Entrepreneurial Democratization - The Power of “Choice”

Techrunch today published excerpts from Ray Ozzie’s strategy memo to employees. Although most of it was somewhat of a “duh-welcome-to-the-club” moment one bit struck a chord.

The Power of “Choice” as business moves to embrace the cloud

…

design patterns at both the front- and back-end are transitioning toward being compositions and in some cases loose federations of cooperating systems … [because] … myriad options exist for delivering applications to the user: The web browser, unique in its ubiquity; the PC, unique in how it brings together interactivity/experience, mobility and storage; the phone, unique in its extreme mobility.

It struck a chord because of a coincidentally related breakfast discussion this morning. The Web has brought a previously unparalled power of choice and democratisation to consumers. Global peer-to-peer discussions fulled by user generated content have not only redefined the knowledge base on which consumers make decisions but also “coerced” large corporations’ PR machines to change their traditional modus operandi. It’s becoming harder than ever for companies to hide misdemeanors - from the littlest to the harshest - because the web is both ubiquitous and persistent.

Despite corporations being larger than life, CEOs have found themselves in a situation where  they must engage in direct conversation with their customers, be it via blogs, Twitter or any other social medium. A recent classic example is the lash-back Facebook suffered on its launch of Beacon.

A New Breed of Entrepreneurs

More interesting and to the point however is what a new ‘breed’ of entrepreneurs are doing given this climate of potential insurrection and swift customer disengagement. Companies like 37Signals, Fon and Seesmic are not only participating in the discussion, but initiating and embracing it. Seesmic in particular, being still in alpha (or is it beta now?), is not just listening to users’ feedback, but basing its product design decisions on what users ask for a priori.

Hopefully, as consumers become more and more used to this method of doing business, they will not only love it more, but come to expect it. And from simply reshaping their PR departments, companies the likes of Microsoft, Apple and the horrendously complicated mobile operators, will be pushed toward redesigning the way their product design departments work.

TicketLeap: Ticketing made easy?

Guy Kawasaki reviews TicketLeap today, a new online service that democratises ticket (to paraphrase Guy). Having an interest in the company, Guy is obviously full of praise for these guys, however it went over to TicketLeap.com to check it out for myself and it’s most definitely an ace service. Here’s a quick run-down of what I found:

1. Sign up is straightforward but they manage to muck it up slightly with the ZIP code section. It only accepts numbers (i.e. US format) but most countries have letters in the ZIP (e.g. UK). So I had to enter a fake one to sign up.
2. Great guidance. Once you sign up successfully you get a simple-to-understand list of next steps and things to do without too much unnecessary jabber and marketing talk.
3. Creating an event is also simple and takes about 4 minutes if you already know the venue, times and so on. A great feature is the possibility of adding a seating chart. Really cool stuff guys… but same problem with the ZIP code.
4. Next you choose ticket options. Not too complicated but provides a good set of features, including limiting number of tickets and defining multiple ticket types (e.g. student, premium, etc). TicketLeap will charge a fee per ticket (that seems to be their business model) and you get to choose who pays it (you, the buyer, or an even split).
5. Finally you get options to invite people (from Gmail, etc) and a bunch of useful stuff like custom website badges for direct purchase links and so on).

Overall it seems like a great service. Particularly in view of the fact that it does not require the event organiser to get involved in technicalities of merchant accounts, shopping carts and all that irritatingly complex stuff.

It will be interesting to see how it compares with Amiando, a similar service that I hope to find time to look at well in the coming days.

Israel Innovation Tour

I’ve been irregularly following the reports from the alpha geeks‘ Innovation Tour of Israel.

Israel as a hub for innovation is often underestimated or overlooked by Europeans yet the troubled country has one of the largest and most active venture capital communities this side of the Atlantic. There’s also a great deal of innovation and new ideas coming out of Israeli engineers and geeks in the web and mobile arenas.

It’s enough to keep in mind that ICQ was co-founded by an Israeli, arguably one of the first internet apps to begin the shaping the web as we know it today, i.e. centered around peer-to-peer and real-time communication. Point is, it’s worth looking out of Silicon Valley and having a peek at what’s happening in Silicon Wadi, the next big thing might just be coming from the Eastern Mediterranean…

LeWeb 3 ‘08 - some details up!

Just read the post about the 2008 LeWeb 3 conference in Paris announcing the dates for this year: 9-10 December.

It’s early days of course but if anyone attended LeWeb 2007 you’ll know that it’s well worth keeping the dates in mind. If this year’s event is even half as good as last year’s it will still be one hell of a conference… and given the organising team’s dedication, its more likely to be twice as good! :-)

Negative Productivity

Even worse than procrastination is a bout of negative productivity.

