After writing about noise of web 2.0, I began to think more about the amount of noise in my everayday web experience. In comments of that post, Cecil pointed me to Nat Torkington and Linda Stone and their concept of continuous partial attention. The stuff is from 2005, but the CPA is even more real today. And then I realised something…Why is my IM list empty?

After talking to couple of my friends, I started to recognize a trend. More and more people were starting to take advantage of “Appear as invisible”-setting. On of the major reasons was that “when I’m online, I don’t want to be constantly harassed by people sending me IM.”, some went so far as telling “I don’t want to send IMs, if people want to talk to me, they can call me”. These findings seem to offer an explanation to why the only people visible in my IM client were those who didn’t live nearby – people who didn’t have many real-life connections to their friends.

I confess, my default setting on Live Messenger and others was Away until couple of weeks ago. Maybe I didn’t want other people to think how much time I spend online. Maybe I didn’t want other people to send me messages. I don’t know. It took me a while to realize all this, but now my default is Online/Available again. Because, when you start to think about it, what’s the use of using IM if you’re using it to show other people that you’re busy? What’s the use to be invisible? Ironically one new feature in Live Messenger seems to have accelerated this behavior: “Offline messages”. A standard feature in all other messaging protocols, this feature arrived just recently to Live Messenger. Now you don’t have to worry about people being invisible or offline as the message gets still sent. A feature which was supposed to enable us to connect better with our friends in fact enables people to hide themselves and making IM seem like… e-mail. No availability information and no knowledge has recipient received your message. With this realization in mind I started to look at how sites like Facebook operate messaging. What Facebook et al do, is that they maintain a image of sorts of our social network until we login again …just like e-mail. You receive messages when you want to. Of course, the problem with this approach is that people create a habit to check their e-mail or login to Facebook every 5 mins. A problem instant messaging was invented to solve in the first place. Are we looking for refuge from cell phones and IM? Don’t people want to be online? This is actually a very important question. The whole premise of web 2.0 is ubiquitous social online presence. Is the reality that this only still appeals to the geeks?

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Here’s a little fact sheet mixed with some thoughts on Green IT. Green IT is a truly serious topic that should be thought over and tackled over a long period of time. There is not one answer to the sustainable development challenge. On thing that’s pretty sure though is that Information Technology, an industry that grows steadily, represents a part of the problem and probably has the potential to generate the bulk of the solution.

CURRENT SITUATION

• According to the Gartner Group, 2% of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are generated by computer networks. Airlines are responsible for the exact same percentage of gas emissions. This figure is bound to increase due to the fact that 3 million new Internet users join the web every month – the bulk of them surfing from their cellular phones; and the huge investments Web players do in datacenters (I noticed something like one third of funds raised by self-hosting SaaS or web startups are aimed at datacenter investments).

• Consider a file. In its entire life cycle, it will consume 10 times more energy than it took to create because: it will be edited, saved, stored on a client hard drive, printed, sent by email, stored on a server, etc. For every new file created, 400 Gbytes of bandwidth need to be added to the Internet (think Video on Demand or advertising banner…).

• Every second that passes sees 24 Kg of PCs produced, 1.8 tons of raw materials aimed at the Information Technology market, half a ton of CO2 generated by hardware heat, 108 Kg. of PC-related garbage.

• Today, there are about 315 million PCs obsolete enough to need a recycling. Huge market! Any creative entrepreneur in the room?

• 2 billion more Internet users will cost 3 times more energy to connect.

THREATS

• Permalinks urge servers to be connected 24/7/365. Albeit it unleashes positive collaborative energies, Web 2.0 is extremely resource consuming.

• VoIP is a fantastic cost-killing opportunity. But it increases traffic dramatically. This issue will have to be tackled at some point. Again, there is huge a market for a VoIP secure compression standard just in case some genius entrepreneur happens to read these lines. We are still in need of an MP3 or DivX standard for IP voice messages.

• RAID redundancies imply  purchasing 2 hard drives. Which actually increases consumption by a factor of 2.

• Cellphones do more and more things everyday. Will a printer be embedded in every mobile phone in a future?

SOLUTIONS

• Multi core processors (produce less heat, more powerful)

• Grid (calculation resource mutualization)

• Working from home from time to time saves time (you don’t waste 2 hours a day in traffic) to yourself and money to your company (more time to work resulting from commute time saved). Furthermore, leaving the car in the garage lowers CO2 emissions.

• Bicycles to go to work (see the Velib initiative in Paris, designed and operated by JCDecaux & user interface + inventory system built on the Microsoft platform) cf. picture above

• Electricity consumption optimization software solutions like IDEAS program startups KalibraXe (a marketplace that allows your company to lower its electricity bill through lowering sourcing costs by making suppliers compete on price) and DOTVision Streetlight Vision (that help cities reduce their electricity bills: who hasn’t  seen a street lamp switched on during the day?). Both ‘undergo’ severe 4-digit growths and I actually believe there is a huge market for clean tech + software solutions. Most of the time, sustainable development and economic performance constrains are aligned. I don’t think these could ever part ways.

• Creative ways to lower server load: use [RSS + cache] combinations as included in Google Reader or use solutions like FaceBook in consumer environments, or blueKiwi in enterprise environments to lower the number of emails, which reduces storage and bandwidth needs through centralizing all the information within a social entity on one single location (eg Facebook group or blueKiwi topic board).

• This is something we do at Microsoft: every file printed out has its own cover sheet mentioning the author. This way, people save the first page (that mention the author) by putting it in a recycling bin and are bound not to take print outs that aren’t theirs – you know, when you realize you took someone else’s printouts – it’s often too far to go and put it back…

• Use recycled paper for draft printing AND corporate communications AND product brochures. Basically, use recycled paper as much as you can. Some people say the recycling process is more energy-intensive than the process of destroying. I don’t believe recycling has no future: I see it as a very convenient solution to start working in the right direction.

