the next, with me, the “boss,” chasing after them. In one way I hate it, in another way I really want people to find the best way FOR THEM to work, though of course respecting the general reality of our situation.

I am taking a risk there, but the crucial part is that I do so in a calculated manner. And that is more literal than you think. For example:

We have a very clear vision of where we want to be in several months time, but there are alternative paths to get there. One would be to build upon existing technology, which would involve a slight adaptation but at a very high financial cost. The advantage is that we have a ready to go product, the disadvantage is that we have to calculate the higher cost down to our customers. That’s ok, if it wasn’t for path no. 2.

No. 2 would require building something from the ground up that would interface with an existing technology, except that it allows us to create something much more impressive (and innovative!), as well as build a series of cheaper prototypes until we reach the mature prototype phase. Cost of production would be the same in the end, except that we can produce 10 versions of our product for the same price. The advantage is a superior product for the consumer, the disadvantage from a developmental stance is that instead of a minor adaption such as in path 1, we spend more time on this part, time we could allocate to other areas.

These are pretty much once-a-week decisions that I have to make, and a large part can already be decided by instinct. It is better to build 10 cheap prototypes than 1 expensive prototype. But how much better it is can also be calculated out in time and material cost in a simple excel sheet.

How I choose to interpret “calculated risk” is that it is actually calculated. Risk is simply uncertainty and uncertainty means that there are alternative paths to a destination and we don’t 100% know which is the right one.

You can apply this to plenty of other things, such as how to design products for different business models and how to design companies for different investors. It is amazing what clarity it brings to quickly crunch the numbers when a new idea is introduced that appears to derail the whole project. After calculating the cost of that choice (the “risk”) it may in fact bring the project to a whole new level!

I still consider myself a visual thinker where ideas are concerned, but I am becoming more and more convinced of the power of “the numbers” in turning ideas into commercial innovations. There is a risk to spending too much time in them, of course. Who hasn’t heard of forecastoritis, also known as the hockey-stick financial forecast. Life doesn’t work that way and while any forecast over a longer period of time ends up looking like starting with a large minus that turns into a larger plus, the best forecasts actually reduce the minuses to a minimum. I see a large R&D budget as the equivalent of a welfare state that just sponsors those types of people that don’t really ever want to make money: the scientists. They just want to build things and love an endless R&D budget. What they don’t realise is that when a company actually makes money, part of that money will be used for R&D anyway, which actually becomes an endless development budget! But only after you have a viable cash cow that makes it happen and only if development continues to generate continuous revenue opportunities. Ok, that last paragraph was a bit of a rant…

All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right. Pictures are courtesy of the great M.C. Escher and nature.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. E’ship diary part 5: project management and vision development in the face of ambiguity, technology and market risks
2. E’ship diary part 3: Why I don’t like the term ‘entrepreneurship’
3. E’Ship Diary Part 8 – On the Marathon of Starting a Business
4. E’ship diary part 6: on the important matter of product design
5. An e’diary part 2: what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur

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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The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. E’ship diary part 7: Gut Instinct vs. Calculation, or On Managing Uncertainty
2. Catching up on software and entrepreneurship books
3. E’Ship Diary Part 8 – On the Marathon of Starting a Business
4. The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers
5. E’ship diary part 6: on the important matter of product design

But how good is this wave of mergers and acquisitions for the future? ( By future I mean upcoming innovation and future of Startups which target innovation not business)

Whenever your biggest competitor takes you over, it blunts the competitive spirit that can drive innovations. Thats what concerns me most, the spirit of innovation is somehow compromised because of takeovers.

Not always always a potential Merger or Takeover can be taken as a positive sign of ever increasing competition and globalization. And particularly not right now when it comes to web and social media startups, many of which are still more focused on innovation and building up audiences than on making profits. Rushing them into deals to fulfill long-delayed plans for an exit strategy could derail the evolution of a strong business plan.

From an investment standpoint, founders and venture capitalists have good reasons to cash out now. Market caps of public tech giants are rising — the Nasdaq gaining big time – and so are their cash stockpiles. For Instance Microsoft has a stock pile of about $49 billion in cash; similar is the story of Google with $24 billion. High-profile Multi Billion dollar deals like the ones we had in recent times have a way of spurring on other acquisitions.

