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

Like

Unlike

From the Official Google Blog:

Today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

I have nothing to say that I haven’t already said before.

Like

Unlike

We’ll be migrating Tech IT Easy from wordpress.com to a self-hosted solution these coming days, so I won’t be posting much, I don’t think. In the mean time, here are a few things flying through my head.

Men can’t get away with this !!

Jason Kottke pointed me towards an anti-fashion-industry trend lead by some women: the wearing-one-dress-slightly-altered-day-in-day-out-trend. Somewhat jealous, because it seems so efficient (and thus manly), but I don’t think men can get away with doing something like that, do you? Then again, men also don’t look quite as attractive…

Factors influencing the ‘virtual office’

I’ve heard several stories of entrepreneurs setting up their companies that they can operate it independently from a location, and if you’ve read some of my posts on “designing companies” and mobility, you know that I feel very strongly about doing something similar. In VAT-law, there’s the rule that you can’t locate your VAT-payments to a VAT-friendly country if you’re doing significant business in the VAT-unfriendly country. I’m guessing it’s quite similar with virtual offices. If your business activities tie you to a particular location, than that is a ‘tax’ that you have to pay.

Since there are plenty of smart tax-lawyers around who know their way around the loop-holes, perhaps it’s time for some ‘expert-consultants’ that help entrepreneurs become location-free?? The 4-hour workweek guy comes to mind.

On building (corporate) Knowledge Centres

I grew up in a library, one which my father built, so I may have a different perspective from people growing up in the more digital, paper-free world. But, to me, libraries are magical and comforting. One of the first things I did, moving to Luxembourg, was to move many of my books here (with more on the way) and asking my boss whether we can set up a library.

More broadly, a library to me stands for building and storing knowledge, whether for individuals or groups, and is a source of creativity, innovation, and also trust. Large consultancies are most famous for doing such things and if you saw the virtual universities some of them have train their staff, you’d be amazed.

No great point to this story, except that I hope that as an entrepreneur/manager/CEO you’ll also consider how to improve the lives of your employees sometimes, as well as consider that your company, which is essentially a living organism, will only benefit from having more knowledge inside of it.

On that philosophical note, I.. am.. out.

Vincent

Like

Unlike

I seem to have made some people upset by a comment thread I started on Friendfeed yesterday. My stance was as follows:

The reason being that Friendfeed has become very forum-like with people forming relationships, writing how Friendfeed changed their life, how they just had triplets, etc. etc.… all stuff an a**h*le like me doesn’t care about.

Other “thoughts” were about the super-spammy #spymaster tag…

Apparently this spymaster is the new hot techcrunch-worthy thing on the internet…

…and about the problem of avoiding spoilers about movies when the inter-continental release-date are so drastically different:

I hate, hate, hate it when people spoil movies or books or anything really.

What all of these problems have in common that the web is a fairly unfiltered mess of vocal thoughts, opinions, and of course spam. With user-generated content far surpassing regulated media (you know, the kind where you need a degree and sources to write an article…), it’s nearly impossible not to come across something annoying.

What I’d like:
Simply: an extension for Firefox (I guess…) that prevents you from seeing things that you put on a block-list. It has to be a little intelligent. For instance, if before seeing the Star Trek movie, I’d like to not read about it, it should be able to identify whole paragraphs or blog posts that deal with this topic.

More simply, banning any tweet that mentions the #spymaster tag or otherwise, etc. etc. And more complex, the ability to ban content about babies and all things that evil people like me don’t want polluting their rss-feeds.

Too much to ask? I don’t know. Too rude to ask? Probably… Logical? Definitely.

Vincent

Like

Unlike

My sentiments about online media aside (I think it’s despicable the way media-companies treat consumers, particularly outside of the US), it has always bothered me to use Last.fm for a number of reasons. Here they are:

1. Last.fm, apart from being happy to pull my listening data into their site, does not integrate with my listening habits Whats.O.Ever. My method for managing music, perhaps determined by owning an iPod, is entirely dominated by iTunes and the usage of the device itself.




2. Last.fm does not play on the road (let’s ignore the iPhone radio app and that eventually all devices will be connected to the internet)




3. Last.fm does not acknowledge that I give different stars (= degrees of love) to songs (instead I have to “love” a song manually).




4. Discovering new music through Last.fm’s radio does not easily lead me to purchase the actual song




5. One cherry on top is that Last.fm now wants to charge me for using the radio, even though I add to it by playing my songs.




6. A second cherry on top is that Last.fm is now, indirectly through CBS, giving information about what we listen to and who we are, to the RIAA, a US organisation that probably also shares that information with other international organisations.




7. The only use Last.fm seems to have is vanity, in the sense that you can see what songs I loved (when I love them) and I can make pretty graphics of my listening habits (makes for an interesting poster).

So, as of this week, I am deleting my Last.fm account.

