I read an awesome book recently that made me rethink many things about location, work, and business. It was Tim Ferriss' book which I highly recommend.

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"The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich" (Timothy Ferris)

I recently had reason to head to Paris for personal reasons. I thought I would use the trip as an opportunity to try working somewhere other than Vancouver - to see if it's really possible to relocate and still work? Of course, in Ferriss' world, you only work 4 hours a week. Unfortunately I didn't get to experience THAT part of the plan.

It worked. Here's how I did it.

I moved all of my landline numbers into a Vonage account about a month prior - personal home phone, company land-line from San Francisco, company land-line from Vancouver - the works. I set up one voicemail box for all of the numbers and forwarded that to Simulscribe which transcribes voicemails to email (and does a pretty darned great job at it). Then I set up the cell to roll-over to the same Simulscribe address.

Once in Paris, I plugged in the phone and Vonage box. And realized that whoops - you can't plug 110V devices into 220V. I had fried BOTH of them. Or so I thought. It turned out that fortune favours the stupid. One of the plug converters was fried so it never passed any current through.

So I bought some transformers (220V to 110V step down transformers) for my other various chargers, bought a couple of plug converters (for the Apple power supply and the new phone that I bought) and plugged it all in. It took a couple of tries but after a call to Vonage tech support, the Vonage box was up and running on the local DSL connection and voila - my phone was plugged in and ready to receive calls at any of my numbers.

I have to admit that it was freeing (and a bit strange) to have people look at my calling code and say, "OH! You're in Vancouver!" and then have to explain that no, in fact I was in Paris, ten hours ahead of them! The sound quality was as good as it is in Vancouver, which is to say, on par with the regular plain old telephone lines that I had before.

There was only one glitch and that was more to do with the Siemens phone than anything else. It would ring but only at the moment it was actually ringing, could you hit the "ACCEPT" button. In between rings, it didn't look "pick up able". Weird.

But that very small issue aside, it means that with a laptop, skype, Gatherplace (for screen sharing), Simulscribe, a good DSL connection, and a Vonage adapter - have equipment, will travel.

I hear that Puerto Vallarta has good DSL... Or maybe Costa Rica....

Here are two interesting articles: one from Glenn Kelman, and a follow on from Guy Kawasaki on why serial entrepreneurs might not in fact be the best bet for funders. Interesting perspectives and I recognize some of Guy's cautions from my own experience.

Worth reading both articles.

This post at VC Confidential contains some fantastic quotes. I have excerpted a few of my favourites.

"The trouble with the first time entrepreneur is that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. After a failure he does know what he doesn’t know and can beat the hell out of people who still have to learn."

“All companies that go out of business do so for the same reason - they run out of money.”

"Great markets make great companies."

"I like opportunities that are addressing markets so big that even the management team can't get in its way."

"I am 100% behind my CEOs right up till the day I fire them."

"The world of technology thrives best when individuals are left alone to be different, creative, and disobedient."

"One of my jobs as a board member has been to counsel management to avoid distraction and to execute with constructive paranoia."

All fantastic and useful quotes.

Last night, my good friend Ean Jackson and I had the pleasure of speaking at the Canadian Public Relations Society on PR 2.0. We had a nearly full room, and the group was engaged and we had a great time meeting everyone. There were some great questions from the room and some good healthy debate as well.

Here is the slide deck.

Ahhh, the joys of setting up infrastructure from scratch. We need a web conferencing application that can be hosted from either a Mac or a PC and it turns out that despite the fact that there are somewhere close to a billion web conferencing applications out there, there are only two that actually work from the Mac: Gathering Place or Webex Meeting Center which can only be found in their Small and Medium Business section of their website.

These appear to be only two real options:

Gathering Place

• Cost: $29USD/user/mo with no ongoing commitment and a 14 day trial.
• Pros: Simple, easy, loads quickly, draws faster than Webex, and allows the viewer to resize the screen they are viewing (to shrink it.) Includes voice calling inside the session. Minimal feature set (in this case, a plus.)
  
• Cons: The software crashes whenever I quit it on my Mac. They don't know why. Minimal feature set. Limited kinds of sharing compared to Webex.
  

Webex Meeting Center

• Cost: $90USD/user/mo and requires a 12 month minimum commitment. What planet are these guys living on? I mean, the application is nice but I'm not sure it's THAT nice.
• Pros: Full-featured application that lets you share a desktop, an application, a browser (when you go to a webpage, your viewers go to that webpage in THEIR browser - good for showing YouTube videos or high-bandwidth sites.)
  
• Cons: Expensive.
  

What about Gotomeeting.com or Microsoft LiveMeeting?

Gotomeeting can't be hosted on a Mac. LiveMeeting can but only if you use Safari. Bleeeccchhh.

What about some of the new, lightweight conferencing applications?

Vyew is completely unusable and honestly just baffling. It doesn't work properly on the Mac at all.
Yugma crashed when I tried it too.

This industry is AWFUL.

