Coworking day in Sausalito

For those in the SF BAy area, I would like to suggest a Coworking day in Sausalito.

I have spent some time thinking about the concept of Coworking and Telecommuting. And while I am convinced that telecommuting is the way of the future, and Coworking environments a must to make telecommuting a more viable or pleasant experience, I also think that it will take time, and a lot of education, before it becomes something that can be truly sustainable.

In the meantime, as a smooth transition towards the ideal, I think that there is room for "Coworking days" where one day a month maybe I would go in a Coworking environment to meet other professional who like me work from home most of their time. This would allow the establishment of the coworking concept without a critical need for it to be completely sustainable from the beginning.

I was lucky enough that I have been telecommuting for a couple of years before going full time into working from home. I am also lucky that I have an office, and a complete setup that allows me to be self sufficient. But then going from telecommute where I was still going to the office once a week to full time working from home as meant that I do not get to socialize with corporate co-workers anymore. I meet clients and partners, but not this guy that happens to be at the watercooler at the
same time I am and with whom I can exchange and relax.

A coworking day event is the opportunity to do that: keep working from home where I have all I need, but go to a local Coworking place once a month, or once a week to see who else in the neigborhood works from home, and to get a chance to learn what they are doing.

I have a friend who owns a very cool space in beautiful Sausalito (http://www.studiomsausalito.com/), and she has been kind enough to let
us have it for an experiment, trying to make the idea happen.

I have created a page to explain the concept and allow people interested in the idea to sign up. check out details here

Let's see what happens...

Google User Experience Research

Crowdsourcing at its best - I love Google:

Read more at www.google.com/forms/us...

Notes on Techmeme's new sponsorship model - blog.memeorandum.com

A new model to provide advertising on a blog. Simple and brilliant. The concept is similar to adversing articles in magazines, with the advantage for the reader that it is clearly identified as sponsored content while being better integrated into the blog itself (you can hope for more relevant and more interesting content than just ad banners).

Very cool...

Read more at blog.memeorandum.com/06...

Mysterious Paypal Secure Storage

From Techcrunch at www.techcrunch.com/2006... Finally the service that I had been looking for: a place to store digital content. It may sound stupid, but one of the big questions I had was what happens when I die? I spend a lot of time online, and I have a lot of accounts in many places, and documents that I write for myself. I am sure a lot of people also have electronic documents that they care about, pictures or books they may have written but never published. And then nobody around them would really know they exist or how to access themClearly there is a need for an "electronic deposit box". I have seen MySpace setup some special places for their users who died, but this is really only the tip of the iceberg.With this new service from Paypal, we may finally have a solution for this problem. A secure place where we can save pieces of our digital personna for future. I hope now that they have also figured out a process for providing access to the Drop Box to family or whoever is named in a will. And maybe this is the next move for Paypal to provide a place to submit online wills that can be opened under specific circumstances. I am sure there is room for such a service as well...

Lunch over IP: Direct Economy

A very good summary of an article published by Xavier Comtesse - Read more here - original here if you can read French.

Xavier explains how the technologies available today allow the transfer of knowledge to customers, so that they can become more involved in the value chain, thus helping companies to become highly productive, as the only way to survive competition from low cost providers (which sometimes does not mean low value, there are a lot of good engineers in Eastern Europe, China or India).

Xavier Comtesse offers a great tool to help companies define their strategy and understand how to move forward and best use knowledge transfers to improve productivity. He also presents an example of how this can work in a presentation available here (in French as well), but the matrix is in english and give a good idea of what can be done).

Web 2.0

I was asked yesterday whether I think that Web2.0 is a bubble or not. And I think it is, but clearly nothing as bad as what happened in 2000.

There is a lot of hype, and there is a lot of unknown, but what cannot be ignored are the fundamental underlying trends that are shaping beyond the hype.

The buzz words are the growth of P2P, marketplace disruptions, swarm innovation, social webs, folksonomies, long tail economy, etc...

Many thought leaders have been preaching to the crowd already:

• Yochai Benkler describes in his book "The wealth of networks" how grassroot movements have been able to resist and fight against large corporations, for example on the voting machine issue. He demonstrates that the cloud is a very powerful and productive force.
  