That doesn’t change that I am a fervent listener of music and it also doesn’t change that I believe deeply in the concept of sharing music. I like finding nice tracks to play at parties and equally I like finding tracks for some of my friends that I can only connect to online. There is no legal service that allows me to do this. As a matter of fact, in the Netherlands, I should even be paying a licensing fee if I play music in public or for too many people at once!!!

In comes Drop.io, a file-sharing service that recently added Facebook Connect as a way to share stuff only with your friends. Drop.io fills the void that Last.fm leaves in the following ways:

1. It has an integrated player that is very elegant and can also be accessed and added to via many different devices.




2. I can restrict access to my files to my Facebook friends only (evil internet lawyers can get lost).




3. It’s free for using 100 MB storage and charges a very fair $10 per gigabyte per year.




4. Any loss in statistical “vanity” data can be compensated by using iTunes and starring / sorting your files accordingly.

That’s it. Of course I will not be sharing songs that are copyright protected (and, of course, if we’re not Facebook connected, you will never know for sure )

Vincent

Like

Unlike

“Ouch, it hurts, it hurts!” … “Oh yeah, that feels good, so good!” Guess which one is all other browsers moaning collectively (Microsoft & Firefox no. 1), and which one is the geeks…

Let me start by saying that Google Chrome rocks! OK, it crashed about 2 mins after I started it, and I think it has a process running in the background, which speeds up the launch, but which I hate, and it is Windows-only, which I hate 100x, but… it rocks! It’s simple, love that, it completely takes in all the bookmarks you had in Firefox, love that, and Gmail, man, Gmail loads like lightning! The browser loads like lightning too, because of the background process, can’t be any other reason.

Gmail’s loading speed confirms it: Google Chrome is Not a browser. Repeat: it is not a browser. It is a Google app-launcher. It is meant to bring the Google ecosystem to Joe Schmoe on Windows, who may know Google, but hasn’t thought about using its calendar, office-suite, or email, for that matter.

It is, to use a buzz-term, an in-the-cloud facilitator, bringing us one step closer to no longer needing computer-processing and storage, but just doing everything (essential) through an internet-connection. I don’t think, I’ve been this excited about a browser since Phoenix (what Firefox used to be called), which was in 2002, 6 years ago.

What’s different? Or what did Phoenix and now Chrome have in common? Phoenix had tabs, it introduced extensions, it blocked the pop-ups that IE never would. It was an evolution over the status quo. Google Chrome is just a browser, built on Safari’s Webkit-engine, with no extensions, but it helps us do what we were already doing, better. Because the world has evolved from the extension-model, it has gone way beyond what a company like Microsoft has even imagined. We live in a world where web-services matter!

I don’t use an rss-reader, I use Netvibes. I don’t use a mail-app, I use Gmail or Facebook. I don’t use a blogging-app (well actually I do, but the majority doesn’t), I use Wordpress.com. I don’t use MSN, I use Twitter or FriendFeed. When I’m on my PC, I’m in fact on the web, and the desktop only exists for work-documents and multimedia.

Google bites right into that trend, it executed well (ok, unstable browser, but localised in my language), it is a window in a world that 100s of thousands, if not millions, have accepted as their modus operandi.

Strategic angles

The love for strategy is really just the love for competition, disguised by fancy words.

Microsoft’s unbreakable chain?
Microsoft’s strength in the 90s was its software-platform. It was strong on multiple levels: market leader in OS, market leader in Office. And consequently, and still, market leader in browsers. It was able to build all these pieces of software on top of each other, tie them together, so that it would be an automatic choice to use them all. This is still the case today, as it is, by default, installed on 80% of computers out there (don’t quote me on this). Backwards integration, which also made it the number one choice for businesses, who like having the same software installed on 1000s of machines at once. And forward integration, through Office and IE, which add functionality in the value chain towards the consumer. From IE, Microsoft could build towards ActiveX and .Net, Silverlight, and other web-services that it was selling/giving to consumers.

Displacement by Firefox?
Yes and no… For displacement to occur there needs to be some kind of commercial angle. Firefox was built on top of open source principles, which is definitely disruptive, but it wasn’t until Google came into play, that Firefox became a commercial success. Google, these last few years, became the cash-cow for Firefox and other browsers, through affiliate fees it was paying for the use of the search-box.

While that’s cool, it also placed Google into a power-position. It knew that there was money to be made with browsers, it knew how much money there was to be made, so it just had to make the right move at the right time.

Google power
I already raved on why I think Chrome rocks, but for Google, the situation is actually pretty similar to Microsoft, except from the web towards the desktop, instead of the other way around. It is the market-leader in search, which some say is the operation system on the web. Nothing happens, without it going by Google, which can make or break a business. As is the case for browsers depending on Google cash as well.

Where Google leads is the web, and it has a pretty good read on where user-models are evolving too: web-services, with some anchoring on the desktop. So building a browser makes sense, it’s a step in bridging the value chain from web to desktop. Where it gets scary for Microsoft (which also collects Google cash through IE, I think), is when Chrome-users start getting the hint that Gmail works great, that Google Docs will hopefully work great (offline), etc. etc.

