Having reached a personal milestone, part 5 of my entrepreneurship diaries, I should mention that it’s very pleasurable and useful for me to write on these topics, and I hope it’s the same for you. In this post, I want to briefly address the issue of uncertainty in early stage technology companies and how that affects management.

As I mentioned before, I was asked to join this company as CEO after consulting them on the commercial applications of this exciting new technology. Joining a year later, we had a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the current organisation. During the consulting stage, I wrote a business plan with a fairly clear time line (to me and our sponsor), but it wasn’t being executed upon as required. One of my the deliverables I set myself was therefore to get development back on track, which not only respects the resource boundaries (financial, human, technological) we face, as well as sends out the signal that we are a serious business.

One thing I keep hearing over and over from entrepreneurs is that you have to be comfortable with ambiguity. And that is absolutely true. We continue to iterate on ideas based on changes in technology, customer and partner feedback, and our own ideas, something that would drive any sane man crazy, but we have to keep it under control. The best way that I find to do that is continuing to develop the vision of where we are going (the strongest motivator I can imagine) and maintain a loose type of project management that gets us to that goal.

I call this project management, as it deals with schedules, milestones, and resource allocation over a period of time. Uncertainty is an important factor to consider in this. In a large company, chances are you’re dealing with a predictable environment, in an early stage startup this is not the case. Getting a tighter schedule in place continues to be a challenge we are working on, however I find that being alert, flexible, and adaptive all the time contrasts with the more stable art of project management. Please correct me if I’m wrong, in which case present a solution also! Of course, there have to be thresholds in place, which to me is very much defined by risk assessment.

Regarding risks, let me start by saying that not all risks can be addressed, which is why being comfortable with ambiguity is so important. And second, there are many different types of risk, technology, financial, market, etc., but one usually outlines the thresholds that you have to respect. In my case, I see this clearly as market risk, as nothing matters if your customers aren’t buying… however, this really is not something to take for granted.

In medicine for instance, which is traditionally patent-based and largely dependant on a complex regulatory process, you have a 15 year window, of which you can spend up to 12 years developing your super-innovative cure. Clearly the technology risks outweigh the market ones (note: this ignores the rise of generic, cheap, knock-off drugs). In the web-industry, on the other hand, it’s perfect for rapid prototyping, it’s hard to protect innovations and easy for competitors to clone them, and it makes much more sense to push out your products asap. That means that there can be plenty of competition and the risk lies in grabbing sufficient market share to make a (sustainable) profit.

In our case, we are not as “high-tech” as medicine and not as “high-market” as web-development, in the sense that we face both market and technology risks. However, I see market risks as more important and try to align both market & technology approaches together. As an example, one of the things we did several months ago, was demo our technology to the general public and to selected partners. After the experience, we interviewed them thoroughly on their experience, as well as their initial expectations. We want to make sure that people don’t expect something different than what we deliver and that our product meets and exceeds their expectations. That gives us a clear view of where we want the product to go.

On a technology level, that presents us with certain thresholds in terms of “the experience” and price-points. And whenever we face a technology change, whatever solution is being developed, it has to fit within that end-picture the customer expects. That also overcomes the problem of black-box development, which is not uncommon in technology development.

So, that’s more or less how we continue to develop the vision for our company and the project management that supports it. We started with a lucid dream of producing great technology. We demoed initial versions and tried to align our vision to the needs of our users. And we end up (hopefully) building what our customers want and pay for. I would love to do this in a web-environment, as that really makes prototyping so much cheaper and quicker, but we do the best we can with our not so intangible technology.

All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

I have been thinking about this topic for a while now. Enterprise 2.0 book from Andrew McAfee chapter 8  (Looking ahead), a nice twitter conversation with @oscarberg, and a New York Times article about Microsoft Creative Destruction : all combine to convince me there was some room for a blog post. Snip from the NYT article :

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

As Wikipedia defines it :

“Office politics is the use of one’s individual or assigned power within an employing organization for the purpose of obtaining advantages beyond one’s legitimate authority. Those advantages may include access to tangible assets, or intangible benefits such as status or pseudo-authority that influences the behavior of others. Both individuals and groups may engage in Office Politics.”

One has to be extremely pedagogic to explain me how on earth this may help the company in being more profitable, increasing customers satisfaction and being a better place for employees, the three goals of any company according to Eliyahu Goldratt.

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I live in a funny world. My company, which is composed of several disciplines in the manufacturing, industrial design, and, yes, programming space, is one factor. I sometimes see people screw together contraptions in our workshop, and I see coders banging away at their PCs and Macs, and I wonder what the hell I am thinking calling programming low or high tech. There are different degrees to everything and just like metal and a few screws can lead to an amazing creation, so lines of code produces the amazing virtual reality I interact with most of my days.

This will be a short post. I think that the Internet has proven to be a two sided coin. It brought us freedom of information, but bits are also information, which makes it hard to gain value from them. Looking at it through a business lens (a flaw of mine) I can’t help but wonder if programming is a worthwhile direction to take, if you want to make money at least.

The other side is what I wrote about in paragraph one. Code produces wonderful things and I am grateful everyday for the fruits of that labour. So I sincerely hope that my world, the business world, will continue to allow for “the code” to reign free, and for those that produce code and its products, to reap the rewards and continue to do what they love.

So I apologise for whatever I wrote previously, namely that software is not high-tech, i.e. innovative, because it simply does not apply to all code (just to the 100s of 1000s of me-too apps and websites out there, which ruin it for the good ones).

