Comments Off Well, I don’t want to be culturally insensitive…
We, the Tech IT Easy crew of new and old, wish all of you innocent internet bystanders a happy and joyful [insert your celebration here] and hope to see you back here with slightly rounder stomachs and at least a new gadget or two.
L♥ve
The Tech IT Easy crew
Comments Off I attended LeWeb, a conference dedicated to…the Web industry, almost 2 weeks ago in Paris. I apologize not to have blogged before, but December was a frantic month, business-wise, and I wish I could blog during the conference but as you may have read on the blogosphere, there was no Internet. On top of that, I wanted to leave some time before I blogged to check whether my words would soften.
I arrived at Le Web, investing a lot of time (2 full days) and money (more than EUR 800, that is to say around USD 1100 – which is a lot of money for what I got), with very high expectations, and I have to say that this conference was a huge disappointment to me. Actually, it was more of a disappointment: I actually found Le Web ‘08 conference to be a huge piece of crap. Here’s why.
The organizers: Loïc & Géraldine Le Meur
Prior to the conference, I was a big fan of Loïc Le Meur. The guy looked like Midas to me: everything he touched became gold. The guy gets people lining up to invest in his startups (look at his list of investors in his last startup Seesmic here, impressive). Loïc understood that blogging was going to be big before everyone, and positioned himself accordingly (a huge blogger and founder of Six Apart, the editor of TypePad). Loïc is also an early investor in LinkedIn, my favorite web app, and recently founded and funded Seesmic that I find to be a very cool video conversation platform. Well, the guy seemed to be the perfect investee for VCs, and the perfect investor for entrepreneurs. However, when it comes to organizing conferences, I would tend to say it’s not there yet. Loïc and his wife Géraldine have been organizing the Le Web event for something like four years. Last year already, criticism had emerged, but overall comments were positive. Well, after attending one Le Web conference, I can only blame myself for not having due diligenced better: I wasted my time and my startup’s money.
The theme
Love. This year’s Le Web conference was about love. At first sight, I found this theme brilliant – too bad the idea wasn’t well executed. Love is a universal value that is only discussed in novels and Vogue. Plus, Love is the perfect theme if you want to think an outside-the-box conference program. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case at all. Although there were a number of supposedly quality speakers, most didn’t actually mention the theme, and I guess some didn’t even know that the theme was Love (Marissa Meyer of Google, Didier Lombard of France Telecom, Maurice Levy of Publicis, to name some of them…). I think it’s a big waste, because having a truly deeply-thought consistent program around Love, with at least some continuity between speakers, could’ve made of Le Web a truly mainstream event rather than just a reunion self-proclamed visionaries.
The speakers
Speaking of self-proclamed visionaries, I had a hard time looking for new ’stars’ on Le Web panels. Or even just interesting content.
Paulo Coelho is a brilliant man, but he had nothing to do at Le Web: his speech didn’t bring anything new, it was self-promotion, and an uninteresting one as a matter of fact. Same with Susan Wu from Ohai, preaching her church (virtual goods): boring slides, boring intervention.
Didier Lombard was absolutely out of scope too. He basically paid to get on stage. And you could feel it.
I was very disappointed by Maurice Levy from Publicis (and by the questions asked by Loïc Le Meur: boring) – the guy could’ve given us interesting insights on web advertising. Instead, we had a boring “fireside chat”, as they say. I liked one thing about Maurice Levy though, he publicly gave his email address saying he was looking for startups to invest in.
Startup competition updates were extremely repetitive; the only thing you could here was “despite the crisis, there are still a lot of innovation around; I’m thrilled by what I saw in the startup competition room”. Except that when you looked at the jury in the room, they were all on their Blackberry or iPhone aswering emails.
I liked Yossi Vardi, Chris Anderson, John Buckman (good tips for entrepreneurs), Marissa Meyer (a few insights on the Google roadmap, like wanting to take Chrome out of Beta) & Joi Ito though.
The sponsors
Le Web’s official sponsor was no company else than Microsoft, the tech giant that probably least understands the Web provided the very poor quality of its online applications, like Hotmail, or its total absence of the collaborative web apps landscape outside its expensive minority stake in Facebook. The good news is, Microsoft folks are smart asses and let some selected startups (some of them embedding no single Microsoft technology) demo their applications rather than demo Microsoft products. Microsoft alone paid Le Web USD 110,000 or EUR 80,000 to get its brand on top of others, rent a lounge space, and get speaking time.
Google also was a sponsor of Le Web – they had Microsoft move first when it came to getting the “official sponsor” title. Google had a special room dedicated to presenting its own stuff during day 1. Nothing new there, except that Google brought in speakers on a number of topics like Adwords, APIs, etc. I guess the fee also included the 2 keynotes Google got. If I were Google, I would, to ensure a maximum buzz around my brand, not attend or sponsor Le Web. That would make the entire conference speak about the absence of Google whilst the whole web revolves around the Google search engine. Google being a sponsor amongst others makes of it a regular company. Too bad.