• John Seely Brown talks about swarm innovation in ecosystems across Asia. In his book "The only sustainable edge", he describes how a network of independent subcontractors can produce faster better goods than a large corporation.
  

• Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore recently published a book called "Communities dominate brands", in which they show how the next generation is about more than just being connected, it is a Community generation. They show how start-ups with low budget can outperform large corporations by fostering a solid ecosystem around their business and by engaging their customers.
• Seth Godin talk about "The purple cow" and the need to move from push marketing to engagement marketing
  
• Chris Anderson exposes the power of the web to enable the long tail economy
• Thomas Malone predicts in his book "The future of work" that the technologies of cooperation available today will change the way we do business and manage organizations

• Michel Bauwens talks about Peer to Peer as the emergence of a new civilization

The online community is vibrant with creativity, and a lot of options/revenue models are being explored or are emerging:

• Virtual worlds are getting real (2nd life, everquest, etc...) with items sold on eBay and credit cards to cash money out at ATMs (gold farming)
• Online videos uploads and dowloads, IPTV and P2P are trying to offer an alternative to regular video content distribution. I have mentioned in my previous post that it is clearly a very good way to produce reality TV
• Social Networks are still the thing of the day, and to me another form (but only 2 dimensional) of virtual worlds
  

Meanwhile Interruption marketing is dying: for example I have read in "Communities Dominate Brands" that a study had shown that 71% of car buyers got influenced by word of mouth vs. 17% influenced by TV ads.

With all these changes come new challenges

• The explosion of services and communities results in content overload and creates the need for managing our attention and digital identities
• Ranking/ratings/reputation systems need to be enhanced and controlled, to prevent gaming, we need to understand whether trust can be transitive, and if so, in which circumstances. In this area, I like also like the concept of transparence: how much of your identity are you willing to divulge. I see it as a good indication of trustworthiness.
• Making sense through tags requires maintenance to aleviate overuse and obsolescence, and to better describe individuals semantic, context, and goals. How will we be able to manage all this content moving forward, at the global level and at the personal level (what happens to my content when I die for example)
  

The opportunity is for companies, large or small to make sense of what is happening. But overall, more than a technology evolution, web2.0 is really an expression of a sociological change that has been enabled by technology, and it goes far beyond just technology. Web2.0 is not about Ajax or the latest cool free service, it is not about cool phones or IPTV, it is about how people relate to each other, how they learn to trust each other, and how they learn to live and work with their neighbors.
And since we are talking humans and not technology, we'd better be ready for this changes to take a long time. The Internet bubble happened because people though the world would change in one day, the web2.0 bubble is another sign of impatience from the techies community and their investors, we should already be looking at web3.0 and beyond...

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Top social media users getting paid; is the balance shifting?

Here is something interesting: a few days after I was musing on the idea of YouTube videos being sold on DVD after a given video dialogue is completed, here comes the news that the amateur video from the popular lonelygirl15 were indeed shot by professional. If there is any doubt that we are experimenting with new ways of producing reality TV, this one is a good sign that we probably are...

Read more at www.techcrunch.com/2006...

Audience 2.0 Launch! — CooperationCommons

Something to look forward to: Issue one of Audience 2.0 will be released this week:

Read more at www.cooperationcommons....

How YouTube could increase revenues

I am looking at some videos on YouTube, and how they are linked to each other to create a complete dialog between a few individuals. The videos remind me very much of the reality TV shows that you can watch on MTV. And some of these discussions have gone long enough that you could make it into a season release on DVD.
I have not seen it yet, but I would think that there is potential for revenue in such a scheme. YouTube can print the DVDs and market them, and would share the revenue with the various participants in these discussions.
The whole thing reminds me of how Armistead Maupin book "Tales of The City" was originally released one chapter after the other as a chronicle in a Marin County newspaper. What I see on YouTube now seem very much like the same thing for videos stories. While the TV format was not really a good venue for this type of process, the web is perfect, and people are not expecting to get more than a few minutes of videos at a time, unless this is the video of a live event.
I am curious to see how long it will take before we see DVD releases of YouTube content...