TimeWarner buying AOL and eBay buying Skype come to mind. Even snapping up a hot startup for its technology or talent — Google buying Dodgeball or Yahoo buying Flickr – can lead to culture clashes, customer anger and other disappointing results.

I  tried to re-compile the list of some major takeovers which are substantial enough to change the future of computing.   We are talking about some multibillion dollar mergers and acquisitions, where the Big gets even Bigger.

Oracle eclipses the SUN @ $7.4 Billion

This Merger can be coined as “father of all the Tech Mergers” announced last year. If the announced the deal went through, Oracle,  the industry’s largest database software vendor would get an entry into the server and storage markets worldwide.

The acquisition, still pending, was announced in April, and may even be blocked because European regulators are contending that combining Oracle’s technology with Sun’s open source MySQL database would violate competition laws. Lets see if this deal goes through.

Xerox snaps up ACS in $6.4 billion

Another major takeover, Xerox pays about $6.4 billion in cash and stock for Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a large IT and outsourcing firm. With this merger Xerox hopes it will give it a bigger foothold in the business services space. While the deal will surely boost Xerox, investors wondered whether it overpriced the deal.

Calling the ACS deal “a game-changer” for Xerox, Burns, CEO of the company, said it would help Xerox “expand our business and benefit from stronger revenue and earnings growth.” The deal will triple the service component of Xerox’s revenue to roughly $10 billion annually from $3.5 billion, according to the company.

Dell – Perot Catch-Up Deal worth $ 3.9 Billion

Buying Perot was a part of Dell’s plan to expand its footprint in the IT services market, which was  a necessity in a time when hardware sales were falling. Dell offered a staggering $3.9 billion for Perot Systems, a 68% premium over Perot’s actual stock value. Dell’s purchase can also be seen as a response to rival HP’s $13.9 billion acquisition the previous year of EDS — another services company founded by Perot.

Cisco-Tandberg worth  $3.4 billion

Cisco, already a major player in collaboration products with WebEx and TelePresence, signed an agreement in October to purchase videoconferencing vendor Tandberg, which makes both video devices and network infrastructure products. The acquisition, if completed, could have both a direct and indirect impact on Cisco’s bottom line, because expanded use of videoconferencing may increase network traffic, letting Cisco sell more switches and routers.

HP Acquires 3Com For $2.7 Billion

HP launched a straightforward assault on Cisco in their own Game of Networks. HP’s increasing influence in data center networking and convergence markets will have a big boost with its purchase of 3Com, a maker of switches, routers and security products. HP says the acquisition will further its data center strategy “built on the convergence of servers, storage, networking, management, facilities and services.” The acquisition of 3Com also help to expand HP’s Ethernet switching offerings, add routing solutions and significantly strengthen the company’s position in China thanks to 3Com’s strong presence in China. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

I have collected the figures and numbers from various sources including PCWorld, Gigaom and Wikipedia. Let me know if you have a suggestion or correction to make. Please forgive me for the grammar, I was always bad in Grammar since school

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

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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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Yes, we have all been busy doing things like moving to different countries and continents, starting companies, starting and changing jobs. I think Cecil is even well on his way to becoming a e2.0 authority, and judging by Fidji Simo’s tweets, I think she’s developing herself into an expert in retail—on-, off-, and hybrid forms. And that is amazing news and exactly what I always wanted from Tech IT Easy—a “workforce” that is productive outside of Tech IT Easy and contributes to its members’ lives on- and offline as well.

Which is why I still encourage anyone interested in technology and its commercialisation to join us, to develop and contribute their thoughts and expertise!

All that aside, what more can I wish for our readers and bloggers on this Christmas day? For one, I wish for a better 2010 and I am 100% certain that it will be. We all got a little roughed up in 2009, but what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger! The Internet Boom & Bust… pah, I laugh at its impact: it lead to Le infamous nouveau Web, aka Web 2.0, aka the one where 37Signals had to remind us of the revolutionary idea of charging $$$ for products. I also laugh at Enron, as all its promised consequences of accountability haven’t affected the upper-tier of management one bit (and maybe never will).