This post was inspired by Fred Wilson’s post “Code As Craft” and by one of our interns producing “beautiful code.”

This is just a short list of challenges that I faced with my current business. Feel free to suggest other things in the comments.

1. your relationship with the company & people you’re starting with: coming out of a position that involved reading a lot, a lot of contracts, I’m kind of particular about how to phrase them. I like the idea of contracts if they very clearly state the boundaries of your position and the relationship you have with others. It should also clearly state the deliverables that have to be met, though that can also be included in a separate “action plan.” A good contract should leave no room for misinterpretation, which is why it took about 3 weeks and 8 draft-revisions to get it just how both me and the company wanted it. Of course, a 1 person business doesn’t have to do this, nor someone that doesn’t get paid, though both in “hobby (that become) startups” situations and multi-team startups, it’s good to have a thing on paper that states a number of things including responsibilities & shares, as well as, if possible, time-frames for carrying out the job. You don’t need a lawyer for this, it’s best to start with a simple list of what you want to achieve and work from that. Very important is to mention what national law this contract falls under (e.g. Dutch law or French law), full names & addresses, etc.
2. your intellectual property: I’m kind of running up against something like this now, which is why I think it’s worth mentioning. IP has different values in different industries of course, but in my industry, a high-tech non-software one, it plays an important role. Not only is it important to dedicate certain resources at protecting your IP, you also have to watch out that others don’t lay claim on it, just because you spoke to them once or twice (or worked there at some point. The Mattel vs. Bratz case is an interesting one to follow for that.). IP protection also plays a part when talking to outside parties like investors. Last but not least, it does protect you against copycats, though, as mentioned, the value of patents or similar varies from industry to industry.
3. your own finances: They say that you should have enough saved up to not have to work for 1 year. I’ll just say that I made sure that I do have a comfort zone, though not so much that I won’t stay hungry (lesson 101 in entrepreneurship and raising (rich) kids: instill a hunger for success).
4. the company finances: at my last company, my job was to handle certain business affairs for companies that have their legal address with us. Company finances are a complex affair, and plenty of swindlers out there try to get out of taxes here and there. Not that I don’t sympathise, but be careful of not signing something that makes you responsible for someone else’s problem. Something similar occurred last year, where someone signed something that nearly (!) made him responsible for ca. 1 million euros in unpaid taxes. Let’s just say that the lesson was to have complete transparency from the start and not sign if it doesn’t exist. Preferably this should be specified in the contract (point 1) also. The other side of the coin is that the company has to become a financial vehicle for the people working there. That means that managing its finances (income and expenses) is vital to making sure that there’s also enough money to pay all the costs.
5. staying organised: Kind of obvious, a chaotic entrepreneur doesn’t make for a good entrepreneur. As I have about 12 different jobs, I have to make sure that I don’t forget what needs to be done, to prioritise the important things at the right time, and to delegate those tasks that I have no time for or someone else is better suited for.
6. staying healthy: I’ve seen three people pass away that I’ve had a professional relationship with. One was of an advanced age, one had a deadly disease, and the third passed away at a very young age of medical complications. Two of these were entrepreneurs, and both let themselves get carried away by stress. Stress means: less sleep, eating crap-food (my new term for fast-food), and not taking the time to exercise. It is not where I want to end up, I want to do a good job (it is just a job) and live long enough to reap the rewards (preferably, I’d like to live forever, but that’s a future startup).
7. staying connected to people: as a first time CEO, I have a lot of questions and the best way to have them answered is to ask them to people that are smarter than me. Luckily, there are many, many smart people out there, and people love talking about that which they know.

That’s it for now and all I could fit into 30 min. of writing. All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

Both ’startup’ and ‘entrepreneur’ are terms that immediately evoke an often false reaction from an audience and I would personally prefer not to describe my work using those words. In the following post, I write about three associations in regards to entrepreneurship, one positive, one negative, both somewhat false, and one what I see entrepreneurship as really: just a job. As usual, these diary posts, which I try to write in a short amount of time, are produced with minimal editing. I hope it makes sense. All my entrepreneurial diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

The popular associations
The word entrepreneur has two popular and a third upcoming association. One association is negative, that of a risk-taker and in some ways a loser—this would be more in a European context where job-security is highly valued. The other is positive, that of a potential Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, i.e. the smart entrepreneur who sees a big opportunity and has the drive, intelligence, and access to other resources to make it very big.

Of these two, the latter is what we are all aiming for, but realistically that applies to less than 1% of entrepreneurs today (using the very broad definition of someone that starts anything from 1-man webdesign company to an ambitious cure for cancer). The first association is also a misunderstanding of entrepreneurship, as entrepreneurs are not blind risk-takers, or at least they shouldn’t be. I would say and hope that it applies to a minority of entrepreneurs also.

The third association: a career-choice
The third association is that of an upcoming trend: entrepreneurship as simply a job. You’ll find plenty of job-adverts with “entrepreneurial attitude a plus” or similar in the job-description, a term I hate just as much as the often mis-used “business development,” standing for just B2B sales.

Added to the job-description part comes that there are plenty of entrepreneurial courses and full academic programmes available to the public, one of which I enjoyed, though I know from personal experience that that doesn’t make a person an entrepreneur.

A third factor contributing to the ‘entrepreneurship is a job’ association is easier access to the marketplace. I’ve had some online discussions with Cecil Dijoux on this blog about today’s technology culture in the context of enterprise software development, and there is as much a democratisation of software-/web-ware development, as there is of other increasingly “low-tech” industries. (As a side note: My definition of low-tech is a technology something has very low barriers to developing it.).

