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?

Purpose of the experiment

The purpose of the experiment was therefore to find out how close I could get to assessing the carbon dioxide emissions of people like Robert Scoble, Peter Kim, Gerd Leonhard, Bradley Horowitz, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig... using only public information that I gathered from the "social web". So this is about using "2.0" tools on the thought leaders and stars of the "2.0" crowd, all of whom are very connected and tend to travel a lot to speak and meet in real life during conferences, not all of them interesting it must be said.

Why does it matter?

There's more to this attempt to assess carbon emissions of prominent figures of today's web than the results per se. It goes deeper to the question of what uses can actually be made of public information that we publish very willingly as part of our being part of the global networked community of what Richard Florida dubbed the "creative class", what some call the community of the über-connected, the "2.0" bunch.

Whether the results are accurate to the gram of CO₂ or not is not that relevant; the fact that the emissions can be estimated with published user data is much more relevant though because it means there is probably a way for people running private intelligence services or marketing organizations (sometimes a nuance without a difference) to do pretty accurate estimates of other dimensions in the lives of the connected crowd from revenues to groups supported to books bought to relationships and addresses... It's food for thought and that's not only for those of use who are active participants to social media and social platforms' permanent beta.

The results

So here are the results (spreadsheets here), using just Google Docs and an amazing gadget called Panorama Analytics for creating pivot tables on Google Sheets. The chart gives average emissions of carbon dioxide for prominent "2.0" figures who were kind enough to allow open access to their travel information on social travel site Dopplr.

For convenience, given that the load time of the Panorama gadget may be long, there's an Excel version of the chart below:

How was this done?

The total distance traveled by each of the people listed here was
broken down into plane, train and car travel making three sets of
assumptions (called scenario 1, scenario 2 and scenario 3) about the
relative importance of each transportation means in the traveler's
total travel distance. The traveler's date of activation of the Dopplr
account was used to calculate the number of months over which the total
distance was traveled and the free carbon footprint calculator provided
by the website www.carbonify.com was used toestimate the carbon impact of each traveler for each of the three scenarios.

Implications

From people to industries to institutions, the ubiquitous network and network based applications are profoundly transforming the way things get done. For all the generous talk about the openness, creativity and sharing enabled by social media, the central issue of what public information says about each one of us is getting hotter and hotter even as people from different background converge to bring solutions to address "digital identity", "e-reputation", "brand protection", "buzz", "intelligence", "monitoring"...

Since the very availability of such information and the thought of how it could be used undoubtedly sends shivers down many spines, it follows very logically that the kind of information we processed in this experiment is also information that has real marketing value because it makes sense. It has meaning. Something that is not necessarily true of all the detailed metrics and analysis we get from sophisticated tools that measure visits, bounces, clics, actions, hits, views or deliveries. At the end of the day less may very well be more if that "less" goes more to the heart of behavior tying back to real life of real people with real dreams, hopes, fears, joys and aspirations. That is the real core challenge for marketers today.

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.

read more | digg story

Traditional media suffer - new business quests emerging

Interesting article posted on Digg about the reduction in circulation of major newspapers in the US. Here's the link to the article itself.

Trends showing reduced circulation of traditional media abound. Every quarter they are being confirmed with fresh data. This is yet abother example. To me it speaks about the following:
1. dramatic increase in production and dissemination of content on the web as a result of improved penetration of tools enabling the production and reuse of digital content
2. growing access to information sources online
3. collaborative creation and communication of interesting content
4. the advent of virtual media networks challenging established players (blogs being just one example)
5. a need for citizens and business decision makers to change their way of consuming information because no source can be safely considered as completely trustworthy today

Some people will derive catastrophic conclusions from that, calling for repressive actions aimed at maintaining artificial scarcity (à la RIAA) to preserve the oligopoly of traditional mass media. That will not work. The new context call for new models. That's fascinating and likely to put a lot more people on the trail to their own very personal business quests in the media & communication space... which as you can imagine I enjoy quite a lot :-)

Support Creative Commons

As you know there are a couple of issues that I care about in a very intense way. Two of them are free enterprise and autonomy of individuals. I consider a few US based organizations to be essential instruments serving those values: the ACLU, the IEEE, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and Creative Commons. I support a couple of those every year.

Now is the time to support Creative Commons because thanks to the framework of IP rights the organization is supporting, copyright is more flexible, fairer and better able to support knowledge exchange all of which are essential to progress, also a value that is important to me.

