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.
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.
I found this stunning YouTube video on John Chow's blog here.
The Bugatti has to race a mile, turn around, and race back. The EF-2000 has to take off, race a mile into the air vertically and then turn around and fly towards the ground another mile and then cross the same finish line as the car.
VERY well done and hilarious that somebody bothered to do it at all!
"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."
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's what I (and many thousands of road warriors) want Google.
I want a local cached always up to date copy of my entire Google docs set of files. I want to create a folder on my local drive and it should automagically sync with Google docs without my ever thinking about it so that whenever I get on a plane, not only can I search for it using Google desktop or Spotlight (I'm on a Mac) and see the contents, but I can open and save files into it. And even drag word/excel files into it too. And when I get back online, it should auto-sync to my Google docs folder. I'm currently in chaos with a big batch of old files on my hard drive and a batch of new files on Google docs and duplicates in both places and frankly, it's becoming a nightmare.
Google, I have said it before and I'll say it again. As long as you maintain your commitment to privacy and security, I'm okay with giving you my documents and I'll pay you too. I need this functionality and so do others.
UPDATE: As I was about to post this, my friend Jonathan Lambert pointed me to this article about Google Gears - a toolkit for building offline apps. Looks like we're on the way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
Many of you know that I was on the selection committee for "Why Office 2.0 Matters" - a one day conference being organized by the Dealmaker Media team in SF. The one day session will look at 32 of the most promising companies emerging in the Office-productivity-on-the-web category.
As part of the run-up to the conference, the team decided to hold a blog relay - "The Radar Relay" - where different writers would summarize the week's Office 2.0 news at the end of the week. This is my week. But you might want to start here first if you haven't been keeping up to date until now.
Also, if you haven’t registered for Under the Radar yet, the readers of this blog can take advantage of a special price at this link. I’ll be there, to see what the judging panel think of the selections that our committee made, and also to give a brief talk about Office 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.
On with the Radar Relay. Tthis week has been ripe with office 2.0 news. There is so much that I'm going to do it in point-form:
A web application designed to help people through their bankruptcies was cited for "practicing the law without a license" and its creator was charged and found guilty. The case is currently under appeal. (thanks to Kurzweilai.net for the link).
The Office 2.0 Database tipped the scales at over 450 Office 2.0 startups. 95% of those will be gone in 36 months but who cares? As Paul Kedrosky says, "It takes a lot of dead bodies to fill a swamp" when you want to get to the other side.
Gianpaolo gave us an 8-floor, 3-bullet point "Why SaaS for the Enteprise" pitch. I would add to his points the ability for users to pilot-test without IT involvement (which really rolls up to shorter time to value though). I think his 3 bullets are absolutely awesome. Concise, and to the point.
The world continues to twitter about Twitter. Millions of people pinging each other with little tidbits of information on what they are doing at the moment. I know that many of the things that take off seem to confound people but you have to realize that deep down in biological and spiritual cores, we are social creatures. We are designed to be social from the ground up. But as people leave organized religion, and as fewer people get married, and as fewer people have kids, and as fewer people live in multi-family homes, there becomes a vast social vaccuum waiting to be filled - hence the explosion of blogs (find your community), photo-sharing (meet people with an appreciation for art), SMS'ing silly messages to each other, or signing up for Twitter - these are all manifestations of a desire to find and stay connected to a community in an ever more disconnected world. I don't doubt that we will develop a bunch of these tools along the way and will eventually be in partially aware, partially connected states to our communities at all time - but will be actually be social or have any friends? It reminds me of the quote I read the other day, "I unsubscribed from all of my social networks so that I would have time to invite friends over for dinners!" Also, here is a shortcut to using Twitter.
Google's diabolical plan to plant people in Microsoft is paying off. Microsoft has managed to make Office 2007 and Outlook 2007 both slow and destructive to data at the same time as Google has launched their applications with a service level agreement (that they breached already.) Lots of notes here on Zoli's blog.
Anne Zelenka posted "Ten Things I Hate About You, Web 2.0". Funny list. Anne, how about Office 2.0? I'll start with my top four most annoying things about Office 2.0:
NOT ONE COMPANY has managed to make a text editor that doesn't completely suck.
Do we really need 50 spreadsheet apps? Are we really that lacking in creativity?
Web 2.0 was about wasting time. Office 2.0 is really about being productive with your time. We need more web 2.0 in office 2.0 or the conferences are going to be REALLY dull.