But I don’t laugh at what is happening today, I’m happy about it. Between the magnificent state’ification of banks, the “new/old” lean approach to doing all business, and the threat of global warming, it’s another warning shot at us, the complacent human race who thought they had it all under control again. The world isn’t perfect and I hope that every one of those bumps bring us closer to making it better.

All cynicism aside, we live in a time where information is at our fingertips, where collaborative filtering and neuroscience help us better filter the relevant stuff to the top, where we can still publish news at a click, which is still an amazing concept, and where we all have GPS in our hands today, and augmented reality in our hands tomorrow. Yay, the innovative mind and yay, it’s practical outcomes!

Merry Christmas everyone and if you don’t hear from us before the 31st of December, have a great transition into the new year!

Love,

Your Tech IT Easy team:
Alex, Jeremy, Steve, Fidji, Georgia, Cecil, Vincent, Kari, Manu, Lucien, Matthias, Raj, Raphael, and Remy

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The question I’m always asked when I run out of my friends/colleagues/dog patience with the issue of Digital Natives integration within the enterprise is : how to convince the proponents of this culture to adhere to a common professional project, to an organization with rules and commitments ?

The answer is straight-forward : leadership. A leadership for a post-ideologic generation. A leadership whose core resides in simple and clear principles, to put in practise, rather than plastic values nobody believes in.

Enterprise 2.0 represents a gradual immersion of the XXth century organisations into the web culture. Digital Natives Companies are born from this culture : there is no change required to adopt these principles as they are the core foundations the companies were built on.

In order to illustrate this assertion (and as promised), an overview of 37Signals, a GenY company achieving incredible results, from both financial and reputation perspectives.

Anti-nonsense manifesto

37Signals initially is a Web Agency created in Chicago by Jason Fried at the end of the XXth Century. We are not talking here about just another web agency. They already display strong opinions and principles with their original manifesto : Ergonomics, Design, Simplicity, productivity, no-nonsense.

This is a small structure where employees are split all across the USA. To solve subsequent problems, 37Signals chose to develop a in-house project management application.

They recruit David Heinemeier Hansson who decide not to use any of the standard technologies (Java, PHP etc …) for the development. Invoked reason : these technologies are far too complex and not productive enough. Being a fan of the agility and flexibility offered by an obscure scripting language (Ruby), he develops his own web development framework : Ruby On Rails.

At the end of a quick build, 37signals proposes Basecamp service in SaaS mode and reaches the million user milestone in November 2006.

Start-up with an opinion

RoR framework is well received by the open source software development community, which leans heavily on the Java side of things back then.

Well respected figures such as Martin Fowler or Bruce Tate praise the great simplicity and the strong principles of the framework (convention over configuration etc …).

Getting Real

From Basecamp development experience and success, Jason Fried writes an essay : Getting Real.

This book enjoys a tremendous success for his strong anti-corporate stances and the radical principles it preaches : no functional specifications, no planning, no meeting. Also : do less features than the competitor but spend more time to design them properly; do not anticipate on problems you don’t already have (think scalability) and embrace constraints which can prove to be innovation opportunities.

As a kind of alternative business bible, this e-book contributes significantly to their reputation and the growing incoming traffic on their blog SignalVsNoise. This online business reputation allows Fried et Hansson to give conferences and raise them to well respected figures in the industry.

The next small thing

All start-ups dream of getting bigger and bigger in order to become global companies ?

37Signals insist they want to remain a small shop : there are only twelve of them today. This small size allows them to remain extremely agile and to progress with small changes while implementing small decisions. This especially allows them to focus on their core activity et to get rid of any other issue.

Key points are productivity and trust : I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done (J. Fried).

Productivity, Trust but also simplicity, the ultimate sophistication according to Leonardo Di Vinci : “Simple requires deep thought, discipline, and patience – things that many companies lack” (Matt Linderman a 37Signals employee)

Business Model Conundrum

In A Secret to making money online a presentation he gave in Startup Stanford conference in 2008, Hansson goes against standard start-up policies and introduce the thoughts that brought them to their business :

The classic conundrum : You have a

1. great application and then
   
2. ?????? (something magical happens and then)
   
3. You make profits.
   

We have been doing research, experiment etc … we found out that the best option for us was to 2 – put a price on the application to make profit. It’s too simple to be true but believe me it works.