I think that the abundance of resources (not just) in regards to programming, to very well developed (internet) distribution methods for getting products, tangible or intangible, out to customers, as well as more-and-more programmes for funding/assisting startups, means that entrepreneurs have access to a better developed funnel where it comes to their profession of gathering resources and marketing their products.

That doesn’t make it easy, and actually brings other challenges like being one tree in a very large forest, but it does mean that it can be seen as a type of job.

Now, what is there not to like about the word ‘entrepreneurship’?
Maybe it’s a personal thing, but I feel very uncomfortable telling people I meet that I’m an entrepreneur. One, I do see it like a job, a job that I have to do well, and nothing special really. The term ‘entrepreneurship’ makes it sound fancy, which it is not. Two, I’m a European and I do feel the same association that many Europeans have to the word, which is that it’s “less than a real job.” Rationally, I don’t think that’s true, but emotionally I have found myself feeling the following initial reaction more than once when someone comes up to me and describes himself as an entrepreneur:

“Get a job, you hippie!”

Add to this that a startup is not a company until it makes money, and an entrepreneur is not an entrepreneur until he makes money doing what he does.

So I think the term ‘entrepreneurship’ is glorified, perhaps invented to make entrepreneurs feel like they’re doing something special, same as the term ‘Artist’ or ‘Inventor.’ Art isn’t art unless the audience considers it so, and people have invented plenty of mousetraps that are now collecting dust in a garage somewhere.

Suggest something new please
I’d like a new term for what I do and maybe you can suggest one. It should perhaps be related to a startup, which immediately summarises what is happening: A company that is starting up and isn’t there where it wants and needs to be yet.

The problem is that an entrepreneur is not always in the same class as a startup. He can be 50 years old and have a long and successful career behind him. Would you call him a “starter,” a term often used for people fresh out of college applying for a job at Consultant X or Multinational Y? Generally, entrepreneurs are responsible for the activities that happen in a startup in order to make it a success. Their chances of success increase if they have prior experience, resources, and networks to build upon, that make it easier to access the three pillars of “starting up,” as I’ve summarised in the picture above.

In regards to the above, I personally like to describe my work as “I’m running a small company and we’re developing a new product X,” but that is also a bit of a mouthful.

The other side of the coin is that entrepreneurs are in (desperate) need of marketing, where glorification does play a part. I read somewhere that entrepreneurship can be described as the process of developing something irregardless of resources currently in possession. That suggests a pitch is necessary, and perhaps already being termed an entrepreneur helps getting a foot in the door. I doubt it and it would personally bother me if that’s all it took, but I’m smart enough to realise that we “entrepreneurs” need to do whatever it takes to acquire resources, as long as it fits our code of ethics of course.

So, entrepreneurship, yes or no? I don’t like the term, but I may be stuck with it. If I come up with something more apt, I’ll let you know. And same for you please!

This post is part of a series, a diary of starting a business if you will. It follows part 1, the decision of becoming an entrepreneur.

One thing I found out is that it’s hard to put your responsibilities down on paper… there are so many!!! There is of course a basic job-description, which more or less sounds like that of a project manager/pull-the-rabbit-out-of-the-hat magician: “make it happen that we go from this thing on paper to the product in the hands of customers.” “Make it happen” is a super-loaded phrase, which can mean countless things.

There is a continuous struggle between micro-management and keeping the overview. Micro, because it is your responsibility that every (little) thing is carried out by your employees (if you have them). Overview, because You the entrepreneur are The Organisation. There is a third struggle that shouldn’t exist really, that between your professional life and your personal life. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to do this thing well is to focus on it exclusively. Friends, family, love, …blogging… it’s a nice luxury to have, but it comes second place.

The responsibility of an entrepreneur are thus: have a goal and make sure that everything is executed to get to that goal.

In a technology company, there are matters of technology and business (really, in what business except for strategy consulting isn’t there a mix of “technology,” which can mean anything from cooking to software development, and the commercial side of things, which is meant to pay for everything?). What I found was that as someone with a business background, who sort-of-kind-of has an idea about product development, and has a better grasp of business development, I still can’t let go of the reigns of product development entirely.

Product development ties in directly with business development. People are unwilling to pay for something that doesn’t exist and similarly our budget is supposed to last us until we have something worth paying for or investing in. Therefore, as an entrepreneur I have to make sure that product development stays on track. The absolute best way to do this is to have a capable product development manager in charge. The truth of it is that startups by their nature are resource-poor, which includes tripple-A product development managers (probably employed at multinational X or Y somewhere), and there is a lot of learning/training on the job. Learning/training means that the (hopefully) existing product development manager (in our case yes) still has to be managed, through schedules and regular meetings. In any case, product development is in its conceptual stage a very brainstorm-friendly activity, which means the more the merrier. But ultimately, a startup must get beyond this stage, respecting the entire resource-poor situation that a startup usually faces.

So, responsibilities of an entrepreneur as far as the technological product development is concerned: If you have a product development manager, you have to make sure that he works under the realities of the business. If you don’t, which I imagine many 1-person software startups operate under (as well as those lucky strategy consultants), well then you have to do the job of product development as well, keeping a close eye on the business realities.

OK, the business part of things. My role is fairly well-defined here as I come from a business background and approach startups from a business perspective. Assume that role 101 is having a firm grasp on everything that goes on, which can be phrased as “where are resources (people, time, money) being expended at and is it wise to do so.” This entails having a good budget plan and sticking to that.

Role 102 is to build the business, which I call business development, but that often gets confused with sales as that that is what it says in job adverts. Business development is the building of the business, which includes sales, but also includes building the company and all that entails.

