Ken Blanchard, the best-selling author of The One Minute Manager (13m copies sold), was the guest of the eBay Speakers Series last week, to present his new book, the One Minute Entrepreneur. I had such a great time listening to him that I read his book in an hour on the same day. Like most of the great speakers, it is really tough to sum up in an article what he said: he presented essentially life stories rather than business ones, without any PowerPoint (and I can tell you that it is pretty unusual in this kind of setting!), but with a lot of humor, modesty and wisdom. For those who are interested in great speakers, you can check out his impressive biography. Since it is hard to share those anecdotes, I’d rather highlight what I liked in his book.

If you want to purchase an entrepreneurship book to know how to approach VCs and start your business, just buy The Art of Start. If you want to understand the mindset of an entrepreneur from a psychological point of view, and how it translates operationally, just buy The E-myth revisited. But if you want something more inspirational, a story on entrepreneurship rather than a business book, then The One minute Entrepreneur is the right choice. It basically relates the story of an entrepreneurial adventure, and highlights the “one minute insights” that we can derive from this story. They can be summarized under 4 Ps:

• Passion: You need to love what you’re doing, otherwise you’ll never accept all the sacrifices that go with your venture; leadership is about love (loving your missions, your people, your customers)
• Profit: You need to find people willing to pay you for what you love, otherwise you have a hobby and not a job, and quickly eating becomes more important than having fun
• Priorities: this is the one I like the most. You should have your priorities in order, and find the right balance in your life. There is a good quote in the book, from the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People from Rabbi Kushner, who says that he never heard anyone on their deathbed say “I wish I had gone to the office more”. And Ken Blanchard seems to be really putting that into practice: he spoke more about his wife during the conference than about his job, he seems completely enthusiastic about his life, and has accepted the bad things that happened to him recently (loss of his house during the fires in San Diego) without too much pain because he has a clearly defined set of priorities.
• People:
  • Entrepreneurship is about mentorship: you don’t have to do everything by yourself, you just have to send a positive energy and a lot of motivation to get people to help you. In the story of the book, it is clear that the entrepreneurs manage to find the advice of the right people at the right moment, and being able to ask for help appears in this case to be their main success factor
  • You need to be a servant leader: you have to empower your people to take decisions (bottom up approach rather than top down). A leader can’t be there during all the interactions with a customer, so he has to give the right power to his employees to make the right decisions during the Moments of Truth of the customer relationship with the company. It reminded me of what Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, mentioned a few weeks ago about creating a strong culture so that your employees do the right thing without being obsessed by processes and rules.
  • You need to help your people get an A: as a professor, Ken Blanchard never understood the need for a normal distribution, and mentions that nobody recruits according to a normal distribution, which is really true! He advocates that in companies, the role of a manager is to make his people get an A rather than grading them. Therefore evaluations shouldn’t be a surprise but only a collection of ongoing discussions.

This book is worth reading for many other insights, and apparently there is a free offer here, so you shouldn’t hesitate. Do you have any suggestions of good entrepreneurship books that you would like to be reviewed here on TIE?

Hi, Fidji here. In the context of my thesis on the democratization of art via the Internet, I had the chance to interview Alain Romang, in charge of the online communication of Les Abattoirs, a modern and contemporary art museum based in Toulouse (France), which has developed a real Internet strategy to reach a new audience. I find really interesting to understand how the Internet, based on open access, has been used by museums, which have tried for a long time to cultivate their sacred atmosphere, whereas their mission is to make their collections as accessible as possible. Here are the most interesting pieces of the interview.

What is the purpose of the online communication of the museum? Attract different people on the website, or in the museum, or is it essentially a loyalty tool?

The first objective was to give some elements of information on opening hours, driving directions… to an audience that starts all its searches on the Internet. Our stats prove that most of the site visits are related to the planning of a visit to the museum. But what we appreciate is that the Internet is also a way of preparing people to the visit of the museum by giving some background on the artist, so that they really can make the most of the exhibition. We can also follow-up after the visit by providing tools to go deeper into the understanding of a particular piece. In terms of finding a new audience thanks to our online initiatives, it is clearly one of our objectives but we haven’t done any survey to prove that it is working yet. Let’s say that we strongly suppose the correlation between the increase in number of visits on our site and the increase in number of visits of our museum.

You offer the possibility of accessing 2000 pieces of art virtually: do you think that it is possible to feel a real artistic emotion on the screen of a computer?

It is almost a philosophical question, but yes, I sincerely believe it, at least if we believe that there are several types of artistic emotions. In the physical museum, there is a relation to the architecture, to a particular atmosphere, and also the intervention of simpler things such as the reaction of other visitors, that you obviously don’t have online. Which is why you really need to use the most appropriate tools online to compensate this, and some virtual exhibitions have clearly manage to achieve this goal.

Do you think that there is a risk of cannibalization of the offline by the online, if most of the collections are accessible online?

I think that the contrary is more likely. I feel that a certain audience, who is not used to visiting museums (for geographical, cultural or sociological reasons) will be more likely to plan a visit to a museum if it had the opportunity of discovering some pieces online. I believe that both experiences are interesting: the Internet is for example much more appropriate for educative purposes since we can put more information online. The two experiences feed each other but there is no cannibalization.*

What are the different objectives of the tools that you use: video, blog of the museum, Facebook page?

The blog allows a better reactivity. We have created it to talk about news of the museum, events or marginal subjects with a more original view that don’t fit within the website. The possibility of commenting is also interesting, since it is, at least for most museums, a new kind of interaction with the audience. And obviously it improves our referencing on search engines thanks to more content and key words.

Concerning pictures and videos on Flickr/Youtube, it is part of the mission of archiving of the museum, but also allows new interactions: Flickr announced the creation of « pools », which will allow visitors to post their own pictures of the museum directly in Les Abattoirs’ Flickr space.

Facebook is more of an experiment so far. Of course the idea of federating a community around the museum is really interesting, but so far we’ve been there only because it is a tool with an amazing growth and I didn’t want to be “late” on such a tool. And thanks to all the new apps, we find new useful modules to add every day, so it forces us to keep being innovative.

What are the next steps to be sure that your museum will remain on top of the new Internet initiatives?

So far we are focused on improving the current tools: redesigning the blog, feeding Flickr and Youtube, expanding our Facebook network. We also want to develop podcasting, targeted to specific exhibitions. Finally, there is the debate on the presence on Second Life: we have done a simple ROI calculation and it seems that at this stage, the time spent to create Les Abattoirs in Second Life is not justified by the frequentation. Of course it creates some media exposure, but we don’t want to do that only to appear in blogs and newspapers. We want to launch this initiative only when we will have more visibility on our return on that, especially since the hype around Second Life is already declining. But we are watching it closely.

