Nicolai Wadstrom on Tech & Entrepreneurship

About another blog. Busy with all my startup projects at the moment (most notably GlocalReach), but just wanted to share this interesting blog post about Mark Zuckerberg (FaceBook Founder):

http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/26/the-shy-mark-zuckerberg-founder-of-facebook/

… Or perhaps you get fans like this because of an excellent design strategy.


(Read more on Gizmondo)

Perhaps apple won’t make this MacBook Touch type of slim notebook (I would agree with Gizmondo that a small/slim notebook more like the Lenovo Thinkpad X-series is more in line with what Apple would do, and what would make sense in generating revenue), for quite some time yet. However Apple’s design department get ideas and design concepts from their fan and customer group. Have you ever seen Sony-Ericsson, Nokia, or Microsoft getting this type of mockups of potential products for them to produce “designed” by their customers?

Now then, design and product development is just one part (and not the most costly) of getting a new product to market, but it lessens the big risk between the “speculation” of a product/service design that your are making and what the market would actually buy, so I would argue that Apple has a great benefit from all this mockup’s and speculations floating around on the Internet.

Stefan Engeseth is right on the spot here with his book “One”.

But why do not Sony-Ericsson or Nokia get the same attention? With mock-ups of potential new and cool mobile phones?

I think it is because Apple built a “cult” around it’s design (and interaction design), and the design department at Apple report directly to the top management of the company, which is something you won’t see in almost any other consumer/computer/electronics company. I think it’s because of their attention to these matters, that they have attracted customers and “fans” that value these things, and come up with new ideas around it.

At one point Apple (or rather Steve Jobs) decided that one of Apple’s core values and “Key differentiators” is design and interaction, and by making the design department report directly to the top-management Apple made a clear statement internally and externally how important this is.

So my lesson as an Entrepreneur here (which I already knew, but need to remind myself of every now and then); is how important a focused and well executed brand strategy is. And it’s as simple as to find your core values and differentiators that will make your product and services distinctly different than the competition, and dare to “kill your darlings”, by making choices that also eliminate some potential customers but makes you more appealing for a group that identify themselves with those core values. And by building this into the culture of your organization, it will be a part of everything you do.

PS: I would actually buy a very slim MacBook Touch (half a page size iPhone type of device), so I do hope Apple will make one, and even though the tablet PC’s have not been a huge success, perhaps the general market is ready for an smaller tablet type device soon. Building a company that makes such a device is actually in my “business idea backlog” (but this is a though business to build from scratch!)

The future is really hard to predict! But here’s my list of things that I believe we will see during 2008:

• Semantic Web. But in general I think the next big thing on the Internet will be something that has been on the agenda for quite some time, and that is Semantic Web applications. I think we will continue to see a social media/network driver, but the Semantic Web will be used (under the covers) to add and refine context of information for Search engines (see Powerset Labs), Wikipedia and communities, and many new types of services yet to be invented.
• Internet Ads. Another trend is that Internet ads will continue to grow, and there will be an heavy emphasis on context matching, the one that excel in matching the right user to the right ad will win. Context will be added by using Semantic Web technology to “understand” content of web pages, community users and other social web sites will use the very valuable meta-data about their users to put the right ad in front of the right person. FaceBook is working hard on this right now with their new ad system, Google as well, and other will follow.
• Higher paying ads. This will continue to drive Internet ad revenues, and I think we will see both better paid ads (and better ROI for advertisers) and continued raise of internet ad volumes.
• Mobile Internet ads might move out of conceptual phases and we might see some interesting things in this area from Google, Yahoo and even some small startups like Mobispine.
• Glimpsing a bit further, in 2009 we might even see some standardized semantic web matching schema’s just for ads.
• FaceBook’s huge growth and success in 2007 will transition into a new phase, and there is a fair bit of uncertainty of what FaceBook 2008 will be all about, but with the momentum FaceBook have, it’s not a fad, but I think the trend and how people use FaceBook will change from 2007 to 2008.
• Funding. We have had a tremendous growth in the financial markets for the past years, the second half of 2007 it cooled down a bit. Most companies are still doing well and are trading at reasonable price/earnings, which should indicate that there should be a good market for funding startups still in 2008, but even though there are no investment bubble indicators (in general), many investors are starting to think that it can’t be this good for too long and are getting cautious, but I believe that most serious VC’s are still in the game for interesting ventures. But there might be a clean tech investment bubble on the horizon though.

Overall I think that 2008 will be quite interesting (every new year is!), and there will be great opportunities for Entrepreneurs especially in the Internet sector during 2008 as well.

In my 2008 I will keep focus on taking GlocalReach and Programmers Heaven to the next level. My brief agenda and goals for 2008:

• A Business Lab oriented blog and networking event thing, with a goal of creating a easy and informal way for Entrepreneurial minds to meet and bounce ideas of each other.
• A new type of work management and outsourcing online service, targeting small amounts of work and free-agents/freelancers not the big organizations, an idea that I have been toying around with for some time (look here for more information during Q1 2008!).
• I will go to San Francisco for 1-2 months beginning of next year, to look into the possibility of moving there to establish Enbou, and work on getting partnerships and other relevant contacts for GlocalReach and Programmers Heaven.
• I hope that I will finally get that new Semantic Web venture going, because I think there is a lot of potential to tap into.
• And maybe one or two of the .com recycled ideas!
• Hoping to find more good people to work with, finding people with an Entrepreneurial flare and drive and a passion to change the world just a little bit, is the most scarce resource for all the projects I have in my pipeline…

This should keep me more than busy for 2008, most limiting factor me will be finding the right people to work with. But my finally my new years promise, will be to blog more, I did get some very encouraging feedback on my blog from the Swedish guys at Disruptive.nu, which is always a good motivator, and I will try to share my ideas more often!