Tech IT Easy

The Mac App Store is gonna **** things up

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 20:50:04 +0000

Horror-tagline for the Mac App-store: It reveals what was previously hidden… but you may not like what you find.

I’ve been looking at two-and-a-half sources for informing my opinion about the Mac App Store (MApp Store for short): TUAW’s price point analysis of the Mac apps in the store today, some developers p.o.v. that previously only sold on the desktop, but not iOS or the MApp Store, and my own experiences and thoughts about both it and the iOS App Store.

So here’s my view of it. I think the MApp Store is scary for many developers and will continue to be for some time. I know that some are not making the blockbuster-sales that they were expecting and I imagine that they are scared to become one of the many me-too apps that the iOS store is famous for. Now, I have no idea about the complexity of developing a Mac app, I imagine it’s much harder to develop than an iOS one, but I do think that copy-cats will be a big risk.

There are three causes for concern, I think. They are: over-pricing, over-featuring, and copy-cats. I’ll go into them one by one.

Over-pricing:

What the iOS store taught us was that a great deal of 99 cent sales make for a million dollar app. Take Camera+ (which I don’t get) or Angry Birds (which I sadly get). For every 1 cent they would’ve raised the price, they may have decreased their market a few percentage points. At 99 cents they stuck and millions they made. That same dynamic should apply to the MApp Store, to the degree that the Macs have become increasingly popular and people that own them need to buy software somewhere. There is no question that the store will become the dominant way to purchase Apps on the Mac in a few months time and anyone who thinks they can maintain a dual sales channel is strongly kidding themselves. I am not going to go into what is the correct pricing for a certain app, but looking at the distribution on the TUAW analysis and the fact that it costs nothing but bandwidth and some support costs to duplicate an app, I expect that there will be some interesting changes happening and probably trending downwards.

Over-featuring:

The iOS store also taught us that single purpose apps can be extremely effective, as long as they do their job well. Instapaper and SimpleNote come to mind, both of which add tremendous value to the iOS experience. At the other extreme, people are not expecting software vendors like Adobe & Microsoft to join the MApp Store anytime soon, because of the complexity and bundled nature of the apps that they sell. Well, the greatest example that simplicity is key on the MApp Store is Apple’s own product-line. Previously bundled into iLife and iWorks, it is now sold seperately as iPhoto, iMovie, etc. for iLife, and Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for iWorks. There is a trade-off for them too because people like me will never voluntarily buy Numbers or iMovie, so I will spend less than the $160 it would’ve cost me to buy both suites on disk. But I’ve also never bought iLife, so they never would’ve collected $80 for me in the 1st place. I will however not hesitate to buy iPhoto when the next release comes out, and the same for Pages, because I love both apps (iPhoto not so much, actually, but what else is there…). I imagine a lot of people will feel the same way, cherry-picking what they need, instead of deciding to NOT spend $160 for something they only use 10% of.

When I look at many apps in the MApp Store today, my first thoughts are: my god that’s expensive and do I need all these features? If App makers can decrease the cost to consumers by decreasing the amount of features they offer (or offer them as paid add-ons as soon as Apple allows it), and thus enlarge their market, doesn’t that seem more logical than doing it the old way of cramming in as much as possible because the total market is small???

Copy-cats:

The iOS store drove a lot of venture capital money to flow into app development, whether it’s on the iOS platform, on Android, or elsewhere. A lot of people built apps because they heard that place was a goldmine. Without a doubt, the MApp Store will spurn Windows to follow suit, potentially doubling the market for app developers. What will certainly happen is that the same type of people that created a million fart-apps will come and create a large number of copycats to today’s Pixelmator, Omniplan, and Marsedit. And the only way for existing developers to defend themselves is to be pro-active now and market the s*** out of their apps (I think a good price does 90% of the work). Pixelmator is good at this stuff, mostly they’ve been fighting the incumbent Photoshop and have been joined by a bunch of other Photoshop-like apps all competing in the same price-range. But a lot of Mac developers are used to being obscure, which is a type of hype in itself. These guys need to learn to come out of their shell and do whatever’s needed to get their lead now.

Many Mac apps are great and have been for the last 6 years that I have had the pleasure of discovering them. I hope they continue to exist, but we are definitely in a new stage of software-evolution now, where only the strongest, the leanest, or the quickest will survive.

Getting back to my horror tagline, the Mac has been in a strange place ever since, in my opinion, the shift from PowerPC to Intel. Mac users aren’t the nerdy Wozniak anymore, they are everyone. And iOS has made developers out of everyone too. So I’m both excited for what’s going to happen in the future, but also a little worried for the small developers that didn’t grasp the enormity of it.

This blog post was written on Marsedit, one of my favourite indie apps on the Mac.

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Overpopulation in Facebook

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 09:44:02 +0000

To fill my quota of social media posts for the year, here’s a post about Facebook’s user base and real-world statistics.

I was inspired by a post in a Finnish blog on social media about how the Facebook’s penetration rate in certain Finnish age groups is way over 100%. From its comments, I found that similar analysis was already done for UK and US with same results and with some explanation for the reasons. However, with the amazing Eurostat and Socialbakers‘ Facebook data, we can do this stuff for many other countries with interesting results! (To save time, I used Socialbakers data which is grouped by age and so doesn’t give as accurate results as going manually through Facebook’s advertisement tool would.)

The interesting bit is that there are big differences between the European countries. The Nordics are similar to UK and US, but that’s about it.

Facebook penetration rates by age group in Europe (click to enlarge)

(You can download the Excel sheet from here)

To solve the problem of above 100% coverage in age groups, there are two explanations that first come to mind and were explored in the both previous blog posts. The first one is Facebook’s age limit, which does not allow people below 13 to join Facebook. The obvious workaround is to round your age up to get in. The other explanation are the people hitting mid-life crisis and rounding their age down. I’m quite the combination of these two explains most of the bulge in the 18-24 age group.

At a glance, it would seem that the 18-24 bulge depends on the overall penetration rate. It seems that once the penetration goes high enough (say, 30%), it basically means that your older siblings’ got their Facebook profiles as well as pretty much everyone else in your real-life social network who’s above 13, and naturally you want it too. Doesn’t take long before someone figures out that the age check is easy to bypass, and like everything that’s age-restricted at that age (like 18+ movies and games) it becomes cool and once it gathers some critical mass, the social norm becomes to fake your age so that you can be on Facebook with your classmates and so on. However, why isn’t this phenomenon more global but just restricted to countries with high penetration rate? There are advertisements in pretty much all media telling how this and that is on Facebook and almost every new electronic device can access Facebook … and yet you, at 12, are forbidden from where everyone else apparently is.

As for other reasons for these age groups going over 100%, there are many. One cause is plain and simple fake profiles (for fun or spam), but I would have assumed young people are equally dorks all around Europe. One of the bigger reasons is business accounts. Then there are the duplicate profiles some people have for the multiple identities they have and want to keep separate. Also, as a pet owner I know some people made profiles for their pets but this can’t really explain the discrepancy at all. The need for sepearate accounts is now alleviated by the (not so) new Pages, which are much more suitable for some of the use cases which previously “required” a duplicate account (against Facebook’s terms of service). However, none of these can explain the tens of thousands of mis-aged accounts, but explain why Facebook has been pushing for people to use Pages instead (and why your interactions with a Page are almost at par with an another Account).

However, it would much interesting to know what explains the differences between the countries. My hypothesis is that the bulge at 18-24 correlates with high overall penetration rate (ie. <13 year olds feel the social pressure to join, faking their age) and high mobile usage in teen age groups. This overcoverage seems to happen when the overall penetration rate is over 30%. One explanation might be that in countries where broadband / mobile phones / social networks are more of a norm, people have started to have fun with Facebook whereas in places where internet usage is scarce, people take it more seriously.

I would have expected the Dutch to be similar to the Nordics, because they do share many other demographical features. Like many other countries, there’s a national Facebook equivalent in the Netherlands, Hyves. I’ve beent old it was very popular in the past, but a lot of Dutch people are migrating to Facebook, the one true social network. This happened in Finland as well, where IRC-galleria has been declining in the recent past due to the “old” generation of teen users “upgrading” to Facebook and the “new” potential teen population jumping directly to Facebook. Another question mark to me is Estonia, where I would have imagined to see similar results as in the Nordics.

On the other hand, both the German- and Russian-speaking world seem to have quite strong “local” social networks. The idea that the language is the biggest barrier between social networks is quite interesting, but I don’t have any evidence for it. The guys at Xiha probably know better. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the near future Facebook borrows ideas from Xiha in their quest to world domination; today Facebook is still very much a product of American culture.

Of course, comparing Facebook’s data against population demographics does not give you any indication what the actual penetration rate is. A much better approach, which was used in the Finnish study was to compare the Facebook penetration rates toh a national survey on social media use by age groups (in Finnish, but here’s a summary in English). The results of this number-crunching was that there can be as many as 200 to 300 thousand accounts with a “wrong” age. Or put another way, that’s more than 10% of Finnish Facebook users.

For further study, Eurostat does offer figures on many internet-related demographics, including “Individuals using the Internet for uploading self-created content to any website to be shared” and “Individuals regularly using the Internet” but these seemed not to be grouped by age, but could be used to better assess the situation. But so what? As baekdal put it in his analysis, age is just a number and “if a person who is really 34 is indicating that she is only 24, you must threat her as a 24 your old person. That’s how old she feels, and that is the only thing you need to know.”

Naturally, the empricial evidence of his users’ behavior goes a bit against Zuckerberg’s idea of your Facebook identity being your only one. As the old saying goes, on the internet, no-one knows you’re a dog.

Newsletters, a flawed marketing tactic

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:32:59 +0000

How many times do you open your mailbox and see something like this?

For me, it’s probably every day of the week. I’m pretty sure it’s because I sign up to at least one new service everyday, but I also know that I don’t sign up for a newsletter everyday. That’s mostly the price you pay for signing up to a service. But I wonder why.

For my business, we have a newsletter option that people can fill out, which allows us to stay in touch with them beyond the homepage, because that’s not where our core-activity lies. For web-services, however, which by their nature revolve around their homepage, I think it’s simply to remind people of their existence. So if I sign up for website x and don’t ever return to it because website x sucks, their newsletter reminds me to check it out again, just in case they stopped sucking.

There’s a step missing, however. Which is that they don’t know why I don’t like their website and decided to improve it without my input. So, chances that website x continues to suck for me over time, because it wasn’t designed for my needs.

Any course or book on sales will tell you that the best sale is the one where the product is aligned with a customer’s needs. Newsletters are akin to a sales guy ranting off a monologue of why his product is so cool, without once checking with the customer if the pitch makes sense or is even necessary.

Newsletter are a form of mass-marketing¹, very similar to they way Spam works, which does not add value to people’s lives. In some cases, it costs a lot of time to get rid of a newsletter, mainly because they require you to sign in with a password, which you may or may not remember.

