BusinessQuests - tailored advice and facilitation for business progress

Dropbox startup lessons learned

The presentation in this video is a really interesting account of how Dropbox grew to become an awesome product for millions of people around the globe. It's very good inspiration.

Watch live video from Startup Lessons Learned on Justin.tv

"2.0" community's stars carbon emissions via the social web

Experimentation is perhaps the most important attitude for understanding the ever changing landscape of a world constantly reshaped by infotech. From continuous experimentation hopefully comes some experience which can be used for execution of plans; we've got the 3Es of success and the cycle goes on and on.

In this post I'd like to share some thoughts about an experiment that started like all of BusinessQuests' experiments: with a weird question. Today's weird question: is there a way to find out how much carbon dioxide the "2.0" crowd of thinkers and star players is generating just by traveling the world to attend conferences, make speeches, shake hands and send those lovely "tweets" about the weather in Paris or the taste of vodka in Moscow?

Keeping copyright sound

That's a worthy cause. Copyright extension is perfectly useless for people who create new stuff and only a means to securing the dominance of organizations that are increasingly made irrelevant by the radical changes in the media distribution landscape. We don't need our legislators spending time, energy and money on building perpetual streams of income for antiquated forms of content usage. Perhaps they'd be much better inspired to consider enforcing Creative Commons as the official copyright management system.

Watch this and sign the petition on the site of Sound Copyright.

Becky Hogge: Speech at Sound Copyright conference in the EU Parliament 27.01.09 from Open Rights Group on Vimeo

Widenoise just released by WideTag

Even the longest journey starts with the first step… As WideTag releases WideNoise I feel this is the best way to describe the event because WideTag’s stated destination is to be a leading player when the Internet of Things becomes reality.

As WideTag’s CTO often says, there is a still a hell of a lot of stuff missing from the real world for the Internet of Things to happen, but one ought to start with what we’ve got, include new stuff that is coming up and build whatever is missing.

WideNoise, designed by a beautiful team released yesterday as an iPhone application that allows you to socially share data about the noise level at a specific location, is very much the result of this very pragmatic approach: use an existing networked device that has at least one sensor embedded to offer a first application of a “spime”. What’s a spime? It’s a device capable of recording and transmitting location coordinates as well as information about its immediate surrounding, e.g. temperature, carbon dioxide concentration… Now, spimes are likely to play a prominent role in the Internet of Things. Although it’s quite geeky as a concept (if you’re interested read this), there are three reasons why it’s noteworthy:

1. spimes will be (already are) all over the place in a matter of a few years using technologies (RFID, GSM, GPRS, GPS, GoogleMaps…) that only need assembling
2. with the environmental crisis we need to measure our “physical” world in order to make smarter (micro-)decisions from whether to use a car to how to manage the powergrid dynamically
3. the flow of data that will be captured will in part BELONG TO YOU so you don’t want it taken from you without your consent or in a way that is so proprietary you can’t control it, which is one of the reasons why WideTag seeks to make things open, something it started doing with OpenSpime, an initiative aimed at offering open protocols and technologies to the world for building and operating the spimes of the future

In fact, Widenoise is also a bridge between the “pure vision” of the Internet of Things (where objects are supposed to exchange information and form self-configuring networks for relaying the data) and today’s reality of applied technology becoming increasingly “social” and hybrid in that it mixes hardware, software and people to create value for participants. So has WideTag managed to make noise social as a very nice post of this morning claims?

SaaS not a panacea

Over the past year or so, I came across a number of young and less young entrepreneurs who seemed completely infatuated with the concepts revolving around or arguing for a "software as a service" (SaaS) model, as though SaaS would solve all of their business challenges in a miraculous way.

So you thought all you had to do was offer software online and that's an easy way to remove all friction, increase your profitability by having customers do all or part of the work and never have to go visit users? Many people I meet seem to be under the charm of the SaaS fad. Many see it as an enabler for them to be a viable business. While there are merits to SaaS, its benefits are exagerated and in some cases the invocation of SaaS comes at the expense of rigorous business design.

