The good news first, I finished my studies of Business Information Technology at the University of Mannheim in June 2009 after an interesting stay abroad at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute in Galway, Ireland. The bad news, at least for this blog, I completely focused on working on Tagcrumbs, a Internet and mobile startup I co-founded during my studies. From time to time there will be some articles here but better follow our startup blog or our Facebook fan page.
The best news, we just released our exciting location-aware iPhone application. Tagcrumbs is now mobile, the way it has to be:
With Tagcrumbs you can remember and share your discoveries with your friends and the world. It’s about those locations that you enjoy visiting, where you spend some time, experience something special and that you would readily recommend to others. This can be a beach or diving spot you discovered during a holiday, a museum or park that you visited or the café on the corner with the best espresso.
Join the Tagcrumbs communityand let me know what you think of it and how we can improve it. Feedback appreciated! Thanks!
And here is Ben explaining what’s behind Tagcrumbs, on top of the house where I live in Berlin.
Metcalfe’s law describes such effects by stipulating that the aggregate value of networks increases with approximately the square number of adopters. This results in first-mover advantages and lock-in effects, due to high switching costs once a network technology dominates the market.
Why do I blog this? Interesting to see the dimension of the problems they have to face, storing billions of photos is not easy and cheap… It’s all about scalability.
Google’s founders have often stated that the company is not serious about anything but search. They built a company around the idea that work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. To that end, Google’s culture is unlike any in corporate America, and it’s not because of the ubiquitous lava lamps and large rubber balls, or the fact that the company’s chef used to cook for the Grateful Dead. In the same way Google puts users first when it comes to our online service, Google Inc. puts employees first when it comes to daily life in our Googleplex headquarters. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to the company’s overall success. Ideas are traded, tested and put into practice with an alacrity that can be dizzying. Meetings that would take hours elsewhere are frequently little more than a conversation in line for lunch and few walls separate those who write the code from those who write the checks. This highly communicative environment fosters a productivity and camaraderie fueled by the realization that millions of people rely on Google results. Give the proper tools to a group of people who like to make a difference, and they will.
Why do I blog this? Exciting to see more and more realistic 3D city models. The next steps are creating digital overlays / digital fabrics / urban tapestries with annotations at each possible place, up to the centimeter accuracy. The Mobile revolution is the enabler for this kind of annotations.
Demo of the first Apple Macintosh by Steve Jobs, January 1984, in front of 3000 people. Andy Hertzfeld captured the moment quite well in his retelling: “Pandemonium reigns as the demo completes. Steve has the biggest smile I’ve ever seen on his face, obviously holding back tears as he is overwhelmed by the moment. The ovation continues for at least five minutes before he quiets the crowd down.”
Services like YouTube and Facebook are distracted by there primary markets. They don’t have the time, the resources, the know how or the local context needed to figure out what works in a country like Uganda. This creates new opportunities for local entrepreneurs with bright ideas. People who can appreciate local circumstances and innovate the business models that make the difference.
Why do I blog this? I am more and more convinced that the Web is already fragmented and that this trend will continue, we have no idea what is happening in the Chinese Web and in Africa new solutions will shape their independent Web, too.
Only in the last few years have we begun to build social technology that enables people to connect and share through the open web. The web is not about information or media, it is about people. People creating, collaborating, connecting, sharing, and participating. It is the power of social participation through the web that creates information and media.
Thus, this movement should be called The Social Web.
When you put data on the web, the added value you get is from the way it can be queried in combination with other data you might not even be aware of. People will be connecting this data with scientific data, community data, social web data, enterprise data, and government data from other agencies and organization, and other countries, to ask all kinds of interesting questions not asked before. This data must be put up with an awareness that it is one among many data sources with which it will later be linked together.
The term “hyperlocal” is sometimes used to refer to news or media coverage of community at a very close up grass roots level. The mainstream media is scrambling to grab a control of hyperlocal markets.
citizen journalism
The revolutionary idea that you as a citizen can be journalist and play an active role in creating your own media.
Nevertheless, simply because most people do not want to spend time manually logging daily experiences does not imply that the logs themselves are undesired. In 1945, Vannevar Bush laid out his vision for the memex, a device that records every detail of human memory and facilitates simple search and retrieval of experiences. While technically infeasible in his era, with the advent of wearable sensors and large amounts of disk space, many researchers today have begun pursuing their own version of the memex.
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
Why do I blog this? With regards to mobile and people-centric sensing the ‘memex’ is often mentioned, a crazy vision which has a lot of implications, especially privacy concerns and the question of how much transparency is good for a society…
Unlike scientific applications, many sensors for urban applications are already ‘out there,’ watching and listening. Mobile phones provide us with sounds and imagery from our homes and neighborhoods, and the near ubiquity of wireless access in many future urban settings will allow us to publish or share data easily, immediately. Soon private citizens will have access to a great diversity of sensors, allowing them to make even more detailed observations of their communities. They will be able to cross-reference spatially and temporally tagged data they gather with publicly available data from private and municipal monitoring of the city—traffic, weather, air quality, pedestrian flow—the environment and rhythms of urban life.
At the edges of culture, lightweight web applications, built on this publicly available information and free web services, emerge already almost daily to explore new linkages among these varied data.
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We suggest that urban and social sensing applications will flourish only given a flexible sensor information fabric that allows a wide range of data remixing, correlation and fusion applications.
We have an insatiable desire to make sense of the world around
us. How do we best observe and record the details of time, nature,
location, events, and our own personal experiences? How can we
understand the interactions among data and utilize them with
intelligence and responsibility? To explore these questions, Nokia
has spurred an explosion of sensor-based research in which the
mobile phone plays a front-line role in sensing, processing, and
communicating an array of valuable information.
Why do I blog this? The concept of people-centric sensing is intriguing, humans with their total mobility are carrying Internet-connected mobile phones nearly all the time and thus it shapes a social sensing overlay of tremendous scale. Sensing anywhere and anytime. Definitely worth reading the vision of Nokia Research.
urban sensing is about people like you—equipped with today’s mobile + web technology—systematically observing, studying, reflecting on, and sharing your unique world. through discovery and connected participation, you can see the world anew. you can tell your local story. you can make change.
Why do I blog this? The idea of participatory sensing or people-centric sensing is tremendous with regards to the Mobile Web revolution we will face in the next years, mobile sensing of sensor data and user-generated content will open up new interesting data streams.
Tagcrumbs is a non-domain specific platform for user-generated textual place annotations with a focus on the Mobile Web. With regards to mobile sensing applications I see potential for the augmentation of sensor measurements (e.g. pollution data) with the Tagcrumbs place data to grasp a better space-time context. It’s about opening up very specific niche mobile sensing applications to increase value and interoperability in the long-run.
Pervasive sensor networks are the source of continuous data streams about our physical environment. With the rise of the Mobile Web people-centric sensing yields a new layer of spatiotemporal contextual data, from qualitative user-generated content (e.g. geo-referenced multimedia messages) to quantitative sensor measurements (e.g. earthquake or hazard alerts). This mobile sensed content is made accessible within an ecosystem of heterogenous service providers, from social networks to social data networks. The mining, analysis and processing of these streams provides many challenges and semantic technologies can be utilized to overcome this heterogeneity. The integration of sensor data with a user-generated context will provide an increased situational awareness and contextual knowledge, resulting in application scenarios from more efficient emergency response management to improved urban planning.
Take a look at “The Rat Race” photograph, interesting art.
Concept:
“The Rat Race” is a piece jesting at the social ideal of the rat race, the idea that we are all rats in a competitive race to the top. Technology plays a key role in enhancing each rat but staying on top of technological progress (new software, programming languages, memes, etc) is a job onto itself. What technologies enhance our daily lives or make our work more streamlined? “The Rat Race” is a fusion of rat and technology.
Sensing is going mobile and people-centric. Sensors for activity recognition and GPS for location are now being shipped in millions of top end mobile phones. This complements other sensors already on mobile phones such as high-quality cameras and microphones. At the same time we are seeing sensors installed in urban environments in support of more classic environmental sensing applications, such as, real-time feeds for air-quality, pollutants, weather conditions, and congestion conditions around the city. Collaborative data gathering of sensed data for people by people, facilitated by sensing systems comprised of everyday mobile devices and their interaction with static sensor webs, present a new frontier at the intersection between pervasive computing and sensor networking.
A great state-of-the-art sum-up, more and more applications facilitate the available sensors on mobile phones and the next step is the sharing of this data not just within your social network but also with your sensor-enriched surroundings. A lot of potential and it’s clear that sensor data is becoming pervasive and demands to be integrated into everyday applications and services. New programmable smartphones, improved tools and libraries to access sensor data and the Internet as the platform are a solid foundation to build interesting prototypes.
If you’re new to developing social applications, it can be difficult to immediately grasp how good applications facilitate fun and meaningful social experiences. To accelerate your learning, we’ve come up with a list of a few light-hearted recommendations around building good social applications.
Why do I blog this? Social media applications often provide an overwhelming user interface with a bad experience taking no care about the special characteristics of social media from self expression to the social graph. The Open Social wiki provides a very good starting point to think more about this topic.
A great polarizing talk ‘Work/Life Balance and Blood Sweat and Tears‘, on the one side Tom Nixon opting for a startup with a work/life balance to be happy while building the business, on the other side well-known Jason Calacanis opting for the excellence with regards of putting all your time and passion into this one real business to change the world and to become big and tremendously successful.
Why do I blog this? It’s good to have talks about work/life balance, a topic never attracting attention in the startupsphere and maybe for good reasons. As an entrepreneur you cannot finish a regular work day and stop thinking about your company, you are always with your thoughts involved into shaping the business and you have to because it has a tremendous impact on your future, your ambitions and your goals in life, don’t forget potential investors and your own money involved. BUT it’s all about productivity, efficiency, finding the flow, creativity and different perspectives and there is a demand for getting a clear mind, a new view on the company and some relaxing moments to get new energy, nothing better than being motivated when starting a new work day. How a company evolves, lifestyle business or not, and how big the potential is, is in my opinion not directly the founders decision but the question of market, technology, company setup, your business network or the innovation potential of your products.
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” Mark Weiser
Why do I blog this? A well-done video about the next big thing, nano-blogging, because Twitter’s micro-blogging approach has signifcant downsides… I like the way to challenge existing application concepts that are often accepted as is but why is Twitter’s 140 character limit so important? The analogy to text messaging is pretty clear and now every other service changing to a little more or less characters are not providing a huge advantage and people are used to stay inside exactly the 140 char limit.
Increasing amount of networked applications on mobile devices
Increasing network speeds
More and more Internet-enabled devices (e. g. smart home automation)
Increasing amount of sensor type systems (e. g. sensing your surroundings from temperature to humidity)
Why do I blog this?
Three minutes I cannot agree more, the future of the Web is predictable from a broad perspective, now it’s time to think about new use cases and services where the real innovation happens.
“And you have to conclude, if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call ‘Web 2.0,’ the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I’m not talking about an investment bubble. (It’s) a reality bubble.”
A insightful talk ‘Web Meets World’ by Tim O’Reilly, definitely worth watching, especially the second part where he stresses the point that every entrepreneur and innovator should focus on the important things in life. It’s time to rethink the whole situation…
Why do I blog this?
A reality check from time to time is important because we are always surrounded by hypes and trends that can be very transient. Especially the Internet (startup) world is coined by fast-paced ideas and products to be competitive edge. Still it’s hard to be too visionary / revolutionary, you have to deliver something quick and simple to have the first revenues or successes that keep your business running.
The video outlines the basic themes of the European Union’s Future Internet initiative. These include: an Internet of Services, where services are ubiquitous; an Internet of Things where in principle every physical object becomes an online addressable resource; a Mobile Internet where 24/7 seamless connectivity over multiple devices is the norm; and the need for semantics in order to meet the challenges presented by the dramatic increase in the scale of content and users.
The introduction video is well-done and it will be interesting to see more outcomes from this large European research initiative with the funny name Service Web 3.0. The Internet of Things and the Internet of Services are definitely hot topics these days. In my opinion the Mobile Web will be the enabler and the first step towards services interacting on everyday objects in the sense that first the mobile phones will be the smart objects that are Internet-connected and capable of sensing the environment. Once you do this right, you can connect the fridge with the TV to see a cooking show for the ingredients in your fridge.
The Internet Identity Workshop focuses on “user-centric identity” and trying to solve the technical challenge of how people can manage their own identity across the range of websites, services, companies and organizations that they belong to, purchase from and participate with. We also work on trying to address social and legal issues that arise with these new tools. This conference we are going to also focus some attention on what are business models are that can make this ecology of web services thrive.
Tremendously important topic, I am not convinced by the idea that big players as Google, Yahoo, Facebook or Microsoft are becoming the centralized identity providers, nothing more useful than having several distributed unrelated identies / online accounts.
To a computer, the Web is a flat, boring world, devoid of meaning. This is a pity, as in fact documents on the Web describe real objects and imaginary concepts, and give particular relationships between them. For example, a document might describe a person. The title document to a house describes a house and also the ownership relation with a person. Adding semantics to the Web involves two things: allowing documents which have information in machine-readable forms, and allowing links to be created with relationship values. Only when we have this extra level of semantics will we be able to use computer power to help us exploit the information to a greater extent than our own reading.
by Tim Berners-Lee “W3 future directions” keynote, 1st World Wide Web Conference Geneva, May 1994
Where does the innovation in the mobile market comes from? The talk gives many insights about the differences in African markets. His examples from states like Kenya or Rwanda show that new kinds of applications are required for a mobile usage behavior that’s very different from the industrialized world.
Interesting talk, session-based SMS have been completely new for me.
Just for fun, I think your business idea/concept should always be related to a global or a very important trend that’s likely to have a tremendous impact on society or the market you care about. To start you have to break it down to something less fancy, more realistic and fast time-to-markets, still you have to have a big vision in mind for future opportunities and continuing growth potential.
Is it on the tip of your tongue? Google Brain Search (BETA) uses CADIE technology to index your brain to make your thoughts and memories searchable. Get Google Brain Search in the Google Mobile App to recall:
the name of that guy across the room
where you put your car keys
why you started dating this woman in the first place
The expanding user base comes with growing costs—in the form of higher expenses for computer servers, storage, electricity, and Internet bandwidth.
