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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Free range animal farming at FarmVille

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harvest time is strongly correlated with experience points you can get in FarmVille

There's not much correlation between profits and harvest time, though.

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

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

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

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

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

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

I’m not trying to provoke you by being so dismissive of flash, even though I feel a lot of people really really hate how the iPad turned out. I am only writing out of my own current and past context and reserving final judgement until it’s in my hands.

My context is several. I was born into an age when there weren’t any personal computers. As a matter of fact, Apple had only just been conceived when I was born. I grew up without computers, until I got a toy Amiga at 13, and a very buggy 1st PC at 15. It ran DOS mostly and crashed a lot in Windows 3.1. I mention this because people in my generation suffer from a curse. We were forced to learn a zillion crappy commands as teens, which made our parents and family members consider us computer geniusses and not a week goes by when I don’t get at least 1 question about a bug in a computer. Last week, I spent maybe 5 hours trying to get a Wifi card to communicate with an Internet radio, I will have to set up skype VOIP at my parents’ house this year and who knows what else.

My no. 2 reason for getting an iPad? To give it to my parents and save me future headaches (knock on wood).

My no. 1 reason is different. Last December, my MacBook was lost on a train. I’m using an older MacBook from work at the moment and digging this iPod Touch a lot. In many ways I do more on the Touch now. It has its flaws of course, and no it has nothing to do with “openness” or flash. The screen is too small and there are times (less than you would think) where I need a physical keyboard.

So picture my context. I travel a fair amount, I think the MacBook is not always neccessary but the Touch/iPhone is not always enough. The Touch meets my casual gaming needs (serious games, that’s what consoles are built for), it kind of meets my wordprocessing needs (still typing on the Touch …). So why on earth, for that price, wouldn’t I want an iPad?

Truth be told, I was considering getting a sleek MacBook Pro to replace my lost MacBook. But for years, I’ve secretely lusted after a shiny iMac as well, never being able to justify having both a laptop and a desktop. The iPad is not a standalone PC. It needs to be synced with one (every week or so). But it also gives me a chance not not restrict computing to a small 13-15″ screen and buy a “real” computer so that makes sense to me.

In my UNIQUE context, the iPad makes sense. In my less unique context regarding my parents, it makes sense. 2010 is hopefully a year of less computing headaches and more of just getting things done.

the end
Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

I do admire Geeks. I have nothing but respect for their work.

Their contribution with open source software to today’s world is unquestionnable. The idea that a bunch of coders came up with such great solutions as Firefox, Linux, Gimp, Eclipse, OpenOffice, JBoss (and all Java Enterprise frameworks) to name a few that I use on an everyday basis, this idea is just amazing.

Back in the day when I was working for In Fusio, a start-up doing video games and services for the mobile phone industry, I had this wonderful opportunity to work with a bunch of the most talented ones. These guys implemented the first over-the-air download system for mobile phones back in the early 2000’s. In 2 and a half years I’ve learnt as much as I would have in ten years in any other company.

What I’ve noticed though, is that geeks are not passionate about products. They are passionate about technology.

Just like old tribes have rites to pass and become a man, one has to harness the technology to get some consideration from a Geek.

00’s : a decade of Geeks splendor

The last 15 years have been the stage of a continued irruption of technologies and disruptive products : mobile phone, internet, broadband, Social Web, iPod, iPhone, Nintendo Wii and the democratization of the computer.

Geeks loved it because this was a world they would fully understand and dominate : innovation was a matter of technology and they were amongst the happy few to fully harness it, i.e able to hack it.

Their general position towards Apple has historically be mainly supportive. To start with, Steve Jobs has been the only one to dare and stand before Bill Gates on the PC market.

Besides, iMac have been a perfect alternative to PC, especially since the turn of the millenium with the advent of MAC OS/X based on BSD Unix. Just like on Linux, they would join the brave David to fight the Microsoft Goliath. They were able to hack the system, but in addition, they would be using a glamorous OS and benefit from the glorious image of the Apple brand.

D.I.V.O.R.C.E

The divorce between Geeks and Apple started with the iPhone. First you can’t hack it, or rather Apple doesn’t want you to. Then, there was the iPhone App store. This is the time where the real difference of vision between Steve Jobs and Geeks became blatant.

Steve Jobs is interested in a) providing the best and simplest products and applications to the broader range of people b) providing a unified user experience and c) fostering an ecosystem : iPod has iTunes, iPhone has App store.

With the App Store, anyone can develop and distribute a piece of software that anybody will be able to install and run smoothly on a glamorous device. Applications became social objects as opposed to technological trophies.

While making the iPhone SDK public, Jobs offered the possibility to anyone to be really innovative. I.e not only along the technological axis but also on the design, marketing and usability ones.

Here is the problem for Geeks : technology is largely democratized. Technological prowesses are no longer something to be proud of. Lovely apps are. What people want is apps that are useful and usable by anyone, regardless of how complicated they are.

Steve Jobs vision has completely hidden the technology behind the usability in the innovation definition. In Geeks law, this is sacrilege.

iPad = the Wii of the computing world

There comes the iPad. No spectacular new technology : iPad is merely a big iPod from a hacker perspective. No multi-task, not possible to develop applications etc … No chance he can gain any traction in the Geeks community.

This reminds me how hard core gamers mocked the Wii when it came out. The technical specifications were just ridiculous compared to forthcoming PS-3 or XBox 360. However, in the end who won ? Wii because the strategy was not to bring the best technology to the minority of hard core gamer. It was to bring the best product to the majority of people, with a special target on people that never played video games before.

How ? In bringing a product that is fun and dead easy to use.

(Geeks still managed to do incredibly fun things while hacking the Wii though)

iPad = iPhone for senior people

iPad strategy is identical : to bring a glorious user experience to people that shy away from the technology.

My take : this is a fantastic device that will have tremendous success with senior people. Senior people don’t care about technology. They care about products : ease, usability, design. To read their paper. To browse the internet. To play around on a big enough screen with the pictures of their grand children.

And to read books. And to buy books.

iPhone is the perfect products for teenagers and active people : small, mobile, connected, sexy.

iPad will be the perfect product for senior people : comfortable, large, easy : the best user experience to do few things but to do them with maximal comfort.

Single Task as a feature

iPhone is used on the go in hectic times. iPad will be mainly used for relaxing purposes in a single-task environment. The latter being more a feature then a restriction.

I was quite dubious regarding the positioning : I’m now fully convinced that it fits nicely between the iPhone and the Laptop. Laptop will still be used by coders to develop apps for the App Store, and active people with multi-tasking activities.

I don’t think iPad will take the place of the latter : rather it will be a perfect add-on to complete our lives digitalisation process.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

I have been reading a lot of Scott Berkun lately, including his brilliant Confessions of a Public Speaker (french review available). A must read for any speaker, professional or not, to make sure you transmit clearly your ideas .

However, sometimes you just don’t have a dedicated room, with people ready to offer you 30 minutes of attention. You don’t have the slideware, you don’t have the projector or your laptop.

No. What you have is just a 30 seconds time frame, where you bump into some executive or very important people in the company. And what you want is to take advantage of this opportunity to pitch people into some Enterprise 2.0 basics.

Scott addresses this point in one of his many excellent blog posts : how to pitch idea.

Now let’s see some elevator pitches to 5 key enterprise persona for 2.0 adoption …

Two things to keep in mind before getting into the detail. First, you obviously won’t be able to pitch people into Enterprise 2.0 adoption within 30 seconds. Second, executives are important people always thinking about thousand things. So what you want is them to pay attention and ignite their curiosity. And the best way to do so is to ask questions, painful questions.

1 – C.E.O.

Definition : A chief executive officer (CEO) or chief executive is one of the highest-ranking corporate officers (executives) or administrators

Role and responsibility : in charge of total management. The CEO responsibility is to align the company, internally and externally, with their strategic vision.

Background : For the last decade, CEOs have been through period of extreme transition. IT has costs him dear with many enterprise system implementation (ERP, SCM, CRM, etc …). They rather are defiant towards the prospect of any new enterprise wide system and million dollar implementation with dubious ROI.

How E2.0 can help : Productivity of course but more than everything : Innovation. Most CEOs surely want to make money but what they mostly take pride of is innovation and his company ability to make the world a better place.

Apprehension : Decreasing employees productivity. So make sure you never pronounce the S word.

Speech :

Would you rank amongst the 65% of the executive disappointed with the level of innovation in their company ?

Have you heard about {competitor’s name} implementation of a system that has improved innovation ?

My name is Joe Smith. May I invite you to a 45mns presentation on how we can foster collaboration, innovation, productivity and knowledge management in our organization ?

2 – Head of HR

Definition : Head of HR is responsible for human resources.

Role and responsibility : Recruiting and staffing, organizational and space planning;organization development;employee orientation, development, and training; etc …

Background : Most of HR people keep a closed look on social networks and how they could implemented behind the firewall. They could be your best support.

How E2.0 can help : Foster an enterprise wide culture, improve employees engagement so that they are happier and more productive

Apprehension : Decreasing employees engagement, mess around the organisation

Speech :

Hey I’ve heard that about 40 %of the workforce are either disengaged or disenchanted. What are we doing in our company about that ?

Is it true that people are unlikely to collaborate if they are more than 50 feet apart ?

My name is Joe Smith. May I invite you to a 45mns presentation (etc …)

3 – CIO

Definition : Chief Information Officer is a job title for the board-level head of information technology within an organization.

Role and responsibility : a CIO proposes the information technology needed by an enterprise to achieve its goals and then works within a budget to implement the plan.

Background : CIO has just spent the last decade implementing and deploying million-dollars project for Enterprise wide systems : ERP, CRM, SCM, KM … CIOs are the tough ones. Both Lee Provoost and Gilbert Cattoire even recommend to skip the CIO altogether and make the E2.0 project an HR one for a faster and easier implementation. Anyway, some tips to try your luck …

How E2.0 can help : A better general knowledge management within the company. As a result : a best overall ROI on IT systems.

Apprehension : 3 of them : Security, Security, Security

Speech :

Have you heard about this study showing that 46% of the people find what they’re looking for on their intranet while they are twice as much finding what they want on the internet  ?

Hey shall I invite you to a 45mns presentation on how CIA, NASA, Intel or VMWare fostered collaboration, innovation, productivity and knowledge management in their organization without compromising the security ?

4 – Middle Manager

Definition : Middle manager are basically in charge of the productive forces.

Role and responsibility : They are responsible for making sure that the teams produces what has been identified by top management and company strategy to make money. Quality, budget and productivity are their main concerns.

How E2.0 can help : : Knowledge Management. Technologies, process, methods : everything evolves as fast as hell and managers are bombarded with information. It is just no possible to keep up the pace.

Apprehension : Disintermediation. Losing control + command.

Strategy : Don’t talk about management radical changes but, rather, smooth shifts and how they align with standard principles of modern management. It is to show that their role may be just as important with Enterprise 2.0, but different. As Cristobal Conde puts it :

I think the role of the boss is to then work on those collaboration platforms, as opposed to being the one making the decisions. It’s more like the producer of the show, rather than being the lead.

Speech :

Hey how do you feel about the figures that managers spend 2 hours a day looking for data, with half the data they found is no value ? And spending 20% of the remaining time struggling with their e-mail box ?

My name is Joe Smith. May I invite you to a 45mns presentation (etc …)

5 – Experts

Definition : They’ve been in the company for ever. They’ve seen many different managers, policies, systems etc … Most of the time they are old fashion, not impress at all by the 2.0 buzz.

Role and responsibility : Know about everything on very specific topics. Quite often this knowledge is critical for the company.

How E2.0 can help : Collaborative platforms may help diffuse his knowledge on a company wide scale. This will give a lot of visibility on his work.

Apprehension : Get bored by a new process/system coming out of the void, imposed by top management and that will make it harder for him to get the job done.

Strategy : Expert usually are old school and still identify their knowledge as their job security. Insist on how the whole company could benefit more of their insight/knowledge

Speech :

Hey have you heard that knowledge workers spend 30%of their time looking for expertise such as yours ?

How do you think the whole enterprise could rip more benefit from your expertise ?

My name is Joe Smith. May I invite you to a 45mns presentation (etc …)

What is your elevator speech for Enterprise 2.0 adoption ? Who have you tried it with in your company ? Any supplementary trick you may recommend ? We’d love to know.

(Hi, it’s Cecil here. A mirror copy of this post is available on Heavy Mental)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Anand’s article touched an explosive combination of decision+change management+money. It was inspiring indeed, and got me to write down two or three thoughts looking the M&A from inside a house. To write this piece, time popped-up by chance and bad luck in the same time. Nevermind why I found myself out of gas and battery in the beginning of my Friday evening, I really enjoyed my decision to go back to cocooning.

The decision

This is the thing about deciding to do an M&A or change, it’s not wise to be 100% sure about the best direction. (Ok, don’t skip the due diligence). A choice might be considered as good by more people and for a longer time, but if you search too long your competitor will do your A and no M for you. So you have to make it early. For normal people with no 6th sense, this means they have to deal with the effects of their choice both personally and in their team .

Why you take the decision? Probably for financial value creation, technical synergies, or to phase out potential competitors.

How you take it? Depends on the decision model of your company : single minded, organizational, political, garbage can. (insights from Strategor, 4th edition, Dunond 2005)

Once the change is there, I’ve observed two styles of dealing with it and getting others to deal with it.

The behaviors

One is that you explode and overwhelm everybody with excitement yourself included, partying hard on change. People are normally happy before they realize what has hit them. The happy tail is guaranteed to last, varies on the party. Life stats say that happiness from a good home party last about 3 days, from a football final for about a month, from Olympic games about a year.

Another approach is that you go Zen, as if nothing has happened, act naturally etc. This works if with adult-ish organizations because routines are very important for adults, etc.