Financial Independence

Each time you see a successful company, tell yourself it’s because someone in the company took a brave decision – P. Drucker

Once again on the opposite side of the other start-up financial approach, 37Signals made the brave choice to bill their customer on a monthly basis. This service is as easy to subscribe as it is to cancel. The objective is to ensure the company is financially sound and independent.

So far, they only have accepted one investor : Jeff Bezos. Bezos, who knows a couple of things about online business, guarantees not to interfere with their business strategy.

A cool, though very meaningful anecdote : when they launched their Basecamp service, they didn’t know how they would bill their customer at the end of the month. They implement their billing solution within that 30 days. This is hardcore just-in-time.

Working hard is overrated

All start-ups have the overtime culture ? DHH openly takes on à Jason Calcanis when the latter recommends in his start-up management principles to only recruit workaholics.

Their position : to design, develop and launch software services is a creative craft and it’s just not possible to be creative more than 4 or 5 hours per day. In order to preserve their creativity, 37Signals decide to switch to the 4 days week. Working hard is overrated indeed to quote the great Caterina Fake, flickr founder.

No meeting

For the Fried’s mob, evil in the organisation has a name : interruptions. And the embodiment of Evil is Meetings. Meetings should be exception not the rule (Fried). According to Fried, in order to be creative, one has to be in the zone, a sort of state of mind which requires deep focus : all these interruptions prevent people from reaching the zone. And from being creative.

In order for people to collaborate smoothly without interrupting each other, 37Signals create the Campfire service, a Business Group Chat.

Ban the four letter words

Leadership also is a sound and harnessed communication. 37Signals has banished a set of four-letter-words from the company vocabulary. These simple and common words which often prove to have bad consequences : must, need, just, can’t, easy, only, fast.

Reality is a terrible collaborator

According to Fried, planning is useless. These are just vague guesses who have no purpose other than reassuring control addicted managers.

What the point in losing time trying to predict the future when Reality is a terrible collaborator. Where will we be in 10 years ? In the business (Fried).

Do the right thing

Management is doing the things right, while Leadership is doing the right thing. (P. Drucker)

Offering simple enterprise SaaS solutions to SMBs who praise their services, and focussing on simple principles they literally apply on a day-to-day basis, Fried and Hansson give a great leadership lesson to the online business.

Some people sometimes misinterpret this intransigence and confuse it with arrogance. As a result, they have quite a few detractors. But these, in turn, contribute to grow their fan base who admire more the company as they loudly voice their strong opinions.

They enter the HallOfFame-2.0 with Basecamp being mentioned in the mythic Meet Charlie presentation slideware, probably the best introduction to Entrerprise 2.0 ever designed.

Wrongfooted Enterprise

37Signals has shown with much panache that Digital Natives know how to run their business while completely integrating constraints and characteristics of the XXIst century connected world. With this amazing result : 12 people (working 4 day/week) in a company delivering services to million of customers. Most importantly, they achieve so doing the exact opposite of what last century companies recommend.

Peter Drucker, again, in Management Challenges of the XXIst Century :

The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge worker.

This objective has been patently achieved at 37Signals.

Thinking about it, that’s probably one of the main blocker of Enterprise 2.0 adoption. For the first time since Taylorism age, Corporate world is facing a successful alternative business model that seasoned business leaders have trouble to apprehend.

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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:

1. Customising to local needs – which involves first understanding these needs, and then meeting them.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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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An utterly insignificant little blue-green planet in the unfashionable part of the galaxy

This morning at the gym, I overheard people talking about the recent e-mail leak from UK’s Climatic Research Unit. Paraphrasing, the discussion went something like this. “…I read from the news that they have exaggerated the numbers.” “Yeah, I never could believe that the sea levels could rise by so many meters.” And off they went talking about heatwaves in the Middle Ages and other stuff, probably trying to assure each other that everything is just fine.

Ars Technica does a good job, as always, explaining how the e-mail leak means probably nothing. And anyway, the scientific community has ways routing around fraud  – which, you have to keep in mind, is not the case here.