Just because you have an Office 2.0 company doesn't mean you have to forget about: customers, pain points, revenues, or long-term viability.
Phil Wainewright has a good post on the Saugatuck report showing that SaaS has hit the knee of the curve or as he writes: "SaaS hits the hockey stick." I'm sure he meant the curvy part near the bottom of the stick near the big flat part that hits the little round thing-a-ma-jig. Go, Beavers, Go. As you can see, I'm not a hockey fan so I prefer the knee of the curve story a bit more. He writes: "Most surprising of all was a huge jump from 18% last year to 49% this
year of companies planning to use SaaS for mission-critical
applications." I think it's instructive to look at internet banking. People didn't want t o use it either because they were afraid of the web - until seemingly overnight when everybody's Grandma joined web-banking.
Harry McCracken over at Slate wrote a decent review of the Zoho office tools suite. I agree with Harry that their suite seems pretty advanced. However, I have tried to use them for real work and have still found enough holes that I couldn't use them. Particularly Zoho show which was nearly useless. The other apps seemed somewhat better. But they have achieved a heck of a lot and I wish Raju Vegesna and his team the best.
AvenueA-Razorfish's new Digital Outlook Report 2007 was released (thanks Guy Kawasaki for the heads up). Some highlights:
"In retrospect, the massive digital disruption we’ve experienced over the last 12 months should have been anticipated. But it seems few were fully prepared for the speed and depth of the changes. Perhaps it’s because the changes weren’t just about what Web sites became popular or what new technologies were introduced. Rather, it was a broader cultural change. Consumers’ expectations of their media evolved. The places they trusted to provide information and entertainment changed. New outlets for consumers to express themselves emerged."
"“Great service. Creativity. Flexibility. A passion for their product and for finding ways to push innovation within their organization. A desire to understand clients’ objectives and not to retrofit them into their own. The hallmarks of great Web publishers are obvious, yet subjective and elusive. Those who are focused on delivering real solutions are best positioned to become partners to agencies and advertisers.” - Sarah Baehr, VP Media, New York.
"Information seeking equals entertainment: Once upon a time, play was more deeply integrated into our daily lives, but that changed with the introduction of industrialism. Then came the Internet, and with it, a reemergence of play in new ways. Information as entertainment was a core concept we heard from our study participants, and one that we can see around us as well....Any way you look at it, play is back, and it’s here to stay."
"Mobile phone use will grow—but not for talking, according to our participants. Phones calls are considered to be invasive in this hyper-culture, to be used only when necessary. For ordinary use, a quick text message will suffice, and many of our respondents didn’t see themselves reversing this trend in the future."
Overall, this is a fantastic report. Get it. Read it. Take action on it.
Dick Costolo wrote a great post titled Too Many Companies? where he addresses an entrepeneur's question about whetehr or not he/she should go out and try to capitalize on a maket opportunity. I agree with Dick. You can't know anything really when you start. It's all a best guess. Once you have done the basics of identifying whether you are entiering what could be a high-growth market, something that you are passionate about, and that you have (or can soon have) a great team to build something with, then get out there and do it and adjust on the fly. Not wait until you "have it figured out".
Cisco bought Webex. For 64x earnings or 8.4x revenues. ($3.2B for 2006's $50M earnings on $380M revenues). I agree with Michael Arrington who questions the value of such a deal when Webex is being disrupted SERIOUSLY by a lot of light, fast, cheap, and frankly much better competitors. Of course, Webex has real revenues that will accrue to Cisco's bottom line and can actually "move the needle" on Cisco's income statement. Hopefully they were buying the revenues and not the technology. I also agree with Paul Kedrosky who says "While this is not your father's Cisco, it's not clear just whose Cisco it is becoming either." When they bought Five Across, it could have been an aberration. Adding Webex to the mix means it is definitely a trend. For it to make any sense, there would need to be some follow-on acquisitions that signal a clear shift in corporate strategy and a redefinition of what and who Cisco intends to become in the next few years.
Darren Barefoot did a nice little review of three new-to-him Web apps: Harvest for simple time tracking, Buxfer for moving money easily, and WhosOff for tracking holidays in the office. Very fitting for the Office 2.0 Relay!
That's a heck of a week!! Lots of interesting things happening and I'm sure we'll have another crazy week next week as we get close to the actual Dealmaker event.
My view on the interesting things happening at the intersection of business, technology, society, and the environment.