* A survey realized by the Institute of Museum and Library Services proves Alain’s point: it shows that people connected to the Internet go to museums 2.6 times more than people without any access. Among the respondents, 45% have visited both a virtual and offline museum, 50% a real museum only and 5% a virtual museum only.

I just discovered the eBay Speaker Series with allows eBay employees to meet with experts and leaders of the industry. I checked that I am allowed to blog about all these great conferences and since the answer is yes, I am really glad to be able to share them with you. Today, this conference was a paradise for my brain: everything seemed to fall into place, to make perfect sense. We had the chance of receiving Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. For those who don’t know Zappos (and if it is the case, you’re probably European), it is the first online shoe retailer is the US, but before all, it is one of those companies completely shifting the paradigm in their approach of customer service. I pass quickly on Tony H.’s history which is anyway pretty impressive (cofounder of LinkExchange sold to MSFT for $265m, cofounder of an incubator which led him to Zappos) and on Zappos history (founded in 1999, now 1600 employees), but instead focus on Tony’s vision.

First, I was surprised by their mission: I thought that they would naturally choose “becoming the largest shoe retailer in the world” or “becoming the largest accessories retailer”. No, instead they chose something way more inspiring for customers and actionable by employees: “providing the best online experience possible”. Tony H. chose not to compete on prices, but on products and service instead, to drive repeat customers (very successfully strategy since 75% of purchases are from returning customers which on average have higher order size that first time ones). And how does it translate currently into their business? By a number of policies: free shipping and free return shipping, 365 day return policy, 24/7 1-800 number. Well, it seems interesting, but some e-tailers are doing the same, right? It seems that the differentiating factor is how these policies are implemented. For example, the number to reach the customer service is on every single page of the web site: Zappos wants their customers to call them, whereas other e-tailers try by all means to make you find your product or answer by your own. Tony H. mentioned that he sees the customer service as an immense branding opportunity, a unique way to speak directly to your customers. Customer satisfaction is the only focus: customer reps sometimes refer customers to competitors’ websites if Zappos is out of stock on a particular model. By the way, on this particular example, Zappos is only reproducing what local retailers, especially in small cities, have always done, but is doing it at a larger scale.

But what are the processes to achieve this customer satisfaction? I’ll pass quickly on a number of operational measures (reps don’t have a maximum call time to follow and are not incentivized on sales, warehouse run 24/7, inventory all products…) but instead focus on the culture. I am always skeptical when I hear a company saying that they rely on their culture to make things right: a nice sign with 10 really basic principles at the entrance of a corporate building has never helped me determine the strategy of a company. Even the really consensual Google’s “don’t be evil” is now questioned! But at Zappos, the difference is that the core values are really committable and that decisions, especially the crucial ones like hiring, firing and evaluating performance, are made in accordance with the culture. Notably, all employees spend 5 weeks in training to learn the culture, and customer reps are given $1000 to leave the company during the training if they feel that they don’t fit with the culture of customer satisfaction. And which impact does it make on the business? It seems that once you get the culture right, the decisions are much easier to make. Tony H. gave a lot of really good examples and I just picked one: a widow wanted to return shoes from her deceased husband, and the rep who managed the case took the initiative on her own to send flowers to the widow on behalf of Zappos. The widow was so moved by the gesture that she mentioned it during the funeral. Of course there is no guideline for this kind of situation, but having the right culture gives you confidence that your employees will do the right thing in terms of human behavior but also for the company (the widow and some members of the family are now repeat customers!).

But finally, what about the costs involved? Tony H. sees customer service as an investment and not an expense: Zappos has been profitable since last year but could have been profitable 4 years ago; instead, it invested in free overnight shipping and other aspects of customer satisfaction. But he is also extremely rigorous about ROI: whereas offering free shipping the same day would totally fit into the culture, it doesn’t make any sense from a business standpoint and therefore hasn’t been implemented.

I didn’t have time to ask the question about whether or not they plan to go global, because it would be a totally different challenge to maintain the same level of CS on a global scale. So if I’m lucky and Tony sees this article, I hope he’ll reply here

I was just commenting on Vince’s last article Copyright or the Right-to-Eat and realized that my comment was getting so long that I should better write an article on the subject. This actually funny because I was about to write a piece on exactly the same subject, and for most of it with the same opinion, because I attended on Friday a conference called “New Media Artists and The Law” organized by California Lawyers for the Arts and I wanted to share the thoughts of this conference on this blog. It gathered Emily A. Berger, Intellectual Property Fellow with Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons, and Joel Slayton, Director of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media, and exploring the ways copyright laws are implicated in new media art and the challenges artists face in this evolving area of the law.

In direct connection with Vince’s article, Mike Linksvayer, VP of Creative Commons defended the idea that there are plenty of ways to make a living while giving one’s art for free. But I had the same issue as Vince’s about the status of the artist in our society: what does this reveal if people are not willing to pay for art anymore? I personally believe that the Internet and the culture of gratuity and open access is an opportunity for unknown artists because giving their art away for free allows them to get some market traction and then, be able to sell some “derivatives” of their art, and make money that they wouldn’t have made without this strategy. So for this specific kind of people, I would say that it shouldn’t be an ethical problem to make money on things that are not the product of their art itself, because the product of their art itself wouldn’t have generated any money otherwise. But of course there is the other portion, which can have an opportunity of making money from its art directly, but which will start feeling a certain pressure to give this art for free. I was kind of shocked during this conference to hear artists in the audience speaking about offering their art on the Internet as a fatality, a trend they were obliged to follow, as if the “Myspace success story” was the only hope left. But as Emily A. Berger mentioned during the conference, referring to Chris Anderson’s article “Free”, you will always have free to compete with you: so either you try to make it better than what is offered for free, or you try to tackle the niche of people having more money than time (the iTunes niche, which, with the right pricing, is actually not a niche anymore), or you make it free and find ways to make money otherwise.  An excellent article from Kevin Kelly called “1000 True Fans” argues that an artist only needs 1000 True Fans to make a decent living, since a True Fan, that you can “recruit” via the free offering, will after that be ready to pay for anything related to you. And he also mentions that the Internet allows you to reach this number more easily than traditional channels and therefore find a middle way between the long tail and the superstar.