And I’m completely leaving Android out of this, whose future I still find hard to read… but I’m hopeful. Chrome definitely proves that Google can build software.

Doesn’t vertical integration rock? Doesn’t Chrome rock? I think they both do.

Vincent, the fanboy. Out.

P.S. I’m also not commenting on Firefox’s Ubiquity, it’ll be interesting to see where that goes… also largely built on Google-tech.

Like

Unlike

Another way to phrase this is, whether mobile commerce will drastically change life as we know it or not?

Disruptive technologies, according to Christensen, lead to products that are cheaper, simpler, and, often, more convenient to use. By that definition, e-commerce could certainly be seen as a disruptive innovation over brick & mortar commerce, and to some extent, m-commerce could do the same to e-commerce. Or could it?

I look at technological disruption on three levels:

1. Production: will people get fired/hired/retrained? Will production-methods change? etc.?
2. Will technological behaviour change?
3. Will societal behaviour change?

As for the first, I don’t think production will change as dramatically as it did from brick & mortar. Clearly, models like Amazon and eBay wreaked some havoc on book- and second-hand stores. But production and maintenance for an m-commerce application will likely just happen on PCs and will logically be built for both platforms (with some possible exceptions in emerging economies). With the mobile versions of browsers like Safari and Opera, changes also need to be minimal. I do see there being less reliance on keyboards, (i.e. an interface-change), just based on my own clumsy fingers, but e-commerce is not exactly word-intensive.

Regarding changes in technological behaviour, this is clearly already happen and will continue to happen. Things like the Starbucks-Apple partnership for digital music-downloads are just the tip of the iceberg. Eventually, we could be seeing more use of phone’s video- and audio-recording abilities. Imagine taking a picture of your neighbour’s clothes and doing a visual search for that sweater? And of course there could be innovations in terms of mobile payment methods, mobile logistics, rfid and barcode-scanning, etc. The possibilities are endless and only constrained by traditional businesses’ lack of imagination.

Changes in societal behaviour is one I am most excited about. The way I see it, PCs have been an immobile force in our lives for many years, forcing us (in my opinion) to think and act in left-brained ways, not to mention never leave our seats out of fear we might miss something. Now, clearly the 24/7 “crackberry” isn’t exactly the answer, but I’d like the new found freedom that mobile technology enables to lead us down a new or perhaps old path, one where I can even see room for brick & mortar again. Something like:

1. take picture of product in store (after smelling/tasting/touching/trying it on),
2. send picture to warehouse,
3. warehouse ships home.

Removing one the most annoying component of shopping, carrying your shopping-bags home.

Two out of three… I think that qualifies as disruptive! But this is just my opinion of course, and I’m just beginning learn about the world of m-business. Tell me how you visualise mobile technology changing (y)our lives, or perhaps not?

Vincent

Like

Unlike

Context: I’m currently in discussion with a number of companies that are involved with SOA-vending & -consulting. As a result, I’ve been studying up a little on this market and hope to learn more by writing about it. Note: Since I know, judging by the response to other articles on enterprise-software, this isn’t exactly the most sexy of topics, I expect the number of comments to be minimal.

Jeremy has already written about this topic (primarily in terms of Software-as-a-Service (Saas) and Software + Service (S+S)) before (here, here, and especially here), so I won’t go very deeply into it, but SOA is roughly defined as:

“guidelines that allow software developers to design systems in stand-alone chunks of computer code, each specifying the critical outcomes, performance metrics, and interfaces between a discrete activity and other services.” (Src: HBR, June 2008)

If that’s a little abstract, I see it as a selling you a ticket to Lego-land, where you can play with legos all you like, those lego-blocks representing individual applications that can be used by businesses through a web (SaaS) or hybrid (Software+Service) interface, and Lego-land being the SOA-system that integrates all of them for you. This is opposed to the historical approach of buying a lego-box, which you eventually replace by another and another (side-prediction: we will eventually see Lego-world online).

SOA’s value-proposition

While traditionally it has been so that in order to compete in a technological world, you have to be technological, the idea of SOA is to remove that element, instead allowing individuals and businesses to focus on what they do best. I, personally, like that very much.

Other, more measurable advantages are that it is dramatically more cost-efficient. If you imagine that 5+ years ago, every company had to either invest into a powerful wide-area network (WAN) to be able to centralise IT-services, or replicate islands of IT-systems for each business-location, SOA removes that idea entirely, using a freely available infrastructure, the internet, and removing the need to build IT anywhere, instead paying-as-you-go for singular services that an external provider hosts and distributes. Added to this is the idea that performance now becomes accountable, in the sense that it is covered by contracts (e.g. QoS or SLA), something that was much harder to do with a permanently employed IT-staff.

With all these advantages and several more, it is no surprise that, in 2007, over 50% of mission-critical IT-projects were estimated to be SOA-based, a figure which is believed to increase to 80% in 2010 (these figures are from Gartner and may be US-only).