In this age, where countless sites tell you in a very clear manner how to have a conversation with the visitor to your site, it is shocking that so few businesses still leave the newsletter auto-checked on, instead of having a nice little feedback box on the page to start the two-way information flow.

The Kissmetrics blog is a good site to start learning about how to act like a 21st century web-marketeer, and stop acting like a web-boor.

1. Interestingly, Wikipedia calls newsletters a form of opt-in or permission marketing, however 9/10 times I don’t remember giving permission.

What’s social, anyway?

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 08:19:04 +0000

The social networks are the latest Flash intro animations, the new tag clouds. They are everywhere. However, what is actually social about all these services? It’s a really valid question, because apparently everything is social these days.

One aspect to this is to consider the available social objects in the service and what interactions are available. As a simple rule, a social object is something that usually has an URL and is often serialized as an entry in an RSS feed. Also, often the actor who created these social objects is also a social object.

I just love this picture.

Let’s take Twitter, for example. It’s as “social network” as they come if you asked anyone. But once you start to think about it, it offers very few social objects and even fewer interactions with them. Basically there’s just two, the social objects are the tweets themselves or an off-linked thing in them. On Twitter itself you couldn’t really interact with the latter directly until recently with the new user interface that let’s you see some of the linked content on twitter.com, but that’s still hardly interacting with them. At least with the tweets you have two interactions: reply (discuss) or retweet (like).

In contrast, Facebook offers way more social objects and allows users to push many more into Facebook. However, the available interactions are often limited to textual interactions (discussing) and liking. Of course, the web is mostly a textual medium so it’s not a surprise that our interaction through it is mostly textual. However, the services and the technology and design in them really limit our interactions with social objects. You’re bound to fail if you just try to replicate Facebook and not think how people have traditionally acted in social contexts.

I would not count services where the only social objects are the users themselves as social networks. Because what you then have is essentially a contact list and e-mail and IM have been already done. In this way, I really liked Google Wave as it made the whatever the people were working on the main social object. It just wasn’t really good at it. Some of the “social” games qualify, only because they add a high score next to names in that contact list.

Another aspect is to consider the value to the user. It really isn’t enough just to depend on critical mass and then let Metcalfe’s Law do the rest, because Facebook already did it. This is probably the only reason LinkedIn is still alive – their value proposition is that being part of the network increases your chances with your career. Another example is last.fm, which promises better music recommendations. Ideally, the social network should allow the user to accomplish something regarding the social objects in a better way.

This aspect is also the one that is easy to get backwards. Adding a “social network” to a service doesn’t automatically add value to the service. It depends on the social objects and if the social network adds any value to them and the users. (As a sidenote, isn’t it a misnomer to say to “add” a social network, isn’t the social aspect always there, but you just “utilize” it?) Many of the various Twitter and Facebook integrations haven’t really increased a services value to me. For example, Spotify’s Facebook integration just lets me see somewhat useless information about what they listen to (unlike, say, last.fm). Also that the major Finnish newspaper shows on its front page what articles my friends have “liked” via Facebook has been less than useful for me so far (it just distracts). On the other hand, adding social features to a service like Nike+ sounds like it could improve a user’s motivation for running – there’s nothing like pure social pressure.

The third, and these days the most prevalent aspect is the value to the network’s owner. Of course, in the ideal world the network would be owned by the users, but we do live in a capitalistic system. The most blatant example of this has to be Apple’s Ping, which is essentially a social network to sell more songs on iTunes. The social objects are the songs, albums and artists on iTunes, which the users can interact to make them visible to their friends. And they can follow products (the artists). It’s just as sociopathic as you would expect from Mr. Jobs. One could argue that Ping is the “naked” social network, cutting all the happy-happy-joy-joy bullshit.

In addition to encouraging your users to pimp your stuff in hope of new business (like Ping and Zynga), the other value in the network is the value you get from an exit. Thanks to Metcalfe’s Law, your company is more valuable the more users you have – but you can also try to do something the others haven’t been able. No doubt many founders of the new, smaller social networks hope to have a feature that makes them the next YouTube, Friendfeed or Groupon. The danger here is of course fragmentation and the current players developing the features in-house (see Foursquare, Brightkite and others whose only magic component was location).

The most curious thing is that most “social” networks are forums where you limit the interaction of the social objects to a list of “friends”. The only way iTunes’ Ping really differs from Amazon’s venerable Listmania is that the latter is visible to all. Is it really social to narrow your world-view to just what your friends or companies who manufacture your favorite products share with you? Also, doesn’t it really bother you that these services are designed to let us socialize using their objects (products)?

Consider this blog post, for example. If this was a Facebook note, or a Buzz write-up, it would be mostly visible to just to people that I consider friends by each network’s definition of a friend. Even worse, the only people able to comment on this would be the aforementioned friends. It’s a brave new world.

Postling and how it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy on social networks

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 17:42:11 +0000

Postling is a meta social network—a network that tracks activities on other social networks, allowing its users, small businesses, to save time and get more data. It was developed by the makers of Etsy, which I love the idea of. Etsy represents the future of retail to me, one where every individual can exploit their talents commercially. So it also makes sense that with considerable data about what their users need, they developed the idea of Postling.

My premise is that Postling is launching at a very bad time for small social networks and related services. My methodology for believing this is based on observing several events that have occurred recently and drawing this conclusion.

How it was previously

Hopefully, I do not need to go in too deeply into what has happened in the social media space. My feeling is that we have all become trend-researchers and the history of everything that happened since Twitter & Facebook saw the light—both true examples of mature social networks—is common knowledge. Here are just some bullet points that illustrate how it used to be.

Twitter vs. open: when Twitter came about, the main criticism was its instability, also known as the Fail Whale. An underlying uncertainty was perhaps whether or not Twitter could exist, as it didn’t appear to have any kind of business model. The most practical alternative out there was Friendfeed, later acquired by Facebook, and Dave Winer was the loudest proponent of an open twitter system, called… I think identi.ca(???), but it didn’t appear to go beyond the earliest of adopters.

Facebook vs. open: This one had a much stronger use-case, but to fight Facebook is to fight a monolith. The biggest critique of Facebook then was that there was no way to get out your data or friends. This lead to the failed-at-start Diaspora, which disappointed people somewhat from a technical side, but that’s no where near the problems they would’ve suffered on drawing users away from Facebook.

Twitter api: I’m not going at this on a strict time-line, as this was actually the biggest news about Twitter when it began; the traffic to their API outweighed the traffic to twitter.com. It sort of signified how open Twitter was to outside parties.

Facebook apps: it is fascinating how design changes influence use behaviour. Facebook introduced apps a few years after it started and the resulting design was that it actually created an interface very similar to Windows, with a task-bar and everything, from which you could manage your apps. It signified how friendly Facebook was towards developers back then, but I don’t think users were that happy about seeing Farmville updates permeate over 50% of their streams. A more recent change made apps disappear from the interface, and give users more stream-management options, allowing them to hide App-updates which can’t do app-adoption rate much good. Curious, whether Facebook did this for its users or for some other reasons.

Two bigger changes during “the early days,” were the acquisition of FriendFeed, which had been competing with Facebook non-stop, and Twitter acquiring the maker of Tweetie for iPhone (but not Tweetie for Mac…). To me today, it seems like the sign of more changes to come.

How it is now

Places everyone: speaking of apps, Foursquare & Gowalla made a lot of news this last year, mainly because they annoyed everyone’s newsstream with people’s irrelevant updates about where they are (but that’s just me). With both Facebook and Twitter integrating “places” into their services, the future of these apps is far more uncertain.

Groupon coupons: After the success of Groupon, Facebook is also considering the very profitable coupon business, leading to rumours that Groupon, rather than continuing to compete, is considering selling to Google.

Hello Facemail, goodbye Gmail: if you’ve missed the squabble between Google & Facebook over sharing user’s contacts, you’ve missed a very boring story. It comes down to Google suddenly blocking Facebook from importing contacts, and Facebook suddenly announcing their own messaging, slash email, slash whatever doesn’t cause a PR debacle, service. It’s a big deal, because Gmail was the most social part of Google and if that is gone, Google is just a phone book utility (both Google search and email).

Twitter vs. URL shorteners: I’m a bit confused about this one, but I remember Twitter announcing their own url-shortening service, called t.co. However, I keep seeing other URLs on Twitter, and the official iPhone app also gives alternatives as a choice. So time will tell what will happen there.

Twitter vs. BoxCar: It’s a small thing, but BoxCar, a notification system on the iPhone for Twitter, Facebook, email, RSS, etc., updated their app and got some hype on the Twitter-channels. What seemed like a day later, Twitter updated their app to integrate notifications, thus eliminating the need for BoxCar, which filled that niche. Fast & cold.

Zynga & Facebook: I am not a fan of Zynga, least of all because I think they produce crappy games, but because they employ a drug-pusher’s model. But they are extremely successful, also on the Facebook platform, which is strange as apps there don’t seem to be as important anymore. I heard that Zynga is pushing a lot of money towards Facebook, thus getting a privileged status. Money is god.

Third party applications bet on everything: in an interview about Seesmic, Loic Le Meur said that given the uncertainty about social networks today, third party applications have to bet on all fronts, hoping that a change from one party will not upset an app’s whole business model. A little scary.

Some management changes: when looking for the origins of changes, always look towards leadership. Interesting is that Twitter has had a management change in the form of Evan Williams stepping down as CEO; Tumblr’s CTO, Marco Arment, also stepped down; and there have been changes at Facebook as well. Change in management signifies a vision change.

Conclusions

I have great sympathy for Postling & Etsy, which is why they are the only companies I linked to in this post (also because I’m lazy¹). But I think the climate for launching these types of services is changing drastically.

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Etsy are VC-backed companies (the latter all have the same investor, Fred Wilson & co.) and we have all heard how venture capital is not doing well today. That means that their portfolio have more pressure to perform. A key metric, for web-services at least, is market- and mind-share, and there appears to be incredible consolidation taking place, now less focussed on acquiring talent, but more on developing revenue opportunities internally. So, instead of acquiring Groupon, Facebook develops Froupon, for example.

In the end, Twitter & Facebook benefit from the network effect and their users won’t switch away from these systems for a small feature being offered here and there. With the fall-out in social services, it also seems pretty clear that there is only space for these two services (I’m ignoring LinkedIn, mainly because it’s so easy to ignore). But the powerful ecosystem that comes out of an open internet seems endangered by these two companies, not to mention the other www-monolith, Google. Truly, Mr. Nice Guy, if that was his real name, is gone for the coming few years.

1. Can I Haz a system that auto-converts stuff to links please?)

State of the iPhone Apps

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 15:42:38 +0000

I’m writing a mail to some people about what apps I like on the iPhone these days & why, so it might as well get published here also. You’re going to have to search for these apps yourself, as iTunes app-linking is tedious work.

