Co-creation

Involving people in the creation of a business from the start.
Vote on the logo and choose the tagline.

Participating in the creation of a conference.

March 29, 2006 | Tags: | 2 Comments 

Time to think

I agree with Keith [ from the very interesting Pure Play blog ] that sometimes the mind gets clogged by so much thinking in a particular way or about a particular subject. It’s not that easy to free yourself from daily routine.

He went to a workshop and was really surprised by the result. The workshop is the work of Mary Whelan who is a consultant in the field of creativity and personal development. She runs The Creative Thinking Network where she manages an excelent resource about thinking skills. I should try this workshop but in the meanwhile I’ll keep her site on my reading list.

As David from Genuine VC points out: it’s important to schedule unstructured time to think.

That’s what I’ll be doing in the next 4 days at La Parra.

March 29, 2006 | Tags: | 1 Comment 

How to build an Airbus A380 in about 7 Mins

Impressive time lapse video. For those of you that like time lapse video Google is full of them.

March 28, 2006 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

reboot 8.0

Thomas is busy cooking reboot 8.0.

March 27, 2006 | | Leave a Comment 

Google Finance as information heaven

Imagine you want to know how the stock price of a company (say Apple, Inc) is doing. While at it you might want to know either who’s the CEO or what was last year’s revenue. Moreover, since news have are very important when we talk about a stock why not check the company’s related news including a match between the time when the news was broadcasted and the value of the stock before and after.

And what if you decide you want to know what are blogs saying about the company? Or in discussion groups?

What if you could have all this aggregated a well designed information visualization page? You’ve got it. It’s called Google Finance.


google_finance_apple_t.jpg  yahoo finance apple

Google Finance is not different from Yahoo! Finance in general. But as usual the devil is in the details. Just two examples of how google as delivered a better user experience and thus a better product. Google let’s you search a company by company name not just stock symbol (e.g. “Google”, “Cars” or “AAPL”). How natural is that? Google is also cleaner than Yahoo in a sense that you have more white space. Space that’s empty to let you browse information in a better way.

I noticed that Google is not displaying ads for now (and this helps the looks of it). But this is probably temporary. Like they did with search, you get lot’s of attention (users) first and then slowly introduce ads. It’s been their strategy all along.

Why am I so enthusiastic about a Finance application? Because it’s an amazing information visualization tool and because I’ll have to get back to it in another post regarding a few ideas I’ve been working on.

March 27, 2006 | | Leave a Comment 

Entrepreneurship: Europe vs US

Good to see that Fred is making his way through the quality of his work. He recently posted about the differences between the US (Silicon valley) and Europe (he is Portuguese) in respect to entrepreneurship. I was going to comment on his blog but decided to write a post (and pray for trackback magic) with my comments on his views so that other European (and Portuguese) people could follow this conversation:

As to get the conversation going here they are:

1. There are less conversations between european entrepreneurs
There are less entrepreneurial weblogs from europeans (to be totally honest, I only read a few, like Tom Coates’s Plasticbag) and there are few conversations between us here in the old continent.

In my opinion people in Europe are more afraid to share information with each other. Sharing a “bigger pie” of knowledge is still very hard to see. People tend to hide a not engage in conversations where they think they might loose some vital information. There are some examples of sharing information on entrepreneurship but it comes as the exception and not the rule.

2. Europeans don’t take as many risks in terms of innovation
There’s less risking getting things out the door in the european IT industry (other industries like design or architecture don’t seem to have that problem).

In the US we have people defending “Less is more” or “Less Software” ideas. In Europe we have only one but is strong enought: “less risk”. Graduating and getting a job at a big company is still the normal behavior. Deviation from that can cause serial social problems. Unfortunately. Besides that, Goverment dependant/financed/subsidized projects and entrepreneurship events are still what people expect to see. Private investment is still too much concentrated in banks, communications and insurances elephant companies. It’s just not easy to get startup capital like angel capital.

3. US Head-hunting gets the talent out, not in
Good people get acquired or work almost exclusively for US firms - we can use our own example: over 90% of our client base is from the US.

