Antyweb quoted the Next web article about search in Russia. What’s interesting in Russian search? It is not dominated by Google:

Most European search markets are dominated by Google and there seem to be no real local competitors. In Russia however, a fierce battle for the search query’s of the consumers is going on. Yakov Sadchikov from Quintura even mailed me that “the Russian search engines are coming.”

Reasons? Commenters point at different character set and language peculiarities (for example different grammatical cases).

Thanks to friends at Gemius I had an opportunity to read some interesting stuff about Internet markets in other CEE countries.. and Russian case is not the only one, even though in most countries Google rules the market.

In Czech Republic, for example, Seznam.cz has approximately 60% share in search. But, Google search is gaining share there.

“Other” search engines have also significant share in Ukraine, Slovenia and Estonia.

In Poland, on the other hand, Google has 90% of the market, grammatical cases notwithstanding.

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Businessweek suspects Steve Jobs of a hidden agenda, aimed at getting into corporations.

Hints: iPhone functionalities aimed at corporates, co-existence of Windows and OS X made as easy as ever.

Meanwhile, my Mac just changed hands in Wroclaw and is set for the final ride to Warsaw. It’s been a long journey.

Mac’s purpose is far from innocent as my corporate colleagues, knowing me, could immediately tell.

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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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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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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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Between burger and an ice cream in Hard Rock Cafe I jotted down notes from today’s bootstrap. I needed them in electronic form anyway. I wrote down stuff which seemed useful for me, so it’s not guaranteed to be complete.

This time it was in an unusual for boostrap form of a panel. Meeting took 3 hours, but I found it very interesting. Technical people might beg to differ, though, as tax/legal discussion was really exhaustive (exhausting).

I made some comments below in the notes, but here I can also share my “first impression” of the P2P lenders present. It is really first impression because I didn’t bother to check them myself, so some doubts below might be result of this.

• Finansowo - approach to start as simple as possible, no collections or support in executing transactions between peers. The biggest risk is that some things that they ignore seem critical (collections).

• Monetto (blog)- most advanced approach, ensured partners from the beginning, including bank (mBank) and collectors. The biggest risk is that they start with a very complicated machine that no-one will use.

• Kokos - midway between the two, with the advantage that it is already up and running.

On a first glance I like Finansowo and Monetto, because they follow clear-cut concepts of simplicity and exhaustiveness, while Kokos was less clear, at least as much can be judged from the presentation, and also takes cautious approach regarding some legal challenges (e.g. possibility to grant anonymity and stick to electronic contract form).

(read more…)

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Strange, but sometimes things that are expected to happen, actually do happen. Microsoft announced a hostile bid for Yahoo.

I so like the bid to succeed. That’s because I feel strongly about the result of this take-over and I would love to verify my hypothesis.

My hypothesis is that the market shares of the two do not sum up. MSFT will lose focus and instead get entangled in restructuring of Yahoo!. Users will get the combination of the two worst, in my personal view, experiences - Google will be able to differentiate even more strongly through simplicity and focus, playing contrast to the new behemoth with combined dna of committee-driven software factory and a portal.

Or maybe the above will be proven wrong and Google will at last get a worthy competitor.

(Even though falling price of MSFT stock indicates that I’m not alone in my opinion of the contrary.)

In any case, this merger going ahead will be decisive, this way or another, for both Google and Microsoft.

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Article by David Hornik (VC) on his impressions from trip to China.

One line summary (I’m in a hurry:): Chinese market is great, but there are few real entrepreneurs. And there is no effective legal protection for investors, so you have to count on the culture not to get screwed by Chinese entrepreneurs. But unfortunately the culture makes it ok to screw foreign investors.

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Article in the New York Times by Gary Rivlin. Stories about entrepreneurs who got rich extremely fast, but still keep on building new companies.

Interesting part:

?It?s easier to start the next company than it was in the past,? said Marc Andreessen, who was a co-founder of Netscape Communications in 1994, when he was 22. It is also potentially more lucrative than it was even a dozen years ago, said Mr. Andreessen, who despite a net worth estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars is now at work on his third start-up, a social networking company called Ning.

?For the first time in history, you have a global market of 1 billion-plus people, all connected over an interactive network,? Mr. Andreessen said. ?The opportunities are bigger than ever before.?

Yup. But also see the quote on working 15-18 hours a day. Got to have these hours first, though.

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A trailer for new book of Naomi Klein is the best conspiracy piece I’ve seen in a long time. Gets even closer to science fiction style of conspiracy, see Japanese Ghost in the Shell cartoons.

Maybe it’s because conspiracy is promoted to the same target audience and through the same means as entertainment.