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Tech analysts believe Facebook’s breathtaking growth is raising its technology costs sharply.
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Facebook spends heavily on equipment such as storage technology. The company is now the world’s largest photo-sharing site. Last October, when it had 100 million users, the company said it had uploaded more than 10 billion photos to the site. Facebook’s storage costs are multiples of what an average company spends because it stores four images of each photo its users put onto their Facebook pages. To handle all that data, Facebook needs to buy dozens of storage systems every year.
The goal of Facebook becoming the web operating system with photo and video sharing services out-of-the-box comes with a high price point. It’s obvious that they have to find a better way to monetize their services if every day most of their users upload large amounts of multimedia data and all their buddies are accessing it. Flickr, YouTube and most of the large sites that offer user-generated multimedia content uploading and sharing should face similar problems. Is it a good way to think about the costs of one feature, e.g. 4 sizes of a picture vs. only one or 1Gb video upload vs. 100Mb, beforehand? Tough question and the quality of your service is the most important criterion.
With Tagcrumbs we are happy to not yet support photo uploads because there are more important features on our roadmap. For now we integrate Panoramio’s photo data, at least Google has some nice profits to keep this free service running.
Commercial entities like Whole Foods, Starbucks, Mission Pie, 52 Teas, JetBlue, even the Korean taco truck guy are all on Twitter—users and businesses alike are finding value.
Our question is, how can we help? What can Twitter offer for a fee that will improve the experience? Will it be account verification? Will it be lightweight analytics? Will there be opportunities for introducing customers to businesses on Twitter.
To put it short: we have to think about how to make money with aka-aki. So, let’s talk about it!
For us it’s important, that aka-aki can be used for free in the future, too. But that means, there will (have to) be a form of advertising. Which form is not decided yet. That’s why we want to get you involved in a discussion about it. What could you imagine? Which forms of advertising in aka-aki would be acceptable for you? And where on the mobile screens and on the website? Which kind of advertising would be totally unacceptable for you? Or is there maybe advertising, that would even be interesting for you? Please, give us input!
Isn’t it strange? Companies asking how they can monetize their services is not a good sign. Either their is only a visionary business plan without any facts & figures about revenue streams or you recognize that there is/was a hype hiding some existing problems with good revenue models for sites relying on huge user bases where millions of page views needs to be monetized. I like Twitter, as well as aka-aki and their cost structures are not as bad as Facebook’s, which seems to face some trouble nowadays.
Perhaps most dangerously, Web 2.0 still had only one business model, advertising, and the Valley was refusing to admit that only one company (Google) with only one of its products (search advertising) had proved that the model really worked. The older internet firms, Yahoo! and AOL, were doing their best to grab a piece of the action. But the “next big things” were selling negligible advertising, often on one another’s sites. Not one of them has become an advertising success in its own right.
& The Valley
And so, as this correspondent prepares to leave, the Valley again finds itself in a curious position. It has been a boon to the world, helping people keep abreast of acquaintances on their social networks, wherever they go, and record and share much more of their own lives. But the Valley stands on ground that is as unstable, seismically and metaphorically, as it was in the earlier bust. Another bubble—this time, not of the Valley’s making—has burst. The world economy is in crisis, advertising is collapsing and start-ups are once again vanishing into thin air. Silicon Valley may be entering another nuclear winter.
Always impressive to see these tremendous changes in society, especially with regards to the employment and the educational situation. You have to be adaptive in this fast moving world.
20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.
The concept of open linked data gets more and more traction and is the logical consequence of opening up web accessible services via APIs, feeds or data dumps. It’s the Semantic Web with a clearer marketing and an understandable concept. At Tagcrumbs we are already supporting linked data principles and each place has a meaningful clear identifier [1] and an RDF representation [2] with a pointer to Geonames data. With a tool like the OpenLink Data Explorer you can get from the Tagcrumbs place data to city information from Geonames to Wikipedia articles nearby to census data and to a universe of web accessible data supporting the same technology stack, great. It’s the beginning of more advanced services with regards to information retrieval and information management.
As an active Twitter user I can understand why Twitter is fun and engaging but it has some serious flaws IMHO that can make the hype stop pretty fast.
a) Broadcasting personal messages creates an information overload for receivers. Once following over a hundred users you have to switch to the Twitter search if you are interested in a specific topics, you recognise that social networks provide better utility for the time spend on the site.
b) Switching costs to sites like Facebook are marginal and now that Facebook has a similar and more feature-rich lifestream layout it’s better to post on their site and most people have their real friends just one message away. The @syntax is not working to reach my friends on Facebook, so I should use either or.
c) The broadcasting scheme is perfect for celebraties or companies to inform their fan community and ask questions. It’s like a new media channel which is so extremely limited with its 140 characters that it is really hard to monetize. If they change something in a fundamental way people can be pissed off and turn aways, there is no persistent data that keeps you there. A message is a one time shout out and the collected friend list is just for your ego, business value not as high as on other sites. There is hype and there will be reality after some time.
Smart Sensing and Context are the key enablers for smarter autonomous systems, providing transparent technologies to realise the vision of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligent networks. (Wireless) sensor and actuator networks, tightly integrated into the fabric of the Internet — a Real World Internet — provide the underlying manifestation of the real world in the digital world. The realisation of this Real
World Internet leads to emergence of smart surroundings, covered with objects and persons wearing clothing that provide networked sensing and feedback elements (through actuation) to infer user’s needs and provide relevant context aware assistance. Networked smart sensors recognise context from raw data and utilise context to optimise sensing.
Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities, or SIOC, is an attempt to link online community sites, to use Semantic Web technologies to describe the information that communities have about their structure and contents, and to find related information and new connections between content items and other community objects. SIOC is based around the use of machine-readable information provided by these sites.
With the current lifestream / activity stream trend on the Web it is becoming more and more important to aggregate bits of information from a variety of heterogeneous services. Semantic technologies can be a good fit for these scenarios in the long run.
For Tagcrumbs we are already supporting SIOC in the simplest form. See the RDF representation for a placemark of a recently opened museum in Berlin. It states that ‘cornelius’ submitted a placemark with a specific location, a title and description and further metadata. Time for activity aggregators to support SIOC and you will be able to see what kind of places your friends are interested in.
P.S. The SIOC standard good some good adoption in the last time.
The Lean Startup is a vision for how startups could be built differently. Instead of focusing on hype and mega-growth, we can focus on building companies that serve customers in a fundamental way. That’s what matters.
It’s so easy to get attracted by all the hype surrounding a few internet startups but in the end what matters is customer satisfaction and a stable revenue stream to support the growth of the company and the birth of new exciting ideas fulfilling the global vision. Tagcrumbs is on a good way to make these things right.
Bud Caddell is making a good point that digital media is very different, rethink what you learned from TV, radio or print. Digital media is interactive and can be much more engaging. Check out the following slides and his blog.
Web services, also known as APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), are components used access to your data and services. Mashery provides a Software as a Service (SaaS) infrastructure for supporting a company’s API through management, monitoring, access control, and monetization. We provide all of the infrastructure you need to help your company control who has programmatic access to you data, and to put a business model in place that supports your revenue goals.
By publishing your API, you give potential and existing partners the ability to create applications that use your data and engage customers in new ways. There is no one way to use an API to gain business advantage.
[Source: http://www.mashery.com/solution/]
For many technology startups I would not consider using Mashery because most APIs are too domain specific, quickly evolving and you want to keep full control on the schema and don’t be forced to map it to their system in any way.
P.S. For a study paper I wrote about domain-specific web service brokers and recognized that they provide good business opportunities these days. Along the lines, there are more and more services sitting on top of the Amazon Web Services platform providing additional management and administration functionalities.
An exceptional short movie by filmmaker Bruce Branit. In this movie the physical and virtual space merge into each other, a powerful concept to express ideas, visions and dreams.
World Builder: “A strange man builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves.”
From the Centralway website, an investment company focusing on Internet businesses.
Centralway participates in companies based on the following investment criteria:
… companies in the Internet sector
… with clear, short, simple business models
… which already have a management team
… which already hold a top position (1st or 2nd place)
… with a positive cash flow
… with clearly recognizable growth and profit potentials
… which already have a “proof of concept”
… which are not in a “turn-around” situation
… in which no other strategic investors or financial institutions hold shares
5 contradicts 7 in my opinion, having a positive cash flow with a proof of concept? Early stage investment or not? It goes along the lines of venture capital companies becoming more conservative and move away from the inital idea of taking more risk to support innovations. Business angels are much more interesting for internet startups these days.
Centralway recently set up a 10 million iPhone fund, worth reading about.
* Fly over the planet and discover other people secrets
* Touch the globe to reveal the secrets (or simply press the “next” button)
* Post your secrets (in the most anonymous way)
* Hug people to express your compassion and sympathy
* See how many people have read your secret and how many times you have been hugged
* Keep track of the most beautiful and touching secrets in the ‘my hugs’ section
* Discover wonderful earth animations
* Browse the top 10 secret
Millions of sensors are currently been deployed in sensor networks around the globe and are actively collecting an enormous amount of data. Together with legacy data sources, specialized software modules (e.g., modules performing mathematical modeling and simulation) and current Web 2.0 technologies such as mashups, deployed sensor networks give us the opportunity to develop unique applications in a variety of sectors (environment, agriculture, health, transportation, surveillance, public security etc.). The terms Sensor Internet, Sensor Web and Sensor Grid have recently been used to refer to the combination of sensor networks and other technologies (Web, service-oriented, Grid and database) with the view of addressing this opportunity.
No comments required, it’s beta, it’s innovative and it has the best name ever.
YouNoodle is a well-funded San Francisco startup developing technology for entrepreneurs, investors and innovation groups.
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If you’re into being challenged, have what it takes to succeed, and want to be part of the next disruptive technology company, come join us!
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YouNoodle is located in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco, CA, and is backed by some of the most prominent investors and advisors in the world, including Peter Thiel, The Founders Fund, Max Levchin and several other angel investors.
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We’re a small, dedicated and international team of athletes, academics, inventors and entrepreneurs.
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The term ‘younoodle’ was the fourth most-searched term on the Internet on the day of our public launch.
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The site is growing fast and we need superstars to help achieve our goals.
It’s easy to get caught up in the heady buzz of making money. You should regard money as fuel for what you really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself. Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road — but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations!
“If we can imagine it, there’s a good chance it can be programmed,” wrote Vint Cerf
“Whatever a Web page can do, so can a pair of shoes,” says rafi Haladjian, the visionary co-founder of Violet.
“The Internet of Things begins with small things,” advances Violet’s Haladjian, “things that are fun, simple, accessible, and that people want to have at home because they are just as fun as they are practical.”
“For example, online versions of print magazines on newsstands could be called up for browsing, the legend for an artwork in a museum could give background and context, a poster for a concert could link to online ticket sales, a tactical interface could give oral directions to a blind person, an entire city could be tagged for an animated guided tour.”
Why do I blog this? With the Tagcrumbs iPhone application in the pipe many questions arise on how we can extend our web application to mobile devices. Mobile is something completely different and we want to ignore the web UI for now, time to think about touch interfaces, limited screen sizes, more disruptive usage environments or short attention periods… The video above is great to get an understanding of touch interfaces from a product developer’s perspective.
“The major issues of the future have to be tackled in cities: environment, security and well-being. To meet these needs, sensors and actuators will thrive preferably there thanks to economies of scale. This will take the form of mapping the physical space into the Internet by allowing the public to interact, locally or remotely, with the physical environment through the Internet via the use of mobile devices.” Roadmap Smart Places
“The essential process in webizing is to take a system which is designed as a closed world, and then ask what happens when it is considered as part of an open world. Practically, this effect on a computer language is to replace the names/tokens/identifiers for URIs. Thus, where before reference could only be made to something in the same document/program/module one can with equal ease make reference to something in a different one somewhere in that abstract space which is the Web.”
“Flickr, the photo sharing site, now boasts more than 33 million users, more than 3 billion images, and was handling 3,087(!) new uploads per minute last time we checked.“
“Wikipedia has 8,687,877 registered users, 144,788 of whom have been actively involved in the last 30 days. It offers 15,741,616 info pages.“
“13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, while 1 billion videos are watched. A day. And that was LAST year.“
“And don’t get us started on the millions of blogs (sharing insights and thoughts), or on reviews (Tripadvisor.com alone hosts 20,000,000 hotel reviews)”
Great article “Social Web is the New Discovery Engine” by Ilya on the Postrank blog, a must read to understand the dimensions of social media and its changing impact on society. As a quick teaser the comparison of social media contributions versus one traditional media company, Thomson Reuters.
Relevancy for my thesis:
A large amount of these social media contributions contain location information which is often already given in a machine-readable format or can be extracted through keyword matching, for example. Can these information be used to describe geospatial activites like earthquakes or plane crahses?
“No one in the room knew a plane had crashed. The next day, Stone would tell me that the site didn’t even get a traffic spike. “That’s only for huge shared experiences, like the inauguration, or Mumbai.” Twitter had unleashed something … and its executives were completely unaware, as its system worked on its own, without them. That might be what the future holds for Twitter. Or it might not be.“
“In Spain, examples of these kind of businesses include Meneame and Panoramio, now part of Google Earth. In the U.S., recent examples are Digg, Friendfeed and Techmeme. Actually some of the world’s most successful technology companies were started without any early stage venture funding, including the likes of Microsoft, Dell, Cisco, Oracle and eBay.”
“With little money to run on you’ll need to solve problems and inefficiencies as they appear and this will build a valuable frugality and efficiency culture into your company.”
“All these trends push towards a world in which VCs could lose much of their relevance, at least for what concerns early stage financing of Internet and software start-ups. These startups will require little or no money to start, capital that can be provided by “friends and family”. Angel investors can get in later to help grow the business, and funding from VCs, if ever needed, will help scaling the operation at a later stage.”
