Nicolai Wadstrom on Tech & Entrepreneurship

Post-vacation resolution - my new “New years resolution”

Nicolai Wadstrom — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:18:10 +0000

It’s summer and it’s vacation times for me, mostly because my spouse has more of a normal job, where she needs to plan her vacation. But this year I have been working too much, and too hard and have really starting to loose a bit of the joy that my work usually give me (which also means that my productivity falls).

At any rate, now, after a few weeks vacation, and I am starting to get my thoughts and ideas organized and finding a new focus for the remainder of the year (not only work related), and I am realizing that Vacation resolutions is so much more relevant than “New years resolutions”, I will try to work my way to find a hide-way period (or vacation) a few times each year to get a bigger perspective, organize my thoughts and come back more focused and with more energy.

Economy down-turn

Nicolai Wadstrom — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:18:01 +0000

Yes, economy is in a down-turn. But yet some of the most exciting opportunities arise for internet related business’.

I have been an Entrepreneur long enough to see recessions come and go, and I think we still have seen a small part of the impact that Internet brings, and that this recession will not impact it much over the long run (also I think even though this is a major economic down-turn, it’s characteristics can not be compared to the Great Depressions, mainly because the economy is a lot more Global today, which means faster impact, wider spread, but also quicker recovery).

Comparisons between the Internet and the railroad boom of the late 19th and early 20th century in the US, often lack some major differences, the Internet impact is global, and in a time where the economy is more global than ever. Besides the extent of change is beyond “transportation”, it’s instant, holds a global reach, and the only real comparison that holds relevance is how the invention of the printing press changed the world.

Kind of odd “preaching” the Internet significance today, as it seems evident to most people, but I am certain that the extent of the impact the Internet have is not that evident yet, there is a lot more to come.

Platforms vs Applications

Nicolai Wadstrom — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:08:27 +0000

A very common discussion among Entrepreneurs is the discussions about building platforms vs building applications.

The general experience and rule communicated is that platforms are hard to build, and applications is a lot easier to succeed with. Platforms hold a very attractive position when you succeed, because you will be in the center of an eco-system and have others creating traction for you by their applications. Think about Windows, think about Google. There are huge eco-systems around these platforms

But succeeding in getting that position is extremely hard, because you do not only need to persuade people to use your service/product/technology, but to bet their own success of their product on your offering. It’s a game of critical mass, and a catch-22 situation.

The general rule, is that for a startup it is almost impossible to build a platform. Many even say that if you business idea starts with “We are building a platform to…” you will fail.

The above is true, but this wisdom is widely abused, and people shy away from platforms. The above wisdom and reasoning is all about a the platform as an offering.

When you build a technology or platform that you can use yourself to quickly leverage a number of different offerings (applications), that gives you a very competitive edge, because you own and control an infrastructure that allows you quickly adopt to new opportunities, customer demands and try new products in the market.

In example, why should you build a authentication, payment system, a CMS system, CRM system (or even if you buy of the shelf, it all have to be integrated, which takes time and costs a fair bit to do), for each of Web 2.0 product offering you do, most of these components can be re-used, and in a platform they are even integrated. Also with a platform you build-in the knowledge you acquired between products you launched using the platform, thus you are getting more value as you go.

A platform can be an huge competitive advantage to offer services. If you look internally this is exactly what Google does, it was many media companies do. They build an infrastructure to quickly and efficiently create and manage Internet properties.

This is one of the things I am bringing in to my new Silicon Valley company, bootstrapLabs, that will commence after the summer (more information to come about that!).

Internet economy in “interesting times”

Nicolai Wadstrom — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:56:15 +0000

Most people have been hearing or saying things that past 10 years as the new economy, the internet economy. And after the .com bubble-burst, most people were saying; there was no new economy, there were no new rules.

I think people were wrong, both times. There was a new dynamic in the economy, it wasn’t just what people thought it would be.

If we go back in history, this is quite common when there is a major change or shift in how certain things can be done. It does not happen linearly and it happens in a different way than people predict. One good example is a comparison I saw 2 years ago, that compared the size of e-commerce between 1999 and 2005, the interesting thing was that besides the outcome, it also had a comparison with the estimated size of e-commerce in 2005 (as estimated by many .com-companies and market researches in 1999). The real outcome compared to the estimates? 10 times as much. But the big growth in e-commerce did not happened where people thought it would be, it was more geared towards companies buying and selling between each other, than people buying cloths over the Internet. It was a lot of electronic goods (music, software etc) but mostly procurement that have been revolutionized.

I have been an entrepreneur in the information technology business since, one of the most lucrative business ideas was selling software. This was due to the enormous scale-factor of software. Build the innovation once, and duplicate it with almost no cost. The same holds true for some other business such as the music industry. This was a time when me and many other looked at Microsoft and thought “I want to be just as big, but not as ‘evil’…”.

The Internet did not change this, but it revolutionized another factor, namely distribution. With the Internet, I can distribute a product (that can be delivered in digital form) for almost nothing over the Internet and stocking fees are next to nothing. But most importantly it changed the game of how you reach your target audience, it made it both cheaper and more complex. Many large corporations have still not understood Internet marketing and sales, and if you ask me; until they do, they are slowly dying, and just waiting for somebody else to sweep in and take their customers.

