Just a reminder to the people who are following us through Netvibes or some other feeds. We have moved away from WordPress.com’s hosting and the correct URL to our feed is http://feeds.techiteasy.org/techiteasy/feed

Thanks,

Tech IT Easy
http://www.techiteasy.org/

Just a brief and boring update to you all. We moved to a new server. This change will only affect you if you still use the old jeremyfain.wordpress.com address. If you use www.techiteasy.org, everything should be fine.

If you do see this from your feed reader, change your RSS feed to http://feeds.techiteasy.org/techiteasy/feed

No other changes (I think) and we’ll be making some slow adaptions to the site, as allowed by the more liberal hosted WordPress installation.

That is all.
Vincent

We’ll be migrating Tech IT Easy from wordpress.com to a self-hosted solution these coming days, so I won’t be posting much, I don’t think. In the mean time, here are a few things flying through my head.

Men can’t get away with this !!

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

Factors influencing the ‘virtual office’

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

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

On building (corporate) Knowledge Centres

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

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

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

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

As someone entirely new to the world of finance (apart from the theory of course), I get a lot of beginner tasks to do. One of these, I found, has had a dramatic effect on my writing (in the positive sense), and basically consists of transcribing a 40-page legal document from (tree-)paper to Word.

This simple repetitive action of typing I don’t know how many words per minute for several hours a day, along with the entire (for lack of a better word) boringness of the subject-matter, means that, pretty soon, your fingers-muscles become as strong as Arnie in his hay day (picture), allowing you to write up your thoughts that much faster. I imagine a similar effect arises from coding and would think that the coders on this blog would find more time to write.. but hey.

The greater point to all of this is that there are no short-cuts to getting better in any craft, apart from more and more and more practice. There are plenty of books on grammar and how to write a novel, which are probably useful to read in regards to the structure of sentences and longer texts. But in the end, the most pleasurable thing of it all is to not have to spend too much time thinking about where the keys are located on your keyboard and instead be able to focus on the greater point of your writing: what you are trying to say!

Vincent

P.S. One negative thing to add: I don’t particularly think that typing all day is very good for the fingers. Can anyone suggest an RSI-preventative keyboard or is any extensive physical finger-labour bound to end up in walking around with the claw all day?

I feel like I’ve already complained enough about the state of mobile telephone on this blog, particularly where it relates to roaming across countries, which just plain sucks. It’s not just mobile telephony, of course, it’s also public transport, where you have to get special discount cards per country, while we live in a so-called united Europe.

You don’t notice this so much within large countries, like France, Germany, and the US, but you definitely notice it living in the tiny Duchy of Luxembourg.  It is therefore an absolute must to a. negotiate higher wages when you start here, to compensate for those costs, and b. the lower taxes compared to the more socialist Netherlands are a nice bonus.

That said, THINGS MUST CHANGE !!! I feel, I cannot say this enough, but there is something very wrong if you go from an all-you-can-eat mobile internet contract for €27 – €50 per month, to paying something like €1 – €5 per MB of data as soon as you move 2 metres (6 feet) across the border!

I’m as against big corporations and government as the next guy, but in this case I favour more consolidation amongst mobile operators and public transport companies (even so, just because I have a T-mobile account in the Netherlands, doesn’t mean that I pay any decreased roaming fees in T-Mobile’s birth-country, Germany, no sir!).

Rather than consolidation, I am even more in favour of large networks infrastructures that are rented out at the same price to companies in different countries, which in turn act as nothing but a language interface for those services (at a minor surcharge). I think this is actually already happening, but the minor surcharge is really abused to the max. in most cases.

Whatever the case, Business-travel in Europe sucks (even more so globally, of course), and I feel that the only way to get around it now is to make more money (as if travelling was a luxury!?) or never travel at all, both of which are, to say the least, inefficient solutions to what should be a simple problem to solve. … as long as, of course, people of all nations get their heads out of their respective a##es (That’s right, I said a## on Tech IT Easy).

End rant,

Vincent
(Apologies for all the swearing. That’s really not like me.)

This in reference to the accusations (1, 2) that Techcrunch made towards Last.fm, which have been criticised by many, not least by Last.fm and CBS itself. For those that haven’t been following it, accusations were raised at Last.fm for sharing (private) user-data with the RIAA, the US institution best known for suing old ladies for sharing music on their PCs. Recently, CBS/Last.fm issued another statement that these accusation are completely false. More recently, today in fact, news was released that the Last.fm founders quit. Now, I, as a blogger and not a media-person (there is a difference), don’t think that this last piece of circumstantial evidence bodes well for CBS/Last.fm.

Let’s first define media and truth as I think its relevant to the discussion. By media, I mean any publication that has it in their core-statutes (or whatever they are called) to inform the public as accurately and honestly as possible. This excludes blogs, in my opinion, as most of us have made no such agreements with our readers (sorry, guys!). Instead, some of us use it as a diary, others as a commentary, and others as a pseudo reporting service (on Tech IT Easy, we try to restrict ourselves to two and three). Techcrunch, on the other hand, while having started as a blog, can now easily be called an organisation reporting the news, with all the conditions that come with it.

Truth: in the media, truths are verifiable facts. You can verify facts in two ways. One, by quoting your source, preferably primary, short and simple. Two, by being a reputable source yourself. In other words, the Financial Times can tell us that an anonymous source has told them that Martians have visited the president and that statement will hold more value than if I told you that Martians have visited the president. Why? Because the Financial Times has more to lose than me (perhaps).

While Techcrunch is obviously not the 121-year old institution that is the Financial Times, it is in many ways it’s equivalent in this time of new online-focussed media. It has a lot to lose by giving out the wrong information. Techcrunch repeated its allegations several times even, without quoting sources I should mention, which leads me to believe them.

So why not trust CBS/Last.fm over Techcrunch? One, a corporation stating that it hasn’t done harm to its customers is simple self-preservation. Two, while I have been following Last.fm even before it was Last.fm, and while I actually find its founders very sympathetic, I think that they experienced the hypocrisy that corporations sometimes live by (it may be in their statutes even), and decided to quit. If this happened to my baby, I would quit too.

I am not saying that everything Techcrunch writes should be taken at their word (nor even the Financial Times), but as recent history has shown us, there is something wrong in the world of the music- and video-industry (you know, that other media-industry), and the only protection we regular people seem to have, is the media calling them out on the sometimes very nasty things they do. And while we should keep double- and tripple-checking the facts, if only to keep the Techcrunches et al. on their toes, if the RIAA is involved and a big company like CBS, I think I’ll side with public media.

End blog post.

Vincent

P.S. the irony: I think that CBS is also a news reporting organisation. However, in the case of the Last.fm “business unit,” it is not!

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

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

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

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

Vincent

Let me just start with that I don’t hate Windows, far from it! I like that I can run most applications on it and, let’s face it, it is still a Windows-centric world, so knowing your way around the operating system is a fairly important skill.

As the latest update to Mac OSX Leopard, 10.5.7, has caused some mayhem on my company’s server (something to do with DHCP constantly refreshing my IP, if you can help buzz me), I am now booting into Windows XP via Bootcamp. Additionally, my boss also ordered me a new Dell PC to persuade me to “be like the rest of ‘em” (my own words), but really more to do with security: we work in a Financial Trust, which means that we deal with highly sensitive data that shouldn’t be stored on any laptop, really!

OK, so how do you, as a Mac-user, survive that Windows experience (slash “Trauma”)? Here’s what I did:

• I love Quicksilver (a launch-utility that allows me to circumvent the mouse and explorer interface and launch apps with a few keys), and I am currently using Slickrun as a fairly effective replacement. OK, you won’t exactly be able to program triggers or append text to files, but it works.
• Expose is another “interface aid” I use instead of alt-tab. DExposE2 is a Windows replacement that works fairly similarly.
• Marsedit is my favourite blogging application on the Mac ever (you all know, how frequently I write..) and Windows Live Writer is a surprisingly good replacement for it.
• GDI++ is an interesting font-rendering app for Windows XP users. It took some getting used to, but I find it works well when Cleartype is turned on.
• Textexpander has made writing a slightly more efficient task on the Mac, certainly a less error-prone one. It basically allows you to create abbreviations or add frequently misspelled words and the program then replaces it with the word you intended. On Windows: check out Texter.

As you might have noticed, the “Mac Experience,” to me at least, is not about Application support, it’s about productivity, i.e. doing stuff quicker, which the Mac excels at. Everything else, from Microsoft Office to Mozilla Firefox essentially works the same and, in several cases better, on Windows, so no survival guide needed there.

While I will never enjoy the Windows experience as much as the Mac one, these few things have made my life a little more bearable. If you have some nifty tricks to share that have made your Windows experience better, please share them in the comments!

Vincent

P.S. One thing I would still love to have is a system-wide spell-checker like in OS X.

Background: This is an advice that I am giving to someone, who is a traditional artist. She paints and tries to sell her paintings. By writing this down for you, the public, I don’t think I am revealing critical information, in that it is a common sense approach to building a sustainable business. It does not address two critical factors: the intellectual property (which is the art) and the marketing (which comes in part from quality and in other part from choosing the right sales channels).

Here is the situation: I like (her) paintings, but they are very work-intensive. Each painting can take anything from 2 weeks or more to produce and the end-price reflects this as well. In today’s economy, in any economy, this means that there is a segment of the population that will not be able to afford it it. Museums, who display art worth millions, have overcome this problem quite elegantly, by selling posters and postcards of these art-pieces. Countless other art-industries are based on turning a singular piece of art into mass-produced widgets. Similarly, I think it is much more efficient, for more reasons than the work alone, to do something similar for the independent painter. Again, I don’t think this is a trade-secret or anything; the quality of the art and the sales channels are most critical aspects.

In any business, there are two types of cost. These are fixed and variable. Fixed costs are often significant costs and difficult to remove. A workplace is a fixed cost, so is some of the material used to produce a painting. Variable costs are smaller, often more flexible costs, incurred regularly. Paint would be such a cost and you can affect the cost of producing a painting by using different paint. It’s not quite as easy to change the workshop you work in from painting to painting.

