Jeff Nolan wrote:

I wrote recently about VC loss of attraction in Web 2.0 and the thing that was frightening about that thought was the inability to answer the basic question “what’s next?”. The Valley thrives on the new new thing (possibly one of the most poignantly titled books ever) and with every turn of a generation there is an awkward moment where we’re just figuring out where we’ve been but have yet to see where we are going? right now is that moment.

(…) I’m still left with the uncomfortable question of what’s next? When Facebook doesn’t deliver world peace, and FriendFeed fails to be better than sliced bread, what will we do?

I suddenly realized that I missed the exact moment when web 2.0 ceased to be the new thing.

Ideas for the new thing: web 3.0 (too obvious), enterprise software (Jeff doesn’t like it, I also doesn’t like it much because it is difficult to scale), AI (as in the last 50 years), gene tech, …other ideas?

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Polish PM Donald Tusk, as the first among international leaders, declared that he is not going to the Olympics opening ceremony (bloomberg).

Amazingly, even opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski supports this decision.

As well as Lech Walesa, and 60% of the population, according to polls.

Polish government asked other EU leaders to join the protest.

This might not be the most pragmatic approach. It may damage economic contacts with China, for example. And some people argue that boycotting the Olympics will not help Tibetans much.

Still, this is Poland and there is more to the stance one would expect from it than pragmatism.

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Is working in a corporation a waste of life and learning opportunities?

Paul Graham attacks corporate way of work in his essay You weren’t meant to have a boss. The essay starts rather strong with the analogy based on observing a group of programmers taking part in corporate team-building event. He compared them to the programmers that he typically works with, who typically happen to be founders of their own companies:

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I’d only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They’re like different animals. And seeing those guys on their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild.

Then he goes into more detail and argues that people are not meant to work in too large groups. Of course, corporations are aware of this and divide people into small teams to avoid management problems:

Companies know groups that large wouldn’t work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together. But to coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.

These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree.

The tree structure implies, according to him, that at a group (represented by a manager) should work as if it were one individual, otherwise a higher level group composed of managers would not be able to operate.

As a result, the higher the tree, the less freedom of action is available to individual team member:

Anyone who’s worked for a large organization has felt this. You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.

His conclusion: corporation does not provide a good learning environment, specifically for programmers. In corporation, programmer will see his ideas blocked by the structure and legacy way of doing things. As a result, he will learn less. Best way to start is through own startup or joining organization which is small enough.

Statements like this can provoke some strong responses. Jeff Atwood, for example, attributes all this talk to Graham’s narcissistic (and self-interested) idea of a perfect career path. It’s true, but Graham spent a good deal of his essay admitting his bias.

Almost everyone would agree that working in a founding team of 10 gives the individual more freedom than working in 75,000-strong organization. But not everyone would agree that one cannot learn anything useful in a corporation. Actually a lot of people, including me (though I’m not a programmer), treat working in a corporation as a learning stage before going after own ideas.

Also, corporation provides resources unavailable in a startup. Joshua Haberman commented about benefits of working in Google:

All the boring sysadmin stuff is taken care of. There’s extremely good components you can use for your projects so you don’t have to reinvent the basics (RPC, storage, monitoring, etc) yet again. Your job is to solve big, hard problems and your toolbox is filled with the best of what the brilliant programmers around you have come up with. They’ve iterated many times and solved problems you wouldn’t have even imagined at the outset. And yet there’s always more to do, because the data gets bigger and the appetite for bigger problems grows.

Then again, does knowing that all this stuff exists make it easier or more difficult to start your own company at some stage?

It’s better not to know that something is impossible because then you simple go ahead and do it. In other words, if you are going to start from scratch, maybe better start earlier, while you are happily unaware of all the reasons why you shouldn’t.

Looking at the people who went startup way from the very beginning it’s hard for me to tell if they are better off, because I still work in the corporation. But I’m going to find out.

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Post on Google’s blog brings video message from Arthur’s 90th birthday last December.

Watch the video and get inspired by his words.

As he would put it, after 90 orbits, he now departed.

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Bret Taylor, ex-Googler, on “cost” of strategy in larger organizations:

With 70 people the odds that two people are working on the same thing are probably pretty low. With 17,000, it’s almost a 100% that two or three people will be working on the same idea, or at least very similar ideas, at different parts of the organization. I think there is a certain amount of cost to just coordinating that activity. I’ve been really impressed with how Google has been able to scale, but inherently it has to change – just because there’s that coordination cost.

I think some bloggers call it “strategy tax.” You know, when you grow, your strategy becomes more and more important, and it taxes sort of everything you do a little bit… because everything you do, it strays from that strategy. You know, there’s a huge cost to that. Whereas I think for smaller companies, the strategy is less well-defined, or certainly the impact of straying from it is much lower.

Startups are adaptive, as friend told me last weekend, when worthy people come together to realize something, even if the first idea doesn’t work, they are always going to figure out a promising alternative (but first you have to make a jump in any case).