In no particular order:

Sleep Cycle App: This is supposed to be an alarm that wakes you up when your sleeping is lightest, but I use it mainly to analyse my sleeping behaviour. It’s interesting for me to know that after a good workout, my sleep is very deep, while stressful days result in very light sleep. It’s the essence of a self-help app for me, one that has a physical impact on my life.

Articles: There are times when you want to be a smart*ss to your friends, or when your friends are smart*sses to you, you want to reach their level of … excellence(?). Articles provides a nice interface for Wikipedia on the iPhone and also allows you to read select number of pages offline, useful for when you’re on a trip and don’t want to roam.

WikiHow: This site is completely amazing and the fact that the app is free is even more amazing. Basically, anything from sleeping better to picking a lock is contained within it.

Dictionary: I shouldn’t talk to much about games here (I’ve become a little addicted to some), but Dictionary, also a free app, feeds completely into my addiction to Scrabble / Words with Friends. It does need an internet connection, which sucks.

Instapaper: I once said that I have no idea whether I’ll ever read all the articles I save in Instapaper, but it’s nice that there is an app where all my informational interests are contained and more. 50% of the value of the app is the ability to discover curated content in the Long Reads or Editor’s Picks section.

iBooks: Formerly a Stanza fan, I’ve become a complete nut for iBooks ever since getting the iPhone 4 with the Retina screen. I’ve read over 10,000 iPhone-sized pages so far (translates to a third of that in real pages) and I just can’t stop. Two significant caveats: the iBooks store outside of the US sucks HARD, so the only way to get good content is to get ePub files (by for instance converting them in Stanza on the Mac/PC) and syncing through iTunes. The second issue is that PDF reading doesn’t nearly provide the same reading experience as eBooks. For that there is…

Goodreader: A PDF-reader that will read anything you throw at it and convert it into a nice readable format as well. A classic.

Reeder: An RSS-reader with a nice feel to it. I used to have issues with battery-life when it is running in the background, but they seem to have solved that.

Soundhound: An alternative to Shazam, it recognises songs via microphone, but also has the advantage of recognising hummed songs. I haven’t used it much, but there are times when it is vital. Offline recording is possible.

Meetup: Not as much into Meetups since I left Luxembourg, but it’s still a nice design, providing relevant local info on what is happening near you.

iFitness: I’ve had some really great workouts through this app, which keeps on getting updated with new ones and has tons of routines for gym & home-use. They seem to really care, and that’s what I appreciate in software. New is a calory-database, but I don’t have the discipline to get into that + most are US —how much is that BiG Mac —centric.

RunKeeper (Pro): This app allows you to track stuff like running & cycling, as well as bunch of other moving-related ones, using GPS. I do have two issues with it: the Pro version is quite expensive, related to other apps & as soon as I bought it, I found out that they also sell an “elite” subscription for stuff that isn’t really that valuable to me (fitness classes, I think), which I think is over-the-top. But ok, for the rest it keeps me fit. I especially like the coaching which you can set to monitoring your average pace and informing you of your slackness.

Calvetica: I had to get used to this app, until a friend informed me of how fast it is to add an appointment. It’s basically a 2 click process, which is amazing and about 1000% more efficient than Apple’s official calendar app. One caveat, which they hacked around: the icon doesn’t show the actual date like the calendar app, because Apple doesn’t allow it, so they allow you to put the date as a badge-notification, which works but isn’t pretty.

SimpleNote & JustNotes (Mac): These have to be mentioned hand-in-hand, because they wouldn’t have any value to me separately. SimpleNote is a free (ad-supported) app that allows you to take … simple notes and syncs them over the web. JustNotes is a Mac-app that syncs up with SimpleNote, ensuring that whatever you write is automatically in both places. JustNotes has become my sole note-taking app on the Mac and it’s also free. Amazing stuff.

That is all. No games, as they are like fly on the walls.

Vincent

Is Apple’s FaceTime (meant to be) Disruptive?

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 14:22:39 +0000

Note from Vincent: Hey guys, sorry for the lack of updates on this blog. I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m very preoccupied with other things (that actually make me money) and really, really miss blogging on Techiteasy.org. If perchance, a random reader thinks he can blog at least 1-7x per week on business, tech, and other coolities, please don’t hesitate to contact me on techiteasyblog at the Google mail dot com. For now, please enjoy a brainstorm with myself in a written form.

Before engaging on a rant about FaceTime and whether it’s great or terrible, let’s get one thing straight: what kind of bandwdith does FaceTime on iPhone consume and what kind of bandwidth is currently supported on the 3G network? The reason being that I think a lack of 3G-support is a real handicap to this whole mobile (!) application, as you can easily find out if a friend tries to Face Time call you while on the road.

A Google-search revealed that FaceTime’s actual bandwidth people are measuring is 100 Kbps to 392 Kbps and an AT&T 3G cell has 7 Mbps of total capacity (source), while T-Mobile in the Netherlands (my country) has a reported capacity of 2048/384 kbps (source), which I assume is representative of some, but not all countries in Europe. So, in theory, FaceTime should work over 3G and I can also report that watching the last keynote live over 3G on my iPhone was impeccable, which should say something.

So if FaceTime over 3G will work fine and looking at how Apple is releasing this technology incrementally, 1st to iPhone, then to Mac, then it can be assumed that we ain’t seen nothing yet and Apple will either/or release FaceTime to PCs as well, open the API to Skype et al, and mobile providers will eventually allow it to transmit over their networks.

As to the question of whether it is disruptive, I can only comment on some features that I think are pretty cool and some that are questionable.

What’s cool?! The second camera: One cool feature is the ability to use the iPhone as a demo-machine. I had a Face-to-Face call with a good friend of mine in Brazil in order to show him our product and how it is developing. We build hardware and try to be stealthy about it, so I prefer the one-to-one call, vs. something more public. So what we did was for him to call me from his Mac on my phone and for me to walk him around our workshop, essentially give a presentation, while showing our tech on the back-camera. And that was… awesome! Now, Apple did advertise FaceTime as a way to show off your babies, which is what I was doing, but I don’t know if this is really a killer-feature that is convincing for everyone. But I can imagine a reporter going to an event and getting a sound-byte from Steve Jobs as pretty cool as well.

What’s bad?! Your nostril-hair: I think that the ergonomics of the iPhone camera are not optimal. Basically, anyone with a fat chin or hairy nostrils will probably be self-conscious to the camera seemingly focussing on these parts of their anatomy. I tried holding it higher and further away from my face, but just like a touch-screen iMac would be super-tiring on the arms, so is such a posture.

What’s controversial?! Instant on: Unlike Skype on your PC or phone, FaceTime does not have to be running all the time, or if it is, you don’t notice it. So people who know my mail-address can actually call me, FaceTime will start (with some delay, I should note) and I can either accept or deny the call. If I deny it, my iPhone tells me that the recipient is not available for FaceTime, which is diplomatic enough. But still, being so used to having Skype off, if I don’t want to be disturbed, I’m not sure how I feel about FaceTime intruding into my space like that. At the same time, always being reachable is a telephone thing, which also has its plus-sides.

What’s bad?! Connectivity-issues: My call to Brazil wasn’t flawless and this is over WiFi. I especially noticed problems when I moved around, which would cost more bandwidth, I guess. This brings me to my next point.

What’s bad?! No backchannel: If a Skype-call fails, I type a message to let my contact know about it. No such thing with FaceTime, and it’s also somewhat surprising that they didn’t make a link between iChat & the FaceTime app on the Mac. A little bird did tell me that that would prevent Apple from releasing FaceTime on Windows, where it would be easier to do so as a separate app. But back to the backchannel, there are two features I would like:

A way to leave a voicemail if I don’t reach someone via FaceTime. This will happen a lot if the recipient is on 3G.
A chat-client that isn’t paid sms & works on both the Mac & the phone.

It’s early days yet, but my sense is that this a pretty cool technology meant mostly for buying more Apple-devices. Now, speculating what could be the next steps for FaceTime, there are several:

Worst-case: it could remain as is and I think that at the very least the lack of 3G and the lack of any kind of back-channel are a problem.
Medium-case: Apple will improve the FaceTime app & allow it to run on 3G. This would be a very big deal already.
Best-case: Apple will open up the API to other programs. Since this is what was originally announced and VOIP is only a threat to mobile operators and not to Apple, I expect this to happen in any case.

But is it disruptive? Only if you consider mobile video-calling disruptive. It certainly is, if you watched Star Trek in the 90s like I did and consider this a next step towards teleportation & exploring other planets. I’s also pretty interesting for live-newscasting (over 3G!). It isn’t, if you or your significant other suffers from excessive nostril-hair.

The Annual Kari Silvennoinen is out!

Kari Silvennoinen — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 07:21:16 +0000

I’ve been on the road recently with very spotty wifi access and that’s when Twitter really breaks down. You’re left without context because most tweets aren’t self-standing but a link to a URL shortener giving no idea what’s going on. If you’re not knee deep in the “social”, Twitter seems like a mish-mash of ideas and links and bot posts. Then again, that what the web is: links to other places. However, how we use it and what we link to seems to have changed.

Yo dawg, I heard you like news aggregation so I put a news aggregator in your news aggregator so you can read social media while you read social media.

People are using services that make Twitter a duct-taped-together activity stream. I prefer to hear people’s ideas instead of being carpet bombed with bot notifications from the social media service du jour. But this isn’t exclusive to Twitter, Facebook took this further with web-wide likes and Facebook Connect. Your activity on the web is a feature on Facebook and they encourage you to dump everything there. Fortunately I can’t control what other people do, but a little bit of the Web dies every time someone publishes that stuff. That’s how I feel, but that’s the beauty of the Web: It’s a playground for experimentation. Too bad it feels like there’s not that much experimentation going on except on the business case side of the Web.

I rarely cross-post what I share/do on the various services. I don’t assume you’re stupid, if you want to know what links I find interesting, don’t expect them on my Twitter feed but on my Google Reader. If you want to know about my runs, I’m on Nike+. If you’re interested in what I read, or something else – well, there’s an app that isn’t Twitter for that. Sure, that’s more work for you if you want to know about everything I do but I don’t expect you to be. I don’t have to promote myself on the web – I have a nice day job and as a Finn I’m quite introverted anyway.

Also, if you guys haven’t yet figured it out – Google’s social network is the Web. And it will fail on your usual Web 2.0 metrics, because people don’t want platforms – they want applications. This is what happened with Google Buzz.

I ran a mile! Then I spent two hours promoting it on the web.

As I alluded previosuly, people use Twitter and Facebook as a make-shift Activity Streams because they just work well enough. Google Buzz was an early attempt to the next gen, but it failed miserably. It was complex, it was a platform and no one got the point. It offered advantages over Facebook and Twitter only on infrastructure level, not for the user. I’m quite certain that Google continues on this path, because there’s no reason to make a yet another Orkut when it seems that the future of Facebook and Twitter are activity updates. Better to control those updates than the services where they are published. Also, most of that stuff is just noise. In the future, the real business is filtering and exploiting those little snippets of information, not just dumbly showing them.