Change can be generated in conditions of shock. Isn’t it suggestive? Conspiracy aside, I had enough of change management topic lately to get interested in this point of view.

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For years, record labels have been busy fighting file sharing on the Internet. This activity gave them a good excuse not to bother with changing their obsolete business model. Today, however, Radiohead’s move to release their new album on “pay as much you like” basis may indicate that it will be top bands, not pirates, who will bury the labels.

Label business model is the following: revenues from top bands allows them to invest in promotion of the new ones, in hope that some of them will eventually reach the top, too.

Now, though, top band can itself distribute its music on the Internet at marginal cost. Why share profit with label, then?

Problem with bands is that, in contrast to the customers, they actually own the music, so there is no option to sue them.

Enough top bands head to the doors, record industry model collapses.

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A quick note on an interesting article of John Hagel, comparing Gaussian and Paretian world views.

Gaussian views seeks for “normal” distribution of things in the world around us, while Pareto focuses on power law distribution, with disproportionate influence of a limited number of events/objects (think: earthquakes, accumulation of wealth, etc.)

Gaussian situation is said to occur when there is little interaction between particular observations. Interactions easily create a positive feedback loop, and some objects obtain advantage which is self-reinforcing.

World is getting more networked and interactions are increasing, and Pareto mindset is becoming more important.

Thus, new tools are required to handle this reality. Some sources of them are hinted - earthquake research, complexity science. It would be interesting to define a toolkit immediately applicable in business, though.

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Apple did it again. Reached agreement with EMI and will offer its music library unprotected (and higher quality, though more expensive) in May. So in the end I finally might buy something from iTunes, since EMI’s portfolio seems to include also Radiohead.

It’s just funny how Apple is able to leave Microsoft far behind on every turn. First with its closely guarded DRM castle, now, when Microsoft copied its approach (poorly), it comes out of the castle and scores as a digital freedom fighter. Microsoft, following Mini-microsoft description, like a “lumbering idiot”.

Still, already 6 years into digital XXI century, and still the only idea to get more songs of Budapest Klezmer Band seems to go to Budapest and buy some CDs.

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Read some comments of Torres on simplicity, relating also to Don Norman’s “Simplicity Is Highly Overrated”.

Never too much talking about simplicity.

I’m a fan of simple things. But does simplicity sell? Sometimes I wonder. To give example from consulting playground, I like to make excel models which are straightforward and well commented and pyramidal in structure, so they are easy to follow from the top to the details. Typically excel models are anything but easy to follow and it takes less time to build a new model than to understand one made by someone else. Then again, maybe complex models that you cannot understand seem smarter in the end.

Don Norman:

Why is this? Why do we deliberately build things that confuse the people who use them?

Answer: Because the people want the features. Because simplicity is a myth whose time has past, if it ever existed.

Make it simple and people won?t buy. Given a choice, they will take the item that does more. Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that it is accompanied by more complexity. You do it too, I bet. Haven?t you ever compared two products side by side, comparing the features of each, preferring the one that did more? Why shame on you, you are behaving, well, behaving like a normal person.

Why then:

People buy ipods? I bought ipod. I doesn’t even have a radio. Even my nokia phone has a radio.

People do not buy hybride products? They do buy things that do one thing well.

Why Google rules and not the portals?

Torres:

Simplicity is primarily around the first-run user experience and making sure to optimize the high-volume scenarios. A great example of this is Microsoft Photo Story 3. This tool makes creating videos out of photos a complete no-brainer, even for someone who has never touched a digital camera.

Simplicity is something that everyone wants… but not forever. The simplicity of Photo Story is actually limiting once you want to do something a little more advanced, like running a macro or applying a custom transition. For that you need Windows Movie Maker 2 or Adobe Premiere.

I would argue (and I do quite often) that simplicity in the long run is over-rated for most users, especially for users who actually know what they are doing. (…)

The MSN Search team did loads of research while developing their search service, and what they found is a testament to this. They discovered that search engine loyalty isn’t earned through stellar results for routine queries, but rather through an amazingly unique response to an off the wall query. (…)

Now, “it just works!” is something completely different - and even more important in my opinion. When you plug your digital camera into your Powerbook and your photos are automatically copied into iPhoto, it “just worked”.

It feels strange to me, listen Microsoft people talk about simplicity. And that they did a lot of research into this. Surely they did a lot of research, focus groups and everything on branding. Look at the results. Still, though, for the theory, fine.

Simple on outside, complex in the inside (if you insist), that is, features are there. I’m not Korean and my toster doesn’t need lcd. But I use Google as a calculator and no one I know does it.

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