• Server virtualization has turned the tables: running many environments on a single machine made the computer industry paradigm shift from “1 application = 1 server”. In many companies, when there used to be 8 servers used at 10% each, you now find one server used at 80% of its capacities + 1 back-up server. On top of that, it all results in costing less in Air Conditioning to keep the room cool. I therefore bought some VMWare stock recently …

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Recently I read an article saying that only 16% of data-processing projects are a success. On the other hand, 59% of data-processing projects don’t respect initial budget, 35% don’t respect deadlines and 54% of all applications don’t match clients’ needs.

This being known, we can understand the success of CMMi (Capability Maturity Model® Integration) model. If you don’t know anything about CMMi you can find some information here, but basically it is a software quality process leading to a certification with 5 different levels.

I took part to a CMMi project at my previous company which has been working on obtaining the CMMi level 2 certification for its R&D department for 3 years, and finally got it last year. The project aimed at reviewing all the software development process. A lot of CMMi experts say that the level 2 is the toughest level to obtain because the company must destroy all previous processes to build better ones, which rubs against the traditional idea that we can always improve on what has already been done without starting from scratch again.

One year after this certification, it is easy to assess the great impact of CMMi: it has definitely improved the productivity of software development processes.

For example, before CMMi, lots of processes were implementing differently depending on employees’ different habits and preferences. It was mainly an oral culture that helped us to coordinate. Now all the processes are archived and referenced in an internal source developed under CMMi quality: the focus is now on discussing important decisions about the product rather than explaining to others the different processes used by each part of the team.

Unsurprisingly, the key to succeed in CMMi certification is to involve all employees. For them, it was a huge change (which implies of course HR management), because all habits have been modified. For example an increased care in file management or the writing of a review after every meeting is now mandatory. In this context trainings are crucial: employees must see why new processes are better than older ones to avoid rejection. But the improvement process is definitely not a top-down one, where the management team would agree on some processes and then try to make them adopt by the rest of the company: employees have to propose new processes to improve the productivity by themselves as they are the main “clients” of CMMi processes. As users, they are in the best position to suggest the greatest ideas.

In general, to reach the next level (except level 1), a company need between one and three years; but why going through all this hassle? Just because, before all, CMMi certification is a great marketing tool: for clients, it means that you produce prime quality software.

In France, only a few companies are certified level 3. In comparison, 89 companies are certified level 5 in India. Indians are even used to create companies which are directly certified level 5: why don’t French companies make the same profitable quality investment upfront?

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I’m hearing a lot of noise lately about the concept of Limits, or rather its opposite, UnLimits. Take net neutrality, for which every geek decided to laugh at the “internet is a bunch of tubes” analogy, yet that seems to be an analogy that strangely makes sense in explaining the concept of limits.

Then there’s the concept of “unlimited” for data-plans, for which O2 just announced its version for the iPhone, but where unlimited actually means up to 1400 pages or 35 mb per day. And then there is the unlimited data-flow that Media 2.0 publishing has resulted in, not realising, maybe, that our brains are limited in processing that waterfall. And historically, the best analogy could perhaps be made with crude oil, which was at some point seen as “unlimited,” and which I’m sure lead to the drama we are witnessing today.

There is no such thing as “unlimited.” Net neutrality wants to assume that everyone uses the web equally and thus should pay equally, and the underlying assumption is that whatever we throw at the net, it will not go under. However, with data-intensive services like YouTube, and even more so, P2P-applications, this clearly does not compare to Joe Schmoe browsing his daily Netvibes. I don’t think I need to go into data-plans as those is based on the same principles, nor the ‘noise of web 2.0,’ as Kari has dealt with that pretty well. Nor do I even need to go into the oil-crisis, I hope.

But what I believe people are really protesting against, is not that O2 can’t offer unlimited services. What they protest against is that O2 calls it “unlimited,” yet writes in small print “as long as it’s fair use.” What this is, is a case of bad PR.

Let’s take another example, e-mail. Back when Google decided to offer 1 gig to everyone for free, it was a revolution. Yet pretty soon others came on board, and people started filling up their mail-boxes. Gmail could have responded by implementing “unlimited” storage, yet with the way people use local storage today, that would’ve not been too bright. Instead, they announced a formula for growing storage-space on Gmail and I’m happy to report that I haven’t come close to reaching it today.

What Google did was good PR. They identified the problem, saw how people typically consumed their services, and came up with a reasonable response to that problem. What other “unlimited” providers should do is the same. They should get away from promoting the concept of no limits, as there are always limits. It’s the way our universe works. They should look at how people consume their services and impose limits in an appropriate and customer-friendly way. They should say: “Hey, we understand that this is a problem, and you can believe that we’ll do our very best to solve it… when the technology and the economics catch up!”

Now, I get why mobile operators and net-providers continue to offer “unlimited” plans. It’s the same reason why some businesses always try to profile themselves as the cheapest or the best. It’s because they are operating in a fiercely competitive market, and they feel they need to do these (stupid) actions to keep up with others who are engaging in the very same thing.

But they are turning themselves into faceless commodities in the eyes of consumers, who are being trained by these corporations, by our capitalist system perhaps, to always look for the next-best, the next-cheapest, or the next less-limited thing. And all that does is open the market for someone else to come in, a Google or an Apple, a company with an identity, with a face, and do something completely unnatural to these companies. Not lie, but tell it like it is:

There’s no such thing as “unlimited.”

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A while ago, I wrote that iPhone won’t matter in Europe. Now that iPhone has been announced to the three major markets in Europe, without 3G as some were hoping, let’s see what has changed since my original post.