This hopefully could also mark the end of the dark age of “social media”, where we ignored the complexities of human social behavior and assuming that before “social media” everything was asocial. When someone can go and say that the end of social gaming is near because all gaming will be social – are you fucking kidding me? At what point in time were games missing a social aspect? Or did these guys only play Solitaire and Minesweeper? The Internet is after all a tool. It’s a delusion to believe we have required social enlightenment through Facebook when a compelling case can be made be against it. Repeat after me: you are not how many friends you have on Facebook, you’re not your LinkedIn profile, you’re not your fucking tweets, …

For example, Facebook gives us just one identity. This is by design and Mark Zuckerberg believes this is the right way to go forward. He and Facebook prefers that identity is our most low common denominator identity, probably so that they can sell more eyeballs to “targeted” ads. That might be reason why Facebook is boring, everyone is just showing their most bland identity they are willing to show to strangers.

On the web, people don’t always want to be “themselves” – or even social. Play some multiplayer games, preferably a FPS on a console – like Call of Duty: MW on PS3 – and you’ll quickly see the dark side of human psyche, also known as Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Blizzard tried to solve the problem as an engineering problem and attempted to force people to use their real names, this was very quickly shot down by users. On the internet, some of us want to be DeathSpank, the Orc slayer.

The Internet does not make much sense… On pricing digital goods and other illogicalities

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:14:49 +0000

“From my cold, dead hands…” It’s something that came to mind as I was thinking about writing this post. The part that doesn’t make sense about the Internet, today and perhaps since ever, is that American concept of “Freedom,” of independence and lack of governance.

In my post on piracy, my point was not complete. YES, historically, there has been a trend in every industry towards eliminating inefficiencies and yes, in some ways making things digital is just another step down that line, but NO, as @ksilvennoinen pointed out in the comments, digital goods do have a value greater than zero, the question is how to find a way to recuperate that value from customers.

To me value equals investment, but that is not the way pricing works. Unfortunately, I managed to misplace my pricing bible some months ago and can’t seem to recall most of the rules of pricing, but there is a strong psychological component to it. And the psychological part is what I am confused about. To get another book in here, it’s just like “Positioning: the battle for the mind,” if online goods are ‘positioned’ against a never-ending slew of free content, how do you position yourself to be priced at a value greater than zero?

On the one hand, it’s not so hard. You position yourself in such a way that a comparison does not make sense. Let’s take digital books, an area I actually don’t consider as threatened as publishers and media-outlets would like you to believe. The reason is that as soon as you download a digital book and view it on a PC, it immediately becomes an inferior product. Unlike a TV-show or movie, which I can frankly watch on a post-stamp (no matter what David Lynch says), reading and eyes work best together on either paper or e-paper (haven’t tried reading on the iPad, though I really like doing it on the iPhone). Of course the real threat to e-books in a PC environment is websites, but that’s a story for another day.

To get back to it, e-books work best in a dedicated reading environment, which immediately creates opportunities for platforms and putting walls around those. Platforms ensure that there is a network effect of content, walls ensure that there is no inter-leakage between the quality-controlled inside and the dark-waters-of-piracy outside. And that mechanism allows digital goods to be priced to recuperate investment and more. But…

Where it gets confusing again is how very open the Internet is. This openness allows you to create an app in a day, it also allows you to jailbreak an iPhone (now with US-gov. support), and it allows for me to get a movie that Chinese kid 107-xg46-*** released 5 minutes ago on the torrentZ. Amazon was built on this openness, as was OS X, as was pretty much anything that was stolen out of the Xerox labs 35 years ago. While there is a trend of eliminating barriers in general, it is even more prevalent on the Internet.

So, what I am asking myself here is the following questions:

Is this 1969 again, where hippies roamed free, sex was consequence-less, and there is an Aids-epidemic on the horizon, which will make us go back to the 50s in terms of promiscuity?
Are platforms doomed? I’m just talking platforms, not walls around them. Twitter is an example of an open platform.
Are the walls around platforms doomed? So: iTunes & iOS-devices, Amazon & Kindles, Facebook & human relationships, every online retailer in the world…
Is pricing digital goods a logical thing when taking into consideration how it is positioned against other digital goods?
Should digital goods be free and prices be set for things that cannot be spread digitally: iOS devices, Kindles, Disk-media, other consumption-devices…
And many more questions…

Getting back to value equals investment in my third paragraph. In any chain that leads from idea to the user, there are value points, which come from some kind of investment. In the embroidery example, a strong value point appears to be the creator. Without that person, there would be no creation. And, of course, there are plenty of examples on that. In the case of iPhone, strong value points are both the conceptualisation (R&D expenditure) and the production costs. In the case of Amazon, the website (presentation, distribution, etc.) is a strong value point. The end-product can still be digital, as it is in the case of the embroiderer’s designs, the iPhone apps, and the Kinde-ebooks, but the investment in certain parts of the chain is very much real.

And the value to consumers, which the crux of the matter, is equally real. If I compare 2010 to 1995, we live in the era of digital convenience. From e-banking, to restaurant-reviews, to TV-shows, to software, we undeniably live in a better world, but one where, ironically, we are less willing to spend as much on it. But there is another side to this as well. Let’s say, everything that exists is walled off. You’d have to pay to get access to every blog-post, to every youtube-video, to everything else that is already being charged for. I would sincerely start to question whether it was all worth it.

The Internet continues to be confusing to me, part shopping bonanza, part free-for-all utopia. Writing this has brought a little clarity, but if you have stuff to add that clears it up even more, please feel free to share it in a comment.

Can we accept piracy as a necessary evil already? [Cranky Rant]

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 10:39:59 +0000

I have a general philosophy on the evolution of the B2C and B2B relationship, one that is inspired by history. Let’s look at some examples. Money first took the form of barter, then gold, then coins, then paper, and now bits and bytes. Transport: on foot (great shoe-sales), animals (great stable-sales), cars (great garage sales), planes (great duty free sales), and finally tele-conferencing (great device sales). Books: handwritten, handprinted, printing-press, mass-media, internet, iPad / Kindle. At every turn, something was replaced, an industry was destroyed, yet it was for the purpose of evolution. Don’t get me started on evolution itself, as that is all about destructive replacement.

The point about all of these is not about destructive replacement. It’s about improving a product in the eyes of the consumer. And what enabled this improvement? Common standards, collaboration, user-feedback, guts, ruthlessness, innovation, progress, etc. Why producers don’t like to cooperate with that? Because every technology requires an investment to make it work.

Think of the poor embroiderer, which is what inspired this post (bound to get a lot of flack). It’s a funny industry. I wasn’t aware that needlework designs are being sold over the internet and thus at the risk of piracy. I suppose I always thought an embroiderer embroids, then sells their product and ships it to consumers. Instead, they seem to go to the simplest side-product of their work, the one that becomes a foundation for potential mass-production, the “design-chart,” which is then being “shipped,” via download, to customers. Interesting! It kinds of makes sense from a distribution standpoint. Customers are not willing to pay for the shipment of needlework, instead they prefer producing locally, which really is a great idea. The only problem here is the way it is distributed.

In a B2C relationship over the internet, I think, it always comes down to eliminating as many barriers as possible. When you buy from an online shop, you really want the product in your house as quickly as possible. If I could reach my arm into the screen in front of me and pull out the product that I just ordered, that would be just perfect. It’s worse when the product is digital, because the customer knows that it’s just bits & bytes really not worth anything tangible (I’m just talking about the 1s & 0s here) and it could be in the customer’s home in a millisecond. Instead, business erect as many barriers as they possibly can, whether it’s a big ‘copyrighted’ sign across a picture, an overly complex signup/payme page, or the somewhat convoluted iTunes-model, where it really is easier to pay than to pirate.

But in the light of evolution, these barriers are bound to be broken! The same reason why gold is no longer a form of payment, because it’s really heavy and annoying to handle, the world of commerce has a way of evolving towards something easier and easier and easier, until finally I pay by waving a magic wand (eh RFID chip) across a panel.

Let’s get back to embroidery. The problem is two-fold. 1. fragmentation, because any solution that I am about to propose will not get blanket acceptance. 2. the silly notion that selling designs, which seems like the most valuable thing an embroiderer has to offer (actual IP), is something that should be done in a direct B2C relationship. In the light of consumers constantly wanting to break barriers, this offering of valuable IP seems like an industry-defeating purpose.

So what are possible solutions?

consolidation & protection. Basically the iTunes model, where everything is placed behind a secure window that can preferably only be accessed via a specific device (my personal belief is that anything bits & bytes will eventually be free as that is not where the real value lies).
selling designs via local shops. If the problem is distribution, why not partner with local shops that keep your designs behind bars and just print out the end-product for consumers.
selling designs via the machines that produce needlework. No idea what they are called, but they have a strong incentive to keep their machines being used and have a direct line to consumers.

I’m sure any of the above is a solution with problems, but my point is the following:

Piracy will continue to exist and will become worse if you make it easy for people to pirate.
Consumer products evolve in a fashion that keeps pushing out inefficiencies and piracy is one of the quickest ways online to remove these inefficiencies.
The only way to prevent privacy is to not distribute anything that can be distributed via bits & bytes.

Case in point: the idiot that just walked into an Apple store and jailbroke every damn iPhone 4 on display.

Last point: I am not advocating piracy. I run a company myself, I have a business degree, and I believe in getting paid for your work. But I do believe silly strategies deserve to get punished. And there are plenty, plenty, plenty of them that I have mentioned on this blog over the years.

Swedes know how to connect with music – or how to stream Spotify to the living room

Kari Silvennoinen — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 08:33:19 +0000

ABBA, The Cardigans, Ace of Base and Roxette to name just a few – there’s no doubt Swedes have always known how to pump out pop music. So, it should not be a wonder that, once again, it took the Swedes to show how to bring music to the masses in the form of Spotify.

However, in a modern home, the other problem with music is that today most people have their music inside their computer – which, more often than, is a laptop instead of a bulky desktop and anyway probably not stationed anywhere near one’s stereo setup. There are many solutions to this problem, Apple has its Airport Express but it only supports playback from iTunes out of the box. So, if you want to stream Spotify from a bigger set of speakers and without cables this is not a good solution.

For a long time, I was looking for such a solution – no additional cables or stuff to just play audio from my Mac to my living room. I did find a bunch, but most of them were complex and riddled with lots of strange limitations (like cost). I was sure that there had to be an easier way to enjoy Spotify further than 2 meters from my laptop. Many A/V manufacturers sidestep the issue by adding a WLAN, Ethernet and/or USB capability to their hardware, so one can play music out of a shared hard drive but this rules all streaming services, like Spotify, out.

Maybe in the future Spotify might be inside our radio tuners and televisions. The latter is possible already in Sweden and Finland, where you can get Spotify on your digital television thanks to the Swedish-Finnish ISP and mobile operator TeliaSonera. Changing my internet and cable operator just for Spotify sounded a bit too complex solution so that wasn’t for me. But it might be a nice setup for one’s parents – if they weren’t just fine with their CDs, probably. Is it really this difficult to just stream arbitrary audio from one’s laptop to speakers wirelessly?

