Google Glass has been very big on the news since 2012 and recently we've even seen venture capitalists claiming that its advent would create a new space for investment in start-ups. It's worth hearing how Sergey Brin presents that initiative and then consider things carefully from the standpoint of human behavior, not technology.
CrowdPhoto.net emerged in my market watch as an interesting initiative, not only because it exemplifies the potential of crowdsourcing, but also because it was built in a weekend using Amazon Web Services (AWS).
CrowdPhoto is a bit like an Aardvark service for pictures: people request a specific picture like "A pink penguinin North Pole" and specify how much they're willing to spend to get their hands on the picture; other people can submit materials in response to the request and get paid for the picture(s) they provided. I'm not too clear whether there is a reward sharing or other mechanism in case many people provide content on the same request, but that's the concept in substance. The prototype is remarkable in a few ways:
Crowdphoto makes me think of the world described by David Brin in his book Earth, where privacy gets overtaken by low-cost mass-adopted high-tech surveillance, communications and database tools that people carry around propelling the planet into an era of complete social transparency. Each person who freely contributes content on the web has a level of authority relative to the topics they are covering and is therefore more or less influential.
Whether it's going to fly or not as an economically profitable operation is quite another story and to a large extent not a very relevant one. The sheer fact that people have the capability to go from concept to deployed prototype in just a weekend thanks to infrastructure as a service is truly amazing and has far-reaching implications for entire categories of businesses that can now be tested fast and in a flexible way. I just wonder what was the sum total of effort and money invested in preparing the weekend and in building the prototype.
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.
Just read a piece about where Google might be in ten years and considering the success of Gmail between 2004 and now, the author might just be right even though his forecasts may seem wild at times (e.g. Android prevailing in the mobile OS wars). That gives me an opportunity to comment and discuss a bit further Google's amazing ability to execute beautifully a bold strategy of massive innovation to deliver on an audacious vision to organize the world's information.
Interestingly Devinda Hardawar (@devindra on Twitter), the post's author, reminds us that Gmail was launched only in 2004. Few people can argue it's gaining traction in the segment of people who use predominantly email in SaaS mode and even making inroads into the segment of more traditional users who are stuck with legacy solutions like Outlook Express. Gmail grew 43% in 2008 and took #3 spot in August leaving AOL behind. It's gaining momentum and is probably a good indication of what Google can do in terms of winning market share with a patient approach that it can afford thanks to its advertising revenues.
Furthermore Devindra makes a couple of very powerful statements regarding Google Wave, stating his belief that it's much more important than it may seem on the surface and could well revolutionize the way knowledge work gets done. In keeping with a recent post on this blog, I very much agree with him and do intend to spend more time testing Wave, not dismiss it as Scoble has done, foolishly in my opinion.
Google ability to consistently pursue specific targets is an amazing characteristic of the company. They've been able to roll out a number of major services over the past decade accomplishing key strategic targets with each of them:
Arguably, there's more and there are other ways of viewing what Google is doing, but in every case you'll find great consistency and clarity of purpose in strategy execution.
Looking at the string of their acquisitions over the past decade (another way to assess strategy execution), the consistency of purpose is obvious and their ability to integrate acquired companies and technologies is impressive. Some people tend to focus too much on plays that did not turn out to be successful and fail to see the bigger picture: Google successfully embeds 80% of its acquisitions in the Google system, when the market average is much much lower (I'd say 20% based on the business news I've followed for the past 20 years).
Significant and successful moves included:
Google is recorded as having purchased 59 companies for a total amount that is hard to assess but likely stands in the region of 15-18 billion USD. The track record of acquisitions can in no way be considered as bad. In fact I know only of one company that is better: Cisco. Both Google and Cisco are hugely analytical players, with extra smart employees on board, giving huge attention to recruitment and equally huge attention to acquisitions.
Another thing worth mentioning is Google's creation of an arm dedicated to early stage investments, which is called Google Ventures, a fund that started this year with 100 million USD. Google Ventures has made a couple of very smart bets in clean-tech with smart grid technology (Silver Spring Networks) and biotechnology (Adimab)...
The launch of Google Wave has generated various reviews and left many with a feeling of perplexity or outright rejection because what they saw seemed so little compared to what had been promised (a lesson for every marketer out there IMO). In fact people who've accessed the platform reported several important issues summarized here.
However GoogleWave is indeed completely revolutionary and could well transform the way we deal with information, interactions, collaboration and value creation... perhaps even transactions some day.