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GDP of Euro zone is now higher than the US due to sinking dollar. Goldman Sachs (Reuters):

Taking the gross domestic product of both economies in 2007, the combined GDP of the 15 countries which use the euro overtook that of the United States when the European currency surged to a record high of more than $1.56 per euro.

Krzysztof Rybinski on crisis in the US:

To cut the long story short, the Fed is trapped between the short-term need to support proper functioning of money and capital markets, and on the other hand it is aware of the potential moral hazard problem in the long run. I am finishing a book with my former NBP colleagues called “Gordian knots of the 21st century”. Among many conclusions in the book we offer this one:

US has committed a crime of short-termism. It will pay the price: US will lose global leadership, and the dollar will lose the global reserve currency status. Panic and ad hoc moves to weather the present storm make me more and more confident that the above scenario will happen faster than most people expect.

Yeah it was quite fast.

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1) Joseph Weizenbaum, who created psychiatrist simulator called Eliza, dies at 85. WSJ article quotes him saying (link by Valleywag):

The Internet is like one of those garbage dumps outside of Bombay, there are people, most unfortunately, crawling all over it, and maybe they find a bit of aluminum, or perhaps something they call sell. But mainly it’s garbage.

2) Friendfeed, basically an RSS aggregator of person’s online activity with added functionality of comments, becomes the latest Internet hit. Scoble loves it, Duncan Riley at Techcrunch covered it and but didn’t see much point, louisgray replied to him with a blog post titled Duncan Riley Misses the Point of FriendFeed, which gained this comment by Ontario Emperor which i.a. explained why it is so useful to add another layer of commenting possibility to the “artifacts” that we produce:

(…) sometimes it’s not appropriate to comment at the original artifact. For example, one day I tweeted

“@commuter ont i10 eb jammed at euclid. 2 rt lanes clsd @ 4th. vineyard archibald offramps clsd.”

Then I subsequently added a metacomment via FriendFeed:

“i was 10 minutes late for maundy thursday rehearsal. my fault.”

The metacomment wouldn’t have made sense as just another tweet, but it made perfect sense as a metacomment overlaid over the previous artifact.

3) Ability of events in reality to generate “artifacts” is virtual reality is growing fast. These first artifacts can attract reactions, which themselves gain status of artifacts and are reprocessed (aggregated, commented on) further.

4) It reminds me of financial markets, which started with rather simple “artifacts” for real things (e.g. currencies), then built so many virtual layers on top of them, that in the end few people can understand the further chains of abstraction.

5) If financial markets were indication, the social sphere can be expected to generate amazing volume given its original “real” base, at the same time becoming unpredictable and impossible to understand for the majority of people.

6) How can social sphere be understood to be “unpredictable”..? In a way illustrated by recent Sarah Lacy interview and the twitter-enabled audience?

Technorati : friendfeed

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I might appear to have been living under the rock, because it is only now that I read the famous “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. The main idea behind the book is to focus on creating new market space, instead of getting entangled in deadly fight for existing one.

Red oceans are existing markets. Red from competitive blood. Blue oceans are (usually) undiscovered market spaces. No competition there.

It is well described how to operate on red oceans. Strategic positioning, benchmarking, etc. Red ocean strategy is heavily inspired by the military (zero sum game). I’m afraid that we consultants work usually on red oceans.

The book might well be inspiring, even if it simply reuses some concepts supporting individual creativity in the corporate setting. Concepts like “out of the box” thinking, identification of hidden constraints, taking unusual point of view for inspiration etc. is repackaged for use in the enterprises.

Remarks related to improving corporate planning process itself by turning it more into “strategic conversation” remind me of Kees van der Heijden approach, which used scenarios to facilitate uncovering hidden drivers and communicating the strategy.

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After trams abusing teenager from Lodz, now Kaczynski made it to theregister with his opinion against conducting polls on the Internet:

I am not an enthusiast of a young person sitting in front of a computer, watching video clips and pornography while sipping a bottle of beer and voting when he feels like it (Reuters)

Some UK commenters actually appreciated depth of his thinking:

This is the first time I’ve ever heard a politician who seems to “get” the internet!

Regardless of his politics he seems to understand the internet a million times better then our “masshup/wiki/blogging/youtubing” obsessed bullpoop artists known as MPS.

The news will no doubt infuriate the country’s netizens, should they actually notice it through their booze and porn-addled haze.

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Keynote interview with Zuckerberg is embarrassing to watch sometimes, but feel free to take a look yourself here (fragment).

There is plenty of commentary of course, about Sarah Lacy putting herself in the spotlight instead of her rather more interesting guest, not knowing her audience, and failing to get a clue even afterwards, but more interesting for me are comments related to twitter.

Bill Thompson:

And yet I was there in another way, listening to and even interacting with some of my friends in the audience, picking up on the vibe in the room and even tuning in later as Sarah Lacy loudly defended herself.

I was there because I was plugged into Twitter, the instant messaging service that lets users send short text messages to anyone who cares to tune in, online or on their mobile phone.

