Category — business

This might turn into an interesting repository of business ideas.

You must post your business plan here on my blog where I expect other people can and will comment on it. I also expect that other people will steal the idea and use it elsewhere. That is the idea. Call this an open source funding environment.

If its a good idea and worth funding, we want it replicated elsewhere. The idea is not just to help you, but to figure out how to help the economy through hard work and ingenuity. If you come up with the idea and get funding, you have a head start. If you execute better than others, you could possibly make money at it. As you will see from the rules below, these are going to be businesses that are mostly driven by sweat equity.

The Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan – blog maverick

Nice to see that my (extended) team builds not entirely useless stuff.

Google Docs is the single platform that enabled Obama's effective organization an historic fundraising success. The Obama campaign was aware that this had become a major player in the grassroots space, sparking a revolution in the way people self-organize and conduct grassroots efforts and political campaigns. Since a campaign is constantly on a quest for money and voters, Obama's grassroots organization valued agility over hierarchy; online collaboration became a necessity.

[...]

Time was — and is — important. Being able to access something where and when you want to is even more important. Google understands that collaboration will save time, but not cut corners. Google recognizes political campaigns spend more time away from their computers and out on the political campaign trail. Knocking on doors with a mobile device in hand, pulling information in real time from a Google Doc is the future for all successful campaigns. Probably not Facebook.

Eric Kuhn: The 2008 Google Docs Campaign

Somebody give this guy a gift certificate for some therapy sessions.

Q: We've talked about Google, we've talked about the economy. Which actually occupies more of your time in terms of which do you spend your time worrying about?

Ballmer: Well in general, the answer is: Google, Google, Google, Google, Google.

Confirmed (again): Ballmer is not worried about competitors building better stuff than Microsoft; he is just worried about Google, no matter what Google does.

Full interview at: Ballmer: Google, Google, the economy, Google | Beyond Binary – CNET News

Some interesting words on enterpreneurship from Eduardo Manchón, one of the Panoramio founders. (If you prefer English to Spanish, skip to the end of this post for a link to an automatically translated version.)

También hay que considerar que los emprendedores nunca no son tan originales, se lanzan por imitación de lo que tienen cerca. Si la gente cerca de ti monta cosas para el turismo, tu montas cosas para el turismo, si se meten en el negocio inmobiliario, tu también. Si vives en Sillicon Valley, pues creas start-ups tecnológicas. Joaquín Cuenca y yo creamos Panoramio porque conocimos a Ubaldo Huerta que había creado Loquo, el a su vez había trabajado en Sillicon Valley muchos años. Es el famoso efecto semilla, a partir de una primera y única empresa que surge de manera espontánea, surgen una legión de ex-trabajadores de esa empresa que montan su propio proyecto e imitadores, que al final crean un centro de este tipo de proyectos.

¿Hablo de Sillicon Valley? No. Hablo de realidades tan cercanas a mi como las localidades mono-industriales alicantinas, cada una con una especialización y un nivel de emprendimiento brutal. A saber juguetes en Ibi, alfombras en Crevillente, calzado en Elche y Elda, marroquineria en Petrer, chocolates en Villajoyosa, turrones en Jjjona, textil en Alcoy, mármol en Aspe, especias en Novelda y redes de pesca en mi pueblo, Callosa de Segura. Podría seguir con muchos pueblos de la provincia cada uno con las industrias líderes a nivel nacional en cada sector. Lo mismo pasa en muchos otros lugares de España y debe parecer provinciano hacer ese recuento, pero creo que hay que parar de hablar de generalidades “españolas” vistas desde la distancia y conocer la realidad a ras de suelo.

Evidentemente, el emprendedor se hace, pero no se trata de lavarle el cerebro a los niños y meterles en la cabeza una mentalidad emprendedora al estilo del “gran sueño americano”, así no funciona.

Full article (in Spanish): Eduardo Manchón: “En España hay tantos emprendedores como en cualquier otro sitio”. Or read the google-translated English version.