Following is the action-plan:

1. Find out what the total fixed and variable costs are for producing a painting and x amount of reproductions (e.g. 100 posters). In other words, list all the costs in a nice Excel-sheet or piece of paper and add them up.
2. Divide the total costs by the number of posters you want to sell. Those are the costs per product.
3. Decide how much you want to charge per poster. If you or the market decides that this price is below your cost, then there is something wrong with your formula and you are making a loss. If, on the other hand, your price is above your costs, you are doing well.
4. Now… find out how you plan to sell the amount of posters you decided on…

Some … pause in that last point because how can a business man or woman really know that these are the sales they will make? My advice is therefore to keep costs as minimal as possible at the start, focussing a lot on developing the actual sales process.

That’s it really! And it reflects how hard it really is to go from having an idea (and preferably also the skill) to a profitable business. From a right-brained creative approach, you have to do some left-brained accounting, and from a product-focussed, perhaps introversive approach, you now have to become outgoing, market-focussed, and sell. Not easy!

As with all big projects, from writing a thesis to climbing a mountain, it’s my opinion and what I have learned so far, that it is always better to break it down into simple steps, see the relationships between different processes, and understand how the whole project is put together.

I always welcome discussion, so if there is an error in my logic somewhere, please, please contribute through a comment!
Vincent

The “Captain’s Chair” is what I call the chair of the entrepreneur which always has to be filled and which sits prominently in the middle of the office and all the business being conducted within. It comes out of the simple evolution from running a 1-man show, and then hiring on more people to do the work. It also has a lot to do with how sensitive the service is that is being released, and when customers expect services to be at the same level of professionalism that the initial founder has always displayed, it is understandably hard to let go.

It is also a trap that is being written about in plenty of business “self-help” books and is, in my opinion, best solved through designing processes to be as failure-free and as simple as possible. In other words, like the preparation of a McDonalds hamburger, which is a scientifically designed factory process.

One public example of the captain’s chair phenomenon is Micheal Arrington’s Techcrunch, which has, until recently, always been run out of his own apartment, and even today he is (I believe) the no. 1 editor and certainly the no. 1 PR guy. In no other media publication of that size (in terms of readership numbers, not company size) does the founder take such a prominent and involved position and, physically and mentally, I’m sure, it is taking its toll on Arrington. Similarly, I know several small companies, where this is a problem, with similar consequences on the founder.

This is not to say that doing the opposite is necessarily a good thing. As perhaps the case of Starbucks showed, which recently had to ask its original founder, Howard Schultz, to return to the captain’s chair, sometimes an organisation can forget the original values it was based on and do some silly things. In Schultz’s case, I have actually always blamed its problems on his book, which was essentially a franchise manual for anyone who wanted to set up a coffee-shop, and which might have also inspired McDonalds to basically become an affordable Starbucks alternative for the masses. A story for another day, but I think the current Starbucks model is doomed and Schultz will have to redesign the company’s business model from scratch.

There is certainly a careful balance that needs to be maintained when designing a company to both expand a business’s reach, without losing the heart of the business. Together with the simple process of “preparing a burger,” you need to instil the values that also lead to the “smile” that accompanies the sale of the burger and leads to a satisfied customer (and his return-visit).

Designing companies must thus, in my opinion, be a rich process, involving the founder(s)’s, the employees’, and customers’ input, finally leading from the single business to the chain of businesses serving all customers equally or superiorly well.

Vincent

This is an angry post, so ignore if you can’t handle it. Nothing is as frustrating to as staring at a blank wall. And to continue to use that analogy, nothing is as frustrating as staring into the face of someone who radiates “there’s nothing I can do” or “there’s nothing I will do” to solve your problem. And the same for talking to people on the phone, etc.

Apart from the personal defects these people have (developed), two main reasons, that I can identify, cause this problem:

1. The organisation itself
2. The legal environment

How the problem manifests itself is in several ways:

• things only work in one country / for one company at a time and have to replicated with every move
• many people have to be consulted to make a decision
• long stuffy contracts have to be prepared and read
• papers have to be signed and delivered with the actual ink of the pen (the worst thing about this is that some people never write, except to sign papers, and what point is the signature then?)
• papers have to be sent by 19th century snail-mail instead of the 20th century fax or 21st century email (I expect that by the 22nd century it will all happen by Twitter)

As a consequence, you have to be a master of patience as you face “wall” after “wall” after “wall,” trying not to tell these people how much they really frustrate you (of course, they already know).

I remember reading recently that electronic voting will never happen because anything that can be hacked, will be hacked. So I guess, we will always have to go to a physical office and vote by pressing a button (at least some innovation there). And I guess that signatures can always be faked, when sent via email or fax, so perhaps snail-mail will continue to exist (apart from the very profitable packet-sending business, which, thanks to e-commerce, is here to stay). And I also guess that because each of you speaks their own language and each entrepreneur decides at the start to reinvent the wheel, aka do things their own organisational way, that cross-cultural and -organisational inefficiencies will continue to exist.

When you think about it, the real problem is that humans aren’t telepathic, because if the “wall-person” in front of me could read my mind, they’d be a lot more helpful.

Yes, this was a “what I’d like,” that no one will be able to solve ever.
Vincent

I used to do this on my food & retail blog and it kind of helped me remember what the heck I wrote about every month. I hope you enjoy it too.

My favourite posts for the last month include (in no particular order):

• A (Sci-Fi inspired) vision of Facebook’s (or equivalent) future: because it was an attempt at humour and it integrated a lot of my reading, watching, and thinking of the last few months, regarding sci-fi and technology.
• My biggest nightmare if I ran a startup, and what I would probably do about it: because it’s about pricing strategy, which is still a topic that I care deeply about and will continue to do so.
• Why you should invest your time & money into space technology: because developing and investing into technology startups is something I spent years studying, and is a space that I want to stay close to for the foreseeable future.
• Keeping the job Fun by tracking your time: because it’s a data-driven post (for me, at least) and it allows me to synergise blogging with work (still not the easiest thing to do).

Next month, more of the same, and hopefully some other authors for me to pimp… we’ll see.

Have a nice weekend.
Vincent

If you think about how the iPhone was launched so many months ago, or rather at what stage the iPods were at, you know that apps were always on the horizon. The iPod G5 introduced a wider range of games that you could buy through the iTunes store, which already introduced us to the idea of buying apps, well games really, through that venue.

When the iPhone arrived, there were NO apps; App-support was basically web-coded widgets with limited functionality. The reason for this was, I believe, that there was no competition to speak of + perhaps the complexity of setting up such a venture. Apps for other phones existed, ok, but it was either in a decentralised fashion (Java for instance), or very centralised and very limited in its offering (e.g. Blackberry & Palm), at least compared to the current iTunes store.

It took pressure from the market [jail-breaking & media] and perhaps already the idea in the back of Apple’s heads to release the app-store a little over a year after the initial device was launched. When it did launch, there was lot’s of hype, lot’s of love, and good news for Apple iPhone numbers both on the device-sales side and that of app-sales.

How the other device makers reacted was two-fold and really quite half-heartedly. Most hardware makers focussed on what they did best: hardware. Touch-screen after touch-screen device entered the market. The most interesting software-based strategy came from Google, which, I guess, realised the potential of mobiles as computing platforms and, more importantly, as search/internet/”revenue for Google” enabled devices in everyone’s pocket.

The current app-store offerings are still lacking with many big parties attempting to launch one for their platforms. The key-factors in terms of adoption seem to be having a critical mass of both users and developers, both of which represent a chicken & egg problem for many, something that the initial iPhone circumvented quite elegantly.

The most promising devices today are Google-/Android-powered phones and the, still somewhat vapoury Palm Pre. The latter seems to be the most competitive, hardware-wise, with much ex-Apple talent having contributed to the Pre’s development. On the App-store front, it’s still very early days, but reports are disappointing.

So, the question is, what can phone-makers and software-makers do to compete with the new “Microsoft” (=Apple) of the mobile space? The choice, to me, appears two-fold:

1. Emulate Apple in whatever way possible: create a great device and create an app-store with a sufficient supply of apps.
2. Or, create a great device and find a way to elegantly get apps onto it, without all this centralising nonsense.

By the wording, it’s obvious that I prefer the second option. As good as the iTunes store is, it isn’t amazing for developers and it isn’t as profitable for Apple as one would think either. The biggest problem for competitors is similar to the music-situation, that Apple has critical mass, which attracts the greatest amounts of customers and is a nearly insurmountable challenge for new entrants.

Where Apple clearly leads is in its developer-support, which isn’t quite as apparent from other software/hardware makers, except perhaps Microsoft (but mainly on the PC-side) and perhaps Google. Palm, as yet, does not offer a comparable service to developers, or to put it in another way, Palm developer conferences are not yet sold out in the way Apple’s WWDC is each year.

Final thoughts:

• I think that developer support is key in any smart phone strategy these days, as mobile devices continue to become computers in your pocket.
• I don’t think that centralised app stores are necessarily the way to go, except (and I suspect this) if the mobile carriers are demanding it.
• The simplest thing would be to create a web-based categorised list of a apps that developers can add to;
• implement mechanisms that vote and demote apps according to their usefulness and other attributes;
• and create / implement mechanisms that prevent abuse (e.g. P2P apps or VOIP apps, though I think the latter can no longer be considered this)
• And continue to innovate on the hardware, because I think there is plenty of innovation left. What makes the iPhone so desirable is the app-support, but the hardware is really nothing to write home about.

Note: I purposefully left the links towards the end, because it allows for a more time-efficient, easier to write (and, maybe, read) article. Links with additional info are included in below list:

• Mossberg on Palm Pre
• Apple App store numbers
• The incredible app store hype (one of many developer complaints)
• Palm developer network

Inspired by the Grasshopper podcast on Venture Voice.

Har har,
Vincent

This is not a show-off post, more a question about making the transition from student-hood & freelancer to professional. Working at a financial trust, whose very name suggests that we should be trustworthy people, I like to think that being nice and creating things that people love, is also good for business.

