Business Quests in the Information Age

Wishes for 2007

I wish you and your loved ones a happy, creative, funny, exciting, beautiful 2007 full of joy, laughter, warm moments with friends, great business, love, passion, commitment, co-creation and basically everything you wish for yourself that is also in harmony with the universe.

New Fonero on the block

I just configured my FONERA and will be trying out FON in the coming couple of months. Configuration was super smooth and their marketing is really cool. Hope the service turns out to be as valuable as the whole concept is sexy.

Season's greetings

Selfish business?

Not too productive these days because of an annoying flu, I've been using some of my time to look for interesting sources of inspiration and I think someone like Richard Dawkins is such a source. A long time ago he took part to a TV program aimed at correcting the misinterpretation of the thesis behind his book Selfish Gene. In that TV broadcast Dr Dawkins discusses evolution theory, game theory and the value of cooperative strategies, showing how fundamentally flawed "survival of the fittest" is and how incorrect a statement "nice guys finish last" can be. It seems like an interesting follow-up to yesterday's quote of the day and good food for thought at a time of the year when many of us are thinking about their strategy for the coming year.

Quote of the day

"It is our earth, not yours or mine or his.  We are meant to live on it, helping each other, not destroying each other.     " - J. Krishnamurti

Today's quote is by one of my favorite authors and I think it is relevant to superb business quests. From those I had the opportunity to watch closely, I conclude that the forces of creation and meaningful cooperation are far more intense than those of destruction and useless competition.

Telcos: is being an incumbent the shortest path to trouble?

The launch of Jajah in 2006 is probably one of those extremely interesting events in an industry. These days, they seem to be pursuing an objective of acquiring more share of market and consumer attention with their offer for free calls for Christmas. Since I now have some data to crunch on how Jajah's changed my pattern of consumption, I thought it interesting to do the analysis. My conclusions may not be statistically significant, but I guess they will give you more reasons to consider Jajah very seriously.

I downloaded data from Jajah (they have this neat service of delivering your traffic in Excel sheets) and also accessed my purchases of Skype Out credits.

Let's start with my Jajah consumption data for February through November 2006:

• my monthly budget is in the region of 8 €
• I am placing about 14 calls a month using Jajah
• the average cost per call was in the region of 0.6 €

During the same period, I continued using Skype a lot for computer to computer calls or for conferences with several people all on Skype and I still bought some credit on Skype although (much )less than before: until now my purchases of Skype Out credits for 2006 are 55 € and I still have about 7 € on my account valid till June 2007, while in 2005 I purchased Skype Out credits worth 85 € and in 2004 credits worth 75 €. So I guess there's been a transfer of part of  my Skype VoIP budget to Jajah, while my overall VoIP budget went up 62% in 2006, with the share of VoIP in my consumption of telco services being over 250% bigger in 2006 than in 2005.

Now making a rough analysis of my yearly budget in connectivity services (telco + ISP, not GSM because I don't have access to my consumption data right now, but I know I dramatically reduced my roaming traffic thanks to Jajah and Skype), I notice the following interesting points:

• while my consumption of connectivity services and the time I spend online has increased, my yearly budget is now half what it was in 2004
• the share of my budget that goes to my ISP increased because my ISP is now also offering VoIP telephony and a fixed budget for domestic calls after 18:00
• the share of my budget that goes to Skype grew much less in 2006 (+12%) than it did in 2005 (+60%)
• I spent 50% more on Jajah than I did on Skype, which is not that bad for a service that got notice of and tried only in February

So I guess that this confirms many of the trends professionals of the telco business are seeing on the market andit should be good news for Jajah and Skype. It does confirm Jajah's claim of being a killer of roaming and I think this space is interesting to watch because the nature of impacts that the telco industry is going through with the wave of adoption of disruptive web tools is likely to be valid in other industries as well. By nature of impacts I mean that the sources of value are changing from "the privilege of access" to "the imperative of customer experience". Access is no longer the issue; customer experience is more than ever, which makes product and service design all the more essential.
That makes people even more important because they represent competencies that ultimately define the performance of a business. And I think that's quite a quest in business.

Are you person of the year?

Now, that's quite an acknowledgment, coming from traditional media: the web  has shifted the balance of influence it seems, with people taking more power in  their own hands. Mass media is being transformed,   perhaps becoming the media of the masses as claimed over a year ago by Joel de Rosnay. It's quite clear that things are changing and no longer will consumption of information be as it used to be in the early days of mass media. In the recent conference Le Web 3, I was impressed when a top French journalist (Jean-Pierre Elkabach) failed to take control of the interview of one of the French presidential candidate as the organizers gave the floor for questions to the bloggers first. That would have been impossible only a few years back.
This space is getting extremely interesting and as a blogger and tech enthusiast I can only rejoice at the fact that the web is finally recognized as a power to be reckoned with. Also particularly pleased that the reality of the Information Age is made so clear.

Any lessons to be taken or has blogging taken a hit?