At another occasion, before the e-mail leak, in a bus an older woman wondered “how can they measure that the sea-levels have risen by a fraction of a millimeter. It’s so tiny.” I almost wanted to tell her about the DNA, carbon nanotubes, integrated circuits and other wonders of science in an effort to explain that, yes, “they” can measure things even if they are really small.

I’m seriously worried that these people secretly wish that the whole climate change is just a bad dream, and that they have a confirmation bias to believe all evidence that disproves that our planet is in peril – that status quo will prevail.

Yes, I’d also like if the whole climate issue was just a bad dream. But no e-mail leak or even a group of fraudulent scientist (which, once again, isn’t the case here) does not disprove the massive amount of evidence that we have for an accelerating climate change. What’s going on is a good example of our cognitive dissonance at work. Maybe it’s easier to justify why you’re not doing anything to counter the problem, if the problem doesn’t exist in the first place.

Unfortunately, the newspapers and TV news aren’t really helping, going for flashy headlines instead. True, the scientific community has a bad track record trying to explain things to laypeople, but sometimes things are a bit difficult – especially when they are as complex as the climate of a planet.

In fact, it seems that television can make things worse, as this video from a Sarah Palin’s book-signing shows (see 7:00 for the kicker). People, instead of trying to even rationalize their arguments themselves, just throw catchphrases to explain their position. My favourite? How polar bears must be removed from endangered species list so it would be easier to drill for oil in Alaska.

I’m really, really worried.

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I’m not going to go into what sad individuals do like Twitter (small gulp), but I am pretty certain that teens are major drivers in terms of Facebook or Myspace (as, from personal experience, I don’t really see teens stopping being teens until their 21, I classify most undergraduate university students as teens also).

The major driver in teen-life is not exposure. It is in fact privacy. For every teen version of Paris Hilton in highschool, ca. 20 students in fact feel uncomfortable about all this exposure. It’s a hormonal thing and I don’t think technology change can change biological factors, at least not for a very long time.

Just my 2 cents, derived mostly from growing up in a large family. Feel free to disagree, but I think privacy is a much better marketing strategy for teens than “let’s expose everything.”

Vincent

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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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Reasons why Starbucks bothers me include, most of all, that it is not a coffeeshop with a European target-audience. We Europeans have plenty of choice and tradition in terms of coffee, and I have no problem finding a place of atmosphere with some kickin’ coffee at half the price of one of those Americanos (which, btw. taste terrible). The only attraction of Starbucks is for me as a take-away place, but that was not really the aim of the business, as described in Schultz’s book.

Starbucks was meant to be a “3rd Place,” a place where people can temporarily reside that is not their office or their home, and that is where Starbucks, in my opinion, fails. It should also not seen in isolation from other chains, like McDonalds, Subways, and the many “CloneBucks’s” that have arisen since the writing of Schultz’s book—it is basically a manual for how to start your very own Starbucks and, apart from its partnerships, it’s a low-tech business. Right now, when you enter a Starbucks in say, Cologne, Germany, it will look exactly the same as the one in Paris, France, and that act of replication already devalues the concept in my eyes. All Starbucks Cafés are very clean-looking, unlike a Hard Rock Café for instance, which doesn’t make them all that much better than a McDonalds (Café), which serves coffee equally well.

End complaints about Starbucks, a chain I had all but given up on.

The most depressing part of this business is the ease at which McDonalds managed to replicate its basic features, ……… but let’s not forget that the Starbucks people aren’t stupid and learning goes both ways. Clearly, McDonalds (another business, I’m a fan of) has strong process-advantages, which are also quite apparent to the observer and can be benefitted from by outsiders. Something that, it turns out, Starbucks exploited and will hopefully lead to a more efficient machine of a business, while (hopefully) placing the focus back on the “3rd Place” idea.

And now, it has been revealed, Starbucks is trying to get back into that game with its “community coffeeshops initiative.” While I don’t think that this will drastically improve the Starbucks offering, I do hope that it allows for more creativity and individuality down the road.

That said, there is still a lot of room for “3rd Places,” also in terms of building chains of them, they just need to be better designed to actually be a 3rd place. From books, to music, to zen-gardens, people like me are still looking for the equivalent of what was before probably known as the “gentlemen’s club,” by I mean, in an entirely un-sexist way, a place where you can go and relax, alone or with friends.

