A very relevant article in The Economist about the DIY/hack trend of the amateur revolution: “Technological tinkering, or hacking, is not limited to computers. Cars, cameras and vacuum-cleaners can be hacked too”. Some excerpts I found interesting:

Today’s technological tinkerers, however, have a far wider range of household gizmos to play with and modify, from cars to cameras. Getting them to do new things, and not merely what the manufacturer had in mind, is an increasingly popular pastime.
(…)
But in some cases, such hacks can undermine the manufacturer’s business model. Consider games consoles, for example, which operate on a “razor and blades” principle. Consoles are often sold at a loss, but console-makers receive a licence fee of a few dollars for each game sold—so provided each customer buys enough games, the console-maker eventually makes money. When Microsoft launched its Xbox console in 2001, hackers raced to install Linux on it, which transformed it into a low-cost, high performance media-playback system. While this was a minority sport, anyone who did this without buying any games was, in effect, receiving a subsidy from Microsoft. Little wonder, then, that the new Xbox 360 console features significantly beefed-up security measures.
(…)
But some companies, at least, have chosen to embrace hackers. iRobot, the company behind the Roomba robot vacuum-cleaner, includes an external data connector in the device and has even documented how to use it. While most customers appreciate their Roombas for their autonomous cleaning skills, there is also a small minority of users who want to reprogram them. iRobot is one of the few firms to acknowledge and appreciate customers who like to tinker. After all, there are few manifestations of feedback as heartfelt as someone who is willing to spend their own time and effort to improve a product.

Some companies are not well-aware that this trend might modify their business model.

A long article about a question that made my week-end: is Europe is THE place to be in Tech right now. Let me develop ;-)

One of the questions that consistently came up in our discussions with VCs was the localization. Where would coComment incorporate and live if it was to become a company?

In 2001 the answer would have been simple: Silicon Valley. The money, workforce, partners, infrastructure, everything we would have needed was there and only there. But today things are not that clear, and I even wonder if Europe is actually not a better place to be. Let’s see

Silicon Valley is less attractive

From last week’s edition of the Mercury News:
Baby boomers are retiring, workers are getting squeezed out by the high cost of living and foreign professionals are moving back home.
That was the buzz in the Valley: the Chinese and Indians are going back home to work on their own projects. The rents are completely insane, and the infrastructure sucks (Californians pay 250$ more per year in car reparations than the rest of the US citizens). For the first time in history, THE valley has to fight to retain talent, the breach is open.

Europe is hot

• reason number one is – I’m sure you guessed – the Skype deal. The company, based in Luxembourg with developers in Estonia, had a worldwide success and got bought by an American corporation despite being based in Europe. So it is posible, you can make it big in Europe. We all know now.
• Investors are turning to Europe, following the Skype deal but also because they see a market with potential and less competition. That means more money invested on this continent, and that could snowball into something. Money isn’t everything (see the bullet below) but it sure facilitates the blossoming process.
• take Switzerland – the market I know quite well. Lately, four Swiss startups have been in the global news: plazes (Zurich), ads-click (Geneva), Wikio and coComment (Bern). That’s because we now live in a meritocracy. Money, VCs, and the press no longer decide what will be successful. Great products/services with intuitive designs that solve a real problem win.