So as to prove your point it’s interesting to note that the biggest ever acquisition of a startup in Europe was kelkoo that was bought by Yahoo.

I believe that in the US talent it is much more spread between startups and big companies than in europe. From what I can see, there having such a dynamic startup environment people do have a real choice on whether to work for a big company for years for a confortable fixed income or try to start or join a venture and invest time and money (either own or VC) and work on real innovation.

Of course you can start a venture in Europe and even try to get some money (though it’s more difficult) but the environment is just not the same. And going against the flow gives you a lot more doubts than garanties.

Nevertheless, I do think that since the market is much less crowed there are a lot more opportunities available here.

4. Less VC investment to stimulate idea development
Even though the need for (the old kind of) venture capital is slimmer and slimmer every day, it stimulates ideas - it forces people and their projects into becoming better.

This is related to point number 2. Bootstrapping an idea can be a good thing. Experimenting, testing, making a model, getting users to give feedback to see where it can lead. But taking it seriously (meaning taking it as a day job) requires some financial support. I think a good set of angel investors would be enough to solve this, most of the time you don’t even need a VC to start.

If Fred is launching a seed idea as to get the conversation going regarding this issue then I think we could join him. Letting the conversation flow is critically important.

Picking up Fred’s question on So what can really be done? I also think the answer is: to get out there and do things, talk to people and create. I’ll add one more because I believe one can only create if his mindset is on the right mood. Enjoy it!

March 15, 2006 | | 1 Comment 

Missing a point

I was browsing the newspaper this morning and saw this advert.


If you were a advertising a new easier and quicker domain name registration process would you choose as an example a wrong domain name? That’s exactly what dns.pt did when they choose to print www.àguas_do_gerês.fr on their advert and make people miss the point completely. If the process is easier and quicker why not explain why is that so? Why not just keep it simple?

March 11, 2006 | Tags: | 1 Comment 

Why the @#$% would I pay to hear the president talk?

Why the @#$% would somebody dial a phone number and pay 0,7 euros to hear a sound bite (?!) of the first sentence of the prof Portugal or of the five challenges that he posed to the goverment?


Is this what Expresso means by Multimedia? Do they think that delivering CDs with Multimedia information is of any value? What is the value to the readers? Am I missing something?

Maybe Expresso should make a subscription based service so that we can receive a MMS (or SMS) each time the president (or anyone else) speaks.

I hope that the new competition (in portuguese) won’t take long and can bring some fresh ideas.

March 11, 2006 | Tags: | 2 Comments 

Darwinistic process of Web 2.0

Like Loic I really like the environment that has been created around creativity and entrepreneurship on the Web. (Some) people are taking risks (either with VC or their own money) and creating excelent problem-solving Web products for users.

Even if, like Jason Calcanis says, 90% will be out of business I too believe this is the way to go. Investors, developers and users (yes, the individual is what matters) all need to try and find which Web products solve users problems better.

As usual, all of this products will follow a Darwinistic process of natural selection where its users will have a predominant role on evaluating and decide to use the products (and talk about it) or simply rejecting them (and talk about it too!). Hopefully the best ones will survive and grow, and the others will either learn and change (like flickr did converting from a massive multi-player online game to a massive photosharing website) or simply disappear.

Web2.0

Sidenote: the image is a great overview of logos and brands around the Web today. Great image.

March 10, 2006 | Tags: | 1 Comment 

Cheesecake surprise

You know you’re in good hands when a friend, knowing you’re home with a flu (not avian), drops by your place with a slice of your favourite cheesecake. Thank you!

Cheese-cake

March 9, 2006 | Tags: | 1 Comment 

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  • about

    andre_ribeirinho_t.jpg My name is André Ribeirinho, I'm an entrepreneur who lives in Portugal
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  • my startup

    Adegga - Social Wine Discovery


    Adegga is a social wine discovery service. The idea is to take the complexity out of wine and allow people to discover wines based other people's choices.