There were other partners, like SwissCom that sucks big time (they had a booth, and did not manage to make the Internet work during the entire conference + Loïc Le Meur says they got paid more than USD 100,000! to make nothing work), Facebook (?), SixApart & Seesmic who got it for free obviously,…and a number of others that are not worth talking about in this not-so-long post.
The budget, the price
1,400 participants x an average of EUR 1,000 per entrance
Sponsoring & demo room for at least EUR 200,000
The overall budget for this 2-day conference amounted to EUR 1,500,000. Yet, there was no wifi running, definitely not enough food for all participants (I had to go grab a sandwich each 2 days), no consistent editorial line, a crowd of people investing time and a lot of money to listen to the same self-called visionaries on stage.
I haven’t paid myself in one year (I live on my fiancée’s salary), every since I started Verteego. I bought myself a ticket to Le Web almost as a Christmas gift, hoping to enjoy a lot. It was a sort of sacrifice (EUR 850 + 2 days of turnover for Verteego – I’m the sales guy there – is hell of a lot of money! the price of a superb laptop or a great long weekend, say, in Venice) but I was plenty of hopes. The least I could say even 2 weeks after the conference is that I have a very angry feeling at myself: I feel I’ve been financially abused. And I lost two days of hard work during an important period.
The place, and the temperature…
Well, it was free-zing. Which is okay for me, except that with so many people inside, there must have been a sort of natural warmth, which wasn’t the case. I felt this place had the worst energetic efficiency in Paris. This absence of environmental awareness stroke me: the second day, it was warmer. I couldn’t believe how much energy was used to heat the place. I am very disappointed by the overall lack of consciousness of web entrepreneurs for environmental issues: if you are really about changing the world, then you should think about measuring their environmental footprint and take action to reduce it from one year to another & compensate the remainings. But they sure didn’t. And I’m not writing this just to sell Verteego Carbon here: I just don’t understand entrepreneurs to pretend they want to change the World and who don’t care about behaving socially & environmentally responsibly. I think that Le Web, an event that took place in Europe at the same time as the Poznan conference (pre next Kyoto talks in Poland) AND which theme was Love, was just perfect place to ensure Social Responsibility and Sustainability became buzz words in the blogging, startups & VC microcosm. Géraldine & Loïc completely missed the train here.
The startup competition
I didn’t apply to the startup competition. I felt it wasn’t right to make startups pay EUR 1,500 for just a pitch. I was wrong in doing so. The startup competition was probably the only interesting thing during this conference. I paid, as I said, EUR 800+ to go to Le Web Paris ‘08 and basically meet with friends. It would’ve been worth paying the double to try and get 7 minutes to pitch Verteego in front of around 300 people. That makes it 5 euros per viewer’s attention, + the backlinks, visibility, and blog coverage you could get later on. Not applying to the startup competition was perhaps my only regret. And that would probably be the only reason I would attend next year.
The food
It was a shame. There’s no other word for it. I could get no food at all, not during the first day, not during the second day. The first day because there was none left. The second because there was no vegetarian food! Both days I went outside for a sandwich. I could then make friends because people were coming to me to ask where I had gotten this.
Worse: during Day 2, I needed to drink water during the day because I caught a cough during Day 1, because of the cold. And I was basically given a negative answer, because the bar was opened neither at 11am, nor at 3pm (which actually made me leave the place). You get 1500 people pay EUR 1000 on average, and there’s no food, and no water???
The Internet
There was very little Internet during the whole conference. Here’s a recap of this lousy situation: not only were you locked in with boring old speakers & because of the price you paid, you couldn’t answer client requests, or blog because of this.
Loïc Le Meur wrote an apologetic post, but I found this post actually ridiculous for him: Le Web gave EUR 100,000+ to SwissCom not to get a service. The excuse is: no provider is used to so many attendants. This is untrue: the very week before Le Web, I attended a huge (20,000 visitors per day!) Trade Show, Pollutec, in Lyon. And there was perfect Wifi.
The attendants
Obviously, I met with many of my existing friends, and I was glad to. I also met with new people from everywhere around the world. Lots of great people there, from everywhere around the World. But come on, at what price…Furthermore, the mindset was rather negative: people weren’t ambitious or optimistic. They should be: the crisis is a great opportunity to move fast whilst remaining lean.