In both cases you surf slower, either because you focus on partying or because you surf tai-chi style.

To keep surfing fast, Brazilians have thought of Kapoeira (training masked in partying).

Ok, this is people, what about the business?

The money factor

Change+money is a bit more tricky, because it involves more tension and more aggressive effects. Culture of money asks for more traditionalism, thoughtfulness, respect.

Mutual respect :) and money-related expectations makes M&As such showstoppers for internal rhythms and decision making (the case of M&A driven by financial value creation). In my view, if the motivation is pure value creation the results risk being lost in translation. And M&A is a showstopper.

other motivations

If it is value+product synergies, the organizations quickly recover and from change and get productive on the common focus. In that case, the initial slow-down, frames significantly the savoir-faire and prevents chaos. The focus is scaling on innovation and this can happen within a few months. And M&A is an investment on strategy.

Let’s not forget that innovative products carry this identity either because they target niches or if not, they are innovative for a specific period of time, on their way to bannalization. So when the Big Fish frames how you scale on innovation, the Small Fish start changing skin. Shouldn’t it? It is very difficult to see in retrospection, what part of product or service the Small Fish has fit in since identity integration is necessary.

Last, if motivation is gulping competition early the M&A is a showstopper by design.

the project

Beyond initial motivation for the M&A , the time to market and style to market of an M&A-ed innovative stg is very much bound to internal Big Fish culture but also to many external factors such as market dynamics.

My basket of examples include,

• Mobile payment : has travelled from developing countries to the developed ones like a financial and regulatory Benjamin Button. (TTM : ~7y, STM: sponsored by heavy banking industry to open-up consumers)
• Peer-to-peer communications : have travelled from early experimental internet to the gray napsteric zones, masked in skypish applications to land through Big Fish in the B2B space as a feature of datacenter operating systems / “branch cache” how it is called in MSFT (TTM : ~15y, STM: integration into the mosaic, identity change)
• Video semantics tracking : has travelled from academia to consumers in speed-light (less than a decade to launch project Natal) (TTM : ~10y, STM: innovation transforms the product)
• Biscuit-flavored yoghurt : Marketing innovation, where you test a few recipes and you build on on insghts that people love biscuits but are too guilty to consume them at the rhythm of yoghurts. Also have to buy the rights of a favorite biscuit brand. (TTM : ~6m, STM: act naturally )
• With this last one I want to emphasize that if software was simpler to build, simpler to adopt, and was sold in cheaper units, end users could possibly profit from and indulge in innovation faster and more naturally. This is why social-technology + M&As are a better match.

Hey I am not pocket-Gartner, so please feel free to challenge my examples.

After aaaall this analysis, I come up with a…question: We’re pretty much involved in producing innovation so it’s normal that we’re pretty demanding on change happening fast. However, how fast can an average consumer or ITpro absorb and adopt software innovation?

In virtualization for example, a lot of which passed through M&As, MSFT carries the burden of late TTM. By the time MSFT was into virtualization, it was no longer innovative. But still adoption rates by the market were loooooow and (relatively) sloooow moving. So buzz-wise TTM was late, but adoption-wise TTM was early. Crazy? just a paradox of software and friends. The attained benefit for MSFT was catching up with the buzz rhythm and also syncing with the adoption rhythm. Isn’t this a successful strategy?

Conclusion?

Overall, even though M&As slow down and phase out a lot of good stuff, technology is still a great industry for M&As because

• A lot more of fresh attitudes survive in tec- fresh towards life and change as well.
• The money culture is less pronounced
• Creativity and innovation need change even in dinosaur size and style.

“Don’t feed the lions!”  – please do….

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Answer comes from a researcher Josh Bernoff who noted a “new behavior” in patterns of social technology usage by the people, and made a new category to describe such users: “conversationalists.” Bernoff defines conversationalists as “people who update their social network status to converse” on at least a weekly basis. According to Forrester surveys, the category is 56 percent female, more so than any other group, with 70 percent aged 30 and older. All of which fits quite nicely with my anecdotal evidence.

They take a close look at the social and demographic structure of the social web population ( To be more exhaustive and close to accurately model the user behavior, they analyzed the profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors).  The categorization of users is different than  Technorati’s statistics which mostly focus on raw blog growth numbers and structural features of the blogosphere.

P.S: Note that participation at one level may or may not overlap with the participation at other levels — so the ratios sum up to over 100%.

I am trying to explain as well as compare the increase and change in the user behavior for two years of their research. Results for previous year research can be found here.

Creators publish blogs, maintain Web pages, or upload videos to sites like YouTube at least once per month. Creators include just 24% of the adult online population. Creators are generally youngsters the average age of adult users is 39 — but are evenly split between men and women. This percent in year 2007 was just 13%.

Critics participate in either of two ways commenting on blogs or posting ratings and reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Critics represent 37% of all adult online consumers and on average are several years older than Creators. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Collectors create metadata that’s shared with the entire community, e.g. by saving URLs on a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or using RSS feeds on Bloglines. Collectors represent 20% of the adult online population and are the most male-dominated of all the Social Technographics groups. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Joiners use a social networking site like MySpace.com or Facebook. Joiners represent 59% of the adult online population and are the youngest of the Social Technographics groups. They are highly likely to engage in other Social Computing activities — 59% also read blogs, while 30% publish blogs. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Spectators represent 70% of the adult online population and are slightly more likely to be women and have the lowest household income of all the social Technographics groups. The most common activity for Spectators is reading blogs, with only a small overlap with users who watch peer-generated video on sites like YouTube. This percent in year 2007 was just 33%.

Inactives. Today, 17% of online adults do not participate at all in social computing activities. These Inactives have an average age of 50, are more likely to be women, and are much less likely to consider themselves leaders or tell their friends about products that interest them. This percent in year 2007 was 52%.

What we see from the above classification is a drastic change in behaviour of online users in last two years, most changes are directed towards the Inactives and Spectators. So now next time if you see your aunt updating her status message in Facebook, consider her among the new Joiners to the world of social networking.

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oracle eclipses the SUN @ $7.4 Billion

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

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

Xerox snaps up ACS in $6.4 billion

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

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

Dell – Perot Catch-Up Deal worth $ 3.9 Billion

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

Cisco-Tandberg worth  $3.4 billion

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

HP Acquires 3Com For $2.7 Billion

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

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

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, my laptop got stolen on the train. Last summer, due to a friend of mine “borrowing” my laptop at an event without telling me, I realised that I better start backing up if this were to happen again. So, on the 27th of December, a day before my laptop actually disappeared, I had a full backup made via Apple’s Time Machine, as part of my weekly routine.

And now, some hardware expenses later, one of which was a gigantic (640 GB) laptop hard drive by Western Digital which I’m loving, I have a different Macbook, but with exactly the same data I had before and am running it like nothing ever happened. And I’m telling you, I didn’t like spending money on this, but having all my data back feels like that money was inconsequential. Backups rock, as does OS X for having backup software built in!

OK, philosophically speaking, I’m still being materialistic about my data. Clearly, I’m not “if you could take one item to a deserted island data, what would it be?” material. But it’s kind of a revelation to me that hardware (and software) and money really is much, much less important than data.

I also hope that this inspires you to make a last minute resolution for 2010. Always back up your data because you never, ever know when it might just be gone.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

What attracted me to Farmville in the first place? Well, in true Web3.0 spirit, it was someone raving about it on Twitter (Fidji Simo, I believe). It made me check it out and when I found out that some of my friends were on it, it made me give it a chance. I also remember SimFarm being one of the first games I played on my first PC and there was the nostalgia factor.

Farmville = FunVille?
The fun part of Farmville was to me truly the social dynamic. You build experience by doing different activities, such as growing fruit and vegetables, herding animals, and also helping out your friends. You can also give gifts to friends who in turn gift you back. All of that leads to two ways of measuring progress: experience points, which leads to new levels and abilities, and achievements, which you get after doing certain activities enough. While helping friends fuels my socialist—we are all equal, blablabla—self, the latter fuels my competitive—I am better, haha—self. As such, Farmville gives me complex feelings of satisfaction that can’t be found in every activity or game.

Now, while I admit that the latter statement is a little weird, but hopefully sufficient to explain why I liked the game, let me get to the parts that made me quit Farmville. They are, simply put: money, Adobe’s Flash, and boredom.

Farmville = CashVille
Farmville was admittedly the biggest blockbuster on the Facebook platform in 2009 and I have no doubt it will do well in 2010 also. The reason it is what it is, is because of its way of making money. Yes, if you want the easy way to winning, which is measured by how beautiful your farm is, you have to pay! There are three ways to pay for stuff in Farmville: achievements, such as having many neighbours or growing many tomatoes, which gets you free stuff; fake money, which buys you stuff; and Farmville money, which you get by either levelling up or by buying it for real dollars.

You can do pretty much everything you want without spending Farmville cash. Except for two things: expanding your farm, which would lead to having more real-estate and thus more “fun.” And, buying fuel. You can buy vehicles that make farming an easier chore, but using those vehicles requires fuel, which is expensive to buy and slow to recharge. The fact that I couldn’t sustainably earn income and spend it (without spending real cash) was a real downer in terms of gameplay.

Farmville = FlashVille
Flash made headlines these last few years mostly because of three things. It got bought by Adobe, its Air-platform and the sheer ubiquity of Flash as a development platform on sites such as Facebook. And, its lack of support on the iPhone / iPod Touch OS. And the latter is the case because Flash really sucks! It’s bloated, it’s not as good as pretty much any other interfacing technology (for lack of a better term), and it reminds us all of badly designed Myspace sites.

For me, the lack of iPhone OS support was a real factor as I got a Touch this Christmas, which became my nr. 1 Facebook interface, minus the reason* why I mainly visited Facebook these last few weeks (*: yes, yes, I really did mean it when I wished my friends a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year, but that just wasn’t getting me the experience points to get me ahead on Farmville…).

The second factor was that Flash is simply a bad technology. 1. it was incredibly slow and I had to reload the page several times, also losing my progress. 2. the Farmville interface is split up into blocks, on which you can farm, build, plant trees, or herd animals. Doing stuff on these chunks required actual movement of my avatar/farmer, who wasn’t moving to swiftly because of “Flashville’s bloatyness,” and I also couldn’t drag actions across the screen, which I would have been able to do even in the 16 years older SimFarm! Flash sucks and was the no. 2 reason for quitting Farmville.

I think Farmville would make the perfect iPhone App, but I really think Flash needs a major overhaul and/or be killed of.

Farmville = FrustrationVille
I already mentioned how repetitive the actual playing part became, going from one block to the next to plant or harvest. Every level felt slower and more frustrating, which was mostly due to Flash, but also perhaps due to Farmville making it harder to get to the next level. In the end, I kind of started wondering why I was playing this game and if I was even playing and not just doing manual labour. The only real reward seemed to be Farmcash, which you could either earn by levelling up (1 Farmcash per level, while buying more farmland costs like 20-30 farm-dollars, seems frustrating) or by paying real money (and that would just be sad). I could also spam my friends to join Farmville and become my neighbours, but come on!

I did get some satisfaction out of reading the several strategy guides that exist for Farmville and there really is no shortage of community support. But in the end it seems like Farmville emulates actual farming too closely, by making it tedious manual labour to grow stuff on your farm (mostly due to Flash sucking!) and it also makes it feel like serfdom, by having to buy Farmcash from your “masters,” in order to have a great-looking farm.

Well, that’s all I have to say on Farmville. It was a fun experience during the holidays and I don’t regret trying it. But while I think social gaming has a strong future, I really don’t like business models that rely on making its users’ lives more frustrating. I know World of Warcraft has a similar model and is the most successful multiplayer game ever made, but that doesn’t mean that it makes it the best game ever made. I can name a dozen single player and half a dozen multiplayer games that aren’t as successful financially, but just work well in terms of gameplay. And games like Farmville have a long way to go before they get there.

End review.
Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

With this idea behind I am trying to categorize the tools which may be helpful for our readers to use according to their needs. Here are some twitter tools  along with the snapshots which impressed me and according to me will be easy to use even for a newbie to  promote his/her business .

1. Buzzom Premium http://premium.buzzom.com/

Buzzom Premium is very newly launched application which allows you to focus in your twitter growth. It has many functions to choose from but more essentially its spam filter, scheduler and monitor. These are the three basic functions over which the application is build.

Direct Message is full of SPAM and it is almost unusable now. Thanks to various gaming applications and welcome or thank you messages. I like Buzzom SPAM filtering for DM. It actually makes this feature usable.

Buzzom also provides a great way to visualize your Twitter growth and network’s activity such as tweets, Retweets etc. The service also has the auto grow and follow system to increase your network’s size. Scheduler allows you to schedule tweets at certain time and control it by specifying its repeat cycle for future tweets.

2. Twonvert http://www.twonvert.com/

Twitter is all about 140 characters of words. People are already got use to expressing themselves in 140 characters with shorthand notation and some ingenuity. But that takes time and when you are in hurry, its more frustrating. With Twonvert you can easily convert your tweets into SMS shorthand language and allows you to say more with less characters!

3. Wefollow http://wefollow.com/

WeFollow is the directory of all the people in the Twitter, who have added themselves to the list. It provides an easy way for you to find relevant people in twitter and connect with them. You can find all short of people from celebrity to technologist in the list. WeFollow.com helps you use your time efficiently by making your people search easy and fast.

4. Twitscoop http://www.twitscoop.com/

Twitscoop is the service which lets you search the real-time trend in the twitter. Twitscoop uses the dynamic tag cloud to show the most talked topic in an interactive way. You can also search for related keyword and finds its popularity in the Twitter network.

Overall, it allows users to “Mine the thought stream” provided by Twitter. Twitscoop’s algorithm cuts every English non-spam tweets into pieces (“tags”), and ranks them by how frequently they are used versus normal usage. Twitscoop can essentially be described as your real-time web’s monitor.