At the same time, a business is about turn-over and offering good value for money, and I sometimes feel that blogging and other stuff can distract from these commercial activities.

How do you feel about it in your job?

Vincent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vincent

At the moment of writing, I’m on page XXII, what some of you may recognise as the introductory pages of the book. Not nearly enough to write a review. But I discovered the title in the FT weekend edition and reading a few pages it already feels alive with the buzz of making it big from the bottom up to the most powerful circles of Hollywood. For that is the topic of the book, tales of those people that started in the mailroom and now rule the woods of holly.

What the mailroom made me think about was IBM. I read the autobiography (I think it’s this one) of the founding of IBM around 15 years ago while lounging on the beaches of Cuba. It made a strong impression on me because it was raw. The book was also badly bound, falling apart bit by bit, which no doubt added to the memory. But what made the IBM story so compelling is that it wasn’t about the “consulting biz” it is now, having gotten rid of 95% of its hardware business, but it was about going from typing machines, to calculators, to huge room-filling computers, to the personal computer. Like the Mailroom, the story is maybe a little dated, but both are about dreaming big and thinking about and experiencing the radical steps that life, business, an industry, society can make. As such, still being on page XXII of the Mailroom, I can still say that it is an inspiring read.

The other thing the Mailroom reminded me of is my love for post-1900 history. Nothing like Word War I, II, of the Cold War, I’m not very interested in humanities continuous attempts to destroy themselves. More about the chaos that made lots of adventures possible. Business opportunities like the ones that Ray Croc discovered in plastic cups and McDonalds, crime in the early 20s and 30s which was really entrepreneurism, the development of cinema as discussed in my Hitchcock / Truffaut pieces. The Mailroom, IBM.

When I look at today, (P.S. I’m just lounging in the garden in the burning sun, reading the book and pounding away at this post), it all seems rather dull in comparison. The real opportunities, which often come from unplanned chaos, seem to be more located in emerging economies like China and India, than in European countries like France where when you get fired you get a (scandalous) 50,000 euro “bonus.” Even the Internet, which has attracted a lot of free spirits in the past and present, seems to continue to get more consolidated, structured, encumbered by taxation and the personal interests of national organisations operating in a nationless environment. OK, I’m drifting…

Read the Mailroom! I predict it’s a good read, particularly during the hopefully more chilled out summer days.

Vincent

I think I must be a geek because I like creating order (that doesn’t automatically mean that I’m a very orderly person, rather the opposite).

One of my first priorities in my new position was to orientate myself in the “order” of things, or rather to have a good view on what the process from customer generation to customer acquisition is (my interpretation of the lifeblood of every company).

So my questions, very formal, covered following three elements:

• what is the profile of a customer most valuable to our company?
• what are the USPs of our company for these customers?
• what is the process of converting potential customers into actual customers?

The answer was that there is no simple answer to the question, except that over time I would learn to understand what was possible or not.

It kind of follows the paradigm that the famous Harvard Business Review article called “The Knowledge-Creating Company” introduces, where experts possess a lot of tacit knowledge, which they use to do their job (Incidentally, the HBR-article is authored by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, who are the original protagonists of the Scrum approach).

In other words, over time, by accumulating experience, I would be able to develop a type of instinct regarding stuff like what a good customer is, what optimal solution is for him, and how the internal process works of customer conversion.

But the article takes it further (and is also my inspiration) in that from tacit or implicit you move to explicit knowledge, meaning that processes are documented and standardised. A kind of spiral forms, indicated in the picture below. This also reminds of Gerber’s franchise methodology in the E-Myth Revisited.

The question is what internal and environmental conditions have to exist for this spiral to function properly, and whether it can be applied universally to all company processes. I do not think so and would ague that in environments that are constantly changing, like global finance or when starting a company, making things too explicit undermines the speed-advantage that the tacit approach brings.

A little academic perhaps (you know me… ), but what do you think? What company processes typically need to be made explicit, and which are not served by this?

Vincent

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

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




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




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




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




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




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




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

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

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

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

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




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




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




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

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

Vincent

My cofounder at Verteego Rupert and I met Michelle Greer in the line to the TechCrunch Party during last December’s crappy LeWeb Conference in Paris. Michelle was the sunshine of at-that-time very cloudy Paris for us: we could discuss blogs (see Michelle’s blog), Twitter (follow Michelle here), hot startups, online business models, web marketing, as well as music, France, the US, blablabla

Since then, Michelle being based in Austin, Texas, we’ve been keeping in touch and I couldn’t resist introduce you guys to Michelle Greer, a great professional as well as an amazing person. Plus, I’ve become lazy writing blogs just myself with me and I, so here Michelle goes:

- Hey Michelle, could you please introduce yourself?
My name is Michelle Greer and I am a web marketing strategist here in Austin, Texas.  I love good movies, traveling, funny people, skiing, tennis, yoga, and using the web to connect people.

Michelle Greer was interviewed by Jeremy, who didn’t get paid for it! Look, Tech IT Easy isn’t even mentioned in Michelle’s favorites…

I hate Windows Explorer and I hate Mac OS X Finder, but what I hate even more is when applications try to replace them by moving all the files into a new, more app-friendly structure. Plenty of examples on the Mac-side, I am, not sadly, no longer an expert on Windows software.

The problem with the Finder / Explorer is that, while they are perfectly suitable for storing and organising files, they are painfully lacking in presenting files in a way that a human or group of humans can understand. The problem / opportunity is also that Explorer/Finder is the standard in as far that every organisation uses it to organise their files. Replacing it by a information system that uses its own proprietary structure to organise files, people, and activities just adds to the learning curve, particularly if, as most experience shows, the software ends up not being that great and the company has to switch.

So, what I’m looking for is the following. An application that:

• works on Macs and PCs (The first is not an absolute prerequisite, it’s only because I work on a Mac)
• Better: is either web- or LAN-based (solves the cross-platform problem)
• acts as a front-end for the explorer, without actually changing the locations of files (except if a user wants it)
• allows users to:
  • sort files into “playlists,” again without changing the location of the files;
  • give long descriptions to files, not just available in a hidden “info” section;
  • assign files and tasks to groups and group-members;
  • assign due dates / sync with calendars;
  • etc. etc., you get the idea.
• Can certainly cost money, must be licensable on a company-basis, and must have a trial period of at least 3 months (it takes at least that long to deploy, adopt, and adapt it on an organisational level).

It’s such an obvious thing that such a software probably already exists. If you know of a good one, please let me know in the comments or per mail.

Vincent

First, what I love about business plans. I contains four elements very close to my heart: Writing, talking to people, innovation, and entrepreneurship. That is not to say that writing business plans is a fun activity that should be taken lightly. The crux of writing a business plan is that it needs to be executed upon. And that is where the complication arises.

One of my last freelance projects was amazing fun and in two ways very rewarding. Financially, because the investment that followed it, far exceeded the more than generous fee I was paid. Creatively, because my involvement lead to a lot of focus product- and strategy-wise, and we developed what I thought was a clear timeline as to the execution of the plan in different phases of product and market development.

But, as mentioned, writing a plan does not mean that it reflects the reality. I was reminded of this again, listening to a venture hacks podcast on “pitching hacks” (you can watch and listen to the presentation here). Business plans are worth squat, because a. there’s a lot of them, and b. the proportion that is executed upon is fairly small.

In theory, business-plans serve as a way to make the strategy of a young company explicit. Kind of like Gerber’s “Franchise manual” for startups in the E-Myth Revisited, it allows you to solidify what you do while you’re doing it. But, I don’t think it automatically leads to a (better or actual) business…

…

Those three dots is where I stopped writing some three weeks ago, and I have in the mean time developed my thoughts further on this. I think that the gist of good business planning is taking ownership of the project. And the single most important key-component of the business plan is the timeline section. And the single most important action as an entrepreneur is to already have at least 10-30% completed of that timeline.

In other words:

• if you’re an entrepreneur you should write your own business plan: you cannot outsource this!




• The most well-developed section of your plan should be your timeline: as conservative and realistic as possible!




• The best way to illustrate the value of your plan (and timeline) is to already be following it: actions scream much louder than written words!

If those three components are in place, I think that the world of business planning and entrepreneurship would be a much better place.

End braindump…
Vincent

Addentum: The problem of multiple agendas! I should also add that another complication is that plans are written with a singular vision in mind, perhaps alternative scenarios are included, but it still very often reflects a singular approach to “doing things.” But… many companies are composed of multiple people, who may or may not have multiple agendas. I still think it can belong to taking ownership of the idea, in the sense that the plan is worked on together and perfected until everyone agrees with it. But more often than not, the business function is delegated to certain individuals, meaning that this isn’t the case.

Working at a financial trust means that many companies that you meet make a bad first impression. Because they come in the shape of ca. 1-10 binders and unless you love handling paper, reading balance sheets and legal documents, and breathing dust, you just won’t like it much. Luckily, reading binders isn’t part of my job description, even though I do it because I want to understand how this business works from start to finish. But, to keep my sanity in check, I try to mix it up between a. doing the (boring) work, b. keeping the overview, and c. doing work that I love.

After writing my work-life balance post some weeks ago, I decided to do one thing from the start: I would keep track of all my professional activities in Excel. Another thing I did was to colour-code each activity and note down how much time I spend on it each day and week, in order to track patterns. I am now in week 7, meaning that I have some meaningful data about this.