For those who were expecting 3G. What were you expecting? You saw the backslash Apple’s price-cut caused. Can you imagine what would’ve happened if Apple announced a 3G model (with larger capacity) first in Europe, which isn’t even their main market? Now, many people will criticize iPhone for entering Europe without featuring 3G, but these aren’t the people who’re going to buy one. I really don’t believe that 3G is the deal-breaker for anyone who’s really planning to get one. Given that other manufacturer’s can put out phones with 3G and decent battery life, I have hard time believing that to be the top reason why iPhone doesn’t have it as Steve Jobs claims. Then again, telling Europeans that Apple cares more about their US market would not be a good idea.

Do Europeans even care about iPhone? Here’s a nice graph that illustrates one of my points. Symbian, for those who don’t care about smartphones, is the OS which among others, powers all Nokia’s smartphones and not-so-smartphones. The market is different, even though iPhone is not probably aimed at the same market as other smartphones, which is good to keep in mind. I still don’t expect to see major differences in that graph in the future.

Exclusivity to operators means that iPhone will still be a novelty in Europe, especially now that iPod Touch has been released. Even though both Apple and Nokia try to convince us that one device that does it all is the way forward, I will throw out a prediction that iPod Touch plus one’s current cell phone will be a serious alternative to anyone wanting the iPhone experience. Does it make any sense? Let’s see what happens.

In the comments of my original post, I mentioned how Nokia’s original Nokia Club was shot down in flames by the mobile operators. iPhone, of course, does the same through its WLAN iTunes store and Ringtones-thing. Nokia, on the other, hand also believes the time is right for another try and launched Ovi. Conincidentally, UK operator Orange has no Nokia phones in their Christmas line-up. Let’s see how this works out this time. I have no idea how important content services like ringtones are for operators’ bottom lines, but Orange’s apparent retaliation would indicate that it means something.

Another thing, I got my hands on a Nokia E70 and while I got totally frustrated with the complex UI. For example, there are at least three different context menus for any given contact, all with a long list of different commands,  depending how deep in the menu tree you’re in the address book. Other than that, I’ve was blown away by the ecosystem of applications available for the phone. Nokia Maps is neat and there’s even putty for the people in need of a SSH client. The internal browser really gives a “true web” experience, but lack of memory cause heavy sites like flickr.com’s and google maps’s non-mobile sites to choke the phone. It’s a solid phone, even though the UI gave me a headache.

For a 1.0 product, iPhone really shows to other manufacturers what’s possible, but I’m still not convinced that it will cause any revolutions. Apple sent a press release that they’ve achieved their 1 million sold by end of September target for iPhone. Apple doesn’t usually tell exact market figures for their products and I’m guessing that unless iPhone does insanely well in Europe we’re not going to hear numbers for Europe, just aggregate numbers when total sales crosses other significant milestones.

My last prediction is that rest of Europe will see iPhone in the same way that iTunes store spread. First the the big three, then others that share common market elemens (iTunes: Euro, iPhone: carrier) and then finally the rest. Given that Finland belongs to the “rest”-category, I’m not expecting iPhone to hit stores here anytime soon.