So, we are trying to get from point A to point P, how do we go about it? If product development is about turning an idea into a product, business development is building a business plan into a business. Business plans are total BS unless they contain validated information. Some key-chapters in business plans are the market overview, the market approach, the time-line, and the financial need to meet all these objectives. Business plans can serve as a. cannon fodder, b. a plan of approach, c. one of several signals to attract investment. For c. no investor will take a look at your business unless you have a plan of approach (b.). On that plan, there should be a time-line, which you are following (predictability!) and there should be a goal: the market you are targeting and your approach.

The market section of the business plan presents a big problem for technology entrepreneurs. Because (non!) customers often don’t know what they want. I can ask a target group “what kind of air do you like to breathe?” and it wouldn’t surprise me if a significant number of responses would say: “I like to breathe air that smells like perfume.” OK, that’s a terrible question, but what I mean is that people sometimes make up answers that have nothing to do with reality (that said, both the perfume business and the fast-food industry have made lots of money from essentially selling air that smells good. Scent is also plays a very important part in memory, but I digress…)

What I’m a big fan of is validated market data, which is data gathered from actual customer experience with your product or part of it. That brings forth another problem of a bias towards early (and over-excited) adopters, something which the book “crossing the chasm” deals with, but is really not something that I think is realistic to address at an early stage, except that validated market data can also come from experts in the markets you are targeting.

The implication is also that product development is again completely tied in with business development which leads us down the path of rapid prototyping, another practice that works great in software / on the web, not as easily (though not impossible) with hardware. In any case, the experts in this area most well-known today are:

• - Steve Blank, who wrote “The Four Steps to Epiphany” and is currently hosting the excellent Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminars (btw. Steve Blank also writes a great blog on customer-focussed development, which I’ve only just started reading.
• - Eric Ries, who authors the blog Startup Lessons Learned and has some great articles on responsible (=lean) development.
• - And Donald Reinertsen, who wrote an incredibly dense book called “Principles of Product Development Flow,” a book which is clearly an authority in the field, but which I cannot recommend to any sensible entrepreneur with a 60hr/week schedule. Those principles, by the by, number in the 100+.

As well as of course Toyota and plenty of other experts out there, I’m sure, many of which are referenced by the people mentioned.

I think that it can safely be said that task 3 or a sub-task of business development is working towards the customer, the lifeblood of a business.

There are other tasks of course, which have to do with human resources, legal work, accounting, etc. Some of which can be outsourced, some of which can be done half-heartedly (oh no, I didn’t say that), some of which are really-really important, etc.

All these tasks, however, require a certain authority. The entrepreneur’s responsibility is to either be an authority on a task level or to be sure to work with authorities, either in the company or in an (informal) consulting fashion, so that they are carried out responsibly.

Task 4 can thus be entitled: be an authority on the tasks that need to be carried out or have access to one.

So, a whole can of worms starting a company can be and it is vital that it does not interfere with the single most important thing that you must do as a human being: be healthy! Health is part sleep, part exercise, part food, part love. There is no yin without yang and vice versa. Thus forget everything I said about personal life being no. 2. The best is if it reinforces what you do in your work. Health leads to happiness and happiness leads to optimism: a key-quality in entrepreneurship if there ever was one.

So the responsibilities of an entrepreneur summarised:

• 100: keep your eye on both sides of the court: the goal & the resources needed to get to that goal
• 101: align Product development with Business development
• 102: always validate your market data by staying close to your customers
• 103: be an authority on the tasks that need carrying out or have access to one
• 104: stay healthy and happy.

This was written in a single session with minimal editing. I hope it kind of makes sense. Part 3 of my e’diary will be on the topic of: can you prepare for entrepreneurship? As I have a master in entrepreneurship, I thought it might make for an interesting perspective. All my entrepreneurial diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ By choice, I’m being mysterious about my company. If you have questions, feel free to comment or write to me via the email address on the right.

Picture courtesy of Be The Dream.

It seems strange to keep a diary as an entrepreneur, which is thought to be a career that is all-consuming. But I made the resolution to not get lost in my work, leaving enough space for inspiration and reflection, next to all the getting things done.

Inspiration, aka new ideas or thinking out of the box, primarily comes from taking time to have new experiences and meeting new people. It’s too easy to get stuck in a rut when spending 9 to 5 in an office. Reflection comes some time after getting things done and so my words today will be mostly about stuff that happened some time ago, during 2009 in fact.

You’ll often find pre-/post-/non-entrepreneurs arguing about whether e’ship is something you’re born with. I think it’s arrogant to argue either way. E’ship is the pursuit of opportunity weighed against the opportunity cost of pursuing something else. Entrepreneurs are not formed in pre-school, running a lemonade stand, it just makes sense at a particular time and environment. And in this case… it made sense to me.

Flashback December 31st 2008. I received a call from an inventor that had read about a previous experience of mine in a technology business and asked me to help him with the business plan for a new venture exploiting a similar technology. As it was something that appealed to me I said yes. The project turned out ok, we secured seed funding to develop the technology, and I moved to Luxembourg for a job in finance, while staying on as a silent advisor in the tech startup.

Flashforward 9 months. The startup was finally ready to demo the technology which had so far only existed in our heads. It’s an important qualifier, not only for our business partners and investor, but also for the team and myself. While we had discussed something similar before, it was at this point that I was asked and considered to run this company.