What if every product category, every business, is a bubble — and some just last longer?

Doc Searls Weblog · Unexpected but inevitable pops

I don’t doubt that an economy without Wal-Mart would mean higher prices for U.S. consumers. We can quibble about the $ amount, but they do get our attention with that provocative sign, which is the *only* flashy thing you’ll see when driving along Walton Blvd in Bentonville. Come to think of it, Bentonville is probably the best example of what Wal-Mart has done for the U.S. generally, especially small-town America. I’ve visited northwest Arkansas many times over the past 25+ years. The Bentonville-Rogers area has been transformed from a relatively unsophisticated place to enjoy the outdoors (with beautiful natural features, such as rivers, lakes, and limestone caves) to a reasonably cosmopolitan place with a few outstanding restaurants, access to good shopping, and things like a W “aLoft” hotel — in the span of only a few years. All because of… Wal-Mart.

Evidence Soup: Wal-Mart claims to be saving U.S. families $260B this year. Does the evidence support this claim?

It’s 2008. Isn’t it time we thought past advertising, toward revenue models based on serving customers, rather than guessing at them?

Doc Searls Weblog · Frontiers of Value Subtraction

Because the world, full of competitors and networked humans with their set of behavior patterns, is part of the spec. If you're designing a product, but don't understand how the system of networked humans will work around it, you really can't understand how your product will work either.

How to Ship Code and Influence People (Skrentablog).

Mobuzz, one of the more popular online shows to come out of Europe, has run out of money. But instead of bowing out, the site is turning to its users and asking for a €5 donation (or the equivalent in your local currency). The goal? 120,000 Euros by next week, which Mobuzz says should be enough to sustain the site until it can get more funding. If it doesn’t make the cut, the site will be shut down and any donations will be returned.

Strapped For Cash, Web TV Startup Mobuzz Starts Panhandling.

The Economist’s editorial on Bill Gates, The meaning of Bill Gates, is one of those thoughtful big-picture pieces that keep me hooked to the publication. You might agree or not with what they write, but they sure provide some perspective and good food for thought.

Some snippets to whet your appetite:

Mr Gates has revelled in the day-to-day details of running his firm. To let it all go is to acknowledge that his best work at Microsoft is behind him. It is to accept that the innovator’s curse is to be transitory.

But Mr Gates’s invention was as a businessman. His genius was to understand what he needed and work out how to obtain it, however long it took. In an industry in which visionaries are often sniffy about anyone else’s ideas, the readiness to go elsewhere proved a devastating advantage.

Mr Gates had the good fortune to be perfectly suited for his time—but he is less well-equipped for the collaborative and fragmented era of internet computing. This does not diminish his achievement. Nor, as some would have it, does his philanthropy necessarily magnify it.

You can read the full article online.

Pretty funny (and effective!) pre-internet form of advert targetting:

This ad was published in a local Zurich newspaper, and the copy roughly says:

Hello, Google Zurich! Forget for a moment wellness lounges, freshly squeezed fruit juices, slides, grounded space capsules and all the other perks you provide to your employees. An evening at the Zurich opera house offers experiences that push the boundaries and strengthens team spirit. We’ll take you backstage, too.

Opernhaus Zurich, you got our attention!

I’ve been meaning for a while to write a little post about Seth Godin’s book The Dip, but procrastination had gotten the best of me. Now that Seth is asking in his blog for owners of a copy of the book to lend it to someone, I feel I have no excuse to put it off longer.

The Dip is, like most Godin’s posts, insightful, inspirational and brief (you could read the book in less than an hour). It also contains some great illustrations by Hugh McLeod.

The message of the book is deceptively simple: The Dip is the slog between starting and mastery. The Dip is the reason we are here.

Some quotes:

Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff a the right time.

Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.

In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition.

And yet the real success goes to those who obsess.

It’s easier to be mediocre than it is to confront reality.

The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.

If you are in Zurich, you can borrow my copy. Just ask.