SOA’s hurdles

While this sounds pretty great, anytime you’re talking about system-wide change, you have to consider that this will meet resistance and involve a great many stakeholders, i.e. take a lot of time. And the question is here, who will you talk to as an SOA-vendor? Will it be the business-side of your client, as you are selling easy-to-understand lego-blocks, or will it be the technology-side, as you are selling technology? This is a serious question, so please answer it in the comments!

Added to this, a SOA-deployment is a strategic issue for your customer, meaning that your selling-proposition will also need to include the option of strategic support, aka consulting-services. This means that technology-only SOA-providers (vendors) will likely have to work with third-party consultants that pick-and-choose the best SOA-package for their client.

Related to this, the lego-like quality of SOA, which promises values like agility, flexibility, price, and reuse, and several more, all very important in this recession-prone time, also mean that someone can quite easily replace your service with someone else’s legos. Arguably this is much less the case if you provide an architectural framework and focus on building ecosystems (create lock-ins). But that is easier said than done, and as such this is a field dominated by few big players that buy up smaller ones.

Some more things, which I haven’t researched, are the degree that open source is a factor/issue here, and different revenue-models.

Grasping the paradigm-change

On the customer-side, there’s two ways of seeing this trend. On the one hand, extreme efficiencies, which also follows Nick Carr’s view that IT is no longer a competitive advantage. On the other hand, you’re giving away a lot of responsibility, which can be bad in two ways.

One, you’re giving away a lot of power to an industry, which will continue to consolidate. It’s something that may not be a problem now, but may become one.

Two, delegating a problem does not necessarily solve it. Taking the retail-industry, the biggest problem here is logistical inefficiencies, caused by delays, unnecessary replication of processes, or otherwise. Here, SOA, as long as it spans across the value-chain of manufacturers-transport-retailers-customer, is clearly a good thing. But it still requires a solid understanding of how IT does and can help your supply chain reap better results, something an independent SOA-vendor may not do as well. My opinion here is purely hypothetical, but it may be worth investigating how the masters of retail (Wal-Mart, Tesco, Carrefour, etc.) solve it. And if this is a problem, I imagine it is elsewhere too.

The SOA playing field

This post is getting a little long, so I’ll briefly go into this. Following Forrester-graphs show the players in the integrating corner of things (consultants) and, on the right, the vendors (also note the time-difference (the second one is Q4 2007) and region). You can find the originals here and here.

Clearly this industry is very layered, with some offering the complete package, including strategic assistance, and others providing either the SOA or a part of it (SaaS or similar). There is a lot of movement in this field with players buying each other out or moving into related industries, either on the hardware or software-side.

Final thoughts

Because I’m not a soft-/web-ware guy, I’m still very much undecided whether to head in the software-only direction myself, though I see much merit for an integrated business-consulting + software-deployment approach, and I also prefer selling Lego-blocks to rubber-trees. Feel free to convince me of your points of view.

All of this was initial thinking of course, and as such I’m happy to hear if you have anything to add or if I made some obvious mistakes. Again, considering the relative unsexiness of this area, I don’t expect too much

Vincent

Like

Unlike

Okay, I was wrong at least on one count. iPhone 3G will hit Finland and pretty much everywhere on 11th of July and I wasn’t expecting it before September. Other than that, I still agree with my previous posts about iPhone (before European launch and after it) and smartphones in general.

One thing to keep in mind is that iPhone 3G is still mostly hype. It’s not available yet so we are seeing just Apple’s marketing material and also I’ve no idea for example what my operator’s (TeliaSonera) plans will looke like. As I’ve written in my previous posts, I still expect carriers to earn premiums from internet access fees. In the US, we already saw that the 200 USD price reduction was more than balanced out by a 10 USD increase in AT&T’s data plans.

The fact that iPhone 3G will be priced at maximum 199 USD is meaningless. I can get a Nokia N95 for (the law-mandated minimum of) 1 euro and the USD/EUR exchange rate isn’t that bad yet. Comparing iPhone’s max 199 USD subsidised price to other, unlocked, smartphones is worse than comparing apples to oranges (or, as someone might say, lemons). I can only assume that for some reason, in the backwaters of mobile world (aka the US), iPhone is the only subsidised smartphone available. Otherwise, for example, this post announcing the death of smartphone market doesn’t make any sense. As I’ve pointed out time and time again, the mobile markets are totally different around the world. The main reason for this is the mobile operators who have quite total control of the whole value chain. I think Apple would really love to learn couple of their tricks.

I’ve found it strange that many U.S. websites somehow say that iPhone “killers” and its competitors are some never-heard-before handsets – and the only apparent similarity is that they happen to have “touchscreen”. I’m pretty sure Apple isn’t worried about these also-rans because I’m guessing they’re not in the same markets Apple is aiming the iPhone 3G at. The first market is the normal enthusiasts market Apple sold the 1st generation iPhone to. This is the market where “cool”, features and such are important. Compare to how Apple markets iPod. This is why iPhone 3G has 3G, GPS and 3rd party apps.