To go back to “what makes an entrepreneur,” you’ll often read about entrepreneurs being a. all-invested in a venture (as opposed to investors, who diversify their risks across multiple investments) and b. Entrepreneurs having to make (relatively) calculated risk decisions. And that is what I did, I made an, as much as possible, rational decision whether I wanted to commit fulltime to being an entrepreneur in this venture. So that was my decision process, which required serious thought, consultation with friends and family, and more.

End of part 1. In part 2, what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur. You can read all my e’diaries from now on under the tag Vincent’s ediary. If you have questions, obviously I’m pretty mysterious about our business, post a comment or mail me via the address on the right.

Be it Automobile , Aviation or Heavy Metal Industries, everyone felt the heat of recession but regardless IT fared better than most. In spite of worst economic meltdowns in history, acquisitions among big vendors continued to reshape the market, operating-system wars extended to mobile battlefields, microblogging became a powerful source of real-time information, and the take-up of small, Net-connected devices was stronger than ever.

But how good is this wave of mergers and acquisitions for the future? ( By future I mean upcoming innovation and future of Startups which target innovation not business)

Whenever your biggest competitor takes you over, it blunts the competitive spirit that can drive innovations. Thats what concerns me most, the spirit of innovation is somehow compromised because of takeovers.

Not always always a potential Merger or Takeover can be taken as a positive sign of ever increasing competition and globalization. And particularly not right now when it comes to web and social media startups, many of which are still more focused on innovation and building up audiences than on making profits. Rushing them into deals to fulfill long-delayed plans for an exit strategy could derail the evolution of a strong business plan.

From an investment standpoint, founders and venture capitalists have good reasons to cash out now. Market caps of public tech giants are rising — the Nasdaq gaining big time – and so are their cash stockpiles. For Instance Microsoft has a stock pile of about $49 billion in cash; similar is the story of Google with $24 billion. High-profile Multi Billion dollar deals like the ones we had in recent times have a way of spurring on other acquisitions.

TimeWarner buying AOL and eBay buying Skype come to mind. Even snapping up a hot startup for its technology or talent — Google buying Dodgeball or Yahoo buying Flickr – can lead to culture clashes, customer anger and other disappointing results.

I  tried to re-compile the list of some major takeovers which are substantial enough to change the future of computing.   We are talking about some multibillion dollar mergers and acquisitions, where the Big gets even Bigger.

Oracle eclipses the SUN @ $7.4 Billion

This Merger can be coined as “father of all the Tech Mergers” announced last year. If the announced the deal went through, Oracle,  the industry’s largest database software vendor would get an entry into the server and storage markets worldwide.

The acquisition, still pending, was announced in April, and may even be blocked because European regulators are contending that combining Oracle’s technology with Sun’s open source MySQL database would violate competition laws. Lets see if this deal goes through.

Xerox snaps up ACS in $6.4 billion

Another major takeover, Xerox pays about $6.4 billion in cash and stock for Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a large IT and outsourcing firm. With this merger Xerox hopes it will give it a bigger foothold in the business services space. While the deal will surely boost Xerox, investors wondered whether it overpriced the deal.

Calling the ACS deal “a game-changer” for Xerox, Burns, CEO of the company, said it would help Xerox “expand our business and benefit from stronger revenue and earnings growth.” The deal will triple the service component of Xerox’s revenue to roughly $10 billion annually from $3.5 billion, according to the company.

Dell – Perot Catch-Up Deal worth $ 3.9 Billion

Buying Perot was a part of Dell’s plan to expand its footprint in the IT services market, which was  a necessity in a time when hardware sales were falling. Dell offered a staggering $3.9 billion for Perot Systems, a 68% premium over Perot’s actual stock value. Dell’s purchase can also be seen as a response to rival HP’s $13.9 billion acquisition the previous year of EDS — another services company founded by Perot.

Cisco-Tandberg worth  $3.4 billion

Cisco, already a major player in collaboration products with WebEx and TelePresence, signed an agreement in October to purchase videoconferencing vendor Tandberg, which makes both video devices and network infrastructure products. The acquisition, if completed, could have both a direct and indirect impact on Cisco’s bottom line, because expanded use of videoconferencing may increase network traffic, letting Cisco sell more switches and routers.

HP Acquires 3Com For $2.7 Billion

HP launched a straightforward assault on Cisco in their own Game of Networks. HP’s increasing influence in data center networking and convergence markets will have a big boost with its purchase of 3Com, a maker of switches, routers and security products. HP says the acquisition will further its data center strategy “built on the convergence of servers, storage, networking, management, facilities and services.” The acquisition of 3Com also help to expand HP’s Ethernet switching offerings, add routing solutions and significantly strengthen the company’s position in China thanks to 3Com’s strong presence in China. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

I have collected the figures and numbers from various sources including PCWorld, Gigaom and Wikipedia. Let me know if you have a suggestion or correction to make. Please forgive me for the grammar, I was always bad in Grammar since school

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

If you are new to Twitter then it’s easy to get confused with so many twitter applications out there. Further, if you are a business user than you may have no time to do research on the applications. We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape.  You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I used many of the tools available in internet to manage my old twitter account.

With this idea behind I am trying to categorize the tools which may be helpful for our readers to use according to their needs. Here are some twitter tools  along with the snapshots which impressed me and according to me will be easy to use even for a newbie to  promote his/her business .

1. Buzzom Premium http://premium.buzzom.com/

Buzzom Premium is very newly launched application which allows you to focus in your twitter growth. It has many functions to choose from but more essentially its spam filter, scheduler and monitor. These are the three basic functions over which the application is build.