The TechCrunch party
It was so-so, I was disappointed and angry: 1) I had bought my business partner (who hadn’t attended Le Web) a EUR 30 ticket, to be told at the entrance that a pass to Le Web was worth 2 entrances. I think it should’ve been explained somewhere because I basically wasted EUR 30 with no possibility to get a refund. 2) I waited for 30 minutes outside, in line, to get in. And during this time I saw 2 groups of people showing up in front and squeezing the line: I found this very abnormal, because the Web is about democracy, having all the same access to information. 3) the place was very small, but this is less of an issue.
Conclusion
For the price I paid, I got very little value back (basically, the only benefit of Le Web was that I got to see many of my friends in very little time). Rather than apologizing, and provided the HUGE profits this conference made, I believe not reimbursing participants for providing no wifi, no heating, and no food services is irresponsible at that cost. I repeat: rather than blame their food supplier, Swisscom or the Cent Quatre (for the heating), I think Loïc & Géraldine Le Meur should’ve refunded participants for providing such a low standard service rather than making this huge profit (I also think they should display publicly the P&L of the conference). This is the least they could’ve done since giving me back 2 days of work isn’t physically possible. Loïc and Géraldine Le Meur didn’t show any social responsibility here, no respect for their customers.
Last, but not least, those who are not going to complain about Le Web ‘08, both in terms of organization and content, are either those who didn’t pay anything to attend, or those who paid so much that blaming the event would make them look stupid.
Comments Off 
About 6 months ago, or longer, Jason Calacanis wrote an essay about what he viewed as the optimal setup, furniture-wise, for the productivity centre that is a startup. Jeremy wrote a response here, as well. I’m sure, things have changed, with the recession and all, but my mantra about that is… don’t dispair, just work harder. In other words, I’m ignoring the recession… just working harder. The setup of an office shouldn’t change, that’s an investment in your productivity.
This last week, I spent in Luxembourg, evaluating whether or not to take on a position in an accountancy. I may write more about this in the future, I may not, but it also confronted me with the topic of productivity in a group-environment. Writing my thesis, I think, has turned me into a “Getting Things Done” freak, reading that book hasn’t helped either, of course.
Right now, I’m working on a dated PC, with a dual screen setup, on Windows 2000, running software that keeps track of the many official documents that form the core of “being accountable,” writing on a French keyboard with crazy letter-placements… sigh. This post is, luckily, written on an international keyboard, on my trusted Mac, which would be my machine of choice as well. Oh, and we have one of the best coffee machines on the market (I will edit this post with the name tomorrow, when I’m back in the office. Edit: the magic word is SAECO), and the chairs are, afaik, of great quality.
Do Macs increase productivity?
So Jason and I agree on this at least, Macs increase productivity. That said, life is not quite that simple. Working in a group-environment, in a legal environment, puts a certain responsibility on you, that you have to produce in an environment that is compatible with everyone else. My Mac would help me, but would only work if, either, everyone had Macs, and if the software, I worked with, is cross-compatible between Windows & Macs, which this one isn’t, afaik.
What I don’t like about Windows… I could write an essay about this, but mainly that it doesn’t feel like it’s designed for most machines I work on. My Mac is a dinosaur, but I run the latest OS on it no problem. Office 2008, on the other hand, that’s a different story.
Verdict: depending on software, hardware, and co-workers / business-partners, both Windows and Macs can increase productivity. Definitely not a black & white issue.
What about dual screen setups?
Having worked with Leopard spaces, ever since I first reviewed it, I’m quite used to have different screens for different activities. However, the way it works on a Mac, when I go to a screen, I only get to see that screen. In a physical multi-screen setup, you see both screens, the advantage being, that you can keep your permanently-used apps (e.g. Word) on one screen and your once-in-while apps (e.g. Outlook) in the other. It’s also somewhat useful for copying text from one app to the other (not copy-paste, but typing out text… on a French keyboarrrrrrd, grrrr).
What I don’t like, however, is that the app-placement is not straightforward—this seems like it can be set up in the ATI-software, but I have no idea where exactly to do this. The Mac-spaces setup can also be frustrating, but is at least understandable and part of the OS. With two physical screens, it also feels like the mouse has to travel much farther, something that isn’t a problem when using multiple virtual desktops, which you can switch to at a finger-click.
My verdict: if you’re constantly switching between multiple apps, then a multi-screen setup can be useful, but I don’t see it as better than Leopard’s spaces.
Should you have a great coffee-machine?
Coming from a guy that’s been drinking green tea for several weeks now, and switched to coffee as soon as he arrived here, my answer is a big fat yes. I remember Jason writing something about saving you the trip to Starbucks. That isn’t actually a problem in Luxembourg, there’s good coffee everywhere (much like in the rest of Europe), and isn’t why I say this.
Good coffee is good for two reasons: it boosts productivity and it boosts morale. The reason coffee is so popular because we live under the reality / illusion (depending where you come from) that it wakes us up. Good coffee boosts coffee consumption and should hence boost energy.
