1.8 Planet Earth

Today, I have received 2 different inputs regarding the way we are using natural resources.

First Nuno and his post on paying more for renewable energies (in portuguese). Then a friend sent me this article and this Ecological Footprint Quiz.

Here’s the result of the quiz:

earth day

1.8 planets ? A quiz like this is worth what is worth and it’s values shouldn’t be taken seriously. Anyway it’s a very good tool to raise awareness.

The fact is that trying is definitely not enough.

October 31, 2006 | Tags: | 1 Comment 

Digital Identity Mapping

Digital Identity Mapping
Digital Identity Mapping
Originally uploaded by fredcavazza.

Very good overview (in french) on how some of our Identity is moving online in several different ways.

There has been a shift from online services where Identity is (kind of) hidden and only known to the site owner (like Amazon and PayPal) towards a more open environment where our Identity is shared.

Sharing is a new driver in Identity building because it helps to change that same Identity like, for example, LinkedIn and Flickr.

Also interesting to note how shopping related services are being used as part of a Digital Identity. Social Shopping services like Crowdstorm (where I first saw this image) have a focus on personal profiles are allowing people to share what they like in a more interesting way than how it was being done a few years ago at epinions.

October 31, 2006 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Social Wine Shopping at Adegga

David Beisel’s post on (The Beginnings of) Social Commerce is very a good description of Adegga.

I envision a day where you can search your social network to find and see what products others who you know own –and– whether or not they like them.

Moreover, you could learn about the people you don’t know when they recommend a product (which you don’t know now on “traditional” shopping engines).

With this information, you could make a more informed buying decision about products you are considering – and keep up to date on the ones you don’t yet know you should be buying.

This info would more than just allow individuals to keep up with the Joneses… True social commerce would provide consumers with rich social context and relevancy to the purchases which they are making.

Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion also does a good addon:

Social Shopping can take several forms, but in sum it means creating places where people can collaborate online, get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and services and then purchase them. It shrinks the research and purchasing cycle by creating a single destination powered by the power of many.

Both are great views on what Adegga is trying to do to support people with a passion for wine.

adegga_logo_good.jpg

By the way, development is going great. I’ll post some more news soon.

note: cross-posted over at the Adegga blog.

October 27, 2006 | | 2 Comments 

LIFT07: 7-8-9 February 2007 Geneva, Switzerland

LIFT07 site is up and lots of details are coming out as we speak.


Last year it was a great event and Laurent and the team have been working hard on making LIFT07 another great conference.

What’s is LIFT ?

LIFT is a gathering of talented observers, explorers, and builders who discuss the current challenges and creative solutions presented by emerging technologies. LIFT is three days to face cutting edge business models, bold predictions, radical thinking, and get new ideas to inject into your own part of the planet.

LIFT has a simple goal: connect people who are passionate about new applications of technology and propel their conversations into the broader world to improve life and work.

What are we going to talking about ?

This year we will talk about the web, mobile technologies, economy, design, technological overload, entrepreneurship, ubiquitous computing, social software, ethic, and much much more.

Who are the speakers ?

Lots of interesting people have confirmed their presence and I’m already looking forward to meet them and see what they are going to talk about.

The speakers list already includes: Stephanie Hannon (Google Product Manager), Adam Greenfield (Writer and consultant), Robert Scoble (Blogger, technical evangelist, and author), Anne Galloway (PhD Candidate and Lecturer), Régine Debatty (Blogger), Bernino Lind (Entrepreneur), Pierre Chappaz (co-CEO of Netvibes, founder of Wikio and Kelkoo), Beth Krasna (Independant board member (BCV, COOP, ETH-Rat, Raymond Weil)), Nathan Eagle (MIT Design Laboratory), Colin Henderson (Blogger, Director at Bank of Montreal), Julian Bleecker (University of Southern California), Daniela Cerqui (Social and cultural anthropologist), Jan Christoph Zoels (Senior Associate Professor at Interaction-Ivrea), Frédéric Kaplan (Researcher at CRAFT - EPFL), Jan Chipchase (Principal Researcher, User Research group, Nokia), Lee Bryant (On-line communication and community specialist), Daniel Kaplan (Founder and CEO of the Next Generation Internet Foundation), Paola Ghillani (Paola Ghillani & Friends Ltd, for a better world through the economy), Christophe Guignard (Fabric.ch), Sampo Karjalainen (Chief Creative Officer of Habbo Hotel).

Why should you go ?

* You missed LIFT06, and it was pretty cool thanks to 350 passionate people from around the globe.
You suspect that somebody, somewhere is exploring amazing things that you know nothing about. You are right, it’s happening now, and LIFT is a good start.
* You attend conferences in your increasingly narrow field but crave for input from farther away. Let’s talk about web 2.0, mobile phones, finance, robots, social software, or ethics.
* You are getting bored, you are losing your edge, you need a kick in the ass.
* You like mountains and snow.

No excuses for not going, right ? Even flying to Geneva is cheap (< 100 euros) if you use EasyJet.