So, more Swedes to the rescue. The good folks at the hi-fi spekaer company Audio Pro have come up with probably one of the simplest and cross-platform solutions with their wireless offering. But, it’s an USB dongle. Aren’t there enough wireless transmitters inside my MacBook Pro to do the job? Well, thanks to yet another Swedish company, Ericsson, and their Bluetooth technology (with AD2P-profile), streaming audio wirelessly should be simple. So, why not just add Bluetooth inside a radio and then things should work with no wires or restrictions, right?

However, this, like many other Bluetooth applications, hasn’t really caught on. Sony has some setups with Bluetooth, but I went with Audio Pro Radio One. Sure, it looks like any Tivoli Audio’s radio and Tivoli Audios are really nice, but the only “modern” one with any connectivity (and radio presets!) is NetWorks and that one costs an arm and a leg – and even that one can’t stream music from a computer in a simple way. Radio One, on the other hand can, because the smart folks at Audio Pro put a Bluetooth receiver in it.

And so, with Radio One, Spotify and a Mac things are quite straightforward. Because the Radio One acts like an ordinary output device which means you can stream any audio to it. No need for Airport Express or Airfoil, things work even simpler than that. Setting up a Windows-machine should be equally easy as long as you have correct Bluetooth-drivers that have the A2DP profile. Connecting your iPhone – or any other mobile phone with BT – to Radio One? Thanks to Bluetooth, really easy. However, because there’s no iPod or USB dock in Radio One, you’d better watch battery usage or use a stereo cable instead.

So, thanks to a bunch of ingenious Swedes, I can finally stream music from my laptop to my living room. The only limits are that Bluetooth’s range is relatively short and it does consume battery. But no artificial limits like with oh so many other solutions. Aren’t standards and simple solutions a fun thing?

A sidenote: Americans and other developing mobile countries take note, Bluetooth does not mean a wireless headset. Bluetooth can do a lot of pretty cool stuff, but unfortunately introduction of cheap mobile broadband and before that Nokia’s and then Apple’s reluctance to actually support any interesting profile (without crippling them beyond any recognition) on their handsets have meant that Bluetooth is not in the spotlight anymore and is mostly in hands-free headsets and wireless keyboards and mice.

The future of online music: not just about access, but about continuous entertainment

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 13:45:58 +0000

I feel that something like this does not need to be said, but Spotify a relatively new service here in the Netherlands and selected countries, while cool, is missing one key ingredient: suggesting new music to users that feels somehow related to what they want.

Spotify knows what users want. There are few songs that I haven’t been able to find on Spotify, which in itself is awesome. But it ends there. When I look for the “Baby got Back” song, which I tend to do, it plays EVERY song that has those terms in the title (luckily fewer than you might expect). Instead of saying, hey, it’s “Baby got Back,” it’s a 90s song, it’s a hip-hop song, it’s funny (to some), it just plays the list of whoever decided to use those terms in the title (no seriously, there’s only 72 tracks).

Why it doesn’t need to be said that such a feature needs to exist, is because it already has for some time. Starting with Amazon, which suggests products to you based on what other people with similar tastes like, to Pandora Radio, which unfortunately (grrrr!) doesn’t work outside the US anymore, to Last.fm, which also plays some funny regional games since CBS took it over, iTunes Genius, which rocks (though iTunes as a music-player is way too bloated), Netflix, another US-only service (I’m sensing a pattern here…), etc. etc.

It’s called collaborative filtering, it’s not a new thing and I don’t at all get why not all (music-)services have it. It leads to more user-engagement, it allows listeners to navigate a musical world that has become increasingly diverse and fast-moving, and it has drastically improved my music-listening experience.

So my question is: why doesn’t Spotify have collaborative filtering? Is it expensive to implement, does it require more data than Spotify has, is it an up-and-coming feature, or is it a hidden feature that I haven’t discovered yet? In any case, it is the No. One Reason why I don’t open Spotify as often as either of us would like.

Thoughts on Intellectual Property and dealing with everything else that is out there

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:05:59 +0000

We’ve talked to a number of investor these last months and I can classify their questions into three categories:

Intellectual Property Protection (IPP)
Revenues
and Operations

Revenues is a straightforward concept and reflects market potential, market share, and business-model. Operations can also mean business-model as that clearly affects your operations, it also concerns the team, and it very much concerns *the last mile*—a very detailed understanding of how your product comes of the “factory line” and goes into a customers hands (every step and every screw has to be planned out). And IPP, well IPP is something special.

Intellectual Property Protection refers to legal and other ways that you protect the innovation and knowledge that is built within your company and its people. It is not as straightforward as simply taking out a patent, copyright, or trademark, though those are usually the first avenues that investors will pursue when talking to you about IP. IPP can just as much come from keeping information tacit—inside the heads of your team—, developing systems that spread an innovation across many parts—e.g. the way technology companies prevent copying from factories they outsource production to, by only giving them parts to produce, but not the whole—, another systematic answer could be deep vertical integration, which ensures a higher quality of products and services than can be replicated by vertically smaller competitors (a strategy pursued by Apple and Starbucks), and last but not least: speed—in some industries it pays to just scale very quickly, rather than build a protective base around IP (a contrast between e.g. web and medicine).

But let’s get real for a second. You’re an inventor, you developed something new. The most obvious path to pursue is a patent. The first issue is cost, because taking out a patent is not cheap. Basically, by filing a patent in your country, you can protect yourself for a while because there is a period, 1-2 years, I believe, where you are filing it and it can serve as a type of legal instrument to prevent other companies from filing a similar patent. But in the end, you have to shell out maybe €5000 per country to protect your invention internationally—and those costs do not cover the legal cost or protecting a patent once it’s being breached. Let’s get real x 2: you’re a startup and while your technology may be innovative, it may not be what the market needs (which can relate to actual taste, but also to cost, to regulatory issues, etc.) and that means that your patent, if you decide to take it out, may not be worth squat. Let’s get real x 3: your invention may not be unique, at least not in its current form, and pursuing a patent in that case is not even feasible.

So practically speaking, what do you do? Just to be clear, I don’t have the final answer to this, though it is something I am constantly thinking about as a potential risk in our, a technology startup. So my interpretation and approach are entirely my own, but I am writing this to start a discussion more than to give the final answer.

The answer to me is all about strategy. IP protection has to make sense in the context of a longer term business strategy, long term meaning to me longer than 2 years and preferably longer than 5 (if you have an actual patent and it has market value as well, you have over a decade of protection). And IP, just like a business, is something that can be split up to cover different areas related to supply, to the manufacturing, to the end-product, to the service, etc. So the more broad and comprehensive your way of protecting your intellectual value is, the less it can actually be replicated by your competitors.

All IP concerns aside, it is sometimes of benefit to not protect the whole value chain. This is true in our business, which I will write about some other time, where we can split up our technology into core-components that are integrated into new solutions which act as a platform for more solutions. Locking off that whole chain is perhaps of some benefit, but in some ways we would like to have people innovate in their respective areas and for us to focus on developing better products out of that. My point is that IP protection should be seen as something that can be shifted to those areas most critical to your business and that new development in your industry is not necessarily something to be scared of. In the end, we are in the product business and if we can produce superior solutions for customers that outweighs comprehensive IP solutions.

So the conclusion is, even if you are developing a product that is not entirely novel, there are places in the value chain where you can still develop an IP solution. And if you are developing novel solution, it has advantages on both the supply and the market side, to not make your IP too restrictive and thus diminish your product potential.

The role of Sunk Costs in Strategic Decision Making—a European’s perspective

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:28:59 +0000

In his MBA-series (that I don’t read enough, but I may not be the target audience), Fred Wilson writes about the role of sunk costs in making future decisions. As an entrepreneur, I am constantly concerned with the cost of decisions, so I was kind of happy to find out (though I do vaguely remember learning this before) that sunk costs—the costs previously incurred in an enterprise (of any kind, incl. love)—should not be an explicit factor in making (financial) decisions about the future. I remember a distinct case not too long ago, where I did include sunk costs as part of my decision-making, so here’s a few thoughts on it.

Sunk costs are part of reality. Every decision you make comes at the cost of not doing another one (opportunity cost) and as soon as you make a choice and invest in it, that money / energy is sunk / gone. The thing that counts then is to evaluate both the context under which the decision was made and the outcome of that decision. While it makes sense to not include sunk costs in a financial decision-making formula, a negative outcome does require taking pause before making new investments. Perhaps this is a European attitude to things, or a risk-averse one, but much of our thinking about forecasts is based on looking at past performance.

What matters most then is the context, and this, in a startup environment, is rather a complex affair. I’m going to draw some analogies with rocket building in the early 1900s, producing art (at any point in time), and staring at goats here. Art is, I believe, a calling that is very difficult to quantify. It is very strong amongst people that seem to be bad at everything else—just based on my own experience. In this case, you have no past performance to base future performance on. And art being a fluid craft where aberrations of the status quo seem to produce some interesting results (but also at terrible odds), it is nearly impossible to predict the future of such an enterprise. Rocket building in the early history of rocket building suffered from similar dangers, in that no one had done it before and it required cracking a great number of eggs before reaching the moon.

All of these are sunk costs that may or may not lead to greatness, and what I take issue with is to then ignore sunk costs in making future decisions. At what point is it justified to ignore sunk costs and at what point isn’t it? If the “staring at goats” division in the army spent half a century, eh, staring at goats, you could argue that it’s an investment in the future, but you could also argue that it’s a foolish enterprise—just for fun, I tried staring at the back of the heads of a few people standing in front of me in a supermarket, I did make a few scratch an (imaginary) itch themselves upon my specific mental request, but I can’t say that this “sunk cost” was a reason to invest some more energy into it.

When we made a financial plan for our startup, we didn’t give much thought to making the wrong decision, though that is a very important factor to consider at this stage. It is nearly impossible not to make a wrong decision when you’re building a rocket to go to a place no one’s gone before. What we did do were two things: 1. we researched as much as we could of the environment we were heading into and the tools & reality we had to work with. 2. Every, and I mean *every* decision that had to be made that involved a financial or time investment was scrutinised as much as possible beforehand. But… both research and execution can be flawed in that not all information may be clear—especially regulatory stuff can be a maze to travel through, as can understanding a science or technology—and execution depends on both good information and good people to execute. And the fact is, I believe with any startup, that we have incurred certain costs that can be considered sunk and gone. When we make the plan for the next stage, we will have to ignore those investments, as painful as they have been.

I’m a great believer in the lean startup. This comes from my father, whose whole life philosophy is based on a Ghandhiesque lifestyle that involves discipline, routines, and a leanness when it comes to living and working. I can’t say that this is exactly the way I want to live my life, but I do believe that the opposite, coming from an abundant lifestyle and trying to make good decisions, is more than often a formula for failure. Entrepreneurs and their startups should to a certain degree remain hungry so that the decisions they make are made with the desire to improve life. If you see the amount of hurdles that are presented to startups everywhere, you know that this attitude of keeping startups hungry is shared by many people.