While I’m not going to share this data with you because I think it’s entirely irrelevant to your life, I will share some lessons that I learned from my experience so far:

• Tracking you time requires a certain kind of discipline, as well as a kind of heuristic thinking: a. you need to continuously do it; b. you don’t need to be entirely precise on whether you spend 15 min. more or less on something (I track each 15 min. in my sheet). P.S. Nothing inspires you to keep such a list as much as being paid by the hour (which is how I started with this habit).
• Asking lot’s of questions is the single most useful thing to do if you want to improve your job-satisfaction: The last three weeks, I was busy analysing a number of companies through their documentation, in French. A complete Nightmare! However, spending just a few hours with someone that has been doing this for years, meant that I quickly learned what’s relevant and what isn’t.
• A person is only really efficient a few hours per day: OK, I should already know this as a freelance consultant who charges by the hour, and you probably know this too. But seriously, track your time during one week and you’ll know this is absolutely true.
• A person is more effective at doing the stuff he/she loves than the stuff he/she doesn’t: Again, kind of an obvious point, but I can see through my time-tracking that job-satisfaction goes down and procrastination goes up after just an hour or more spent on non-enjoyable activities. I, personally, hate admin work, but love anything involving creating or learning. Productivity adds more value to the company so try to find an alignment between the stuff that you love and projects for the company you work for. Outsource / delegate the stuff that you hate / dislike / makes you procrastinate more.
• Expect a 30% return on investment on a todo-list: Meaning that for every 10 items you write down, you’ll probably manage 3 in the short-term. With a few exceptions, I generally find that those todo’s that don’t get handled are usually not that important anyway / sort themselves out automatically / have a longer due-date. P.S. I finish every day composing thoughts about what needs to be done the next day(s).
• Pay attention to how you spend the rest of your time: Work isn’t life and life isn’t work. And how you spend you life will very much affect your work. Things to track include amount of sleep every day, exercise, diet, and learning. Regarding the latter, I keep track of the (study) books that I read, podcasts I listen to, and blog-posts I write. While diet, sleep, and exercise is relevant to productivity in the short-term (that day, that week, that month), learning affects the long-term. I think a good ratio is 10-20% of time that should be spent on the latter, of course mileage may vary.

That’s it for today, hope it added some value to your life and that it made you open an excel sheet to track your time. If you need a template for setting up your own schedule, drop a comment or send me a mail.

Vincent

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

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

The Interview

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

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

1st Dimension: The start-up
The start-up is seen as a place where fertile (space) technology meets an individual or a team of people. They in turn go through an incubation process (at the ESI) and finally come out as a company to do business.

2nd Dimension: Stakeholders
This doesn’t apply to all incubators in the network, but in the Netherlands, the two main stakeholders are the ESA and the Dutch ministry of economic affairs (EZ). Both naturally want to promote employment, economic growth, and entrepreneurship in the Netherlands. Furthermore, ESA has the objective to improve the image of space in the eyes of the general public, of investors, and of businesses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

VvW: What are the advantages of a start-up approaching investors through the incubator, rather than going at it alone?
BN: To start, a venture capitalist can receive thousands of business-plans during a year. The aim is that ESI-plans land on top of that pile. This is because the ESI, and the ESA, provides a quality label to its’ residing startups, which manifests itself in four ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VvW: Do venture capitalists also support the incubator itself in some ways?
BN: Not hands-on, no. They do provide access to a network of companies, investors, and people to work with, which wasn’t there before. There will be more, once the ESINET-fund is started.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VvW: What is the investment climate like in the Netherlands, compared to other European countries?
BN: The Netherlands is not so great for finding private capital, except for subsidies. Both the UK and Germany rank highly for private capital. France and Italy have good governmental support.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vincent

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

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

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

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

…We haven’t exchanged a single word with each other. I’m trying a new thing and my inspiration for this is a picture I took from the latest Wired “Mystery” edition.

Apart from it being a smart picture, what I found more interesting is how the effect was achieved. Note the amount of people that Mr. sampotts is following, ca. 50. Having previously followed over 200 (now shrunk down to ca. 35), it was impossible for me to “listen” to a single word people were saying. My only two pieces of salvation were if you @vincentvw’d me (in which case an rss-feed would catch it) or if I added you to Friendfeed, where you can set up friendlists and place (imaginary) friends from Twitter inside.

Twitter is badly designed for this kind of collaborative effort, unless you minimise the amount of people you follow or find workarounds. Even so, those workarounds mean that you cheat 80% of your “friends” as you just push them into a corner where you listen to them less or not at all. E.g. on Friendfeed, I “follow” ca. 300 people, but really only read about 5. I’m sure 90% of Friendfeed users do the same.

My method, for now, is to restrict myself to people whose blog I read or with whom I chat (hopefully) on a regular basis. In the future, perhaps I’ll add a few people that I want to talk to, we’ll see. But the ultimate aim is to get the same effect that sampotts has, that I can ask a question and get answers from the hive mind.

If you remember, that was my vision of Twitter the first time I wrote about it on Tech IT Easy, nearly two years ago. I hope I can regain some of that innocent utopian vision.

For now, the best way to get me to follow you, is to say (smart) things to me, via Twitter, mail, this blog, or in real life!

Vincent

I spent quite a lot of time evaluating smart-phones this last week, including having hands-on time with the Nokia E71, the Blackberry 8900, the iPhone & iPod Touch, with a firm eye on their capabilities as a mobile computer, more so than a mobile phone or a mobile entertainment device.

My conclusion: the iPhone (or respectively iPod Touch) are interesting insofar as interfaces are concerned that either require mouse-like interaction or that require no interaction whatsoever, e.g. listening to music. And it’s pretty consistent with my first post about the iTunes app store, where I wrote that developers should focus on developing games and other visual applications, rather than on typing-intensive apps.

Now I may be perfectly wrong about this and if you’re a long-time iPhone / iPod Touch user and are able to type long messages without a problem, please drop a comment.

There’s no denying that the Apple gadget (whichever version) is h.o.t. But I think it’s a matter of the software-features being over-hyped and people forgetting that the hardware isn’t mature yet.

• First of all: touch-keyboards, really? It just doesn’t seem precise enough for accurate typing.
• Second: 400 dollars/euros for 32GB of space seems way over-priced, more so because it’s also a video-device and increased video-quality also comes with (much) increased file-sizes. Add to this that streaming video from your Mac doesn’t seem possible, unless you employ one hack or the other.
• Thirdly, I think that the web2.0 hype of developing application after application after application has strongly spilled over to the iTunes appstore, which is one of the few digital venues to have some kind of business model, but it totally overshadows any hardware deficiencies the iPod and iPhone may have (and I mean that only in terms of typing and storage, as I think apps for gaming and other entertainment work perfectly fine).

My gut tells me that iPods are mainly for entertainment and not productivity and even so that there’s a better deal to be had waiting for at least another generation beyond this.

Once again, I’m very open to you (trying to) convincing me that I’m am completely and utterly wrong.

Vincent

Just read the Face Value in the Economist from a few weeks ago, on Shai Agassi, an Israeli entrepreneur and former SAP employee, who is developing an ‘electric infrastructure for cars’ business, called Better Place. The idea is that there will be hotspots across a region and for cars to be subsidised by the subscription that you buy.

After the financial marble that the Indian company Tata Motors has produced, a car that costs between $2,200 and $3,800, and having seen several other concept cars in that price-range from companies like Volkswagen, is it possible that we will approach a time where cars will essentially be free?

I’m more sceptical, I think it’s a sign of the times, a recession + oil-prices and availability + the rise of emerging economies + more abstractly, that whole global warming thing, and the resulting desperation, which is causing businesses to come up with alternative business models around personal transportation.

And if given a choice, I would prefer for a system like Vel’oh!, here in Luxembourg, where you simply borrow a bike and bring it back at a pre-determined parking-zone after you’re finished with it. That said, I do hear that they get stolen a lot over there in France…

Thoughts?
Vincent

I know I wrote about rebooting the entrepreneurial brainstorming sessions. I kind of prefer an informal style of ‘idea generation’ though… Today, the subject is literature, of which there arguably is way too much. Sometimes it’s nice to read a ‘thin book,’ like The One Minute Manager or even The Alchemist.

What those books have in common is that they give you lessons in a very compressed space. But it works, because rather than doing a dry, point-by-point summary of the content published in much longer books, they do so in story-format. The One Minute Manager is about a man trying to learn about management and he goes on a kind of exploratory adventure to uncover the secrets. According to the book there’s only really three elements to effective one-to-one management [there's another book in the series, I'm reading now, on one-to-many management also], but I won’t bore you with them. The only thing to note is that I REMEMBER the lessons in the book perfectly!

The Alchemist is not a management book, it’s a self-help book about finding happiness and the meaning to your life. It’s again about an adventure and you follow this kid across the desert. Very simple principles, clothed in the format of an entertaining and exciting story.

No wonder these two books are best-sellers!

These last decades have seen a tremendous rise on various fronts involving the mass-education of mankind. From MBAs, to millions of published books, to billions of informational websites, it’s understandably overwhelming. As a result, you now get books teaching you (supposedly) “MBAs in a nutshell”, you get websites that sell you books in audio-format. And you also get websites that sell you book summaries for the busy executive.

Having read several of these, I have to say that I’m not impressed. Sure, I can read Crossing the Chasm in 5 pages, but what have I actually learned? How do the lessons that I read in bullet-point format translate into a language that my brain understands and remembers?

The answer is, if you ask me, to start a business that translates (boring / long) books into shorter books and doing so in story-form. Nothing is as exciting to business-folk like me, than reading a Harvard Business Review case-study. Because, it’s a (nearly) living example. I place myself into the antagonist’s point of view and learn about the challenges he/she has to face!

So this is my first “entrepreneurial brainstorming” topic: start a business that translates longer books into shorter entertaining stories and sells them to executives!

What do you think?
Vincent

OK, admittedly I’ve gone a little Facebook-crazy, ever since I joined the service ca. 2 years ago. Not Twitter-crazy, as in adding millions of friends, but an infatuation based on real value, the ability to organise activities and communicate with long-lost friends. And definitely not as crazy as the future I envision for Facebook or what I call *real friend*-based social networking™.

Phase 1, five years from now: Real-time

Imagine Google talk’s new innovation, video chat through the webplayer. Also imagine perhaps the most annoying internet-phenomenon of all: “voyeur TV,” made most famous (to geeks) by the likes of Justin TV and other Lifecasters, not to mention Survivor and Big Brother.

Where I see Facebook going in just a few years, is that you tune into a profile and if your friend allows it, you see a live feed instead of a static picture. Already, when I met old friends in Maastricht a few weeks ago, I thought how cool it would be to track a person’s physicial changes real-time on Facebook, instead of seeing what they *want me to see*.