This article can somewhat be seen as guideline or description of what we followed at Tagcrumbs, founding team 2 developers one business person, Amazon Web Services (virtual Internet company), Open Source (Rails, PostgreSQL, PostGIS,…), external APIs, product first, internationalization,… Bootstrapping for the sake of having more time without external pressure and trying to focus on the perfect placemarking experience, especially in a mobile context.
On Thursday evening I attended the Twestival in Galway, a real-life meet-up of Twitter users. The Twestival happened in over 150 cities worldwide and is a great sign that Twitter as a company managed to built an active enthusiastic community despite haveing scalability, security or spam problems or thousands of critics.
The reason for this post was the surprising moment when I received the following message: “reyes: I’m on the BBC reading out a tweet by @rabschi using @dabr on my e71 – my voice sounds soo nasally, also in shot at 2m15s http://is.gd/jqUL”
So, these are @rabschi‘s and @terraces‘s 3 seconds of fame. Now being a social media expert I have to figure out how to use our Tagcrumbs Twitter account in much cooler ways, any ideas?
The tweet that has been featured: “@terraces On my way to #twestival galway, arrive exactly at 9:20pm, #guinness order #guinness on table“
In an upcoming series of blog posts I will write about geospatial web content, location-based services and the Geo / Geospatial Semantic Web. The focus will always be on the location aspect of web content but why is location something special?
Usage: location as enabler, location as requirement, location as support mechanism
Perspective: real-time user location, friends nearby, setting location on demand
There are many sides to consider when thinking abaout location data and how it can be used in new and better intgrated ways.
Relevance for my thesis:
There is a large amount of geo-referenced user-generated content available in the Websphere, distributed over dozens or hundred of service providers. This aggregated data provides detailed contextual information for events, news, places or businesses. Semantically linking this user-generated contextual information to activities from sensors and sensor networks, e.g. seeismic wave notifications from earthquake detection system, can help to bridge the two worlds of the social and the sensor web.
Relevance for Tagcrumbs:
Every placemark in Tagcrumbs has a GPS coordinate attached to it, this location annotation provides the foundation to show placemarks, photos or wikipedia articles nearby, the distance to your current location or the visualization via KML or GeoRSS on maps. In the backend there is a PostgreSQL/PostGIS relational database optimized for geospatial queries (e.g. distance queries). Location matters!
Attribution: Screenshot provided under CC by Locify on Flickr.
Wow, it’s finally done. We just opened Tagcrumbs to the public. After some amazing month of product development and talking about business it was time to expose Tagcrumbs to the world. We are really excited to see all the different usage scenarios and how YOU can get the most out of it. We will listen to your feedback and continuously improve the service.
First you should take the tour, use our new pretty front page as a starting point and take a look at my placemarks as an example.
Locative dynamics, locative media and urban dynamics mashed up. Exploring heterogeneous data sources with geospatial and time-sensitive information will be the foundation for my master thesis (German: Diplomarbeit).
The DERI is one of the world’s leading semantic technologies research institutes and its mission is “to explore semantics for people, organisations and systems to collaborate and interoperate on global scale“. With over 120 researchers working on topics from Semantic Reality, Semantic Sensor Networks, Semantic Web Services to Social Software Research.
Research focus will be obtained by picking very specific examples for semantic data integration in an urban environment. More information and entries about relevant findings will come soon.
Research Goals?Integrate, aggregate & visualize geospatial activity. As data sources user-generated content (e.g. geo-referenced photos or place-based communication) as well as sensor network data (e.g. wireless network activity or traffic data) will be considered using a semantic vocabulary to create a homogenous data layer. The novelty lies in aggregating many kinds of data sources to get a more complete picture about the main question surrounding my thesis:
What happens at a specific place at a specific time in a city? Think about conferences, large events, earthquakes, fires, long-term fluctuations,…
As an outcome I would like to see a convincing web-based prototype implementation for one specific scenario to express the urban dynamics. (maybe a conference?)
If you have any relevant research work, publications, urban studies, location-based projects or any interesting open geospatial data sources feel free to contact me or leave a comment. I am still in the period of collecting and getting the whole context.
Relation to Tagcrumbs: All research work will be public domain and Tagcrumbs is yet another data source provider for place-based annotations, although a really nice one by supporting GeoRSS with meaningful markup. The research about urban environments, places or location-based services provides a great source for new ideas and use cases for Tagcrumbs, more announcements will follow.
I am still writing about entrepreneurship and technology topics on this blog as time allows but the category ‘Locative Dynamics‘ will be the focus for the next months.
It creates an interesting perspective if you collect all relevant keywords to your research topic and visualize it. For completeness here is the list:
urban dynamics
digital footprinting
sensor networks
social networks
semantic technologies
wikicity
real-time city
urbanism
system dynamics
social
citizen journalism
citysense
sensing
citizen empowerment
citizen science
urban economics
urban efficiency
real-time systems
mobile
mobility
mobile evolution
iphone
sensor
location
location-based services
lbs
earthquake
digital cities
urbanization
spatiotemporal
geospatial
geo
events
map
mapping
neogeography
place-based conversation
places
disaster scenarios
urban informatics
data integration
semantics
web 2.0
semantic web
pervasive systems
real-time control system
real-time urban environment
semantic reality
semantic sensor networks
web services
semantic web services
dynamics
mobile 2.0
mobile internet
future
social
android
ubicomp
ubiquitous computing
senseable city lab
sensor data diffusion
data visualization
pervasiveness
web science
connectivity
API
activity vocabulary
ontology
urban planning
urban development
social media contributions
user generated content
ugc
location-sensitive
locative
wireless
emergence
geo-awareness
real-time infrastructure
place annotations
visualization
geocoding
reverse geocoding
street view
heat maps
movement
local
local business
tourism
ambient sensing
mobile web
social placemarking
ethics
geo-referencing
wireless networks
gsm
wifi
communities
georss
location-sensitive
what
where
when
gps
interfaces
tags
local authorities
broadcast
agents
city wifi networks
infotainment
entrepreneurship
public sensors
traffic
physical context
real world
mobile media
sensor revolution
participatory planning
digital traces
urban space
public space
virtual urbanism
virtual city
social dynamics
vicinity
proximity
social environment
proximity detection
device detection
event-driven
technology-driven
societal change
real-time information visualization
digital walls
social media
physical proximity
social proximity
place blogging
creative urban intervention
architecture
urban hub
locative media services
metropolitan area networks
body area networks
building information system
city life
networked city
sentinent city
social location
location-based social networking
urban professionals
urban studies
geo-notes
ad-hoc
community
networks
mobile navigation
personal navigation
context-based services
geoweb
social objects
place-based privacy
socio-locative practices
locative metadata
mobile networking
location-tracking
urban landscape
public authoring
urban tapestry
urban screens
urban interfaces
geospatial data
geospatial technology
geospatial web
remote sensing
geomatics
spatial analysis
urban area
Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows
You will have a crystal ball for your health
You will talk to the Web . . . and the Web will talk back
You will have your own digital shopping assistants
Forgetting will become a distant memory
These trends are based on IBM’s research and the impact on society.
I am sceptical that speech interfaces will become really dominant. Mobile search via speech input is already deployed by Google but as mobile phone keyboards and touch interfaces are getting better speech is just a good alternative.
The digital shopping assistant scenario is already an attractive business opportunity for new startups like Barcoo, that facilitate barcode scanning to retrieve product information and price comparison data.
The distant memory is a scary scenario in which all your activity in social networks, on the web plus the sensor data of your mobile phone (GPS) is collected. Your whole life is one data stream including all your interactions and if everything from every point in time can be accessed this would dramatically change the way we behave and live. Problematical ethical questions would arise but you don’t have to take the perspective of all of your personal data must be collected, instead consider use cases where it makes sense to collect very specific data in health scenarios (diseases) or business scenarios (workshop protocols). In more closed scenarious you have better control on privacy issues and the big brother is not watching your whole life.
We will see what happens… locative media is becoming much more influential and important, especially with the rise of ubiquitous location-based user generated content and sensor networks data.
Yet another post about the copycat attitude of Germans, this time by VentureBeat. So why not state some subjective opinions about this frequently mentioned claim…
This kind of annoys me because as an interested person in the Internet startup scene you always read that Germans are just doing copycat startups, meaning copying existing ideas from other countries and introducing it (only) to the German market, with the hope of pioneer gains. Also referred to it as the Second But Elsewhere strategy, which puts a focus on the underlying strategy instead of just saying yet another boring startup. Seems like everyone is hoping to find spontaneously a killer innovation in a startup but innovations are not a big bang process and also have to evolve and a wide distribution is what makes something to be innovative and useful.
The annoying point is, that this fact is always repeated by the media, founders or investors (customers don’t care if they get value delivered), so it is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. What is the problem with that? First, as long as you create profitable companies and customers love you application, nothing is wrong. Second, the term copying is pretty broad, identical copies, copies of features, ideas or concepts? The car was invented in Germany and I can see a lot of copycats (with close to identical products)… No one cares. If you go to a shopping mall you see various products of different manufacturers and this is how business works, there is a market with competition and you can compete over the price, the quality or the time to deliver. A normal process of idea and product dissemination with the goal to provide the best customer value, because the customer can select out of a variety of products the one that fits best. It is a consumer market where the consumers decide what the company should provide and not vice versa. There is a need for really similar applications that have something special for specific niches or geographic regions.
Ok, now we have a fast-paced Internet economy with less protectable intellectual property where it is even easier to go with a second but elsewhere strategy, so why complain? That’s just the case and the market is really big with a distribution channel like the Web. But I admit, I wish there would be more innovative and creative Internet startups in Germany with an international focus. At the point two companies compete on the same market it does not matter anymore who copied whom. There have to be more good examples of how it can be done but continuously speaking about copycats is just annoying.
To conclude, stop the copycat posts and give a more detailed analysis of Internet startups and their potential markets if you care but don’t create a general hypothesis of Germany’s copycat attitude over all industries, just tedious to read! You can call every company a copycat if you want, Google did not invent online search, YouTube not online video, Facebook/MySpace not social networking but still they did provide something new and attractive to customers.
By the way, Germany is still export champion world wide and the number of patent application in relative and absolute terms is pretty impressive. Nothing to worry about the copycat attitude or the missing technology transfer. Still, the Germans are the calm hard-working and smart persons with there strengths in the non consumer-oriented industries. Or does anyone has one of the fabulous Heidelberg Druck printing machines in their office?
The Chinese culture and economy is much more focused on developing close to identical copies but no one cares in the Internet economy because they are working behind walled gardens in their own market. If they get the chance to become more international no one will speak about the German Internet copycat attitude anymore…
P. S.
As the co-founder of Tagcrumbs I have to say it is born out of an idea where we took different concepts like user generated content, tagging, folksonomy, mapping in the GeoWeb, social media trends to create a product that we and hopefully customers like. Of course there are competitors with similar ideas, otherwise there would be no market. But Tagcrumbs distinguishes itself in many ways, not just some unimportant additional features.
The tone of this post is not as bad as it sounds, it is caused by the bad weather here in Galway, Ireland. Keep on the reporting about German startups.
The ‘Never Hide’ picture was taken by Svadilfari, thanks.
You don’t know what social placemarking is? Don’t worry, it is a pretty new trend in enabling location aware applications to become more social. Collecting places you want to remember and you want to share with your friends like a favorite bar, the perfect picture spot while traveling, the cozy internet lounge or whatever place comes to your mind. I already wrote that I co-founded Tagcrumbs, a social placemarking startup, and we are making good progress. Current to does are finishing design work, amazon web services setup, first beta tests and some bug fixes to create a smooth user experience. We can’t wait to switch from test to production and the day is coming closer…
If you are having any questions, just ask me or write a comment.
The good thing today, if you have a broadband internet connection you can gain access to the worlds best information. Especially in computer science a vast of world class content is provided for free, accessible online.
If you don’t know the MIT / Stanford Venture Lab you should sign up for a free account and then active a free Standard Membership. You will get dozens of high class videos about important entrepreneurial topics and trends. For example:
I already wrote in my last posts that I am working on a startup project. Over the last months we developed silently a big part of the application and set up Tagcrumbs Limited. I co-founded the company with Sascha (IT) and Ben (Business). A cool team with all core competencies on board so we can exactly design and build the product we love and that is framed in our minds. So far working on this project was fun and I am looking forward to the next months.
From now on you can read more about Tagcrumbs, the startup experience or our mobile lifestyle under blog.tagcrumbs.com. Feel free to contact us if there are any questions related to Tagcrumbs.
With the announcement of the iPhone everyone was happy to have a large screen (480×320 Pixels) that makes it possible to easily access and use mobile applications and web sites. Thus, the iPhone brought mobile applications to the main stream and more and more application developers are recognizing the potential of the mobile web and change their focus from web to mobile.
Extending your web applications to become mobile aware can be done in several ways. Adapting your design or stylesheets to become better accessible with mobile browsers like Opera Mini or Safari is one way. Completely restructuring your content and creating a separate mobile web application or a native mobile application another way. The latter provides the advantages of a better support for the target platform and its characteristics. For example, it is now easier to access standard web pages with your iPhone but for a better ease of use and usability a reorganization of content elements is necessary because the screen size limitations are inherited in the mobile world and require adaptions. To conclude, developing separate mobile applications should be the preferred way, although a lot more effort is required for the implementation.
Going through the iPhone app store I recognized that there are no standard ways of designing an application. Presenting a consistent feeling like in the desktop world is hardly achievable. To get some impressions I created some iPhone application screenshots that show a variety of possibilities to present your web application on the iPhone.
What are the best practices for iPhone applications?
Present your logo at the top of the application on every screen?
A search icon at the top right next to the logo? A search bar at the top in the standard Apple style?
Main navigation at the bottom with text and icon?
Content items in a vertical list form with arrows at the right pointing to more details?
A horizontal simplified navigation?
Wisely chosen default values and an advanced settings section to make adjustments?
Using standard iPhone design elements? E. g. iUI tries to simulate it.
Simplified content elements, one column, avoid scrolling?
Avoid borders surrounding content?
Content overlays for full screen maps?
Sign in, log in, log out, profile links at the top right?