5. Twittercal http://twittercal.com/

Managing your calendar is very tedious. You may have to enter new task on the go and may not have access to web version of Google calendar. Now you can do that easily via Twitter, you just have to send a small tweet and it gets added to your Google Calendar.

It’s a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar. Add events in a snap from your favorite Twitter client. Follow the 5 steps procedure to get started.

6. Socialtoo http://www.socialtoo.com/

Socialtoo is a paid service that lets you manage your twitter account by autofollow and unfollow tool. It also provides you basic statistics about your followers count and tweet count. It helps you manage your account and reduce the spam in your network.

It has interesting features like social survey that allows you to create survey that will allow you to understand your network much better.

7. StrawPoll http://strawpollnow.com/

Can you measure the sentiment of your network? Ets say you have 1000 people in your network, getting everyone’s opinion one to one is difficult. If you just want to measure if your network is Pro Apple or Pro Google, what do you do? Well Strawpoll is the tool you are looking for.

StrawPoll is the coolest way to follow the opinions of people onTwitter. It allows you to create poll and communicate with your network and understand their opinion.

8. TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/

Tweetdeck is the most popular desktop application for Twitter developer in Adobeair. It is very popular for its interface. It provides you a very easy way to maintain your daily twitter activities. Tweetdeck provides easy way to group your friends into different tabs and clean up the twitter stream. You can also search in the Tweetdeck and open a dedicated tab for the keyword; this allows you to track them easily. Recently, TweetDeck also has added TweetDeck Directory which is similar to WeFollow.

9. Stocktwits http://stocktwits.com/

StockTwits is an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.

User can add a set of specific stocks, save them to their own portfolio and limit the conversation around it or focus only on their favorite and trusted sources. Watch the whole stream or create your own filters. User can follow the best on the site, the best only in your areas of interest and in turn share your best actionable ideas. This is the best Twitter related financial site on the web does this in real-time.

10. TwitterSearch http://search.twitter.com/

TwitterSearch is the basic framework of the entire search engine that is present. It provides an easiest way to find out tweets related to keywords. It also has an advanced feature that lets you customize your query to find relevant tweets. It is small but powerful tool.  Once you get hang of it, it can be your most powerful tool of all. Beside search, it was shows the trending topic which can be useful to get hold of the perspective of twitter.

To Actually understand how to use twitter to promote your business here is a link to an awesome article by Chris Brogan.

P.S : All the rankings and stats are based on my personal opinions and experiences while using them.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

(Knowledge Capture in Enterprise 2.0 – click to enlarge)

Knowledge Worker : one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace (Peter Drucker – 1959)

If the definition above applies to your job then you probably are a knowledge worker. I personally am. And knowledge is the raw material we’re working with.

As opposed to the raw material manual workers deal with, knowledge is immaterial, it is just floating around. If we want to be productive we need to make sure this knowledge is harnessed, i.e captured and easily accessible.

Some studies show that between 25 and 50% of the communication between knowledge workers remains tacit and uncaptured. The question is how can we be productive and comfortable with our daily work if about half of the raw material we’re working with is wandering around ?

In the enterprise 2.0 presentation, I compare the knowledge capture in Enterprise 1.0 and 2.0. And it goes like this …

Enterprise 1.0

(Knowledge Capture in Enterprise 1.0 – click to enlarge)

Split knowledge

In the Enterprise 1.0 Microsofty world of the last century, the enterprise knowledge is split all around the place.

To start with, there are different types of document : office, HTML, mails. Even though mails are not supposed to contain information they do contain an awful lot of project related information.

These different types of documents are stored on different machines : mail server, intranet, shared network drives, knowledge management systems, local machines, etc …

Last, but not least, these pieces of information are accessed via different applications : Outlook, Office, browser.

Intimidating corporate policy

In the post about the conversation in the enterprise, I stress the fact that a knowledge policy based on Word documents and Knowledge Management bloated solutions is intimidating and discourage knowledge workers from capturing these units of knowledge. Therefore, a large number of units of knowledge (illustrated with color circles in the diagrams) are not captured and remain tacit.

However, some brave knowledge workers sometimes capture units of knowledge in Word documents. But they still don’t go the extra mile and share the actual document on the complicated KM system.

In the event where there is no KM system but a network shared drive they don’t store the document in the right location according to the actual taxonomy. As a result, these pieces of knowledge become hard to reach and find.

Knowledge leaks and productivity issues

From the whole enterprise perspective, just like tacit knowledge, this unreachable pieces of information are knowledge leaks. And lost of productivity.

This results in figures such as the ones reported by an Accenture study on 1009 middle managers from UK and US. It shows that managers spend about 2 hours a day looking for information and 50% of the information found is of no value.

There are tons of such studies : another one reports that knowledge workers spend about 30% of their time looking for data (Butler Group). Others show that

Looking at the different applications and data repository used, this hardly comes as a surprise.

Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers (Andrew McAfee).

Most people naturally focus on the term social in the definition above by M. 2.0. However, emergent and platform should not be underestimated.

Emergent

Emergent means that the system has gradually been adopted and naturally emerged as the best solution. The collaborative environment in which these systems have naturally emerged is the bigger there have ever been on the face of earth : the internet.

One can notice that there has been no manager or super architect that has defined up front which tools and how to use them to communicate. This has just emerged between the developers and project stakeholders.

The barrier entry for knowledge capture and sharing is just one click. It makes a huge difference. As a result, knwoledge workers capture far more knowledge.

Social

These collaborative platforms have been heavily used to develop successful and ubiquitous applications on the internet. How relevant these social tools are in a collaborative environment is therefore unquestionable.

If the system has emerged in such a darwinist environment as the internet, it also is because it has proved the most appropriate in a social environment.

Wiki, forums, blogs, etc … are straight forward, one click away from any browser. There is no intimidating corporate template to follow, no complicate KM system to master or Network Share Drive taxonomy to remember.

Folksonomy and social bookmarking have offered a new way to categorize the information. It helped in making the information easy to index and find afterwards. As I mentioned in the post dedicated to management in enterprise 2.0, whenever we put information in order, the objective is not to have an harmonious and logical tree of information which make managers feel secure, but rather it is for the information to be found quickly and easily afterwards by anyone in the community.

Besides, the natural conversational tone of these tools allow a more efficient communication.

Platform

Platform means that the whole set of collaborative tools is accessed from a single entry point. Blogs, Wiki, Forums, etc .. they can all be searched from the platform single search engine.

This is a key aspect of Enterprise 2.0 : having a single entry point for search is critical in this respect.

Enterprise 2.0 Vs Enterprise 1.0

Enterprise 2.0 knowledge capture is more efficient than Enterprise 1.0’s because :

• It is easier and less intimidating for knowledge workers to capture knowledge on collaborative platforms (wiki, blogs, forums etc …) then on word documents and then knowledge management systems
• Collaborative platforms offer a single entry point from the same application (web browser) to a set of tools and application where information has been captured

This enhanced knowledge capture has measurable results on knowledge worker productivity as reported by Andrew McAfee in his Financial times article :

The consultancy firm McKinsey has conducted three annual surveys on this question. In the most recent, published in September, respondents reported benefits that included better access to knowledge and internal experts, greater employee and customer satisfaction, and higher rates of innovation.

The magnitude of the gains was striking, ranging from 20 per cent (innovation rates) to 35 per cent (access to internal experts).

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

The compass functionality is still a bit underutilized

The media seems to be a bit obsessed with hardware, iPhone and its “killers” and software (“apps”). This is technology after all. For me, much more interesting phenomenon are applications. I’m not talking about software but more generally what we use the technology for. In “Salmon of Doubt”, Douglas Adams put it well that “[we] are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” I believe that iPhone and what have followed since it are enabling just this. I also believe by just being “stuff that works” was the feature that made iPhone what it is today, while Nokia was fiddling around with technologies.

When I’m talking about mobile phones as Human-World Interface, I’m not really talking about augmented reality. For most part augmented reality is just hype and worst of all, it was just technology. There was some cool factor in being able to see where the London Tube stations were, but all of a sudden it seems like people are far more interested in “monetizing” the technology instead of looking for applications.

Instead, in my view one of the examples of how iPhone gives you an interface to the world around us are the public transportation guides. With access to your location, you can easily check out when the next bus or tram arrive and what bus or tram you actually need to take to get wherever you’re going. I think that the applications for more specialized uses are more interesting, like snipers using iPhone for calculations and doctors using it for stethoscope. For me, Human-World Interface could be summarised as the ultimate universal remote for the world.

I think we’re finally arriving to the vision of a PDA. What the things we used to call PDAs a decade ago were crucially missing were mobile internet and user contexts (fe. location). One important part is also a universal information exchange protocol, and for most part the Web fills that role on modern phones. Right now it would look like instead of general-purpose web, one-application “Apps” are the way to go. I don’t think this is a sustainable way forward, though. It works as long as you only focus on one device (like the iPhone) and you believe in an Apple monopoly, but if/when in the future we have forward-incompatible iPhones and plethora of smartphones running Nokia’s Maemo or Google’s Android, you might be better off falling back to the common Web.

Google’s opinion is that the Web will eventually win, but you have to keep in mind that their whole business depends on that. In the short-term, there’s still loads of money to be made in Apps, but in the long-term investing in the Web will pay off. It is however quite hard to justify investing for the long-term unless you have boatloads of capital, but Google’s planning to be here for that long. There’s no money to be made in infrastructure or technology per se (as RSS and Atom have shown) but once you have an application that depends on them, it all pays out (but you really need an application that has or adds value, not just a fancy feed reader/parser).

One of the still-in-R&D technologies for smartphones is Near Field Communications, which would enable one to (finally?) use one’s smartphone for paying for public transportation or at point of sales. Unfortunately this stuff has been so long in the pipeline that it might really be a technology in search of a problem. It is however a foray into the world where we would use our smartphone to interact with the world.

A similar idea of replacing one’s wallet with one’s mobile phone has been one that Nokia et al. have at various times tried to push, but like NFC, the main problem is that the advantages are not really significant (yet?) and there are serious drawbacks compared to the things you actually have in your wallet. For example, the credit card you have in your wallet is probably almost universally accepted, unlike mobile payment. Overcoming this rather crucial shortcoming is a chicken-egg-problem, however for mobile phone manufacturers. The companies that should develop this stuff are the credit card companies.

The same thing goes for everything else, like using your phone to open your garage door. The two things that need to happen for a universal remote for thw world are open technologies (in this case an API for your garage door), which in turn requires a business case for the companies to open up their interfaces. Only then is the Internet of Things possible. I believe that for Internet of Things to emerge, there’s little point in just identifying everything around us, but also interacting with them. Other than implants, mobile phones seem to be the best thing we have to do that.

Digital Chocolate’s Trip Hawkins has said that the iPhone is the coolest thing in all time and for him, it’s vastly superior to what Kirk had in Star Trek. I’m not as optimistic about iPhone of today, I’m sure there’s going to be much more cooler things in the future. Of the things that we have right now, I have to agree.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Having both studied a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship and working in my 3rd startup (trying to apply the lean techniques that Lessons Learned made me aware of), I can say that my ideal is that entrepreneurship is a science. In reality, it’s a collection of Sciences as well as the act of Imagination AND Guts AND Agility, none of which are particularly scientific.

It’s a collection of sciences because no entrepreneur or team of entrepreneurs is undertaking just one activity, he, she, or they are doing many in parallel, some of which are business related and some of which are technological. Both have scientific foundations behind them.

Why the Business of Entrepreneurship is scientific is simple to explain. Businesses, starting or existing, can’t operate in a vacuum (for long). We have to obey financial restrictions, sell the idea to our investors, who themselves employ scientific means to measure whether the return on their investment justified, communicate to the market in effective ways, study the market, and project manage all the activities and people in the company. For most of these “wheels” already exist, so there isn’t always a need to reinvent them.

BUT, there is no replacement or science for guts, imagination, and agility in starting a business. You have to ignore many rules, you have to play dirty, and you have to be quick & flexible if you want to succeed. Maybe a management scientist can eventually plug those dirty variables in a formula somewhere. But I doubt it can be applied to any two startups successfully.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Generating the electricity needed to power those computers requires hundreds of power plants that produce billions of tons of CO2 emissions. Many of those machines sit idle for 12 to 16 hours per day, burning electricity, but not doing any work, because businesses habitually leave their computers running overnight.So how much does this one click matters? Here is an awesome report published by Harris Interactive some time back.

Some Numbers Worth Understanding

A mid-sized company with nearly 10000 PCs,  wastes more than $165,000 a year in electricity costs for computers that have been left on overnight. By turning these computers off, an employer can keep more than 1,381 tons of carbon dioxide (C02) out of the atmosphere.  Across the nation(read USA), this adds up to more than $1.72 billion dollars and almost 15 million tons of CO2 . When calculated using EPA’s  Green House Calculator the emitted Carbon is equivalent to  Annual CO2 emissions of  4  coal fired power plants.

As of April 2007,  145,800,000 Americans have full-time jobs. 72 percent of all employed adults regularly use a PC for work purposes at their jobs. Combining these findings suggests that more than 104 million workers reach the end of the work day with a PC to shut off—or not to. Next most important things is to analyse the reason for this type of behavior from the office goers.

Workers Attitudes behind this Wastage:

In an enterprise like situation, when asked whose responsibility it should be to save energy in the workplace, 28 percent of PC users said it should be down to management or the IT department. More than half (53 percent) said they were not at all concerned about their companies’ carbon footprints, indicating that effecting change in “shut down” practices at the behavioral level might yield disappointing results.