Procrastination can be irritating but at least its somewhat in your hands. Negative productivity comes about from events that happen outside of your control but that conspire to drive you nuts. Typically just when you’ve decided to stop procrastinating and get some work done…

This happened to me yesterday.

Having taken a strong decision to spend a solid afternoon working on the upcoming Billy Connolly website, I made coffee, turned on my laptop and prepared to get down to business, little knowing that Fate was thinking “And now, for something completely different!”

Each time I got started with outlining a work plan I was rudely interrupted by various things ranging from soggy sheets stubbornly entangled in each other, delivery of a large box of clothes and books, delivery of a new microwave oven, failed attempts to get rid of old microwave oven, bad internet connectivity, forgotten passwords, and finally, numerous topplings-over of clothes horse under combined weight of said soggy sheets.

By the end of 5 hours, all I had accomplished was writing down a list of 5 to-do items and in the process of doing so had reached such a level of frustration that it was impossible to settle down to do anything productive by then.

So I went out to have a Gynn ‘N’ Tonnick, safely procrastinating further work to the next day :-)

MSFT Silverlight in 140 Characters

GapingVoid asks on Twitter “Can anyone tell me, in 140 characters or less, what is “THE BIG IDEA” behind MSFT Silverlight?”

Pretty good question I thought. What’s the big idea behind a company like Microsoft, who’s not really well known in the creative/desktop-publishing space, stepping into the highly competitive market of computer animation. A market where Adobe (formerly Macromedia) have been building a huge market share and “fan club” for a bit more than a decade.

Well, Microsoft is definitely a little bit better than Adobe at the programming side of things. And given their success with .net it is safe to assume there’s a huge framework ready to be tapped into by Silverlight. More importantly though, Silverlight is most likely going to be a huge asset to the millions of aesthetically-challenged Windows developers. Its provision of basic UI components that conform to basic interface and usability guidelines will up the standard of developers’ output and also make it several orders of magnitude easier for them to interact with designers since a lot of the presentation is abstracted out of the code itself.

Therefore, my answer to GapindVoid’s question was “Silverlight is Flash for MSFT Developers: Lets geeks make beautiful stuff and interact better with designers”

What do you think? Will Silverlight beat Adobe at the browser-animation game?

Tech Questions & Answers

Thanks to Jim at EzPzApps for inviting me to answer a couple of questions about technology and creativity. You can get the full article here.

I met Jim at an entrepreneurship event some years ago in Malta and I’ve followed some of his very interesting software projects. His most recent “ClipaSearch Pro” is definitely worth checking out!

SWOT Analysis - Climate Change

 I was sent this video clip, posted on YouTube by “johnq5″. Recommended watching  for all and sundry.

Embedded Video

Tags: entrepreneurship, climate change, global warming, environment

The importance of early-stage entrepreneurship

Early-stage entrepreneurship encompasses a spectrum of stages in the entrepreneurial life: ranging from the “idea-in-the-shower-phase” to business planning through to prototyping and launch.

This period of time is crucial in the life of an entrepreneur. Not only do decisions taken at this time impact upon the eventual success potential of the start-up, but more importantly they play a significant role in helping the entrepreneur decide whether or not she actually wants to be an entrepreneur. Early-stage entrepreneurship is therefore important because this period will determine whether:

1. the idea the entrepreneur has convinces her to launch the venture, and
2. impacts directly on probability of success of the venture if the answer to (1) was “yes”

Therefore developing skills at dealing with the issues arising in early-stage entrepreneurship will lead to:

1. more entrepreneurs
2. higher success rates

What’s The Fuss?

This blog is intended to be a coming-together-place of snippets, thoughts and ideas about entrepreneurship, creativity, and simplicity.

The main driving topic will be early-stage entrepreneurship, or in more conventional words, “start-ups”. The terminology is important however because I take ‘early-stage entrepreneurship’ to mean something slightly different from ’start-up’. Or rather, slightly more focused.

Typically, a start-up is a business venture that is in the process of commencing operations based on a specific business idea/model. In other words, the entrepreneur and her team have come up with a business idea and are executing. ‘Early-stage’ however refers to the subset of start-ups within which there has not yet been made a significant commitment of resources to a specific idea/model. Both the idea and the organisation are still fairly ‘embryonic’ at this point and can still be changed, moulded and refined much more easily that would be the case at a later stage.

Secondly, I use early-stage entrepreneurship and not early-stage start-ups to emphasise the innovation element. Every new venture is a start-up yet arguably not every one is necessarily entrepreneurial. I like to differentiate between ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘businessperson’, lightly defining the distinction as being that the former is being somewhat innovative while the latter is simply trading using tried-and-tested ways.

So early-stage entrepreneurship is all about the subset of new ventures that are in an innovative idea development phase.