Coffee is also popular because people love it, and people love good coffee more than bad coffee. Hence, good coffee = happier people. As a manager you can now say: look, I know I scream at you guys sometimes. But here’s some good coffee, now please get back to work. Done.
Answer: yes.
What about furniture?
I think that IKEA makes perfectly affordable furniture that works great as well (big fan), so I see this as a basic expense that every business needs to make. And you need to have furniture that allows people to be comfortable for longer periods of time. Not only the 0 to 24 hours a day, you spend in the office, but the many months to years that you will work in that same office as well.
Answer: yes, but it doesn’t have to be expensive.
Other factors?
I’m too tired to think of them now. Furnishing your office feels like spicing your food. Food will often taste fine without spices, but add the right spice and it creates taste-explosions in your mouth.
Well, that’s my sentiment. Who’s next?
Vincent
Comments Off is 39 < 26?
Oh my god! I am older than internet!!!!
I woke up this sunday morning with this geek neurosis, suddenly feeling terribly old and rrrrushing to my computer to confirm that it was only a bad wake-up confusion.
…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf53PczuJXc]
But no, it was there, in front of my browser I could feel my senile arthritis, my fingers tapping same old familiar adresses, my reflexes being sterilized and the randomness having somehow disappeared from my contact with the internet. Before I began preparing my Facebook “so long” event, I stopped a while
and thought about this paradox. How can this organism that functions 24/7, can work against what we know and manage to keep its youth and firm ?
Internet has apparently found the answer to aging-free eternity, buzzing cheerfully in the face of its devoted aging fans (me!). And as its commodization sets in, the evolution is a thing of younger and younger devoted fans (me?, hmmm….).
Having a sunday coffee with a friend only made my neurosis worse (he was paris, not woody allen). We chatted about our home social crisis, which is initially and significantly driven by 15y.o. teens.
To give you another picture, imagine Greece as a football field:
Right in the center you have about 1.000.000 young active people trying to play football, and everybody else packed in the seating area. The rest of the field is empty. <void>
Not because there is a gathering prohibit like in the parisian 2005 events, but simply people in the comfortable seats feel the field as their garden and the grass is not to step on.
Sometimes some young at hearts have a walk there, like dogs enjoying the city.
Are they visible?
When you have a certain age, sharp vision and hearing is quite an issue.
To bridge the gap, the masscha media, have placed their cameras to zoom in the field and journalists to amplify the sound. You now wake up with very educating tv-magazines that explain in the morning breeze the complex dynamics of action and reaction in social crisis.
You learn about corruption, politics, sociology theories, with your morning coffee. And then you go search for handkerchiefs from your local store and the old lady analyzes the dirty secrets of police to her peers…Excellent!
To come back to my neurosis, this time I realized that I am sitting around the green and not in it. It’s not that I don’t have energy or reason, it is my social network that has classified me in the oldies (but goodies I hope). As simple as this, since I don’t have friends in highschool, and I don’t live right in the heart of the Exarcheia “anarchy ghetto” (mercy masscha) I get to learn things with a delay long enough to receive them and not live them.
My hi5, facebook and me!cha refugees have wrinkles, so so do I…
No matter in how many protesting facebook groups I sign up, I see and hear the internet getting younger as I get doggy.
Georgia
bonus quizz :
What is the news in this video ? or me!cha vs masscha live from your TV
Comments Off Almost two years ago, Jeremy praised Kiva here on Tech IT Easy. I’m also a strong believer in microlending and Kiva. It makes a lot of sense to help build businesses and help entrepreneurship thrive in developing countries.
But, for entrepreneurship and business to work, the would-be entrepreneurs need skills. Here in the western world we might take education as granted, but this isn’t the case in many developing countries. Even if free education is available, the opportunity cost for families to let their kids attend school might be too high. If you’ve ever browsed through Kiva the entrepreneurs’ profiles, you might have noticed that many of them state they’re aiming to get their children good education and that most businesses are relatively low-tech.
Let's put those two at the top of that there.
This all is why I see that projects that aim to teach important skills to people in developing countries as at least as important as making small businesses work. And this is why I’d love if you, dear readers, could pitch in to my girlfriend Satu’s and her colleague Pia’s fundraising effort to raise £4,000 for VSO’s Accenture Kilimanjaro Challenge.
They are taking part in the Accenture Kilimanjaro Challenge, which is a charity project by VSO and Accenture to support VSO’s work in East Africa by climbing the cool Mt. Kilimanjaro. All the money these two geeks raise will go to VSO’s projects in East Africa (they’ll pay for their trip themselves). You can read what VSO does, for example in Mt. Kilimanjaro’s Tanzania. What I learned was that even though basic education is free in Tanzania, only half pass the primary learning exam. In my opinion it isn’t enough to throw OLPCs at these kids, the whole education system needs more resources, from schools to teachers and the students themselves.