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The long-awaited, more open Movable Type 4 was released a while ago and I installed it to see how good it actually is. My review is from the perspective of a guy who’s been working with Wordpress.com’s blogging platform for over a year. It’s also good to know that I couldn’t hit the problems that would await me in day-to-day use of MT4 over a longer period than couple of weeks.For comparison, I’ve tried out stand-alone version of Wordpress some time ago and of course this blog is hosted by Wordpress.com’s own service. This is the easiest way to start blogging, but most people want to progress to their own hosts at some point. Now, Wordpress’s stand-alone version runs on PHP, which is supported by virtually 100% of web hosts so no problem there. MT4 on the other hand depends on Perl and some extensions, some which you can be sure are not installed by default by your host. Now, MT4 requires only few of these extensions to actually run, but to get all the features (like automatic thumbnail generation) you probably need to ask your hosting provider to install a couple Perl extensions This shouldn’t be a problem as long as your host has customer support (or you got admin rights).Installing both is a breeze, as long as you’ve installed a couple of web apps in the past and all your Perl/PHP/Webserver/SQL settings are sound. Just extract the archive and point your browser to the installation script and off you go. The easiest route seems to be if you follow the Apache+MySQL+PHP school of web app infrastructure on a popular/widely-supported standard Linux distribution. The web is full of tutorials and help for such a setup. Any more exotic and you might be on your own.When I launched MT4, I was impressed by its design and layout. I had tried the first beta of MT4, so the design wasn’t totally new to me, but unlike in the first beta, the admin panel worked. The settings are grouped nicely. The whole experience is somewhat more pleasant than the one in Wordpress, which is also really easy to navigate – its just that MT4 seems to offer more in less space used. It’s a bit unfair to compare MT to Wordpress, because Wordpress’s admin panel is one of the few good ones around in free web apps. I have had continuing, erratic problems trying to work with Wordpress.com using Safari (3 public beta), but with other browsers, things work fine.The only big downside with MT4 is that the documentation is not ready. There are still things that I’ve no idea how they work and while the documentation site mentions these things and even have links to these issues, the links themselves go nowhere. This is bad. Otherwise, MT4 is totally solid solution for any serious blogging. Wordpress has a comprehensive codex wiki available, but it too might miss some answers newbies’ questions. But that’s why there are forums.My favourite feature is the native support for Markdown and Textile, features that are available for both Wordpress and MT3.5, but these work out of the box. The editor on MT4 is, in my opinion, superior to the one in Wordpress. Then again, I think majority of people prepare the blogs in some other editor (I use Google Docs) and only do the last-stage tuning in the blogging engine’s editor. In any case, MT4’s editor manages to use its space much more efficiently than the one in WP.Wordpress shines in its ease of installation and use. Out of the box, Wordpress has (better) visitor analysis. Its by no means Google Analytics, but in my opinion, Wordpress stats give the information average blogger needs.MT4 is a radical new direction from MT3.5 and as a relatively new product, MT4-specific plug-ins are still somewhat rare. This is of course offset by the magnitude of built-in features, but Wordpress kicks MT4’s ass when it comes to plug-ins. Both offer extensive support of any blogging-related protocols and services you can name.They both support variety of comment authentication, either out of the box or through plug-ins. When it comes to things like OpenID, well, it’s there. I’m actually surprised that neither comes with built-in support to use authentication through Yahoo! or open authentication providers similar to it – even though MT4 naturally supports Six Apart’s other services’ (Vox, Typepad…) authentication schemes.The major difference between MT4 and Wordpress is that the latter is totally free. Six Apart has promised a Open Source version of MT4 later, but that probably doesn’t change the fact that for commercial use, MT4 is going to cost you a little. For personal use, it’s free and Google ads and such don’t make your site “commercial” or for-profit so for many this isn’t a problem. Wordpress is licensed under GPL, so all your freedoms are there. While not a deal-breaker, this license issue is probably the major reason for many to go for Wordpress.Given that an average web dev is more familiar with PHP than Perl, customizing and extending Wordpress will probably be easier to many. If all you want to do is to customize templates, MT4 isn’t difficult either as it uses a custom template engine so you can keep your hands clean of any Perl coding. Wordpress also has its template engine for people not wanting to touch PHP (who would want?), but with some knowledge of PHP you can go deeper.MT4 comes off as more refined than Wordpress, and even though it doesn’t make that much of a difference in the long run, things like nice admin panel and stylish built-in themes give it a good first-run experience. If you know what you’re doing, you’re up and blogging in no time with either software. It really comes down to your own needs and the limits of your web hosting. Use whatever gives you most control and power over your publishing process. Many think that MT4 is more professional and one reason is the first-run settings – through customization you can easily make either look like the other. Where MT4 really shows its power is when you admin and/or run many blogs on it – somewhat rare scenario on average.The one rather major problem I ran with MT4.0 was that I couldn’t get my Pages listed in the templates using the widget sets. The other issue that was just silly was that even though I was the blog admin I had problems commenting to one of the blogs. I hope these are fixed in the next release. Documentation for making scheduled posts was also missing, which is a bit evil as there’s no indication that it won’t work unless you add a cron job.Here at Tech IT Easy, things work (and don’t work) on Wordpress.com’s service. By far not the most optimal blogging platform, but it gets the work done. Then stand-alone version gives you naturally much more, but usually with a price of your own hosting. With your own hosting, you probably need to evaluate your blogging options, of which there are many. Migrating to Wordpress is usually the most easiest and simplest solution, most web-hosts might even have one-click installers for it. In the end, though I personally enjoy the MT4 experience much more.

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I went through an enlightenment last week when Google Reader told me that “From your 30 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 1,023 items, starred 3 items, shared 10 items, and emailed 1 items.” Over thousand items? (also, I actually emailed an item?) OK, I have five (news) feeds that put through more than 5 posts per day, but majority of those 30 publish below one post per day. That number was staggering. It can’t be all signal and I tend to skim most of the headlines and click “Mark all as read” on some of those high traffic news feeds, but that makes it worse actually – it means it’s just a lot of noise.

Twitter? Jaiku? All noise. Facebook. IM. SMS. Del.icio.us. Noise. Noise. Noise. N.oi.se.

People complained before how they didn’t have time to read their e-mails and how their inboxes were getting full. How on earth do they get their e-mails read today? E-mail has never been a problem for me as I only subscribe to one monthly mailing list and can always get my inbox to unread zero. I can also get my feed reading to zero on a weekly basis, which is only indicative that these feeds interest me. If I only clicked “mark all as read” on a feed, is it a feed I really want to follow? Apparently not.

On our Facebook group Jeremy told how he has set aside about an hour for blogging and how 15 minutes of that is spent only scanning the group. True, we are at a stage with this blog that we really need to think where we are heading, but still it made me think about the time spent with all the stuff and notifications coming everywhere. Is scanning through all that noise taking time off more important tasks? Suddenly I realize what’s so great about periodical magazines like The Economist. It’s pretty much all signal. Sure, there are many such high signal/noise feeds on my list like Daring Fireball, but even Gruber decided to mix things up by combining his linked list with his main article feed. Even when I was a paid member of DF, I opted for the articles only feed. Gruber’s linked list is good, no doubt about that, but the combined feed dramatically lowered the signal-to-noise ratio I so much enjoy. Fortunately I wasn’t alone and we got our article-only feed back (yes, this was in July, but the wounds run deep).

I know there are things that I’d like to know about when they happen and now what’s new. But I don’t want to follow everything like that. On aggregate the “what’s new” gets overwhelming. I rarely get past the page four on reddit without sheer exhaustion, even though I’ve clicked on only couple of links (and many [pic]-links, but those don’t count, right?). After what I can only say a healthy warning from Google Reader, I decided to cut back reddit too. The rate I consume the web was getting out of hand. There’s no way I could concentrate on that many items in that timespan.

Where’s Merlin Mann when you need him? On twitter?

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On Martin Koser’s blog I found the IT Flower, a presentation about enterprise software. Rod Boothby, the creator of this presentation (framework), did a very good job with it as the image of a flower is easy to memorize and helpful to explain (or discuss) different types of enterprise software and recent developments in the field.