The second market is “enterprise”. Steve Jobs spent a long time talking about how iPhone 3G and Fortune 500 companies are best friends forever and for a reason, the first major critical backslash to 1st generation iPhone was that it wasn’t “business-friendly”. This market is now dominated in some countries by BlackBerries and in some other by Nokia’s E-series. This is why iPhone 3G got Exchange and Office document support.

Unfortunately, the latest (and in my opinion, misguided) trend in corporate IT is “mobile device management”. See, for example, Nokia’s Intellisync. Fortunately, most companies’ IT systems are so vendor-locked-in that it’ll be years before they can even dream to get anything beyond Exchange to mobiles, so this doesn’t really matter. But, the control-freak nature of corporate IT means that iPhones aren’t still “enterprise-ready” unless they can (if they wanted to) lock the user out of using iTunes-functionality of an iPhone.

Anyway, let me reiterate the numbers: “Smartphones” make about 10% of the global mobile handset market. About 50% of this belongs to Nokia and Apple is third with appx. 7%. 18,5 million Symbian phones were shipped to consumers in Q1 2008 alone. Also, Nokia makes most of its profits from its low-margin phones.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the product itself. My main point is that it is easy to fall for all the hype and marketing fluff going around. It is way too early to call Nokia, RIM, Motorola or Samsung irrelevant and my guess is that Nokia will still lead the market – their current volume is just so huge. Apple is no doubt one of the big boys, but one of the reasons is that the market isn’t that big to begin with. But there’s nothing wrong with that, as this is exactly how Apple operates with its laptops. Its niche there is the high-end, high-margin, over $1000 USD laptops – a niche it has a nice 66% market-share in.

So, iPhone is one of the phones I’m considering now that my current plan runs out. The problem isn’t iPhone as a product. The main barrier is my mobile operator, which in addition to sucking also charges pretty nicely for data – and without internet access, why would I want an iPhone? I already got a mobile phone and an iPod and in their normal use, I couldn’t care less about things like UI or touchscreen (which would mostly touch my pant pocket). It’s the other functions that make iPhone great. For me, it’s the mobile operator who makes or breaks iPhone and also the reason why I don’t see Apple ending its exclusive deals anytime soon.

All the smartphones, and especially iPhone 3G, are designed for a world where the cost of internet access is not relevant. The only people living currently in that world are business users. Do not forget that the true clients of phone manufacturers are the operators themselves and it could be argued that the true function of their phones’ features is to make “value-added” profit to the operators. Want to guess why iPhone’s Bluetooth is still crippled?

PS. And seriously, many of the “innovative” applications of iPhone have already been done for the Symbian like ages ago. For an example, see how many people have suddenly reinvented Jaiku Mobile et al. True, it doesn’t really matter who does it first, but who does it best.

Like

Unlike

This morning, I read an interesting piece written by Steven Poole, and just had to comment on it. In it, he discusses his book, which he released for free (and DRM-free) around the net, and which has received ca. 30,000 downloads so far. But he also discusses the idea of artists, or creators in general, making money, and how that + giving away stuff for free, doesn’t compute.

He also refers to what he calls the “Slashdot argument,” one, I should add, I’ve used myself several times, that (music-)artists should keep giving away their creations for free, because it’s possible, and instead collect revenues from live-performances. As a counter-argument, he uses the programming-profession:

Oh Mr Freetard, you work as a programmer, do you? How interesting. So do you perform all your corporate programming duties for free, and earn your keep by selling personally branded mousemats on the side?

It is actually interesting, because the live-analogy actually applies to programming also; where is software slowly but surely moving too? Towards hybrids, like Software-as-a-Service, Software+Service, and other incarnations, as well as a 100%-on-the-internet model. A hybrid model is, incidentally, also the way gaming-companies like Shanda combat the problem of piracy in China.

But a large part of what he’s saying, I do agree with. Releasing your stuff online, for free or a freemium, is most suitable to artists whose concerts are sure to be sold out: NiN and Radiohead. Plenty of artists, like my mother who paints, just want to create art and sell it; not release it for free and do crazy live stunts to earn a living (even though that’s what’s entrepreneurship is all about).

I guess, when he calls for a renaming of copyright to Right-to-Eat, that perhaps he has a point. There are plenty of people out there, who don’t get copyright, don’t care about it, or justify it through a self-serving argument.

I don’t particularly think that prosecution works that well here—crime is global, while crime-prevention is local—but perhaps we need more education; perhaps we need the equivalent of pictures of blackened lungs on cigarette-packs to be extended to media? The only problem with that are videos like this (couldn’t find the original, so enjoy the parody), which, ironically, mainly target those people who paid for a DVD, while pirates smartly removed that “feature” long before releasing the DVD into the wild. Or perhaps we do need DRM, like the kind that Steven Poole refers too, tying you to your Kindle or iPod?

It’s definitely a tricky situation, and I’m not sure there is an easy answer that works for everyone. I’ve heard of people pasting a big copyright-sign across their pictures; of authors, who read chapters or the whole book for free through a weekly podcast, while selling the book on the side for the impatient. And of course, of Radiohead and NiN, both of whom are huge artists, but who didn’t exactly employ an all-your-eggs-in-one-basket formula either.