So, go show some Tech IT Easy geek-love and help put these girls at top of the summit. You’ll find more information about their project at their sites. You can follow the Satu’s & Pia’s fundraising effort at their fundraising site, their blog or at their Facebook group.
I hope that through VSO’s work, we will be able to see more Tanzanian and other East African entrepreneurs on Kiva in the future. Join me in making this real by donating as little as £2 to the girls’ fundraising effort.
Also, I encourage you to start the habit of lending as little as $25 to an entrepreneur in developing world at Kiva. And, if you feel like it, give an OLPC for a kid at $199 a piece.
Tags: challenge, Entrepreneurship, fundraising, kiva, OLPC, Startup, vso
Africa, Economics, Education, Entrepreneurship, Friends, Future, Globalization, blogging
Comments Off Thinking a lot about blue and red oceans these days, which was a topic of a New Venture seminar last week (summary post about that coming up). Still not having completed Blue Ocean Strategy, the book (someone told me, reading the summary would suffice. See slides below), I’m still not entirely sure how to get to a blue ocean. More after the slides.
[slideshare id=61974&doc=blue-ocean-strategy-summary4461&w=425]
I know, from the first few chapters, that you analyse features of a competing business. You list them in some kind of chart and map out how far they go and how to beat them with your own features. Taking the case of gaming consoles, which is as good as any, for the two powerful ones, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, we would list:
And I could probably go on.
Fighting Microsoft and Sony would require some serious leaps in logic, you would think. You can see that the leap that Sony and Microsoft made was not too far off. It was based on the assumption that any next generation of console would have to be significantly more powerful than the last. And you could see that, them being huge multinational corporations, the thinking was probably that if any drastic industry change could happen (take that format war), they could make it come true. There’s another industry-change that had to happen for both of these to take off like gangbusters, which was that everyone would buy an HDTV. That didn’t exactly happen.
So, essentially, we had several weaknesses, namely that:
You could also add that they focussed on the same consumer segments as a weakness, but how could they know, right?
Now, if you read into Blue Ocean Strategy, then you would expect for Nintendo to have anticipated these issues. How would that be possible?
For one, they are industry-insiders, just like Sony and Microsoft, so they would have had access to data about production costs of both competing consoles, as well as of the state of HDTVs and HD DVDs, now and in the near future. Two, being a successful console and game producer, they would also have a good grasp on their audience. Three, they would have their own vision and be able to iterate quickly on it.
When you think about it, the leap of logic wasn’t actually happening from those entering the blue ocean, it was from those operating in the red one: Sony and Microsoft.
I wrote this, because sometimes, as a new player on the market, you aim small. You don’t want to upset the big players in the red ocean and instead want to *grow* a blue one. I don’t think blue oceans are grown, they are instead hidden. Growing an ocean is the worst leap of all, because it means changing people’s behaviour. Core-users of Xbox & Playstation haven’t changed one bit, rather you found new customers that weren’t being addressed by those two marketing strategies.
If you do have to make a leap in logic to launch a product, make sure that the price you pay isn’t to expensive.
End of thought.
Vincent
Tags: Blue ocean strategy, Nintento, Playstation 3, Sony, Wii, Xbox 360
Asia, Books, Business Process Management, Business intelligence, Business strategy, Consumer electronics, Design, Economics, Education, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Future, Gaming, Globalization, Internet, Organization, Project Management, Software, Supply Chain, Technology, USA, innovation, marketing, media, operations, video games
Comments Off Meet AddressBookSync, a simple Mac-app created to synchronise pictures and trivial (birthday) data from Facebook with the local Address book the Mac. This is about as much as you could possibly get out of Facebook, without infringing on the terms of agreement that you agreed too (probably without reading) when signing up to Facebook.
And meet my other friend, LinkedIn’s AddressBookExport, which allows me to place all of my contacts into the, again, more useful Address Book on the Mac.
Now, I can take that address book and import it back into Facebook. But I cannot do it the other way around.
Maybe I’m being too European about this, but it seems logical that this should be a law. These are your contacts; there’s a mutual agreement between both parties to come into contact. That same agreement might not exist regarding me importing their addresses into Facebook (Still have to read those TOCs), but Facebook still allows it.
We all get why they don’t allow the opposite. They don’t want me to take my contacts with me to some other social network. Because it isn’t a utility like LinkedIn, but more like a gym-membership, with lots of fun activities to do onsite.
But seriously, shouldn’t this be a law, and if so, why isn’t it being implemented?
Vincent
Comments Off This is one the hardest things ever. While I was blogging daily it was easy; you somehow get into this rhythm of pumping out text everyday and, at some point, you’ve hit your groove. Taking my break really made little sense to my brain whatsoever, as day-after-day, I kept on writing draft-after-draft, while I was meant to take a break!!!