The only thing on this framework I am not (yet) really comfortable with is the axis of “how work gets done“. To distinguish between structured processes and ad hoc processes is in itself ok. But being applied on the IT flower I ask myself, if for example blogs or wikis (appearing as “new productivity tools”) only fit for ad hoc processes. And all of us may find some examples in which Microsoft’s Office is used (or misused?) in structured processes (let’s only think of all those MS Access data bases used for regular controlling purposes).

But when we focus more on the horizontal axis of the framework the IT Flower really is a strong tool to make recent shifts in software development visible. Enterprise 2.0, as a term being introduced by Andrew McAfee (and not yet everywhere really accepted), is bringing a totally new dimension to organize work and to improve processes. Its main focus is on collaboration, but there is also a huge influence on established software (and its traditional use). That’s what the IT Flower makes obvious.

But even quoting Eric Schmidt (Google) and drawing an insightful flower about enterprise software can’t hide the fact that knowledge in companies about web 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 still is very low. What do you think?

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I’ve begun to realize how serious the very idea of privacy can be jeopardized because of the web. The web can be a pandora box that may profit malicious folks.

This blog post was triggered by an encounter that I will remember for a long time. Last week, I met, in a semi private, semi professional context, an entrepreneur, someone that shouldn’t have known anything about me but that basically knew everything about me before we even met.

He showed me:

- my CV and professional network through LinkedIn

- who I hang out with through Facebook

- ‘what I’m doing’ through Twitter (although my Twitter has become private since then)

- where I went, how I and my sybils look like through browsing my pictures on Flickr

- my private address thanks to a ‘Whois’-ization of Tech IT Easy

- what I think, how I think, through reading the blog posts I’ve published for 15 months

- what I bought and sold on different eCommerce platforms

- the authors I like, the books I read, the movies I watched, etc. on U.[Lik]

- the videos I published on various VOD platforms

- how I react through all the comments I left on many different blogs

- the articles I read on del.icio.us

…and a lot more public things that I promised I wouldn’t mention here. All I can say is that it was bloody (UK; in US, that would turn out to be ‘fucking’) scary.

The guy actually knew more about me than my own self.

Fortunately, his whole idea was about tackling such identity issues on the World Wide Web. The idea was brilliant, but as I told him: executing and establishing a strong market position will be tough. Anyways, the meeting couldn’t be more eye awakening.

Identity Management on the WWW is a very serious issue, a high stakes poker. I decided to save 2 hours to myself every week to brainstorm alone on this issue: what kind of information am I okay making public, what kind of information that I leave public today should I turn private tomorrow, how do I protect myself and those that I love from intrusions, etc.

This is a very serious issue. Probably one of the top three current challenges the Internet is facing.

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As the youngest member of the Emerging Business Team, it is an honor for me to have been invited to blog on Microsoft’s Startup Zone with bloggers and colleagues as prominent as Don Dodge (my favorite blogger ever alongside with Marc Andreessen), Cliff Reeves, David Rowe and Rodney Bowen-Wright.

I see this opportunity as a perfect way for me to, from time to time, put the spotlight on Startup Zone (rather than Tech IT Easy) on the most promising French software startups innovating on Microsoft server and developer tools that I work with, and provide insights on venture capitalists perception of the Microsoft platform – which is positive at utmost, thanks.

I will allow myself to post brief pointers on Tech IT Easy to MS Startup Zone blog posts that you may find of interest – and vice versa.

Blogging on Microsoft Startup Zone will obviously not change anything to my commitment to making of Tech IT Easy, hand in hand with our crazy crowd of authors, a high tech blog reference.

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Hey all, welcome to T.T.T.T. Not a new series of mine, I’m afraid, considering I have a horrible track-record of starting them and not continuing it. Case in point: my first and last post on community. So, next time I start a part 1 of anything, please slap me!

Back to Twitter. Just like many others, I’m trying to grasp what it means to me and to others. Following are some conclusions, after updating and reading Twitter since July 12th… which I guess, makes me a veteran now!

Twitter-marketing

Twitter is in fact RSS times 10, there is no denying it. If you look at “serious” channels, like TechCrunch, BBC news, or, most recently, MTV, you can get the same info you would get from a regular rss-feed. We don’t belong to the giants yet, but you can find us on Twitter.com/techiteasy as well!

All this has greatly been facilitated by a service called Twitterfeed.com, which (unofficially) allows people to feed rss-feeds into their channels, as well as people like Dave Winer, who has happily been hacking away at the API this whole summer.

The only downside is that, if you subscribe to the Twitter-feed in your rss-reader, it opens Twitter, not the originating site. The second issue is the use of Tiny-feeds, to conserve space of course, but it also prevents the Google-juice from spilling over.

That said, the big T is an excellent way to update your readers on the small and big things happening in your / the world. This brings me to the next topic.

Twitter-learning

Huh, you learn things from Twitter? Let me explain. To me Twitter is two things.

A. it is a highly personal and dynamic look into the ups and downs of somebody’s life. I wrote about this briefly on another blog of mine, but the value of Twitter, to me, is that it brings you closer to a person, sometimes high performers, and makes them appear more human. Better than a biography, which is highly edited.

I do believe that it is possible to write a book about net-society, by just reading Twitter-streams for a while. I’m not going to mention names, but when people say stuff like how they feel about social networking, how the post-holiday period affects them, how blogging is difficult, etc. you get a real insight into what today’s information-worker is going through.

B. Twitter is also like the place in the room where the crowd is gathered. When you just join, you’re on the outside, just listening in. You can learn an incredible amount, but you will only be able to teach, to interact, if you speak up. This is hard, but not much harder than standing with a room full of strangers.

I should also add that I think its important to keep a blog next to Twitter. Not only does this give people a richer understanding of you, just like visiting your your house; there are also thoughts that need a bigger text-box to be expressed. Some people disagree with me on that.