This wiki (kindly provided on Wave by my friend David Dossot) is proof of the revolutionary aspect of Wave as it deals with bots, each of which has a special function within the Wave ecosystem allowing it to connect and interact with other formats, platforms, logical spaces, communities and online properties. What's still very much unclear in what I've read so far (not nearly enough) is the security model and the degree to which bots can be configured with standard behaviors but if secure and with extensive ability to configure and string together (with some of these objects providing flexibility analogous to Yahoo Pipes), then Wave could well be the equivalent of the "one ring to rule them all" and probably also "an offer we can't refuse" as the Godfather would say.
On the even more interesting side of things, once adopted Wave becomes a real Complex Adaptive System with a greater potential for structure emergence than the open web because of the existence of rules and constraints that are neither too many (as in collaborative systems like blueKiwi or SharePoint) nor too few (as in the open web). The concept of wave being so open and so flexible provides for an ideal combination of rules and flexibility, which is necessary for CAS dynamics to really operate.
Now this is a first impression and I have not tested this stuff a lot, but if it is what I understand it to be and if it becomes what I imagine it can become, then this thing is not simply big, it's huge.
"The wise learn from other people's mistakes and fools from their own." So goes an ancient proverb that some say was first written in Aramaic. As far as I'm concerned, I have been more often a fool than a wise person. That may be because I prefer experimentation to inertia, feeling that Randy Pausch was so right when he said in the Last Lecture that in life "experience is what you get when you you didn't get what you wanted". This post is about experience sharing and it was prompted by a visit to Genaro Bardy's recent post on a presentation made by Kevin Rose.
Few things are more valuable for entrepreneurs and venture investors than getting the account of some real-life experience, whether it speaks of "success" or "failure" is completely irrelevant so long as the content is genuine and the analysis honest. When speaking to customers during workshops, trainings or coaching sessions I often encourage them to examine cases of other entrepreneurs they might know. I also advise them to cut through the crap of accounts entrepreneurial successes and failures:
In this post, I'd like to comment a bit further on this matter of sharing experience and use a presentation made by Kevin Rose as an example of the practice of honest and factual sharing of experience gained through different entrepreneurial initiatives.
Accounts of how entrepreneurial ventures unfolded are interesting insofar as they allow us to see how a given entrepreneur acted, both successfully and unsuccessfully, through expected results and unexpected twists and turns of the economy, in the context of a specific industry.
In such accounts there are elements that are very peculiar to the industry or to the entrepreneur and could not possibly be replicated. For example, Steve Jobs has very peculiar ways of doing things and much of his ways cannot be replicated even if we try to immerse ourselves Inside Steve's Brain (very interesting book) and in the business of social marketing there are practices that work very well but could not possibly be applied to financial services where regulatory constraints set clear limits on the nature of open community driven interactions. On the other hand, entrepreneurs' account offer elements that can be replicated and can be used in other contexts, in other industries, by different people. Very often these elements are good practices, activities, initiatives and sets of assumptions about the business. For example, Jamendo's founders could teach volumes about their initial assumption that open sharing of content under Creative Commons licensing would pave the way for new forms of distribution of and interaction on music. Their input would be valid for other forms of content and could be used to examine the impact of social media on traditional media or to carry out an analysis of the current war between Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, Google and Bing.
One great example of such account is Kevin Rose's presentation in which he shares his experience of practices that worked well at Digg, Twitter or WeFollow. His low key approach is great as he is giving us a perspective on what worked and what did not, to tell us how to go with the flow and listen to users in shaping a service and to honestly state he is on constant experimentation. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect in Kevin Rose's presentation lies in his relentless drive to speak of practice and not to preach for a theory or abstract construct. Practices can be replicated elsewhere giving due consideration to the peculiar aspects of a given business or industry.
Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose
View more presentations from Carsonified Team.
A mini-conference about the basics of how to use search marketing to develop the business was organized today at Technoport with eTeamsys and BusinessQuests presenting.