Of course, all web applications are different and mobile applications can be different too but facilitating standard methods of designing an application and using typical layouts can provide a consistent feeling between applications on the target platform. This makes your users happier, too.
Integrating a nice-looking map in your web application is a painless task with the help of powerful APIs like the Google Maps API. Within minutes you can present your geospatial information on an interactive web map and everything should be fine but let’s dig a little bit deeper in this issue to find the best practices and to avoid some obvious mistakes.
I created a set on Flickr with over 50 screenshots of web maps to provide a quick overview of ways to integrate them in your application.
If you have to handle spatial data, first, you should ask yourself the following questions (Source: M. Hockenburry).
Who is the user?
What is the task?
What technologies are appropriate and why?
What is the role of spatial information and location?
How do we represent that information and why is that representation effective?
There is no universal solution to present spatial information and the goal is to find the best suited for your application’s needs. Let’s do a classification to distinguish the different integration methods.
Static vs. Interactive
A static map does not provide any kind of interactivity (e.g. moving around, clickable interface or mouse wheel support). By clicking on a static map, a full-screen interactive map can be presented for advanced features.
Content
Is a plain map view without additional information sufficient? Does it makes sense to use a single marker or multiple markers to show data on top of the base map?
Distribution
If multiple data items are shown, how is their distribution? Is it even or are there hot spots with many items on the same place and thus a clustering is required? E. g., maps can get messy and unusable if dozens of geotagged photos refer to the same place.
Screen size (full screen vs. partial)
A map can be shown in a full screen mode or as a small additional page element in a sidebar or within the main content area.
Fixed width / flexible width
Is the map resizable and adaptive regarding different browser screen sizes?
Content overlay
Is content presented dynamically as an overlay on top of the map or in an area next to it?
Controls
Is it necessary to provide controls for different layers or zoom options? For example, offering a satellite, a hybrid, a street and a terrain view.
Consistency
Do all the maps behave in the same way? For example, zooming can be done with the mouse wheel on every map.
Technology
What kind of technology is used? A static image, a JavaScript-powered map or a Flash map?
In my opinion it is often the best way to show a static fixed-width map in a sidebar that can be used as an entrance point for a bigger (full screen) map that is interactive, provides many controls and eventually content overlays. A static image of a map is good to quickly highlight the geospatial nature of the information while a large map can deliver the full power of web mapping, enabling to aggregate, search and filter geo data.
If you want to learn more about spatial applications, check out the excellent course notes “Design of Spatial Applications” provided by Mathew Hockenberry of the MIT Media Laboratory. He makes aware of the fact, that it is not always the best idea to present geospatial information on a map. Often it is clearer for a user and better to understand if a textual representation is used.
Ok, finally I spent a full day on developing an own WordPress theme for my blog and did everything I always wanted my blog to be able to. It should already be the third bigger iteration while blogging. The reasons have been the following.
Old Posts Without Future
I recognized that old posts not facing the front page anymore disappeared and got no more interest. So the new site cares a lot about older posts. I used the Related Posts plugin to refer to posts with similar tags, cleaned up the navigation, so the archive and the categories are more visible and easier to access. There is now one sidebar just showing links to find other posts of your interest, through search, categories, tags or by the rating of AideRSS.
The home page is now like a portal where you can explore stuff. Only on this page you see the widget sidebar and the footer with the recent posts, comments and recent twitter messages.
Content is King
It was not just supposed to be a redesign, it was clear to have the goal to write better and more interesting posts. Shorter with more unique aspects and better use of lists and font styles. I reduced the amount of categories to focus on the things everyone expects, entrepreneurship and technology and one catch the rest category miscellaneous. Good content will arise out of the fact that our mobile startup involves doing a lot of research about various topics and along the way our experiences and failures should be in the interest for other entrepreneurs. This blog should now exactly support this goal. A regular schedule is also planned from today on!
Widget Clutter
Widgets are nice but if the sidebar is longer than 5 full blog posts something is wrong. I decided to use one widget sidebar just on the front page at the right. So all content pages are freed of flashing Twitter messages and disturbing click-me-now buttons. I added the MyBlogLog widget to see who is visiting my page, an interesting concept and I will check it out for some months.
Search Engine Optimization
One of the biggest problems I recognized was the fact that I never cared about search engine optimization. A big mistake because thinking about SEO improves also your site concept and the way you write you blog posts which at the end should increase your search traffic. The All in one SEO-Pack Plugin is great and is super simple to install and use. From now on page titles are SEO-friendly and many optimizations are done under the hood to make Google & Co more likely to give higher rankings (e.g. care about double content).
Check also out the definitive guide for WordPress SEO. The new single post pages have no surrounding clutter like the widget sidebar or the Twitter messages, so the keyword density is a lot higher and the ranking should improve. The URLs are also more SEO-friendly. Instead of including a date scheme, the format %category%/%postname% is used.
A Design Supporting the Content
My old wordpress theme was a typical big header two-column design. Nothing really exciting and the blue colors got more and more disturbing. The new design focuses on simplicity, the content is king. The post titles and the context of each post are now easier to recognize, achieved by improving the title area of a single post. You directly see the date, the category the post belongs to and the tags.
Tagging the World
On my old blog tagging was not really used. I assigned them but you could only see them after the content of a single blog post. Now you can see them directly under the title for each post and a tag cloud shows the most important tags in the sidebar. Related posts are also recognized by the used tags. Tagging brings semantic to posts that you should facilitate.
Personality
Blogging is presenting an own perspective on various topics, so it is an individual thing. I totally redesigned the header area to be more unique and easier to recognize. The inperspektive logo is now part of the new branding and it sets the main colors and supports the name of the blog. www.inperspektive.com is the new main address, without a subfolder /blog or different domain names. Next to the logo there is a simple navigation presented as a sentence. The blog has no complex structure and sub pages, it is all about the individual posts. Still, I needed to refer to the About and the Resources page and wanted to express the importance of subscribing to this blog.
What do you think? More content will follow in the next weeks.
“You know the world is going crazy, when the best rapper is white, the best golfer is black, France is accusing the US of arrogance and Germany does not want to go to war.” [Anonymous Internet joke]
Today I heard an exciting farewell talk of a professor for international management about China in the 21st century. This statement was on one of his last slides. It should make you aware of the fact that stereotypical thinking is often misleading. There are always perfect exceptions and different perspectives, so start thinking outside the box and challenge established conventions.
Another finding: “Thinking outside the box requires different attributes that include:
Willingness to take new perspectives to day-to-day work.
Openness to do different things and to do things differently.
Focusing on the value of finding new ideas and acting on them.
Striving to create value in new ways.
Listening to others.
Supporting and respecting others when they come up with new ideas.”
If you want to develop a successful product or application, you have to truly understand the target market, the demands of the users, the opinions of the thought leaders, the market trends and opportunities and the whole ecosystem that surrounds you. This is a hard tasks because there is a wealth of information but a lack of attention. Always getting distracted by the stream of information from various sources is a really tough problem and makes you unproductive.
I won’t present any solutions to this problem but invite everyone who is interested in the mobile space, mobile technologies & applications and mobile entrepreneurship to join a group chat our team just initiated. The Mobile Chat, see below. It is meant as a place for short qualitative announcement messages and a place for interesting discussions with the focus on mobile, the market of the future. It is open to everyone and feel free to participate and add some value.
I just compiled a quick and dirty collection of my favorite podcasts. Topics range from entrepreneurship to technology, lifestyle, traveling, Ruby on Rails and many more.
Any excellent podcasts to add? I’m especially interested in the entrepreneurship ones and podcasts about mobile application development or anything targeting the mobile market.
After listening to a great podcast with Martin Eberhard of Tesla Motors Inc. from the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture, I thought more about the statement “Build your company while building your product.” He mentioned it twice and really pronounced its importance. It is a really helpful advice, especially for young entrepreneurs working on their first startup.
You and your co-founders had an interesting idea and developed a full-fledged concept around it. You know how to market it, how to generate revenues, how to get investments for the product development, how to convince your customers and how to optimize the many little details. Everything fine by default? It is normal to focus only on the product because this is what you sell and what makes you stand out but let’s consider the basic needs for a sustainable company.
What about the company that stands behind the product? How fast can you scale up? Integrate new team members? Coordinate work with freelancers or external agencies? How complicated is it for you to change the roadmap and diversify your product which is often necessary if your competitors launch 3 months ahead of you with a very similar product? Is the organization of your team a big mess or does everyone know what his or her duties are and where help is demanded? Do you spend a lot of time figuring out the next steps on the roadmap or discussing too many things without making progress? Communication is king but the corporate meeting culture is counter-productive. Everyone has a feeling if something works well or not, and every startup means working with many persons from various fields. Think about effectiveness, doing the right things, versus efficiency, doing things right. Optimizing processes that are wrong from minute one is useless.
A lot of these points can be improved with a well thought-out company structure and organization that suits YOUR needs. Let’s consider some points our early stage startup focused on. To make it clear in advance, this does not mean we spent too many hours on improving our organization and have no time to build a sweet product. After discussing the pro and contra of many applications and tools in the first days we found out that it is already better than in many other projects. We are a distributed team of three persons but have to work together with a designer and additional developers in the next months. Especially for virtual teams it is important to have a good organization and a communication. Nothing worse than seeing no progress in a project.
Our Tools:
Twiki. An open-source wiki that is very powerful and used in many fairly big enterprises. You can create spaces and assign permissions in a very flexible way. We have a main page with the sections business, organization, product development and it/technology. You have to regularly rethink the structure because it is evolving with the company. The e-mail notification and the powerful plugin system are other big advantages of twiki. It is also feasible to create a nice competitors matrix, in case you have some.
Redmine. A flexible project management software that integrates with our source code repository. You can create tickets to define the development roadmap, assign tasks for the business stuff and track the time you spent on all these issues. Redmine supports subprojects, a calendar, gant charts and offers an activity stream to track what is happening. The interface is simple to use and very clear. You have to do some customizations with regards to the categories and projects. We disabled the wiki, the forum and the blog.
Google Calendar. A shared calendar for the team to show everyone what is happening and to make appointments. It has a nice, fast and intuitive interface.
Campfire. A group chat that also allows you to upload files for discussion. No one is missing important points that are discussed between team members.
Skype. Free VoIP conferencing. A weekly telephone conference with an agenda set up in the wiki can make the organization structured and convenient.
Git. A version control system for our source code files. Excellent for distributed software development in teams. Integrates well with Redmine where you can take a look at the repository from the web interface.
Google Notebook. Hmm, not really. It is fast to collect a lot of links and categorize them but to stay up-to-date, some notification system is missing.
By the way, they are all free to use. Campfire is just free in the basic version which is fine for now. For us, nearly all the information that belongs to the project is documented in any way
Any further recommendations or tips? Which tools do you use in your startup?
P.S.
The blog post is also part of our think about your internal organization & processes time.
At the Everything A Startup Needs blog (German) they are asking for tips you can give aspiring entrepreneurs.
The typical answers you here most often:
You need a great team,
a concept that is demanded by the markets,
you should solve a problem,
ask for early stage opinions of customers,
know your competitors and their next moves,
be motivated and focused,
you need endurance and passion,
don’t forget to network and communicate your idea,
try to gather as much feedback as possible and listen to it,
only hire skilled and productive team members,
be conservative with your financial expenditures and of course
just do it. If you do nothing, nothing happens!
With hard work it is easier to find the right time, the right place, the right product and the ability to meet the right market demands.
True, that’s all right but still leaves you somehow unsatisfied. There are no “If you do exactly this right, you will have success!”-factors. It is most often the context in which you live that coins your ideas, you business opportunities, your professional networks and your growth potential. Thus, I want to add one point I consider important to become motivated to found your own company. Let’s take a look at the entrepreneurial context. What does it mean and how is it characterized?
With the word context I refer to your environment, your surroundings, your networks and contacts, the support you get and everything that directly influences your ideas & decisions. Everyone is dreaming of having the one great idea that will automatically lead to a successful million dollar business. It is not unlikely that many people have great ideas but they never execute them.
Let’s consider four diverse examples of successful contexts:
Silicon Valley: The Silicon Valley is a hot-spot for the IT industry. Companies like Google, Apple or Yahoo dominate in many ways and are leaders not followers. The startup scene is big and attracts highly-skilled persons from all over the world who are looking for the next big thing. The tech affinity, the willingness to take risks, the entrepreneurship talent, the most influential investment companies and the increased competition creates a flourishing entrepreneurial environment with a tremendous outcome.
Elite Business Schools and Universities: The influence of Stanford University students and alumni on the Silicon Valley is big. Their entrepreneurship education is one of the best in the world and it shows results. Many successful companies are grown out of this school. Same for Harvard or the MIT. The WHU Vallendar or the HHL Leipzig, two high-class German business schools are also fostering entrepreneurship talent. Take a look at the highly-successful companies like Spreadshirt or Jamba, for example. These schools with very talented students are coined by a very competitive environment but also by very valuable business networks you will get access to. You are never on your own if you try to build the next big thing and if you are looking for support while pursuing your idea.
Sports: Ever wondered why there are mainly runners from Kenya in long-distance runs, or why the Scandinavian countries are always the best in cross-country skiing competitions, or Germany has often places one to three in bob races? Their trainings are most often coined by high competition which will lead to very successful outcomes. It is like the system archetype success to the successful. Everyone wants to be the best, and if you train with the best you will reinforce your ambitions to become better.
Hidden Champions: “Little known European companies conquering the world.” Hidden Champions are very successful companies that are number 1, 2 or 3 in the world or number one in Europe in their market. They have less than 3 billion dollar in revenues. These companies have very ambitious goals (strong growth strategy) and try to dominate their markets to be the best. They are often unknown to the public (e.g. Enercon, Britta, Brainlab) but another interesting fact is that it often occurs that two direct global competitors for one very specific market are having their headquarter in the same small city. Würth and Berner (both mounting and compound material) in Künzelsau, for example. There is a head-on competition going on between these companies that makes them succeed both. See the Escalation system archetype for clarification.
To conclude, are you living in a context that drives you to build the bakery chain instead of just one local bakery? Or, to go for investments to ramp up your business more quickly? Or, where you feel the (healthy) pressure to be better than your competition and to succeed? Here are some points that could help you finding the right context, the important motivation and the perception of competition.