The flaw: most people aren’t that comfortable showing unfiltered feeds. The opportunity: everyday, we’re becoming more accepting of the lack of privacy that the internet provides. The reality: probably a mix of both, where users give consent and only operate the camera when they feel like it.

Phase 2, ten years from now: in your living room

Picture the two innovations that Apple has essentially made mainstream. One, a camera in every electronic device. Two, training users to abandon the keyboard, through the iPhone and now multi-touch gestures. Repeating something I wrote before: this video-review, where a journalist compares typing on the EEE PC vs. the iPhone, at insane speeds in an all-terain vehicle, was really eye-opening how well that “virtual” keyboard works on the iPhone. So much for my first post on the iPhone app-store, that “the iPhone is just for games“…

My vision of a connected society in 10+ years is not that we all become experts at typing. The PC has always been designed by and for geeky engineers and we’ve had to put up with it because there was simply no other choice. Instead, I see every TV, every device perhaps, internet-enabled, in which we manipulate by simple gestures, a shake perhaps, the push of a single button…

In the future, I see people turning on their TV and tuning into Facebook and chatting with their friends as if they came for afternoon tea.

Phase 3, twenty years later: holofriends

In “Avatar,” the new movie by James Cameron, 13 years in the waiting, the story is that people use avatars to explore strange new worlds. In the real world, James Cameron is developing technologies that can capture actors’ facial expressions to the nth degree, and offer a real time preview into how that would look like post-production. Take that together with ca. 2000 cinema screens in the US that have been converted to 3D and perhaps you see where my thinking is going. In a few decades, both the motion-capture technology and the 3D one will become affordable, already 3D filming is a matter of tying two HD-cameras together, and eventually 3D screens will come to our living rooms,… perhaps enabling us to see and interact with hologram friends from Facebook?

Imagine, jogging with a Facebook friend, having your mom “virtual hug” you after you were dumped, having virtual se… ok, now I’m going to far!

Phase 4, fifty years into the future: I’m alive, I’m alive!!!

In the future we will be able to speak to dead friends and family members. Morbid? Perhaps it’s better expressed as, in the future we will live forever, at least digital versions of us.

But perhaps the 300 MB sized data encompassing our brain, as envisioned in the Battlestar Galactica sequel, Caprica, isn’t quite so realistic. Instead, a $100 million Paul Allen foundation, called the Allen Institute for Brain Science, is using digital technology to slice, dice, and capture what our brains are made of. It’s quite sad, because so far they are finding that the data is so excessive and so “personal” (every brain is different!!!), that they don’t yet know when, if ever, they will have finished capturing the brain.

But what is certain is that, eventually, we will develop an understanding of what makes us tick, and perhaps, perhaps, develop technology to transfer our memories to a machine. And when that happens, what’s to stop people from signing up to live forever? And imagine the pressure then coming from friends and family members to experience those memories one last time, and again, and again. It would be the rebirth of a more morbid social network, finally.

Final thoughts

None of this has to be Facebook-powered of course. But there’s no denying that wherever the internet is going, it will be built on more interactions between people, between real people, not these quasi-friendships strangers make on Twitter, mostly for selling and customer support purposes. And right now, as far as those *real* relationships are concerned, Facebook is king.

The end… or the beginning?
Vincent

Bear in mind that by calling you cheapskates, I also call myself the same (plus, I’m Dutch…). Remember that I was the one raving about a €30 contract-less phone not too long ago, the Motorola Motophone (which I have since given to my mother, who hates it). Since moving to Luxembourg, less than a month ago, I’m shopping for a new phone and am considering the iPhone.

At the same time, do the math! To get the 16GB version, I have to shell over €99 + €50 per month for the next two years. That’s €1300 as a base price for the iPhone, not including the cost of getting hooked to paying such prices in the future.

Some other factors to consider:

• There’s is city-wide, free WiFi in Luxembourg (at least one good thing about this small city, apart from me being there )
• Skype was just released in the app-store, making calling on the iPod Touch + Wifi a viable option.
• Signing a 2 year contract seems like a big deal, considering I just started the job and still need to be able to keep it.
• The country of Luxembourg is so small, that I ‘ll be in international roaming mode before I know it (Mobile in Europe sucks, did you know that?)
• Taking a 32GB iPod Touch + a internet-less phone, would be ca. €400 + €30 per month = ok, €1120 for 2 years (bearing in mind that I usually NEVER take 2 year contracts on anything!)
• I already have an excellent portable camera, the IXUS 870 IS
• I also expect an upgraded iPhone to come around, hopefully within the next 6 months, but too long for me to wait.

So, it’s a tough decision for a cheapskate like me.

It’s taken me a long time to get to the point of wanting to use a touch-screen, which I considered an inferior typing solution, until… I watched this video. It’s amazing that this guy, sitting in a moving vehicle shaking like a bull on steroids, can type intelligible words on his iPhone, and nothing at all on a regular button-based keyboard.

Take that together with the iPhone OS 3, due to come out within the next 1-3 months, and it sounds like an interesting option. But €1300 for a phone? Man!

What do you say, cheapskates, buy or don’t buy?
Vincent

I started a new job recently, at a financial trust. Part of my job is, for now, to learn about the financial structuring of companies setting up in Luxembourg and wanting to expand internationally. I’m also in charge of marketing (whatever there is to be done in a company that generates most of its customers from word of mouth), and to continue on selected strategic consulting projects (a continuation of my previous (freelance) activity).

A basic administrative requirement of my job is to, of course, have an email-address, containing the domain of the company in it. It’s basic PR, when you contact a potential customer, to use a common domain-name, also increasing brand-recognition. But what about phone-numbers? I get my email-address and business-cards for free, but have to pay for most of my phone-costs myself, the reason being that it’s not really something that has to be associated with the business.

That would be different if the identifier that I used would be a branded one, representing the company I work for.

Today, I had to deal with a payment issue with my Dutch bank, Rabobank. Via their website, you can call them for free, using the very clear “Rabolijn” username on Skype. I would love for something similar to exist on phone, which would instantly identify me as such whenever I call someone.

When you think about it, seeing a number for strangers calling you really seems like something from the 20th century. We use digital mobile phones which communicate across digital communication channels. Already, it is certain that the internet of the next decade will be dominated by mobile communications. So, how hard is it to send a name + a number to another person’s phone, when you are calling them?

My thought is: not very hard.

Vincent

I always really liked Jeremy’s posts on entrepreneurial brainstorming sessions (I think he got all the way to 15!). I’m thinking of making this a weekly topic and already have ca. 5 ideas lined up, which I’d like to discuss.

But before I start it off, I’d like to briefly discuss the elements that should be contained within such posts. For me, entrepreneurial ideas evolve in 4+ stages (the + referring to the technology side, which also has its own phases of development). Following graph illustrates how I see it:

Not all ideas start with “pain” probably, but for obvious reasons (if you feel it, someone else may too), I think it’s beneficial. The idea is the pitch which I think should be a core-element to entrepreneurial brainstorming sessions. The business-model is the “how to make money” part, which should also optimally be contained within. Business development is the executive part, which is already beyond the scope of these post, though any market data is relevant.

Prototype development is both the most interesting and, for me, the most abstract element in entrepreneurial projects. I think there are variables which affect the timing of prototype development, namely technology risk vs. market risk, and technology cost, which is also a factor influencing technology risk. Technologies which are cheap to develop, e.g. the web, are better to develop earlier, also because the market risk is higher (many other entrepreneurs could be working on the same idea). Expensive technologies, with a significant technology risk also, e.g. biotech or medical tech, require more business development at an early stage, to find funding, etc., though they are also often developed within universities, where there is more freedom to take such risks. OK, I digress.

Entrepreneurial brainstorming sessions, I propose, contain the pain, pitch, and possibly business model as well. Since my ideas range from small ones, like barbers on trains, to complex ones, like e-learning or legal sandboxes (more on that later), I’m not sure how well each can be executed.

Most of all, I’d like the chance to engage in an interesting discussion with both positive and negative feedback, and I hope you do too. That’s it from me, for today! Next post sometime this week, next entrepreneurial brainstorming session next week!

Vincent

The best way to start this expose is with a “Marie Claire” phrase like : How has internet changed the way we trust?

Out of common sense I will jump to the conclusion : a lot, and it has transformed Trust into a peer-to-peer thing.

Attention! This is not about  the good old buzz-path of word-of-mouth. Peer to peer means that I use your resources-without-knowing-you and without-you-knowing that I use your resources.

Personnaly I am furious with this and I have jotted-down some cases to share

• We blog, tweet AND keep a secret diary for mother’s shake
• We start-up business based solely on V-teams (“Time” magazine’s best practice for creating a LILO company- Little In Lots Out)
• mWe umble-jumble generalities to colleagues and chat our PRO projects to your sexy-Sue73 on IRC

But I guess that’s my problem. With a Woody Allen film I will get over this social drama.

Some other smarter guys turned this into business. And created mint.com, a tool for managing online your financial assets, all of them. Aaaall you do is enter aaall your bank accounts data and they happily process. You never enter personal identification data. Well, sort of. Well is some countries. Well. (and that’s where Trust becomes like marriage : potentially outsourced to lawyers)

And then you announce how much you spend on life issurance, dippers and anchovies and they propose scenarios.

Does it sound familiar ? Does it sound Facebookish ?

If Facebook studied your Love, Mint.com studies directly your Money.

If Facebook is a $4b company by only having the potential to study your preferences patterns, Mint.com is a $?b company for having ready-made your spending patterns.

Peer-to-peer trust can make miracles for the little ? mark above. Alleluia.

JEALOUS Georgia.

PS: the anchovies are stolen, too stinky to be replaced with another example! thanks

I don’t know if you can really generalise across all teams what makes them great. I’m still young and learn something new about teams every day. That said, this is what I’ve learned so far and these are values that I try to keep in my own work, and encourage in others. This topic is inspired by the ‘thin book(tm)’, “The one minute manager builds high performing teams.”