Making Business Out of IT:

Almost all the industries (be it mid or large sized) are facing similar challenges of harnessing maximum output with minimum power and infrastructural expenditures. And with global recession the idea of Cost cuttings also include supervised use of Power and Infrastructures in the enterprises and commercial centers. No  company likes to waste money. On the surface, the financial impact of 24-hour computer power consumption may seem insignificant compared to traditional concerns such as payroll, supply, and rent—but the waste is actually substantial. A few important findings from enterprise point of view :

• Energy costs—typically 10 percent of the corporate technology budget—could rise to as much as 50 percent in the next few years.
• If not exaggerating, a good  Power management software can reduce a PC’s power consumption by 80 percent, allowing companies to save between $25 – $75 per desktop PC.
• Turning off PCs, with their heat-intensive power supplies, will also reduce the load on air conditioning equipment, leading to even more energy savings.

If you are working in/for an enterprise, its your responsibility to turn off/hibernate  your PC when you are not working. On the funnier side, Gary Hird, IT strategy manager at UK retailer, John Lewis, says “I joined the company in 1989 and one of the first things I noticed was that every light switch had a sticker next to it, reading ‘switch off, you’re burning my bonus” .

But on a Serious Note “It takes between 60 and 300 trees to absorb the yearly CO2 emissions generated by a single PC left on 24 hours a day. That means it would take between 1.24 and 6.24 billion trees to absorb the emissions caused by the nation’s office computers that are never shut down.”

Take one step towards being Green, try to hibernate the PC whenever possible.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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

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

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

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

Video Songs from Standford.edu

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

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

Pop covers

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

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

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

Dongle and crowdsourcing

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

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

Who needs a record company ?

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

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

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

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

Pomplamoose September

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

This application brings environmental information closer to the world’s citizens. By simply entering a city name, the amount of greenhouse gases released since 1970 can be visualized. In addition, the main sources of GHG emissions in the year 2005 can be identified: industries (fuel combustion, process and waste emissions in energy and manufacturing industries); transport (road, rail, shipping); residential fuel combustion and waste handling; and agriculture.

As in my last post Jeremy pointed out  “the environmental footprint of their premises, logistics and supply chain, paper and ink consumption, utility consumptions (water, electricity,…), transportation and travels, waste, etc. must also be a point of concern”. Using this application we can definitely get a better view to the complete picture.

How to Use the Application:

• Install Google Earth

• Downloaded EDGAR GHG viewer 2005

Once you have installed Google Earth, install EDGAR GHG viewer and restart the application. Its just a matter of some clicks. I was really excited to see it for the first time. I am attaching a few snapshots that I took today morning. Try it yourself, you will understand how grave the scene is atleast in Europe, China, India  and USA.

Snapshot 1 – US of A.                                                           Snapshot 2 – Europe and Middle East with Africa

Snapshot 3 : Asia.

Representations : The data presented here covers carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorcarbons (HFCs), perfluorcarbons (PFCs) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). In order to compare different greenhouse gas emissions the emissions of individual gases have to be converted into CO2-equivalents. The Green Areas of Map has 0.00 -0.10 G equivalent of CO2 and Black/Blue spots are worst affected areas with or more 250 G equivalent of CO2 .

Personally, I hope this modeled simulation of World Wide GHG emissions will help a lot of people involved in Carbon Foot printing or planning to join the Green movement world wide. Let me know your ideas and reviews about this. The data sets are also available for download (free ) at the link.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

(Hi, it’s Cecil here. A french version of this post is available on Heavy Mental)

Bertrand Duperrin explains in a quite remarkable post the risk of backslash when using standard web 2.0 key words while presenting social networks to a new audience. The reason is : there could be some misunderstanding from the audience.

Among these key words : Conversation. Bertrand exposes the issue :

Just try to explain to a manager who has been struggling for years to reduce wasted time and productivity due to gossip, that time is now for team talk and conversation. And even worst : that his role is to stimulate this conversation. Then watch his face that slowly turns sour.

6 reasons to bring management and the enterprise conversation back together. And to use collaborative platforms to foster the latter.

1 – Conversation = units of knowledge

I have been working in the IT industry for about 20 years. Whatever the country, the industry or the size of the organization, I have always found myself facing this problem : how to capture these priceless bits of information floating around and share them in an efficient way ?

How to foster these coffee machines or telephone discussions where experts talk about the best way to solve a particular problem and help a customer within a specific context etc … ?

Management always has proposed the same solution : bloated Knowledge Management systems and well structured Word documents with corporate templates etc … Even though this tends to reassure management, nobody uses this system or write those documents because it’s frustrating.

It’s frustrating to write a 10+ pages document for one unit of knowledge. Not to mention the actual Knowledge Management system that is so complicated that most people are terrorized with the idea of logging onto it.

Reason #1: Within conversations lie many units of knowledge that the company need to capture. It is easier, more direct and far less intimidating to capture these on collaborative platform tools such as Wikis or Forums. And it’s then easier for other people to find them afterwards.

2- Knowledge Management != Documents Management

I was giving a training to some U.S call-center colleagues back then. One of them, Billy-Bob, told me this : Hey, when the client calls for a problem, depending on the area where the problem occurs, I forward them to the right document and give the polite RTFM Directive (Read That F***ing Manual). Because, hey, all documents are available online.

Except that, as part of the training, they have to configure a database. Billy-Bob encountered a problem and although the document describing the database configuration was open right before his very eyes on his PC desktop, he directly googled the symptoms (I.e error code) to see what it was. I asked him what he was doing and gave him some RTFM. Which had everybody laughing. Everybody but him, of course.

Reason #2 : When a knowledge worker looks for some information in the 21st century, he uses a web browser to search. Collaborative platforms offer single entry point and search engine on company knowledge (Wikis, Forums, Blogs, documents …).

3 – Conversational communication is more efficient

In one of her many unmissable posts at Creating Passionate Users, Kathy Sierra tells it all : Conversational writing kicks formal writing’s ass.

Kathy has been interested in cognitive science as she suffers epilepsy. So she knows what she talks about : you can see the result of her study on the topic in the amazing Head Firt Series IT industry self-teaching books.

In the blog post, she mentions a study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, in which researchers found out that :

Students who learned with personalized text performed better on subsequent transfer tests than students who learned with formal text. Overall, participants in the personalized group produced between 20 to 46 percent more solutions to transfer problems than the formal group.

According to Sierra, when pieces of information are communicated using a conversational tone (using You and I) the brain thinks it is in a conversation and become much more responsive and involved in the communication.

Reason #3 : Communicating in a conversational style results in a much better quality of message transmission. Collaborative platforms have a native informal style and therefore nurture better quality communications.

4 – Conversational communication is key for leadership

We have already mentioned it here. Michel Crozier is a sociologist, expert in the study of the enterprise. His analysis (according to a french university lecture) of the tight relationship between the simplicity of the speech and the subsequent team support is rather interesting :

The more sophisticated and complex the communication, the more it sounds simplistic. While simple message appears as a source of wealth, because it allows individuals to make it their own and discuss freely. The involvement of experienced manager, the fact that everyone is convinced of his conviction helps to give considerable strength to a simple message.

I once had a great American CEO. He had a straight forward speech style, both bewildering and stimulating. During the open questions in General Meetings, he would encourage people to ask questions on and on, until the very last drop. He would then willingly answer, using this typically American laid back tone using We/You/I. This always resulted in giving a great feeling of proximity and stimulated employees engagement.

During my long career, I’ve hardly ever been so motivated and convinced by the company strategy than when I left his meetings. A feeling that was shared by my colleagues.

This is something that large companies are looking into. At Intel, for instance, most company executives have an internal blog, Paul Otellini – CEO – included. Thanks to this medium, they benefit from the disintermediation offered by the collaborative platforms and engage in conversations with potentially all employees, regardless of their role and position.

Reason #4 : Excutives speech with conversational tone help to establish leadership and contributes a great deal in engaging employees. Blogs is the perfect media for executives to engage into these company wide conversations.

5 – Fostering weak links

Thanks to collaborative platforms, coffee machine chats became global. In other words, the global conversation has started.

Rather than chatting with always the same colleagues, people we professionally hang out with, people we share the same knowledge with, we have broaden the conversation scope thanks to collaborative platforms on the internet. We now reach different people and roles. The exchange has become much more fruitful, for everybody’s benefit.

Mark Granoveter wrote a theory about this : the Strength of weak ties. The great benefit is innovation. While one confront ideas with always the same people, with the same knowledge and new innovative ideas seldom appear. On the other hand, these new ideas are much more likely to pop up when different people in the company, working in different areas, with different responsibilities engage and chat.

Reason #5 : The global conversation is encouraged by collaborative platforms. It leverages weak links and allows new ideas and new business opportunities to emerge.

6 – Make sense out of knowledge workers contribution

One of the great frustation and source of insecurity at work for knowledge workers is how difficult it is for them to apprehend the actual purpose of their contribution in large projects.

We have this excellent developper in our team who has been working his ass off for 6 months building a fully integrated Installer for our PLM solution. PLM is an enterprise complex system involving many servers, different components etc … It is was a nightmare to install and configure. Johnny Boy made a great work automating our solution installation, hiding all the gory details of the configuration behind a smooth user interface.

A couple of weeks after the release of this installer, we had Peggy Sue, our lovely Marketing Events Manager storming into the office asking Who the hell this Johnny Boy is ?

He rose his hand and she ran to him giving him the biggest hug in his professional career. She said : “Oh thank you so much. You made our life soooo easier with your great installer. You don’t have any idea how much this tool has changed our daily work in such a lovely way”.

No matter how much we, in the department, praised his remarkable work, nothing gave more sense to his contribution than this hug from someone he never heard of before, a person and a role he hardly knew they existed. The reason is : all of a sudden, with Peggy Sue hug and gratitude, he touched the reality of his contribution, his piece of software became a life changer. From that hug onwards, Johnny Boy dedication and commitment (which already were of higher standards) became unbelievable.

The global conversation on collaborative platforms facilitates this type of real life feedback from someone at the completely opposite end of the enterprise organization.

Reason #6 : The enterprise global conversation with collaborative platforms provides a company-scale perspective to employees actual contribution together with real-life feedback. To paraphrase the stone cutter story, it helps turning knowledge stone worker into knowledge cathedral workers. This is a key factor (arguably the most important) to employee well-being and commitment.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

The debate on climate change has moved beyond an argument about whether it is happening or not, to a discussion about what can be done to tackle its root causes. Pollution and energy savings are keywords that are becoming more and more of interest to people and to governments across the globe, and the research community is also becoming more sensible towards these topics.

McKinsey & Co. recently reported that the world’s 44 Million servers* consume about 0.5 percent of total electricity productions across the globe and emits about 80 megatons of Carbon Dioxide a year, which is nearly the emissions of entire countries like Argentina or the Netherlands (Data needs an Update ).

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year,

The Tech IT Easy team

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

And guess what, when you purchase an app in the Netherlands and then change the residence to Luxembourg, all or most of your content becomes invalid and gets deleted from the device you purchased it for. It doesn’t matter if the app was free or not, it’s just gone, even though your purchase history clearly states that you did pay for that app!

I have written to Apple to report this problem, but in the mean time I worry every time that the apps, in which I also produce content, may get deleted the next time I sync my content.

I’ve previously written about Media being the most “unflat” industry on our planet, but I really wasn’t expecting this to be the case for Software, which I thought was produced by hip, non-conformist guys like you and me, that sell to everyone over the internet and don’t care about national borders.

Can someone, an app developer perhaps, explain to me the reason for having a different license for different countries? I understand currency and language differences, but many apps are just in English and the whole of the EU uses the Euro?

If alternatively, you happen to know of a solution to keeping your apps while changing residence, please let me know!

All that aside, have a great New Year, everyone!

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

First, the 3D experience. I’m afraid I didn’t like it very much from where I was sitting. And that I learned is one of the keys to watching a 3D flick, you have to experience it just right.

A couple of thoughts on the human experience: You have to wear glasses, you have to sit in the right place, and no one can pass the screen to go to the bathroom or else all is destroyed.

• The glasses: there are generally 2 types of glasses used in 3D cinema, active ones with shutter technology, and passive ones, which are just like regular, slightly over-sized sunglasses. I used the latter. Having biked for 30 min. at full speed just to get to the cinema on time (that’s how geeky I am about this), I found that sweat really didn’t agree with these glasses. The cinema provided me with one of those alcohol drenched tissues, but that definitely didn’t last me through the two+ hour movie. For the rest, I found them a little dark and the image without them was a lot clearer, though of course not meant for regular 2D viewing.
• Sitting just right: so I arrived to a packed cinema, meaning that I had to sit bottom-center-right and also that I have to try to see the movie again in a more empty cinema. To me the viewing experience definitely seemed sub-par and I will have to research optimal placement prior to seeing my next 3D movie.
• Other people’s bladders: so a couple of things disrupted the experience: my seating position, the subtitles, and people passing the 3D screen to go to the bathroom. The latter seemed to disrupt the image physically with the light of the entire image actually changing, and my thought is that they must have disrupted the beamer in some way. And while the subtitles seemed to float as much as the rest of the objects (see next paragraphs), they took away from the illusion of staring into a wonderful 3D world at times.

Generally, I think that Avatar should actually be viewed in an IMAX theater, which has a far larger screen and is designed for 3D, and not a regular cinema converted to 3D, which seems to be all the rage these days. And while dubbed movies kind of suck, I think it may be a better choice for people like me residing in a non-English country.

THE BIG QUESTION: So how was the actual 3D? Apart from the qualms I mentioned, actually pretty interesting! A few years ago, I watched Superman Returns at an IMAX, which required me to put and take my 3D glasses on and off as a green or red symbol appeared on screen and that sucked. But for Avatar, I could keep the glasses on all the time.

The 3D itself wasn’t the pop-out kind either, rather it was like you were looking into a window at 3D objects. In one scene, Sam Worthington’s character was exploring the alien jungle and looking at some exquisite flowers and it felt to me like I was standing opposite him looking at the same objects, which was nothing short of amazing!