Twitter-business

Sigh. I’ve read about a dozen interpretations of how Twitter (will) make(s) money. I don’t know, you don’t know, and who cares, right? We are talking about simple software, which costs drastically less than say, creating a Facebook or a mobile phone. Seriously, it’s like wondering what a mouse eats for breakfast.

That said, I am aware of the principles of business, you invest and must recuperate that investment. And Twitter has received investment. Most recently, Twitter has subtly been advertising the MTV VMA-channel, which leads me to believe that they expect Twitter-marketing to be a factor in their business-model. Where Twitter (and Jaiku) really shines is reporting from live events. Just look at Scott Bourne’s live Jaiku-coverage of the September 5 Apple event, and you see that it is in many ways superior to Engadget’s coverage. For one, you can comment on each piece of news separately, and two, you only have to take your mobile with you! So I hope that people find find ways to exploit Twitter this way too and that the company makes some kind of revenue from it, without pissing the users off!

At the very least, they’ll need money to bring out more needed innovations: more interactivity, a better solution for urls, and please, something better than Twitter-blocks!

The picture is courtesy of Brent Hodgson. Incidentally, Jeremy has suggested that I start writing about some topics that affect both my new interest (and blog) on sounds, food & retail and the world of Tech, here on Tech IT Easy. For ideas, e.g. cool retail-related software or e-commerce-sites, please send me a mail to foodandretailblog@gmail.com.

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Just come back from the third edition Win In China september session. It is entrepreneurship program financed by CCTV2 (channel 2 of China Central Television). The winner gains ten milion rmb (around 1 milion euros) to realize his project in China. All challengers have to speak chinese mandarin to present his idea and at least 18 years old, last year there were around 200 people from overseas enrolled.

I met M. Andy Lee who presented his Web3.0 project. Unfortunelly I did not have enough time to understand his idea, because there was noisy. He just sent me a mail today to explain his idea, and he quotes this article from the magazine The Economist, Inserting advertisements into video games holds much promise.

I am still trying to understand the relation between web3.0 and in-game advertising. Some smart people like Andy are definitively not on the same planet as me . I will continue to give some feedbacks of this meeting.

Who is Andy Lee ? Andy holds EE Ph.D from Stanford, and MBA from UC Berkeley. He used to work in Cisco, AMD, also as CFO in EiC Corp., and CTO in TeleVersal Systems, Inc. Andy is currently the Managing Partner of Berksford, a US/China Investment, M&A, and Strategy company. His project in Win in China is about Web 3.0.

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Hey Rupert, what’s your name?

Rupert.

Right. Can you tell us more about you?

As part of the Ziki team I am working as community manager for the English speaking web. My main task is to make Ziki’s innovative features known by the biggest number of people possible and we think that there are still a lot of potentially interested users who have not heard about our services. Ziki was first launched in English before coming out in French and our high growth rates show us that our members appreciate and recommend Ziki more and more each day .

Can I add that you were born in Austria, and that we became good friends in graduate school, @ HEC Paris? So that I cut off arguments of people who’re going to ask for interviews after this blog post. I don’t interview people in general, however I’m ready to podcast developers – entrepreneurs though. Enough said, can I add that we knew each other pretty well before?

Well, you just did.

Thanks Rup. Let’s now get straight to the point: what the heck is Ziki?

Ziki’s main goal is to make our members more visible on the web. To do this, we offer a sophisticated cocktail of sevices to our members which’s ingredients are social networking, people search and feed aggregation. Ziki’s open network and our own unique tagging algorithm will help you to find and get in contact with other members having the same interests as you.

Ziki is also a free way to search for comprehensive information about a person based on published information available on the Web. Our search results will be represented by relevancy and grouped by personal profiles so that when you follow a link you’ll find a personal summary of the researched person if there’s one available.

Ziki also offers a lot of complementary features that help you manage your own online identity. It allows you to concentrate your whole web identity on only one page and, thus, improve your communication about yourself. You may import nearly all your feeds such as posts, photos, videos, comments or your favorite websites to your personal Ziki in order to create some sort of virtual ID card. Ziki is also an OpenID provider

Allright, I think I’m getting it. Pretty nice Internet Software concept. Where is the Ziki idea coming from?

An estimated 30 percent of Internet research relates to people searches. “To Google someone” has become a part of everyday language for most Americans, and with the explosion of social networks and publication platforms (blogs, photo sharing sites, video sharing sites, etc), Internet users have scattered across the Web a mine of personal information. Since this information is searched on a regular basis, there is a need to organize and present it in a structured way. That is what made Olivier Ruffin and Patrick Chassany launch Ziki in April 2006. Today Ziki counts more than 20.000 active members and is available in both English and French.

Man, what you’re telling me is truly, sincerely pretty cool. But you know, I remember having once subscribed to Ziki. I was just curious and then never went back to it again. From what you’re telling me, I guess Ziki has changed a lot. So what’s your pitch to make of me an addicted user of Ziki. In other words, why should one start to use Ziki?

Leaving aside Ziki’s great design and the nice usability of our site, there are a lot of reasons to use Ziki :

Like many internet users you are likely to have signed up to a number of other sites that you visit regularly. Ziki allows you to consolidate all these sites on one and only place. And instead of subscribing to a new feed each time your contact subscribes to a new web service, you may subscribe directly to your contact’s Ziki in order to keep yourself up to date.

Our new internal search engine is a powerful tool that will make you benefit from your networks collective intelligence. Ziki offers you the unique opportunity to become registered for free within Google, Yahoo! and MSN which will make your name appear on the top of the result list whenever anyone searches for your name on these engines.