My criteria for the following 10 traits are the ultimate outcome, not necessarily just working with great, smart people:

1. Ownership of the idea: that should be clear. In my experience, the kind of people who take ownership are the kind that pull all-nighters to get things done.
2. Clarity of goals: having a clear idea of what we want to achieve, with the understanding that these things need to be discussed regularly, is invaluable as far motivation and focussed work is concerned.
3. A strong work-ethic: by which I mean, being an honest, hard worker, and also someone who keeps others on track.
4. Open communication: nothing kills teams as much as frustrations, problems, or compliments left unspoken.
5. Trust: not the same as open communication, often you need to be able to count on your team-members, blindly, rather than having to tell them what to do. And vice versa!
6. Multi-disciplinary backgrounds: I still believe in the three core-disciplines of teams being: detail, social, and vision, but I also think working with people, who have a different (educational / work) background to your own, can be tremendously rewarding in terms of thinking out of the box.
7. A both fuzzy and clear division of tasks: Sometimes, it’s needed that people pull themselves away from their own tasks and help others. Overall speaking, I think it’s very useful to have a clear division of tasks, with everyone in the team being aware of what they have to do.
8. Broad-mindedness: Maybe I’m biased here, but there’s nothing like working with people that have an international background, who think beyond boundaries. This trait can also be developed by just keeping an open mind though.
9. Competitiveness towards the outside: as a team, our goal is to win.
10. Reduced ego on the inside: as a team, no one is better than the other, and the best synergies are developed when egos are left at the door.

I’d love to hear about some of the traits that you discovered in great teams you worked with.

Vincent

Arguably, my case is one in a million. Being the man with “no nationality” (that’s the way Jeremy introduced me on this blog), I’ve spent the larger part of my childhood being in international schools. There’s a funny aspect to those kinds of schools, something I’ve only seen reproduced in certain multinational companies and when going on an exchange year at uni. It’s that a type of island forms around a community and regardless of the class or social circle you’re in, you start forming deep bonds with people. I’ve considered many of high school classmates family members, even now, many years after graduation, but those bonds have to carry across national boundaries, continents, and different time zones.

Facebook has been an amazing tool in this process of re-discovering past bonds with classmates and, to some degree, continuing my more recent relationships. It doesn’t strengthen that which was never there—people in my contact-list, who I’ve not exchanged more than a few words with in the past, don’t automatically become better friends on Facebook. Instead, it’s little things, like seeing someone’s holiday pictures, the status update of a friend buying a hat (is that a mid-life thing?), wishing someone a happy birthday and back, and writing long, reminiscing private messages, all of which create a series of anecdotes, which, when you actually meet your friends physically again, bring much laughter to those moments.

When I started coming on Facebook, we used it to set up two groups for Tech IT Easy, one internal, one external, neither of which worked very well. Why, when we already have this blog + an effective email system?

Now, more than a year later, I use it to set up a reunion for people I haven’t seen in over 10 years. The group isn’t seeing much activity, apart from the membership-numbers, instead we use Facebook’s messaging system, Google’s free survey-tool, as well as Skype and email for the organisers, to manage this medium-sized event of ca. 100 people coming from all over the world, at, so far, zero cost and minimal effort!

This truly is an amazing innovation, perhaps best appreciated by someone coming from a time where we didn’t have personal computers (until I was 15), the internet (until I came to uni), or mobile phones (until I was 20). Whatever the case is and whatever negative things people have to say about Facebook, I am very glad it has come to my and my friends’ life.

Vincent
P.S. My next post: envisioning a science-fiction like future for Facebook.

“The strategy and tactics of pricing” is the toughest book I’ve ever read. Not tough as in boring, what most books regarding finance, accounting, law, programming, and other subjects I’m bad at end up being. But tough like Chess, you have think more than a few moves ahead. The fun part about chess is that it’s a game and you can fail without much pain, but with Pricing… it’s better not to make too many mistakes.

Picture this nightmare scenario, an example I just read about in the book [paraphrased]:

A large building products manufacturer is operating in a commoditised market, but has continuously been profitable due to banking on perceived technical excellence and exceptional customer service. Still, market share has been going down due to aggressive price cutting by competitors.

How would you address this problem? Well, this is what the new management of the company did:

Whenever an account was seriously threatened, sales manager were authorised to negotiate “special deals,” that would retain the business at lower, but still profitable prices. It seemed successful, and market share increased by a few points over the next few quarters.

But what happened in the long-term?

The company tried to minimise damage, by not making this a public policy. But still, customers eventually ended up talking and found out that other customers got the same quality and service for less. Worse, those customers that negotiated by threatening to go to the competition, were the ones that got the lowest prices!

Long term effects were that customers decided to no longer get “taken” by the company. Whatever previous loyalty existed, eroded, and customers opened up their doors to competitors, which had previously been closed. The company had ended up creating a financial incentive for its buyers to become more informed and less loyal, and customers responded.

Something that seemed like a smart move in the short-term, had turned into a nightmare over the long term.

Now the book goes on to say that any strategic move you make, pricing wise, must be one that weighs the short-term vs. the long-term consequences. The difficulty is that pricing is an area often dominated by sales people, who use the sport-analogy in doing business: “there can only be one winner, and it must be me!” Pricing, as the example above shows, isn’t just about winning in the short-term however, it’s about operating in a triangular fashion, respecting your bottom-line, understanding what your customer needs, and dealing with the competition. In the words of the book, it requires a “diplomat,” rather than a general to manage this area of strategy.

Reading this book would probably take 1 month full time. It would take ca. 3 months total to understand what is being said. And it would probably take another 3 months to try and implement it in your business. No sane CEO / startup founder would have time learn this stuff! They’re busy enough managing other aspects of the business, such as cash flow and people. So what I would do, if I were the founder of a startup and wanted to master pricing strategy [and you really should], I would hire an intern and make that his job: take 1 month to read the book, take another 5 to develop a pricing strategy for our business.. Then, if successful, hire the kid as the pricing strategist for your company. I’m 100% sure that it will pay itself back and now consider pricing as one of the corner-stones of any company’s strategy.

This was just a brain-dump. Love to hear your thoughts on this.
Vincent

Ironically, this lesson comes from a manufacturer of hardware (mostly), Nvidia. In a “Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought-leaders” podcast lecture on the role of Vision when building companies, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia says:

[ca. 30 min. in, responding to a question about how the culture of Nvidia was built]
At the core of our company’s success is innovation. A lot of companies say that innovation is important to their company. However, I don’t think you can fundamentally say that you want to nurture the spirit of innovation as a CEO, unless you have a culture of risk-taking. We have to encourage our all of our employees to take calculated risks.

It’s a matter of courage. Most people hate to fail. If you want to be successful, I would encourage you to develop a tolerance for failure. That doesn’t mean fail purposefully. Instead, I want you to try things even though it is impossible to calculate precisely that it would lead to success, that your instincts, your intuition are something you should follow. Where would we be today, without the intuition of our employees? So you have to have the tolerance for risk-taking.

The thing about failure is this. If you fail often enough, you might actually become a failure! Which is not the same as being successful [laughter]! So the question is, how do you teach someone how to fail, but fail quickly? And to change course, as soon as you know it’s a dead end? And the way to do that, is we call it “Intellectual Honesty.” We assess, on a continuous basis whether something makes sense or not. And if it’s the wrong decision, let’s change our mind!
…
…
That type of culture is very necessary in today’s environment, with competition coming all over the world, 24/7, especially for webservices, where ideas take no time to experiment. A particular company could throw out 20 ideas into the world. So unless you are thoughtful about risk taking, and being able to change your mind, react to market conditions, and being flexible, how are you going to stay alive?

You can almost see what I just described in the nature of older companies and in the nature of newer companies. The modern companies, look at Google, almost every single application is in Beta form! They’re trying all kinds of stuff, right? If they call it production, and it doesn’t work well, you guys would just be upset at them. So they call it BETA! So they can try a lot of things. And it it works, do more, and if it fails, get rid of it.

Innovation requires a little bit of experimentation. Experimentation requires exploration. Exploration will result in failure. Unless you have a tolerance for failure, you will never experiment! And if you don’t ever experiment, you will never innovate, you don’t succeed… You’ll just be a dweeb! That’s it!

And that’s why I dig the business of software. Not because I want to be a coder, but because it serves as an example, as an ideal of all the business ventures I want to do. The kind that encourage quick experimentation, developing and building on systems and infrastructures that allow for reducing the cost of failure, and increasing the chance of radical innovation.

Tons of other valuable lessons in that podcast, but this is the one I dug the most.

Vincent

What all these apps have in common is that they do their work with very little involvement from the user and thus make the computing experience a little more… as it should be. Just discovered the 5th, hence this post

1. Eversave (free): will auto-save your documents in whatever application you’re using. Most useful settings for me: don’t ask for every new application + save front-most window only.
2. Windows Live Sync (free, previously Foldershare): autosyncs your files with other computers, regardless if they’re a Mac or a PC, or what geographic region you’re in.
3. Hazel (payware): auto-cleans folders that you don’t always feels like cleaning. My downloads folder / desktop is organised at last! It also uninstalls all settings with an app when you remove it.
4. F.Lux (free): A new one for me, auto-adjusts the temperature of your monitor according to the time of day it is. Since I already turn the brightness down at night (also using Nocturne ), as I notice it keeps me awake otherwise, this is a welcome addition!
5. Last.fm (free): To be honest, I was really struggling to find a fifth (there’s a few Firefox extensions perhaps) and I’m also not 100% sure how useful it is for me to track what music I play (especially since it doesn’t feed back to iTunes). Still, it’s been my loyal *quiet* companion for the last few years, which should mean something. And I can make up beautiful graphs of my annual listening habits.

Curious if anyone else has a *quiet* background app that they “use” every day? Drop a comment if you do!

Vincent

It’s high time I came back to give Vincent a hand on making this blog very active as you people deserve.

I’ve been rather inconspicuous on Tech IT Easy ever since I started Verteego, 18 months ago. Initially, I found a hard time looking for economies of scale and synergies between being a tech blogger and a sustainability entrepreneur. I was wrong: the more our company grows, the more I realize how much what we do at Verteego actually leverages Technology.