But while all this talk is perfectly understandable in the case of the music industry which is a market based on volume, it is a totally different story when it comes to visual arts. Which is why I have trouble understanding a copyright law which seems to tackle all the artists as if they were a unified world facing the same challenges. And this is also why I welcome initiatives like Creative Commons which allows people to give away some of their rights when they feel that the copyright law doesn’t answer their needs and that these new licenses can benefit them, as long as (and this is a major risk) it doesn’t put any pressure on other people in the industry to do the same. But how do you adapt these notions of derivatives in the case of visual arts? It is way harder for a painter to get True Fans, and even if he manages to get some, I am not convinced at all that a person falling in love with the image of a painting will be ready to buy a T-shirt with this same image: it is just not the same feeling. The visual art market has somewhat been already confronted to the same kind of problem outside the Internet, like how to monetize a happening or short-lived works of art. When Christo decided to wrap the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris, he had to find ways of monetizing a work of art that was offered for free to the inhabitants of these cities, and therefore he sold some pictures of the different stages of the experiment. But, to go back to Vince’s point, this is Christo, and a lot of people are interested in those pictures, whereas an unknown visual artist doesn’t have the traction.

Actually, the major paradox is that only artists who would manage to sell their art directly are able to sell derivatives in a significant amount, whereas the starving artists who would be ready to give their art for free and make a living by selling derivatives don’t have the market traction to generate enough interest around their derivatives, especially in visual arts. And after all, even if Emily A. Gerber said “get your art out there by any means, get market traction and after that you’ll see”, a thousand fans is a pretty large number don’t you think?

Hello, Fidji here. I remember that, for one of my first articles on Tech It Easy, I spoke about it with Jeremy and he told me “that’s interesting, but there is no way you are going to make your point if you don’t draw something to show it”. And I didn’t, because I couldn’t find a way of summarizing it all in a simple picture. I thought it was better with words only, but truly it wasn’t. That’s the point that Dan Roam is trying to make in his book “The back of the napkin”.

Dan was today’s speaker at the eBay Speaker Series conference, so I had the chance to enjoy hearing him explain his theory. He is convinced that any business problem can be solved by a simple picture, that anybody has the ability to draw. But we often believe that we are not able to draw anything because the current educational system doesn’t give us many opportunities to use our visual thinking – even if it is an innate form of thinking as a child.

He shared a funny anecdote with us: he was advising Microsoft on a UI type of problem, and to foster the discussion, he showed them some handmade drawings. The people in the room were enthusiastic about this new support for their discussion, and at the end of the meeting some exec went to see Dan and asked him: “what software did you use to make the UI seem as if it is handmade?”.

And I definitely agree with Dan when he says that some software help and stimulate our thinking whereas others (and a lot of them) just block us: as a strategic analyst, I personally thinks about a problem only in terms of “what is it possible to show about it in a PowerPoint?”. I know it sounds kind of pathetic, but it is clear that my brain is now used to think about solutions in terms of slides.

So Dan’s solution (which can of course be summarized in a picture drawn on a napkin as you can see in this article) is to use the swiss knife of visual thinking:

• Use our built-in tools: eyes, mind, hands.
• Use the “look, see, imagine, show” process when approaching a problem, like we would do in poker game (we look at the cards, we see the patterns, we imagine what we could have, whe show our cards).
• When you arrive at the “show” step, use the SQVID framework: try to understand wether you need, for your audience to understand, to make you picture Simple or elaborate, Qualitative or quantitative, to focus on the Vision or the execution, to adopt an Individual or a comparative view, and finally to show your problem as a Delta (change) or as a status quo.
• Match your picture with one of the way we see the world: to answer a What? question, draw a portrait; to answer a How many? question, draw a chart; to answer a Where? question, draw a map, to answer a When? question, draw a timeline, to answer a How? question, draw a flow chart, and finally to answer the Why? question, draw a multidimensional picture, often a combination of the previous questions.

What I also find interesting is his classification of people into 3 categories regarding visual thinking: the black pen guys, who are the ones that can’t help jumping from their chair during a meeting and drawing things everywhere on the white board; the yellow pen guys, who are the ones good at highlighting the important areas in a picture and improving what’s be drawn; and the red pen guys, who hate drawing but who usually think that what the black pen guys are writing is bullshit and feel so exasperated that they end up amending the whole thing. I took Dan’s test and it happens that I fall into the second bucket; and I’m really curious to know where you think you fit the most to see if it confirms the repartition that we had within the eBay audience!

I am still a bit obsessed on how companies manage their innovation processes and how they make it fit with their culture. In this context, I recently read an HBS case about Intel research. The “Intel lablets” particularly attracted my attention and raised general questions about the management of innovation.

In 2004, Intel realized that faster and more powerful processors will not be the most important customers’ need anymore and that it had to shoulder more of the burden of innovation. But Intel’s historical approach to R&D didn’t allow the company to spot the technologies that can impact the core business dramatically, or create new businesses. Indeed, Intel has based his R&D strategy on the idea of connecting closely research with manufacturing, by allocating R&D resources to each business units. This structure, even if really efficient in sustaining Moore’s law, was only focused on incremental innovations in the silicon roadmap, making it inefficient to identify some disruptive technologies.

These technologies could only be developed through “exploratory” research. However, Intel’s aversion for a centralized lab, which is definitely the standard model for this kind of research, pushed the company to look for another model. The search for a “happy medium” led to the creation of the “Lablets”, which are some small labs located close to universities well known for their collaboration with the industry and for their expertise in some sectors of interest for Intel. They selected Berkeley, Pittsburg and Seattle. Some characteristics of these lablets are differentiating them from some firms’ previous attempts to build labs close to universities and are particularly conceived to foster innovation:

• Thanks to an Open Collaborative Agreement, much of the research can be published and shared widely, with Intel hoping to acquire proprietary advantage in the downstream stages of the projects;
• Lablets are staffed with 40 researchers and are co-directed by an Intel research employee and a university faculty member changing every two years;
• Projects in lablets are funded on a milestones basis and were reviewed quarterly.

But this clever approach raises a certain number of issues.

How can the scope of activities of an “exploratory innovation program” be defined?

If the lablets’ role is to sense the environment to understand potentially disruptive technologies, then the scope is really wide. So it has to be reduced to some large sectors likely to have an impact on Intel businesses or ecosystem, as the final objective is to end up by passing projects to business units. The model thus represents a tricky balancing act: giving researchers enough freedom to be creative and to think broadly in terms of sectors in which to spot disruptive technologies, while confining their efforts to predefined aspects. There is a happy medium to find between the systematic search for opportunities congruent with core capabilities and “adhocracy”. Intel’s answer to this problem is to have Intel specify the problems it wants researchers to solve, but not the idea it wants them to work on, which sounds like a really fine distinction.