Luckily-unluckily I eventually gave that up…
Now, I don’t actually thing there is any great secret to starting up again. It’s going to be a bitch, we all know that, and we can all remember that first workout in the gym / at home, after taking much-too-long-a break. Muscle Ache!!! Which in blogging-terms, translates to brain-ache or have-I written-sh*t-today?-ache. I know that, writing this, I will check back over and over and over again to see if it made any sense.
No, the real secret to starting up again is just… to never stop! Or, to continue like you never stopped and have faith in the imagined fact that someday that brain-ache is going to pass… even if it doesn’t feel like that right now.
See you tomorrow, Tech IT Easians!
Vincent
Tags: Art, creativity, writing
Comments Off Hi, this is not a technology report – analysis, so somehow out of the usual TIE dresscode.
But I feel that I should blog about what is happening in my country Greece nowdays for all the impact that it has on a personal, national, European and human level.
Last Saturday night a teenager was shot by a policeman in the street.
Ever since, Athens and many other Greek cities live in protesting, rioting, and worse, looting and burning of public and private urban tissue.
It is not the first time citizens fall pray to urban risks, neither in Greece nor in other cities of the world. Reaction is always part of the game. But extending these reactions over a surreal period of several days, signifies that the game is still a subject of negotiation under the sound of anger.
For me, and for many other people living here, it is a strangling of our logic.
It is only by focusing on each incident separately that we can form a vision on the facts.
Whoever tries to see these past days as whole, is faced with profound stress because there is no connecting line, typical of violence, eh?
So instinctively each part of the population identifies his reason with his own anxiety in this massive crowdsourcing of hate colours.
for example…
Teenagers face their economically and socially undermined environment.
Students and people who enter the productive ages face the paradox of building a life in one of the most expensive European countries by means of parental mecenat.
People in their 50s revive their post-war issues.
Pensioners stress the absence of social welfare.
Artists reason on cultural sins like sleep and obesity.
A big happy extended family …
Life in Greece is beautiful, most of the time you feel as if it is a party. If it is not in the air, it lives in the minds of the people.
Sometimes people get drunk. In 2004 we were drunk by the sudden euphoria of the Olympic Games, and in the aftermath we kept on the festivities (very bad for our credit card reflexes)
In 2008 we are drunk with anger.
This is a good kick to begin bringing to reality what we have in our minds. And start building.
Soon, when the violence will be over, we will have no illusion if burning everything down could have been a solution.
A big “NO” will be stuck in our minds hopefully.
And hopefully our animal farm is short-circuited here.
me & my friends, after
With or without Mr Jones we will be more ready to build what we want for Greece.
First thing is to put in action some conciliation practices and rebuild our public safety mechanisms.
Instead of overeducating kindergarteners and pappy-students, getting our guardian angels to learn the basics.
And then begin reintegrating them in the society, which has fiercely stereotyped and dehumanized them.
And then reintegrating ourselves in the society.
And then working for it and not against it.
We all now that, either in Greece or in other parts of the planet. now it’s time to begin doing it…
no grande finale in this article, because I will sound even more like a third class politician.
+ behind the violence, there were also some interesting stuff on how people communicated during the crisis, I will blog about them soon, when I find my words back.
Georgia
Comments Off Previously on this blog, Vincent talked about learning Java. That reminded me of this post that I had kept as a draft for a very long time. It’s more like a (really) short story, though. I guess it just a love story about Ruby and perils of having too much time on your hands.
I have a confession. I recently wrote a program, or maybe it’s just a script. I’m a bit ashamed to confess this, because it serves little if any purpose.
You see, one group of my friends hang at this irc-channel where they post occasionally funny links. The problem, of course, is that you’d need a connection to IRC to see what’s going on in the channel and IRC is usually blocked at any public or work access points. It’s also a pain to keep track of all the links unless you’re online all the time, 24/7.
So, having some time on my hands, I started writing a little Ruby program that would parse the irssi logs for all links and publish the latest ones as an Atom/RSS feed. Thanks to the open source movement, it was easy to find a library, atom-tools, that would do the heavy lifting of writing out the XML of an Atom feed. I decided writing the regular expressions to parse the logs was enough so I could say I had actually done something myself.
It was fun. And I got to use Transmit and love its feature-I-now-can’t-live-without Edit With <editor here>.