But what about my namesake, Vincent van Gogh, an incredibly talented, yet socially awkward individual? If we expected people like him to “perform live” to earn money, perhaps we would have never seen his art today.

This piece is written by Vincent van Wylick, co-author on Tech IT Easy. The picture is courtesy of csauce.wordpress.com.

Like

Unlike

This post is aimed at helping friends bootstrap projects (although they certainly don’t need me to turn everything into gold, especially these ones). I apologize for the inconvenience caused to readers coming for content, not announcements, but these are 2 AMAZING projects that definitely deserve exposure. Unfortunately, a number of readers won’t be able to be part of the game since #1 is for French companies only, and #2 is for French speakers only. There we go:

1. Sheirin Iravantchi, Aymeril Hoang & Paul Degueuse, three people who have been instrumental in the success of the study trip to Silicon Valley (full quality debriefing in French by Olivier Ezratty here)I organized back in November 2007, are organizing what they call a (French)TechTour between May 19th & May 23rd 2008. The concept is pretty clear and very appealing: a sample of 10 startups will be selected to go to Silicon Valley & meet with corporate development departments of major large corps. Here’s a list of planned meetings (note the diversity of industries considered):
   1. Google David Lawee, VP corporate development
   2. Ebay Erik Stuart, Director, Corporate Strategy
   3. Cisco Didier Moretti, VP Business Incubation, Emerging Technologies Group
   4. Microsoft Beti Cung, Director, Emerging Business Team - I met Beti before, and an hour with her is worth the return trip: super smart girl, if all meetings are planned to be of such quality then becoming a TechTour participant is what you should be desperate working on
   5. HP Damien Henault, Director, Strategy & Corporate Development
   6. AT&T Rupert C. Young, Director, Strategic Business Development
   7. Intel Capital Eghosa Omoigui, Director, Strategic Investments
   8. Symantec Hans van Rietschote, Senior Director, Office of the Chief Technology Officer

Assuming that the agenda speaks for itself, impressive uh?, my bet is that you should take a look at the following links and apply:

(French)TechTour, the blog here; details on the tour here; application file here; the launch post here. Enjoy!

2. Thomas Faivre-Duboz, a former classmate of mine & Raphaël Fétique are 2 very active entrepreneurs in Paris. They run a consultancy aimed at helping website owners with a conversion rate enhancement methodology. The name of their company? Converteo. The good news is that Converto recently launched an Error404 competition: design the most appealing Error 404 page and you’ll win a one week conversion rate optimization audit worth 4000 euros HT (1 million US dollars – just kiddin’, around 6000 USD). I believe this is a great initiative: some Error 404 pages can be such a shame that they might never make you feel like coming back on a site; on the other hand, some display a message like ‘our teams are now aware of the malfunction, thank you for helping us improve our service and sorry for the inconvenience’, a sort of message that may improve user stickiness at the end of the day. Here’s the link to the Error 404 Converteo competition.

Wanna jump on one or the other, or both competitions? Please be their guest. Feel free to keep me posted on the outcome of your applications.

Like

Unlike

Here’s a quick question to all people used to either interact with or being part of software development teams.

Consider a software vendor, a good one, and its technical headcount. It is no secret that R&D teams aren’t made of software developers only. In order to be deployed successfully, architectures and code need to be tested by a QA department (QA = quality assurance) where professional testers run through thousands of automatized-or-not scenarii; documentation; technical support staff help the install base with potential regressions occuring during updates and coping with changing information system environments; localization project managers monitor translations of the software: and last but not least, application engineers actually parameterize the software at clients.

Now my question, how many technical staff should you account for every software development engineer? I figured out an average ratio of 1 to 4, that is to say, for every technical team of 100 there should be around 25 software developers actually hacking code.

I know there exists extremes but by and large, from what I’ve seen, I don’t think I’m too far from the reality with a 1:4 developer / all-categories-technical-staff ratio.

What do you think? Feel free to describe what the company does when sharing your experience, because, since there are very large discrepancies between, say, an SAP that manufactures ‘heavy’ enterprise software and any web application designer that may not necessarily run industrialized testing and that has no professional service department, we might not get nuances at first sight.

PS: the ratio will also depend on the maturity stage of the company: at Microsoft, [# of develops]/[develops + Microsoft Consulting Services staff + developer evangelists + localization engineers + testers (1 for each develop) + architects] approximately equals 1/4 (1 to probably 5 ot 6 adding documentation specialists; & 1 to much more if you consider the system integrator ecosystem that actually does the application engineering). But the company is rather mature and therefore can afford to focus on quality of execution rather than productivity in execution. Which probably wouldn’t be the case for an enterprise software startup for obvious resource reasons. Anything to share? Best and worse practices, per specific industry (Web 2 / UGC, Video Games, enterprise, affordable consumer traditional applications, etc.) most welcome. I need to test my own budgeting assumptions

Like

Unlike

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

I can only guess what the man on the right picture is doing here. I guess he makes our new blogger, Ms. Georgia Psyllidou (left), look good. I’d like to spend some time, introducing her to you.