What type of structure is the most appropriate for this kind of exploratory research?

When I heard about the lablets, I couldn’t help thinking: is it really the right structure to be in charge of the strategic responsibility of understanding what will be disruptive in the market? Having only 40 researchers in each of the 3 lablets is a good way to limit costs and therefore limit the impact of the high level of risk involved, which is what companies try to do most of the time with their innovation team, but it also can appear difficult to reach the critical mass, often mentioned as crucial to create a fertile environment. Moreover, even if being a small group can limit the internal resistance (as this kind of exploratory research is absolutely not part of Intel’s culture) by not attracting too much attention, it doesn’t allow stand on your own in a large organization. Intel lablets would require a heavyweight team (see matrix) to push projects into business units without having to fight to convince the business units of the viability of a project. In addition, the frequent turnover of people due to the university involvement can be a threat in the case of long term projects. Besides, if some lablets’ projects make it downstream into the main R&D fold, then some great researchers will probably leave to ensure the follow-up. But it seems that this is the price to pay to always bring new blood into an innovation program, which is crucial to generate more ideas and more expertise.

How to assess the performance of such structures?

What I find interesting here is that the lablets’ case reflects the basic problem of any innovation process: how can you set up performance metrics in a domain that flourishes only when there is a tolerance to failure? Finding metrics to measure the success of exploratory research is difficult as the process of sensing the environment can lead to many useless results, but is still necessary to have chance of producing breakthrough products or predicting disruptive changes in the market. It is clearly the case of R&D as a Real Options: you pay a certain amount of money to have the right to exercise an option when the market changes. Which is why funding the projects on a milestones basis is so important in this context, as this sequential investment creates the option to abandon the project in midstream if it is too early to market or doesn’t fit the company’s strategy. Each stage can be viewed as an option on the value of subsequent stages, and valued as a compound option.

The point of this post was not to speak about Intel’s initiative in particular but more to discuss about the issues that any innovation process will generate. So just for information, since their creation Intel’s lablets have been working more and more closely with business units to facilitate the downstream transmission of projects, and have generated some cross-industry collaborative projects, like PlanetLab. If you have been part of an innovation program or have any thoughts about these basic issues, do not hesitate to use the comments part!

For my course of Entrepreneurship,I had to interview an entrepreneur to understand the major obstacles to overcome when creating a venture. Raphael Labbé, one of the co-founder of U.[Lik], has taken the time to share with me the story of U.[Lik] from an entrepreneurial point of view. A lot of Tech It Easy readers probably already know U.[Lik], and this article is not about U.[Lik]’s features or the concepts of social cataloging and collaborative filtering that Raphael contributes to democratize, but more about the creation of the venture in itself. Sorry for the length of the article, but it’s hard to shorten an entrepreneurial adventure!

Background about the entrepreneur: Raphael Labbé

Raphael Labbé is 28 years old and graduated from HEC Paris in 2003. After his graduation and a first venture attempt (already on the entertainment intermediation field), he started working in a private equity fund of funds, which gave him good insights about the relationships between financing sources and entrepreneurs. In 2005, after a long talk with his HEC alumnus friend Mathieu Léronde, they decided to work together on a recommendation system. After a long period (nearly a year) of study on recommendation algorithm and a deep analysis of the new web trends (UGC, SN, Long Tail that turned out to be Web2.0), they went back to the other side of the fence and created U.[Lik] : the virtual library.

Identification of the opportunity

During their 3 years at HEC, Raphael and Mathieu benefitted from 2 aspects of campus life:

The cultural enrichment due to the possibility of going into some friends’ room to discover and borrow new CDs, books and DVDs;

The chance of having access to a high speed Internet connection and a computer network allowing the emergence of P2P sharing long before the mainstream usage, which gives them a glimpse of what the future will be.

When they met again a few years after having left campus, they both felt that this kind of cultural sharing was much more difficult in professional life and that there were few solutions to provide with good recommendations on what to buy. One of them is Amazon’s recommendation engine, which is a sales booster but not really user-customized. Raphael assesses: “It’s far from being like the trusted librarian or friend who knows your tastes […]. Also, my purchase history is not a really good proxy of my tastes: I dislike some CDs I ordered and many books I bought were intended as a gift for someone else. Amazon has actually few social / community features that would entice users to rate items and share them.”

This perception of an unsatisfied need, associated with a strong interest for cultural products -Mathieu’s thesis was about dematerialization of culture – and the ideal objective of connecting people through their tastes, pushed them to create U.[Lik]. U.[Lik] allows users to share their tastes by creating their own online library where they can aggregate their ratings of cultural products (music, cinema, arts, people…). The items users rate are placed on their Hall of Fame (what they can’t live without) or on their Hall of Shame (what they deeply hate) based on their rates.

This virtual library enables users to share their tastes, to meet friends with the same tastes, and to benefit from U.[Lik]’s recommendation system which suggests items users are likely to enjoy considering their tastes.

The business model is based on transaction pay-per-action or pay-per-clic with e-merchants websites: e-merchants are always in need of qualified traffic and are ready to commission on sales this traffic of potential buyers.

First steps of the venture

With this idea in mind, Raphael and Mathieu had to start developing the algorithm allowing U.[Lik] to provide relevant recommendations in relation to users’ ratings. Fortunately, complementarities between the two partners helped a lot: Raphael had a strong background in sociology and Mathieu in mathematics, which allowed them to design the most relevant algorithm.

For example, whereas on all other recommendation systems on the Internet users are invited to rate products with a mark from 0 to 5 (mainly stars), Mathieu and Raphael decided to make users rate cultural goods by allocating these products to one of the 5 categories of their library (Hall of Shame, Dislike, Interest, Like, Hall of Fame). This system forces users to make a significant choice when they rate a product (socio-psychological aspect) while allowing the algorithm to be more efficient when providing recommendations (mathematical aspect).

However, they had no real coding knowledge and had to learn really quickly to develop the first version of their website, as they needed users to start rating products in order to adjust their algorithm. Timing was crucial as network effect plays an important role in this market. But after a certain time, they divided their tasks according to their area of expertise: Mathieu has developed strong coding skills and keeps on working on the technical side whereas Raphael focuses on the marketing and financing sides.

Finding financing: overcoming the timing obstacle

Raphael had the chance to intrigue his previous managers at Finama with his ideas about cultural intermediation, so they followed his entrepreneurial adventure closely and invested at the beginning to help him start his venture. But finding more financing became rapidly crucial to recruit some talented developers and before all, to get an office.