Sometimes the web is just wonderful.

Apple 1984 commercial, found sifting through Flashdance videos.

In the quest for the definitive blog ranking system, some optimistic guys (and maybe gals, who knows) have launched today the cleverly-named site blogged.

This is how it works: you submit your blog, with a description and some keywords (which they call tags, which is, you know, more 2.0 and stuff), and their team of editors will eventually review and rate your submission.

This innovative approach to organizing and ranking web-content has only two minor problems:

1. Editors need to be extremely well-versed in the categories they are responsible for. Their opinions and tastes should be in line with those of users.
2. You need an army of editors. A big one.

So maybe they can hire lots and lots of editors. Maybe they already have, who knows. But is their editor hiring process good enough? Judging from my initial explorations, the answer is “No!”.

See for yourselves: blogged Programming Blog Directory. Horrifying, isn’t it?

According to blogged, About.com: Web Design / HTML (grade: 9.3) is a better programming blog than Joel on Software (grade: 9.1), and the best programming blog of all is Slashdot (grade: 9.9), Coding Horror coming in a distant second (grade: 9.5).

Anybody that has spent any time at all reading programming blogs (e.g. me) can tell you that neither Slashdot nor About.com: Web Design / HTML are blogs, and neither of them is really about programming.

I guess the blogged guys have never heard about Yahoo! and why/how it lost in search. And I guess they haven’t noticed Technorati’s struggles, either. Sigh. If they would have just read the right blogs…

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

• Mashable.com: 70+ Tools For Job Hunting 2.0
• Paul Graham: How to Make Wealth:
  

  Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast.

• Free Exchange blog at The Economist: Sick man no more: the German economy and labour market is recovering:
  

  Germany is indeed waking from its sclerotic slumbers and might post a growth rate of 3% in 2007. That would more than double the 1995 to 2005 average growth rate of 1.4%, and could even exceed expected American and British 2007 growth numbers.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

A site for a book called “Career distinction” has something they call an online identity calculator. The ‘calculator’ is actually a rough guide to assessing how does your personal brand look on the internet.

I had never heard about the book or the site before, but the online identity calculator seems like an interesting tool for those that want to build out a reputation online.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Interesting links on the topic of jobs, work and careers:

• Enrique Dans: ¿Alguien ha visto un programador? (Has somebody seen a programmer?):
  

  En España, a este lado del túnel, se necesitan programadores. Y los programadores necesitan una reivindicación urgente de su profesión, que recupere el legítimo orgullo de quien crea, de quien desarrolla, de quien se responsabiliza de un todo, de quien se enamora de un proyecto y no se limita a ser un obrero en el mismo, sino un verdadero arquitecto. Se buscan programadores con orgullo y capacidad para serlo. Pero por lo que se ve, habrá que mirar debajo de las piedras.

  Rough translation:

  In Spain, on this side of the tunnel, we need programmers. And programmers urgently need to claim back their profession, they need to recover the legitimate pride of someone who creates, develops and is responsible for a whole, of someone who falls in love with a project and doesn’t limit himself to being a mere labourer on it, but is a real architect. We need proud programmers and programmers with the skills to be one. It seems they will be hard to find.

• The Business of Software Wiki (from Joel on Software):
  

  Our goal is to gather and present unbiased, useful and up-to-date information about the business of software, whether it’s microISVs selling desktop software, Web 2.0 sites, or even the big enterprise kind of outfits.

• Brazen Careerist: How to be a star performer: 4 things to get good at (yes, this one’s a year old, but it’s still a good read):
  

  To become your best self – a star, a great leader, a fulfilled worker – you need to know yourself and your goals very well. Start now. It’s a lifelong process, and done honestly, it’s the process that makes almost any job intrinsically challenging and interesting.