"Today, you need transparency and decency to run a business."
Shimon Peres, 12-DEC-2006

A conference also needs transparency and decency. Having some ground rules looks like a good idea. It would probably help achieve a higher level of quality than that reached at Le Web 3. While very unhappy with the wave of Loic-bashing that took place (I don't know the man, but I feel there is a distinction to be made between a person and what that person does), my choice is to examine what happened and try to derive a couple of useful conclusions:

1. about organizing a conference I tend to agree with most of the ground rules proposed by Tom Morris and also believe ground rules themselves should be questioned on a regular basis;
2. about the wisdom of crowds, I think this week shows us that crowds can be as furiously crazy as they can be "wise". Collective intelligence does not happen automatically simply because one connects individuals and grants them unprecedented freedom of expression: it takes respect and awareness, both of which ought to start within each one of us. How can I make an intelligent and useful contribution when I don't respect myself and others? How can that contribution be thoughtful when I am not aware that what is speaking is an unbridled ego?
3. about crisis management, silence is not an option as nicely shown here;
4. about feedback, it ought to be adequately focused, specific, balanced and solution oriented.
   • Adequately focused means that it does have a clear objective (e.g. "identify strength and weaknesses of a conference" or "improve the way a conference brings value to participants") and not be all over the place sometimes becoming mob lynching  (do I need to provide examples here?);
   • Specific means that feedback is at its best when it focuses on identifiable events, times and effects (e.g. "Sarkozy's speech was a mistake because it did not bring anything useful to the conference and wasted most people's time") rather than being unfocused and general (e.g. "Le Web 3 sucks" - something I read somewhere but do not believe);
   • Balanced means that it contain both points that were particularly good (e.g. "managing to bring together 1000 people from 37 countries was a major achievement") and points that can be improved (e.g. "the subjects discussed could have been better framed and the panels could have been better managed to help derive useful conclusions about issues");
   • Solution oriented means that the ultimate objective of feedback is to improve something or help someone, not to exclude and destroy something or someone, which means that the content of feedback ought to help us generate possible solutions almost immediately (e.g. "when it became obvious the schedule could not be kept I felt unhappy with the presenters claiming we would still be able to go through the schedule by simply eliminating coffee breaks" - drives immediately possible solutions like "amend schedule" and "communicate decently");

Choosing sides and fighting from the trenches is probably not the point and I find it rather impressing that this seems to be the game in many cases. In my experience, when that happens it means that we have probably lost track of the objective, the means are becoming an end, a system becomes a caricature of itself (and ends up collapsing) and decency, clarity and transparency are lost. Can that be avoided or has blogging taken a major hit?

Exciting workshops ahead

Hopefully something creative and positive will come out of the whole Le Web 3 issue. I cannot believe how this matter seems to have become topic #1 on Technorati these days... Anyway, I am now heading off to lovely Luxembourg where I have a few interesting workshops to run and I am particularly happy since I will be using a couple of very effective tools like for example De Bono's hats method.

Web conference hacked: what's next?

The amount of criticism about the way Le Web 3 conference was high-jacked by politicians is stunning. A distinction needs to be made between issues and individuals. I have certainly made quite a few mistakes in this life and will not cast a stone at any one individual; Loic Le Meur has been criticized as a person and in terms of his competence for running a conference like this one. I am not sure that's the point. Actually, I do think we need to distinguish between individuals (with their limitations and personal challenges) and issues.
Perhaps what happened is an opportunity for the community of bloggers to play the game of democracy, "the right to make mistakes and the obligation to correct them" as Shimon Peres said. After all, don't we all carry part of the responsibility for letting such an event in the hands of one, when our true aspiration is one of a peer-to-peer distributed world in which individuals can freely participate? In the economy when markets work it is because no single participant can skew the process. So, acknowledging the following facts:

1. there must be a reason why 1000 people from 37 countries gathered in Paris these two days
2. humans need to meet in person aside from having a presence on the web
3. the community of people involved in collaborative, distributed, social processes is interested in
   • finding out new applications and services,
   • understanding how existing applications affect real life
   • finding their role in the world
   • ...
4. "the world is pregnant  with a new age" and this community stands to play a role to transform old ways
5. as the influence of the community of free agents / free participants grows, established players will try to seize the dynamics of the process to their own benefit (see how Elkabach from Europe 1 jumped on the scene to take control of the interview of one of the French politicians on stage - luckily the facilitator that was translation stopped him and took questions from the audience)

perhaps the community of bloggers ought to put together a dynamic self-organizing global forum:

• built around the essential principles of the Internet (peer-to-peer, distributed, never relying on any one node, inclusive, self-organizing, with minimal central infrastructure used to help route packets, free as in free enterprise, sometimes free as in free beer, open...)
• organized in streams (and perhaps politics should have a stream of its own with rules for politicians to be there on equal terms with participants), with topics emerging dynamically instead of being built as an agenda of items structured as "Is XYZ dead?" (where XYZ is some familiar topic of the traditional world: media, politics, television, bananas...)
• focused on objectives (one of which could be a "better world" initiative if the objective emerges from the community of bloggers) to be updated on a regular basis
• bridging the gap between technologies and applications in this space
• providing opportunities for people to meet and co-create
• ...