A part of this leanness in decision-making is what I discussed before: scrutiny, scrutiny, scrutiny, among many a step of the way. But I have to frankly admit that this scrutiny can lead to a near bureaucratic way of doing business, which, to me, seems quite incompatible with creating great innovations that require some significant dreams. Dreams are your mind processing information in funny and interesting ways, and if there was an accountant sitting in the back of your head telling you to not dream this and that because it costs too much, it wouldn’t be much of a dream.

That brings me back to the role of sunk costs in decision making. One must be allowed to make mistakes when engaging on an enterprise. It’s quicker to learn from a mistake than to try to constantly prevent it. I’ve also been thinking quite a bit on the role of subsidies in early stage startups and the chance they present to make these mistakes. That, however, should be the topic for a future post.

My conclusion thus is that while entrepreneurship is a serious business, there can be little great ideas without some (in many cases considerable) room for experimentation. How you quantify this, I think, remains subjective. It can’t be Google’s 80-20 rule, where 20% of an employee’s time is spent on his own ideas. When you start, it should more likely be 50-50, with 50% being aimed at making good decisions and the other 50% at pursuing the dream that make those decisions have meaning.

The last retail store on earth—a fantasy story

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:41:46 +0000

The door slid open slowly, all that was visible from inside the store was a wide beam of light that slowly expanded into the shape of a door. The automatic triggers kicked in and the other security-panels in front of the windows slide open also, illuminating the last retail store left in the world 2020.

He entered. The last ever retail-clerk left on earth. A wide smile on his face, from years of practice, a swing in his step from his regular work-outs. All part of the routine.

The camera-system, also the lighting system of the place, followed his every step—one tiny camera in every tiny light-bulb, giving combined resolutions beyond that of any screens in use today and filming whatever was in the store with more dimensions than the holographic output to date would require. As he reached the music-rack, the one closest to the door, the one most geared towards impulse buying, he passed the security threshold and the system was forced to react—was he an intruder or an insider? Always a fun game to play with this flaky system… He passed the test and personalised systems started turning on all around him.

It started with the music-rack, a 50 metre (150 feet) long pathway surrounded by holograms of artists’ heads performing—sometimes in group-form, if it was a band—and tiny beams triggering the sub-dermal speakers behind his ears to play a song, just right for his mood and of course just out in the charts that week. He sometimes felt he was his best customer, because he rarely left that isle without purchasing at least one song. Another credit down from his, well , limitless credits that he could spend on these things. One thing caught his eye, the Beatles hologram was slightly off-colour, the yellows not quite as yellow as they should be. He knew banging the holographic projector would only make it worse, so he made a mental note to call the mechanic, who could probably calibrate it from his home office.

Next up, the movie isle. He loved how movies had evolved over the years to become a hybrid of a blockbuster movie with great effects, a great story-line that was essentially limitless and could be changed by the viewer as he or she consumed the movie. The movie isle was a mini-experience of such a thing, also targeting his past taste, his current mood, as well as plenty of other variables of course. The result was that as he moved onto the platform, he saw Disney-bunnies playing in the grass around him, and walked along a couple of prehistoric hunters in their furry outfits with, in the distance, their attractive female mates waving at them and cheering as they got closer. He could smell the food as he drew closer, another marketing gimmick, and he was happy that after this came the food isle.

At this point, it should be said the last retail store in the world (also the name of the store) was in fact a great big mall. The difference to other stores that came before? It was run by a single man and everything else was automated or remote-controlled. A consumer would enter and would first be entertained through music and movies, and could then choose to fulfil his primal needs: food, hygiene, etc. The second-smallest section in this store that had everything was the electronics section. People basically had electronics implanted into their bodies or they ran everything off a terminal. There was no hardware differentiation, everything had already been invented, and every software could run on the hardware that people owned from the day they became an adult or when their parents gave them permission. The smallest section of this store was the payment area, in that there was none. Why pay when every credit you need is stored on your person and you can just swipe the product you want and get it?

The clerk had said his goodbyes to the women in his personal film and started down the food isle. Again, a moving platform, on which he could sit this time, with choices flicking across the tables next to him, sushi-style, until he identified his favourite, grabbed it, and munched it down. The platform, measuring his progress and seeing that there were no impatient customers trying to get by, basically came to a standstill, allowing him to eat and enjoy.

This was a typical start of the day and arguably he had the best job in the world. The rest of the time would be spent on support, on dealing with customers that “didn’t get it,” take care of the technical issues that arose even in his technology heaven, and, even, doing some sales, though that was highly unlikely with the kind of data computers already had on consumers, making every product suggestion the perfect one.

The clerk didn’t care where his customers came from or where they went, but he suspected that they lived very much like he did, in an overcrowded apartment block with a big postal area designed specifically to receive all the UPS shipments people ordered online or in his store (mail and those inferior small postal boxes were out-innovated years ago).

The first customer came in and he smiled in anticipation of having to do absolutely nothing, while the customer spent at least 20% of his disposable income that month. Typically, people only came in once a month, if ever, just to get that personal, immersive touch that systems at home and elsewhere would never be able to replicate.

Welcome to the last retail store on earth.

This story was inspired by a recent Macworld article on comic stores vs. iTunes, my blogging on food and retail, and thinking about the future of the physical retail store. Pictures courtesy of the movies “Clerks” and “Thomas in Love.”

Prefer to have me blog in fantasy format? Let me know and I’ll continue to do so!

Status, Signals, and the Startup

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:26:08 +0000

Starting a business, just like anything else, really is defined through personal contexts. For instance, I’m a first-time entrepreneur and my partner is a 4-5-6th (hard to keep count) entrepreneur—for him, he views starting a business very differently than me. There are other differences as well, such as age, type of education, culture, marital status, all of which affect how one views the starting of a company. I aim to not pronounce these differences, rather this is a blog post about the generalities of sending out positive signals and raising the status of a startup.

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

The quality of your idea/prototype/product (the whole range of what your startup is centred around)
The quality of the team
The quality of your associations
Your legal status as a company
Your financial situation
The satisfaction-quotient of your customers
The speed of growth, which is really a component of ‘quality’
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.

A review of the 23andMe genetic profiling service

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:56:32 +0000

People frequently ask me why the $%^# I decided to ‘get my genes done.’ I get the feeling that this is a scary area for many of us and that is part of the reason why I did it, to explore something that has an interesting future possibly. I also thought it would be a good idea to both understand where I’m from, genetically, and what possible risks lie ahead for me. Finally, 23andMe offered a DNA-day special a few weeks back and the price was right for me to do it.

For those that don’t know, 23andMe is a company who’s mission statement it is to develop new methods and technologies that will enable consumers to understand their own genetic information (source: Wikipedia). It has made headlines because Google invested in the company and one of the co-founders of 23andMe is married to one of the co-founders of Google.

In the following review, I want to write about several things: the last mile, which is a concept I discussed in my last blog post; the analysis; and finally, about whether it means anything.

The Last Mile
I previously wrote how crucial this concept is to running a successful business because 99.9999% of customers pay a business to get not only a product, but none of the headaches associated with getting this product—they don’t want to spend time making bank-transfers, physically going to a store to buy it (debatable), physically carrying the product home, reading complicated manuals. They just want to use it! Taking care of the last mile means that you can charge 2x or 10x for a product because the last mile is simply part of the product.

That 23andMe takes care of the last mile was very apparent to me in the context of the discount I received and the fact that live in Europe. If I remembered correctly, they discounted ca. 80% of the price of the product, but the non-discounted shipping costs of getting a ‘spit-vial’ to my home and back again to their labs was more expensive than the price of the product. It made me think twice about doing this, but in the end the result was that I had a pretty perfect service that required nothing from my part except:

paying,
waiting for delivery,
spitting into a vial,
filling out the Fedex papers,
sending it off,
and waiting for the results.

The total process took ca. 6 weeks, and while I’m not a particularly big fan of the shipping process in general, it was pretty comfortable on a whole.

Once the lab-analysis is done, you receive a mail notifying you that you’re results are ready, which you can access on the 23andMe website. Nothing wrong with that, except I hope that they use the dynamic nature of the web to keep updating info about my genes as their understanding of genetics improves. As I find it unlikely that people will do this analysis very frequently, I consider me not having to retake the test to get a marginal improvement in results a ‘last mile’ service as well. But we’ll see…

The Analysis
It’s important to state that ‘while you wait,’ there’s plenty to do on the site other than seeing your results, which frankly requires some (4-6 weeks after sending) patience to arrive. There are endless surveys you can take, forum-discussions, and articles. The whole thing feels like a Wikipedia for genetics, written in a clear format that even dumbos like me can understand. It does require time and interest in the matter.

The actual data that you get from the analysis is split into health results and ancestry results. Of these two, I found the ancestry part the least useful, even though I consider my personal ancestral history to be quite mixed and thus, for some, fascinating. Things you can do there is find out your maternal and paternal ancestry, find relatives (so far, completely useless, probably because most 23andMe users are American), and see visual representations of your geographic ancestry. I appear to be 100% European and resemble Northern Europeans the most, but the site also writes that “all humans are more than 99% similar to each other genetically,” so I’m not sure how significant or interesting this is.

The health results are much more interesting and for obvious reasons I will not go into great depth about my own results. The results are split into five categories, ‘Disease Risk,’ ‘Carrier Status,’ ‘Drug Response,’ ‘Traits,’ as well as a category, called ‘Health Labs,’ which goes into more experimental data. For some results, specifically carrier status and drug response, I feel like it’s a list I need to discuss with a doctor, as a lot of terms are quite scientific and it would require considerable time to understand what is relevant and what isn’t.

Most interesting to me is ‘Disease Risk,’ as it identifies areas to watch out for in the future and areas that are of less concern, and ‘Traits,’ which tells me stuff about lactose intolerance, muscle type, etc., all of which are handy to know in everyday life. Regarding Disease Risk, I like that they hide more serious conditions, until you specifically give permission to see these results. I was a little nervous about finding out exactly about those conditions, so I was happy the site allowed me some time to prepare myself mentally before seeing “the truth” (as far as that can be determined through such an analysis).

Does it mean anything?
Will you be able to live life without knowing these results? Clearly, we have survived for a long time without knowing much/anything about our genes and plenty of people today live on just fine in ignorant bliss. I have also lived my life in relative ignorance so far, though through years of playing around with exercise and diet, I realise that healthy living certainly benefits my current life and hopefully leads to a longer one (the analysis incidentally also shows your odds of living a certain age).

While frightening to find out whether you have an elevated chance of dying from things like cancer or getting Parkinson disease, I was relieved to find out about my chances, good or bad. Information means that you can prepare yourself, whether it’s just the idea that we are all mortal in some ways or that you have a checklist to visit your doctor with. I think my family will also be interested in finding out what my ancestry information reveals, though I didn’t think that part was particularly detailed.