Join entrepreneur or business networks or student entrepreneurship initiatives.
Go to entrepreneurship events, business plan competitions, presentations of founders or StartupCamps
Do brainstorming sessions with your friends and discuss opportunities.
Networking can be very valuable over time. Join alumni networks of your school or university.
Read books and articles about entrepreneurs you admire most or who provide the most interesting (often radical) perspectives.
Read founder / start-up blogs or follow their Twitter messages.
There are many websites with high quality entrepreneurship videos and podcasts that give you the right insights.
So, hopefully I made my point and you will think differently about your context & perspective and how it influences you and your ambitions.
“It’s a big, fun game we’re all in here–nothing more. Don’t take it so serious… play hard and enjoy it!”Jason Calacanis, successful entrepreneur and founder of Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo.com.
What is Twitter? Depending on your Internet affinity and your attitude towards new promising web services you may or may not have heard about it. Twitter is a micro blogging service that allows you to write mini blog posts up to a length of 140 characters. So it is very similar to an SMS but every post is publicly viewable unless you decide to protect your Twitter message feed. Why does it make sense to limit the number of characters if regular blogs posts or e-mails are not limited and thus should provide more flexibility and usefulness? That’s exactly the point with micro blogging, this artificial boundary changes and effects your style of communication. You have to try it on your own to experience this service and its provided value. On their website you can request to follow other Twitter users and you will see a list of persons following you.
Communication Patterns
Twitter messages can be informative “XYZ just happened”, entertaining “My cat just…” or totally useless “plus one #coffee”, to name some examples. It’s the same as for every other method of communication. It is not forced to be just informative or just about writing the most funny statement this day. Often you see posted questions from people looking for answers within their friend network. Everyone is listening to recommendations, reviews or general hints, so this is a highly valuable use case.
Writing direct private messages is allowed but it is common to use public replies to establish an open conversation, so everyone willing can follow it. That’s why you always see the @nickname syntax in your friend feed. This new openness makes Twitter very unique. The conversations are also a lot faster than regular blog entries and their comment system and thus the service has its right to exist next to all popular blogging platforms. It is just different.
You can try to use it as an replacement for an instant messenger or use it like a chat room but then the number of messages is getting to high and you will lose followers. Twitter is just an interesting mix of different communication tools.
Presence Feed
Twitter is an excellent service to publish information in a very frequent manner. You just need an Internet-connected mobile device and one out of several mobile Twitter clients and you can send information about your current location or your status whenever and wherever you want. This is a process that can be done within a minute and it is faster and easier than writing an e-mail. But you have to decide on your own if you want this openness in your life and what the advantages and disadvantages of this behavior are. A fully traceable life is not in every persons interest although it is getting more and more common.
Twitter is a location-based service in a sense that you can always mention your current location and anyone of your followers can react on this specific information and send you something that fits your context.
Network effects
Twitter was already founded in 2006 and grew steadily from this time on. It will reach the 1 million user base this year. The first time I tried it in June 2007. It did not convince me because no conversation took place and I did not know anyone. Luckily this situation changed and at one point you just recognize how many web worker around you are using it. Twitter relies on direct network effects and the more people use this application the more interesting it gets for everyone. At the LIFT conference dozens of attendees wrote Twitter messages during a talk so you could get immediate feedback of something going on at the same moment. It supported an active discussion and the sharing of ideas which can be very valuable. Of course this is not always wanted and necessary but in some scenarios this is a great method of interaction, e. g. interactive e-Learning.
Advice for beginners, if you don’t know any of your friends using Twitter look for people you know from you favorite blogs, podcasts or news sites. Twitterholic has a list of the most popular Twitter users, definitely a great starting point.
Productivity & Manageability
The risk and the fun with Twitter is that you can get addicted and that you spend many hours on reading these short messages and following its interesting links. There is the danger to become unproductive if it is too disrupting and thus you should avoid instantaneous alerts and notifications when using a Twitter desktop client.
Another problem, if the list of the people you are following becomes to large you cannot track it anymore because you will receive every minute a message and the noise is destroying the Twitter experience. Many people are already overstrained with their daily e-mails so hundreds of additional short messages are not in their interest. This is a general and not an application specific problem and you have to be your own regulator. Maybe just read the direct replies or the messages pointed to you and use Twitter search engines to figure out the latest hot topics.
One interesting question arising from these considerations: Is it enough to rely on Twitter or the Facebook news feed as your daily information source? Is it OK to ignore news sites because if something really important happens someone will mention it on one of these personal channels?
Openness & Mash-ups
Twitter provides a good APIs to remix its content and to access all the personal information and especially the messaging system. Thus it became one of the most popular applications for third-party developers to extend and evolve. It is a good example how openness can create a lot of publicity and attract many more users because of interesting third-party applications.
Maybe you are interested to use the Twitter hashtag syntax (#a_tag) in your messages. This allows services like #Hashtags to display realtime usage of tags in Twitter messages. Definitely interesting to recognize what is hot at the moment.
Strawpoll is asking one question a day and you can influence the result and vote via a Twitter message. Twittervision shows the latest messages on a map. Twitterbuzz figures out the most popular links sent. Maybe you should check out this list with 50 Twitter mash-ups.
I am synchronizing my Facebook status with my Twitter messages, although it is not ideal it is a good example of interconnected web applications and how open APIs allow interactions between them. Despite that there are dozens of Twitter clients for every major operating system and widgets you can integrate on your website.
Read more about Twitter and interesting mash-ups on their official blog. You can also check out my Twitter feed and try to
engage me into a debate…
Happy twittering everyone.
P.S.
Twitter is also used by companies as another marketing channel or for press or news announcements.
P.P.S.
Revenue model? Money follows the users and thus their goal is to increase the user base to become valuable as a company. Welcome to the Internet economy.
Published by cornelius on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 in Technology.
Tags: geneva, lift08
OK, already some days ago but it was good to keep some distance on all these manifold impressions of the LIFT conference 2008 in Geneva, Switzerland. I attended the event as part of the 20 international students sponsored by the Gebert Rüf Stiftung. LIFT is about the opportunities and challenges of technology on our society. It is one of the major web conferences in Europe and thus characterized by great speakers and very interested attendees. From designers, entrepreneurs, developers, sociologists, freelancers, professors to students every group was represented. I liked the variety and the mix of so many different and often opposing ideas. It is a place where you gather impressions.
The conference had only one single track with very diverse sessions. Online Environments, Gaming, Sustainability, A Glimpse of Asia or User Experience to name a few. Videos of these talks are available at Nouvo.tv or at VPod.tv in full screen mode. It is great to have them freely accessible for everyone. I should also mention the great social and artistic events that accompanied the conference. But a cheese fondue with over 600 persons was definitely the highlight. At the end of such a conference you will recognize: “I got LIFTed”.
Here some more or less random links to interesting websites and blogs of speakers or attendees I met.
Nabaztag – The First Smart Wi-Fi-enabled Rabbit, developed by the French company Violet
On the luck of Seven – An open-source journey around the world documenting free culture, social innovators & global change.
Kevin Warwick – Professor of Cybernetics, The British “cyborg”
Open Innovators – A Website about Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation. By Philippe de Ridder from Belgium
Wireless North – A Canadian blog covering the mobile sector. By Thomas Purves.
Remarkk! – Mark Kuznicki, a Canadian tech blogger with a focus on creative communities
WattWatt – A community for individuals interested in electrical energy efficiency
To conclude, I totally recommend going to the LIFT conference, also because Geneva is a great place to visit and a good starting point for some traveling or skiing in Europe.
I posted a blog entry on the LIFT conference community blog. It is about the characteristics and differences of mobile and web content, if you want to separate these two. Feel free to comment on these thoughts.
The Internet and its services play a more and more important role on mobile devices and thus I am interested in mobile application development and its chances for startups. Everyone is waiting for mobile killer applications for years but we are coming closer and I expect 2009 to be an interesting mobile year.
OK, shame on me, I haven’t written a blog entry for a long time. The break started with some long days and weeks of intense studying and writing exams. Fortunately, after enjoying Christmas with my family and meeting a lot old friends from school in my hometown, I had 6 weeks to do something exciting before my next term would start. With a Delta Airlines voucher from a canceled flight in my pocket, I decided to fly back to New Jersey for 3 weeks to visit some friends from my time as an intern at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton. The friend I was staying at approached me for a startup project in the fitness and health sector while I have been at the University of Waterloo in Canada in August 2007. This is already a long time ago but we used the time to think more about it and how much sense it makes to create a web application for an area that is very competitive but also very traditional and less innovative.
Sounds all complicated and confusing? I know, but it makes the situation also very interesting and it is a good chance to develop a product I really want to use. We will continue developing a prototype and experiment a little in all directions to see how everything can get organized and managed. The next weeks will definitely be the most important for making progress and analyzing the chances for a real startup. I make the process as transparent as possible and questions are always welcome, so maybe this blog turns out to become a founder blog with some insights.
After returning from the US I attended the amazing LIFT conference in Geneva, Switzerland. It is a conference about the challenges and opportunities of technology in our society. It is one of the major European web conferences and I got one of the student tickets sponsored by the Gebert Rüf Stiftung. A big thanks for this great opportunity to attend a conference that covers such a broad range of interesting topics, from user experience to sustainability. This makes it very special and unique. There will be a recap in the next post.
My last regular term with exams will begin next week and lasts until June. Hopefully there won’t be an overlap with the European championship in soccer which takes parts in Austria and Switzerland. After that I will write a six-month lasting diploma thesis which I want to write in a foreign country.
So far my future plans and the reasons for not blogging. I will try to blog more regularly from now on and if anyone is interested in specific topics just send me an e-mail and give me some ideas and questions.
P.S. The Thinc team, the student initiative for entrepreneurship at the University of Mannheim, is organizing a business plan competition called Thinc!Cup for May 2008. It is targeted for over 20 schools and universities around Mannheim. There will also be interesting speakers this term. Just visit the Thinc homepage for more information.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of social networking site Facebook, wrote a blog post called “Thoughts on Beacon”. Beacon is the one month old highly controversial Facebook advertising platform that is developed to monetize the huge Facebook user base in better ways than before. Advertising on social networks is still a difficult topic because users are more interested in their friends updates than in any ads surrounding them. The result are very low ad click rates. Therefore it is necessary to think about new ways of advertising and how to create more targeted, highly specific ads. Behavioral advertising is the big hope and its intention is to analyze thoroughly the user behavior with the goal to predict exactly the user’s interests and intentions. Sounds scary, it is…
“About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I’d like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.” Mark Zuckerberg
What Beacon is supposed to do, is to collect user data from participating websites. This means if you go on a website that is collaborating with Facebook, it can send your personal information, like the IP, the URL you accessed, the access time, the products you have been interested in and so on, back to Facebook’s Beacon which creates very detailed user profiles. You don’t have to be logged in and you don’t have to be a Facebook user, this is how the platform is supposed to work. This gathered information is also used to send automatic updates to your friends on Facebook with the sites or products you have been interested in. By default this “Share everything” behavior was enabled but now they switched from opt-out to opt-in which is a more sensible approach.
The questions that arise:
How can you be sure that if you access a website that it won’t send personal data to other “partner” websites? From a technical standpoint this is totally transparent for the user and out of his or her control.
Is the future of advertising the collection of personal user data from a large number of websites? There will be huge centralized data repositories with the purpose of creating detailed user profiles to predict behavior.
Is it good for the user privacy, if a a social network opens up its platform? Data portability is something useful for the user but if it is too easy for third parties to get access to it, the risks will increase. Nearly all Facebook users integrate third-party applications which are provided by untrustworthy companies, private persons and insecure servers. With the Open Social widget platform this development continues and there are no standards how data privacy protection can be guaranteed.
More and more applications are connected with each other, through APIs for example, but are you always aware that you access a meta application working on top of maybe several data leaking, untrustworthy, insecure servers?
A difficult topic with no solution so far. Data privacy standards and agreements are always based on trust and often failed its purpose.
In my last post I referred to Chris Shipley, a journalist and analyst of the Demo conference. Read the About Demo page and you will recognize that this is a conference worth following, especially if you are interested in market trends and cutting-edge entrepreneurship. The special thing about Demo is that every company presenting there has not yet officially launched. So definitely the right place to follow early stage ideas and concepts.
“For an early look at emerging technologies, the Demo conferences can’t be beat. Attended by corporate execs, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other tech junkies, the semiannual events feature demonstrations of dozens of new products, none of which has previously been shown publicly. Unlike other trade shows that allow any company that can afford it to exhibit, each product at the Demo conferences is handpicked by executive producer Chris Shipley, a discerning journalist and analyst who has covered the industry for more than 20 years.” Mary Kathleen Flynn “The Woman Behind the Curtain,” The Deal, October 27, 2006
Check out their informative website. They offer a video archive of Demo conference videos, a 6 minutes podcast series with former participants and a blog worth following.
I just read a brilliant post by Chris Shipley, a journalist and author for the prestigious Demo conference, with the title “Distribution Trumps Aggregation“. It is a must read because it really gets the point what is going on on the Web.
“That game is going to change. The laws of large numbers will still apply: the more folks exposed to your service or product, the better the opportunity to monetize your business. But bringing people to a single Web site will become a smaller part of the equation. The winners in the big audience sweepstakes will be the sites that distribute their products and services across the Internet. Instead of aggregating audience to one Web site, successful Web-businesses will distribute a Web service out to audiences who gather on other Web sites.” by Chris Shipley
If you develop your product or service you have to think about widgets, APIs, web services, feeds, third-party integration, collaboration, coopetition and every opportunity to distribute your services. To reach customers you have to face them where they are and nowadays more and more time is spend on social networks like Facebook or MySpace. Obvious consequence, OpenSocial and the Facebook Developer Platform are becoming more and more important.
I am planning other posts on APML, the attention profile markup language, and the more and more common lifestream feeds. Everything points to a direction where ubiquitous connectivity of services is targeted and a website is not a silo anymore. Exciting times.