The CC framework is one of the key enablers of open business and I have used it many many times to place content co-developed with customers in a legal context that allows everyone to use it while at the same time respecting the unalienable rights of the creators.

Please support Creative Commons and contribute to their fundraising campaign.

"Recueil Désuet" : A dive in fantasy

Maya de Luna - "Recueil Désuet" on Jamendo

This is a great creation. I really like the way music and voices mix creating a strange and inviting atmosphere that prompts me to imagine fantastic landscapes and settings. It's lively, yet quiet and melodic... great discovery.

Gloomywood

Please take a look at David Dossot's blog for an excellent article to which I subscribe 100%, even if "counter-culture" or "alter-culture" is in fact part of the larger system that has Gloomywood (nice word by the way) as an established player. One thing cannot exist without its opposite; light cannot be without shadow and vice versa. Harmony stems from the coexistence of opposites and the combination of similars...

Hence my question: how do we combine fair creation and respect for necessary intermediaries? Intermediaries will always exist because mankind is relational. They are neither "good", not "bad". It all depends on how they play their role.

Positive coverage for Jamendo

As you know I have been following Jamendo for over half a year now, doing some work on their business model and business plan. In the process I also became a member of the community and I discovered quite a few jems in the music published on Jamendo. Today, I am really excited with some very positive news from their tour in the US and from their participation to events for start-ups in Europe. Let me quote this bit from this blog:

"Company: Jamendo <http://www.jamendo.com >
Customers: from Google Ads
Competitors: Magnatune, Soundclick, Snocap.
Key Judge Question: As an artist what does the deal look like for me?   
Monetization: Ad sales, Media Partnerships, Revenue split with Artists 15% of commercial use licenses.
Business Challenge:  Bringing the model to the US.
Quick Take:
The have exponential growth, and like all communities that add value to
their users, they seem to be growing very fast via word-of-mouth.  The
business model is also refreshing and should go far.
Would I invest: Yes."

The following links are also interesting to visit if you want to learn more about Jamendo.

• reference to Jamendo on the news of Creative Commons



• slides of Jamendo's CTO at Holland Open Conference in Amsterdam
  
  

Les Temps Modernes : Musical modern times from Ehma (Belgium)

Ehma - Les Temps Modernes on Jamendo

I have been using Jamendo for over three months and I just love the musical discoveries the platform offers. My latest is an album called "Les temps modernes" by a band called Ehma who are from Belgium. Now, the funny part is that I live in Belgium but was able to discover Ehma only through Jamendo; in fact that is also the power of the web and I think it disproves the assertions of many who believed technology isolates people. Anyway, enough about the greatness of the web: go listen to Ehma because it's really worth it. Enjoy!

First was the business model

Over the past couple of months I came across several articles claiming that there are investors today on the market who are more interested in product features than in a company’s business model. That is tragic.

Perhaps this line of reasoning is why we are seeing (again, as it was the case back in 2000) so many initiatives that are merely nice online tools but not businesses. I was really surprised to discover a number of online todo lists and I am not too sure how these guys are actually going to make money. Ditto for a number of online tools aimed at building the so-called “social Internet”.

A company’s business model is of the essence and it’s worth spending time to define and refine it. It’s the core of business sustainability and no company in the world can afford not to be clear about its business model. And because I now have some experience with entrepreneurs, let me add this: pick one and stick to it. Few things are worse in strategy execution than trying to have two or three business models because you can’t make up your mind.

Defining a business model sometimes involves disruptive thinking (not always though). And to do the job of business modelling properly one must take industry practices and economics into account as they are shaped by available technical means of production. InfoTech is a revolution in that respect. Economic phenomena previously considered to be marginal or exceptional are becoming mainstream with the advent of InfoTech; the network effect (or network externalities) is one such example. But that does not mean that the rules of business are radically transformed. As mentioned in an article published just after the downturn of 2000:

“[…]you can't give things away for free and you can't sell things for less than they cost”.

In the same article, a venture capitalist says that what sets apart a successful start-up from a failed one is the business model. There are other factors of course and I personally consider people to be more and more important. Fundamental in fact, which is why, done properly, the HR job will be one of the sexiest areas of the 21st century. And I am not talking about payroll administration but about finding, nurturing and developing talent in human organizations.

At its core a business model shows how an entity is going to be profitable by selling a product or providing a service. So, if the idea is that an individual (the entity) has a cool idea (product or service) with nice features that would be valuable as a component of another business but not as a standalone business, then, at a higher level, that individuals personal business model is that of the inventor, not that of the entrepreneur.