Direct Message is full of SPAM and it is almost unusable now. Thanks to various gaming applications and welcome or thank you messages. I like Buzzom SPAM filtering for DM. It actually makes this feature usable.

Buzzom also provides a great way to visualize your Twitter growth and network’s activity such as tweets, Retweets etc. The service also has the auto grow and follow system to increase your network’s size. Scheduler allows you to schedule tweets at certain time and control it by specifying its repeat cycle for future tweets.

2. Twonvert http://www.twonvert.com/

Twitter is all about 140 characters of words. People are already got use to expressing themselves in 140 characters with shorthand notation and some ingenuity. But that takes time and when you are in hurry, its more frustrating. With Twonvert you can easily convert your tweets into SMS shorthand language and allows you to say more with less characters!

3. Wefollow http://wefollow.com/

WeFollow is the directory of all the people in the Twitter, who have added themselves to the list. It provides an easy way for you to find relevant people in twitter and connect with them. You can find all short of people from celebrity to technologist in the list. WeFollow.com helps you use your time efficiently by making your people search easy and fast.

4. Twitscoop http://www.twitscoop.com/

Twitscoop is the service which lets you search the real-time trend in the twitter. Twitscoop uses the dynamic tag cloud to show the most talked topic in an interactive way. You can also search for related keyword and finds its popularity in the Twitter network.

Overall, it allows users to “Mine the thought stream” provided by Twitter. Twitscoop’s algorithm cuts every English non-spam tweets into pieces (“tags”), and ranks them by how frequently they are used versus normal usage. Twitscoop can essentially be described as your real-time web’s monitor.

5. Twittercal http://twittercal.com/

Managing your calendar is very tedious. You may have to enter new task on the go and may not have access to web version of Google calendar. Now you can do that easily via Twitter, you just have to send a small tweet and it gets added to your Google Calendar.

It’s a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar. Add events in a snap from your favorite Twitter client. Follow the 5 steps procedure to get started.

6. Socialtoo http://www.socialtoo.com/

Socialtoo is a paid service that lets you manage your twitter account by autofollow and unfollow tool. It also provides you basic statistics about your followers count and tweet count. It helps you manage your account and reduce the spam in your network.

It has interesting features like social survey that allows you to create survey that will allow you to understand your network much better.

7. StrawPoll http://strawpollnow.com/

Can you measure the sentiment of your network? Ets say you have 1000 people in your network, getting everyone’s opinion one to one is difficult. If you just want to measure if your network is Pro Apple or Pro Google, what do you do? Well Strawpoll is the tool you are looking for.

StrawPoll is the coolest way to follow the opinions of people onTwitter. It allows you to create poll and communicate with your network and understand their opinion.

8. TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/

Tweetdeck is the most popular desktop application for Twitter developer in Adobeair. It is very popular for its interface. It provides you a very easy way to maintain your daily twitter activities. Tweetdeck provides easy way to group your friends into different tabs and clean up the twitter stream. You can also search in the Tweetdeck and open a dedicated tab for the keyword; this allows you to track them easily. Recently, TweetDeck also has added TweetDeck Directory which is similar to WeFollow.

9. Stocktwits http://stocktwits.com/

StockTwits is an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.

User can add a set of specific stocks, save them to their own portfolio and limit the conversation around it or focus only on their favorite and trusted sources. Watch the whole stream or create your own filters. User can follow the best on the site, the best only in your areas of interest and in turn share your best actionable ideas. This is the best Twitter related financial site on the web does this in real-time.

10. TwitterSearch http://search.twitter.com/

TwitterSearch is the basic framework of the entire search engine that is present. It provides an easiest way to find out tweets related to keywords. It also has an advanced feature that lets you customize your query to find relevant tweets. It is small but powerful tool.  Once you get hang of it, it can be your most powerful tool of all. Beside search, it was shows the trending topic which can be useful to get hold of the perspective of twitter.

To Actually understand how to use twitter to promote your business here is a link to an awesome article by Chris Brogan.

P.S : All the rankings and stats are based on my personal opinions and experiences while using them.

I’m reposting this comment I wrote in response to Eric Ries’s stimulating blog post on Harvard Business Review online, with the title “Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?” Feel free to share your thoughts on it there as I think it’s worth thinking about whether Entrepreneurship can eventually learned or whether it is an art-form. My thoughts on that are below.

Having both studied a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship and working in my 3rd startup (trying to apply the lean techniques that Lessons Learned made me aware of), I can say that my ideal is that entrepreneurship is a science. In reality, it’s a collection of Sciences as well as the act of Imagination AND Guts AND Agility, none of which are particularly scientific.

It’s a collection of sciences because no entrepreneur or team of entrepreneurs is undertaking just one activity, he, she, or they are doing many in parallel, some of which are business related and some of which are technological. Both have scientific foundations behind them.

Why the Business of Entrepreneurship is scientific is simple to explain. Businesses, starting or existing, can’t operate in a vacuum (for long). We have to obey financial restrictions, sell the idea to our investors, who themselves employ scientific means to measure whether the return on their investment justified, communicate to the market in effective ways, study the market, and project manage all the activities and people in the company. For most of these “wheels” already exist, so there isn’t always a need to reinvent them.

BUT, there is no replacement or science for guts, imagination, and agility in starting a business. You have to ignore many rules, you have to play dirty, and you have to be quick & flexible if you want to succeed. Maybe a management scientist can eventually plug those dirty variables in a formula somewhere. But I doubt it can be applied to any two startups successfully.