Georgia is actually an acquaintance of Jeremy’s, though she caught my attention by some of the comments she’s been leaving on this blog, which I felt showed inspiration, style, the ability to build up an argument, and an understanding of matters of technology (no pressure, G.).

Georgia’s from Greece, though she’s been living in Paris for three years, where she’s been studying management and telecommunications, and is currently employed by Orange Business Services, as a solutions engineer in areas including data access services, VOIP, and security. She also has a background in computer- and electrical engineering.

I’m not allowed to say too much about her professional dreams, as those are still “in progress,” but I can tell you that they involve transforming natural paradises into technological utopias, hopefully without stepping on too many fish…

Her ambitions for this blog, so she told me, are to discuss themes that she comes up with during coffee-breaks, showers, supermarket-queues, and routine code-monkeying. Which is fine, as I think we can all identify with that. More specifically, she wants to discuss anything from internet practices and behaviours, business, and whatever else pops up in her mind.

So her tech-credentials are all covered then! Concerning her style, Jeremy calls it “inimitable” when she writes in French, and I have faith she can replicate it in English also.

Oh, and she’s never blogged before. So be gentle, and above all, join me in welcoming Georgia to this blog !

A warm welcome, Georgia!

P.S. you can hook up with her on LinkedIn here.

Like

Unlike

The more and more I’ve started to think about it, Facebook’s applications are an exercise in personal information anarchy.

One evening at a bar, we were joking with my friends that it would be quite trivial to make an application to Facebook called “How sexy is your social security number?”, which would compare your SSN, bank account and other personal information in a “fun” way with those entered in to the application by your friends. The strangest thing about this is that this would most likely be in accordance of all Facebook’s privacy terms.

Couple of days ago I was quite surprised to see when my friend showed me how hot, geeky and so on I was ranked by, I suppose, my friends. The problem is that I’ve never used or ever given any permission for this application to use my profile picture or my name.

I’m pretty sure that in any European country, this would be illegal. Conveniently Facebook is located in USA, where privacy is somewhat looser.

I’ve not given my permission to these people or these corporation and their applications to use my picture or my name. Yet, because they discard any business ethics in their pursue of Google Adwords income, they cannot respect any privacy conventions. If people cannot compare all their friends (users or not of that comparison app) they will not use that application. There has to be enough information in the application for people to be interested in using it.

Because I do not use these apps, I cannot set any privacy settings in my profile. In their Privacy Policy, Facebook states that “If you, your friends, or members of your network use any third-party applications developed using the Facebook Platform (“Platform Applications”), those Platform Applications may access and share certain information about you with others in accordance with your privacy settings”. Yet, because I don’t have those applications added, I cannot control that use of my information. Facebook washes its hands by saying that “while we have undertaken contractual and technical steps to restrict possible misuse of such information by such Platform Developers, we of course cannot and do not guarantee that all Platform Developers will abide by such agreements”. This is quite similar to the defence YouTube uses when defending all the material on their site. Thanks to DMCA’s safe harbour sections, they can easily claim that they can’t be held responsible for their users actions. I don’t believe Facebook has the same defense against their third-party application developers pimping out people’s private data without their consent – their friend’s consent doesn’t count. They can use DMCA in their defense when people upload photos of featuring other people (identifiable) without the latters’ permission (which happens, well, all the time) – but even in this case Facebook goes so far as encouraging identifying people with their photo-person-tagging function.

As a citizen of a country with quite strict privacy laws, I find it rather strange that there’s an application on Facebook where people can rank certain aspects of me without me knowing about it. Even though I’m a blogger on Tech IT Easy, the premier tech blog, I have quite a broad rights to privacy (ie. I’m not a public person). In Facebook, I’ve understood that this means that applications that I’ve not given direct permission to use my personal information (like name and profile picture) cannot use them. I think it’s not enough that Facebook tells that they’re not abusing my data, when they can’t make any assurance of their third-party applications.

I’ve not given (or to my knowledge, neither has my profile picture’s photographer) rights for these applications to use my picture, which clearly identifies me. Yes, Some Comparison Application, Inc. might pull that image from Facebook’s database, but they do not have the right to use it in their context, without my explicit permission. The point that this information is only shown to people I’ve flagged as my friends who could anyway see my picture on my profile page does not count. You can take a look at the information any Facebook Platform application can get about you if your friend happens to use that application. As Facebook tells in their privacy terms, they make no guarantees what their thrid-party developers do with your information they got through your friend. (Your friend may have waived his rights to privacy by agreeing to some stupid EULA to get his/her hands on new smileys, but his/her agreement does not extend to you, or me in this case.)

I can clearly understand why any developer would like to code his Facebook application in this way. It’s far easier to gain the needed critical mass when most of your users are part of your application without knowing it. I find this morally at least questionable. I don’t know about the culture in USA, but at least in Finnish context, I find many of the uses of my personal information outside my control in Facebook quite offensive.

