The real thing for sharing spreadsheets

Google has tried, but their Google spreadsheet is not really great, nothing I can use in real life.
But there is a start-up who has an interesting solution you may want to check:
http://www.xcellery.com

What is nice about this service is that you do not have to be online to access the info. You access the spreadsheets through your regular Excel software, but the data is synchronized in the back so that the other users you are working with can also see the updates as they happen.

The best I have seen so far on the matter....

Another attempt at managing online reputation - Venyo

I just ran into this very interesting start-up working on reputation. What is nice about their approach is that they tie ratings to tags, so it allows for very flexible rating of people.

www.venyo.org

blog.venyo.org

http://www.venyo.org/download/venyo_reputation_service_presentation.pdf

A service to watch...

The Quickeo website is finally open

For those of you who want to share videos, photos, music etc... with friends (and only with friends, not the whole word), Quickeo is finally available for download. The software is slick (I am on the team, so check it for yourself), and it is addictive. I have to admit that after playing with it for sometime, I really like sending quickeomails to my friends and family, much nicer than plain text :-) Check it out, let me know what you think...

Something really cool from the Gizmo project team

Check this out, it is now possible to call from your browser at gizmocall.com
I love the idea, one less client I have to load at startup...

Protest in 2nd life

A good story here about somebody virtually protesting on 2nd life.
I really believe that 2nd life would be a perfect place to do conflict resolution. No yelling, no fighting, no killing, just sit and listen to the other (if you are willing to get some progress), then take your turn to speak...

A great report on the Future of Small Business

The corporate social contract is broken (no more job for life, much less benefits, etc...) and personal business is on the rise, as a way to provide better life-balance or options for baby-boomers reaching retirement age. If you want to get a glimpse at what the future of work is, the Institute of the Future has produced a very interesting report.
With the new trends, comes a need for coworking spaces such as workclub, and comes collaborative entrepreneurship. Something to look forward to...

2007 - the year for reality check

After a year with a lot of bubble feelings (YouTube acquisition, hype around social networking, etc...), we are now entering into a year of reality checks. Many start-ups have been launched but I have the feeling that the excitement around social networking is cooling down. While the technology is much more accessible, and the price to get a website going much lower, it remains really hard to build a strong community of users, and there is always this unavoidable need to bring value but also revenue at some point.
Interesting enough, it could also be the beginning of the end of the free. While it is really cool to get all these services for free, developers, designers, managers all need to pay rent at one point or another. So I believe we will see more and more of paying services, and I'll be the first to enjoy paying for something that brings me value and does not have the same level of noise that you get with all these ads.
Signs of this trend:
- Google results are being questioned - can you trust page rank? and how are search results being impacted by paying ads?
- Skype is starting to raise their rate, and free calls are being changed into monthly flat rate offers
- Bitwine and Wengo are trying to help people monetize their knowledge, which otherwise could not be delivered online outside of free forums

The end of the free does not mean the end of freedom on the internet though. Actually I see it as an opportunity for entrepreneurs to re-organize around a more sustainable model, so that individuals can better compete against large corporation and collaborative entrepreneurship can take a stronger hold.
So I am ready for another exciting year, and hopefully you are too :-)

Open Source for Hardware

Another interesting idea in the area of crowdsourcing: open source approach to hardware design.
http://newassignment.net/blog/nichole_altmix/dec2006/11/open_source_move

Tech lessons learned from the wisdom of crowds | CNET News.com

Crowdsourcing is making its way into the corporation. A very interesting article on how this is happening:

Read more at news.com.com/2100-1014_...

histoire2femme.com

A very interesting discussion with David Sifry, from Technorati, on what is happening on the web and where this is all going.Thank you Estelle for organizing the meeting and capturing this moment.

Read more at http://histoire2femme.typepad.fr/histoire2femme/2006/12/interview_de_da.html

NewsTrust - Our Guide to Good Journalism - Beta Home

A great service launched today, which brings some balance in the distribution of news through a rating system that helps evaluate the neutrality of news articles. Definitely something that everybody should subscribe to...

Read more at beta.newstrust.net/webx...

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » BitWine Gives Access To Those In The Know

Finally something that will help unleash the voice services market, one of the huge potential offered by Skype that had not really been exploited so far.

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

Smart Mobs: Boston Launches Small Business Incentive Card Program

This is great news, the Interra project is finally getting more visibility. This program has the potential to change how we function within our community, let's hope more implementations will follow...

Read more at www.smartmobs.com/archi...

Paris blogue t'il?

Maybe this is me being French, but I am amazed at the amount of activity in France around everything web2.0. I see people involved in Coworking, Pinkomarketing, I see great start-ups being represented at shows in the US. Maybe something that has to do with the online culture of people who were raised with Minitel?

I'll will not be in Paris for LeWeb3.0, but I will at least get a glimpse of who is involved in these events the week before:



I will be looking for the begining of an answer there, why so many French are involved in this? Is it me or is there really something?

I love Google :-)

I was not impressed by Google acquisition of YouTube, but since wikis are a key component of building a better web I really like this one:


>>

JotSpot is now part of Google

We're writing to let you know that Google has acquired JotSpot. We believe this is great news for our users. More importantly, we want to reassure you that you'll continue to have uninterrupted access to your account. Both Google and JotSpot are committed to supporting our customers, and we understand that users have invested a lot in our products. In the near-term, we're focused on migrating JotSpot to Google's systems and datacenters. We'll work hard to make that move as seamless as possible so that customers won't be inconvenienced.