I liked 3D a lot in slow scenes like this, but fast scenes such as battles were a little harder to follow. Cameron tells one hell of a story though, which drew you into the picture regardless.

Topic 2: Motion capture
The actual revolution that this movie is supposed to herald is the new kind of motion capture used, called performance capture. As far as I understand it, it allows for a few innovations in film making: accurately capturing face movement, having real characters interact realistically with virtual ones, and, for the camera person, seeing in realtime the result of the performance capture through the camera’s viewfinder.

THE BIG QUESTION: did it work? Hell yes!!! You notice it first with the female antagonist, Neytiri played by Zoe Saldaña (I had no idea!), who is completely “performance captured,” and whom you fall in love with within a few minutes. Her face shows an amazing range of emotions, from anger to joy, that demands an emotional response from the viewer. The last time I found myself infatuated with a virtual character was in King Kong, where I felt real sympathy with this fantastical character that Peter Jackson brought to screen.

Topic 3: the environmental message (limited spoilers ahead!)
Yes, one of the strongest themes of this movie was preserving a planet, respecting it’s inhabitants, both plant and creature. It was very powerful, I thought, but some people may consider it as preachy.

The problem with this message is that following it would require us to abandon 99% of our technology and return to a lifestyle more connected with nature and I’m very sceptical that this could ever happen, certainly not in time for this century’s crisis.

What Avatar manages to show is that the human race, through it’s relentless need for progress and profit, will always end up destroying that which exists in order to create something new. Avatar condemns our race to a “dying planet” and it can’t send a sadder message than that.

In Conclusion:
Above all, Avatar is an Action and Sci-Fi flick, and a good one at that, but it also makes you think, which many of Cameron’s movie seem to do. Definitely a re-watch for me, both on the silver and the small screen.

Rating: 7/10

Vincent
(p.s. minus the added formatting and picture just now, this post was written on an iPod Touch, forever dispelling my notion that typing on a touch screen is impossible. It did lead to some typos & grammar errors, mostly caused by it’s 95% useful predictive spelling engine.)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love,

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

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

In the book a group of doctorate students from three universities in Helsinki wrote cross-disciplinary visions of what certain IT innovations will break through by 2030.

The future is notoriously difficult to predict and the future of technology even more so. So, I’m pretty sure that any predictions we have made for 2030 are going to be wrong. There are some things we can be pretty sure about and try build on them, though. For example, technology will get better. The western population will grow older. Fusion energy will always be here in 30 years.

My second group wrote about intelligent or smart machines on how we see that there are some non-technical barriers that have to be broken before we can see robots and machines everywhere. Some of our ideas are also presented at the 26C3 conference under the title “Here be Electric Dragons: Preparing for the Emancipation of Machines“. So, if you’re in Berlin around Christmas, go and listen to our fantastic ideas.  Unfortunately I can’t make it there, but my co-author Lorenz Lechner will be there to entertain the audience.

One of our core ideas is that for autonomous (or, as we put it, ultimate) machines need rights. One reason for this is that normal product liability is not enough if these machines have AI dictating their decisions. If giving rights to machines sounds strange, it shouldn’t. In a sense this is comparable to human rights and the idea of corporation as a legal entity, where the corporation and not the shareholders are legally liable for its actions.

The follow-up question is of course how to manage the risks that autonomous robots pose? We are pretty good at managing all kinds of risks. One approach is to design fail-safe systems. The other is using insurance.

One of the challenges is that the machines of tomorrow and even today are more and more dependable on the software. We can’t end up in a similar situation with robots as we have done with commercial software – no guarantees whatsoever (see for example the capitalized(!) section 17 of a Microsoft EULA or similar section 16 of GPL). We believe that through an insurance of sorts, these sections could be shortened two capitalized words, DON’T PANIC, instead. Preferably in large, friendly letters.

Also, we believe these issues are urgent. The actuality of the technological development was really nicely illustrated by a recent xkcd comic (note the mouseover text). We have also discussed about this subject previously on this blog, Vincent already wrote about the relationship between man and machine early this year.

If you can’t make it to 26C3, here’s a copy of our paper “Augmenting Man”. We are currently in process of refining it and trying to pimp it for other publications.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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

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

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

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

Anti-nonsense manifesto

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

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

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

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

Start-up with an opinion

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

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

Getting Real

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

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

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

The next small thing

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

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

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

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

Business Model Conundrum

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

The classic conundrum : You have a

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

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

Financial Independence

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

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

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

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

Working hard is overrated

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

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

No meeting

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

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

Ban the four letter words

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

Reality is a terrible collaborator

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

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

Do the right thing

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

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

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

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

Wrongfooted Enterprise

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

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

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

This objective has been patently achieved at 37Signals.

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

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Second, if somebody has the answer, be my guest, will give you my credentials to edit.

Third, the salmon can be both a gift (as in the semiotics of Umberto Eco) and lethal stinky arm-extension (as in Asterix)

Fourth, let’s get serious.

Social enterpreneurship is one of the new buzzwords in business innovation. Buzzwords are obviously made up to speak situations that exist but with a lot of entropy until somebody names the fear away. And can also give you a scolarship to top-notch business schools, so your 5min of attention please.

To save you some brain cells from suranalysis I’ll give you three pictures of social enterpreneuship fields :

1. Economies in “turbulent times”
2. Recently patchworked societies
3. Niche populations in balanced societies

(sound too familar? need something more exotic? … please refer to expert-experts.)

Lately, I have the privilege to live in an environment that has 2,5 of the above.

Thus its quite fascinating that few people around me, move on the great dynamics of this 83,3%  (2,5/3) fluidity. The blocker is violence.

Violence such as

• rioting half the population against the other half waving salmons
• dangerous life-hacking (d-driving, d-careering, d-tax-paying, d-pressing your children and d-attending your lifemate)
• self-asphyxiation in a team
• tv

so what would you see happening first? closing the tv? feeling good? doing good? putting down the fish?

My two pennies on ………………………………………. putting down the fish, for many reasons of mass-psychology only Philip-Morris knew (but now we all do).

so, dear Greeks, enough with rioting, put down the fish, or better , put them in a plate.

Georgia

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some very interesting examples are mentioned, like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vincent out

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

(Hey, believe it or not, it’s Cecil again. Another translation from an original french post on Heavy Mental).

One often refers to usages when talking about the advent of the collaborative web. In my opinion, this is an understatement which nurtures misunderstanding. The relationship developed by people with the collaborative web is much more of a culture with principles, values and habits.

In this respect, the Digital Natives has an equally revolutionary DNA, although less spectacular, than the boomer generation.

This Generation Y presents cultural characteristics that cause thorny problems within the organizations, in particular as far as the propagand … erm … internal communication is concerned.

Here we have to deal with knowledge workers : a post-ideological /over-educated /over-informed / born connected generation. In short : a corporate BS proof generation.

Some tips to facilitate the communication …

Knowledge workers

Even if Peter Drucker coined the term back in 1959, the Digital Natives seem to be the first generation to assimilate this concept so naturally.

The result that Drucker mentionned is completely integrated into the psyche of Digital Natives : if as Karl Marx rightly said the workers are alienated in their relationship to their job because they don’t own the means of production, it is not the case for knowledge workers : their production tool is knowledge.

Drucker goes on to explain that this is the reason why the company or organization need more the knowledge worker than the KW needs the organization. This is a radical change in the nature of the company-employee relationship.

Solutions for business communication : eliminate the assumption of subordination in the relationship with the employee to establish a balanced connection, based on mutual exchange.

Post-ideological

This is the biggest difference between this generation and the boomers.

The boomer generation will remain the one of the adolescence of the modern man. A generation that will be remembered more for consuming illegal substances and having fun naked from San Francisco to Paris while proclaiming Guy Debord than for what they actually achieved : building up la Société Du Spectacle.

(Being a nice guy I won’t even mention the Generation X, the generation I belong to and for which the “Generation no-one” would be a more appropriate name, as it remains still and quiet in the shadow of the boomers. But that’s another story.)

Digital Natives left childhood when the Berlin Wall fell and came into adulthood when the twin towers collapsed. Within ten years they witnessed in real time both the end of communism and the end of the belief that democracy + market economy = world peace.

During their studies they’ve seen Maoist China become the main ally of Uncle Sam in a rapidly globalizing world. Finally they entered the job market with the subprime crisis and they saw, live again, the market oracle himself stunned by the insatiable greed of financial business.

So we’re talking about a generation that is genetically immunized against the rhetoric, the great ideologies and the views of the mind.

It’s no surprise that they are post-ideological and fundamentally pragmatic. They only believe into things that work. The only remarkable and undeniable realization that this generation has seen developing while growing up is the Web. This is what they believe in.

Solutions for business communication : Integrity. Align actions and words. And swap pompous values (that sound plastic, as Jason Fried said) with principles that are clear and easy to implement.

Over-educated

If you look at the evolution of university graduates in the OECD over the past 20 years, you’ll see that this number has doubled. It would not be stupid to pretend that human knowledge area has at least doubled as well since the late 80s.

More importantly, with the advent of the web, the volume of information and knowledge that is instantly available has increased in an incommensurable proportion.

This has a direct consequence : the key to survival in the online world is the ability to make sense of the ocean of information available: the ability of synthesis rather than ownership of knowledge ; the ability of being a human synthetizer as David Armano puts it.

Thus, if expertise (mastering a part of knowledge) is the guarantee of job security and recognition for Generation X, it is just wasted effort for the Digital Natives. Knowledge is too vast and changing too fast to be harnessed by one individual. What matters is the ability to navigate this knowledge and to make sense. That’s a key concept discussed by David Weinberger in his essay “The Hyperlinked Organization” in Cluetrain Manifesto.

Solutions for business communication: focus communication strategy on the ability to manage change rather than on the five-year plans that everyone knows they are useless (and GenY openly say so)

Connected and over-informed

Digital Natives = who grew up in a perpetually connected world, alongside the more powerful tool ever built by humanity for sharing knowledge : the web.

A tool they manipulate better than anyone else. A consequence : they have made a habit of verifying the authenticity of any piece of information communicated to them.

For the generation in control (X, Baby Boomers) the truth lies within the company (intranet, emails, official gossips) and should be monitored. For GenY, the truth is on the web : immensely larger and obviously uncontrollable.

In the introduction of his forthcoming book on the subject, Andrew “Mr. Enterprise 2.0 “McAfee tells this story about Wikipedia. Highly doubtful as to our willingness to work peacefully to build knowledge, McAfee went to see the definition of Skinhead, a rather fertile ground to witness the application of Godwin’s Law.

And there he found the more objective, dispassionate and documented description of the word together with its political, musical, cultural, etc … connotations.

With Wikipedia as a constantly evolving bible, this generation has developed an inordinate taste for objective truth and beyond, for conversation and exchange that help to let the truth emerge.

Solutions for business communication: tell it like it is and face reality, even if it has to hurt people. Assertivity is the most effective communication technique for this generation.

Confident, assertive and unhappy

We cannot speak about this generation without mentioning the remarkable essay by Jean Twenge: Generation Me, which explains Why Today’s Young Americans are more confident, assertive, entitled and more miserable than ever.

This, mostly in the United States, is a consequence of the emphasis on self-esteem in education, importance of which has caused terrible damage. This is a generation who were told throughout their education they can do what they want during their careers. The shock when they arrive onto the job market is even tougher.

I don’t know what to recommend here. However, it remains quite important to keep this element in mind during the integration of GenY in the company.

Digital Natives in action

Enough of dry theory : this post will soon team up with another one dedicated to a genuine Digital Natives company in action: the ruthless crew and super sexy 37Signals.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

All organizations say Routinely ‘People are our greatest asset’. Yet few practice what they preach, let alone truly believe it. (Peter Drucker)

Peter Drucker is the main theoretician of modern management.

He was the first to define the Knowledge Worker, back in 1959. The excellent David Weinberger (one of the Cluetrain Manifesto terrorist) may call the definition as pompous, it remains nonetheless visionary. Drucker’s whole theory on organizations of the XXth century is built around the knowledge worker.

What is surprising when we analyze the recommendations for management within the implementation of an Enterprise 2.0 approach is that by and large, these are pretty similar to the ones we can find in the writings of major XXth century authors on management and leadership (Drucker, Crozier, DePree) or among the great industry leaders.

Participation, reputation, emergence, transparency, simplicity, agility and trust : would Enterprise 2.0 finally deliver the promises of modern management ?

(Hey, it’s Cecil here. This is a translation of an original french post published on Heavy Mental).

1- Participation

Max DePree is the son of the founder of Herman Miller, a US company manufacturing high quality office furniture. Herman Miller is consistently recognized for its dedication to a people focused employee culture, following a servant leadership concept.

DePree wrote Leadership is an Art in 1987 while retiring from the business. He was a keen supporter of participatory management, a popular trend in management during the 80s :

Participatory management begins with a belief in the potential of people. Everyone has the right and the duty to influence the decision making and to understand the results. Participatory management Guarantes that decisions will not be arbitrary, secret or closed to questioning. It is not democratic: having a say differs from having a vote. (Max De Pree)

This concept of participative management is also central in Peter Drucker work :

Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives’ decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.

2- Reputation

Reputation in the online world is the quantified assessment of the contribution of the individual by his peers. We find one of the basic principles of evaluation advocated by P. Drucker : not the effort, the time spent in the office or anything else but the contribution and the delivered value.