I’ve got loads to tell and share on bootstrapping, product positionning, building a great team, going abroad, learning from your mistakes, closing sales deals, establishing partnerships, raising funds, getting Press coverage,…but most of all, our core business at Verteego really is enabling organizations, be they companies or local governments, to go green thanks to our software and services.

So, one topic I would like to discuss frequently here is Green IT, because Verteego definitely is a Green IT company.

According to the Gartner Group, Information Technology accounts for 2% of worldwide carbon emissions – about the same as the entire aviation industry. This figure is by and large correct. However, Information Technology has the power to lower the 98% remaining CO2 emissions. That is Green IT: use technology as an enabler.

And that is exactly what we do at Verteego: sustainability software. For instance, one of them, Verteego Carbon, is a carbon management software that enables organizations to collaboratively assess, analyse, and report the greenhouse gas emissions generated by their activity or products. Verteego Carbon is also a beautiful entrepreneurial story in itself: started as a side-project by one of my partners, the application now represents a significant chunk of our turnover and a truly global product. Verteego Carbon is indeed available in French, German, and English.

To make a long story short, I’m back on the Tech IT Easy tracks for good and more-than-ever willing to start amazingly interesting conversations about my experience as an entrepreneur in the Green IT business. You can expect one post per week from me on this exciting topic of Green IT.

No great point to this post; I occasionally grab this book and read a few pages, as I’m an avid film-fan and interested how they are made. This piece, where Alfred Hitchcock talks about silent films and what was lost after sound was introduced, reminded me a little of the experimentation that has been happening on the web and whether or not that is a good or bad thing. I think that those that were masters of the previous mediums, in this case print and all kinds of analog media, will certainly have a strong opinion about what is happening today, just like Hitchcock did, after silent pictures, which he started with, were displaced by the more noisy kind.

Here goes:

Alfred Hitchcock: The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changes that sound brought in. In other words, since all that was missing was the simple natural sound, there was no need to go to the other extreme and completely abandon the technique of the pure motion picture, the way they did when sound came in.

François Truffaut: I agree. In the final era of silent movies, the great film-makers—in fact, almost the whole production—had reached something near perfection. The introduction of sound, in a way, jeopardized that perfection. I mean that this was precisely the time when the high screen standards of so many brilliant directors showed up the woeful inadequacy of the others, and the lesser talents were gradually being eliminated from the field. In this sense one might say that mediocrity came back into its own with the advent of sound.

Alfred Hitchcock: I agree absolutely. In my opinion, that’s true even today. In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call “photographs of people talking.” When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I always try to first to tell a story in the cinematic way, though a succession of shots and bits of film in between.
……
In writing a screenplay, it is essential to separate clearly the dialogue from the visual elements and whenever possible, to rely more on the visual than on the dialogue. Whichever way you may choose to stage the action, you main concern is to hold the audience’s fullest attention.
Summing it up, one might say that the screen rectangle must be charged with emotion.

While I’m on this wavelength, this piece also reminds me of another essay, I read recently, this time on making solid investment decisions. The piece, by Andy Kessler, was on the concept of elasticity, which is not only used in evaluating customer decision making under different conditions, but is also relevant when shifts in technology occur, allowing for drastic development on that new platform. From semiconductors, to phones-that-are-computers, each allowed for explosive innovation to happen, displacing the masters of the previous era. But there is still a place for masterdom, I feel, as the example of Hitchcock, a director that will likely never be forgotten, clearly illustrates.

Taking opportunity of opening markets makes a lot of sense; becoming the master of your medium, gives meaning to what you do.
Vincent

A note: I’m not in software, I’m in startups—a topic for another day—, but these two are ideals that I strive for in any business. They were taken from a recent interview with Joe Spolsky of Fog Creek Software, on the Venture Voice podcast, a recurring classic in entrepreneurship podcasting.

1. you can launch low-cost, i.e. bootstrap your way to the top: Joe differentiates between those companies that need to get to critical mass fast (the Amazon’s and eBay’s of the world) and pretty much everyone else.
2. instead of making (often) senseless financial projections, you can throw it out into the world and use the infrastructure of the internet to monitor actual sales, and make forecasts based on actual data. Again, if you need external funding for things like launching a comprehensive marketing campaign, you’ll probably need to make some (senseless) projections.

I know, it’s a pretty basic set of principles, and there’s lot’s of other good stuff in the podcast as well, such as SaaS vs. licensed software, but these two are the ones for the books. It reminds me a lot of this recent blog post on the Lessons Learned blog, about “Validated learning about customers.“

Vincent

You may have noticed that I sign my name below my posts on tech it easy. The reason is that when we first started guest writing on this, Jeremy Fain’s blog, he asked us to write a small introduction before each post, a habit which we later abandoned. I miss the practice, but what I think was most valuable about it, was that it positioned each of us as a separate voice on the collection of thoughts that is tech it easy.

As I am, for now, a lonely contributor to tech it easy, this practice is perhaps completely unnecessary, but I still maintain it, perhaps for egotistical reasons. I like standing for what I write. At the same time, it may also cast a kind of shadow across other people’s [unsigned] post, which is definitely not my intention.

I’d like to know your opinion on it, whether you are a blogger (in which case, imagine yourself blogging on a site that once had 15 active writers) or a reader, and how you feel about the signing of names.

What do you think?
Vince

Rule 101 of blogging: Never write about how you’re planning to lead your life. In my experience, this process of externalising your thoughts, as opposed to internalising them, often leads to people shoving it away from their minds. So, rather than going to deeply into the sh^t that I have to deal with myself, and which would be entirely boring to you, I’ll go across some ‘influences’ for my thinking on work-life balance.

An attractive woman on a plane once told me that life is a like a bunch of rooms in a house (no, not a box of chocolates), each representing one area in your life and each to be kept separate and clean, in order to have a fulfilling life. Since she was beautiful and because it made sense, I try to follow this philosophy as much as possible, with both successes and failures to show for it.

The one book which has been most influential in my approach towards work is called “The Now Habit” by Neil Fiore. It introduced me to a concept called ‘the Unschedule,’ which basically means that you plan your work around set routines, rather than planning routines around work (which always ends up coming first place). If there’s one complication with this ‘un-scheduling’ approach, it’s this concept of “the economy as a machine,” which always has to keep on turning and turning, making human workers nothing more than replaceable parts in that machine. I think there’s something principally wrong and outdated about this idea, a relic from the industrial age, and will make it my life-mission to change it… at least for myself (if successful, I’ll write a book).

The second book [which I haven't read, but am planning to] is called “the 4-Hour Workweek,” by Tim Ferris, which introduces us to the concept of “personal task outsourcing,” as opposed to outsourcing on an organisational scale. The perhaps third book is “The E-Myth Revisited,” by Michael Gerber, which I’ve written about extensively before, and which deals with developing a type of franchising approach regarding the starting and running of companies. I’m strongly for the idea of dedicating a set amount of my income towards personal assistants, because I think it will allow for more brain-work, which is also better paid, and the whole reason why people go to college, to use their brains.

If there’s a recurring theme to all of these approaches, it’s that they require a clear understanding of one’s capabilities, non-capabilities, and the strength of character to say “yes” and “no” to things. Many self-help books teach you about [identifying] the first two, but can’t help you much about the third. I think I’ll leave it with the stance that I think that the best decisions are made when people are well-slept, well-fed, well-exercised, and made happy by other unmentioned activities. You can read books all you want, but if you don’t maintain those basic ingredients to life, no methodology will ever work that well.

End of thought for today. I’d love to hear yours on what has been influential on your [path towards] work-life balance.
Vincent

I want to keep this short and leave the floor to you mostly, as I’m not a software developer or smart enough for this topic, I’m just a consumer and user of the product. On the train to my parents for this Easter weekend, two young guys were eying me and my Macbook and, seeing that I was wearing earphones perhaps, discussing the mac. One guy said to the other: “those Macs look like they’re taking over the world. Did you see the new one, it looks slick, but it costs € 1500.” And the other guy responded: “How dare they?” Whereas the other guy said: “Well, they look pretty cool, but interface-wise, I could never get used to them.” And the conversation died after that.

So what makes Macs so cool. Rather than discuss the superficial, the hardware, I just want to briefly write about why I like the Mac OS “interface,” and then leave the floor to you, answering the question: “What makes OS X so damn great?”

My impression: I don’t know how to explain it exactly, maybe it’s because OS X is Unix based. But what I really dig about OS X (Tiger & Leopard) is that every menu-function, every possible action you’d want to undertake, can somehow be translated into a script or service, and thus entered in Quicksilver or another “launcher.” That means that my hands rarely have to leave the keyboard, which I think saves me a few seconds vs. going for the mouse/trackpad, point & clicking. It also means that my Dock [Apple's application launcher] and desktop are clean most of the time, as I don’t need a “visible” shortcut to get to the destination I want.

I could never get that same workflow going on Windows, and perhaps it’s because of the architecture, that it just isn’t written to be that open. Sure, things like SizeUp and Fresh, both of which I discussed last week, are not part of the Leopard interface, but the fact that they exist, the fact that Quicksilver exists, is actually what makes OS X 10 times as effective an OS to me. Once again, I don’t know why exactly this is the case, I attribute it to the open architecture of Unix.

So, now it’s your turn: why makes OS X so damn great (or not, if that’s where you want to take it)?

Have a nice Easter weekend!
Vincent

I took part in a seminar on venture financing yesterday, at the ABN Amro headquarters in Amsterdam, as part of the New Venture business-plan competition. Some very dry material and not much to report, I’m afraid. I did get some positive signals that this recession will not hit banks as hard as the media makes it out to be, and similarly, equity financing, which makes relatively little use of debt. More on that perhaps when I get sent a copy of the presentation given by Maarten Holleswinkel, from Holland Corporate Finance.