Over at business2blog I read that Jon ‘Neverdie’ Jacobs buys a space station in Project Entropia for $100.000. Clive Thompson explains why it makes sense:

Because it’s just like owning the Mall of America — it’s a place to conduct business and make real-world cash. Indeed, Project Entropia currently has 236,000 registered accounts, and the game allows you to use Earth money to buy in-game currency, which makes it spectacular place for any entrepreneur to set up business, really.

Not only does it makes sense (to me, anyway), but it feels as the all those futuristic novels where people lived and transacted in virtual worlds as much as in the ‘real’ world are coming true. And really, why not? If you do some work and provide some services in-game, why not be paid for it with ‘real’ money?

Trying to think about the implications of this is making me dizzy. I’ll better go grab a tea. Talk to you later.

Joi Ito writes that

At EuroOSCON, Microsoft announced new software licenses including some variations that may meet the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Open Source Definition.

The times they are a-changing, or what?

Catching up with my overdue feed-reading I come upon this pearl of modern patent-making:

Cereality has patents pending to give them an exclusive right to six business methods, including “displaying and mixing competitively branded food products” and adding “a third portion of liquid.” If these patents are approved by the U.S. Patent Office, Cereality would have a complete monopoly on cereal bar business–just for being the first to put together the legalese necessary to describe mixing breakfast cereal.

I wonder why we still haven’t seen anyone trying to patent burgers. Now that would be a profitable one!

(via Boing Boing: Putting-milk-in-cereal patent-application: kill business-method patents now!)

Martin Varsavsky’s Fon [es] is rapidly gaining momentum. The idea is simple: share your bandwith with other Fon users. You can choose to share your bandwith in exchange for the bandwith of others (the ‘Linus model’), or you can charge others for access to your bandwith (the ‘Bill’ model).

The sharing is done through WiFi access points enabled with special Fon software and an external antenna. The company can provide you with Fon-configured access points, or you can use your own and install yourself the software on it and connect a secon antenna. If you don’t have a nice broadband connection, Fon can also provide you with a 2 Mbps ADSL connection for 30 ?����, including a WiFi router and a static IP address.

It strikes me like a great idea, beautiful in its simplicity. Many of us have more bandwith that we can use at home, but we lack WiFi in public spaces and while travelling. With Fon you will be able to profit from your internet access when you are away from home, because you will have WiFi access to the internet through the access points of other Fon users. No more expensive and uncomfortable connections through 3G phones.

It is also interesting that the 80% of people that have expressed interest in joining have chosen the Linus model, according to Martin. There is a big demand for more WiFi in public spaces, and no one seems to be addressing it (yet).

For the moment they seem to be targeting only the Spanish market, but hopefully they will extend to other countries soon. Martin has been recently talking to Mangrove, the VC company that financed Skype and they seemed very positive.

It is going to be very exciting to watch this project unfold.

(via Enrique Dans)

Via Chema I find this hilarious photo from Reuters, published at Yahoo! News Photo. Apparently, while at a meeting during the summit and 60th General Assembly of the United Nations, Bush writes this note to Condoleeza Rice, and some photographer catches him red-handed. The note says “I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible?”. Chalk one for tele objectives.

Leaving the funny aspect aside, I propose we look a bit into the implications of this.

First of all, it is interesting that Bush finds it necessary to ask Ms Rice for permission to take a bathroom break.

Second, wasn’t he taught to hold it at kindergarten? Or is it that he has some prostate problems we don’t know about? And if so, what does it mean if the President of the USA has prostate problems? How does it affect the rest of us?

Third, does this happen routinely? And if so, how many important bits of meetings has Bush missed while he was worrying about his exploding bladder?

Fourth, what kind of image does this project? Not a very good one, I think. If the recent discussion on the Life of a Consultant weblog about the importance of a consultant’s image concluded that projecting a professional image is as important (or more) as being a good professional, clearly image is something that Bush should pay a bit more attention to. From this picture I get the impression of an immature person that is unable to focus on a meeting because at the moment he is more concerned with his bowel movements, and as a bonus, he needs to ask for help to resolve the situation. Clearly not the image the President of the USA should have.

