Nicolai Wadstrom on Tech & Entrepreneurship

Joi Ito, the CEO of Creative Commons, spoke about Barriers of Innovation and how the layers of the Internet have lowered these. It started with “Getting IBM and McKinsey out of the loop.” was what drove the development to connect and build the Internet infrastructure, and then Sir Tim Berners-Lee, wanted to easily reference related research articles, and all this led to a shift in how content is created, treated and distributed.

Creative Commons
Background, sharing in the old media happens through lawyers meeting to negotiate MUSD content syndication and distribution deals. Old media fights the most expensive thing on the Internet; incoming links and references. New media; sue Google for a billion, get a little bit in settlement.

Creative Commons Licensing
Creative Commons, have 6 different licenses, to simplify legal aspects and sharing for people creating content. This makes it easy for anybody from Obhama or Gwen Stefani to you and me to share things with a predictable copyright legality. Creative commons now also supports the emerging RDFa standard, a standard for semantic markup copyright and licensing.

In summary; Nothing new to most of us, but the ones it affects the most, old media need to change their business models to take advantage of the enormous distribution.
And as I have written about before on this blog, the power of sharing and the power of Open Source is not free, but the result of free over the Internet => distribution.

Some questions for Joi:
- What is really deemed commercial use today? Currencies on the Internet or not always monetary.

This week’s link in my a link per week; goes to Mjukvara.se, which is a website covering things you need to know to find the right software for your computer for certain things such as Internet security, Anti-Virus and Firewalls.

The website is a Swedish project run by Christian Rudolf, which is a quite unknown Search Engine marketing expert in Sweden, but probably one of the best in Sweden today.

UPS have been trying to deliver a package to me this past week, and their notion of service, is that they won’t tell you or agree at what time during a day the will deliver. And they showed up two times at 12.30 (both of which I was in a lunch meeting), and most companies close their reception during lunch, what is UPS thinking?

Probably they plan their whole logistics system, including their customers, but with-out considering their customer’s customer (namely me that is the customer of Iomega, which in turn is a customer of UPS in this case).

Lesson to learn for all entrepreneur’s, design your services and products and go one step further, this is not the only way UPS in it’s practices bluntly ignores the receiving end, and upsets people (or rips them of).

UPDATED: To elaborate a bit, you need to understand the eco-system that you are in, and how that reaches beyond your own customer. When Iomega finally get the feedback (or UPS handling of Iomega’s customers get apparent) and figure out what the problems are (UPS), it is often too late for UPS to correct the problems (too much negative momentum). But if you instead can work into your business to understand the eco-system better (and deliver value through out it), you will be more successful over time.

This week’s “christmas calendar” link goes to Moyume, Moyume is a microblogging for photos. It makes it very easy to share photos with friends and family, both near and far.

Expecting my first child with-in a month and in the process of moving to San Francisco, I will introduce Moyume to my mother and other family so that they can follow us thousands of miles away.

I did attend ETRE 08 in Stockholm the other week courtesy of Red Herring and Peter Sandberg (at Moyume), it was a very inspiring event, and I meet a lot of interesting people.

This was the 19th ETRE, and gathered movers and shakers from all over the world, from Berthelsmann, Press, Entrepreneurs, Banks to VC icons such as Tim Draper and Swedish financial elite’s such as Marcus Wallenberg.

I think ETRE is set apart from many of the events I have intended, and provided an excellent networking opportunity to meet, discuss, and exchange ideas with some very interesting people from all cornors of the world, and can be highly recommended.

Next year, the 20th ETRE, should be something special (Alex, the CEO of RedHerring hinted it might be in France), so check out Red Herring for more information during next year.

I will also be attending SIME 2008, and blogg live from the event, so watch out for that here!

So this week’s link goes to Paul Graham, he runs a interesting project called Y-Combinator (not very unlike my latest startup bootstrapLabs, but he has come much further!).

Also he writes interesting essay’s (longer blog posts?), about topics relevant for entrepreneurs, and the latest one is a recommended reading form most:

Why start a startup in a bad economy?

Some food for thoughts if you have doubts about pursuing you startup business idea, because of the economy down-turn.

Hi, this week’s link goes to skiften.se, it’s a Swedish blog about change.

Skiften is an interesting blog about change that was started by 5 bloggers, coming together under a common theme, I think we might see more of this, bloggers clustering together to create a bit more critical mass around specific topics. Some of them might also be the emerging media properties of tomorrow.

So Monday again, and time to fulfill last week’s promise of a link a week until Christmas, this week’s link goes to:

Mattias Östmar and Prfekt, that is offering (and building a tool for) analysis of blogs based on Myers briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and some other psychology tools for analysis.

Of course you can apply it to responses to blog posts (the readers), and get a profile for the readers of particular group. The interesting idea here is that it will allow advertisers or brand owners to get more in-depth trend analysis of how there brands are perceived and in which context.

Now you need to think about that it’s the analysis of the persona as portrayed on a particular blog, not the person as such behind it (the same person can have different “personas” for different blogs they write).

Discussed the Christensen’s book “The innovators solution” on CJ’s blog, and how important it is to think about less of your product and more of how the product will be applied and used. I we move the analogy out of the tech industry into something such as the tobacco industry that actually do sell products that will kill you albeit more or less slowly, it becomes more evident.

The “job” of the cigarette is the whole situation where a cigarette is consumed, and the tobacco industry really understands this.

If cigarettes were sold as many tech companies sell their products; they would sell it as “Our product cures you nicotine craving much quicker and more effective”, but the customer is probably going for “looking sexy”, feeling sexy, relaxed, feeling cool etc.

By using the “job” analogy approach you move away from the specs of the product and look at the customer and how your product might change or be part of a specific scenario.

The Henry Ford quote still applies; “If you asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”, you need to address needs not wants, the customer want is created out of a their perception of a solution of their need (which very often do not fulfill their actual need), and sometimes customer do not even know what they need. This is the tricky part… Many companies have failed listening to the customers and giving them what they say they want (brings us to Christensen’s first book, the innovators dilemma, his books are really a must read!).

I have three love affairs; London, San Francisco and my girlfriend/fiance Anna (guess which order!).

I am in London right now, I am getting ready for my big move from Europe to San Francisco, I setup my new US company and I am working on getting the E-2 visa organized, and I got rid of my London apartment… God how I will miss London…

Being a Swede, but not much much of Swedish in culture, London is all I never knew I wanted. London is nothing like Sweden; it’s multi cultural, people come from all over the world and opportunities are plentiful for everyone that want a go at them.

But don’t be mistaken London is tuff, but the rewards and people are great, the Swedish way of easy wins and low rewards, and uniformity is not my cup of tea. Keep in mind that the british myth of “stiffness” is far away from reality, just think about the multi-cultural society London has been for hundreds of years.

I know for sure I will miss London, and in particular the feeling I get whenever I am “home” (I am a busy traveller…), which is what London emotionally has been for me for quite some time. A number of Swedes I know living abroad for years are still felling home in Sweden, but thrive wherever they are.. I feel home here in London, to paraphrase JFK; “I am a Londoner”.

I went to the Oriental Club with a friend today. This might be a way for me to keep a connection to my emotional home, and a home here in London, when moving to San Francisco.

So this is my oboe the one of my loves; London, another of my loves is San Francisco, so I think I will do well over “there”, but I will for sure miss London.

Nicolai - The Franciscan Londoner.