As I see it, a third-party application could only call users.getInfo on me if I had the application added myself (e.g. friends.getAppUsers, users.isAppAdded or users.hasAppPermission). This of course would be a major restriction on the Facebook ecosystem as it is today for the reasons I’ve mentioned above. Right now, this restriction is left on the shoulders of the developer. And, right now, the developers seem to use those functions only to find the users’ friends who dot not have this developer’s application added and to bombard them with invites.

When I last visited my school’s library, I noticed that in the textbook section, the shelves were full of international marketing books, but there were only couple of books titled business ethics. Is it really okay to pimp other people’s private data without their consent?

Like

Unlike

Time for some trivia. I installed Leopard last week on my tiny iBook G4 (1,33 Ghz, 1 gig ram, new 160 GB 5400 rpm hard-drive), which is still happily churning away after two years. Here are some observations.

• I first did an upgraded install, but Leopard changed something unix-based and didn’t like my separate partitions for swap, applications, and users. I then did a clean install, using only separate partitions for users (which is very easy) and Time Machine, and everything works great. Of course, I backed up first!
• It runs just as fast as Tiger, some apps like Safari launch even faster. All effects are working on my humble G4, as far as I know.
• All of my software works, except Skype, which doesn’t like the Firewall, and Last.fm, which works, but acts funny.
• Not a minor update, Mail now supports setting different reply-to’s for different email-adresses. I don’t use its other new features, to-do’s, rss, ical-integration.
• I got the right-click tap on my trackpad-mouse now (previously Intel-only), which I’m having enormous difficulty getting used to. I still prefer the ctrl-click. Not sure how you Intel-guys cope with it.
• Spotlights is now enormously fast, and if it wasn’t for Quicksilver’s triggers, would be a great replacement for that.
• The firewall supports per-app rules now, except that I never really felt unsafe on my Mac, but OK.
• Grammar-check is not universally supported, only in Textedit, I think.
• Spaces rocks, 4 spaces to which I assign applications to open. So I now have a space for web, one for work, one for multimedia, and one for maintenance. In other words, no more minimising… ever! Works great, except when I switch and switch back it has the tendency to select the background window instead of the one I was using before. Apart from that, no slow-downs, no nothing.
• Fixing permissions in disk-utility is slow, sometimes takes 10 mins, and I’m not sure if it really works. I expect this to be fixed in the next update.
• Time-machine’s backing up to a separate partitions, and works great. I backed up around 9.5 gigs yesterday, today, after 20 hourly backups, it’s only a few mb bigger. The space-effect looks pretty cool also, but a simple menu-bar icon instead of a dock-one would be nice. That said, I’m not sure I find the concept of backing up all that useful, to be honest
• Stacks are pretty useless, and actually annoy me.
• Airport has become much more stable, dropping my connections far less than before, with all other conditions unchanged.
• File-sharing has become slighly more pleasant.
• Cover-flow is useless, 99% of the time.
• Using the smart-folders like crazy.
• Software-update does something new with updates that ask you to restart. It logs out and then installs them.
• The dock looks great … on the right side of the screen.
• Quicklook is a wonder and has turned my Mac into media-heaven. Imagine pressing space (or cmd-alt-Y for full-screen) on any file in the finder and just viewing it without opening a separate app.
• Preview-app is still not better than Skim (the open source alternative to Acrobat)
• I haven’t really looked, but I expected an updated Worldbook to come with Leopard, I guess that only happens with new Macs.
• The print-this window has received an upgraded look.
• Still missing the ability to easily enter meta-data like tags.
• Spotlight now looks up dictionary words ; works as a calculator ; in the application-help, which is basically spotlight, you can enter any possible term on the menu and it will open it from there
• Dictionary and wikipedia = yum!
• Safari and Camino now look identical = scary! I haven’t used Firefox in over 6 months and no withdrawal symptoms.
• Safari’s “clip and add to dashboard” feature is as useless (or useful) as Dashboard, which I never use.
• Dashboard looks exactly the same: annoying and distracting.
• I don’t mind the see-through menu-bar.
• I haven’t used back-to-my-mac

And that’s about all I can think of. Overall, while it really does not put any extra strain on my system (which I expect to keep until 10.6 comes out or if a mini-MBP with a matte-screen is released), I consider it a substantial upgrade. Spaces, Quicklook, Spotlight’s extra capabilities all make it worthwhile, though I’m not sure whether it’s worth €129, more like half that. Some of the rest is nice, and I hope that 10.5.1 fixes some bugs like the disk-utility, and that more applications integrate more of Leopard’s functions, like grammar-check and Quicklook.

Mac OS X Leopard: 7/10

So what do you guys think? Is Leopard worth the upgrade? Is there an important feature that you like or are looking forward to in Leopard, and that I didn’t mention? Or is there a reason you won’t be using Leopard (yet)?

Vincent is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find all of his posts here, or check out his food & retail blog, updated nearly every day.

Like

Unlike