Trustmojo » Facets of Facets, Tagclouds And Trust

I am happy to see that somebody liked my business card :-)

I have a tag cloud on the back, because I think that it is a good representation of who I am and what my interests are. Maybe this will inspire others....

Read more at trustmojo.com/2006/08/3...

Open Business as Entrepreneurs Lifecycle Management

After doing some research and experimenting with "collaborative entrepreneurship", this is how I see that Open Business should (and hopefully will) emerge:
Entrepreneurs Lifecycle Management:

- Entrepreneurs, because they are the drivers of the economy, the ones who create value from their ideas. They should be the clear focus for any business opportunity.
- Lifecycle Management, because throughout their life they will most probably succeed at some point, and they will succeed many times if they are good at what they do
The cycle includes starting a project/company, generating revenues, cashing out or growing through acquisition. All transactions that can easily be identified and measured.

So what's new?

The current model for business is based around corporations with many individuals and projects. The individuals inside the corporation are managed by the excutive team. The executive team ultimately answers to the investors. And the overall responsibility for actions is spread along the chain with enough intermediaries that none can feel entirely responsible for anything bad that the Corporation does.
Inside the corporation, the focus is on products or services issued managed as projects. And while everybody agrees that the people are what makes the difference most of the time between good and bad projects, the focus remains on projects, and the assumptions is that one qualified individual can be replaced by another qualified individual.

Instead, I would like to suggest that a better model would be to focus on entrepreneurs, and the team of individuals around them.
In this model:
- everybody is their own corporation of one individual
- the project is managed as a commons, with the entrepreneur as the benevolant dictator and with the other people involved as contributors volunteering to the project
- the entrepreneur carries the idea, and keeps the motion forward with the help of whoever is relevant at a specific time/phase of his project
- At each step of the lifecycle (where transactions are clearly identified and value can be measured), the entrepreneur will decide how much value was added by who, and will distribute the reaches accordingly

Yeah right, but how do you make it work?

There are many issues obviously with the model:
- it takes a while to see revenue: this all depends on where the entrepreneur is in his lifecycle when you meet him. If he is just getting started with a project, it may take some time. But if he already has revenue coming in, then it becomes much easier.
- it requires that everybody has access to an entrepreneur: this is what social networking should help achieve. Whoever comes out of school or is looking for a job is already using his/her network to find such a job. So people are already going through the motion, the only difference is that since the system is focused on people, it requires to focus not just on skills, but also affinity with the entrepreneur and the other members of the team. I believe that it is better to have such focus anyway, so this is not really a big leap from what we have today.
- it requires complex discussions to distribute revenues: yes, it may be complex, but no if the size of the "business cell" is small enough. In order for such a model to take off it needs to be constructed with a layer of small businesses rather than huge organizations. But we are seeing already that ecosystems of small subcontractors are doing very well if not better than large organizations in Asia (see the ecosystems studied in "The Only Sustainable Edge" from John Seely Brown). So if we are talking small business cells, discussions remain at the human level and are very manageable. If I do not get what I think should be my share of the rewards, I am always free to work with somebody else. At the same time, the entrepreneur has no interest in being unfair because the word would get out and nobody would want to work for him.
- It will be hard to get investment: who would invest in projects if they are not hosted within corporations? Well, what we are talking about is similar to what has been done to IP in the Open Source model. Everybody gets the right to use instead of the right to own. So now investors are contributors, except that they contribute money instead of just time. And they will get their share just as the other contributors (call them angel employees for this discussion, or think advisory capital as described by Stowe Boyd). The good news with this concept is that money will no longer get accumulated in stock, but rather it will be re-distributed to all contributors. As the result, it will also probably become a lot less sparse than it is today.

Some good things about this:
- no need for large corporations anymore, the corporation is used for individuals to be the recipient of their business personna. This will bring to an end a model where organizations will sometime knowingly do the wrong thing for the sake of generating revenue for their investors. In a one man corporation, nobody can hide.
- a much stronger focus on people: any contributor is no longer a pion in a large organization, but rather somebody who chose to work with a given entrepreneur or a given team, and who has been accepted for his/her contribution - a good thing for everybody's own self estim
- a "companion" model, where individual contributors will be included as part of a team, and where it is everybody's interest that each individual keep learning and growing.