Starbucks seems to have gotten lost on the path and retreated down to the level of commoditization. It make me wonder if perhaps these types of qualitative initiatives simply cannot be undertaken quantitatively, without losing too much in the process.

Vincent

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The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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I think there is a certain danger here, if Apple doesn’t fight it, which it does, while Palm Pre continues to try and gain access anyway. It seems very shady on Palm’s side, but doe sit have a case here? I will discuss the strategic implications, as far as I can identify them.

Apple, as we all know, is a very interesting company. It is very vertically integrated, building hardware, software, and has a large influence on the connection between them (e.g. mobile internet), as well as the content provided on them (e.g. music, movies, the app store). Some would call this a monopolistic situation and it seems strange that it gets away with this, while Microsoft, with something that is, for now, as trivial as a browser, does not (in the EU at least).

iTunes is a powerhouse for media and mobile software, but this can be segmented into different areas and different phases. The iPod was released at the beginning of this decade (phase 0), shortly after iTunes, which then built up a power-position for music (phase 1). As the iPods became mobile computing devices, more content was being shipped via iTunes, such as video and those little games (phase 2). Finally, 2 years ago, the iPhone was released, with about a year later, the App Store (phase 3).

Music, phase 1 of ITunes’ power play, is the area which the Palm Pre (to my understanding) is impeding upon. You could easily see Video being the next thing to sync, though I’m not sure if this is possible now. Unless the iPhone takes a step back towards a more web-app-based approach, I don’t see the Palm Pre being a threat to Apple on the App Store front.

Apart from a phase-based perspective, there is also the matter of the lowest common denominator (LCD). Why do people buy mobile Apple products? I would argue that nearly everyone buys an iPod, because of playing music (and not so much video), while a growing niche segment buys the iPod Touch and iPhone for applications and games, as well as media. The LCD is music and it continues to be of strategic relevance to Apple, even with the hyping of their App Store, where Apple will continue to stay entrenched indefinitely.

So, from a strategic perspective, Palm Pre does not stand a chance. Apple will continue to make iTunes incompatible with each future version. Legally, on the other hand, I am not nearly qualified enough to make that assessment, though I think the “cow argument” may apply. If Palm Pre keeps trying hard enough, and continues to get a user-base that desires this link, there may be a legal argument towards loosening Apple’s grip on mobile media.

Since iTunes isn’t very profitable for Apple, I’m not sure what the implications will be for it, but I expect them to fight ’till the last breath.

Vincent
(Picture has no relation to this topic, but is of a cool movie nevertheless)

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At our financial trust, I’m currently filling out a pretty long survey from the Luxemborg statistical office (STATEC) regarding our level of “internetisation.” It’s not easy being digital in a world where you often deal with highly sensitive data, sometimes coming from individuals who do not like dealing with you through digital means. The very word “Trust” in our company description, already forces you to ask the question: can clients trust us using digital communication?

The answer is in most cases No. Go to any bank and try to get significant things done and they want you to sign for it. Same with notaries (and doehetzelfnotaris.nl does not automatise the signing part). The financial sector is particularly stuck in what I would call “the old world,” though not, I would say, without good reasons.

My question to you is:

• is there such a thing as fool-proof communication, which cannot be falsified by any means?
• Is there a surrogate for being there in person and signing your name?

I don’t know of any, but I always assume that our readers are smarter than me.

Chime in, if you can.

Vincent
(Picture of a Robot Accountant. Waah!?)

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I just finished going through the Lesson’s Learned blog post on “The Principles of Product Development Flow,” which I think is an excellent review of a book that I does not seem to be on public release yet for us Europeans. Well, you could order it from Amazon.com.

I’m fascinated with things like lean manufacturing, total quality management, agile development, etc. Basically, product development, which Eric enticed me with, as it’s the crucial link between invention and commercialisation (aka the definition of innovation).