Raphael started looking for business angels. He didn’t only want to get some money but also to add some expertise to his company and build relationships on the long term with people able to really understand the U.[Lik] project despite the early stage of the realization of the vision. Therefore, he approached only business angels having a strong knowledge of fields related to U.[lik]. He finally managed to get on board a few high profile business angels who gave him the money to get an office and recruit the first developers, and also provided U.[Lik] with more exposure. He notices that the deals were based almost only on the team and the fact that Raphael and Mathieu had executed everything by themselves so far, more than on the business plan: at the business angel stage, it seems to him that the human side counts much more than the economic one.

One of the most difficult decisions Raphael had to take was to refuse money from a business angel who had promised €50K and then lowered his offer to €5K. The team and the other Business Angels strongly believed that it was better for the project to give equity only to people ready to strongly back U.[Lik], without half-measure.

One month after having moved into his office, Raphael started a VC round to get money to build his team. The website he had to present was everything but polished, and the value of the venture relied at the time on the perspective of evolution and the capacity to understand Raphael’s vision for U.[Lik]. But the timing was wrong: the concepts of long tail of cultural products, social cataloging and social shopping didn’t mean anything for VCs at this time and U.[lik] was probably too much in advance. The most striking example is one of his meetings with a VC where he explained that he wanted to be able to illustrate with videos all the cultural products that would be inside U.[Lik]’s database. The VC thought that this was completely unrealistic because Youtube was just starting to boom on the other side of the atlantic and VCs couldn’t imagine that so much content would be available so soon. In a word, understanding the venture required being familiar with some nascent concepts and being visionary enough to evaluate the impact of these concepts on consumption of cultural products in the future. Clearly, it was too much at the same time and this round of financing was far too early considering the maturity of the market.

Raphael went back to see VCs one year later and expects to raise money before the end of the year. He received better feedbacks this time and VCs seem interested in participating in this still early project, that Raphael compares (with a smile) to “the creation of a cultural Babel”.

But Raphael still faces major obstacles. The difficulty to do a seed financing round in France and the risk-averse culture make it difficult to trust two HEC alumni (with a business background) to create a technology. On the other hand, he is still confronted to some incomprehension about the project from some Business Angels and VCs who try to force him to adapt U.[Lik] to reduce risk. This involves some tough decisions to break some deals because the team and its backers believe in the project as it is and don’t want to alter its potential.

Building a team with limited resources

Staffing was another challenge Raphael had to overcome when building U.[Lik]. He has decided to recruit only active users of U.[Lik], so that he’s sure that these people are strongly motivated by the company, understand the value of the project and share the same vision. This is how he recruited the 2 content managers, in charge of animating the U.[Lik]’s community and to manage the database of entertainment items on U.[Lik].

But it was much more challenging to recruit technical people, essentially developers. Developers are not really in the target of U.[Lik] (centered on culture, with women being a large part of the user base) and it was harder for Raphael to find developers strongly motivated by such a cultural project. Moreover, the shortage of good developers in France has led to an increase in wages, and Raphael couldn’t compete with other big companies’ packages. So he lost some developers because of their low motivation for the project and their focus on high wages. As he really needs some technical profiles to develop his algorithm, he hopes that the next round of financing will provide him with the resources to offer competitive wages.

Key success factors: Mathieu and Raphael expertises and involvement of U.[Lik] users

Key success factors are probably Mathieu and Raphael’s executed work and analysis of the market, as well as the core community of U.[Lik].

Raphael has become a reference when it comes to social web. His analyses of the phenomenon and his vision about possible evolution have made him a privileged insider of the all social phenomenon. At the beginning, this extensive knowledge was probably a drawback as he recognizes that he was probably in a “bubble” and didn’t manage to understand people who didn’t get the U.[Lik] concept. But now that the notion of social web applications has emerged and been democratized thanks to popular websites, this knowledge is a strong asset, especially when dealing with financial partners.

Mathieu has managed to create a great algorithm proposing relevant recommendations to users and has coded a very advance UI (that needs to become more use friendly) that is able to foster contribution and enables a very quick way of navigating through an ocean of content (that will be, at one point, fully available online)

Another key success factor is linked with the product himself. U.[Lik] is a strongly viral and addictive product: once you start rating some products on the website you can’t stop, and you want your friends to join the service so that you can see their tastes and get better recommendations. This characteristic has helped to expand greatly the user-generated database of entertainment items and starts to become viral. Some heavy users have largely contributed to the expansion of the database at no cost for U.[Lik]; other users have even developed U.[Lik] plug-ins for Firefox. This kind of outside help at no cost for the company has been priceless for U.[Lik], and is possible almost only in the particular sector of social web. It is something that is difficult to take into account, even if this kind of online behavior has been put into lights with example like Yelp, flickr or wikipédia.

Results to date and next challenges to face

Raphael and Mathieu have managed to create a great algorithm proposing relevant recommendations to users. They are adding social features along the time (for example matching users’ tastes to propose them common recommendations, which is useful when you want to decide which movie to watch with friends). But more concretely, U.[Lik] has 21K subscribers and is now a database of 216K references, with more than 800K users’ ratings. With 500 items added everyday by users, Raphael knows that the database of reference items to rate is now growing autonomously thanks to users’ contribution.

The next challenges will be to reach a critical mass of users and to build a technical team to guarantee the development of new functionalities.

In terms of financial objectives, U.[Lik] has just started implementing its 2 different models of monetization: pay-per-clic on the French website and commission on sales on the US website. Raphael is waiting to reach a critical mass of users to start optimizing the monetization model, which will mean determining which model is the most profitable on which kind of web pages. But by starting monetizing the website already, he proves to VCs that the model is viable and has an exponential growth potential.

U.[Lik] is a great example of quite a pharaonic project (creating a platform of tastes sharing) driven by the identification of a basic need and by the strong belief of two entrepreneurs that it is possible to fulfill this need even with limited resources and the necessity to overcome the major obstacle of being in advance on the market. So, good luck to the U.[Lik] team to achieve this goal!

If you want to discover my tastes, visit my lounge here. Christmas is approaching, so please also check my wishlist .

One of the difficulties of technological markets is that, in most cases, technologies are developed and then have to find a customer’s need that they can fulfill to be marketable. However, the reverse process, meaning identifying a need and looking for a technology to fulfill it, is often key to succeed, at least in the short term. But traditional market research methods fall short in indentifying customers’ needs far in advance: typical customers have trouble conceptualizing ideal products and are often stuck in the boundaries of current technologies.

