Nicolai Wadstrom on Tech & Entrepreneurship

This is something I have been working on for the past 3-4 years, and give more and more attention.

I believe that it is impossible to manage a productive work week, by working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, due to a number of factors:

• I am not productive 8 hours straight.
• I am not productive 5 days a week, when I am supposed to work.
• It is not how much you work, it is about the results.
• There is a difference between being busy and being productive.
• I am good at certain things, not as much at others.
• Disruption dramatically lowers productivity.

“Jack of all trades, master of none”
Is something I hear a lot from people, specially in some places in the world. I firmly believe that this is not true, not in a post-industrial knowledge worker economy, but is something spoken by conservative people that still think of things in a industrial and perhaps closed system economy context.

My Plan
I believe that I will be both more productive and happy if I can diverge and slash my work life, by spending time really focused on different things and actually be quite specialized on each, instead of spreading myself to everything of one thing (a few aspects of which I am really good at others that I am not at all, or as I have discovered there are things I can do really well, but I should not, because it disrupts too much of my balance and slowly brings my productivity down dramatically).

This is why I have decided to build a Business Lab and go from less of a serial Entrepreneur to more of a parallel Entrepreneur during the past few years. I focus on spending time on the things I can do really well, and work with other people that can do the others, employ or contract people that are really good at those things.

When I diverge from this plan, which have happened every now and then the past few years, I see myself becoming more burnt out, less satisfied with life in general, less productive and producing less results for the one thing that I spent most of my time on.

Outsourcing is key
One deceptive thing can be to hire somebody that you pay the same or more as you would make your self, you might think that your are better of doing things yourself.

But you need to value your time, and what you can do instead with that time. If you would pay someone let’s say EUR 20/hour as a personal assistant 8 hours a week to get a lot of your administrative work off your back, that would total 160 EUR a week, and think instead what additional revenue you could build or personal things you could do by getting one whole day extra every week?

If you make sure you spend that extra day every week on the right things, you will build more revenue than that 160 EUR every week, or perhaps you will just get a longer week-end, which might be worth that 160 EUR, but the key thing is that if you embrace this way of thinking you will be able to focus spending your time on things that will actually be more productive and out-source as much as possible. And that 20 EUR/hour you spend to off-load some administrative tasks might generate you 100 EUR/hour or more.

How I am working to achieve these goals
These are some of the things I am trying to work into my routine to achieve this:

• Time Management is essential, and the main problem is disruptions, which kills any planning and focus.
• E-Mail is broken, and to partly fix that I have used a GTD type system (my own version of it) for two years or so, and trying to keep the Inbox empty, tagging things by project, and to read, act-on etc. This has allowed me to gain some focus and I spend 30 mins on going through and responding to all e-mail on just one project, instead of going through every scattered e-mail. E-mail still lacks a lot, so will start to reduce the amount of time and e-mail I use from now on.
• Discipline, try to discipline myself between work and personal life. And I will disconnect my work Reach-ability to be disturbed.
• Be effective, be very focused on a few things in every project that I am working on, and minimize other things.
• I try to remember how I totally burnt myself of working 70-80 hours a week with one of my previous companies that I started in 99.

With this in mind, I started ReachCards (GlocalReach Ltd) with two co-founders a year ago, to help manage how people are reached which is one of the most important things for getting your personal Time Management to work (manage your disruptions). We are entering an area where people will share almost any personal information element, but will want to manage their interaction space very carefully.

Finally a video with an interview of Timothy Ferriss (4hr work week) and Marci Alboher (One Person/Multiple Careers) at Google @ Authors.

In my previous post I forgot to metion the one feature that I think that Apple really got right with the iPhone, and perhaps one of the most important (and neglected one):

Data Synchronization

It syncs everything onto my Laptop, and not only my Contacts and Calendar (that works well with my old Nokia E61), but it syncs, my Internet Bookmarks, browser sessions, favorite call list etc. Which means if I loose my iPhone I have it all backed up. But the important thing is that the sync is pretty much seamless and automatic. I plug it in to my computer, and it’s charged, synchronized and photos sent to iPhoto. I went to Apple store San Francisco yesterday to replace my 8GB iPhone with a 16GB one (they were out of stock last week), plug it in, and a few minutes later all my data is back, even my call history (this goes away on my Nokia E61 each time I switch SIM card, from my UK to US, or Swiss one).

