Archive for July, 2006
This was a fun week. I’m involved in the Telus New Ventures program which is a business plan competition sponsored by Telus each year. Up to 60 teams of entrepreneurs submit business plans and go through rounds of mentoring and judging, mentoring and judging, until one plan is chosen as the winner of $60,000 [...]
Those of you who you know me well know that I disdain the entire “Balance Movement” with its focus on balance above all. Where is the balance in Stephen Wolfram squirrelling himself away in his attic for fifteen years to write his canon “A New Kind of Science” or in any serious athlete’s pursuit [...]
Yes, it has been a long wait. When we started this Manifesto, it was “way back in October 2005″. The world has moved a long way in that time. Much of what we wrote then is now already out of date!! But the current draft will be released for better or for worse at the [...]
Darren Barefoot asked, “Does the Blackberry Reduce Email Response?” and I would have to make two comments:
Structure ALWAYS drives behaviour: The computer is easier and faster. The Blackberry is clumsy at best. Therefore for any given 10 emails received on one or the other, it can be assumed that there would be a [...]
I would like to offer up a business idea to an enterprising young engineering student. Develop something that operates a bit like a speeding ticket camera but that is for sound level instead. Build it so that it can sit in intersections and detect noise levels of Harley Davidsons and other bikes with modified [...]
My last post was on IBM jumping into lightweight apps and wikis. This news story from CNN covers how IBM is releasing Lotus Notes for Linux. Who’s using Lotus Notes anymore? Just the poor suckers who bought in and kept it as the world’s most expensive Exchange replacement? Bizarre.
Here’s a good article on IBM’s moves into light-weight end-user application development using wiki type tools.
And another one on IBM’s move into Enterprise mashups.
Has hell frozen over? Maybe we can go skating.
Peter Rip over at Leapfrog Ventures has a great article where he compares Web 2.0 apps with PCs back in the mini-computer era:
Here’s the quote but I suggest reading the full post:
Today the Enterprise seems to be The Land That Time Forgot. The IT lock-down of the Enterprise (because of [...]
(For the most recent articles on Web 2.0, check out my full Web 2.0 articles category.)
(This original post was written in July 2006. There have been MANY updates. Please read all the way through to the end of the article for all updates as my opinion has changed over time as the vendors have [...]
I have a new favourite market segmentation acronym: VSB. It stands for Very Small Business. Zoli Erdo has two excellent articles on this market segment (article 1, article 2). The reason that VSB is now beginning to make sense is directly tied to Long Tail economics: if your production costs are lower, your customer [...]
Jupiter Research reported in June 2006 that 34% of all large companies have deployed blogs and a further 35% will deploy them by the end of 2006, totalling 70% of large companies. I find those numbers shockingly out of touch with my experience and reading. It would be interesting to dive into this [...]
Joe Kraus from JotSpot calls it “The Consumer Enterprise“. Ray Lane from Kleiner Perkins calls it “The Inter-Personal Enterprise“.
I suspect we’re naming things the way we originally called the automobile “the horseless carriage”. In other words, we are naming things based on the old worldview.
We probably need a [...]
I am happy to see that Vancouver has come alive in a competitive frenzy to enjoy soccer. But thankfully it’s over. I have had to listen to honking horns of Italian fans for almost 12 hours now today as they drive up and down Denman Street hanging out of their cars and whooping and [...]
There has been a lot of talk about how Web 2.0 doesn’t need VCs. The general outline of the discussion is thus:
Web 2.0 companies are capital efficient and don’t need a lot of money
they should start small and grow efficiently
VCs have certain size thresholds below which they won’t fund because the overhead involved [...]
This is brilliant. From the people over at Innovation Creators.
Includes the ever popular reflection at the bottom too!
The gist of the first half of the day was “Small is Good”. Small companies, small teams, small successes, small communities. It felt a little like a revival town hall meeting with people saying things like, “I’m John and I have a small company that allows me to stay home with my kids and [...]
For reasons related to work, I spent yesterday NOT attending Gnomedex but I did manage to make the dinner and get together afterwards. There was a large Vancouver contingent there. All of the usual suspects – Boris Mann, Darren Barefoot and his lovely wife Julia, Andre Charland from e-business Applications, and the entire Qumana [...]
If you haven’t read the LA Times article, the Men’s Health article, or the Men’s Journal article on Crossfit, you might not know what it is. It is a fitness regimen/program that started in LA about ten years ago and that is now spreading across North America, and which is favoured by the firefighting, [...]
I picked up a MacBook13 Black the other day with 2GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive from the good people over at the Yaletown location of MacStation. (Thanks Paul and Harald!)
This is probably one of the nicest pieces of Apple hardware I have ever had the good fortune of owning [...]