Peter Merholz gave an exciting talk about product experience called “Experience is the Product“. He is president of Adpative Path, one of the leading consulting companies when it comes to product experience strategy and design. Why is the experience of a product so important? Why not focus on the technology and many features? The answer is simple, because customers just want and demand it. Who cares about unimportant feature XYZ of a product if it is instead good looking, easy to use and simply attractive or cool. If you can create a product that customers are standing in a line for to buy it, then you are on the right track. Ok, this happens not very often but it gives you a metaphor.
If you develop a product you should start with a product and experience vision where you state the keys that make your product used and loved by everyone. For selecting your features think about simplicity and usability. Experiential requirements are an interesting concept to consider. Use features where appropriate, less is more in most cases. Look for the order winners (i. e. user experience) and not just the order qualifiers (many more features).
“…But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, underlying principle of the problem. And come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works.” Steve Jobs in 1984
You need examples of products with a passionated user base?
The Nintento Wii is loved by everyone and not just the typical gamers. A great success.
Steve Jobs, a forward thinker in creating cool products, knows how to design products that users love. iMac, iPod+iTunes, iPhone, iWhatever. Apple fans really love to argue that they use the best devices ever invented. It is definitely the experience and not the feature completeness.
Flickr - the community for people who love taking and sharing pictures. Many professionals upload their pictures and the quality is superb. One of the best Internet communities and the website is designed to create passion.
Car manufacturers like Porsche or Ferrari, the Swiss army knife and many more. Unfortunately there is only a minority of the companies that follow this experience principle.
At Stanford University they offer a course, Creating Engaging Facebook Apps, where students create in small teams their own Facebook applications. The goal is to recognize the underlying fundamentals of successful applications that utilize the Facebook application platform. Success is measured by the number of persons using an application, so word-of-mouth effects play an important role to reach a large user base. The key is to develop simple and interactive applications like KissMe to send virtual kisses or Dodgeball to play a virtual Dodgeball game on Facebook. Over two dozens other examples are mentioned on the course page.
But why is it necessary or useful to offer such a project at a university?
“Facebook is a Persuasive Technology”
“In 2007 the most effective persuasive technology has been Facebook. People in our lab have researched persuasive technology since 1993, and we’ve found the fastest path to insight is studying what’s working best in the real world. Today’s Facebook experience has so many elements of persuasion, so we’ve decided to dive in deep. Our goal is to understand the psychology of Facebook.” Citation from the course page.
It is definitely an interesting hands-on course that shows the entrepreneurial spirit at Stanford and the demand to really set the cornerstones for the next big things on the Internet. Setting such a focus on Facebook, a regular commercial company, goes in my opinion one step too far for a course at a university but they want to update the course to “Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook” which is a little less direct. They also have to react on the Open Social announcement and the fact that there is now another widget platform to analyze.
Definitely an interesting course that I wish I could take at my university.
A new service called Mogulus allows everyone to create their own broadcast station in a really simple and easy way. You just have to install a webcam and create a Mogulus account. They offer a simple studio interface which guides you in creating interesting broadcast channels, including the possibility to mix in existing video content. A great service that goes against the convention that broadcasting is a complex and expensive thing. It will be interesting to see how they progress and how the citizen journalism will adapt to these new methods. Definitely one step closer to media transparency and the risk that privacy concerns will increase.
They have a well-done Mogulus introduction video on their site that explains the service in an exemplary way.
Maybe in some months/years you can use their service with your mobile phone which increases mobility and makes it mass market capable.
P.S. I am writing my exams in the next three weeks, this means studying, studying, studying. This means Middleware, Internet Technologies, Web-based Information Systems, System Dynamics, Strategic Management, Outsourcing and E-Business. I will see, if this works out as planned.
The last weekend I attended the IdeaLab 2007, which is organized by students of the WHU Vallendar, one of the leading German private business schools. They invited young entrepreneurs and those interested in startups and entrepreneurship. The agenda was filled with several presentations of well-known speakers, from the venture capitalist to the successful serial entrepreneur. There were also many interesting startup presentations. I will add some links at the end of this post for those interested.
The headline of the event was “Founders wave?!” (German: Gründerwelle?!) and thus there has been a panel discussion if we have a new bubble in the Internet sector in Germany. The answer was mainly that there is no bubble but in some sectors there are too many startups jumping on exactly the same business ideas, e.g. social networks for athletes or any other niche community. The consensus was, as long as not all of these companies get high fundings there won’t be serious economical problems. Inspired by the success and the successful exits of companies like StudiVZ (the German Facebook), or Xing (a LinkedIn competitor) the Internet is still in the interest of many young tech savvy people and thus the growth in the number of startups in this sector was naturally but is nothing concerning in comparison to New Economy times. The number of newly founded companies (relative to last year) is only growing in the Internet sector in Germany, unfortunately.
Thanks to the students of the WHU Vallendar for this great event and the perfect organization and the tasty food. Some advice for the next time, maybe reduce the number of presentations and leave more space for questions and open discussions after each talk.
In the next days or better weeks I will write some more posts about this event and with a focus on more specific presentations and topics. For example, impressions about the venture capital market and the background story of StudiVZ. The founder of StudiVZ, Ehssan Dariani, gave an enjoyable presentation that is worth writing about.
I just saw on the German site DocInsider that they are having a link called “Hide the Community”. By clicking it you can hide all the user profile pictures, doctor ratings and user questions. Actually afterwards the start page is empty and it is just a search engine. What is it supposed to be? Why should you allow users to disable the core features of the application? Maybe they know that social networks and communities are getting more and more a commodity and thus it is a nice to have that belongs to every site. In my opinion this is just crazy and a bad positioning in the market. Normal users, especially in the health field, don’t want to customize their site in such a complex way.
Bye the way, there is also a DocInsider.com that offers a doctor search for the US market. Without having done some research on IP issues, I would say this is a risky thing.
My 2cents,
Cornelius.
P.S. A recap from the IdeaLab at the WHU Vallendar will follow in the next days.
The video below is just insane. It is the Diggnation Live from London! episode at the Future of Web Apps conference. Digg.com founder Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht are talking in their video cast about tech and web culture. The integration of the latest news and musings from the social bookmarking site Digg makes it an interesting format for young and tech savvy people.
I cannot imagine someone in Germany getting this popular with such a show, this is really where you see the American tech culture is way ahead of us. Kevin Rose is definitely a leader in this technology culture with a lot of influence. Created Digg and co-founded the Revision3 video platform and the Pownce micro blogging site, great work.
“Revision3 is the first media company that gets it, born from the Internet, on-demand generation. Unlike aggregators, mash-ups, and user-generated video sites, Revision3 is an actual TV network for the web, creating and producing its own original, broadcast quality shows.” from Revision3.com
Martin Oetting from trnd (the real network dialog) is asking in a blog post how his marketing and trend agency can help startups with their marketing strategy. The goal of their efforts shall be an improved, more effective and viral marketing for your own startup.
I am not sure if startups that are working on a shoestring budget, shall involve third-party marketing agencies. It always depends on the situation but let’s do a short brainstorming to give them some input.
Guy Kawasaki said during one presentation that the next slide will explain everything in marketing you ever need. It is, create a value for your customers and be unique! So this should be the marketing strategy, make clear that you provide a value and that your company or better your product is unique. If trnd can support startups with this, their service is useful.
Name instruments how to create virality and passionated users. For example, perfect industry design (Apple), addictive features (Facebook’s activity stream), news people love to speak about (newspaper reports about weddings and born babies through eHarmony or other success stories for PR), quality content (MySpace announcing new partnerships with famous bands), founder blogs that provide new perspectives,… There are many instruments and I am still looking for some frameworks that support you in creating virality.
Show and explain marketing campaigns that worked with similar products.
Find the right marketing instruments with a broad reach. You can invest your money in hundreds of different marketing instruments but which ones have been proven more successful than others. e.g. Avoid expensive TV campaigns but look for highly specific Google Adwords.
Be creative. Don’t do what everyone else is doing and avoid being a follower instead of a leader. An easy and cheap way to get some professional feedback about new creative and maybe risky marketing efforts would be helpful.
Consulting about the different marketing channels and how you can leverage them best for your startup. e.g. Facebook Social Ads, founder/company blogs, press releases, TV, radio, newspapers,…
Create and test a strategy how your product development goes hand in hand with a feature marketing, so that you produce regular attention and press releases.
What are current trends and how do they affect your startup? As a startup it is difficult to get access to expensive trend reports, help on this topic is appreciated.
Finding the connectors for your product, the persons that will spread the news out of an intrinsic motivation.
Get access to marketing research material that effects your sector. e.g. how to do technology marketing, international marketing or marketing for health related sites,…
What a great weekend, I attended the Entrepreneurs Garage (German: Unternehmerwerkstatt) which was organized by the Aachen Found.AC project team which are the members of the Aachen Entrepreneurship Team (AC.E). AC.E is a student initiative supporting entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking at the RWTH Aachen. I am member of Thinc! a similar initiative for the University of Mannheim so it was good to see what kind of events they organize to support students getting an entrepreneurial mindset. The whole theme of the event was “The Next Big Thing in the Internet”, so I could listen to many interesting and inspiring presentations.
Long story short, what are the key learnings?
It is always the best thing to speak about your interests and intentions, especially if you are starting a company and you need more feedback and ideas.
Team matters. With a motivated and passionated team you can always create a successful venture. Maybe not with the first try, but then with the second or third. Good teams can handle failures but still thrive for progress and continuation.
There are tools and instruments out there to evaluate ideas and markets. Use them to figure out the potential of your idea and your startup.
Discussion is important, the questions and answers after the presentations have been great and valuable. The interaction between the participants made the difference in comparison to regular one-way presentations.
No outsourcing of core competences. If you are an Internet startup, you are a technology company and a core competence is often the in-house development of the application. Without outsourcing or offshoring you have less dependencies and a higher flexibility.
Speed of execution matters. Do it better and faster than your competition. Don’t follow or swim with the market, lead it.
Often you must find or need the luck for the right timing of your startup. Social Networks in the year 2000? No, but portals. Pure mobile social networks in 2007? Not in Germany or the US, maybe in some years. Sometimes ideas are too early for the current markets and often just too late.
To give you an impression about the participants and the presenters, here are some links. Note: They are all in German.
A lot of diversity and inspiration and at least one more good idea for a small software development project that can be a profitable business. No big business, but good business. Maybe there will be a startup with the roots in this event. I met so many persons with whom I want to stay in contact with for many reasons, exciting times.
Thanks to the organizers for such an event and hopefully more events like this will spread over Germany.
Yesterday, Monday, November the 5th, there was the first Web Monday in Mannheim. 16 persons showed up and it was an interesting and mixed group with young and old founders, startup enthusiasts, web developers and blogger with an interest in Web and Internet trends. There were many exciting discussions about topics like finance, venture capital, marketing or music recommendation services. Here a short list of the topics with the most interest, regarding to the participant’s list. Within the parentheses the number of votes.
Social Networks (3) | Startups, Founding a company, Exit (8) | Software and Web Development, Ajax, Flash (4) | creative ideas, pitching ideas (3) | PHP (3) | Ruby on Rails (2) | Music, Music Recommendation, Social-Music-Networks (2) | Marketing (2) | Finance, Venture Capital (2) | Symfony | ORM | Security | Long-Tail Strategies | Meta communities | Mobile Education | Open Innovation | Social-Semantic-Software
So, if you are interested in these kind of topics or you want to add other interesting ones, feel free to come by the next time. We agreed that the format was well-suited, so just some small introductions of projects and afterwards open discussion about this and that. There will be a Barcamp Rhein-Neckar on November 24th/25th which will have longer presentations and parallel sessions with a clearer focus. The next Web Monday is planned for the beginning of January. To stay informed you can look at the wiki from time to time or subscribe to the BarcampMannheim Google Group.
The KISS principle. “Keep it simple, stupid.”or “Less is More” point out the importance of simplicity. Over-engineering and complexity have often no advantages and shall be avoided, especially in startups. Ignore features that are unimportant for most of your users and create a slick and simple designed interface.
The Dalai Lama once said that simplicity is the key to all happiness.
“Say No by Default”
Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, “Does it do [x]?”, “Do you plan to add [y]?”. Finally Jobs said, “Wait wait — put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don’t want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.” — by Derek Sivers “Say NO by default”, president and programmer, CD Baby
Conversation
“Feedback is a Gift.” Try to get as much feedback as you can, it will shape your product to something with higher value and makes it unique, the two ultimate goals.
“Good Science is Conversation.” This citation goes in the same direction as the one mentioned before, try to have a conversation about your startup or your product to bring up new ideas and to get valuable feedback. In science you want to create something valuable out of many ideas, so there are some parallels to entrepreneurship.
Strategy
“Think Big, Start Small and Scale Fast is a Winning Approach.” An advice by Accenture for successful E-Government initiatives, see slide 9 of the presentation eGovernment – Lessons For Leaders and Followers. Starting small is often a good idea if you want to see progress quickly but to succeed you have to scale fast and think global at one point. It is also known of the strategy of the “Small Steps”.
I think I will use this style of posting more often to keep track of smaller things that are not worth a full blog post. What do you think, interesting or not?
Last Wednesday the Swedish founder of dotCom startup letsbuyit.com, Johan Stael von Holstein, held an exciting and inspiring presentation about his life and his experiences at the University of Mannheim. This great event was organized by the entrepreneurial student initiative, Thinc!.
Many of you will still remember the many advertising spots on TV with the red ants convincing you to buy in groups with LetsBuyIt.com. The European company headquartered in London, registered in Amsterdam, failed as many others after the dotCom bubble burst, after receiving dozens of millions of venture capital and not making any profits or reaching break-even. Despite that, with the co-buying revenue model, the company was one of the more innovative ones during the New Economy times.
“We all get things cheaper when we buy in a group.”
“All together better value.”
“Together means more.”
Mr. von Holstein is still a believer in this model that buying in groups to get a better price is a valuable approach and he wondered why not more companies picked up this idea.