For one of my course, I recently had to analyze a case on 3M innovative methods. One of them, called the Lead User Methodology (created by MIT’s Eric Von Hippel), is a well-known methodology aimed at creating breakthrough products by identifying the needs of the most advanced users, who often develop themselves some solutions to fulfill their current needs because no company already develops these solutions. The best example of this consumer-generated product is the sports drink Gatorade developed with input from athletes, or the “liquid paper” invented by a secretary for correcting typos. The Lead User Methodology proposes to leverage these users’ knowledge by offering a process for companies to identify them in their sector and translate their ideas into concrete products. You probably already know some examples of the application of the LUM but I will simply provide more details about the framework.

The LUM is a 4 stages process lasting approximately 5 to 6 months in total. It is a project team based approach, involving 4 to 6 people from the marketing and technical department. The project team is required to commit up to one third of their time to the project, with the aim of encouraging the commitment of the project team and fostering a sense of ownership of the project and its final outcome. The first stage is the Project Planning stage. This generally lasts 4 to 6 weeks and involves general research and identification of areas of interest and the level of desired innovation in the selected area. The second stage is Trends/Needs Identification. At this stage, the information gathered in the earlier stage is consolidated to identify areas for further development. This would take approximately 5 to 6 weeks and would involve discussions with experts in the relevant area. The third stage, lasting 5 to 6 weeks, involves Preliminary Concept Generation and Lead User Identification. At this stage, the project team would be working closely with lead users to gain an in depth understanding of the need and generate a preliminary concept to meet this need. The final stage is the Final Concept Generation. At this stage, the preliminary concept is further developed. A workshop is held, with participants consisting of the project team, in-house experts and lead users to discuss and improve on the final concept. It is important at this stage to evaluate the feasibility, appeal and priorities of the final concept to ensure that the final outcome is commercially viable.

At 3M, this methodology has been first implemented in the Medical-Surgical Division, and has led not only to new products in surgical drapes but also to some strategic shift: Lead Users, picked in all the relevant areas of expertise, including a make-up artist for his expertise in the application of materials to the skin) identified the need of providing a solution to keep infections from happening by precautionary upstream measures, whereas entering the upstream containment market was a departure from 3M traditional strategy of working only on incremental innovations. But the LUM was so successful for the Medical-Surgical division that it was then adopted by 8 of the 55 other divisions. According to the article “Performance Assessment of the Lead User Idea-Generation Process for New Product Development” (Lilien, 2002), the lead user method generated breakthrough new products at a higher rate than methods traditionally used at 3M. Annual sales for the average funded LUM project idea was forecasted by management to be $146 million in year five—more than eight times higher than projected sales for contemporaneous traditional projects. They also found that funded projects emerging from 3M Lead User studies had significantly higher novelty (usually being judged “new to the world”), addressed more original newer customer needs, and also had significantly higher forecasted market share in Year 5 (on average, 68% vs. 33% for non-Lead User ideas) than did those from more conventional methods.

However, even if this methodology is especially designed for technological products, some specificity can reduce its applicability:

• Highly secretive industries where lead users may not feel comfortable or may not be able to disclose information and knowledge are not suited for this process;

• The lengthy process can prevent this methodology from being applied effectively in industries with really short term innovation cycles or where quick turnaround from research to market delivery is required;

• The LUM is better suited to meet the needs of the industrial goods market rather than consumer goods market as lead users of industrial goods can typically be identified more reliably than lead users of most consumer goods.

And eventually, it goes without saying that the major obstacle to the implementation of this kind of process is simply the resistance to innovation in some large companies, afraid that Lead Users could identify disruptive needs forcing the company to evolve, which exactly the purpose.

Despite the fact that summer is a slow blogging period, Tech IT Easy remains attractive for bloggers: please join me in welcoming Rémy Miralles, a new blogger on Tech IT Easy.

We have been looking for a long time to add a technical profile to our team of bloggers: as a French software engineer, Rémy will help us provide you with more technical articles about software and development in general. Rémy is also particularly interested in quality management and will hopefully help us better understand all the aspects of this subject. Also, if you are interested in some special subjects, do not hesitate to drop a comment and Rémy or one of our bloggers will probably find it interesting to dig more into it.

To get to know Rémy better, here are some basic facts about him. He will graduate in September from a Master of Information Technology for Management Applications (MIAGE in French) from Orsay University, which combines both a technical and a business education. Thanks to a work/study program, he has also been working for two years as a Software Engineer at Linedata Services, a major player in the market for financial IT solutions. Among other things, he participated in the implementation of quality management projects to help Linedata to get certifications. Rémy has also been appealed by the entrepreneurial adventure as he founded (with me ) in September 2005 Blogentreprise, a corporate blogging platform and directory, which is now discontinued: apart from the technical side, this experience has made Rémy acquire more business insights. He is now looking to internationalize his career by moving to the US in September to find a new job.

If, like Rémy, you don’t have enough time to run your own blog but would like to have feedback on your tech thoughts from a great community of readers without the constraint of updating everyday, do not hesitate to drop Jérémy an email (see his addresses in the About page) to join our team. I also remind you that if you have a blog written in a local language and would like to gain visibility in English, Tech IT Easy may be a great solution.

To conclude, a warm welcome to Rémy!

Some people manage to analyse and remember information by writing, hearing or visualizing it. I am definitely part of the latest type.

This is why I am really interested in tools appearing on the web to visualize some experiences like shopping, search and social networking.

Some of these tools serve a practical purpose whereas others focus more on the artistic experience, but the frontier between the two interpretations seem to become more and more irrelevant.

I have made a quick selection of some tools I discovered on the net for different uses:

1) Shopping: it is proven (don’t remember the source but it is quite obvious) that starting a product search with images improve conversion rate. I can personally confirm this assessment as I buy more books on when I use Blackdogair (visual tree of Amazon’s recommendations) than when I simply go on Amazon as I rapidly get lost trying to explore every combination. For lifestyle products, Browsegoods totally stimulates impulse purchase: if you’re a woman and click on the “shoes” category, the vision of thousands of great shoes will definitely drives you crazier than traditional browsing putting in evidence prices rather than images!

2) Search: visualization of search results can cater to some unconscious users’ expectations. For example knowing how many search engines references this result, knowing at first sight if the result is a picture, a video or text, understanding how the different results are linked to each other. This is exactly what Touchgraph offers by clustering results and clearly indicating sources and connections. I also heard that SearchCrystal isn’t bad (even if I haven’t tried it) notably because it shows with different shapes results appearing in different numbers of search engines, as a proxy of relevance.