Some weeks ago, Random Thoughts from a CTO wrote that

Regardless of which type of blog you promote, one thing is for sure — “You need to find your voice” and stay true to it.

Identity is certainly a fundamental ingredient to make a project successful. It doesn’t matter if the project is your personal blog, or some bigger task where a whole team is involved. People need to know the values, motivations and goals of the project, so that they can find how they connect to the project, how do they fit in it.

But do we ‘decide’ on the identity beforehand, when the project starts, or does it emerge organically over time? For business-style projects, I would suppose that the identity is something clear from the beginning, as they start with clear goals and motivations. But for more personal-style or experimental projects, such as blogs, the identity might not be defined long after the project started.

When I bought this domain and put up this page, it wasn’t even a blog. But I gradually realized that something blog-like is what I really wanted, and timidly started to experiment with the medium. I started with some short posts on random issues, trying out what worked best for me, what felt more comfortable, more fun. Slowly, some main subjects started to emerge: current events, IT, books I read… Later, some six months into my ‘blogging career’, I realized that the CMS I was using (Pivot) was inadequate, and migrated to what I perceived as a better one (Wordpress). Later still, I started looking for a tag line that would somehow convey what are the main subjects of this blog. Along the way, the design of the site changed quite a few times. And finally, after a bit more than a year, I have a clearer idea about the identity of this blog. But it is definitely nothing that I consciously planned.

But of course, this is just my personal case. Clearly, many blogs are created with a clear identity in mind, and state it clearly in their titles, tag lines and posts from day one.

This morning, while listening to the latest edition of the TWIT podcast, I heard for the first time about Lulu.com, which has apparently been around for a while.

Lulu.com describe themselves as ’self-publishing’, but I prefer the ‘on-demand print’ description used in the podcast. The idea is simple: anyone can go to the site, register and put her book on sale, both as an e-book or in dead-tree version. Then, if someone does buy the book, it will be printed and shipped to the customer. The author can gets up to 80% royalties, which is a whole lot more than what an author with a ‘real’ publishing house gets. They claim to have some 13.000 titles available, and are currently experiencing a grow of around 1.000 new titles per month. Books published by Lulu.com are also available through Amazon. They also publish calendars, audio and video. If you are curious about the quality of the resulting books, check this post by Chris Davis, which includes close-up photos of books ordered off Lulu.com.

All this Lulu business means that you (or I) can write a book and make it available to millions of people on the internet, and make some money with it, without needing to go through a lengthy process of applying to publishing houses, getting rejected, applying again… Of course, the money will only be significant if thousands of people buy your book, but that is not totally impossible. I believe nowadays someone can effectively market his work on the internet at almost no cost, with active involvement in the appropiate communities, blogging and so on. And if you are not that interested in the money, you can lower the price of your book, as that is something you get to set yourself on the Lulu site.

In case you are wondering why was I listening to TWIT, I was curious about what makes it so (apparently) popular. But I did not find much of interest there. A bit too much of ‘we are the most subscribed-to podcast on iTunes’ stuff. And a bit too much time (1h 14min) for not-so-much content.

Lulu.com, though, is something to remember. Just in case you write a book. Or just feel like producing a printed version of your blog.

If you are interested in business, innovation, the power and wisdom of crowds, or in any combination of these, you should probably check out The Business Experiment.

The Business Experiment was born about a month ago, and is the brainchild of Rob May of BusinessPundit. The idea is simple: a company run collectively by the users registered at The Business Experiment website. All decisions are taken by voting, and members are asigned points for participating in the polls. When the company is created (for the moment the business idea is being chosen), the users will own about 60% of it. And yes, it is expected to become a real company, with a business plan, investors, employees and so on.

As Rob writes in the What is it? page:

What will happen? I don’t know. This site could die out, or it could create a new way of doing business. Either way, the goal is to test some ideas and learn some things about business, work, and society.

I already registered. What are you waiting for? Registrations are limited to 2.500 users!