Bloggers may better understand their audience and increase its size with Ziki. One week ago we launched a new special feature which even allows them to monetize their posts directly on our site by entering their Google Adsense Code.

Finally, companies may find Ziki’s offer attractive as we give them the opportunity to create a personal website as well as a people search tool able to find potential business partners, customers or employees.

Allright, that is convincing. But isn’t the virtual identity market crowded? Who are your competitors?

As Ziki’s services are extremely diversified in order to achieve our target – which is increasing our users’ online visibility – we have a certain number of competitors depending on the market you place us. On the people search market, you can name Spock or Spokeo, concerning online visibility management and feed aggregation and sharing, Naymz is offering also free search engine placement for “Empowering Reputable Professionals”.

To sum it up, Ziki’s approach is unique as we try to combine the highest value services of all these different markets.

What’s Ziki’s competitive advantage vs. this quality competition?

Ziki has developed its own algorithm to collect and organize information relative to a person – starting with information available on the Internet.

The site allows its users to create an official webpage for free (a ziki), on which all personal and relevant information – from a bio and resume to multimedia files and blog posts – can be stored. These official profiles can be tagged and searched through Ziki and other search engines.

Ziki members are guaranteed to appear in the first position of Google, Yahoo & MSN search results when their name is searched, given that Ziki buys sponsored links. Ziki community members can therefore create, manage and optimize their online presence while controlling their image. Through Ziki, members can tag/favorite community members, allowing them to create their own social, personal or professional networks.

How is Ziki financed?

Ziki is entirely financed by private funds.

Seasoned entrepreneur business angels? wealthy private individuals? the founders?

You go and figure out. But it seems you’re getting the picture.

Which technology do you use to make Ziki run?

Ziki is programmed in Ruby on Rails. Olivier, our CTO, has developed all the features you can find on our site today.

How many people in the team?

Beside its founders, Patrick and Olivier, Ziki is composed of a team of about 10 members managed by Jean-Francois Ruiz, who is also blogging on webdeux.info. We are permanently adding new features to Ziki, which we communicate through our blog, and we try to keep in close contact with our members in order to understand perfectly what they are looking for and be as reactive as possible while responding to their needs.

Man, this is great. We need a marketer as a blogger on Tech IT Easy. When are you joining us?

Some day probably. I would really like to. However, I’ve been very busy recently, taking care of the English speaking Ziki community, especially on a Ziki blog here. I prefer to stay focused and avoid blogging everywhere. The development of our web application in the Anglo Saxon world is instrumental to Ziki’s future success and growth globally. My job is strategic and the adventure worth it.

Indeed, staying close to one’s users is one of the keys to success in consumer web and should be your top priority. Thanks for your time Rupert and good luck with the development of the Ziki community in English speaking countries.

People, there’s one crucial question I haven’t asked Rupert. And you have to tell me. In your opinion, how is Ziki going to make money? What’s Ziki’s underlying business model?

Let’s call it the brainstorming of the day.

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Yesterday, as I was reading an article on portfolio management in my issue of HBR, important news (to some) was announced: Palm has cancelled the release of the Foleo—it’s ultra-mobile laptop solution. I can’t speak for all, but as a fairly mobile person and a writer, I find the idea of ultra-portable devices with good keyboards (!) very alluring, and don’t care so much about performance and app-support. On a side-note, I am currently looking at the Dana Wireless as a similar solution.

The Foleo has of course been met with much scepticism by the (consumer-)media; it’s not quite a laptop and not quite a mobile phone. It was announced around the hype of the iPhone. Palm’s own line of mobiles and handhelds are not meeting the bar for innovation. And there was this whole discussion around the $100-laptop, which was not very well-perceived either (though still more favourable than the Foleo). We are in very turbulent times as far as the mobile platform is concerned, and perhaps it was simply a bad time to launch. It probably also didn’t help that the iPhone outsold every smartphone on the US-market in July and is about to launch in Europe (I won’t go into last night’s shocking announcement of a $200 price-drop!).

Porfolio-management, as outlined in the HBR-issue, works on three horizons, which develop in parallel. The first is the day-to-day management of products; you think in quarters and focus on current competitive factors. The third is the innovative activities of a firm, much lab-development, nothing in commercial income. The second brings it all together. HBR calls this phase the “equivalence of adolescence” in business. Innovations are put in a commercial path and are expected to become self-sufficient product-lines, hopefully sooner than later.

Of course this is not easy. You have to manage horizon 1, make sure that cash-flow happens. And you have to manage horizon 3, make sure that there are innovations in the future. However, what if these two don’t connect? Horizon 1 staff is busy fighting off the competition, and also more motivated by the instant gratification from the market. And horizon 3 is all excited about their lab-work, their Foleo if you will, but can not present a viable business-model for it. So you bring the Foleo into the second horizon, and dedicate staff to launching it. But at the same time the pressure on horizon 1, the market, is increasing. Customers are demanding better Treo’s and the competition is fierce. And on horizon 3, the innovation-platform is far from stable either, as the technology is changing rapidly. And horizon 2 gets neglected, staff perhaps diverted to horizon 1 to help manage the day-to-day, and to horizon 3, to develop new tech. Etc. etc.

I imagine that this is a plausible scenario for Palm’s current fiasco. The question is of course how to do this better? Many companies don’t actually manage this process very well, and that is how disruptive innovation can gain a foothold into a market. An example is VOIP. AT&T had internet-telephony on it’s third horizon for a while, but never actually managed to bring it to horizon 2, until it was too late and competitors like Skype and soon Ooma, (which I’m very excited about) launched.