So here's my take:

1. SaaS is not a panacea that will address all the issues revolving around your business model, your pricing, your distribution and your support to real customers
2. as a business buyer you'd better assess carefully how much of your stuff you actually want to entrust to online resources whose viability is yet to be demonstrated and which can be discontinued or frozen without notice (see Google's recent announcements, e.g. on Jaiku or their Notebook). Actually the consequence of this is that you do need trustworthy and financially sound partners who operate such tools like for example Salesforce with AppExchange
3. if you're going down the SaaS path as a business (which makes a lot of sense in many cases), you're likely to need a hybrid approach with at least some of the functionality residing on the user's machine, very much like Evernote does, and that has to be factored into your model because you're likely not going to get away with the assumption that you won't need any support or releases of updates to end users...etc.
4. irrespective of the form of implementation of your idea, you still need to put yourself in the shoes of your customers, to understand their needs, think as they think, feel as they feel, do as they do and be compassionnate about their current frustrations to be able to design a better experience. SaaS is not necessarily your answer and in any event, if you seriously design your customer experience, you'll have to take into account new kinds of needs such as online training, online support, remote sales...etc
5. legal issues are often disregarded in a very strange manifestation of carelessness: if you offer or use a SaaS solution, you do need to care about the jurisdiction and the legal constraints pertaining to data ownership, privacy, copyright, service level, authorised usage...etc. And in fact legal matters could be a serious friction in our sales efforts especially if you're targeting industries that have a tradition of discretion, secrecy and prudence like private banks, retail banks, investment banks, fiduciary and domiciliation companies, family offices, accounting firms, law firms...etc.

SaaS is all fine and good. Permanent beta is great. The network becoming the computer is brilliant. All the new stuff going on in the field of computing services is just very exciting. However none of it is panacea and it is by no means a license not to design, structure and manage your business in a careful and diligent manner. There's no free lunch.

As an aside, this latest wave makes me feel the passage of time given that this is my first direct personal experience of an old concept making a comeback under a different name: a few years ago the fad was called Service Bureau, ASP (for application service provider), grid computing and Software On-Demand (with Salesforce, Google Apps, Amazon and and IBM leading the way). Interestingly, the big guys are still around with relevant offerings irrespective of the way they're presented (ASP, On-Demand, SaaS or the next fashionable acronym).

Awesome innovation at WideTag and sr labs

One thing is certain: my current trip to Milan is most interesting. That's mainly because I had working sessions and discussions with three exceptional persons, the founders of WideTag, Leandro Agrò (blog - profile - a conference he co-founded - idearium and leading designed at sr labs until a couple of years back), Roberto Ostinelli (profile - a multi-talented individual who's a beautiful artist as well as an accomplished technologist and business person) and David Orban (blog - profile). The achievements of that little bunch of determined persons have been very significant indeed over the course of the past 10 months and they create a foundation on which to create more.
As a coincidence of sorts I also got a great opportunity to learn about a fascinating Italian company called sr labs and to actually try their amazing i-able product which makes it possible to control and command a computer solely with one's eyes. It's quite an extraordinary experience because of the incredible precision of the device, its ease of use and the speed at which one gets acquainted with the way the product works. Aside from obvious applications to help disabled people access and control a computer, there is a range of other fields in which the eye tracking technology could be applied. Definitely worth a closer look...   

Lego Mindstorms at Ad:Tech

Just attended a splendid presentation of the way Lego has been actively seeking to and succeeding in involving passionate users in the life of the Mindstorms product line. Lego's people noticed that Mindstorms was generating a lot of passionate contributions and involvement by the community of users, many of whom were absolutely not kids but male adults. The product seems to have been outrageously successful in the Silicon Valley, where the local tech enthusiasts seem to be the typical customers. The product was being hacked and transformed in all sorts of ways... So Lego's people decided to really engage in a very intense interaction with their customers and to let them influence the life of the product to a very large degree. They set a few very simple rules to manage the community of carefully screened engaged users: respect, positive contribution and giving Lego a veto right on how the product would evolve... Today, it's one of the best known examples of how powerful a genuine engagement with customers can be to drive buzz, word of mouth and basically to make it possible for a lovemark to emerge. There's even the case of famous author Chris Anderson who went on to build a drone using a Mindstorms NXT control module...
Here's a nice little video about Mindstorms:

(Re)thinking your business: where psychology meets business

Over the past couple of weeks I have been involved in work to help customers approach their business from a fresh perspective and in discussions with a friend who sees innovation opportunities in the way a traditional business is operated right now in Europe. There are challenges and perils in (re)thinking a business both for insiders and for outsiders, and these are not the "usual suspects" (strategy, marketing, sales, finance...) as the next frontier of business performance seems to be what is going on inside our psyche.