Europe has a few unique assets

• You’ve heard the old adage: Europeans have ideas, but they can’t take it to the market. Thing is, taking an idea to the market is getting easier with each passing day. In the future, the edge will be more about having ideas, less about being able to implement them (I’m simplifying for sure).
• another piece of wisdom: the European market is too small. But adwords have no boundaries, and if you’re smart enough you can speak any language by outsourcing localization to your users. There are enough global customers – connected to the web, speaking English – for thousands of companies around the globe, wherever they are.
• slow is right, and we’re prepared for that. I’m really convinced that there is something in the slow movement initiated by Carl Honoré. As Bruno Giussani writes in a recent blog post about slow, “we’ve lost the race for working hours against the Chinese anyway, and our future is in the value added, the creativity, and for that our brain needs time for relaxation.” True, and I feel that Europe is better prepared for that than the rest of the world. Here I am surrounded by people who want to preserve themselves, not to get overwhelmed by work. Two of my closest friends decided to reduce their work time at the birth of their kids, while it seems that the US is about leaving later than the guy above you in the pyramid, and Asia about working 20 hours a day 7 days a week (unfortunately without anybody asking if you like it or not). Ideas come to those who take time, and our setup is better suited for that.
• all those years of being in the shadow of Stanford and the MIT have finally forced the Universities to move, and do two things: 1) get together and unify their systems (the Bologna process, introducing more transparency, mobility, and therefore competition between the schools), and 2) get closer to the economic world.
• there is less competition for talent. How many attractive web 2.0 startups in Europe? Impossible to say, but surely less than in the US where finding programmers is again getting difficult. We have great schools here, and surely more talent looking for challenges and cool projects.
• there is a great infrastructure. Take the train in California, you will get my point.

Europe has a chance (and needs to change)!

All these factors – and there are probably more btw – give me the intuition Europe is not such a bad place. But there are a few things that need to change, for example:

• top people not answering their emails. LIFT exposed one thing about Europe: the probability that someone answers an invitation to speak email is inversely proportional to the person’s importance. It seems that the higher you get, the more unreachable you have to become. Tim Berners Lee, Ray Ozzie, Robert Scoble, Vinton Cerf, all these guys answered me – and remain REACHABLE despite their amazing careers – while I’ve never heard back of Daniel Borel, Mark Burki, André Kudelski or Stelios. This doesn’t matter in the old top-down world, but is a huge problem in the bottom-up era. Ideas come from the smaller guys, established players better listen or innovation will never come out of the dark.
• get together. Again, LIFT. But also Reboot, Innovate Europe, Pedro and André’s upcoming conference in Lisbon, we need more occasions to network and get together. Good things come out of these gatherings.
• take risks, try things you’ve never done before, don’t fear failure. Failure is the best learning experience you can get!
• be proud! There is a fine line between confidence and arrogance, the reason why most Europeans don’t even like to appear to self assured. Having been around Americans lately, I like their approach much more. They don’t hesitate to speak up when they do good, but also accept the blame when hey have to take it. That’s totally fair.

If I’m writing this it’s not to start a debate over what’s the best place to do business. That’s an endless debate and it’s not the right time to start a company anyway ;-)

What I mean is that Europe might not be such a bad place after all, and that we might have a few assets to play in the global game. It’s now up to all those with ideas to take their responsibilities. Stand up, do your thing, now is the time (and it has never been easier)!

In the april 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review (Vol. 84, Issue 4), there is a column by Lawrence Prusak that struck me: “The World Is Round”. The author is actually taking the counter position of Thomas Friedman who claims that ““Several technological and political forces have converged, and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance – or, soon, even language.” along with Bill Gates or Jakob Nielsen (who advocate for a similar idea).

Yes, we are interconnected on a truly astonishing scale. But Gates, Friedman, and many others make a fundamental error (…) Their mistake is that they’re confusing information with knowledge.
(…)
What’s the difference between information and knowledge? Information is a message, one-dimensional and bounded by its form: a document, an image, a speech, a genome, a recipe, a symphony score. You can
package it and instantly distribute it to anyone, anywhere. Google, of course, is currently the ultimate information machine, providing instantaneous access to virtually any piece of information you can imagine
(…)
Knowledge results from the assimilation and connecting of information through experience, most often through apprenticeship or mentoring.
(…)
Most of the people in the world remain out of the knowledge loop and off the information grid. One billion people on the Internet means there are five and a half billion people who aren’t on it. Bringing those people into the global conversation is essential to achieving true democratization of knowledge. But simply giving everyone access to e-mail and Google will never in itself flatten the earth. Until our governments, NGOs, schools, corporations, and other institutions embrace the idea that knowledge – not information – is the key to prosperity, most of the world’s people will remain a world apart.