That said, product development is something that you best learn in university and not (just) from a book. Several reasons:

• anyone can say that they read a book
• there are no tests at the end of books, no accreditation for you.
• it’s a singular view at a problem, while in a course you (hopefully) get presented with multiple views
• you equally don’t have your peers or teachers to discuss problems and solutions with.
• And, the most important reasons of all, a good university provides a link between theory and application, by providing you with opportunities for doing internships and/or jobs.

None of this is sadly provided by books and is why I feel that reading a book on product development and management will only help someone actively engaged in this activity and/or doing a study in this field.

That said, I think that those are all areas where bloggers, authors, companies, and educational institutes can do a lot about improving the system of learning and particularly the link between learning and application.

Just my point of view, I’d love to hear yours.
Vincent
(Picture courtesy of sinesoflearning.blogspot.com)

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Back when I followed 300 people on Twitter you couldn’t pay me enough to read my Twitter-stream. I called it trying to drink from a waterfall several times and you all know what happens when you drink from a waterfall: you fall in!

No, the only way I read Twitter content and pretty much the best way to catch my attention these days is to @vincentvw me, just because I have an rss-feed just for that.

The traditional, “writing for success” way? Write a compelling title. But that has back-fired on me as a reader more than once. You can also write posts to p*ss off people, which is pretty effective, but leads to stuff like death threats.

I like the idea of pinging someone personally, à la the Twitter reply, much more. What I would like is something as follows:

A system that gives people the option to register with their names, contact-details, and interests (in the form of tags, maybe). And when, and only when, that particular interest is being written about, then you get pinged.

I guess you could already do this with some fancy Google tracking or just by subscribing to a tag-based rss-feed (Delicious allows for this, not sure about other platforms). But I see this as a great way for blogs to become relevant once more. It would also force bloggers to connect more with their readers’ interests and perhaps lead to a stronger community feel.

What do you think?

Vincent
(Picture, called “Emptiness is form,” is courtesy of Scott Snibbe.)

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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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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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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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Watching this movie in bed this morning, recuperating from a very exhausting but great few days, I thought about the meaning of it all. And because this is a business and technology blog and I can’t exactly write posts about the meaning of life, I’ll write about what I think it means in a business context instead.

In sales, which by its nature of convincing people to spend their hard-earned cash on a product or service, has a bad reputation, you can either sell a widget (Sindbad) or you can sell a life (the sea). But really you should sell the widget, within the context of the life. So, in other words, the most convincing sales method is to sell an Experience.

Right now, I am sitting at a terrace in the Place Guillaume II in Luxembourg, listening to live music, and drinking my third tea. Had the context been, pardon my French, merde, I would’ve left after the first tea. Had the tea been bad, I would’ve left also. But because the context and the product/service are good, I have become a repeat-customer, at least for today.

I don’t think this is restricted to B2C only. In business-to-business, which is the area I operate in, we also sell services which have to either fit within the context of the customer, or create an entirely, new and better context for him. So, for instance, our financial trust manages certain financial affairs for customers who want to settle down their company or savings in Luxembourg and enjoy certain tax- and other advantages. The context/product combination is even more clearer in this case, as we are in fact offering a country as our product. Of course, we still have to do a good job, but we convince our “Marinas” to come here and work with us, through a big-picture sale.

I hate it when salespeople try to convince me about their product without having considered for one second what the financial or other benefit is for me. And there is an incredible amount of these negative experiences out there, which I think is the primary reason for why sales gets a bad rap. If you instead think of it as selling a cruise on the sea, or, better, an sea-adventure with Sindbad, I think you’ll generate much more positive returns.

Of course, this doesn’t always work for a cheap product like tea, where the margins are so low (actually, I think the margins are at about 70%, but 70% of 2 euros is not a lot) that you would rather sell more, more quickly, than spend too much effort on the context and in the process sell more slowly. The difference is perhaps that with a product like tea, the location matters a lot, which means that you have to spend more on rent and include that in the cost of your product.

End of thought for today. If you’re in sales, sell the experience, not just an expense, and I think your quality of working life will increase. I prefer a happy paying customer than just a paying customer, don’t you?

Vincent

(Picture of The SS Rotterdam returning home from her last voyage)

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Since Tech IT Easy was founded by a Parisian, I felt it was good to go to the source and have a “vision-refresher” as it were. At its peak, this group-blog featured 15 writers, the majority of which was from France or situated there at some point. Many are now spread across this planet and it’s sites like Tech IT Easy that represent a small node where we can occasionally brush against each other (in an intellectual way) and exchange the wisdom we have learned.