It’s not only backup, makes it easy for me to browse the Internet, bookmark interesting stuff for reading more later when I am using the iPhone, and continue that on my laptop. It makes me surf more on the iPhone.

The same data synchronization can be extended to other applications and with the new SDK it probably will be used by everything from CRM applications, to documents to just about anything you could imagine, and you will have be able to have seamless access to your data on your small “web-tablet” iPhone and on your desktop or laptop.

With that in mind I would also buy a larger “web-tablet” (think A5 or 3 Iphones together), of roughly the same thickness as the iPhone, and I would replace my paper notebook with it, and use it for reading eBooks, on the Web, e-mail and taking notes and sketches on the go. A tablet of this type will not need a full-blown Windows or Mac OS X, the computer power of the iPhone would come a long way to do the tasks needed (think of the Asus Eee PC).

I think we are seeing the next generation of PDA’s, that is really picking up where Palm left off (or got off-track), and they might have big brothers and sisters that will be what the Tablet PC always wanted to be (or Bill Gates vision of it at least).

If I wasn’t to busy with a number of other startup companies, I would look into doing something here of getting a Linux based small (less than 10 mm) Tablet PC, that has a iPhone like user experience, there is room for a number of products in this space (think same user experience and UI, but different form factors to appeal to different people), but Apple might do it, and if they do, it’s hard to compete with.

Lot’s of people have written about the iPhone experience and about touch, and gestures and the obvious UI paradigms that the iPhone brought (no matter if Apple did not invent it, they did bring it to market in a nicely designed package).

After using an iPhone for a few days, quite intensively, here are my thoughts:

- Web surfing; To compare with my Nokia and Sony Ericsson devices I have used, put simply: It works. Even if I have my laptop in my bag, it is actually easier to pull up the iPhone and check something on the web. And Ajax works, and Videos, and most things you expect in a normal web browser. I have used lot’s of PDA type phones from Nokia and some from Sony Ericsson, and a bit of Windows devices, but no one is even close here.

- Internet connection. The iPhone seamlessly switch between any number of WiFi networks (and here in Silicon Valley, they are everywhere), and the Edge network, so I don’t really need to know. On the spec sheet a Nokia will as well, but in reality I get so many pop-ups requesting me to choose connection access points that I don’t really bother.

- E-Mail, have not tried this as throughly, but it seem to work well this far.

- Typing, not as good as a Nokia Communicator, but after some practice, in equal terms to my Nokia E61.

- Positioning and Maps, it just works, positioning is not very accurate, but good enough to be useful.

- WiFi. My Nokia E61 has WiFi, but won’t connect to many Access Points. I think the WiFi implementation is buggy in the device. And when it connects it’s quite slow (connecting and transfer) compared to the iPhone.

There is a lot in store for the iPhone in terms of software updates, but I don’t think we will see any major hardware updates soon (perhaps more memory, only thing is a 3G type device for Europe). Except for 3G (and possibly a GPS receiver), the device has a powerful CPU, lot’s of memory, Bluetooth built-in, fast WiFi and using that capable hardware, Apple can bring lot’s of new functionality on the existing hardware (much of which is not fully utilized today, like Bluetooth).

From my second day at Mash-up Camp 6

Yahoo FireEagle
First session was from Yahoo’s FireEagle, really interesting platform for Location Based data, a good API’ to get LBS data for building services. It’s most accurate for US, but works world-wide (invitation only at the moment).

Serena


Serena shows a cool viral marketing video, about organizations complexity in getting new business requirements implemented in their IT infrastructure.

Mash-up really is what the highly touted and expensive integration platforms sold by IBM, Tibco, Sun, WRQ and others for years, and especially what the whole idea about Composite Applications. Last few years there been a lot of talk about SOA, and ESB, but this is all heading in the direction of Mash-up, where you combine structured data from public and private sources. Mash-up’s are not just Google Maps any more…

I did some work in the early 2000’s in the data integration and Composite Application space, and did a technology licensing deal for my software company’s (VIOMA) of it’s data integration platform to an US EAI/Composite application company (GTSoftware) and where had partnerships with some of the other ones. And the business cases of allowing non-coding (or very little of it) to snapping together some new applications or view into data that you can interact with or just simplify some complex processes and user interfaces.