Vincent

As formal as Address sounds, it’s not meant to be. Just a small reminder that we are still here, more exemplified perhaps by the inverted correlation between blogging and doing great things (P.S. Many of us can be followed on Twitter, which doesn’t appear to have that problem).

Yes, we have all been busy doing things like moving to different countries and continents, starting companies, starting and changing jobs. I think Cecil is even well on his way to becoming a e2.0 authority, and judging by Fidji Simo’s tweets, I think she’s developing herself into an expert in retail—on-, off-, and hybrid forms. And that is amazing news and exactly what I always wanted from Tech IT Easy—a “workforce” that is productive outside of Tech IT Easy and contributes to its members’ lives on- and offline as well.

Which is why I still encourage anyone interested in technology and its commercialisation to join us, to develop and contribute their thoughts and expertise!

All that aside, what more can I wish for our readers and bloggers on this Christmas day? For one, I wish for a better 2010 and I am 100% certain that it will be. We all got a little roughed up in 2009, but what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger! The Internet Boom & Bust… pah, I laugh at its impact: it lead to Le infamous nouveau Web, aka Web 2.0, aka the one where 37Signals had to remind us of the revolutionary idea of charging $$$ for products. I also laugh at Enron, as all its promised consequences of accountability haven’t affected the upper-tier of management one bit (and maybe never will).

But I don’t laugh at what is happening today, I’m happy about it. Between the magnificent state’ification of banks, the “new/old” lean approach to doing all business, and the threat of global warming, it’s another warning shot at us, the complacent human race who thought they had it all under control again. The world isn’t perfect and I hope that every one of those bumps bring us closer to making it better.

All cynicism aside, we live in a time where information is at our fingertips, where collaborative filtering and neuroscience help us better filter the relevant stuff to the top, where we can still publish news at a click, which is still an amazing concept, and where we all have GPS in our hands today, and augmented reality in our hands tomorrow. Yay, the innovative mind and yay, it’s practical outcomes!

Merry Christmas everyone and if you don’t hear from us before the 31st of December, have a great transition into the new year!

Love,

Your Tech IT Easy team:
Alex, Jeremy, Steve, Fidji, Georgia, Cecil, Vincent, Kari, Manu, Lucien, Matthias, Raj, Raphael, and Remy

The question I’m always asked when I run out of my friends/colleagues/dog patience with the issue of Digital Natives integration within the enterprise is : how to convince the proponents of this culture to adhere to a common professional project, to an organization with rules and commitments ?

The answer is straight-forward : leadership. A leadership for a post-ideologic generation. A leadership whose core resides in simple and clear principles, to put in practise, rather than plastic values nobody believes in.

Enterprise 2.0 represents a gradual immersion of the XXth century organisations into the web culture. Digital Natives Companies are born from this culture : there is no change required to adopt these principles as they are the core foundations the companies were built on.

In order to illustrate this assertion (and as promised), an overview of 37Signals, a GenY company achieving incredible results, from both financial and reputation perspectives. Read more »

First of all, let me make clear that the title is a question and this post will give no answer. 

Second, if somebody has the answer, be my guest, will give you my credentials to edit.

Third, the salmon can be both a gift (as in the semiotics of Umberto Eco) and lethal stinky arm-extension (as in Asterix)

Fourth, let’s get serious.

Social enterpreneurship is one of the new buzzwords in business innovation. Buzzwords are obviously made up to speak situations that exist but with a lot of entropy until somebody names the fear away. And can also give you a scolarship to top-notch business schools, so your 5min of attention please.

To save you some brain cells from suranalysis I’ll give you three pictures of social enterpreneuship fields :

1. Economies in “turbulent times”
2. Recently patchworked societies
3. Niche populations in balanced societies

(sound too familar? need something more exotic? … please refer to expert-experts.)

Lately, I have the privilege to live in an environment that has 2,5 of the above.

Thus its quite fascinating that few people around me, move on the great dynamics of this 83,3%  (2,5/3) fluidity. The blocker is violence.

Violence such as

• rioting half the population against the other half waving salmons
• dangerous life-hacking (d-driving, d-careering, d-tax-paying, d-pressing your children and d-attending your lifemate)
• self-asphyxiation in a team
• tv

so what would you see happening first? closing the tv? feeling good? doing good? putting down the fish?

 

My two pennies on ………………………………………. putting down the fish, for many reasons of mass-psychology only Philip-Morris knew (but now we all do).

so, dear Greeks, enough with rioting, put down the fish, or better , put them in a plate.

Georgia

I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible.

Sarah Lacy writes about SMSONE, a ultra-local news provider in India similar to Outside.IN, a Union Square Ventures funded US-only company that provides news updates via the web. SMSONE does it, as the name suggests, via SMS. And it spreads through a franchising model, working with local entrepreneurs that pay a franchise fee and also collect a share of the advertising revenue from locally focussed businesses. It is able to do this because of something that apparently doesn’t exist in the US (but does in Europe): receiving an SMS in India doesn’t cost the recipient anything.

When reading about this, I was immediately reminded of a similar business model employed by a Dutch entrepreneur in Russia, Ms. Annemarie van Gaal, founder of Independent Media, a company that distributed Russian versions of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire en Good Housekeeping (source). When she spoke at the Star entrepreneurial seminar in Rotterdam a year ago, she told us about how she differentiated herself from the competition (paraphrased as I haven’t got my notes with me):

The trouble with getting your magazines distributed in Russia was that you had to pay quite a lot of money (some would call it bribes) to companies that would then take care of it… badly. Instead van Gaal decided to do it differently. She would hire street kids to distribute her magazines, similar to the gold days of newspapers: the newspaper boy.