What happened next, was the real killer for a company like Microsoft, way try to build products that can run reliable in a remote hardware environment, which you know nothing about and can not control, while every customer blames you for the ability to do so or not?
Why not only deliver the service or usage of the product? And keep the software running in a controlled data center, with IT-gurus that eats Linux, Windows, AIX, Solaris or whatever for lunch?
Not only have we reduced the complexity, but also pooled costs for things that add very little value to manage yourself for most companies, namely servers, data centers, platforms and infrastructure. But most importantly, we can make very complex software and solutions available to customers for a fraction of the previous price due to marginal distribution, stocking and support costs, many costs which have no been directly related to the actual product you are selling.

This spiked the real growth for companies like Google, and more importantly the birth of companies like SalesForce. SalesForce builds a CRM application that costs very little to use and own.
CRM used to be extremely expensive (I had a software company in 2000 that built software products for Enterprise Content Management, one of our major clients was Compaq, they spent millions of dollars to install Siebel, and then the same amount again to use it, and then again to manage it). Our 20+ people software company was too small to use a CRM system at that time.

Today a one person companies can use a powerful CRM tool the manage their sales, leads and customers interactions, and there is even a “SalesForce for dummies” book! This is the long-tail in effect. There is room for a lot of more services like this, for managing everything from business productivity to personal information and entertainment to almost any niche.

Now it gets really interesting; we are in a state of development, where there are a lot of inexpensive tools available to use, and we are also in a position where it’s is rather cheap to build new Internet services (effective software development tools, RoR, Seam etc); to distribute them even to a very small niche (almost free distribution over the Internet), a growing number of people using the Internet, Internet has already become the most dominant media (in favor of TV, Radio and papers).

The most interesting part is that I think we are only in the beginning, only about 5-10% of the most interesting things with the Internet have happened so far, 90-95% of the opportunities is yet to come.

In China it’s a curse, but I like challenges and shy away from too much conformity and safety; “We are living in interesting times”, and I think we might be really living in the most interesting times ever.

In the past year there have been a lot of emphasis on economic down-turn, I think it’s important to keep the big perspective; globally poverty is in decline, wealth on the rise, and there are more opportunities for Entrepreneurship than ever.

What makes Silicon Valley VC’s different? They are riskmasters…

Nicolai Wadstrom — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:23:23 +0000

I presented my startup GlocalReach at Launch: Silicon Valley 2008 this Tuesday, great event, lot’s of great companies there, and we were lucky enough to be selected by large number of companies submitted to present. Meet with Bill Reichert at Garage Ventures, Adeo Ressi creator of thefunded.com (which you need to check if you haven’t already!), among others. Like the thing Adeo is doing with the funded, but seems to stir a lot of emotions in the VC industry. Also I meet Tim Draper.

I was next to last to present, and after the last presentation, the closing speech for the event was delivered by Tim Draper (Managing Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson (funded companies like HotMail, Skype among others), great speech about leadership, entrepreneurship, and visions. His view on questions such as will economy down-turn is that the next 5 years will be the 5 best yet for entrepreneurs. But most importantly, he finished his speech with singing live on stage. A song he wrote. About Entrepreneurship, and taking risks, about being a “Risk Master”.

Memory stick got full in my camera… But here’s a video, from a previous live performance of “The Risk Master” by Tim Draper:

(Get the song from Tim’s web site: The Risk Master).

Even though Tim told me every VC sings and dance on stage here in Silicon Valley, I know it’s not so, but a lot of the VC’s here understands that Entrepreneurship is about being a “Risk Master”, which is not as true back in Europe, and especially in Sweden (which explains why Draper Fisher Jurvetson invests in Skype but no Swedish “VC’s” believed in Skype). For us Europeans a senior VC partner doing a “Sing and Dance” is just something else!

Tim, hats off, I like your style! I have had both good and bad investor experiences, and I try to choose investors carefully. You seem to be a guy I would like to work with in one of startup companies one day! Looking forward to meet again soon!

Finding the right, trustworthy software

Nicolai Wadstrom — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:03:55 +0000

I see myself as rather computer savvy, and even though I don’t particularly enjoy fixing, installing stuff on my computer, I always get the job done (perhaps asking Google a question or two), but even at that, it’s easy to find lot’s of useful software on the Internet, but what software can I trust? What will actually work for me? Both commercial software (such as Norton Anti-Virus) and free can cause a lot of problems and it’s hard to know what will work for you among all the things you can download on the Internet.

Think about how hard it is for my mom? The number of people using computers everyday for work, at home etc is growing everyday, and most don’t have an IT department to check and manage what software is virus free and won’t create a conflict, they manage and install software themselves and are not too comfortable about finding what will work well, and will not contain malware and spyware.

Christian Rudolf’s Mjukvara.se want’s to solve this by offering localized reviews and rating of software, to make it easy for people to find good products. It works much like Download.com, but is localized for the Swedish market. And by segmenting it well for specific targets, such as “Brandvägg” (firewall) and “Anti-Virus” he makes it both SEO friendly and easy to find for users on the website.