3) Social networking: this field is probably the one where visualization tools are the most artistically involved, which may lead to think that these visual representations are just “gadgets”, like for example the Facebook Friends Wheel. But, apart from artistic projects, some of them are more useful, to visualize the structure of your network: how people are connected, what are the “clusters” in your network for example. Again, Touchgraph provides a great and customizable tool to do that (the image in this article is the visual representation of the core of my network), including the links between people thought pictures’ tags.

Understanding networks (being recommendations, search results or communities) has always involved visual representation (essentially with basic lines and points), so this is not surprising to feel familiar with these tools. Jérémy always tells me that a great chart is worth thousand words, so he should agree with this article

Fidji SIMO is a co-author on Tech IT Easy, who preferred looking at images than reading text when she was young; it might have left marks! You can find out more about her on this blog’s initial announcement or her blog.

“Abbots Aerodrome is the place to go if you have a head for heights and a taste for adventure. If you’re visiting on a budget, arrive only to beat the crowds and then head to the top of the skydiving tower.”

You probably think that it is an excerpt from a Lonely Planet or another touristic guide… well you’re not wrong, except that it is a touristic guide to Second Life. Across 223 pages, Paul Carr and Graham Pond invite you to spend your holidays in Second Life in “The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life”.

For somebody really down to earth like I am, I just don’t get it, even if I have spent some time in SL not to have a biased judgment. First, how can only 40K users at the same time (source: Forrester research) can spend so many time building touristic places in SL? And, even more worrying, how can people think that tourism in Second Life can be as great as in reality?

Anyways, I have been just amazed by the number of “places to visit” in Second Life, and I have made a quick selection of what I find the most surprising:

Svarga: it is a kind of SL paradise where there is an entire ecosystem such as in real life (clouds rain to make flowers grow, which are pollinated by bees… well you get it).

Virtual Hallucinations: it is a place aimed at raising awareness about schizophrenia, where your avatar can experiment the sound of voices, visual hallucinations, illusions of himself in a mirror… Really scary.

Hearts Enchanted: it is a place where you can simply have a really advanced experience of fishing. And you can even keep the fish at the end!

Regina Spektor Audio Kiosk: I am a personal fan of Regina Spektor’s music, and even if she is not so much known in real life, she is apparently a star in SL, as you can visit her virtual loft, listen to her music and even nip up the iron staircase and have a snooze.

Wheelies: it is a nightclub dedicated to disabled but also able-bodied clubbers (or avatars!).

Machinima: it is the burgeoning movie industry in SL, where movies are played by avatars themselves. You can even see kind of a SL teenage drama here on Youtube: definitely a new style!

Bruno Echegaray’s immersive spheres: Your avatar enters a 360° sphere where pieces of art are displayed. I kind of like those initiatives as they are a new way to show art (see my post about art in virtual worlds). I must also mention Kula, the Creative Commons Island, where you can find a lot of free art that you can even remix.

And finally, as it is common knowledge that one of the basis of SL is sex, you can go to Xcite to buy you some… genitals (and lots of other things I don’t even want to mention!).

So if you’re really interested in SL phenomenon, you should definitely buy this book, but you will have to keep in mind that with the number of users decreasing, it won’t really matter how amazing the places to visit are.

And finally, just to make this post a little bit funnier, here is a “real” video which shows all the bugs of SL which are for the moment a major problem for its expansion:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flkgNn50k14]

Fidji is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement or on her site. She enjoys real trips around the world, with real people, real seas and real fishes.

After Vince’s book review of the MacDonald’s Franchise system, I thought that I would make a review of « The E-Myth revisited » by Michael E. Gerber, who sees the « Franchise mind » as a key success factor for small businesses. It is quite an old book, but I have been amazed by the simplicity and the truthfulness of how the author describes the mind of a business owner.

The author describes the entrepreneurial myth as 1) the myth that most people who start businesses are entrepreneurs, 2) the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does technical work.

He says that almost every business starts with a Technician (somebody with a great ability, for example baking pies) having an “Entrepreneurial seizure” (“it would be so much better to do it for me!”). But in each business owner, there are 3 different people with different interests: the Technician, the Manager and the Entrepreneur.

Whereas successful businesses are owned by people having “the Entrepreneur” in them shaping a vision which will lead the company to succeed, most businesses are owned by people who are Technician at 70%. They are people who have started their business thinking that by this way they will be able to dedicate entirely to what they love, without knowing that being a business owner requires many more skills.

For a Technician to develop his Entrepreneur side, he needs to think about the business as a Franchise (named the Turn Key revolution) as if he had to build a business which would have to seduce potential franchisees not for the product the business is selling but for the perfect functioning of the business itself. He has to create a Prototype business, as though it was the model for 5,000 more just like it.

I really think that Gerber has understood the psychological brakes which prevent owners from creating efficient businesses:

- Owners focus on the product rather than on the business

- Owners build a business based on their talent and personality rather than on processes, which makes impossible to grow the business or to create others on the same model

- Owners go to work in their business rather than on it

Fidji is not at all a reference in entrepreneurial success, but her mistakes make her believe that she can talk about it. You can discover her in her initial announcement or on her blog.

I am really interested by how Internet contributes to give everyone access to art, being by stimulating new types of artistic creation or new types of artistic presentation.

But virtual worlds are accelerating this democratization at an unprecedented rhythm. Here is a review of the different types of artistic presence in Second Life.

Some artists or galleries just reproduce their exhibition on SL:

• Jen Berkman, who owns a gallery in NYC says that it is far much better than reproducing the paintings on a website.

• It is not at all limited to contemporary art: even the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen of Dresde has opened a virtual museum in SL, reproducing its famous gallery of Old Masters and its architectural environment.

Some other artists use SL to sell online some of their offline pieces of art thanks to scanning:

• Carla Chandrayaan is an amateur painter which sells for about 350 Lindens each piece of her scanned worked (about $1.25). With the boom of real estate in SL, it is not silly to think that the need for decorative art will follow the trend, but it remains hard to charge a high price for just an image.

• The “twins” Ysaline McKay et Kymi Mountain have also created a French art gallery in SL, which renew the concept of “originality”: they sell a unique item of each piece of art, which means that “scarcity marketing” can also be part of SL.

Finally, some artists use SL as a creative place in itself:

• Sasun Steinbeck has created specific SL pieces of art such as polymorphic sculptures: they are randomly generated (you will never see twice the same), with personalization options (music, shape) when you click on them, and have necessitated 8 months of programming in SL script!