I have already signed up. More at the conference website and if you’re interested register and join the conversation.

Update: I’ll be staying with Hugo at the City Hostel Geneva.

October 26, 2006 | Tags: | 1 Comment 

Moleskine City Notebooks

I must buy two of this lovely Moleskine City Notebooks.

One to add more stuff to the notes from A small guide to Lisbon and one to add all the notes I have been collecting from my journeys in London.

What’s inside ?

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More info at moleskine@pt (in portuguese) and a very good review and more photos here.

Moleskine City Notebooks

October 26, 2006 | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment 

Seth Godin on Marketing

Interesting view by Seth Godin on The accidental marketer.

Every person is a marketer, and anyone crazy enough and passionate enough to start something is definitely a marketer. It’s not great programming that turns one Net company into a success while another flounders. More often than not, it’s about how good a job the amateur running the marketing and design did.

In a startup the programmers are the marketers and the product developers. All with passion.

This is probably why startups are able to innovate better than bigger organizations.

October 17, 2006 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Wine & Jazz

Relaxing while having a glass of Versus 2004 (no link, yet) and listening to radioiojazz via iTunes…

Versus 2004 wine

October 16, 2006 | Tags: | 6 Comments 

Mind the Knowledge Worker

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about knowledge workers. I’ve been reading, learning and talking to some people about how organizations are still not aware what a knowledge worker is and what can be done to improve their productivity. In fact, by not paying attention to these workers organizations are making them less productive and generally demotivated.

What is a knowledge worker?(1)

According to Thomas Davenport (researcher and author of the book Thinking for a Living):

knowledge workers are people whose primary job is to do something with knowledge: to create it, distribute it, apply it.

And he explains why they are so important:

Knowledge workers create the innovations and strategies that keep their firms competitive and the economy healthy.

But, he acknowledges that there’s a problem and says:

companies continue to manage this new breed of employee with techniques designed for the Industrial Age. As this critical sector of the workforce continues to increase in size and importance, that’s a mistake that could cost companies their future.

So, where is the problem ? And what are these Industrial Age techniques things that keep being used ?

The workplace (design)

In article on Why Office Design Matters, Thomas Davenport, tells about the problem of bad workplace design:

One factor that affects knowledge worker performance that isn’t well understood is the physical work environment—the offices, cubicles, buildings, and mobile workplaces in which knowledge workers do their jobs.

Even more unfortunately, most decisions about the knowledge work environment are made without seriously considering their implications for performance.

Continuing he’s reseach he came to a few conclusions:

Knowledge workers prefer closed offices, but seem to communicate better in open ones.

Which I think, clearly indicates that knowledge workers should be able to easily access both types of workplaces according to which kind of work they were currently doing. I’m not saying every knowledge worker should have a Bionic Offices(2). But having a private space for concentration tasks and a more open area for every other stuff would be great.

Knowledge workers move around in the course of their work.

What this means is that knowledge workers need to have access to the best tools that will make their jobs easier and more productive. This includes laptop computers, telephones (with internet capability) and easy access to books and files.

Knowledge workers collaborate.

This means that they need places to do so. Meeting spaces, conference rooms and whiteboards are easy to make available and should be available in every organization that want their knowledge workers to collaborate.

Knowledge workers work in the office.

But they also like to flexibility to work at home occasionally. Being in the office gives them access to share gossip, exchange tacit knowledge, or build social capital (3).

Knowledge workers communicate with people who are close by

It’s part of the knowledge workers job to share by communicating with other people. Thomas Davenport claims that the closer two workers are physically, more chances they will communicate frequently. E-mail and instant messaging have changed all this (making communication ubiquitous) but person-to-person communication should be easily accessible too. Team members should be able to meet each other quickly if necessary.

Management

On another article from Working Knowledge on Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation the authors claim that management has a great deal of responsabilty in a workers motivation:

The great majority of employees are quite enthusiastic when they start a new job. But in about 85 percent of companies, our research finds, employees’ morale sharply declines after their first six months—and continues to deteriorate for years afterward.

And they conclude:

The fault lies squarely at the feet of management—both the policies and procedures companies employ in managing their workforces and in the relationships that individual managers establish with their direct reports.

According to the article there 3 goals that most workers seek from their work:

Equity: To be respected and to be treated fairly in areas such as pay, benefits, and job security.
Achievement: To be proud of one’s job, accomplishments, and employer.
Camaraderie: To have good, productive relationships with fellow employees.

The authors then claim the obvious:

to maintain an enthusiastic workforce, management must meet all three goals.

One goal cannot be substituted for another. Improved recognition cannot replace better pay, money cannot substitute for taking pride in a job well done, and pride alone will not pay the mortgage.

The article then goes on to explain What individual managers can do(4).

Resuming

The idea is that knowledge workers are a different type of worker and they should be respected as such. Moreover it should have access to the kind of workplace conditions that allow him to make the best of his job.

The more confortable knowledge workers feel in their work enviromnments (physically and mentaly) the more productive they’ll be, the more knowledge they’ll share and the better the organization will compete.