Mike Mitchell, eTeamsys' CEO, spoke about the challenges and the major trends affecting search marketing, with a highlight on e-reputation. When speaking about e-reputation he showed how search results about Clearstream are currently affected by a high-profile trial that took place in France recently and by video content making a number of negative claims about the Luxembourg-based player in securities clearing & settlement. By contrast, Mike showed how search results about Euroclear were consistent with a more desirable image for such a player. That was pretty interesting and I certainly recommend you look at the slides with evidence of the difference between the search results of these two players. Now you might ask what the impact may be since these are B2B players and their business is unlikely to be affected by that kind of results as industry insiders will filter out the noise. Well, it may well affect the ability of the organization to recruit talent (remember how people became uncomfortable saying they were working for Philip Morris a few years ago or how people working for virtually bankrupt investment banks were being very discreet about that last year?). And since there is a war for talent and these organizations do need good IT people, there may be an impact. At any rate I'm not sure you want your brand to be tarnished even if that can boost your PageRank, right?
I spoke for BusinessQuests to highlight:
The two sets of slides are to be found below.
A mini-conference about the basics of how to use search marketing to develop the business was organized today at Technoport with eTeamsys and BusinessQuests presenting.
Mike Mitchell, eTeamsys' CEO, spoke about the challenges and the major trends affecting search marketing, with a highlight on e-reputation. When speaking about e-reputation he showed how search results about Clearstream are currently affected by a high-profile trial that took place in France recently and by video content making a number of negative claims about the Luxembourg-based player in securities clearing & settlement. By contrast, Mike showed how search results about Euroclear were consistent with a more desirable image for such a player. That was pretty interesting and I certainly recommend you look at the slides with evidence of the difference between the search results of these two players. Now you might ask what the impact may be since these are B2B players and their business is unlikely to be affected by that kind of results as industry insiders will filter out the noise. Well, it may well affect the ability of the organization to recruit talent (remember how people became uncomfortable saying they were working for Philip Morris a few years ago or how people working for virtually bankrupt investment banks were being very discreet about that last year?). And since there is a war for talent and these organizations do need good IT people, there may be an impact. At any rate I'm not sure you want your brand to be tarnished even if that can boost your PageRank, right?
I spoke for BusinessQuests to highlight:
The two sets of slides are to be found below.
This is an excellent piece of communication by BooneOakley a marketing agency (whose site homepage is actually this YouTube video - quite radical and why not after all?) that is very successful in:
I just read this excellent report on the status of innovation in the US (link kindly provided by the excellent Leeander) and I find it just amazing that the authors show a great deal of analytical rigor both in assessing the past and suggesting ways for the future in the form of a public private partnership. The article is long but very well worth your time.
With this kind of approach I see the US going back to the very top of innovation performance. It's time we did a similar assessment in Europe instead of just celebrating innovation and creativity in a very institutional manner.
So we now have the winners of startup2.0, a platform I particularly like because it shows the power and perhaps the relevance of crowd-sourcing when it comes to identifying new businesses with good potential. Perhaps something that should be considered by more institutional players who organize "business plan competitions", a concept that leaves me wondering about its actual value and relevance.
Anyway, congratulations to the top-3 of the 2009 vintage:
Haven't done any research on any of those, but with a family scattered around the globe from Ethiopia to New Jersey, US and from Greece to Beijing, China, I guess Genoom would make sense for me to try.
I came across Vopium today and from what I read on their site and elsewhere online:
Anyway, I downloaded the software on my E61i. More in a few days.
Today is one of these days when I can express better than on most other days why I carefully remain on a spot that is common frontier to several seemingly different worlds: business, marketing, technology, psychology, software development, complex adaptive systems, social media... At the end of the day this is also what defines BusinessQuests: the often treacherous area defined by 'business + innovation + technology', where starting from what drives people is a fundamental starting point. BusinessQuests is where people's quests drive business value and where people's values resonate with quests in business.
What a good day this was! Started early, spent the day in two cities
while cooperating with people in 7 different areas of the world and
discovering refreshing perspectives... I met some pretty creative and passionate entrepreneurs, got exposure to beautiful artistic creations including some nice stuff with Philippe Stark (an awesome super-passionate creator) and had a speedy meeting with Nicolas Martignole a leading practitioner of agile practices in the field of software development.