Meeting several Tech IT Easy authors, Steve Danino and Emmanuel Perez-Duarte, it reconfirmed to me the intellectual spirit in which this weblog was founded, as well as the search for something, anything, but probably tech- (and/or business!-) related. Many of our authors enjoy a solid educational background, which is both good and bad. Good, in the sense of the value it brings. Bad, because there are many opportunity costs in life and even more so for well-educated men and women. It is clear then that we all write when we can, but more often than not, we cannot.

It is all the more important then to get more (and more and more) fresh blood onto Tech IT Easy to replace those that have moved on, and to connect those who are “old” to those who are “new.” The vision, my vision for Tech IT Easy has always been that of building a community of talented people who directly and indirectly assist each other to make our world a (technological) marvel.

Does that work in practice? In my opinion, only if people work hard at making it happen and the effects are far from direct or instantaneous. Rather, if I need to speak to an interesting person in France (or anywhere really) or bounce a complicated idea of someone, I’ll often look up one of our Tech IT Easy members and vice versa.

A few blog posts that I thought were great and directly showed off the value of some of our members, were Remy Miralles‘s posts about being a software developer, and Cecil Dijoux‘s (who is incidentally also a musician by night) posts about High Availability Architecture. I have met neither of them yet, but I know the day will come. These posts are more the exception to the rule, which is that, on this weblog, we often do not market ourselves, but instead think out loud and whatever opportunities happen because or outside of it, are the individual’s own. The risk is that sometimes you of course do the opposite of marketing, but hey…

It is the nature of the beast that is blogging that its value is hard to determine. We host this weblog for a negligible amount and the 45 min. a day that I spend blogging on it is also negligible in terms of expense. We could value this blog by asking for money, but apart from some unobtrusive monetisation exercises on the horizon, we will not make a serious effort at that… because it would create a different kind of pressure and hence different kind of focus. But, who knows…

The value that Tech IT Easy has to me, remains to be that node, out of which occasionally there is some new strings that are formed, either intellectually or through building up a new relationship or venture. Everything else is… soft tissue.

In the words of the once great Arnold, I’ll be back!
Vincent

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Men can’t get away with this !!

Jason Kottke pointed me towards an anti-fashion-industry trend lead by some women: the wearing-one-dress-slightly-altered-day-in-day-out-trend. Somewhat jealous, because it seems so efficient (and thus manly), but I don’t think men can get away with doing something like that, do you? Then again, men also don’t look quite as attractive…

Factors influencing the ‘virtual office’

I’ve heard several stories of entrepreneurs setting up their companies that they can operate it independently from a location, and if you’ve read some of my posts on “designing companies” and mobility, you know that I feel very strongly about doing something similar. In VAT-law, there’s the rule that you can’t locate your VAT-payments to a VAT-friendly country if you’re doing significant business in the VAT-unfriendly country. I’m guessing it’s quite similar with virtual offices. If your business activities tie you to a particular location, than that is a ‘tax’ that you have to pay.

Since there are plenty of smart tax-lawyers around who know their way around the loop-holes, perhaps it’s time for some ‘expert-consultants’ that help entrepreneurs become location-free?? The 4-hour workweek guy comes to mind.

On building (corporate) Knowledge Centres

I grew up in a library, one which my father built, so I may have a different perspective from people growing up in the more digital, paper-free world. But, to me, libraries are magical and comforting. One of the first things I did, moving to Luxembourg, was to move many of my books here (with more on the way) and asking my boss whether we can set up a library.

More broadly, a library to me stands for building and storing knowledge, whether for individuals or groups, and is a source of creativity, innovation, and also trust. Large consultancies are most famous for doing such things and if you saw the virtual universities some of them have train their staff, you’d be amazed.

No great point to this story, except that I hope that as an entrepreneur/manager/CEO you’ll also consider how to improve the lives of your employees sometimes, as well as consider that your company, which is essentially a living organism, will only benefit from having more knowledge inside of it.

On that philosophical note, I.. am.. out.

Vincent

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