“Why Ruby?”, you might ask. Because it’s the only language, which syntax I remember and to which I remember where the documentation is (thanks RDoc ). Publishing this little gem (in figurative sense, not as a ruby gem) on my friend’s server pointed once again the blocking problem of Ruby. My friend’s Debian box had an outdated version of Ruby and when I finally (okay, it took a day after I hinted about that) got him to update that it was still missing IRB (Ruby’s interactive shell). Debian doesn’t like rubygems, so I had to add atom-tools library the hard way. Running the script on Apache through something like mod_ruby or mod_fcgi or something? I chose to run the script as a cron job instead. Deploying my little ruby script was a pain. Had I written a php, python or perl script I would’ve no doubt avoided some of the obstacles, but my main idea was not to actually have a script converting irssi logs to feeds, but enjoying writing a program, i.e. coding.
But I wasn’t satisfied after the script started to write out every hour the latest links on our irc-channel. There were so many features I could add to it! I could make it so that instead of just linking to an image, it could also display the image as inline content! I could make it better! I could make it faster! I have the technology!
I wasn’t satisfied with the code. It wasn’t poetry, but the source was still… ugly. I wanted to make little classes out of everything. Make it more general and modular. To give rhythm to the code. (I blame myself for reading The Ruby Way).
I was over-engineering. The script was done. It did what I had wanted it to do. But I wasn’t satisfied, I wanted more. There were still bugs to fix.
If you have a burning desire to parse links out of your irssi logs with Finnish dates in timestamps, the code is available … at request.
Tags: programming, ruby
Comments Off Previously Vincent wrote about collaborative filtering here on Tech It Easy and made a really good business case on the topic of user-generated content (UGC) versus Expert input. Here, I’ll go a bit more deep into the ways collaborative filtering is done and what are the challenges.
For simplicity, I have divided the ways to filter in two. There’s the Pandora way, where the approach is that a song can be explained by about 150 different genes and recommendations are (in very simple terms) other songs in the neighborhood in that multi-dimensional space. To accurately achieve this, they use expert opinions. Then there’s the Amazon, Last.fm, Netflix et al. way of clustering users with similar histories and recommending what other people in that cluster have liked.
The huge difference in these approaches is best illustrated by the fact that for the Pandora way to work, you don’t actually need any users. The expert’s role in the latter way is to somehow come up with a way to model these clusters accurately.
The latter is much more interesting, because it’s always a challenge to infer anything from user data. The Pandora way’s “only” major challenge is the assumption that people like similar things (ie. how big the searched neighborhood should be).
The other main reason for interest in the Amazon/Netflix way is, of course, money. The $ 1,000,000 Netflix Prize is, simply put, a hunt for a certain RMSE (root mean squared error). When described this way, some interesting questions arise.
For the record, I liked Napoleon Dynamite
One question I think is important is what’s the theoretical limit for accuracy in Netflix’s case. In other words, let’s assume that all users at Netflix rate fully rationally all and only the movies they have seen on a cardinal scale. That’s a pretty heavy load of assumptions and I’m pretty sure that’s not all. That’s why even though Netflix could accurately forecast the data it wouldn’t mean it mirrors users’ true preferences. So, what actually is this upper limit on accuracy, or lower limit on RMSE, in Netflix’s case is a good question.
For these reasons it shouldn’t be surprising that “just a guy in a garage”, a psychologist employing behavioral decision making assumptions instead of hard rationality, could get so good scores in the Netflix Prize. A pretty good story on that was in Wired a while ago.
For the reasons above, it’s also pretty backwards to think that the problem is fitting the data into the algorithm, so I wouldn’t really call it a “Napoleon Dynamite problem” as NY Times did recently. But do note, that the “Pragmatic Theory” team interviewed in this article, just like “just a guy in a garage”, didn’t actually invent anything new, they just realized to use a method didn’t know or had forgotten about, in this case singular value decomposition. One such method is the Principal Component Analysis, which is available in pretty much any statistical software package available (no, Excel doesn’t count) (and yes, could think Pandora way as something similar to Factor analysis).
One difficulty in Netflix’s case it pretty much boils down to what’s in a number. Remember that in this case the teams work only on user rating data, but they are of course free to add more data from other sources as well. This doesn’t change the fact that the only user data they have are user’s ratings.
As a sidenote, I guess that one reason demographics aren’t used is legal issues. Vince pointed that things like the “Napoleon Dynamite problem” could be solved with more data like demographics and mood. Now, usually more data means just more problems, but let’s forget about that for this discussion.
On this topic, I recently listened to a really interesting lecture about modern consumer analysis by Petri Vasara from Pöyry consulting. They had come up with neat tool, ConsuNaut (PDF) to show what certain segments are doing at what times (comparing to the old “your target audience watches TV x hours day” way) and what was their mood etc. One “press release friendly” finding of this tool is that the Global Rush Hour, or when most of the world’s people are commuting, is at 18-19 Finnish time (UTC+2).