Personally I often tend to think globally for my projects, and sometime I miss great local opportunities that are just in front of me and I think Christian is on to something by going local for this, there is a lot of people that will trust a localized website a lot more.

Trust on the Internet is an issue that have had a lot of attention in the past, but I think this is an area where we will have a rapid growth of services, solutions and technology. And I think hardware solution’s such as Yubico, will continue to grow, but it will be more about services and solutions. Credit rating will merge with different types of trust and authentication solutions to form new services for Internet trust and identification (which goes beyond authentication), this will be a separate blog post about a business idea about Internet trust though!

The process of innovation

Nicolai Wadstrom — Sun, 11 May 2008 23:42:29 +0000

Had a discussion with a friend some time ago about the definition of innovation, that we didn’t quite agree on the semantics but kind of agreed on the principles. After giving it some thought, I realize I was not arguing for the definition of innovation, but rather how I see the innovation process, and how to break it down, and how I value the steps of the process, which I have touched before here, but here goes another approach of it:

1. “Problem and revelation”
Either you have a problem or you just have a revelation of that something could be done differently. This can often coincide with step 2.

2. “Idea”
Elaborating, brain-storming or what-ever get’s you going, you conclude this to an idea of how something could be done, or doing something already existing better, or just different to fit another use. In this step an application is developed, e.g. “I want to pinch to zoom in when using the mapping application on the device”.

3. “Innovation”
You “solve” the idea, by developing methods, technologies etc to bring it to life. This is what is traditionally called an innovation. This could be the multi-touch screen technology on the iPhone, the software the processes the inputs. This step is often patentable.

Now the whole idea is that this 3 step process is what’s crucial for the innovation process to produce valuable outcome. Some put a very industrial approach to this, with a heavy emphasis on a problem (defined out of existing value networks), but no “revelations”, which can result in missing new customers groups and applications (non-consumers today), read more about this in Clayton Christensen’s “Innovators Dilemma”.

There are good examples of innovations that is extremely valuable that did not go through this process, one that changed the world as we now it, that with-out we would not have the speedy Internet, view DVD’s or play CD’s, or precision corrective eye-surgery among other things.

That is the Laser, which was an innovation that started in the 3rd step, with-out a problem, revelation or an idea of application.

So would you not want to be the inventor of the Laser? It would be fun, but I would rather invent something that did not take 20 years to find it’s first application, which is why I try to focus my Entrepreneurship on creating ideas and innovations that have applications in the near future.

Apple service and warranty

Nicolai Wadstrom — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:30:58 +0000

Been a bit slow with the posts, it’s partly because I have been quite busy with my startups, traveling, and my MacBook Pro is being serviced by Apple (or their partners).

Since this fall I have been a happy Apple user, and now it was time for a check-up, it have been behaving oddly for a few months, but I was just too busy to not have a my laptop. Apple had it for 10 days, and they are not yet done with it, which is really bad (that are “hoping” to have it to me before the end of this week!!!).

I think the Apple service in Europe might not be as good at it has to be to be feasible for typical business users. I am not upset that I need to service it, every manufacturer of a portable PC’s have these issues (some more, like a friends Dell had to be repaired 5 times the first 3 weeks), some less (IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads have served me well in the past), but speedy service is essential, and in using Thinkpads since 1996 until last fall service has always been swift everywhere in the world.

So although happy with my Mac, if Apple won’t improve warranty service response times, this is a major drawback for going for a Mac for business use.

Time management and 4-hr work week

Nicolai Wadstrom — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:18:58 +0000

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.

The iPhone Experience - part 2

Nicolai Wadstrom — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 05:14:13 +0000

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.

The iPhone Experience

Nicolai Wadstrom — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:39:50 +0000

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).

Mash-up Camp 6 - Day 2, “Mash-up killed the Integration Star”

Nicolai Wadstrom — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:16:46 +0000

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.

Mash-up Camp 6 - Part 1

Nicolai Wadstrom — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:35:24 +0000

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.

Open Source Licenses - There is no “one size fits all”

Nicolai Wadstrom — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 13:27:37 +0000

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.

About Android, and Open Source Mobiles

Nicolai Wadstrom — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:49:57 +0000

This is old, and I read a lot about Android when launched but didn’t see this video until now, an interesting presentation of some Android features:

Kind of makes you think about the iPhone. An open sourced platform with a user interaction more like an iPhone than a Nokia or Sony-Ericsson would be appealing both to developers and end-users.

I have been a bit skeptical about how Android will succeed, but I think there is a real opportunity for an Open Source mobile OS platform, and I think the timing is right, 2008-2009 I think we will see more and more diverse devices from smaller companies and startups. If you ever thought about building your own mobile phone startup, I think now is the time to start (if you have any interesting ideas in this regard, feel free to contact me).

Just a short notice on…

Nicolai Wadstrom — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 22:40:41 +0000

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/

With fans like this, you do not need a design department (updated)

Nicolai Wadstrom — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:17:10 +0000

… 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!)