An example of leveraging reputation is what Max De Pree called Roving Leadership :

“Roving Leadership is the expression of the ability of the hierarchical leaders to permit others to share ownership of problems, in effect to take possession of a situation. Roving leadership takes charge in varying degrees when hierarchy does not respond swiftly or decisively. It demands a great deal of trust “

3- Emergence

Wiliam Mc Knight has dedicated his career to 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company). He constantly promoted an open culture based on trust, and he made sure the company leaves enough room for the emergence of innovation. Doing so, he transformed a mining company which produces grinding tools and sandpaper in a particularly innovative one, successful in many different areas (abrasive, athletics tracks, boardgames, synthetic fibers, office furnitures etc. …).

His profession of faith does not let much room for misinterpretation :

As our business grows, it become increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way. Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell Those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs. Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.

4- Agility

Dee Ward Hock is the founder and CEO (68-84) of Visa Credit Card Association. He coined the term chaordic, mixing chaotic and ordered. His praise for agility is summarized in this quote:

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.

Here we find a trend of Management 2.0, described with the usual panache by Kathy Sierra : Micro management and the zombie function.

5- Transparency

Again, Max De Pree has a clear and straight position. Again, not much room for misinterpretation here :

“It is better to err on the side of sharing too much information than risk someone in the dark. Information is power but it is pointless power if hoarded. Power must be shared for an organization to work” (Leadership is an Art).

6- Simplicity

The best response to the complexity of human relationships is the simplicity of the organization (Crozier).

Michel Crozier is the leading expert in the french sociological study of the enterprise. His analysis of the relation between the simplicity of speech and the commitment of teams is rather interesting:

The more sophisticated and complex the communication, the more it sounds simplistic. While simple message appears as a source of wealth, because it allows individuals to make it their own and discuss freely. The involvement of experienced manager, the fact that everyone is convinced of his conviction helps to give considerable strength to a simple message.

Which brings us back to two things:

1) the strength of the ties born from conversation, as opposed to the defiance born from official speeches full of TechnoLatin (as David Weinberger calls it) or more prosaically, corporate BS.

2) the leadership that results from simple and clear communication. Mentioning studies from 1984-1985 on the necessary corporate cultural revolution (the time was then at the advent of the participating companies), Crozier identifies simplicity as one of the 5 prerequisites.

7- Trust

The quotes on the subject are countless. The contribution of Peter Drucker in his reflection on the management of knowledge workers is  not the least:

It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.

Knowledge worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker is both seen and treated as an ‘asset’ rather than a ‘cost’. It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities.

Making knowledge workers productive requires changes in attitude, not only on the part of the individual knowledge worker, but on the part of the whole organization

The most spectacular may be the work of Stephen Covey Jr., the son of the author of the bestseller  7 Habits of Highly Successful People. Covey Jr. became the head of the publishing house of his father’s company during the merger with Franklin Quest. In a difficult and challenging time, the leadership of Covey Jr. obtained impressive results. The motto : trust. He wrote a book on the subject : The Speed Of Trust.

Bar the vaguely guruesque approach which may inspire some caution, the feedback remains interesting. It explains how trust enables smoother relationship within the company and save valuable time.

Jason Fried, CEO of the start-up extraordinaire 37Signals has adopted a similar principle : “As a rule, I always decide to trust the people I meet, this saves a lot of time and inspires trust back.”

So ?

With the implementation of collaborative tools within the enterprise, would it be the the time for modern management to finally keep its words ?

The temptation for utopia is quite big …

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

(Hi, it’s Cecil here. This is a translation of an original french post published on Heavy Mental).

One of the most common misconceptions our managers make when they talk about Enterprise 2.0 is to reduce this approach to a mere web2zero (quote mark with the fingers) collaborative toolset. We can smile about it, but if we get this kind of misunderstanding, it’s probably because we missed something while communicating around this.

In the slideshared Enterprise 2.0 presentation, I realized that I only devoted one slide to the underlying changes.

It’s critical for people to understand that while importing these social platforms from the Internet, we also import an underlying electronic culture that will profoundly change the workplace organization. And these changes involve management principles. 10 of which being described hereafter …

1 – Conversation (Vs Broadcast)

Just as traditional media conditioned the audience to be passive consumers — first of commercial messages, then of products — the traditional organization conditioned employees to be obedient executors of bureaucratically disseminated work orders. Both are forms of broadcast: the few dictating the behavior of the many. The broadcast mentality isn’t dead by any means. It’s just become suicidal. (Christopher Locke – Cluetrain Manifesto)

This medium based on open conversations has irrevocably changed not only our electronic culture but also the way we apprehend social relationships. It will become increasingly difficult for our management to have us accept a one-way communication (top down) while we are used to bi-directional ones in our everyday online life. Reducing our contribution to enterprise communication field to 5mns Q&A at the end of General Meetings will quickly become unsustainable.

2 – Bottom up (Vs Top Down)

It’s about the same as far as technologies choice is concerned when it comes to develop new product/services. As Tim Bray put it : Decisions on key technologies are now being taken by developers and not by leaders at the turn of a golf course.

This a similar trend to that of Toyota workers on assembly lines. In this company, recognized worldwide for its amazing processes, the employee contribution to innovation is permanent :

The average Toyota employee Contributes more than 100 improvement ideas each year. That quickly adds up to millions of ideas. Certainly most of them are incremental ideas, in fact, most of them probably are not even new ideas. But while the actual ideas are important, even more important is the culture In which this spirit is nurtured.

It is not only a matter of innovation, but also recognition, rewarding and job commitment. This is pure Management.

3 – Reputation (Vs Hierarchy)

Another fundamental aspect in the participatory culture imported from the internet is the concept of Reputation. In Enterprise 1.0, the job title embodies the status of the employee within the company. This concept is substituted in the internet culture with Reputation, i.e. the quantified assessment of the contribution of the individual by his peers.

This significantly broadens the scope of reference for people skills evaluation, from the sole enterprise to the whole Internet.  The consequence is that the reputation built by an employee on the intranet and internet will have to be taken into account in one way or another within the company.

Conversely, hierarchy granted power will not necessarily be recognized among employees if it is not validated by a significant reputation in the intranet / internet. This is the Granted Power Vs Earned Power issue discussed by Scott Berkun in the Trust chapter of The Art Of Project Management.

3 – Emergence (Vs Structure)

There is this unquestionable statement : the Web works. The Web was built without a predetermined structure. Unexpected solutions have emerged naturally and were massively adopted : this also is called Serendipity.

As an example, hyper-text has naturally fostered the relevance of Google and has helped to classify the web. No one has written in the Web_User_Guide.doc that whenever we publish resources to the web we have to make links to other pages. This has just happened and it has shaped the internet as we know it.

4 – Folksonomy (Vs Taxonomy)

Similarly, Folksonomy has naturally taken precedence over Taxonomy when it came to classify the ocean of information available on the web. Namely, according to Wikipedia, a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content performed by non-specialists, rather than a rigorous and structured classification.

The advantage of folksonomy is that information is classified according to its contents, with labels (tags) that anyone can choose. While with the Taxonomy, the information is classified according to its location. Folksonomy has two advantages: a) we find pieces of information more easily and b) within collaborative platforms, these tags help in finding quickly people we share thematic affinities with.

If you give it a thought, it makes sense : when we put our information in order, we do it to find the information quickly afterwards. Not to build an harmonious and logical tree of information.

5 – Agility (Vs Bureaucracy)

Agile project management (focusing on transparency, simplicity, collaboration, visual management, simplicity and trust) helps greatly in absorbing the inevitable changes that occur during the life of a project development.

Similarly, the Enterprise 2.0 needs an agile organization that enables to absorb the emergence of new tools, practices and relationships. Among other things, this open organization allows emergence and promotes innovation.

Agility also meets the high demands of connected culture, namely the radical pragmatism (to quote Alexander Bard) and the obsession in Getting Things Done. Productivity rather than processes, speed of execution rather than bureaucratic slowness, frequent releases, etc. …

6- Transparency (Vs Security)

Before anything, let’s make sure we share the same understanding of what type of company information we apply transparency to. It obviously does not apply to sensitive and confidential pieces of information. But to any other.

Talking with managers helps to reveals the main fear it inspires. According to managers, it may let emerge the fallibility of their teams and/or themselves.

The thing is : when honestly undertaken in a context of trust and addressed quickly, these errors and potential problems help to give a human face and to create genuine links between the teams. As Herman Melville puts it :

“Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses — for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it…”

On the other hand, the temptation of security, of building silos of knowledge accessed through complex algorithms which rule rights access can contribute to add friction, to slow down the diffusion of knowledge and to nurture a sense of paranoia. Which is not a good for teams morale.

7 – Intertwined Networks (Vs Silos)

Transparency is about information sharing, on both vertical and transverse organization axis. This multi directional communication helps fostering efficiency as it ensures that employees know what the priorities and business strategy are. In addition, it also nurtures innovation through the use of Weak Ties of Mark Granovetter (see Enterprise 2.0 Presentation).

Besides, broadening the scope of knowledge of collaborators to the activities of the company as a whole allow them to give a meaning to their professional contribution. This is a fuel to collaborator commitment.

8 – Simplicity (Vs complexity)

Agile is focused on driving towards simplicity rather than creating systems that manage complexity (Mike Cottmeyer et V. Lee Henson  The Agile business Analyst)

Simplicity is a core agile principle and agile organization is a critical component of Enterprise 2.0. Therefore, it is necessary to resist the mysterious charms and the intellectually stimulating complexity of potential solutions / organization / processes. The aim is to strive for simplicity in the implementation of social networks in the enterprise.

9 – User-oriented technologies (Vs IT Governance)

One of the main feature identified by Andrew McAfee in his presentation on Enterprise 2.0 is the concept of simple tools and easy access. The usability has became the key quality criteria against which we rate online applications. The main difference between internet applications (Facebook etc …) and intranet’s : the budget share spent on design and usability: about 10 times more for the internet applications.

Again, it will become increasingly difficult to impose anti-ergonomic and unusable intranet tools to people that use Twitter or Facebook day-in day-out. The main reason is that applications developed without usability concerns are neither pleasant to use nor productive.

10 – Trust (Vs Control)

This is the basic principle as it determines all others.

Without Trust there cannot be transparency in information. There cannot be an organisation flexible enough to let emergence happens. There cannot be an open bottom-up communication.

Without Trust, Management will only prevail in the implementation of complex processes to define the inflexible scope of responsibilities of knowledge workers. Without Trust it is not possible to establish an organization which leverages the agility, speed (refer to Stephen Covey Jr. book) and productivity offered by the net.

Without Trust, the management will not abandon the command and control strategy. And the required space for effective implementation of collaborative tools shall never appear.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Here’s what the Google Chrome Browser shows me.

Every time I open multiple tabs, it shows me a process, called Google Chrome Helper. With half a dozen tabs open, I soon have these processes filling up my whole tab-switcher.

I realise that Chrome is in alpha, beta, or whatever disclaimer they use these days, but I just think it’s really messy. Ironically, it is the fastest browser on my system and I really do lean towards it when quickly wanting to browse the net. Even though the average user will not see these aesthetic little bugs, I sincerely hope that they clean it up a.s.a.p.. Even Chromium, its seemingly more mature brother, displays the same behaviour.

Stop being so beta, Google!

/Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

A brief background. I’m pretty a-cultural, but I find audio-tours in museums generally a must, which means I usually spend the 5 or 10 euros extra to get one of those players to walk around the exhibition with headphones on. A little anti-social, but it helped me discover the lives of some amazing artists, like Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc. And my favourite nation of artists: Japan!

Yesterday, I was an an exhibition of “That Scream Guy” Edvard Munch. I was there with my sister and it seemed a little wasteful (it was only 3 rooms of lithographies), not to mention anti-social, to get an audio-guide. Still, it helps tremendously to get just a little background on a picture, really adding to the experience.

Here’s the iPhone app I would like to see.

1. Point the phone at a painting (an immediate weakness there),
2. image recognition happens (how?),
3. it hooks into a source of info about it (preferably in an audio-format) such as Wikipedia,
4. and you get to hear or see a description of the painting you are seeing.

It’s nothing genius and apart from perhaps the image recognition part, it seems fairly cheap/easy to produce.

The one weakness: cameras in museums aren’t always allowed. I would guess this means that you have to work together with museums to get things going (which sucks!).

Well, this is just something I want to throw out there, a la the much underused twitter hashtag #freeideasiwanttoseehappen

So if someone is looking for a creative challenge, you have your first customer right here!

/Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

An utterly insignificant little blue-green planet in the unfashionable part of the galaxy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m really, really worried.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

PC OSs are in the same boat. As much as I like Mac OS X, if it didn’t run the apps that I needed to be productive or unproductive (you know, media & games…), then the chances of me getting a Mac are zero. Any new OS maker is in the same boat, having to think about both their OS and the apps that run on it. A hardware maker designing an OS would have to think about all three dimensions (+ all the other stuff: consumers, partners, etc.).

I think I was fairly down on Android as an OS and fairly up on Chrome OS (COS), long before it either came out. I’m still sort of down on Android and very much up on COS. The reason is for once not hardware or software, it’s the changing world of telecommunication.

I haven’t been silent about my feelings about mobile operators. They’re not good, mostly for people in Europe that travel internationally a lot. And just when some positive movement is happening in terms of mobile and sms roaming charges, we now get Internet roaming, where operators still find plenty of opportunities to gouge consumers. It’s not unusual to pay several Euros/dollars/pounds per MB for instance, which is o.u.t.r.a.g.e.o.u.s.

As such, when I saw the ASUS EEE and all the other Netbook models being offered with subscriptions, I was skeptical. But what I didn’t think much about, because I wasn’t a user at the time, was the opportunities that ubiquitous internet (within roaming reality) offered: by buying a subscription with a laptop you are in fact instantly online, which makes any argument against a NetOS moot. It completely opens up the road for a NetOS maker, like Google, but also like Nokia, RIM, Palm, Apple, Microsoft, etc. to build an OS that entirely operates on a connected backbone. This is the opportunity that I see Chrome OS exploiting and why I think it, as well as the iPhone netbook/tablet if it comes out, will be massively successful.