In a recent project, I noticed how difficult it is for people who have been running a business for a long time to step back and reconsider their fundamental assumptions about the business; for me as a facilitator it takes a lot of focus just to create an environment in which it is safe to question some of the fundamentals of a business, i.e. precisely what makes a business owner feel secure in a company that may not be an explosive success but that does manage to generate fairly decent profits. Helping someone approach their business from a fresh perspective is much more a psychological than a business endeavor: it's about guiding an entrepreneur with all his hopes, his dreams, his fears, his  ego, his desire to be loved / admired / accepted and his representations of complex equivalents of specific values... That's quite a fascinating job to perform and definitely one that completely confirms my strong belief that the next frontier of business performance lies in the proper management of people and of their potential.
At the same time, in very stark contrast, outsiders who see an opportunity to do things differently in established industries seem to be able to access relevant statistical data supporting their views very rapidly indeed. Thus, asymmetry of  information, one of the most important historical barriers to new entrants, seems to be rapidly collapsing as content of good-enough quality is made accessible in the open environment of the Internet. This has profound implications on the impact of the free flow of knowledge on the intensity of competition and on business strategy. People who run their businesses according to the good old methods of scientific labor organization and fail to go one step beyond to take the information age into account, will slowly but very surely become extinct. I think this is also supported by Mavericks at Work, a book I am currently listening when I'm in my car. Again, the disruptive potential is no longer prevented from expressing itself simply because mere access to information is impossible. And that disruptive potential becomes effective disruption when actual people manage to overcome their internal barriers and limitations to make a credible commitment to a fresh vision of an entire industry and lead the way. Again, the endeavor is largely a matter of psychology.
In a way, the Information Age may be characterized by the disappearance of "impossibilities" and objective barriers to entry (at least those based on mere access to information) that could be analyzed and almost quantified. And perhaps that is precisely what reveals the next frontier of business performance: man's internal barriers and limitations, which require a peculiar mix of skills to be removed or transformed into creative energy. A mix of skills applied to help individuals evolve, express and achieve goals and find meaning in a holistic approach to the individual person whose life requires her to play many different and increasingly interrelated social roles.

Jamendo picking-up speed

Jamendo recently announced having over 2000 albums online and their website is more and more active with the number of members growing fast and volumes of file sharing exploding. Today they announced a revenue sharing scheme thus starting the roll-out of a business model that is suitable both for artists who wish to keep offering their music free of charge and for bands who intend to use Jamendo as a direct distribution community-enabled platform. For details, take a look at the press release below.
Download pr_jamendo_rs_en.pdf

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.

Le Web 3 - Notes from N. Zenström's interview

Loic Le Meur's interview of Niklas Zenström was a very interesting way to start the conference. The perspectives of this serial entrepreneur are worth listening to. If you are interested in notes, they can be found here in a format generated by Freemind, the cool open-source mind mapping tool I am using. I found Zenström's short comments about his plans for TV ("it's supposed to be stealth" as he said) particularly interesting... What happens when the best aspects of the Internet are combined with the stuff people like about TV? I bet his next venture will be explosive... again.

Wanna work together?

This is the latest video campaign from Creative Commons and I think it does a great job at explaining what Creative Commons is all about and the good reasons why CC is a fantastic enabler for anyone interested in freedom, fair use, knowledge sharing, content reuse and unbridled creativity. It takes only 3 minutes. Enjoy.

Big labels are f*cked, and DRM is dead

Got this article from the CEO of Jamendo who never thought DRM was a viable way to proceed in this industry. Actually, he walks the talk to the point of building the business model of his company in a way that does not require any DRM and that focuses entirely on the participants in the ecosystem of the music industry.

My humble opinion is that creating artificial scarcity has seldom been successful in economic history at least in the long run. The media & entertainment industry had better reinvent its model instead of trying to persuade everyone that piracy is the reason why people buy less CDs and to coerce people into paying the outrageous margins of an obsolete value chain that comprises many unnecessary intermediaries. The point of the matter is that we consumers demand:

1. usability in the form of easy access to content through open technologies making it possible to transmit and reuse content in a fair way (managed within the framework defined by Creative Commons)
2. convenience in the form of not having to toy around complicated rights management stuff whenever we want to simply listen to music. That means that we want to maintain at least the same degree of flexibility with digital content as we have with off-line stuff (e.g. if I can lend my collection of CDs to a friend, I don't see why that is so cumbersome to achieve with DRM protected material)
3. seamless usage of content across our various devices because nobody understands why for example some protected CDs will not play in a car audio player...

for a reasonable price that compensates the artist and those adding value to the industry.

And as a matter of fact, the distinction between producers and consumers of musical content is fading away; this is the age of the prosumer in music too... Alvin Toffler was right in his analyses in the Third Wave and in Powershift.

== Go read the article in The Register
Few people know the music industry better than Peter Jenner. Pink Floyd's first manager. Jenner has also looked after T.Rex, The Clash, Ian Dury, Disposable Heroes and Billy Bragg - who he manages today. He's also secretary general of the International Music Managers Forum. And he doesn't pull his punches.

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