If you read Sarah Lacy’s account on Techcrunch, you’ll see that SMSONE does it similarly, hiring local kids, often without much education, to take care of distribution. Doing it via official channels is likely a nightmare over there, and centralising distribution kind of defeats the purpose of micro-news.

It’s a different way of thinking, which many of us westerners don’t have. I mean, would you entrust your products to a beggar on the street or to a street musician? Not only is it probably against the law (except if the government does it), we pride ourselves on our super-organised infrastructure, where anything from temp-workers to interns are there to provide companies with a flexible workforce, and anything from printing presses to mobile internet exists to produce and distribute your stuff.

Of course, I wouldn’t just leave you with these two examples. In the beginning of 2008, Boston Consulting Group published a study of “local dynamos”— domestically focussed companies, which use creative business models to capture value from emerging markets that are filled with challenges, like lacking infrastructure and low-income consumers. The map below shows how widespread these companies are.

Some very interesting examples are mentioned, like:

• Shanda, a Chinese gaming-company, that, in order to combat software-piracy, focusses on providing interactive services through gaming, services that are impossible to pirate. And to overcome a lack of a financial infrastructure to pay for online services, they work with pre-paid cards.
• Indian CavinKare, which sells cheap sachets of shampoo through small local retailers, while using educational marketing to teach customers how to use their products.
• Goodbaby, which targets the many 1-child families in China, who are both willing to spend more on their child than multi-child families would, but are also in need of education.
• Amul, an Indian food-and-beverage-marketing-organisation, which collects and pays for milk locally, while tracking all operations via satellite and uses ERP solutions to make analysis based on the data and gauge whether future supply needs to be increased or decreased.
• Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods (Russia), which works extensively with local partners, and has devised leasing schemes for expensive machinery to boost their production and is able to serve 280 million consumers nation-wide.

The BCG, of course, takes the stance of its customers, Western companies, and the study is mainly aimed at how multinational companies (MNCs) can replicate 6 of these dynamo’s advantages, in order to compete with them. They are:

1. Customising to local needs – which involves first understanding these needs, and then meeting them.
2. Devising innovative business models that overcome local challenges – a logical follow-up to the last point, how to make money from the info you gained.
3. Leveraging the latest technologies – meaning that these emerging economies are less burdened with traditional infrastructure and quicker on the uptake of more affordable, newer, and easier-to-spread technology, e.g. mobiles.
4. Benefiting from low-cost labor and overcoming shortages of skilled labor – there’s two ways to look at this; a local workforce will be better equipped to interact on a local level, a highly-trained workforce will be better equipped to run a business. Tough call.
5. Scaling up fast – Russia, India, China, Brazil, etc. are all giants with the promise of huge rewards when you capture them. Many of these dynamos grow quickly through both through acquisitions and building up their network of suppliers and distributors.
6. Sustaining long-term hypergrowth without imploding – this kind of follows on to the last point

Some of the Western companies mentioned, which have managed to compete on a local level, include:

• General Motors, which has adapted its luxury-liners to meet the demands of its Chinese customers, who are usually sitting in the back;
• LG, in China, which has learned that the audio-quality of its televisions is more valued by its customers, who often reside in noisy environments;
• Carrefour, which has started to work with local municipal governments in China, as these don’t meddle in their operations like local dept. stores would, and are able to provide access to prime locations;
• Perfetti Van Melle, in India, a candle/chewing-gum manufacturer, which has found local means to advertise, interacts frequently with local partners, and has adapted its products to local tastes;
• and Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut and KFC, and has adapted its menus to meet local Chinese tastes, started a new food-chain aimed specifically at the market, and uses its international expertise to integrate IT, lean supply chains, and a higher level of food standards into their offering.

It shows the value of out of the box thinking in terms of reaching people, and I believe that traditional “Western” thinking should long ago have been thrown out the door anyway, particularly in light of the troubles that media-, automotive, and financial industries are going through. We are in the flux of disruptive innovation and only those quickest to grasp new technologies and ways of thinking are able to survive another day.

No shortage of lessons on that from entrepreneurs in emerging economies…

Vincent out

Hi, Vincent here. I have neither the intent, nor the talent to develop this application, but it was a thought/pain I experienced at a museum today and an iTunes search didn’t reveal an app like it.

A brief background. I’m pretty a-cultural, but I find audio-tours in museums generally a must, which means I usually spend the 5 or 10 euros extra to get one of those players to walk around the exhibition with headphones on. A little anti-social, but it helped me discover the lives of some amazing artists, like Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc. And my favourite nation of artists: Japan!

Yesterday, I was an an exhibition of “That Scream Guy” Edvard Munch. I was there with my sister and it seemed a little wasteful (it was only 3 rooms of lithographies), not to mention anti-social, to get an audio-guide. Still, it helps tremendously to get just a little background on a picture, really adding to the experience.

Here’s the iPhone app I would like to see.

1. Point the phone at a painting (an immediate weakness there),
2. image recognition happens (how?),
3. it hooks into a source of info about it (preferably in an audio-format) such as Wikipedia,
4. and you get to hear or see a description of the painting you are seeing.

It’s nothing genius and apart from perhaps the image recognition part, it seems fairly cheap/easy to produce.

The one weakness: cameras in museums aren’t always allowed. I would guess this means that you have to work together with museums to get things going (which sucks!).

Well, this is just something I want to throw out there, a la the much underused twitter hashtag #freeideasiwanttoseehappen

So if someone is looking for a creative challenge, you have your first customer right here!

/Vincent