Some solutions mentioned in the article are:

• Insulate businesses, not products: by turning your horizon 2 product-lines into a complete enterprise, with dedicated management, sales staff, and technology support, you prevent individual leakages to horizon 1. Another way of looking at this is corporate venturing; creating a spin-off dedicated to commercially viable innovations and spinning them back in when they are ready for prime-time.
• Use acquisitions to bridge the periods that there are no horizon 2 products and the horizon 3 “labs” still need time: as Jeremy oulined in his last post, this clearly works for Oracle. By doing this, you again ensure a culture of dedicating resources to long-term growth, not only the short-term.
• Recognise that your portfolio 2 products may be niche for a while: The Foleo is clearly a niche-product, but can grow into a magnificent platform over time. But expecting it to immediately gain mass can be fatal to the limited capabilities of portfolio 2 “start-ups.”
• Dedicate talented leaders to horizon 2: New business developers are a class apart, entrepreneurs with a corporate mindset. Parent-companies can be quite generous with funding, but stingy with putting the right man or woman in charge.
• Blocking resource-migration between horizons: I think this should be carefully evaluated and there will be many adaptions on a per-project basis until this process works well. Nevertheless you cannot expect a horizon 2 product to succeed, if you’re constantly pulling resources away from it to deal with horizon 1 & 3 concerns.

Clearly this represents an interesting paradigm for any company to view their life-cycle in. One implication is that executing well on all three levels can decrease the sole dependance on market-share, which many (large) companies are pushing for, but which also makes them lax in their drive to innovate, and which is also no longer as legally acceptable as it once was.

It is hard to say what exactly happened with Palm’s Foleo. Was it a case of scientific over-excitement, which does not guarantee commercial viability? Was it a result of competitive pressures? Or are there more exciting technologies on the horizon? From their blog-post, they make it appear like the latter is the reason, but of course we’ll never know the entire truth.

I imagine the Foleo II has been pushed back to horizon 3, and hope that they can find synergies between their diverse product-lines. Like Apple is now pushing OSX down to its mobile line-up, Palm should do the same. But of course they need to have a good operating system in the first place to do so, and a somewhat stable hardware-platform to build upon. All in all, I feel a little sorry for Palm but am still rooting for it to succeed, as it is a sympathetic company and more competition hopefully leads to better products all-round.

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Here is the thing : after a while in the IT tech area, one feel like stepping to another level. What is it going to be ? Architect ? Consultant ? Marketing and product definiton ? Manager ? This is a post for the ones that made the last choice.

Next stop : management

Most of the times we’ll think this is a natural career move that doesn’t need anything special to be prepared. “Well, I know the job, I know the technology, I know the guys, I know the industry, I know the company : it just going to be a walk in the park“. Well I tell you : it won’t. Especially in the IT industry where we are used to work with 0 and 1s. Working with people is a whole different story.

In the IT world we tend to think that Manager is not a real job, that we all have the soft skills required, probably because there shouldn’t be too many anyway, they are not measurable and quite blurry. We tend to cheat ourselves believing we already have put them in practise.

Believe it or not, there are quite a lot of clearly identified techniques and know-how to master : here is where techITeasy steps in and provide guidance on where to look to become a good, fair, understanding and yet efficient manager : Scott Berkun’s blog.

Scott Berkun

Scott used to be a Project Manager for Microsoft, working on versions 1 to 5 of Internet Explorer. He knows what he talks about when it comes to issues in managing very exposed software projects. He wrote the best seller “The Art of Project management“, which, needless to say, is a must read for managers or wannabes.

Even more interestingly, Scott writes essays (there’s about 60 of them), mostly on project management and these are invaluable assets.

Team, Bullshit and objectives

In Advice for new manager part.I Scott asks the most important question : why to manage. This helps you finding out if your motivations are pure, young Jedi. Advice for new manager part.II addresses more day to day issues especially if you manage a team of people you don’t know in a new environment.

Work Vs Progress allows you to set up and monitor clear objectives. How to learn from mistakes and How to give and take criticism will allow you to become a better professional and a better person altogether.

If you courageously stand up and honestly say “This is my mistake and I am responsible” the possibilities for learning will move towards you. Admission of a mistake, even if only privately to yourself, makes learning possible by moving the focus away from blame assignment and towards understanding.

Hilarious How to detect bullshit and assertive Why smart people have bad ideas gives you some hint on how to step back in some tense conversations not to get misguided to incorrect decisions. How to interview and hire people shows you the do and dont and the real goals of an interview while Team and Stars discusses the tricky issue of managing ego inflated developers (which happens more with the raise of the Alphageeks).

All-star teams lose. While it’s an honor to be chosen to an all-star team, it’s miserable to play on one.

Sharing knowledge

What makes these reading worthwile is how efficient they are in achieving their objective : sharing knowledge and experience on a very specific topic. Scott puts a huge effort in making sure his words are concise and clear and each issue and is addressed thoroughly and perfectly. In addition, these are a 15 minutes read : they come in very handy.

His theories are supported by every day life examples first and then office experience second, starting with being quite general (and usually quite funny) about the subject and then getting more precisely to the point. A fun yet optimal read for all the wisdom and know-how that is nicely packaged and freely distributed here.

So if you plan to become or a manager, do yourself a huge favor and be prepared. Make sure it’s not for bad reasons and know what is waiting for you. As Scott puts it, this is a great and rewarding job as

“There are thrills in bringing a team together and making good things happen, at a scale larger than you can do alone (…) When the project is completed you’ll look at the work done by many people at share pride for the whole thing“

But before that :

You will be asked, on a daily basis, to make decisions that impact the lives of other people, (…) Some of your best moves will be out of your team’s view, and the positive impact you have won’t always be acknowledged. Despite any pay raises or perks that come with the job, it’s rare to be fully compensated, in financial terms, for the challenges and tough choices that will inevitably be yours.

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