The really enjoyable part is, as always, meeting bright entrepreneurs and inventors, and you can smell the energy in the room, particularly when ideas are being discussed and explored. Last year, I heard that anyone that can create an effective, efficient way to store and transport large amounts of energy will have hit upon a gold mine, and yesterday I happened to meet someone that studied exactly this problem, designing solar-powered micro-sattelites at a Delft company in the Netherlands. The guy went completely nuts on the idea and pretty soon others joined in too. Loved it and I’ll be sure to stay in touch with those guys.

The “Quit Hill”

But the highlight of the evening was definitely when I met a marketeer / artist, called Jan Willem Wartena of urbanjoy.org. He developed this weird park attraction, called “de FLUISTERHEUVEL” (translated: The Quit Hill; see picture) for a park in Utrecht and is a big favourite at the competition.

Google-translated, the “Fluisterheuvel” can be described as:

The Quiet Hill consists of two opposing hills, with parabolic collapsed wall in the form of a half circle, the size of a football goal. When whispering into the focal point of one parabolic, you can hear it in the opposing parabolic as if you were wearing headphones! The unit invites you to play an innovative communicative game, use it as a football goal, a climbing device, and as an open gaming platform.

Talking to him was a real joy because he’s both very kind and constantly talking about different creative ideas. I liked the process in which he came up with the concept of the Quit Hill, which involved first of all, observing how different groups of people, young and old, use the park on a day-to-day basis, and coming up with a contraption that is both fun, multi-usuable, and in it’s own fashion durable and timeless. It’s a great example of what I’m coining a “living portfolio,” and I think is the most effective way for creative types to market themselves.

I decided pretty quickly that he is the perfect candidate for positioning products in a unique communicative fashion, particularly in markets which you hadn’t thought of before. In other words, relevant to most startups! It is the one business card, I’ll be sure to use this year and, who knows, maybe you’re interested in working with him too.

Take care,
Vincent

This week a Dutch commission on the banking recession to came to an end. Their conclusion: banks should be more customer-focussed (translated article). Wow… If there’s anything this crisis has shown us is that during times of crises, creativity takes a dive out the window. Because I’m pretty sure that people were talking about more customer-focus back when the Lehman brothers went out of business.

Just briefly, before I go on to a more pleasurable topic. Wired Magazine last month had an article on what they identified as the cause this whole crisis: the gaussian copula function (depicted above), invented by a man named David X. Li, which made it possible to model risk down to a simple number, allowing for any idiot out there to label an investment as an affordable risk. As the article states, Mr. Li won’t be getting a Nobel anytime soon, but it only serves to illustrate a simple point: money makes the world go round, and more specifically, money makes the world of finance go round. Banks, until recently, had a nice little formula that allowed them to make money. Now they don’t. Will that formula be found in increased customer-focus, I don’t know. But I do think that we need a better understanding of the complex variables that play a part in our globalised economy, and customer focus alone won’t do the trick.

OK, rant over. My stance for this recession remains: work harder and smarter… and don’t watch the news.

In Hitchcock / Truffaut, Hitchcock tells the story of One-Round Jack, a character in an early film of his, The Ring (1927). Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

A.H. In those days we were very keen on the little visual touches, sometimes so subtle that they weren’t even noticed by the public. You remember that picture started on the fairgrounds. There was a fighter, played by Carl Brisson, and he was called One-Round Jack.

F.T. Because he knocked out his opponents in the first round?

A.H. That’s right. And in the crowd, watching the barker, there was an Australian, played by Ian Hunter. As the barker in front of the tent urged the crowd to go in, he had a little flap and could look back over his shoulders to see how the match was progressing. He used a sign to indicate the round number to the people standing outside. We showed volunteer fighters going into the tent and then coming out holding their jaw. Until Ian Hunter goes in. The seconds were sort of laughing at him and they didn’t even bother to hang up his coat. They just held it, thinking that he would never last more than one round. The match started and I showed the expressions of the seconds changing. Then we showed the barker looking in at the match. And at the end of the first round the barker took out the card indicating the round number, which was old and shabby, and they put up number two. It was brand-new! One-Round Jack was so good that they’d never got around to using it before! I think this touch was lost on the audience.

We all know that Alfred Hitchcock went on to become a great filmmaker, but even he started small, experimenting with different effects, like the glass ceiling I wrote of last, until he understood the effectiveness of his medium. It’s an attitude that I greatly respect, and try to implement both in blogging and my work. You can’t achieve great things without breaking a few eggs.

There’s a pretty entertaining TED video here with the stereotypical mad scientist, Cliffort Stoll, in which he says:

“The first time you do something, it’s science. The second time, it’s engineering. The third time, you’re a technician. I’m a scientist, once I’ve done something, I do something else.”

That’s a philosophy I can also respect.

Back to banking. I think that what is customer focus has changed much over the generations. According to my father, customer focus is having a bank outlet + friendly smile in every neighbourhood. More deeply, back in his day, a bank would contribute more significantly to buying a house, funding well over 50% of the purchase price. I’m not sure how the latter has changed now, but I do now that what is called “customer service” has simply moved online. I haven’t seen the inside of a bank in months and I don’t miss it. To me, customer service is having more payment options, much more innovation, as well as for all transactions, no matter how small or large, to be free, instantaneous, and unencumbered by national borders or currency. I want to see the day where all transactions go via a single device in our pocket. I’d also like to see more funding for things like housing and startups, of course, but I know that a certain measure of reality needs to be in place for that, i.e. how credit worthy is your customer.

I think that won’t be able to count on banks much until they replace the faulty mechanism that was either the gaussian copula function or another one, allowing for banks to regain their profitability. I think that this will entail making mistakes and that room needs to be allowed for that. That banks are supposed to be customer friendly, goes without saying, but that banks are businesses that need a solid balance sheet, goes without saying too.

Went a little overboard there on the text. Sorry about that. Hope it’s readable / entertaining.
Vincent

If you look at the world of video now, there are a number of trends that reign:

• The shift from TV to web (Youtube, Hulu, iTunes Video, etc.)
• The shift towards gaming, aka interactive video
• The shift towards 3D cinema
• The unabated reign of piracy, which means that content-producers have to look beyond traditional media.
• The relative affordability of the home cinema.
• The rise of televised serials on par with movies in terms of budgets, screenplay, acting, and other qualities
• Something else? Please let me know in the comments!

It kind of makes you wonder whether cinema as we’ve known it is ending. Is cinema, in its constant drive to innovate, losing those things that made it great in the past? It took me something like reading “Hitchcock / Truffaut” to come to the conclusion that that is not the case. As the web2.0 boys like to write, “Shift happens!”

Case in point: when Hitchcock started making movies in the 1930s, they were silent. To give the effect of the sound of a man walking back and forth in the room upstairs in “The Lodger,” he used a glass ceiling. That’s right, you could actually look through the ceiling and see the feet of the man. Today, even a decade or two later, that effect would’ve been completely unnecessary.

Same as today camera rigs are becoming affordable to you and me, changes in technology can and will affect how we give visual meaning to a story. Because that’s what it’s all about, story telling, and the medium is simply the one that is the most effective for that.

There is perhaps a risk of focussing on form over substance. Many have predicted that in order for the status of proprietary cinema to be safeguarded, there would need to be a 3rd and maybe even a 4th dimension. My last IMAX-experience having been the two year old “Superman Returns” movie, I’m no expert, but I found it entirely unconvincing. 2009 is the year of 3D cinema, so I’ll leave it up to the more recent IMAX-visitors to decide whether 3D is as yet ready to replace 2D. I’ve heard critics say that “the screen just points at you,” which I don’t find particularly encouraging. At the same time, as equipment becomes cheaper and people experiment more, I’m sure a way to settle into the new medium will be found.

4D, which is the time-dimension, and in which you can find interactive media like games, and media spread across a longer period of time, such as TV-series, also holds much promise, perhaps more so than 3D. As a story-teller, imagine the potential of having the viewer co-create the story, or of having 50 hours of film to tell a story in. Amazing!

“Hitchcock / Truffaut” is a fascinating study of Hitchcock films, in the form of one long interview between Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut, and I encourage anyone interested in classic cinema to give it a read. It’s also about finding visual elements to tell a story and gives an insight into how cinema has evolved over the years. 4 Thumbs up!

Vincent

On any given day, I work with perhaps 5 apps and 5-10 important files on my Mac. The way people traditionally organise their computing activities, is that they place their most used apps on the Dock or Desktop, and organise their files in folders in the Finder. Life has been made somewhat easier with Spotlight search, as well as Quicksilver triggers, but not so much for getting to the files that matter most quickly.

Fresh takes you out of that context. Instead of doing a search, you press a shortcut key and an overlay like this appears:

The top-bar simply lists the most recent files that you used. Sometimes those files are irrelevant and you can block that file, that extension, that folder, etc. Very simple, very effective. The bottom bar is your shelf where you can place often used things. You can also tag files in Fresh, though I haven’t yet figured out how that, in any way, increases productivity.

Fresh is payware, costs $ 9 (€ 7), but is worth it if you’re into making finding files quicker. Sure, Quicksilver is fast, as is Spotlight, but sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for, just that you used it recently.

I’m not paid for saying this, but I highly endorse this app as another evolutionary step in Mac productivity. You can get it here.

I’m sure I’m not the only switcher to find the Finder windows on the Mac… a little tedious (Finder is, to those that don’t know, the Explorer equivalent on the Mac). Nobody can explain exactly what the green button does (it supposedly zooms to the perfect size for what’s in the window, but what does that mean?), and it seems like the least flexible application on the Mac. A number of Finder, aka file-management, alternatives exist, the most famous one being Path Finder, which is a something of an overkill, I think, but it has a loyal fan base.

SizeUp only recently came to the market, previously being a freeware app called TwoUp, which has now been supplemented with this pay-what’s-fair app. Paying what’s fair incidentally means, ca. $1.50 (or € 1.70) and upwards, which is a great system I think.

What SizeUp does is allowing you to assign keyboard shortcuts to how you want a window to be placed. You can have two windows sideways, like so:

Or four windows on the screen, like so:

Not to mention, assign a shortcut to maximise a window to fill the screen (finally!!!). As mentioned, you can use TwoUp for free and get SizeUp at a fair price. So grab a copy and make your life easier here!

Vincent