I still don’t like the idea of hardware enslaving itself to telecom-operators. But I think we really can start thinking about a cable-less world a few years from now, with all the implications (no more offices, augmented shopping, etc.) that it can bring.

Yay mobile net. Yay Net OS.

/ Vincent

(Picture: city in clouds, courtesy of www.crestock.com)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Finnish boxy architecture, now on Google Earth.

The one thing that reminds me that we do live in a future foretold by all the great 80’s sci-fi movies is Google Earth on iPhone and especially it’s useless feature where you can change the view by tilting the phone. It serves no purpose whatsoever, but it’s cool and feels like “future”. I think Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash really showed the vision what Google Maps/Earth ultimately could become (think real-time satellite feeds).

A while back magical elves -generated buildings started appear in selected cities in Google Earth, which was also pretty cool. Unfortunately these magical elves were somewhat sloppy about the finer architectural points of our human buildings so most of them look like boxes – and, well, some of the 60-70’s era concrete buildings are in fact (ugly) boxes.

So, when Google revealed their new Building Maker, I was pretty much hooked. It allows you to easily model buildings out of aerial photography. And if you’re good enough, those models might just end up on Google Earth.

This tool reminded me of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which was also interesting in how it allowed to harness the human processing capability to tasks unsuited to computers (or magical elves, who don’t grasp our architectural styles). Some might remember how it was used (unsuccessfully) to search for the remains of Steve Fosset’s plane. Google does have some experience in this fields as well, they did something similar with their Google Image Labeler, which paired random people in a game of labeling images. Unlike Mechanical Turk, Image Labeler was mostly harmless fun and a game to kill time for participants. It is this fun part that I find really important in these things. I think Google accidentally or on purpose have also some fun elements in Building Maker, in addition to it’s crack-like addictiveness level.

The best thing about the Building Maker is that it runs in your browser and is dead simple to use. It’s fun. It’s like a small flash game, but instead of just wasting time you waste time in benefit of a commercial, listed company.

So, now I have 25 models worthy of Google’s acceptance criteria. It’s these accomplishments that keep me coming back to model things. Unfortunately, many models were rejected by Google and that of course isn’t fun. The main reasons for rejections so far have been “Incomplete texturing” and “Floating”. The frustrating thing about this is there’s very little I can do about these two problems. It’s a bit frustrating to notice that Google doesn’t have imagery for all sides of the building after you have started to model a building and short of renting a plane and taking pictures yourself there’s not much you can do. Floating is even more frustrating, because there’s very little hinting you can do to tell the modeling software that the box you’re trying to make should, in fact, be on ground level instead of floating couple of meters in the air.

Yes, if you want, you can import the model from Google’s servers into SketchUp and refine the model there, but that’s both extremely difficult and requires a lot of effort. Not fun, but maybe, just maybe, that refining could get your model listed…

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

On my trip to Africa the most inspiring thing that happened to me happened on my last day, on the Nairobi international airport. This post isn’t about technology, but about globalization and, well, maybe in a small way how technology is only an enabler, it just has made things easier – but it doesn’t do things for us.

It was still couple of hours before the flight would start to board but we were already at the gate. And sitting next to us was  Phil. I don’t remember if his name was really Phil, I just think he looked like a Phil. Now, Phil was a huge, white, bald, old guy with diabetes and thick glasses. Really huge. He was wearing a traditional Kenyan suit/robe-thing. He looked like a fat white Masai. He was dozing off and told people around him that they should feel free to wake him up if he started to snore. He wouldn’t mind.

Phil really was a Buddha. He was out there. I don’t know if he knows it.

One thing lead to another and Phil started to tell why he was in Kenya. I don’t think he has ever been to any other country. Phil’s from Virginia, USA. He’s a schoolteacher.

I don’t remember all the details correctly, but that’s okay, because the details don’t matter. You see, Phil’s dad had some money, but he was in a home. Got MS. Now, being a good Christian, he had donated a bunch of money to missionaries to build a church in Africa. Church of Nazarene. Now, Phil was a good son and visited his father now and then. His dad was a bit sad about there being a church after him somewhere in Africa and he was there in a nursing home on the other side of the world. So, naturally, Phil goes and says “Gee, dad, if I could just go there and take pictures for you, I would.” So, his dad takes out his check book and asks “Would you? Here’s some money, it should cover your tickets?”. Here Phil said to me, “Who was I to say no to my dad?”

So, Phil got himself a passport and all the other stuff. He only knew that the church was somewhere in Kenya and that it was called Church of Nazarene. And that he knows no-one there but that didn’t stop him from booking a trip over the weekend to Kenya. Someone might think Phil was either simple or just insane, but, I don’t think that. He was just this unassuming guy.

At some point during his story, another flight arrived and people started to come in through the doors of our gate. There, sitting on an airport’s plastic seat, around 9pm in the evening, with the red robe on, this guy starts to greet all the people going past him, “Welcome to Kenya, hope you have a nice stay”. Most of the people don’t even blink in his general direction. Some say thanks. Some smile. But I bet most of them felt at least something. So what if you can’t please all the people who just don’t care when you can make some people feel a bit better?

So, anyway. A day before he’s leaving he gets an e-mail from some missionary that yeah, the church exists and they can take him there. So, he goes to Kenya, gets on a jeep, takes out his digital compact and starts taking a lot of pictures of the church and gets back to USA to go back to work on Monday.

Back in US, he goes to visit his dad with hundreds of pictures and he’s dad’s all excited – but he doesn’t even look at the pictures. He almost pushes the pictures away and asks “Do you wanna go over there again?” And, again, who’s Phil to say no?

“At this point I realize that I’m going visit that church every year for the rest of his life.” And so he does. Phil’s not that into the whole Church of Nazarene thing, he’s a schoolteacher. So, this one time he asks if he could visit a jail in Kenya. Normally this would be totally impossible, but as it happens, there just happens to be this guy who’s the head priest of all prisons there in the group. And well, at this point Phil’s been there for some years already so he has some street cred and the doors to the jails are open for Phil.

I totally forget if we wanted to teach these guys something or if it was something else, but anyway, Phil’s visit is a success. He starts to visit the prisoners in addition to going to see how his dad’s church is holding up, all this in over a weekend. Many years pass. I didn’t ask, but I guess his dad’s passed away since I understood he doesn’t visit the church anymore. He still visits Kenya every year for a weekend and goes to visit the prisoners.

To drive the point home: This guy takes a long-haul flight every year at the same time, for a weekend, to visit these guys. And these guys wait him like he’s Santa Claus. And to them, he is just that.

I guess these prisoners don’t get much visitors and I’ve no idea who they think Phil is back home, I don’t think Phil has any idea who they think he is. But they write to him. Last year, the prisoners asked if Phil could get them a electric piano. Now, hauling something like that from USA would be impossible and expensive, so he just arranged the piano there otherwise. These guys don’t have even clean water or anything, and they ask for a electric piano and this guy delivers. He knows that there’s a very small chance that these guys actually get to use whatever things he can procure for them, but I guess it’s the gesture that counts. Someone actually cares.

Coming back to the robe Phil is wearing. It’s not Phil’s first, and not his last. The prisoners make them for him. This year, a tailor took a measures of Phil so they can make a new one for him when he comes to visit next year. Again, these guys who are living in conditions I can’t even imagine are making these robes for this one guy who comes and visits them every year.

Now, Phil says he’s ready to die. He says it’s really great to know that you’re ready to go. This is not exactly something I look forward to hear before a 8 hour flight, but he might have a point. I’m not ready to go. Phil has had an heart attack and he tells how excited it was to be transported to ER by a helicopter. Phil said he’s on VA so it was all covered. He hasn’t talked about religion at all before this point, but it’s hard to escape the Buddhist vibe from this guy.

I told Phil that for the sake of the prisoners, I really wish that he makes it next year.

There, on Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, among all the people coming and going, mostly young western tourists going to volunteer to build something and who are there to naively save the world, was unassuming Phil who no-one took seriously. I shook his hand and thanked him for being a human.

–
Phil also told when he got his heart attack at home and somehow made it to the hospital, a doctor came to see if he had got all the necessary medications. A nurse would go that yes, except for one that’s barcode didn’t register into the system. The doctor then took the medication and gave it to Phil noting to the nurse that the needs of the patient went before some accounting system.

Thinking that this guy wouldn’t have been there telling me how he gives hope to more people ever year than I ever will because of a nurse wouldn’t give some stuff to save his life because she couldn’t register into a system is something that really scares me.

–
It’s wrong to say Phil said he gives hope to people. He never said that. He just told what he does and how he ended up doing that. I got the impression that the people who he teaches don’t know what he does over a certain weekend in September. Why he keeps doing that, he never said.

–
I honestly don’t remember all the details correctly. I wrote this to tell you about Phil. I decided to wait for some time before writing this down so I could think the whole story over and better distill it to the point that there are way too few Phils around and too many people to whom Phil is a lifeline.

Why I decided to publish it is also in some part due to this post.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Just uploaded this Enterprise-2.0 presentation. Title : Enterprise 2.0 : leveraging collaboration platforms to foster knowledge, innovation and productivity.

Best to see full screen

Target audience is upper management.

The objective is to address key issues faced by organizations built around knowledge : management of not only knowledge but also innovation and productivity. First to see the current limitations with the tools and processes in place and then to see how collaborative platform and enterprise 2.0 approach can offer competitive advantages to the company.

I have not been really convinced by the material available on the topic. Mostly too buzzwordy and flashy, this often scares upper management out. Most of them then subsequently relate E2.0 to consultant-dollarmaking-vaporware material, hence the dedicated section in the presentation.

Besides, in my view, these presentations usually go from the existing social applications (and their many exciting features) into the enterprise. In order to convince management, they should rather go the other way round : from enterprise real problems to how they can be addressed by social software platforms.

Mostly influenced by this excellent presentation by Mr Enteprise 2.0 : Andrew McAfee at PARC (link). Also by many of the videos, books, articles, blog posts refererred to in TechItEasy and Heavy Mental.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

So, my review today will be short, so short that I won’t talk about more than one feature. And that feature may disappoint you, I know it. But, in the greater picture of things, I think it’s pretty cool.

Stepping over from Windows half a decade ago, I had to adopt a new behaviour. I was forced to use iTunes, which meant that I had to import my whole library into it to make full use of this software and it’s ability to organise music. The iPod also affected this, which, prior to the iPhone/Touch, delegated its entire user-interface to iTunes also, allowing people to create intricate smart- and playlists, download podcasts, etc. in the software, whilst letting the hardware be controlled by one button only.

My musical behaviour on the computer had become somewhat bloated, less spontaneous than before. Leopard (10.5) innovated on this a little, by introducing Quicklook, which, through the space bar, allows for the quick previewing of most files, which is especially nice for movies and occasionally nice with music as well. The problem with the latter is that when you shift the focus to another app, as ADD-affected/music-listening people tend to do frequently, the music stops… quite literally. So it wasn’t a perfect solution.

Snow Leopard (10.6) introduced an improvement to that feature, one that is already affecting the way I listen to music on my Mac. Quicklook still works the way it always did, but what’s new is that you can quick look within an icon. By hovering over a music file on your desktop and changing the display in the finder to large enough icons (they need to be made a certain size (64×64 on my Macbook) for this to work), you will see a play button on the icon, which, when clicking, plays the track or video. And you can keep playing it while you do your other stuff, such as me typing this blog post.

Pretty awesome, if you ask me. No need to fire up iTunes just for that one file and my need to ADD has been satisfied.

/End Review.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Hello Seb, could you please introduce yourself?

Hi Jeremy. Well, my name is Sebastien Blanc and I am the Business development director for YoolinkPro, a Paris-based start-up developing a micro-sharing Platform for professionals.

Things have changed and knowledge now is increasingly on-line. We all spend loads of time googling the Internet for information about customers, about markets or to solve work-based issues. Yet when we find an interesting document we rarely do anything with it.

YoolinkPro changes that. The service allows you to save, share, tag and discuss information you find on-line. It allows you to bring the knowledge you find on the web into your company to increase productivity.
– What’s Yoolink business model?

We are mainly targeting SME. So our business model is really flexible. You can subscribe to the service and pay a monthly fee depending on how many people are going to use the service. It starts at 34€/month for 5 people.

For departments or teams within large companies we offer special plans depending on needs and of course we offer tailor-made developments to ensure the product meets each customers’ needs.
– What is YoolinkPro’s market?

We are developing sales on different markets, the main ones being communication agencies, R&D fuelled companies and public organization. We have customers in Western Europe but France is our main market. Our average customer is a 30-40 person company but we are currently implementing tests in companies way larger than that. We’ll keep you posted!
- Is Enterprise 2.0 an evolution or a revolution? Let me ask the question differently, do you think large companies are ready to switch to Web 2.0, online services like Yoolink?

That’s a good question and I think many people are discussing it in depth: Dion Hinchcliffe or Denis Howlett to name but a few. Personally I don’t think it’s a revolution per se. You can’t get into a company – large or not – by saying everything they are doing is crap and they have to change it all. They were making profits way before you existed. So talking about revolution is not likely to drive up sales.

If you want to work with large groups, I think you have to start with a small team of highly motivated users and then use them as a base to spread within the company. It’s a one-step-at-a-time approach. And I think dropping the buzzwords is also a good idea. Or to put it differently, you solve problems rather than bringing in some fancy technology. People call me back a lot more since I started talking about operations instead of 2.0.
– What is Yoolink’s secret sauce? What makes you better than del.icio.us and Wordpress altogether?

Wordpress is not really a competitor. We are working with people who are using both YP and Wordpress. Wordpress is used to communicate with people outside a company and YoolinkPro is an easy way to share information within the company. Both services can communicate with each other.