My time at Business Objects has finally come to a close. It was an awesome two years, with a lot of learning. I met a lot of extremely talented people there and through my association with the company. I was feeling the entrepreneurial urge again so i decided to throw myself back out of the perceived safety of the corporate life and back into the chaotic startup world.  I have been out for two weeks so far and couldn't be happier. I feel like I'm "home".

Now that I'm out, I'm taking on a few different projects. I'm working with a group called Hinchcliffe and Company. They are a leading Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 consulting, training, advisory, and media firm headed by Dion Hinchcliffe. I am joined by a top-tier team that is seeding the company and it our goal to ramp up this company very quickly. I will predominantly work in the corporate training, enterprise consulting, and startup advisory area - helping startups with their business planning, go-to-market planning, technology strategy, and/or sustainability practices.

You can see some of our sites here:

Main site: http://www.hinchcliffeandco.com
Training: http://web20university.com
Media: http://enterprise2tvshow.com

This will also give me the time and flexibility to work on some other business, technology, and sustainability related projects that I have been wanting to work on for a while as well as to build out my speaking engagements and writing and blogging.

Some people ask me how I tie this all together? I explain it like this. I have come to the conclusion that it is my mission to use business and technology to create a better world. That includes Web 2.0 (bringing a social aspect to computing and to business) or Sustainability (bringing a social and ecological aspect to business).

In my new role(s), I will be doing all of that - sustainability, web 2.0, business building. I have the best "job" in the world! Because I get to work with entrepreneurs, BE an entrepreneur, and work with people who want to change the world for the better.

It's going to be a crazy and fun year - I can sense it already!

My new contact information is: troy at hinchcliffeandco dot com. My cell hasn't changed: 604-551-8275 (Vancouver). Drop me a note if we haven't spoken in a while and we'll catch up!

Have a great 2007 everybody!

Here are a few interesting notes from the opening sessions:

• Jeff Bezos
• a better question than "what's changing in the next five years" is "what is going to be the SAME over the next five or ten years?" because that allows them to build a sturdy business.
  
• he talked about the current services: message queuing, storage, computing and fulfillment. They can take inbound data jobs, store your data, store your physical goods, and provide computing cycles. So what would they build next? He wouldn't say but he did say: "when you build a house, you build from the ground up."
• So what would they build next? I think that one of the next services they will offer is a billing platform for all of that so you can turn around and bill your customers for their usage of those services. But that's just my opinion.
• Battelle interviewing Mena Trott, Joe Krause, and Jay Adelson (Digg)
• Krause: It's relatively easy to find buyers who you can sell it to for $5M. Having a $10M business means having fewer buyers. Having a $50M business means that there are really only one or two potential buyers. This impacts whether or not you want to take VC money. Because if you are taking VC money, you need to go for much higher multiples (see below.)
  
• Joe Krause made an interesting point: You might want to sell and get a 5x or 6x return on the money which is good for you, and good for your employees. But your VC is thinking, "These guys might be the 100x opportunity." So they're not excited about your 5x return and can fight it. Interesting dynamic.
• Biggest mistakes: "What was your biggest mistake"?
• ****Krause: Not launching our business model at the same time as we launched our product. We launched the product and learned a lot about it for six months. But then we launched our business model six months later and had lost those six months - we didn't learn anything about how people valued our application. Because you can't have those conversations with people about value...until you are charging!
• Apollo / Kevin Lynch:
• COOL demo from Salescorce.com's Apollo desktop. VERY nice. Same with the eBay Desktop application.
  
• WOW. Awesome word processor that is online/offline called Buzzword from Virtual Ubiquity. It does TABLES properly! For an HTML type text editor, that is unbelievable!
  

I have to duplicate this entire post here. It's brilliant. Thanks Seth for the post. I filed this under Business AND Life Lessons.

• The best time to start is when you've got enough money in the bank to support all contingencies.
• The best time to start is when the competition is far behind in technology, sophistication and market acceptance.
• The best time to start is when the competition isn't too far behind, because then you'll spend too long educating the market.
• The best time to start is when everything at home is stable and you can really focus.
• The best time to start is when you're out of debt.
• The best time to start is when no one is already working on your idea.
• The best time to start is when your patent comes through.
• The best time to start is after you've got all your VC funding.
• The best time to start is when the political environment is more friendly than it is now.
• The best time to start is after you've got your degree.
• The best time to start is after you've worked all the kinks out of your plan.
• The best time to start is when you're sure it's going to work.
• The best time to start is after you've hired the key marketing person for the new division.
• The best time to start was last year. The best opportunities are already gone.
• The best time to start is before some pundit declares your segment passe. Too late.
• The best time to start is when the new generation of processors is shipping.
• The best time to start is when the geopolitical environment settles down.

Thanks Seth.

30 days of Sustainability is once again happening in Vancouver. This year it runs from April 22 - May 21, 2007. I highly recommend that people go check out the temporary site and sign up for updates. The full site will launch sometime in the next few weeks.

Every time I read this I go off into fits of laughter. Having spent fifteen years now doing project management on one thing or another, I can relate to this very deeply. Sometimes Scott Adams really nails it.