Finally, while I’m a believer that no matter how well we understand ourselves, the chances of humanity as a species destroying itself or our planet destroying us are much more significant, I still think that we have for some years been on the threshold of a genetic revolution, one that will very likely result in things like a much longer and healthier life, though not without some significant societal consequences such as how to support an ageing population.

Just like the Apple iPad could potentially revolutionise computing and it’s good a reason for buying one, I consider the ‘plug-and-play’ 23andMe service to be a worthwhile purchase to gain a better understanding of where we stand in terms of the revolution in medicine.

Marks out of 10 – Service: 7/10 (points taken off for the time it took to find out the results); Analysis & presentation: 8/10 (points taken off for ancestry & complexity of certain health information); Overall Usefulness: 6/10 (you can live without it, not sure how doctors will react to this, more targeted at US than elsewhere); Overall grade: 7/10.

Vincent’s E’ship Diary Part 10: Thoughts on Selling

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:43:31 +0000

I am not someone that typically applies for a sales job, yet I consider it a vital function of the job of an entrepreneur and hence my job. Running a business is all about convincing people, both on the inside and out, and the best way to describe it is Sales.

One of the most important things you should be doing as a new player in a game is to fail fast and fail often. In practice this means going out into the field, trying out many, many alternative approaches, always listen to the feedback you get, whether negative, positive, or meh, and try, try again. There is no better teacher and overcoming the fear to approach new people with new ideas is actually step 1 in sales and entrepreneurship.

I probably wrote about this before, but as a startup, you tend to make changes in the direction your product development takes. Sometimes this is based on technological barriers that force you into a different direction. We faced some of those and needed to adapt. Sometimes, perhaps more often, you are forced to change because people don’t react that well to your “awesome idea.” Naturally, not everyone is right in criticising you and one thing I learned is that criticising is easy, building is hard, and sometimes people just need to shut up.

But when you take the ‘fail fast, fail often’ approach, you overcome the over-criticism-issue through spreading the love/hate and drawing out an averaged out answer. For us, one re-occurring feedback was that we were being too academic in our approach. Our sponsor sponsored us because of this approach, but the market sometimes has different objectives. We learned this by presenting our idea over and over again, and by involving smart people in our development on a continuous basis. Blogging is good practice in that, as I now keep people updated through lengthy mails that might as well have been published on this blog (but they likely never will).

When you start selling something, you first have to know who you’re selling to. That entails listening. So principle 1 of sales is generate lots of feedback as it will make for a better sales proposition down the line. I have no tips on what message to use, as I think this is different for every idea.

But there is another thing to bear in mind, which is that The Last Mile Matters… incredibly much! The last mile can be seen as two things: the mental map you create for your customers and the physical last mile that you build into your product-/service-delivery system. As to the latter, people like it when Amazon or Apple set it up that you only have to click 1-2 times to order a product and have it delivered to your door. They like it when Ikea makes buying furniture not only cheap but a furniture builder out of all of us (though I think this is more of a masculine-marketing thing). And they like it when Facebook presents them with a list of “close friends” immediately after joining.

While that takes some ‘mental mapping’ too, there is the other part of selling, appealing to the irrational part of the brain. Steve Job’s reality distortion field is an example of that. You walk into a bar… and you come out with a horse that you don’t have a barn for. What this comes down too and this is something that places like McDonalds have made a science out of, is to appeal to the part of the brain that lusts after things. By making the french fries smell of … I was looking for the right term, I think this quote says it all: “complex aromas comprising bitter cocoa, butterscotch, cheese, earthy potatoes, onions, and flowers.” And yes, that is a science.

If you have a good product, the process of making someone believe in it goes beyond the pragmatic last mile. It’s about making the recipient of your message envision what you’re seeing, about making them want to have this at all costs. Once again, two words, Apple products, and I think the point is made.

To reprise:

1st principle is to listen, i.e. get a good understanding of what your audience needs.
2nd principle is painting the right picture in the mind of the customer.
3rd principle is creating the perfect last mile in terms of delivering a product or service into the customer’s hands.

And afterwards comes profit? I really can’t say, but if you see life as an opportunity to make lots of mistakes to learn from, then I think everything will be all right.

Will computers enslave or liberate us? [TooLong4ATweet]

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 18:58:40 +0000

I think in very a short time humanity will have to make a choice regarding the path that computer interfaces take: allow them to enslave us a la Terminator (or financial algorithms) or to enhance our innate capabilities. This video [embedded below] makes my new Macbook Pro feel like outdated technology.

Unlike

Is “Great artists steal” still a good mantra for Blogging?

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:42:37 +0000

I’m bearish on blogging and have been so publicly since the publication of the Techmeme 100. The “problem” (more of a natural phenomenon really) is as follows: in order to compete in today’s ‘blogosphere,’ you need a high volume of news being published. What this means for a blog: you need to do a lot of writing, which means a ton of research (sometimes), a ton of time, and a ton of output.

You’ll need to have multiple people on the team to hit the magic timeframe of where people in your market (usually the US one) read news. You need to pay these people somehow. This already represents a barrier to blogging on a professional level, as to pay people you need traffic and to get traffic you sometimes need to do things that are out of your ethical sphere. Gizmodo’s questionable appropriation of the next iPhone comes to mind.

It comes down to being newsworthy. Gizmodo’s actions are nothing new to media, as news usually comes from 3 sources:

good research, leading to original IP
copy-pasting other stories (hopefully combined with some value-adding research)
wallet-based reporting—you pay sources for original IP.

As mentioned, this is nothing new and what the Techmeme leader-board made clear was that the leading blogs are actually no longer “blogs,” they are digital newspapers. And, I assume, because blogging still has this cool ring of independent news reporting to it, those sites decided to keep the title.

So what does that mean for an up-and-coming website? Take TheNextWeb, which I’ve been aware of since the days of Friendfeed—Zee, the editorial director of the site, had a very high-profile presence on FriendFeed (incidentally, it makes for an interesting case study of how early adopters on social networks can rise to the top and use that to leverage their relevance in other areas) and it was interesting to see how they went about making their site a significant news source. And, sadly (but perhaps realistically), their strategy at the beginning appears to have been to simply report the same news that others have been reporting. This year, there was of course the TheNextWeb conference, which made some headlines and which perhaps means that there will be a shift in strategy of news reporting by the site.

I think that, bearing the economics of news reporting in mind, which largely depend on producing large quantities of timely news, copy-pasting news is a realistic approach towards growing a blog to professionalism. On the other hand, it represents a big problem. Back when my Twitter-feed followed Techcrunch, TheNextWeb, and some other tech-blogs, I was bombarded by the SAME news coming from different sites within 20 tweets. It got so annoying that I complained to e.g. Zee at TNW, and I finally ended up unsubscribing from any newsblog on Twitter, instead subscribing to their newsfeed via RSS, which is more manageable.

It sounds like a cliche, but we live in a highly transparent real-time web. Every online news source is trying to profile itself as the most relevant and they do so by trying to be quickest, loudest, but not necessarily by being the most unique. It’s easy to copy news, because there are no pay-walls to prevent this from happening. The problem is how this affects people, and as a consequence other blogs (I’m a firm believer in survival of the fittest, so in principle blogs that do not make it simply do so because the nature of the blogosphere is pushing them out).

I think that people react to the bombardment of news in a way that they prefer to stick to a few sites that give them enough news to be informed (this is ignoring aggregators like Digg and YCombinator, which adds another layer of complexity). Ultimately there will only be a few professional blogs serving news for a given industry (arguably, there already are just a few relevant ones with many, many irrelevant ones), and they will benefit from network effects for both access to news, access to advertisers, and access to other factors.

To answer my question of “Is “Great artists steal” still a good mantra for Blogging?”, it is a great startup strategy, which leads to more visitors, more advertising revenue, better research/writing, and ultimately (HOPEFULLY!) a better blog. But it requires a shifting of ethics that usually comes with running a business. Instead of serving your own interest as a writer / creator, you serve business interests of generating traffic which ultimately leads to a better quality blog (again hopefully), but not without its compromises.

Liberating Leadership, intrinsic equality and world-class businesses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The key to F-Form organisations

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

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

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

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

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

Nourishing people three universal needs

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

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

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

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

Creating an environment for intrinsic equality

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

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

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

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

It’s all about listening

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

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

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

Creating an environment for people to grow and self direct

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

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

Fostering culture-keepers

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

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

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

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

Main values

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

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

Be nice

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

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

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

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

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

URL as a metric for social object’s value (Weekend rambling)

Kari Silvennoinen — Sun, 30 May 2010 07:13:13 +0000

A part in the series of just writing out an idea and rambling on it on this blog.

One of the core architectural big ideas of the web is that each resource, or web page has an URL or a link, and other pages can link to them. However, in the “social media” reiteration, these links are called “permalinks” in a strange doublespeak way as the ordinary Web 0.1 links were meant to be permanent as well and, instead, “link rot” seems to be more prevalent as ever with short-url services and other strange URL schemes.

I am of the opinion that we make a great injustice to discussion on the web by calling those things that hang on the bottom of web pages (and hence do have URLs) “comments” and, as non-entities of the web, only rarely have URLs of their own (even of the hash-variety). This is the second injustice. It is often that in these “comments” there are real gems, but you can’t refer to them with any direct link.

The worst offender, unsurprisingly, is Facebook, which from a cultural-historical viewpoint is going to be a huge black hole. It is in a stark constrat to Twitter, where each tweet has an URL. There are many social “objects” on Facebook that are completely inactionable and this is completely against the very nature of the Web. Technically, with stuff like Activity Streams, it’s possible to “like” a “like” and so on, but this isn’t possible from most social network tools’ user interface.

From the Web point of view, having URL for each tweet might be one reason why Twitter is gaining more steam and Facebook is struggling. Twitter is actively becoming a part of the Web, while Facebook is actively trying to turn the Web into Facebook (see Open Graph and Wikipedia-entry Pages) – this walled garden -strategy has always failed on the web, but it hasn’t stopped businesses from trying.

My thinking might be biased because I’m a firm believer in the open web and the idea that the web promotes openness and sharing of ideas, but not in the way Facebook has recently tried to open its users’ identities and “life streams” to the world. I believe the web is a great platform for collaboration and it’s a shame that while (as Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out) there is no shortage of URLs, we don’t give them out to all objects that live on the web.

However, the one exception that I’m willing to make are YouTube comments, which in number exceed the amount of information (with a loose definition of “information) in the library of Alexandria, but loss of which absolutely no-one would cry over.

How to tell when Enterprise 2.0 is not appropriate for your organisation

ceciiil — Fri, 28 May 2010 12:54:36 +0000

As Enterprise 2.0 activists, we keep on trying to sell Enterprise 2.0 as the ideal solution for your organisation.

But to be completely honest, depending on your company objectives, values and culture it may just not work.