What's the common thread? Several things:
Apologies for being philosophical on this one, but some things need to be approached from a different angle and make it necessary to use the perenial principle of beautiful creation: COUS, that is Combination of Opposites and Union of Similars... More on that in a future post :)
Given the experience of attending recent presentations and having workshops and discussions with start-ups or companies in growth mode, this quote may provide motivation to (re)think basic assumptions about a business... or any other creation for that matter. Particularly relevant as a minimalistic tool like Twitter shows unexpected versatility and incredible adoption levels:
Over the past few weeks I've been doing some research work around the financial system because I have an idea that I might pursue as an entrepreneurial venture aimed at making a difference in the following areas:
I still need to do some work, but the thing is taking a nice shape, especially after a sudden satori I had over the weekend... It now seems so obvious I am in bewildered wonder at the idea that something so evident that was right before my eyes could have escaped my attention even as I was working on stumbling blocks that it helps remove! Anyway, more in a future post. For now, I'd be grateful if you could help me by voting on a question I have: how would you go about salvaging the financial system? To answer on LinkedIn, please click here.
Skype seems to be showing signs of sustainable growth not only in terms of new accounts but also in terms of turnover and profitability. What's the impact of VoIP adoption overall and how good an investment has Skype been for eBay? Follow the link below the clipping for more on these questions.
Internet telephone company Skype, an eBay company, has released impressive user numbers. The company now has 405 million users worldwide, and it is adding 380,000 new accounts daily. Skype continues to offer free calling between Skype users and low cost rates to all other physical phones. The company also posted a $45 million Q4 2008 profit, the 8th consecutive quarterly profit for the company. Skype also says 2.6 billion SkypeOut minutes were used, and SkypeOut minutes are estimated to be growing 61% quarterly, which will bring significantly more revenue to the company if the trend continues. Skype recently launched Skype 4.0, the biggest and most comprehensive upgrade to its service.
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Skype's apparent success is good for Skype, but the real long term relevance of Skype's performance is how it's going to translate in the economy. And it's not Skype specific, but that company is iconic when it comes to adoption of VoIP and new practices of global communications. Skype's performance, especially the 2.6 billion minutes sold, make me wonder whether there are going to be larger benefits for sustainable development of the economy, e.g. in the forms of:
Let's get back to Skype because for an investment to be really relevant and really meaningful, it should benefit all stakeholders. That's increasingly going to be the case in the economy of the 21st century (which also means that the way we measure performance is going to have to evolve). In Skype's case, eBay is obviously a key stakeholder. The $45 million in quarterly profit posted for Q4/2008 is nowhere near the kind of amounts that would justify the price paid by eBay to acquire Skype in September 2005 ($2.6 billion - an interesting report report here). In fact, with a quarterly corporate profit of $45 million, assuming it's sustained through 2009, the pre-tax profit could be in the $200 million ballpark. In fact that would mean a return on investment of just 3.95% for eBay...Not that good a financial deal for eBay although it may have strategic value that has yet to translate financially.
I paid a very short visit to FOSDEM yesterday. A bit too technical for me, but still some very good vibes of a beautifully creative crowd and an excellent opportunity to answer an existential question with WideTag's WideNoise. Watch and don't take my "scientific" conclusions too seriously.
200902087_BQ_QuestsCast-0901_Fosdem
Vidéo envoyée par alexpapa
This evening I attended the meeting of Beta Group in Brussels. The event took place in one of the classrooms of the University of Brussels, home of my business school… It felt like a big return to the past since it’s been at least 14 years since I last visited that part of the world and in fact it hasn’t changed on bit… There were five presentations of startups that I found refreshing, not particularly because of the quality of the demos (sometimes too technical, low energy and not that assertive), but because I saw people creating fun stuff and prusuing visions and dreams of their own. Here’s a couple of companies I think are before good market opportunities:
During the event I heard someone ask the presenters of the last presenting startup (Seetiz) about Seetiz’s scalability. An interesting question, even though growth is not an objective per se. I think companies are better off making sure they’re great, solid, disciplined, high-quality and fun places to work before they attempt to grow. Growth is a by-product, a consequence of something fundamental: the enthusiastic urge to profitably serve customers in a consistent manner such that they become eager to stick with a company as a supplier. So, the list of this post is not meant to identify potential “high-growth” companies, but merely to say why these three stand out in my opinion.
Definitely refreshing to be spending some time with people who innovate by pursuing their own quests in the wonderful and often mesmerizing world of business.
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:
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?
Almost a year and a half ago on I covered Nimbuzz on this blog because I felt they had a pretty cool and promising proposition. Since, their team has been able to progress even more and get to the point of receiving the prestigious Red Herring Global 100 award.
As always, I am thrilled to see entrepreneurial ventures find their way and reach new heights, so congrats to the team of Nimbuzz for beautifully pursuing an entrepreneurial quest that creates value.