He is a great speaker and likes to share his knowledge to support entrepreneurship and aspiring entrepreneurs. This is also highlighted through his various investments in early stage companies and his work in the IQube incubator in Sweden. Let’s take a look at the many points he talked about:
Money is not all. He is a strong believer in entrepreneurship with all its freedom and responsibilities. Just focusing on making money makes you fail. Having owned multiple millions in stock options which have been priced by the short term thinking of stock markets and the New Economy bubble, he went through all ups and downs from a financial perspective.
Successful entrepreneurship is the 2nd best feeling in life. Love is number one. Mr. von Holstein was born in a small village and many were struggling around him and had no perspectives for their future. He was lousy in school but found his passion in skiing, what he followed professionally for 4 happy years until an accident destroyed his career. He did not know about entrepreneurship until age 26 when he went to university to study business. During this time he recognized his desire for achievement and the desire to win and to become an entrepreneur.
Work hard! Working always two hours more than everyone else makes you succeed, you don’t have to be too smart. He pointed out that the smartest will never win, but they can work for him, one of the many polarizing comments which made the presentation worth attending.
Everything works. You don’t need to have the best idea but you need the courage, the willingness and the passion to execute it.
Diversity is important. Mr. von Holstein lived in several countries for many years and always was surrounded by diversity, creativity and a multi-cultural environment. You have to be open-minded as an entrepreneur to succeed. The more diverse the team, the better.
Entrepreneurs make irrational decisions. These decisions drive innovation but also lead to many situations you are not expecting beforehand and are difficult to solve afterwards.
Nothing sells itself, ever! Thinking about the sales process, the distribution and the marketing in an early stage with a high priority is very important to create revenue. No one should ignore this fundamental business aspect.
Quality is a matter of recognition and thus over-engineering is more a burden than a success factor.
Avoid the help of VCs. They add overhead on top of the 100% work you already put into the product. Just the financial investment is highly appreciated. If you need an investment you have to reduce the risk levels.
A company needs time to grow. To be sustainable a company needs more than a couple of years to establish efficient structures and to expand. Ikea needed 40 years for its second shop, for example. The growth of letsbuyit.com was incredibly fast and led to the collapse.
Mr. von Holstein concluded with pointing out that the entrepreneur is the biggest hero in society because he or she creates jobs and supports the growth of the whole economy. A country that wants a long-term growth and a sustainable wealth has to support entrepreneurship in all areas of society.
Just a quick announcement about an upcoming event that a friend and me just initiated. On Monday, November 5th 2007, there will be a Web Monday in Mannheim.
A Web Monday is an informal participation-oriented gathering where everyone is invited. From the entrepreneur, the developer, the designer, the investor, the journalist, the business person, the researcher, until the blogger and the podcaster and everyone else who has an interest in the web and startup community. The only requirements are openness for new ideas and the willingness to learn, to participate and to share your knowledge. The idea, initiated by Tim Bonnemann to bring together various groups who have an interest in Web2.0 in the broad sense, is to create networks and to enable information exchange between Germany and the Silicon Valley.
More general information about a Web Monday on the official wiki page. To find out more detailed information for this specific event in Mannheim just go to the wiki page from the Web Monday Mannheim. If you want to participate just add your name to the wiki page, so we know how many attendees will be expected.
The first event is mainly for networking purposes and to discuss how other events like Barcamps can be initiated and how to establish a local community.
That’s what the University of Mannheim wrote in one of their announcements. Second highest information technology density after Silicon Valley? Sounds great, but I think it is less because Mannheim is so superior in the IT area but more the fact of the good location between Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Darmstadt, Heidelberg, Ludwigshafen, Karlsruhe and of course SAP headquartered close to Mannheim. Despite that, it shows that the whole region has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the Internet startup scene is underdeveloped and not very distinctive.
I could not find the original report that proves the statement above but if someone knows it, please send me the link.
Published by cornelius on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 in Entrepreneurship.
I think it is common sense that it is helpful to write down your own future goals and plans from time to time. Why that? It helps you to keep on track with the things that you value and that are important for you. Of course, setting the RIGHT goals with accuracy is hard but should be the focus. There is nothing worse than badly specified goals. A 100 days plan gives you some critical feedback about the things and events that happened in this period. Sure, if you want to use 90 days feel free to do so, but with 100 days you are crossing the border of thinking in months.
Some days ago it was time for me to review the last 100 days and set some new goals. Often you think a 100 days period it just too short and not much will happen. A lot happened in my life, mostly connected with my exchange year but despite that there is always change going on. Let’s see, today is October 8th, so what occured after June 30th 2007?
In this time I created this blog and wrote my first entry, I was still a student at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Everything was perfect and a fun time with a lot of freedom. I went to one of the most beautiful canoe tours ever, wrote my Ruby on Rails in Academia paper, saw a presentation held by Richard Stallman (founder of the Free Software Foundation), did my first steps in programming with Ruby, had one of the hardest CS assignments ever, went on holiday with my Dad and my brother to Vancouver, Banf and Jasper National Parks, met a cool guy whose startup is really exciting (we are still in contact from time to time), had some amazing farewell parties (the days afterwards have been really sad), met again my old US roommate with whom I work currently on a promising startup project, met many old school friends in my hometown I haven’t meet for a long time, attended the StartupWeekend in Hamburg, Germany and met so many young (aspiring) entrepreneurs, joined the entrepreneurial Thinc! student initiative, and after 8 weeks back in Germany I am just getting used to everything. There have also been some sad personal stories not belonging inside the blog.
That’s a long list and luckily I track from time to time the daily happenings otherwise it would be hard to remember everything. I accomplished most of the goals I set in my 100 days plan but some seem really unambitious and unimportant from today’s perspective. The whole planning and setting the right goals is a process that needs adaption. 100 days from now? January 16th 2008, exams for my courses are finished and I have a 7 weeks period where I can do whatever I want. Hopefully it works out to make some real progress with the startup and combine it with traveling. Goals set.
Short story long, I can highly recommend setting the right goals in 100 days intervals. It is a great way of reviewing things that happened and thinking about the coming month.
Writing down life time and childhood goals is something completely different. Just as a side note, if you want to see an awe-inspiring presentation, watch the presentation “Really Achieving Your Childhood Goals” by the pancreatic cancer diagnosed Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch. One of the seldom things you experience which can change your life immediately. I should watch it every 100 days. The fundamentals, the fundamentals, you have to get the fundamentals right!
Many people only know Microsoft Office which is kind of sad and demonstrates the de-facto Microsoft monopoly in this space. There are obvious advantages (and disadvantages) of using web-based office products like Google Documents. Ever received 10 revisions of the same document via e-mail? Sending always a copy of a file to your team members is inefficient and leads to an unproductive and unorganized work-flow. In one of my projects we just share links or work simultaneously on the same document which is great and simplifies the whole process of collaboration and information sharing.
I think all the new web-based office product won’t rival Microsoft Office for a while, especially not in slow-adapting large enterprises with high switching costs but if you are working in a small company, a startup, or you work as part of a distributed virtual team, these applications can give you a productivity increase and it is just nicer to work with them instead of the old-fashioned Microsoft Office or Open Office products. But it is also a trade-off between feature complexity and collaboration simplicity that you are facing. If you rely on the scripting functionality of Excel you should stay with it because no web-based software provides these capabilities. Of course, privacy, security and reliability plays an important role while using web-based applications but in many cases the advantages outplay the disadvantages.
There are also more and more very good web-based project-management tools, that have fair prices and allow easy collaboration with team members and clients. For example, Copper Project or Basecamp.
Personally, I share around 30 Google documents and spreadsheets with 22 persons, mainly from group work in my classes. Worked out pretty well so far and saved me a lot of pain. Give it a try.
Published by cornelius on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 in Entrepreneurship.
Where to start? So many different impressions of just one weekend. Many interesting persons, a great location and a lot of ups and downs. Conclusion first, it was amazing, a tremendous experience and I am glad that I’ve been able to take part in such an experiment of creating a business within 48 hours. We created Edelbild (German for precious picture), a web-based service that connects customers who wants to beautify their digital images with image experts, who can sign up and process certain orders.
“Startup Weekend is an idea, an experiment, a chance to gather the tech community and create a company over one jam packed weekend” (from StartupWeekend New York). In Germany the Startup Weekend was not tech-oriented and from the developer, to the consultant to the lawyer, everyone took part. This makes it more exciting but also more problematic with regards to the whole coordination and the common goals. A developer wants to see a running version and a fast launch, business oriented people have been happy with a complete business plan, for example. We had around 14 developers with very different skill sets and technology focuses. In total we have been over 120 persons who are now shareholders.
Everyone would say it is not possible to start a REAL business in under 48 hours but with some more work we accomplished what we wanted. The company is now an official Limited registered in England & Wales. In Germany it would not have been so easy and fast to create one, luckily there are some improvements in the near future.
So, what are the limiting factors or the bottlenecks of the whole plan? I guess it should be obvious that this is the development. It is an IT company that has to create a web-based platform to provide its services. No one suggested brick-and-mortar businesses in the 13 elevator pitches and only a few really cared about the feasibility of the implementation in such a short time. How can you develop a software product that should be ready for production use in 2 days? Developing software lasts a while and is a complicated process. We could not figure out which technology to use until the early morning of the Sunday.
Now just considering development aspects: I started developing with Ruby and the Rails web framework because it was the fastest way I could imagine. We did not see the possibility to extend existing software that provides most of the needed functionality, which often also takes a long time and creates pure frustration. Having chosen the technology and being able to split up the work, the Sunday became very productive and we made good progress. We finalized the design, set up the server, tested the deployment methods, worked on the main HTML templates, implemented a big part of the functionality, evaluated payment methods and much more. The system administration was exemplary, so everyone could rely on the heavily used issue tracking system and the source code repository. What a difference, on day one, we have been totally disorganized and we had problems with the wireless internet connection, problems to find a place to get some work done and the missing development power. Day two, highly productive, we developed major parts for a first release and the atmosphere was great, energetic and supportive. Two more full-time Rails developers joined the development team. It would have been disappointing if the Saturday has been equal to the Sunday. This situation has been faced in nearly all teams.
Long story short, now the weekend is over and to make the company succeed and the web application launch, developers are needed to work maybe full-time on this project for a short time. This requires money that we don’t have and the developer team just can support the whole process but no one has the time to work on it long hours because of other projects and regular work. If the new voted Director can manage this tasks and if he finds a solution to this problem the company can proceed which would be great to make the accomplishments of the weekend even more exciting.
Despite that, one of the goals was to connect interesting persons and to build a community which was definitely the case. I met many with similar interests in startup culture and technology and I am looking forward to meet them again for some other occasions or a startup weekend reunion.
The end of the weekend was a little bit too abrupt, so we just voted the directory and secretary but did not summarize the work that has been done. Hopefully I get some information in the next days, I definitely want see the business plan for example.
If you read this and you took part in another StartupWeekend please share some comments and comparisons.
Thanks to the organizers who put a lot of work into this event.
Having lived in Waterloo on my exchange year at the University of Waterloo, I have to say some comments to this place. Nearly no one knows it in Germany, of course, the world is big and Waterloo has just 110.000 citizens, so nothing special. Mannheim is in Germany on rank 20 with around 300.000 citizens and not this exciting from a technology / entrepreneurship perspective.
A top-notch technical university with one of the biggest math / computer science departments in the world.
“With more than 5,300 students, 200 full-time professors, and 180 courses in mathematics, statistics and computer science, the faculty is a powerhouse of discovery and innovation.”
Research in Motion, the company that produces the well-known Blackberry was founded in Waterloo, next to many other technology oriented international businesses.
You will always hear the words talent, collaboration, community, entrepreneurship and technology in combination with Waterloo. These are success indicators if done right.
P.S.
Still, if you are driving into Waterloo you would never expect such an exceptional place. German cities have the better infrastructure and liveliness, especially the city centers. Waterloo looks like a small village and has to do some work on this part.
Feel free to add other interesting aspects in the comments, this was just a rough cut.
Published by cornelius on Friday, September 21st, 2007 in Entrepreneurship.
In 7 hours I will go by train to Hamburg to attend the Startup Weekend, the first one in Germany. It will be exciting and I haven’t been in Hamburg for many years, although it is supposed to be such a nice city. It will be my first German tech/web/startup community event, and I love to see how it compares to the Canadian Barcamp/Democamp atmosphere. Oh, there is also the big question if there will be a ready-to-go company after this weekend? All signs are on green, so we will see.
I will definitely write a follow up on this event because one goal is to create a viable spreading startup culture in Germany and I have to put my 2 cents to it.
Published by cornelius on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 in Entrepreneurship.
You think it is not possible to develop a serious web application in 48 hours? Mainly true but I tried my best and you can see the result of 2 days web application development on *.inperspektive.com The idea was a test run for the Startup Weekend in Hamburg, Germany that takes place next week.
The whole idea was spontaneous and I created it within 2 days. This is also a perfect example of how productive Ruby on Rails is.
What is *.inperspektive.com?
A web application that enables you to find, share and discuss items that bring things into perspective like panel discussions, interviews, personal blog comments, subjective videos and more. Everything less objective and open for discussion.
Warning, this site was a test project and is not ready for production use, so submitted data can get lost. Feel free to try it and give some feedback. I know a lot of features are missing but hey? I had 48 hours to create a web app really from scratch. Check out some nice Rails commercials. Be warned, the site can be very slow because nothing is optimized and it is just shared hosting. I try to keep the site online as long as possible.
And the best, you can read some insights about the whole development as a chronology.
I would like to hear some feedback and your impressions?
Because of a lack of time, I cannot work anymore on this project and I am ready to sell the whole application including 30 hours of developed code, 3 domains and all underlying ideas and thoughts. I would get weak if someone offers me a MacBook Pro 15 inch with 4Gb RAM.
Looking forward to next weekends startup camp in Hamburg.
Published by cornelius on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 in Technology.
I just read an interesting article at the AdaptivePath homepage. The comment is about technical libraries, for example the Association of Computing Machines (ACM) Digital Library, and why they charge for research work that is often publicly sponsored and provided to them for free. If you think of research as sharing and exploring ideas as publicly as possible, their methods seem very contradictory. Supporting Open Access should be a main goal of every researcher. Why not getting a little bit more feedback than locking the work into proprietary databases?
