The Swiss Internet Professionals Index – the first project I launched when I started this company – is going strong. More than a hundred companies and professionals are now listed, the site gets around 60’000+ hits a month (sorry I don’t have the more relevant page views figure), and at lunch the other day a friend working for the United Nations told me their procurement department was using it as a resource to find companies to send their request for proposal to.

So if you are active in the Internet industry in Switzerland, feel free to add yourself to the wiki listings at liftlab.com/sipi

Richard Stallman, the initiator of free software movement (full bio here) will speak in Switzerland TWICE next Monday, the morning in Lausanne, the afternoon in Geneva.

Lausanne (UNIL)
When: Monday 18th June; 10:00-12:00
Where: University of Lausanne, Anthropole, Auditoire 1129

Abstract: Richard Stallman will speak about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide.

No registration needed. Link

Geneva (CERN)
When: Monday 18th June; 17:00-18:00
Where: CERN Council Chamber
Topic: Ethics and Practice of Free Software

Participation is open to all and free of charge. Contact Miguel.Marquina(at)cern.ch to arrange access to CERN.

China is just two years away from catching up on Europe’s level of spending on research and development, a study showed on Monday.

Link (via IFTF)

We lost the workforce war. Will we also lose the ideas one?

I was late for a meeting last week, and began to run to arrive as soon as possible. Then I remembered that the meeting was happening in a Wifi enabled place, and that my interlocutor had a laptop.

When I arrived he was working on his emails, and didn’t lose a single minute despite the delay. Lesson of the day: the level of worry one should put in being late depends on wifi access. Will the pervasiveness of our offices mean that being on time won’t matter as much as before?

Today I got an email from a friend who closed his LinkedIn account. He (like me and Pascal a few days ago) considered the time it takes to be part of this community vs the reward he gets, and decided it was not worth it.

As our time becomes the most precious resource we have, the millions of web pages competing for our attention are becoming a problem. Early adopters – the canaries in the coal mine? – are reacting, arbitrating between all their time consuming actions. When I lost my mobile phone two month ago, I almost didn’t renew my subscription. It’s only after I got blamed by a client who was trying to reach me that I decided to re-order a mobile. Email? I am increasingly forcing myself to only answer them once a day. I let the flow of information get in anytime, but I stack all the answers together, trying to get in a more productive flow once a day to answer. Best practices are coming together to counter the overflow. We just need to create them.

But there is something here, and it’s big. Will the masses ever reach this point of saturation? Will this crash web 2.0?

Update: Steve Rubel is describing the same phenomena today on Micropersuasion in a clearer and more elegant way of course.

An easy way to make a splash this summer if you have a mass product to launch: Skytyping.

Business Week is searching for Europe’s Young Entrepreneurs of 2007.

Where are they coming from? Estonia, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. No French, no Swiss, no German. I would like to think that it is because Business Week is biased, but I’m afraid there is a lot of truth in this geographical repartition.

Hyunjung Kim, a MBA student I met back in April while presenting at the University of Seoul, is explaining what the “Akple” phenomena is all about. Read it, we will face it in 2-3 years!

The term “Akple” […] refers to malicious comments or curses in online posts with the intention to degrade the person whom the comments are addressed toward. With the recent incidents of famous entertainers’ being the focus, Akples became a heated debate topic and the voice to implement systems to control. […]

Most Akplers are presumed to be students, unemployed, and “WangDda”, a “defeated group” of the society, who are rather timid and oppressed in the real world that turn belligerent online. Akplers, whether intended or not, are becoming an evermore disturbing factor in the Korean society causing mental and/or emotional shock, leaving detrimental legacies such as elopement of minors, depression (and in some radical cases, deaths).

Akple has forced a strong reaction from the government, who took some radical measures in the form of the “Internet Real Name System”.

The government has passed a bill called “Internet Real Name System” that will be effective July, 2007. Any online postings posted on a portal with more than 300,000 daily visitors, would reveal the poster’s real name and her personal information.

Link

Google has a particularly buggy application out there: Google Videos. Uploads fail quite often, videos suddenly become “unavailable”, stats show zeros everyday for ten hours (probably when the whole count updates), etc… It’s in beta so I don’t complain. But a funny bug just showed up this morning: the negative view count.

I am just curious to know how users can “un-view” some of our LIFT talks… And the 6 negative views are on Bruce Sterling‘s talk, is there a conspiracy theory somewhere?

Here at Reboot Matt Jones just showed the newest version of Dopplr, the straightforward travel tracking, serendipity provoking service he launched with a couple of buddies. When discussing the eternal feature vs application debate any web entrepreneur is facing, he shared his vision that “Dopplr is a feature of a very large application, the Internet”.

For a totally inexplicable reason this made me think of the following: the lifespan of a newly launched online application knows 3 stages:

• the first mover stage, where the product is the only one to do something. Think Blogger in 1999, Digg in 2004, coComment in 2006, Twitter or Dopplr in 2007. At that stage it gathers all the early adopters crowd and builds a strategic advantage.

• the clone stage, where similar services start showing up all around the web. It used to take months before the clones would show up, but these days with 1) the increasing simplicity of the new services 2) the increasing maturity of technologies, it seems clones need less and less time to show up. After all Assaf took his domain name 4 hours after Scoble put coComment in orbit, and released co.mments in only a few weeks. These day Twitter clones were out 5-7 days after the father of crapublication came out.

• the free for all stage, where doing what a company does is as hard as getting a host and unzipping an open source package. This is what happened to Blogger the day Wordpress came out. Same for Digg. Competing with them is as easy as installing the free Pligg. That’s the ultimate stage, when what a company does can basically be replicated by anybody in a few minutes.

A few thoughts:
• companies are going through this cycle faster and faster. Competition is getting more and more intense.
• success factors are the brand, the user interface, the design, and the number of users joining the community.
• I believe there is room for much more than one winner. Even more with localization. After all, even Google can not rule all the markets on the planet (see South Korea)
• technology’s role has changed. It is a commodity now. Its role is simply (!) to NOT get in the way of users. Ideally it should go unnoticed.