Further reading
From my research into this subject I’ve found out about 2 books that seem to be higlhy recommended reading. Peopleware is a recommendation of Joel Spolsky and Thinking for a Living from Thomas Davenport.

PeopleWare  Thinking for a Living

(1) If you need a more practical example on why a pilot can be considered a knowledge worker and someone that makes pizzas isn’t, read this great interview (tip: because knowledge is not a primary component of the job).
(2) Although Aeron chairs and double screens would definitely be nice.
(3) Social Capital on Wikipedia
(4) What individual managers can do is one of the best articles I’ve read on this issue and I highly recommend it to anyone managing a team of people.

Update: great Field Guide to Developers from Joel Spolsky.

October 14, 2006 | Tags: | 6 Comments 

Portuguese Web market is very similar to China’s

Reading a post about the Top Web Apps in China I discovered that the Portuguese Web market is very similar to China’s Web market.

sapo homepage sina homepage

Big companies still dominate the market

so far there are no outstanding small startups that have successfully gained the attention of ordinary internet users. For example, in the blog hosting market Blogcn, Bokee and Blogbus were among the first movers. But after big companies Sina, Sohu and Baidu entered the scene, they won market share quickly

Portugal: SAPO has the biggest share in the market and although there are are a few startups they haven’t gained the attention of ordinary internet users.

Chinese startups often copy the Silicon Valley model

Sometimes, just a copycat even without any change.

..but as usually more than one company does this, it eventually results in tough competition to differentiate and gather/lock in users as quickly as possible. Some are making use of China’s unique characteristics in terms of mobile penetration, labor cost, cheap logistics and lack of credit cards.

Portugal: There are small innovations here and there, but still, companies prefers to follow industry trends and try to apply them to the Portuguese market.

M&A (Mergers & Acquisitions) is rare in the China market

Tangos says M&A is rare in the China market, which makes it more difficult for China’s startups to raise funding and find an exit.

Portugal: M&A in the Web industry are rare (if existent).

China’s mobile sector has more innovation than the Web sector, because of the high penetration rate of mobile handsets and highly developed short message, ringtone and ringback tone services.

Portugal: I wouldn’t say that the mobile market has more innovation than the Web marktet but is does have much more users and there’s also a high penetration rate of mobile handsets and highly developed short message, ringtone and ringback tone services.

…in the general Web sector the big companies - Sina, Sohu, Baidu, Netease, etc. - seldom acquire startups, unlike what usually happens in Silicon Valley. In China the bigcos “just build new services by themselves.”

Portugal:: This could be the description of the Portuguese market. Big companies like SAPO (where I work) never buy startups and most of the time prefer to just build the new services.

In my opinion there are several reasons for this to happen. Most of the companies, SAPO could have used, in the past, to get market share by acquisition didn’t seem to have enough users / quality. On the other hand there’s a strong technical team than can deliver great results (and it does).

Foreign companies find it difficult to compete

language barriers, difference in culture and government policies and regulations make it difficult for foreign companies to compete in China’s market.

Portugal: foreign companies either have an general worldwide strategy for countries like Portugal (think of hi5, google and MSN Messenger) or they just don’t care about the Portuguese market since it’s quite small (think Amazon, Yahoo! or eBay) and it would too expensive to enter the market and compete with the leader - SAPO.

Going through the other Web Market Overviews (Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan and India) you can see that China and Portugal have much in common and both are very different from other more open markets (like the French Web market) where the values of startups (risk, flexibility, creativity) is driving innovation and bringing new ideas to the market.

October 11, 2006 | Tags: | 5 Comments 

Irish government approach with startups

The Irish government has an interesting approach to the way they help the company base grow and create a lot of new jobs along with it.

The way the program works is explained in this conversation where Loic interviews Andries Molenaar from Enterprise Ireland.

Loic comments that:

Instead of investing hundreds of millions of euros in search engines nobody uses, they invest the same amount in startups, along with VC funds. One could argue that public money is not here for that but Europe does not have enough entrepreneurs and when they start their business it is too difficult for them to find seed money. Andries Molenaar explains us how Ireland helps.

I think the problem of investing with public money is not really a problem. Goverments have so many different ways to spend money that spending 4 million euros in this program is close nothing and it cleary helps to create startups and grow small and medium businesses. According to Andries they have supported around 750 companies with seed money (with values around 100 000 euros). They do not make money (nor do they loose) but they help entrepreurship in its whole and that’s certainly worth a lot.

From what I know in Portugal there are very few programs to support these kind of ventures (maybe only one ?). But to get the money (that you obviously need or otherwise you wouldn’t be asking…) you usually need to go through piles of bureaucracy and wait a couple months. By then, either you idea has been implemented or the market timing might have disappeared.

It’s a good thing that a program like this exists. But its has to be much more flexible, faster and risk taking. Maybe it is, but then the message must be more clearly communicated.

October 11, 2006 | Tags: , , , | 7 Comments 

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