As for Delicious there are of course some common features. But it is definitely a service for private users, not for professionals. YoolinkPro offers features a company really needs that private users don’t: privacy, guaranteed quality-of-service, support, storage, etc. When you address companies, you have to meet higher standards.
– What are you most proud of at Yoolink?

Our interface. We definitely have a good interface. We often have a “wow” effect from people during presentation. That’s something we really enjoy and that is critical in users’ adoption of the service.
– What will you be most proud of at Yoolink in 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years? In other words, what will be Yoolink’s next major landmarks?

Our next landmark is a business one: break-even. That’s what we are working toward. Bringing the service to companies, solving their problems, developing new ways to work. I hope my portfolio of happy customers is going to be what I am most proud of in 1 year!
– Do you find easy to get bloggers write about Yoolink Pro?

Well if you want me to be honest I’d say it is one of the hardest things I’ve encountered. From a more general point of view it is really difficult to get visibility as an IT start-up when you’re not US-based. It’s as if being American boosts both your product and your brand…
– Is blogging and twittering most useful when it comes to building a community around the Yoolink brand?

Definitely. We worked a lot on PR and media a couple of month ago. And then we realized that a single twit or blog post from a good analyst was worth more in terms of users than several articles in major on-line newspapers. Besides, with twitter and blogs we can actually exchange with our users and not just publish information…
– How does the Yoolink team look like today? And tomorrow?

We are a small but efficient team. There are 6 people, three of whom develop the service, 1 designs it and 2 develop the Business. Everyone is highly motivated and devoted and the CEO – Sunny Paris, former founder of Weborama, a listed company – is bringing loads of energy and vision to the team. I think the team is going to remain the same for a while, at least until 2010.
– How is Yoolink funded as of today? What are its capital development perspectives?

We raised 500k€ last June from industrials and BA and we have a really low burn-rate. So we don’t plan to raise money in the short term. Once again the focus is on business development.
– On a more personal standpoint, what is your next move?

I have many in mind. The one coming the fastest though is to try running the semi-marathon in less than 1’30!

Many thx Séb.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

So gadgets, by which I mean anything that costs in excess of €200 and more probably in excess of €1000. How do you keep your gadget habit safe? Three things that really-really-really matter:

• Common sense: I don’t need to explain this much, but not leaving expensive stuff unattended is probably rule 101 of common sense. That said, we are all human and common sense will never protect us 100%.
• Backups: I’ve had 2 moments of stress regarding my laptop in the last month. The first was installing Snow Leopard, which didn’t make it very clear whether I was upgrading Leopard or formatting the whole drive. Luckily it was the first, but it was stressful for about 30 min. The second was when I couldn’t find my laptop waking up and had 2 hours at breakfast to reflect on “how important are those pictures/documents/memories really?” Nothing with bits in it is really life-changing in my experience, but still it kind of feels like an extension to our human brain.
• Theft insurance: I currently pay about €200 per year on this, covering about €5000 of property and, at my age at least, it’s a real stress-reducer, especially with things that can easily get lost. You can think logically, you can backup, but having to buy a new laptop out of your own wallet kind of sucks.

So, just a short message to all the gadget lovers out there. Technology rocks, but so does a little insurance. If you have any ideas of your own of how to keep your gadgets safe, feel free to share in the comments.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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

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

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

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

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Your newspaper doesn't show unread count, so why does your feed reader?

This time the debate originate from a blog post at ZDNet. And I think that as long as the title of the post was that RSS readers are becoming meaningless, the post makes some sense. And it’s true, there’s not much innovation in RSS readers these days and some of the design mistakes were listed here. The idea that a user imports a RSS document and reads just it, that’s dead. We’re still far from what’s possible when computers work on feeds.

Another thing this means is that as feeds become more and more part of the web’s infrastructure (see for example Google’s GData), it’s not really interesting for end-users. This in turn means that there just isn’t any money in it. For certain websites, this of course equals to that tech being dead.

One of the blunders in feeds was the dichotomy between RSS and Atom standards. While the former is used today as an umbrella term for feeds in general, it’s really, really inferior to the latter. The problem with Atom is that it came late to the game and while it can be as simple as RSS, but it can also be used for many other things than just blog posts and most RSS readers couldn’t be bothered. This is why the RSS format is dead in the water. The Atom format is much more flexible and is used in many other ways than just one-way polling (see above-mentioned GData for example).

Feeds are here to stay, they are not Web 1.0 stuff, but an integral part of Web 3.0. They just can be so much more than “seeing what’s new”. A site like Techmeme could not exist without feeds. It’s just that we haven’t unlocked the potential. It’s not sexy and it might negatively affect web ad revenues. This is why I think Techmeme shines, just like Friendfeed; they follow the “River of news” approach to new items that was proposed early on. Other readers, like most desktop apps and Google Reader, put new items into an inbox, pretending that each new item has an equal value to us.

Feeds are really immature technology, we’re still unsure about formats and how to consume feeds. And, on top of it all, how could we use this technology the improve the experience of having a discussion on the web. I propose we take a look to ancient computer history.

Before the Internet, on the dial-up BBS services it was a common due to the call costs to download all the new discussions on that box’s forums to your “offline reader” and disconnect. One could then peacefully go through and answer to any threads that were interesting and upload these back to the BBS. But it wasn’t limited to just one board, an offline reader was one inbox for all your discussion on all your BBS boxes. The Usenet newsgroups could be “consumed” using a similar logic. But, today, as Diaz says, our “sources of for reading material are scattered across the Web” and this approach doesn’t work right now. But it could in the future.

I’m not sure that we can stop and concentrate on discussion anymore, because Facebook and Twitter have made “discussions” move so quickly that concentrating on just one is impossible. But if we could go back to those more peaceful times, I’d like to have these “offline readers” back. Of course, they wouldn’t need to be offline today, but real-time.

Discussion on the web is not in good health. It’s scattered and disjointed. I’m not calling for a centralized solution, I’m looking for a standardized solution – something that’s already possible with Atom. We subscribe to blog posts, but we don’t subscribe to the comments. It’s a hassle even if the blog you read happens to use Wordpress’ e-mail subscriptions or Disqus, Intense Debate or some other solution.

There are some major obstacles, one of them being that the income of sites are tied to ad impressions. The other huge problem is that we need to lay down the infrastructure first. Pretty much all sites support the one-way RSS today, but only a handful support Atom Publishing Protocol (which is a different thing from the simple feed itself). Also, none of the forum software, as far as I know, support anything like this. Instead of using the web interface, it would be possible to access the discussions using another, more suitable interface. Most of blogging tools are APP aware, though.

We don’t listen to music by going to individual bands’ websites, we have collected our music to a single source (be it iTunes, Spotify, Winamp or something else). I don’t know about Google Reader’s long term roadmap, but it wouldn’t surprise me if something like participating to comments is there. Yes, you can “like”, “share” and “comment” the posts there, just like in Friendfeed et al., but you can’t participate to the discussion on the original site.

We can rebuild discussions on the web. We have the technology.

Image by FastIcon.com

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

So here’s what I propose.

1. form a group of tech/business enthousiasts (aka regular readers)
2. find a platform (e.g. mail, but I also favour the private wiki where texts can be shared privately and easily edited)
3. share ideas for blog posts and drafts and discuss those internally
4. release, not often, but qualitatively good pieces on technology / business / etc.

Why do I call this the Paul Graham model. Take a look at his essays. Under some of them (e.g. the Ramen profitasble essay), there’s a thank you to people that helped him edit the piece.

I’d like to hear your thoughts. If you’re interested in collaborating, either publicly or anonymously, and/or happen to know a good platform to do this on, leave a comment or send us a mail.

Thanks,
Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

But what I’d really love is: a laptop with a projector built-in.

Apple changed my life when it introduced the in-built camera in the laptop. It changed many people’s lives from all demographics, I imagine, who starting thinking about the possibilities for collaboration through Skype or otherwise.

The one thing that I miss from my laptop (occasionally) is the lack of big screen-size. It doesn’t make a difference for writing or surfing, but it most certainly does for graphic work, media-consumption, or gaming. I would love for it to be super-simple to enlarge the screen, simply by having a type of projector built in.

Of course, I realise that projectors run hot and because of that cannot perhaps be compressed to a very small size. I don’t know what the model no. is for the ASUS depicted above and how it makes it work, but I’d love for this to become a standard.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Retro Programming sucks?

I love this idea, but my no. 1 thought is that the context differed largely for him as a kid and for kids now. 1. there’s peer influences. I know that home schooling is a semi-big deal in the US (tried it once, it sucks) and that a large factor of that is keeping your kid isolated from bad influences.

In the scenario of CreatoComputer2009(TM), you would have to keep the “bad” influence of innovation and gadgetery around kids to a minimum, to allow your kid to use CreatoComp. Because as soon as that kid sees that all the other kids have to work nada to have a working computer, the whole experiment implodes.

Vs. 1978, where everyone had to work at making these wiry beasts, people dared calling a computer, work.

You can take this analogy to anything retro really: cars, movies, Asteroids the game. Compare that to any modern invention and people (except for the nostalgic crowd) quickly turn away.

I agree that to create creative & creating people, you have to confront them with difficult problems to solve at an early age (perhaps). I do think that it needs to be built upon the platform that we are now living with: super-connected graphical interfaces that operate in the digital realm mostly and involve minimal wiring or soldering. I also think that our understanding of education is evolving to the extent that even playing games can be considered a type of learning, which seems fairly compatible with being a child also.

You know there’s only one answer to this problem, right?

Vincent.
(P.S. I know, 2 posts in 2 days. Doesn’t mean that I’m back though, more confused about whether I want to come back. Gotta love the limbo that is August…).

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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

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

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

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vincent out.

(Picture courtesy of thehindubusinessline.com)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

On my last blog, on food & retail, I ended with a conclusion as I don’t like long silences and having people guess what’s going on.

The short answer to that is that I will be taking an extended leave of writing for Tech IT Easy as I currently have other professional and private matters to focus on. My definition of extended leave is not that I will no longer write, just that I will write when there’s time and inspiration, but no longer on a daily schedule.

I still very much love to put my thoughts to paper, so expect a post whenever the mood hits me. For the rest, I don’t speak for anyone else on Tech IT Easy, all of whom are busy as well, and I sincerely hope that they too will find it within themselves to keep you (and me) updated on their thought progression when they find the time.

Vincent out

I’d say, thanks for all the fish, but instead I’ll leave you with the most amazing video of fish I’ve ever seen.

Kuroshio Sea – 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world – (song is Please don’t go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

“When everyone saw mobile telephony as a professional service, Nokia’s leadership saw mobile phones as consumer – almost fashion – products. Rather than predict five or ten percent maximum penetration rate, Nokia quickly imagined everyone in the world having one – or why not several? – mobile phones for personal as well as professional use.” (page 3)

“[On the importance of strategic insight] Some insight may result from intense personal awareness and conviction, such as Pekka Ala-Pieitilä at Nokia being an avid Mac user and seeing the potential for Nokia to turn mobile phones into mass market consumer goods the way Apple was doing for personal computers.” (page 21)

One has to wonder why this Mac-love was only visible in the strategic thinking while Nokia’s Mac-support (PC Suite and other things) has been abysmal throughout the years.

So, what has changed so dramatically that blogs and business newspapers are declaring doom on Nokia? First of all, Nokia’s DNA changed the moment the became #1 mobile phone manufacturer in the world. Before that they were a challenger, trying out

The Nokia 1100, the best selling consumer electronics device in the world

different things and taking risks. But now they are playing defensive, trying to maintain their market share. According to Kosonen, Nokia is trying to counter this by being “strategically agile”.

But it isn’t just that. The backwaters of mobile innovation, USA, suddenly became relevant. I would argue that this is mostly due to Blackberry and iPhone and the huge domestic market. Also, one has to remember that the US is overpresented on the internet, so once the web broke through to mobile devices and Apple started to market the idea of software apps on mobile devices, things seemed to change a bit. Nokia has never been strong in the US, or for that matter in any market where consumers do not choose their own phones and where Nokia has never been able to work with operators. That’s probably the only thing that has been constant.

Couple of weeks ago yet another analyst group forecasted how Apple could pass Nokia in as soon as 2011. Now, this fantasy was based on how iPod users would convert to iPhone users and how Apple should launch low-cost iPhones (especially to developing countries) and sell customized ringtones and overall act in a non-Apple way (and eerily like Nokia). And yet, we’re still talking about smart phones which so far represent a tiny minority of total mobile market.

Sure, Nokia needs to get its act together, especially on the services front, but it’s too early to say that they’re doomed. Especially when you consider that Nokia is pretty strong in the developing countries. My prediction is that it’s not Nokia that will be irrelevant in the mobile phone market in the future, but the US market ’s importance will fade and it is the mobile players that win elsewhere that continue to matter. The sheer size of mobile phone markets in Africa just boggles the mind.

In the new world of the mobile web, Nokia’s biggest problem is their own legacy, something that slowed Ericsson and Motorola down when Nokia was decided to bring mobile phones to the masses. Apple, on the other hand has shown that it can take advantage of market discontinuities in many different markets where traditional barriers to entry are crumbling down.

“For decades, the dominant players were EMI and RCA, and more recently Sony Music, which had built up the assets and capabilities … In today’s digital world, however, companies like Apple, which have none of the traditional music industry capabilities, are becoming leading players.”

In summary, it’s all about bringing technology to the masses. Apple did that for smartphones, but Nokia, inspired by Apple’s success bringing personal computing to masses, did and continues to do that for mobile phones. It’s just Nokia struggles with the US and smartphones for the rest of us. In Fast Strategy, Cisco’s Corporate Vice President Strategic Allainces, Steve Steinhilber is quoted to have said “…five years ago could Nokia really have expected Apple to be the main threat to their high end phone business?”

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2010 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.