So I think we will see that simple to advanced Mash-up’s will replace, and deliver the promise of the complex SOA and Composite Applications integration solutions that we have seen in the past. And we will probably see a lot of expensive Business Mash-up server platforms from the big vendors, but the low-end, open and accessible free mash-able services from Google, Yahoo, Xignite and other Internet companies and startups will drive this trend, and make sure that there a lot of people that know how-to and are building Mash-up services in-side and out-side of the Enterprise.

First day of Mash-up Camp 6, Monday 17th of March 2008.

Welcome speech

David Berlind, Mashup Camp co-founder

Raymond Yee, Author, Pro Web 2.0 Mashups

Ribbit

Charles Freedman from Ribbit shows an example of a iPhone Flash app using the Ribbit API’s to manage voice calls. Ribbit has a Voice Mash-up platform that allow any developer to build voice apps in JavaScript/Actionscript.

Intel MashMaker

Rob Ennals from Intel shows the Intel MashMaker Beta. It’s a an application development and sharing platform for Mash-up widgets.

Interesting day, in particular I liked the Ribbit presentation, but maybe that is used perhaps because I am one of the founders of the ReachCards service.

I read about Richard Stallman’s visit to Sweden and the Royal School of Technology (KTH) this week, and his general bashing of everything not GNU.

I would not call Stallman a communist as some would, he want software to be free and open, and make it possible for individuals to contribute and be protected of license infringement (if he was a communist he would have wanted more control and a strict board to govern which software was to be allowed to be written, and individual choice would not be promoted or allowed…). In terms of licensing Stallman has a totalitarian view that GNU is good enough for everybody and all software.

I would like to see more choices, and it’s good with different Open Source licenses, they serve different purposes for different projects. And in a way even Stallman and the Free Software Foundation has realized this and created LGPL, that is a bit more friendly in terms of how you can use the software as components (with-in software with another license).

And I think this is the flaw in his reasoning; he argues that software patents do not work because software is a complex set of different ideas and concepts. I agree, but software today is so complex that it is also a complex set of ready made components (some commercial, some open source) and custom components put together to form a complete program or service. Almost no software built today is built from scratch, and almost any electronic product today contains software, software is everywhere.

So if I am building a commercial product (let’s say a mobile phone) and there are a number of ready made software components for some of the building blocks available as Open Source, some of them are not exactly what I need, so I need to add some functionality to them.

1) If any of these components have a GNU-type license, I could use them, but would have to distribute the complete source for my Mobile phone software (in one way or another).

2) If any of these components have a Apache-type license, I could modify the components as needed and include them in my product. I would not need to distribute the complete source for my Mobile phone software.

There are a number of compelling reasons not to do 1), and there are some perfectly good business models that could be built around 1), but with 2) I could modify the components and feed that back to the Open Source project and add some value to that.

For Linux the GNU model, 1), works quite well I think. But for minor components I think the Apache style license works a lot better, because it allows me to choose 1 or 2 above, whatever fits my business model, it also means that if my business model and business idea is working out, I can dedicate more resources to the contribute to the community (Open Source) project, which is what you can see with a lot of the small Apache projects (that don’t share the “heavy” foot-print that Linux has in terms of momentum etc), I think many of these small Apache projects would die (slowly but surely) if they were to be GPL licensed. A lot of the GNU licensed smaller projects don’t thrive as the Apache ones do. If I am a small startup with few resources, and early-on before I know which business model really works and how I will actually end up making money, the flexibility can be quite important and in many cases it would make sense for a small startup to open-source my custom/proprietary components with an Apache model, but not with the GPL (in terms of benefits of sharing it).

Now FSF and GNU has realized this and created the LGPL, but GNU would like to forget that, it seems.

Stallman thinks the world could be better by with widespread technology use, me too, I just think that variations, openness and flexibility is what moves things forward and will in the end be the route that creates the most diversity and spread, and I am foremost an Entrepreneur that want to create companies that make money of creating a value for it’s customers.

My punchline: Freedom of choice, and different licenses are good, there should not be just Apache or just GNU, just as there is no “one size fits all” for anything else in our world.