• Dancoyote Antonelli (whose real-life name is DC Spensley) pioneered hyperformalism as “an art movement that creates abstract art in the digital world”. His work includes single paintings that can transform into others on command, a variety of giant moving sculptures.

• The Metaverse gallery is a project of University of Texas at Dallas Art and Technology, and I have loved their “glitches”, which are realized from pictures of SL characters (such as the one on the article’s picture). You can see more of them on Dean Terry (leader of the project and professor at UTD) Flickr space here.

I am not a sheer fan of SL (too slow, and I never find what I want), so my opinion is biased, which is why I would like to know:

What do you think of these initiatives? Do you consider those creations as “pieces of art”? Do you think that people will enjoy discovering art by this way? Do you like digital art based not only on digital tools (type of art which is more than common since the creation of Photoshop) but also on virtual communities? Do you think that there is a real benefit for an artist in being present on SL (in terms of visibility and profit he can make)?

Read more about Fidji SIMO here.

Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited Fidji Simo to write about web strategies and provide you with insights on how to manage and develop small & medium businesses. Fidji’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most is to start nice conversations and have fun.

There are not so many book reviews on this blog, but as we are making changes, it might be interesting when great books generate great discussions.

I have just finished “Payback” (James P. Andrew, Harold L. Sirkin), and even if there’s nothing revolutionary, it gives a clear vision of the three different innovation models: integration, orchestration and licensing.

What is really fascinating is that there is no winning model; not even for a specific industry; it really depends on the company and on the type of product. The choice must be conditioned by the different components of the cash curve (prelaunch investment, time to market, time to volume, support costs) and the required risk exposure level.

Integration (e.g. the company manages all the innovation process internally) seems to be the best model when:

• control is necessary,

• the company has world class capabilities,

• the risks are manageable,

• knowledge assets must be protected.

This model was until recently the most chosen, but the Polaroïd example shows that it also carries some risks: although this model had always worked perfectly to the company, it has caused major delays when entering the digital market which has led to bankruptcy.

Ochestration (e.g. the company collaborates with others to innovate, arbitraging between what to keep in house and what to delegate) should be considered when:

• a capability is missing,

• entering unfamiliar territory,

• you don’t want to invest in building capabilities,

• you trust others,

• you want to share risks.

One great example of orchestration (sure that Jeremy will agree ) is the creation of the Tablet PC by Microsoft (even if Microsoft is traditionally a licensor): to launch into pen-based computing, Microsoft needed to also create Tablet PC hardware as no such platform existed. But without the key resources and experience to do that, Microsoft preferred to stick to what it knew well (software) and partner with hardware companies (IBM, HP, Toshiba, Acer…) to help them create hardware and adapted the software to their needs.

Licensing (e.g. the company is the primary owner of the spark of innovation, but has limited involvement in the realization) is an under-used model which is becoming more and more popular to generate payback. It is particularly relevant when:

• the company doesn’t have the possibility to commercialize innovation,

• the innovation can create critical mass or lead to the creation of a standard,

• competition can be transformed into a royalty source.

This last point is very well illustrated by P&G strategy. I know it is not tech-related but this really clever strategy can easily be imitated by tech companies: CEO claims that his goal is to license his innovations to his competitors for one dollar less, and one day sooner than they can do it themselves. Of course it totally nips into the bud any willingness of competitors to invest in risky innovation.

A little quiz to finish: what is the innovation model of:

- iPod?

- iTunes?

- TiVo?

- AIBO from Sony?

- Dolby?

- Intel Microprocessors?

Free beer for those who find all the answers…

Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited Fidji Simo to write about web strategies and provide you with insights on how to manage and develop small & medium businesses. Fidji’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most is to start nice conversations and have fun.

This article will probably complete the excellent article from Kari a few weeks ago, concerning the portfolio of Google’s products.

I know that many authors and readers of this blog already know a lot about Google, and it becomes quite difficult to write something original on the Mountain View company.

However, I have the impression that people focus a lot on all the new tools Google provides to users, but sometimes do not really realize the tools Google provides to advertisers.

What is the dream of an advertiser? I guess that it is to have a unique interlocutor to coordinate his Internet campaign (SEM, display ads, price comparators, video, rich media, blogs), TV campaign, radio campaign, mobile campaign… Not a single player in the advertising market, not a single advertising network is able today to provide such a universal service.

A few years ago, everyone would have bet that, if such a concept had to exist, it would be launched by offline advertising network, having already access to big brands and a large database of clients.

But with paid search becoming unavoidable for every advertiser, Google has rapidly built an even better database, and was in a better position than anyone else to consider grasping a huge share of the advertising market.

However (and perhaps I am a little bit slow) I have the impression that the concrete realization of this strategy has started not so long ago, probably with the acquisition of Youtube.

We often see some news about Google’s acquisitions but without taking the time to aggregate them, it is hard to realize that Google is absolutely everywhere:

- Online…

• Leader on search marketing with Adwords

• Leader in distributed advertising with Adsense

• One of the leader in Internet Display advertising with the acquisition of Doubleclick

• Building a strong position in online video advertising through Youtube

• Product search / comparison advertising through Google Product Search (ex Froogle)

• In-game advertising with the acquisition of Adscape

• Blog advertising through Blogger and with the acquisition of Feedburner

• Widgets advertising via Google Gadgets Ads

• Local advertising with Google Maps

- …and offline

• Ads in newspapers

• Radio advertising thanks to an agreement with Clear Channel

• TV advertising (tests have started recently)

• Mobile Advertising with tests starting in Japan

I am sure that most of you are aware of all of those deals and moves, but put together, we really see that the question is not whether or not Google / Doubleclick is a monopoly but just to wonder if Google has not already won the battle to address all the advertising needs.

It would mean that, at some point, everyone, from you and me to the Fortune 500 company, will be able to advertise everywhere, without real advertising knowledge.

It will also be really interesting to see how Google will combine all the advertising monetization models: CPC, CPM, CPA, broadcasting time, space…

Correct me if I am wrong, but I do not see a single big advertising market where Google has not already taken positions. Do you see any other?

The real threat for Google is that users are starting to realize how much the knowledge of their behaviour is worth, and will probably be willing to start monetizing by themselves this information, instead of letting Google do it. Some “myware” (you spy on yourself, instead on spyware) are already tackling this need: Attention Trust (non profit organization) tracks your clickstream information for you and help you manage it the way you want.

In a word, Google is the perfect example of a company which has managed to extend its core competencies while focusing on a very precise goal.