So how real is this?

As I mentionned earlier, and as it has been presented for example in "The Only Sustainable Edge", collaborative entrepreneurship and crowdsourcing are trends going in the right directions. Meanwhile telecommuting is changing the way people think about their job and how they relate to their company.
I believe that change is on the way.
Let me know if you think I am dreaming...

How I would like to consume

I have read a lot about attention economy and how we could make it easier as consumers for brands to reach us.



Everything that I have seen or read so far requires extra work on my side, to install a piece of software or maintain my data somehow. I do not think than the average consumer would go for this. Who has time to install software so that we can receive targeted ads?

Meanwhile, it is also true that when I want to buy a car, or a camera, or a surf board, I am looking for information and it would be good to have it all in one place.



So far Google has done a very good job at helping me do this, and I suspect this is the reason for the success they have with their Google ads. But it is still a painful process, because the data I have access to is not always good quality.

Del.icio.us has also done a very good job at helping me if I am a geek and I want to get into collaborative filtering.



But what I really want is a repository of product information, a mix of wikipedia and YouTube, where all brands would agree to show their product information, including cool videos or cool ads that they may have. And if brands are really sincere about helping me, they would even allow the public to add their own comments or revisions to the information.

With this ONE SOURCE OF TRUTH, I will be able get the information I need when I need it, and then I will be able to decide what I want to buy.

It would be nothing different from what I do today, except that it would be designed from the beginning to work for me.



So what happens to competition?

Well, with this system in place, it will become more obvious than competing is not about luring me into believing something about the product, but rather it will be about truly providing value, through great prices (value to my budget) and through great features, which is what it should be about.



If any one brand cares about getting my attention, please listen to this...

Supernova 2006 - Weblog

Il y a de la vraie bonne action a Supernova, et les notes sur les sessions sont mises en ligne sur le blog de la conference. Un must read pour ceux qui n'ont pas pu se rendre sur place:

Read more at www.supernova2006.com/g...

Pinko Marketing - Commons based unmarketing.

[via AttentionTrust.org: http://www.attentiontrust.org/node/293]Une experience interessante a suivre:Pinko Marketing (http://pinkomarketing.pbwiki.com/Why%20Pinko%20Marketing), qui veut mettre en application les theories sur le pouvoir des communautes dans le domaine du marketing …

Read more at pinkomarketing.pbwiki.c...

Innovation through design thinking

Une presentation interessante sur le process de Ideo (en anglais). Le process commence par une approche entropologique, pour essayer de comprendre ce que l'utilisateur vit. Il s'agit ensuite de transformer les observations en idees, et puis experimenter pour pouvoir finalement executer

Read more at mitworld.mit.edu/stream...

Thumbstacks.com - Live presentations on the web!

Si vous cherchez a faire des presentations sur le web, Thumback vous permet de faire ca:

Read more at www.thumbstacks.com/

eyeOS | Web desktop - Web OS - Web office - your data and applications everywhere

Apres YouOS, il y a eyeOS:

Read more at www.eyeos.org/index.php...

Google Spreadsheets

Je viens d'avoir mon compte pour les Google Spreadsheet, this is hot. Pour l'usage tres basique dont j'ai besoin aujourd'hui c'est largement suffisant, une vraie revolution.

J'avais aussi essaye Writely, que Google a rachete, il ne manque donc plus que de pouvoir faire des presentations et la boucle sera bouclee.

Par contre je desespere encore avec le Calendar: pas vraiment convivial, rien a voir avec ce que donne evite aujourd'hui. Les gens de Microsoft ont donc encore quelques beaux jours devant eux...

Read more at kre.spreadsheets.google...

RED HERRING | VCBank's $250M Islamic Fund

Apres avoir vu certains groupes ou pays parler de mettre en place des internets indepedents dans lesquels ils pourraient mieux controler l'information, voici maintenant des investisseurs qui se specialisent dans les business qui respectent la sharia. Peut etre une tendance positive (il y a aussi des investisseurs qui se specialisent dans l'ecologique), ou peut etre encore un fosse qui se creuse...

Read more at www.redherring.com/Arti...

BarCamp

Encore un concept fascinant...

Read more at barcamp.org/