Steve O’Hear:

I think another factor in the keynote’s downfall was the use of Twitter as a so-called ‘back channel’. With keynote attendees able to share live commentary instantly, a negative response can spread like wildfire in a profound way that is very different to what’s possible without such connectivity.

Mark Evans:

What’s particularly fascinating is how quickly the criticism and vitriol started to flow as the interview started to go pear-shaped. While Twitter emerged out of nowhere last year at SXSW as a tool to tell people what was happening, Twitter’s took centre stage again this year to blare out anti-Lacy pronouncements in real-time.

Participants are able to turn event into a discussion forum in real time. Both exciting and scary (when you imagine yourself running the event).

Technorati : SXSW, Twitter, Zuckerberg

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Google Sites is a wiki service derived from Jotspot, which Google acquired some time ago. It really does feel that Sites fill a gap in Google Apps. Now they combine knowledge organization tool in a shape of this wiki, online office tools, email and a calendar.

Such combination seems promising for my numerous side projects and I wanted to give it a try, even though, as far as wiki goes, I had good experience with Wikispaces before.

On a positive side, Google Sites does have a feeling of simplicity that I will always appreciate. Even though, it is surprising that it misses some seemingly no-brainer functionalities at the moment, like closer integration with Google Docs.

But the other key advantage of Google products is traditionally their responsiveness. On this account Google Sites is, so far, a disappointment. It’s not just slow, it simply hangs the browser at times (I’m using Firefox). I mean the whole thing goes “not responding”.

ZDnet blogger Dennis Howlett posted similar remarks, even though his focus was on gadgets.

That’s it for my first impressions. I’m curious about opinion of my project collaborator. I’m really optimistic about future of such offerings for teams, anyway.

PS. speaking of performance, now Google blog returns 502 server error, heh.

Technorati : google apps, google sites, wiki

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Yup I need a phone that can connect to wifi and allow convenient browsing while I don’t have laptop with me. Doesn’t need to replace my ipod, but it wouldn’t hurt, one less gadget to carry around.

After trying to learn differences between gazillion Nokia models I ended up with conclusion that this is supposed to be the best that Nokia can offer – N95:

It looks like a brick, with especially awful cheap shiny buttons on a side (one I held was plum, not black, and it looked far worse than picture). It seems to have a separate, tiny button for each function, with priority given to the functions that I never expect to use (e.g. conferencing).

It is trying to be also a music player, but I don’t see giving up a handy 8gb ipod for this mess (and besides the one I saw was just 2gb). On a plus, the camera seems advanced (but then again, why need a good camera in a phone).

I’m seriously considering simply buying an unlocked iPhone.

Ironically, I recall article in NYTimes which I read not long ago, about Nokia stance against iPhone. Nokia Pushes to Regain U.S. Sales in Spite of Apple and Google:

Nokia’s executives describe their own reactions to it in flat, unemotional terms that would seem scripted, if the speakers were not Nordic.

“The user interface was what one would expect from Apple,” said Kai Oistamo, the executive vice president for mobile phones. (…)

For now, though, Nokia is counting on its broad portfolio of products, rather than a single iPhone-killer, to fend off the competition. “We’re not a one-product, two-product company,” Mr. Kallasvuo said.

Yes, Nokia, fortunately you are not a company of one elegant, pleasant-to-use product. You are a gazillion substandard products company. Way to go.

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I don’t know why, but corporate email in Russia and Ukraine apparently leaves a lot to desire and lots of people are using gmail as semi-official secondary email.

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Monetto was kind enough to send me their press release, announcing partnership that they concluded with Nasza Klasa (Polish equivalent of classmates, but more of a Facebook phenomenon in terms of popularity).

Not that I could do anything with the material while in the Ukraine, but still a point for their PR.

One curious thing is the homepage screen shot they attached to the press release.

Some static elements are evidently in a “draft” state at the moment, and it’s not clear if the core functionality (transactions) has the same status. Placeholder for press snippets shows that Monetto has really high hopes. Folks at bankier should take note.

Back to the main point. From the press I understood that:

• Monetto signed letter of intention with Nasza Klasa regarding the partnership, which will work as the following (in my understanding) -
• Users of Nasza Klasa will be able to “confirm” their profile using Monetto capabilities (more info on blog entry: “test” money transfer and sending ID scans by email)
• Additionally, NK user will be able to indicate on his profile that he wants lend/borrow money
• Nasza Klasa hopes that it will improve credibility of the service (validation of profiles) and reduce problem of fake profiles
• Monetto hopes that users redirected from Nasza Klasa will in part get interested in P2P lending and use its intermediation
• The actual contract between two sites has not been signed yet

Meanwhile the release was picked by Gazeta Wyborcza, which reprinted it, without hesitating to spin the point about raising Nasza Klasa credibility to describe it as a site which “more and more often raises mixed feelings”. Get over it, Gazeta.

But in the end they comment that the deal has a high potential for both sites and can harm competitors a lot and especially kokos.pl.

My first thoughts on the deal below.

(read more…)

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