Why is Google acquiring JotSpot?

Google shares JotSpot's vision for helping people collaborate, share and work together online. JotSpot's team and technology are a strong fit with existing Google products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Groups.

What does this mean for JotSpot customers?

We believe that joining Google will accelerate our team's vision of offering users the best collaboration platform on the web. Google shares that vision and presents us with the world's best environment for delivering on it. We'll be taking advantage of Google's world-class systems infrastructure and operations expertise to ensure that access to your JotSpot is fast and reliable. We can't share any of our plans publicly just yet, but we can tell you that we're incredibly excited about the possibilities. We can't think of a better company to have been acquired by.

Will paying customers still be charged?

We will no longer be billing customers for the use of the service. Although you will still have use of the product at your current pricing plan, we won't charge you anymore when your current billing cycle expires.

What about security and privacy?

Your data is yours — that doesn't change at Google. We will continue to work to ensure the privacy and security of your data. Furthermore, Google is as committed to privacy and security as we are. Since the user information you provided to JotSpot will soon be transferred to Google as part of their acquisition of JotSpot, we want to provide you with the opportunity to retrieve your user information and cease usage of the JotSpot service before the transition. If you do not wish to continue using JotSpot, send an email to privacy@jot.com in the next sixty days and we will reply with instructions for retrieving your user information.

Answers to more frequently asked questions are available at http://www.jot.com/. If you have any other questions, please email support@jot.com.

In closing, we wanted to offer our sincere gratitude to you — our customers — for believing in us and helping us achieve success. We look forward to continuing that relationship at Google.

Best wishes,
The JotSpot Team

Blog for Change

A very interesting approach to mobilizing people to help influence the next election: the Blog for Change campaign from MoveOn.org, using blogs as a way to spread to word and recruit volunteers. Something everybody should consider doing...

Is the VC model broken?

Daniel Primack asks this question in his latest newsletter: Sevin Rosen Funds has indefinitely postponed fundraising for its tenth fund, which had been scheduled to hold a first close this week. This is being treated as big news in VC...

Interesting to see that some VCs are discovering that adding value in an investment should not be just adding money at a late stage, but rather getting involved early to help the company grow.
The "old school" VCs were doing, they may have to go back to it...

Read more

The Direct Economy document has been summarized in English

Following up on an earlier post , I have summarized the document published by Xavier Comtesse on Direct Economy .
The summary is available on the Cooperation Commons website here . A must read if you try to make sense of what is happening today with media, politics, and social networking in general...

Open Services

There is a discussion going on on the Open Business site regarding Open Services and what they should look like.
On this matter, as I see it, there is what would be ideal (from the theoritical point of view) and then there is economic reality.

We have gotten used to get all services for free, thank you Google and co for my email, calendar, text editor, web pages, blog, forums, photo+audio+video storage etc… This is great and it does cost money (lots of money if you look at how much YouTube was pouring down the tube every month). And while it would be nice to have truly open services, something where the company that owns the infrastructure behaves ethically (The famous Google “do no evil”), then I think that the fake open is a good compromise if it can keep the model sustainable.

It is the same concept as for open source: you get the code, but the experts who built it or improved it get paid to support you using it. Nothing is really free, just easier to access even if you do not have a large budget but lots of time instead. For Open Service, you get the service, but you agree that the content will be on that one website so that they can benefit from the mass effect to get some revenue from somewhere. After all we are talking Infrastructure, this is a better alternative than having the government provide it (and charge us taxes for the service).
My concern is actually that we are not even sure that this model is completely sustainable for the long term. YouTube was said to be loosing money all the way to the day they got acquired. Google is getting so big that they may end up imploding: just think of the payroll they carry for example, how much innovation can you sustain with such a big organization? Could it be why Google Video did not really take off (too much friction internally) and why they had to buy YouTube instead to keep the motion going?

A solid underlying infrastructure is healthy, having large companies to take care of it is ok: we have today at least 3 big players to keep the competition going (MSFT, Yahoo, Google). And it may come a time when P2P technology will allow us to get the same infrastructure from home computers all connected together and sharing resources (a la Skype for example). But even then we will have to figure a way to pay for these computers and these connections. There is no such thing as a free lunch…

Having said this, I am also sure that the day people really want to edit the content that is available and the issue of licensing is clear enough (a whole other subject) that they can do so without problem, then it will be easy for a GooTube to add functionality to let users do this. And if they want to keep their audience they will probably do it too, because somebody else could offer the option and attract users away from them.

The key to an healthy ecosystem is the balance between the investors who want to see some return on their investment, the users who want the service and the company employees who want a salary for their work. A good guideline for Open Services should take this into account. Assuming this, Open Services do not have to be about users doing what they want with their content, but about the communication between the 3 groups (investors, employees and users) and keeping sure it is open enough that all can function together with minimum or no friction.

Designing Business for an Open Model

Howard Rheingold just released on the Cooperation Commons blog a great document produced by Herman Miller and the Institute of the Future that provides an excellent view into the various concepts at play with web2.0 and the related changes brought by social networking and the use of new technologies of cooperation.

A must read for anybody interested in Open Business and how to make it happen...