Anyway, back to the topic. What I also see as a problem is the actual “forecasting” part. Now, this doesn’t affect Netflix that much, because I assume that it is in their interest to get customers rent whatever movies, even – using the out-of-fashion term – “long tail”. Even more so if there are inventory costs involved. What happens when a new movie enters the pool? Remember, that for clustering to work, there has to be data, which is pretty sparse for a new movie. How long does it take for new movie’s recommendations to be accurate and how does it affect other recommendations?
In other words, how stable is the solution for the problem? How does seeing the latest James Bond, because everyone goes to see that, change the recommendations to someone who doesn’t like other action movies? Is he recommended Transporter 2? Is fan of Pixar movies offered Disney’s children’s animations, or worse yet, DreamWorks’ animations?
Not Madagascar 2
So, while Netflix way is about fitting data and finding clusters, Pandora bases it assumption on the idea that all music can be labeled accurately and objectively. The main criticism against this approach in my opinion is the post-modern philosophy of subjectiveness. Is there really one truth? (Also, how many genes does it need?)
I was attending a guest lecture by Andrzej P. Wierzbicki on “The Problem of Objective Ranking: Foundations, Approaches and Applications”, where he, for example, discussed the “dangers and errors of the subjectivist reduction of objectivity to power and money”. So he was painting with a broad brush, but there were lots of gems. He also noted that intersubjective rational ranking is difficult and full objectivity is impossible, which should demotivate the Pandora crowd a little.
So, what might at surface look like a statistical challenge is deep down much more cross-disciplinary and it goes all the way to our assumptions of reality. This is why it is important to keep in mind the most important thing, the end of all this – the business angle. It is not Netflix’s or Pandora’s interest to 100% accurately predict anything, they only need to do it well enough. Well, not Netflix’s anyway. The whole reason for improving Cinematch is purely economical, they have found out that people actually rent more if the recommendations are good (enough). There’s a reason they’re offering one million dollars for 10% improvement. I’d love to know how quickly that million pays itself back.
And, really, let’s face it. Most of the collaborative filtering things today are just toys so none of this really matters. There’s a lot of assumptions and approximations and the results are good enough for the purpose. For example, iTunes’ Genius is certainly flawed and limited, but it’s way better than normal random or shuffle play. But if you want to go that extra mile, then you see that the challenge gets exponentially more difficult.
To top it off, in the end there’s the age old problem of optimization, which is that on average, the solutions are “good”, but not “interesting” and definitely not varied. But to add “interestingness” we have to add uncertainty and that’s whole new world of pain (Allais paradox being the least)… but risk should have its rewards, shouldn’t it?
Kari Silvennoinen is a Ph.D student at Helsinki School of Economics and is currently working on behavioral decision making topics.
Comments Off There’s a law in art, which is that to be creative, you must go out and smell the flowers. With that in mind, I’ll take a breather from Tech IT Easy and will look for some adventures that will automatically translate into more and better content… when the time is right.
I hope you enjoyed these last few weeks and until soon, I hope!
Vincent
P.S. I’ll continue to share links and write 140 letter haiku on Twitter.
Tags: Art, creativity, writing
Comments Off 
In many ways, I consider this the best strategy book, I’ve ever read. “Valuation,” by George Norton, is, as the name suggests, a book that uses financial models as a basis to build (sound) strategies. It is also a textbook—my version is hardcover and 190 pages long—but written in a format that reads easily and is structured to be implemented—ca. 30% of the book are (group-)exercises meant to implement what the book suggests.
If I had to criticise it, it’s that I don’t consider it very practical in an entrepreneurial setting. One thing that such methodologies require, is time, which is often a luxury that smaller/younger companies and projects do not have. Building up a set of co-ordinated, organisation-wide strategies can be a matter of years, and, I expect that if you were to follow the book’s advice, you’d engage in a 6 month trajectory, at least.
That said, it is a well-written book and achieves the objective of a book, which is to make understood its topic. In this case, valuation means understanding the value of companies, their products, and business activities. The financial part only really plays a part in the first third and last third of the book, while the middle is more about the actual coming up of the company’s mission, its broader goals, its objectives, and its strategies—the latter being the nitty-gritty activities of how to fulfil the grander vision.
And, where valuation comes in, everything will affect the cash position of the business: some activities may be research-intensive (= costly), but lead to greater rewards in the long-term; others will be quick-sale actions, which generate revenue, but may not always improve the long-term position of the business, unless that revenue is re-invested in more sustainable growth.
I find that these principles easily translate into small business- and individual activities, but only if taken on a holistic level, in which case reading this book may be overkill. But if you’re a finance-geek that wants to learn how to better translate the numbers into practical company-activities, or, vice versa, if you’re a creative business-person, who wants a relatively easy intro into the financial fundamentals behind strategies, then this book may be for you.
Vincent
Tags: balance sheet, valuation
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