10 principles your company may have adopted that will make Enterprise 2.0 implementation counter productive …

1. Your company is not comfortable with innovation

It’s not a matter of being conservative, it just that your company culture loves it when nothing change.

Managers and employees alike have been doing the same routine job for the last ten years, they don’t want any innovation to emerge and disrupt the nice and quiet day-to-day work in real life business.

2. It is business critical to foster politics

Politics happens in any social organisations. So if you master politics, you master the organisation.

Your company loves it when people in the hierarchy feels they are powerful. This is the raison d’être of your enterprise. They have dedicated parking spaces, business card for travels, dedicated secretary, guaranteed pay rise and many other advantages.

Each department rates its own importance with the number of people they have and the cash flow they burn : that’s the way it is in real life business.

3. Strong managers are pivotal in the organisation

In your company managers have to be tough men, there’s no wimp in here. They have to be able to kick the butt of people lacking motivation to reach the company objectives.

They make it clear who is the boss during the very long meetings whose agenda is decided on the fly by the manager.

In addition, managers make sure any bottom-up or top down information go through them so they can filter and make sure they stay in control. A proof of how important they are : they spend 20% of their time fighting with their email box.

Taylor and Ford made it clear that’s the way you have to run your lazy resources to get the job done in real life business.

4. Employees are engaged or else …

The Company needs the engagement from employees. So either they engaged, either our managers kick their butt (refer to point 3).

Employees have to behave. They’ve been hired to produce and apply the methods, processes and strategy coming from above.

They are not here to ask silly questions that would disrupt the regular process.

It is OK for strong managers to take ownership of any of their employee successful contribution : this is what we call team spirit in the real life business.

5. The IT department defines the organisation

Nowadays you have to be VERY careful with IT security issues. As a result, IT has naturally emerged as the most important department in your organisation.

It is very handy for the IT department that all different department (Marketing, Sales, Professional Services, R&D, Product definition, IT) has its own hermetic silo : then we can ensure that all communication go through the Strong manager : this help preventing any security issue in real life business.

6. Collaboration is dangerous

In a similar fashion, collaboration is DANGEROUS. One could exchange information with somebody from another department without going through the manager. The latter would then be terribly upset and upsetting managers goes against your company core values.

Besides, it could happen that employees share information that is not 100% VALIDATED & CORRECT. Can you envision the disaster ? Your company can. Better be safe in real life business.

7. Employees need to know where to find stuff

In every company, people are losing an amazing amount of time searching for information. Not in yours, because employees HAVE to know where things are.

The IT department have structured what there is to know in directories in different network drives and in Real Time Database Management Systems. All your employees have to know is the name and location of every bit of information they are supposed to work with.

Who needs knowledge management system in real life business with disciplined and closely monitored employees ?

8.High Fear / Low Trust

In such a dangerous world as ours you don’t want to nurture a trust culture. You need your employees to be wary of any person they have not been working with for at least 5 years.

Besides, you make sure that any mistake is severely punished and ridiculed so that people don’t lose other people time with any idea/document they are not 200% sure of in real life business.

9. By IT workers for PC users

Your company is developing software. To be run on computer. Nowadays every man and his dog can use a computer.

So why should your teams ask any question to the customers and question the way they use your product ? Asking questions to your users is the best way to make them think you are clueless and lose market share.

To communicate with the customer, a couple of annual official corporate statements and ad campaigns are the way we do in real life business.

10. Business Methodologies are just a way for consultants to make big bucks

What’s the whole story with this Getting Thing Done fad ? How about these Agile projects ? Hey did they use Scrum to build the Pyramids or the Ford T ? Let’s be serious for a minute. Your company has been in the business for 30 years and it has been doing things the same way ever since.

Why should it change ? As if the world has seen any dramatic change since then. Hexadecimal numbers still go from 0 to F : there’s nothing new under the sun.

And don’t even mention business schools studies or academics : none has been interested in your organisation lately. A proof of how little they know about real life business.

Conclusion

If any of the above is true for your company, then Implementing Enterprise 2.0 is very risky.

It encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing for employees to be more efficient.

It fosters weak links, networking, questioning and associating : there could be the risk of some people discussing the same problem from different perspectives and come with some ideas or even an innovation.

It fosters employees engagement and helps leveraging flow of information to create value.

How scary. Better be safe : in that case make sure you stay out of Enterprise 2.0.

Can you think of any other principles that would make Enterprise 2.0 a no-go for an organisation (in real life business) ?

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E’ship Diary part 9: The belief in Luck is a Wonderful Thing

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 26 May 2010 20:33:55 +0000

Over the years, I’ve developed more and more an appreciation for Luck. It’s hard to touch, like Love, and it’s impossible to predict, like Love, but the belief in it alone can shift mountains (like…). I’ve studied the statistics over and over before starting a business and they don’t lie: whatever business you start, however good the idea or however well the execution, if luck isn’t on your side, a great deal of businesses fail in the first 2 years.

“On a sunny day in spring this year, I engaged on a journey with three other people, two of them strangers. We were here to do something important, something that had been playing for nearly two decades and had finally come to the resolution. The problem, my problem: this thing we were engaging on has been frayed with bad luck all these years. Anything that could go wrong, would go wrong, and a large part of me expected it to go wrong that day also.

The night before, I hadn’t slept well at all. Before going to sleep, there had been a lot of discussions about possible scenarios that day and one I considered significant one was that the operation would fail. But ok, (sh)it happens and it should never stop you from doing something. My real, primal concern were those two strangers. The fact that this had been playing for so long was for one reason and one reason alone: the object of our adventure was something very, very valuable and many people wanted in.

So my real fear was that I would die that day. That one or both of those strangers saw an opportunity to take control of the situation, perhaps with guns or by employing a gang of thugs to pull us over and leave us shot dead by the road. That thought dominated my dreams that night and I was more than apprehensive meeting the team for that day.

It all went well. While I couldn’t have been more nervous, I tried to hide it and act as natural as possible. I pretended confidence and while fate could’ve have still struck a negative note, somehow it didn’t.”

In a small way, I am a different man today then I was the many years being aware of a tragedy taking place.”

I write this not to write anything promoting entrepreneurship, but I feel it makes a strong point in relation to it. I do not yet know where we will be in three months, but I can see that we’ve come a long way in the three months preceding it. A large reason for this is to do with being open to change and being confident that going forward is often better than standing still. I still believe that good ideas are worth nothing without execution, but that execution is not just a matter of “doing things.” It’s about throwing your idea into the wild a little bit and seeing what “the wild” makes of it.

Enterprise 2.0 : less control and more leadership

ceciiil — Tue, 18 May 2010 13:50:15 +0000

Bertrand Duperrin makes an interesting analogy in his post Will Adam Smith drive business in the future ? His take :

(…) Opposing a top-down and directive model an emerging relying on the existence of an “ invisible hand” that, in the same way as Adam’s Smith theory in economics, would make people personal actions and choices contribute to a collective purpose without the need of organizing anything.

I guess the difference between the enterprise and the market is that within the former, people (ideally) are working with the clear goal of collectively creating value and making the company richer. While in the latter the goal is to individually create value to make oneself richer.

Bertrand then sets a table comparing Enterprise 1.0 (strict), 2.0 (anarchy) and Rationalized 2.0 (ideal organisation).

My take : Bertrand’s Rationalized 2.0 is Enterprise 2.0 with a strong and clear leadership. The invisible hand in Adam Smith Enterprise is the leadership.

Leadership is doing the right thing while management is doing the things right (Peter Drucker).

Usual suspects 2.0

Offering more organisational freedom to employees is suicidal if it’ not carried out under a strong leadership. Looking at the usual suspects in terms of bottom up organisations these companies have strong principles.

Whole Foods Market have strong purposes and causes that are underlined by Gary Hamel essay The Future of Management.

Cisco‘s CEO John Chambers has completely revamped Cisco to build the whole organisation around collaboration as main core value. This transformation has been carried out based on five pillars, first of which being change of leadership style.

WL Gore Terri Kelly CEO on her company organisation :

WL Gore has guiding principles : freedom, fairness, commitment and waterline. this creates engagement, empowers team et voila : business results. People are leaders in our company only if there are people to follow them. (…) Leaders at WL Gore are not bosses. They earn their leadership, they have followers, they live the culture, and they explain rationale behind their decision.

37Signals is another great example of an amazingly successful company with strong principles. No-nonsense, get things done, technology alignment on objectives, think small, do less but do better, financial independence, etc … Strong principles are so pervasive in the company culture that they even infuse the web development framework (RubyOnRails) they have created : Convention over Configuration is the motto being the whole framework.

Agree on what to do

These guiding principles act as clear boundaries and define the frame within which employees are given freedom to organise their activity. They provide visibility and guidance.

Since the foundations of the collaboration the enterprise and the employees agreed on upfront are principles on what to do rather than processes on how to do, they naturally give more freedom to employees and are a bedrock for trust.

Organise and Control Vs Lead and Engage

Thinking about it, this is probably what scares the most leaders out of enterprise 2.0. It is not possible to hide : they need to show a strong and clear leadership to frame the collaborative work. There is no workaround if they want to fully benefit from bottom-up organisation that empowers employees.

Leadership is not granted. As Terri Kelly reminds us : it is earned. Organising control is dead easy. Leading to engage people is not.

This brings us to the first questions an organisation should ask itself on its way to 2.0 : do we have a strong and clear leadership ? What are the principles and purposes on top of which we want to build our whole collaborative environment ? Are these clear and strong enough for our employees to take ownership ?

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Tech IT Easy

The Mac App Store is gonna **** things up

Over-pricing:

Over-featuring:

Copy-cats:

Overpopulation in Facebook

Newsletters, a flawed marketing tactic

What’s social, anyway?

Postling and how it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy on social networks

How it was previously

How it is now

Conclusions

Some links:

State of the iPhone Apps

Is Apple’s FaceTime (meant to be) Disruptive?

The Annual Kari Silvennoinen is out!

The Internet does not make much sense… On pricing digital goods and other illogicalities

Can we accept piracy as a necessary evil already? [Cranky Rant]

Swedes know how to connect with music – or how to stream Spotify to the living room

The future of online music: not just about access, but about continuous entertainment

Thoughts on Intellectual Property and dealing with *everything else that is out there*

The role of Sunk Costs in Strategic Decision Making—a European’s perspective

The last retail store on earth—a fantasy story

Status, Signals, and the Startup

A review of the 23andMe genetic profiling service

Vincent’s E’ship Diary Part 10: Thoughts on Selling

Will computers enslave or liberate us? [TooLong4ATweet]

Is “Great artists steal” still a good mantra for Blogging?

Liberating Leadership, intrinsic equality and world-class businesses

URL as a metric for social object’s value (Weekend rambling)

How to tell when Enterprise 2.0 is not appropriate for your organisation

E’ship Diary part 9: The belief in Luck is a Wonderful Thing

Enterprise 2.0 : less control and more leadership

Thoughts on Intellectual Property and dealing with everything else that is out there