Just some days ago a friend ask me if I could order with my credit card (having one is not common under German students) a paper about risk-based testing. This was about $30 and it was from 2000. Why should a student pay 30 bucks for maybe two sentences that could be useful for his research paper? No, our university library had no access to this database. Luckily, I found after some searching a similar paper from the author with 90% overlap and for free.
These methods move me away from serious research at universities.
Published by cornelius on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 in Technology.
Wow, how can it be that my last post is close to two months ago. A lot happened in this time and I am finally back in Germany but I will write another post about my great Canadian experience.
I am doing currently a lot of work with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Some will ask what this is and where the advantages are. Ruby is a dynamic, flexible, general-purpose and highly productive programming language that makes programming fun. Programming, fun? With Ruby definitely yes, with C, C++, Java, Scheme, PHP yeah maybe, I don’t know. Ruby on Rails is a powerful web application framework that gives you the ability to create quickly database-driven state-of-the-art web applications. It uses a lot of best practices and clever abstractions to simplify the whole development process. It makes your development professional from day one without being a software engineer for several years. There are so many advantages for most of my projects I like to do, so I definitely want to deepen my knowledge around Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
At the end two interesting videos.
David Heinemeier Hansson, a Danish software developer and the creator of Ruby on Rails, develops a blog in 15! minutes. An amazing quick introduction to Rails. This does not mean that Rails can only be used for simple web projects as a blogging system. It is very powerful and if you are interested in developing a web application you should definitely take a look at it.
A very well-done clone of the Apple vs. Microsoft advertising. To summarize: Java is often overwhelmingly complex and the wrong choice for most of the projects.
Published by cornelius on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 in Miscellaneous.
Today I attended the DemoCamp Guelph which was again a nice opportunity to meet with some web development and technology interested people. After several Barcamps here in Waterloo this was my first DemoCamp and the first time in Guelph. It was a nice atmosphere and we had some good discussions about various topics. Here are some snippets and thoughts about some of the demos.
There was the demonstration of Freshbooks, an online invoicing and time tracking service which is a very useful tool for freelancers and small companies who are regularly concerned with things like these and want to automate the whole process. Watch this video for a good explanation. Their presentation focused on the new reporting card feature which allows you to compare your invoicing data to the data sets of thousands of others working in the same area of expertise. Opening up their databases, which are normally completely locked by the service providers, to allow these kind of comparisons is a big advantage for this service and the user acceptance is giving them right. Freshbooks with over 200.000 users is pretty popular and growth opportunities are great. On their website I saw some marketing slogans that the service is used in over 120 countries but I could not find quickly detailed information about international usage. If everything goes as planned, I will give it a try back in Germany.
Norman Young talked about disruption in the market space. He mentioned some disruptive technologies and products like the Model T by Ford or the telegraph. It is pretty obvious that there are always disruptions in the market but the question is how to predict, create or react on it so that you can gain competitive advantages. Norman recommended the podcast Capturing the Upside and the book “The Innovater’s Solution” by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen.
Another pretty amazing application was shown by Chris Thiessen. zoomii books allows you to find books online like you are used to it in a bricks-and-mortar book store with its book shelves. The key thing was the user interface that allowed you to zoom in fluently into a specific book category which is represented as a good looking shelf with book covers of various books of this category. It was very well done and I can see a lot of users being interested in finding their readings in this non-conventional way instead of the typical search / recommendation approach that everyone knows from Amazon. The used data set for the book covers is a small subset of Amazon’s offerings. The user interface can still improve a lot, especially the start page and the page for the book details. This will be essential to make users happy to use this service on a regular basis. By the way, another startup using the Amazon Web Services. The zoom technology reminded me a (very) little on the video I will attach at the end of this post.
To make the list complete, there was another demonstration of Castroller which allows you to manage your podcasts, Blogthot a Twitter clone and Avery’s amazing Delphi database-backed UI creation demo. The latter one was neat, because I created a similar interface by drag & drop with Delphi in grammar school 9 years ago. If the result would be a web application with web service integration I would use Delphi again.
Published by cornelius on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 in Technology.
Today I went to another interesting talk in a series of distinguished speakers here at the University of Waterloo. Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of the well-known C++ programming language, spoke about the future of C++, its new language features and how the standardization process is slowly progressing. He made clear that C++ is a systems programming language and has a very strong focus on performance. With billions of C++ code lines already written it is nearly impossible to come up with major changes that would ignore downwards compatibility.
I would love to see a systems programming language with a nice syntax and a high expressiveness where the compiler logic is becoming more powerful and the language syntax clearer and more concise. Why that? Recently, I am getting more and more interested in the Ruby programming language which is a dynamic typed, pure object-oriented, multi-paradigm programming language which was invented with a focus on supporting the programmer’s needs and not the machine’s. Of course, the application scenarios for C++ and Ruby are totally different but is this the only reason why writing C++ or Java is much more painful than writing Ruby? Think about productivity and having fun while programming. So, if you are not planning to write real systems software, e. g. an operating system or hardware drivers, you should consider more and more dynamic languages like Ruby or Python which become more and more popular for application development, scripting tasks and web development. At the end it is always a preference choice, but knowing some more programming languages should be essential to compare and judge.
There was the question by one of the listeners if C++ should become a more or better “teachable” programming language. More and more universities are switching to solely teaching Java. C++ is over 20 years old and there is still no or only a little experience how to teach it right and make it attractive for students. It should be important for everyone in computer science to make programming more attractive. A good way to do it, is to start teaching programming principles with easy to learn and easy to understand programming languages or start by building quickly real applications instead of explaining for hours and days the first “Hello World!”. At the beginning you need motivation as a student to create the necessary enthusiasm to dig deeper into the topic. Diving deep into pointer and memory issues in C/C++ is fine at a later point when you already know where the use case is and how it makes sense in the overall system. The ETH Zurich seems to have some success with there so-called “inverted curriculum” where students build complex applications while learning to program.
By the way, I started programming at the University of Mannheim with Scheme, a Lisp dialect, but now they changed the programming introduction to Java. I don’t know any student who said after one of these courses, he really loved it and wants to do some small application or scripting stuff on its own. It is simply too complicated and not obvious how it can be useful. With the Ruby on Rails web framework you can write your first “manage my courses” web application in the first 2 weeks and Ruby would also allow you to do live programming as an instructor during the course!
Published by cornelius on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 in Entrepreneurship.
This video definitely includes some good tips, especially the suggestion to integrate unintentionally the logo of another VC company in your slides. Be cool and jinx Web2.0. I guess it really worked in some cases.
Published by cornelius on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 in Technology.
While reading an article about Canadian web start-ups I found the website StandoutJobs.com which “changes the face of recruiting”. A very neat idea that makes the company more personal and you get a first impression that is authentic and not the standard anonymous one. This site provides a good opportunity for small companies to recruit some really passionated and interested people. Despite that the job positions should be described in a little bit more detailed way. You don’t need passion if the job consists of 80% standard tasks, a perfect getting things done philosophy is more helpful in this case. This recruiting principle is not only useful for start-ups or small companies if you imagine that specific departments of a large company would use it too, under the assumption that they have the freedom to do so. Every employer can record a video, put it on YouTube and present it on their website. Just be more creative and authentic.
Published by cornelius on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 in Technology.
Once again there was an excellent speaker as part of the distinguished lecturer series here at the University of Waterloo. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and initiator of the free software movement, talked about “Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks”. He has, in my opinion, some radical views about free software, copyright laws or digital rights management. But maybe this is a necessity for such an important position he holds and therefore some polarizing statements make people really think about what matters. Saying that watching Hollywood movies should be avoided if you are not absolutely sure that it is a good movie or avoiding all kinds of non-free software seems too strict and unrealistic. Of course, as an activist you are not accepting the current situation, you try to improve it but as an end user you would just punish and restrict yourself.
Authors (of software, books, movies,…) should be able to decide on their own how and under which licenses their work should be published. Freedom of choice is important and puts the burden on the author who should be aware of the consequences of using a strong copyright or Open Source license for his/her work. There are too many situation where no one license fits perfectly. In some cases it is the best choice to use a commercial license to make the most profit out of your product or service. This is your right as long as your users are happy and not too restricted in their capabilities.
Stallman complained about the big music labels and how less money is going to the artists. This is a well-known fact and hopefully these companies will loose their influence on the whole market. If artists would get more money if they offer their work for free with the hope to get donations and enough money through concert fees is questionable. For some it will work, for others not. Flexibility must be in the hand of the artists and the more approaches are tested the more successful revenue models will appear. Be it selling through independent labels or through an own website with micro-payments, two options out of a huge variety of possible ways.
For software everything is even more complicated caused by the manifold purposes and usages of software and the fact that it is intangible and easy to distribute and copy over available networks. Open Source software is easier too extend and distribute. You are not restricted to a specific usage of the software. Improvements can be made independently which is useful especially for software that will be reused in other developments. Essential software technologies should be available as Open Source, especially for the sake of providing third world countries with the necessary access. They need the knowledge and non-restricted software but cannot afford license fees. An advantage of Open Source software is independence and flexibility you gain while using it. Saying that all software must be free is a strong statement as long as there are companies who exactly deliver what their customers want and like to pay for.
Difficult topic with too many opinions and true answers. Be the criteria for the right choice a satisfied user who likes the software or product he/she is using.
Published by cornelius on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 in Technology.
It is always useful and interesting to take the time to do a review of the latest happenings in the Web. Read/WriteWeb posted a 2007 Half-Year Web Technology Report. The time period seems pretty short compared to traditional business sectors but the pace in web technology is still very fast. The speed Google goes with all its acquisitions and product launches is amazing. We are coming closer to a well-working, user-friendly, web-based office application including a presentation software and offline support. Google Docs is already a very useful and practical software but with some more additions in functionality and reliability users will be pleased to see it as an alternative to desktop office applications.
Facebook opening up its platform was a big headline and they are a trendsetter for many web application provider. More and more will start opening up their applications to provide a platform instead of just a single service. There is a high diversity of web services out there and a need for some integration point for the end users, be it start pages, social networks or bookmark manager.
The technology report does not state consequences about these occurences and of course it is still too early to do so. Thus, for the second half of 2007 it will be interesting to see the consequences of Google’s and Facebook’s decisions and product launches. I expect a high adoption and a growing user base for Google Docs and Facebook’s application platform because of their ease of use and usefulness. All in all, the user experience is increasing and this is a good trend.
Published by cornelius on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 in Entrepreneurship.
There is an interesting post of an anonymous employee who describes the work environment of Google in comparison to the one at Microsoft. It seems pretty accurate and balanced, so definitely worth reading. He points out that there are disadvantages like career development, health plan benefits or non-personal offices at Google. He also mentions that Google provides things like 3 free meals per day, an own bus route, free t-shirts, free choice of computer equipment, home broadband connection and many more incentives.
He rises the question if the management structure is well-suited for a now pretty big IT/media business. There will always be misunderstandings and disputes between so many smart individuals where a reachable manager could provide a quick answer and gives the direction that follows the company’s mission statement best.
At the end it should be obvious that Google, Microsoft and most of the other big IT companies are providing very good work environments and what matters most is the interestingness of topics and positions available. If they suit your needs perfectly, then it is a no-brainer to go or apply there to stay passionated about what you do.
Another thing that becomes obvious while reading his post, is the fact that the Google work environment is perfectly suited for fresh university graduates who want to have the same protective care as most universities provide. Having seen two Google company presentations at the University of Waterloo, Canada, most students seem to love the fact that working at Google is cool regardless of the positions or topics available. With Google’s nice and clever marketing and their incentives like free t-shirts it is easy to allure most of the students to apply for a job interview or an internship position. A panel of fresh graduates who are speaking about how cool their work is and how exciting is a must have at such an event. Maybe it is the perfect work place?
Published by cornelius on Friday, June 29th, 2007 in Technology.
I was kind of surprised as I read in one of Google’s blogs that they will give seed investment to someone who creates a business based on Google Gadgets. Why surprised? Creating a business based on a gadget or widget or eye candy or screenlet or however you want to call it? Seems not like a rock solid business idea but it makes it obvious that the user base is tremendous and reaches the millions. With such an amount of potential customers small ideas can become pretty valuable. Can gadgets be so powerful and exciting that someone is willing to pay money for it? Creating a gadget is pretty easy for everyone who knows how to build a web application thanks to JavaScript and HTML.
What about Facebook‘s new opened platform and the variety of third-party applications? It seems like a similar situation where you can theoretically target a broad audience with millions of user. The question is if it is possible to earn enough money for a sustainable business with a carpooling or to-do-list application, for example. Most of the applications are of promotional nature for third-party web sites like flickr or YouTube. The advantages that come with a high user acceptance are obvious, of course.
And there is also the MySpace add-on universe and LinkedIn which is planning to open up its platform, too. A lot of opportunities to create something on top of these platforms and see if it will pay off. So, start building your gadgets!
Published by cornelius on Friday, June 29th, 2007 in Miscellaneous.
Ok, there must always be a first post. I decided to create this blog to write about some more or less interesting stories and thoughts about topics I care about. So, expect readings about web development, information technology, entrepreneurship, Ruby on Rails or anything else. If you have some feedback just e-mail me or add some comments.
First of all, thanks to all WordPress developers. This publishing software is a great product. Easy installation, nice user interface and extendable with hundreds or thousands of plug-ins and themes. It is not the technology anymore that could stop you from installing your first blog, customizing it, and start writing. If anyone has some recommendations for useful WordPress plug-ins just drop me a line. Happy blogging, Cornelius.
Everyone is looking for a cool idea to create a business out of it. Once you start a business on top of an idea, you recognize it’s not about the idea but about the general concept and framework how to generate new ideas and execute them. So, I don’t trust the idea machine and actually I’ve too many ideas, I should sell them…
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The good news first, I finished my studies of Business Information Technology at the University of Mannheim in June 2009 after an interesting stay abroad at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute in Galway, Ireland. The bad news, at least for this blog, I completely focused on working on Tagcrumbs, a Internet and mobile startup I co-founded during my studies. From time to time there will be some articles here but better follow our startup blog or our Facebook fan page.
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