Très bonne sortie de la semaine, le dernier livre de Joël de Rosnay et Carlo Revelli : La révolte du pronétariat : Des mass média aux média des masses

Décryptant les tendances actuelles en termes des changement dues aux nouvelles technologies, de Rosnay et Revelli traite du nouveau paradigme culturel actuel. Un extrait:

«Nous allons vivre la montée en puissance de l’Internet des gens, capables face aux “infocapitalistes” qui détiennent les contenus, leur programmation et leurs droits de produire et de diffuser leurs propres textes, images, sons et vidéo avec les mêmes outils que les professionnels. Au lieu de gérer la rareté, comme dans la société industrielle, il va falloir apprendre � gérer l’abondance de la société de l’information.

Suivre également le blog du livre. Que l’on acquiesce ou non, ce livre semble amener matière � reflexion dans le débat sur l’évolution de la culture (et des médias) actuels.

Leapfrogging is not only for third-world countries. There is this relevant information in the NYT/IHT today:

A recent survey of how the Internet is being used in Europe shows that in some key areas, the east is ahead. It’s a symptom of the “leapfrog effect,” in which technology laggards skip a couple of middle steps that mature markets take, according to Alex Burmaster, European Internet analyst at Nielsen/Net Ratings.

For instance, a higher percentage of Internet users in Lithuania – 42 percent – access the Web from portable devices like mobile phones than in Britain, where the figure is 25 percent, the Net Ratings survey showed.

The same is true for instant messaging, looking for a job online and a handful of other tasks that the industry considers advanced use of the Internet, Burmaster said.
(…)
More startling, perhaps, are the survey results for online news. Eastern European surfers are more likely to be reading the Internet version of newspapers than the print version, he said, and far more likely to get news off the Net than Western Europeans. Ukraine, Hungary, Poland and Latvia are the four European markets whose online users are most likely to read an online newspaper, the survey showed

For reader who are not aware of it, leapfrogging is “the notion that areas which have poorly-developed technology or economic bases can move themselves forward rapidly through the adoption of modern systems without going through intermediary steps

The best-known example of leapfrogging is the adoption of mobile phones in the developing world. It’s easier and faster to put in cellular towers in rural and remote areas than to put in land lines, and as a result, cellular use is exploding.” (According to Worldchanging).

The WSJ last week had a good column about an interesting fact: for some technology companies, ‘Beta’ becomes a long-term label (by DAVID KESMODEL)

For years, the term “beta” referred to a relatively short period of testing by a select group of outsiders. These days, beta editions are not only released to the public, but also stay in that mode for months, or even years. Google News, Google’s news aggregator, has been in beta for three years. Microsoft’s antispyware application has been in beta for nearly a year.
(…)
The companies say consumers benefit from the practice because the widespread testing helps them make critical improvements and determine which extra features users want.(…) Many consumers will tolerate problems encountered with beta services
because many are offered free of charge

Maybe it’s connected to the ‘kidult’ phenomenon (Kidult = A middle-aged person who continues to participate in and enjoy youth culture)?

The latest report from the Pew Internet, which deals with ‘teen content creators’, is very insightful. It reports that more than half of online teens have created content for the internet; and most teen downloaders think that getting free music files is easy to do

Some 57% of online teens create content for the internet. (…) These Content Creators report having done one or more of the following activities: create a blog; create or work on a personal webpage; create or work on a webpage for school, a friend, or an organization; share original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos online; or remix content found online into a new creation. The most popular Content Creating activities are sharing self-authored content and working on webpages for others.
(…)
Bloggers and to a lesser extent teens who read blogs are a particularly tech-savvy group of internet users. They have more technological tools such as cell phones and PDAs and are more likely to use them to go online. Not only do they live in technologically rich households, but they are more likely to have their own computer at home and to be able to use it in a private space. They help adults do things online. Most strikingly, they have more experience with almost all online activities that we asked about. Bloggers are more likely than non-bloggers to engage in everyday online activities such as getting news, using IM or making online purchases, but content creating and sharing activities are the areas where bloggers are far ahead of non-bloggers.

The report is of great interest. In addition, people interested in sort of content creation might been interest in check this “I want to” webpage which summarizes the large number of web applications to manipulate content on the web (sharing pictures, do podcasts, share bookmarks…)