What Is It That Makes YOU? Tariq Krim, Serial Entrepreneur.

Found this post from last year though my behavior to look up things and people (I-have-too-many-tabs-open-disorder). I share it with you, because I believe in it as statement, karma and integrity every Entrepreneur should show and incorporate some if not all of it.

[F]our things matter to me : the opinion of my team, our users, our clients, and the developer community, and nothing makes me more happy than their commitment to Netvibes. From the bottom of my heart, I thank them for their continuous support.

I have created 7 companies so far, and Netvibes is by far the most international and the one with the largest number of employees. With Netvibes I have always considered myself as a founder CEO.

That means two things: a founder and the first CEO of the company.

As a founder you have to provide the ambition, the vision, and hire the best team possible to do the job. I believe that we have succeeded in doing so. People who are not entrepreneurs sometimes do not fully understand the unbelievable level of commitment you need to create a company.

Before founding Netvibes, I didn’t know if I was capable of such commitment, dedication, and will for a project. For a project like Netvibes, you have to give everything or it doesn’t work. You have to believe for yourself and the rest of the world, and provide your team with constant energy, making sure that you can get the best of each person on a daily basis.
You have to channel your doubts into operational focus, because it’s not where you start that matters but how you can lead your team to fulfill your vision and to the difficult road to success. This is why I have respected and admired entrepreneurs ever since I was a child.

As the founder of Netvibes, I am here to create something that ultimately has meaning: for the market, the team, and clients, but also fundamentally something that has meaning for myself. It’s that last factor that truly defines entrepreneurs.

What about strong competition with seemingly unlimited funding and workforce against us? This served as even further motivation to get excited about the project and pursue it despite the related challenges.

As a founder CEO my vision is very simple: you have one mission, make sure that the company executes your vision and that it hires the best people in order to render yourself unnecessary as quickly as possible at the operations level. That is the only advice I would give people, hire people you like and respect and that are much better than you in their areas of expertise. Furthermore, give people a chance to express their full potential because sometimes you will be fascinated by the result.

And one last thing, keeps egos away as fast as you can. The Netvibes team is by far one of the best teams assembled in the web 2.0 world and is still extremely hard working, modest, and funny.

Before handing over the CEO position to Freddy, I wanted to make sure that I had completed my to do list for the company:

An ambitious vision: a startpage combined with a monetized widget platform that is now the only alternative to google. An elegant alternative to google.

A strong team: Netvibes has a team that is 100% committed to the challenge, extremely talented and capable of creating miracles every day. We’ve had a very low turnover — 90% the team is still there and still rocking as usual.

A sexy business model: As Freddy has stated in interviews, Netvibes’s revenue is increasing every quarter. He expects the company to break even next year and I am fully confident of this. For us, the monetization of Netvibes was never the problem, it’s how you monetize while respecting the user that is the hard part. You can’t go for the simplest solution and use the traditional tricks of web 1.0 monetization. But if you find a way to make your user accept sponsored widgets as a suggestion and not an obligation, you have a winner.
The sponsored widgets model is Adsense 2.0 and Netvibes will play a key role in this transformation.

In general I am proud of what we have done and I would change very little of what we did.
It is important to note that decisions are made in a context that is often not public, and that Netvibes has always seemed bigger than it is. Our staff of 35 people is not that big when you think of it.

This is why it took us more time to deliver what we announced, but we always delivered:

* a complete rewriting of the Netvibes backend to support APIs,
* a new and more flexible front end that can evolve and be more easily improved,
* the public page (Netvibes universe) that is becoming more and more popular every day ,
* our latest product development: the Netvibes activities that will add the much-anticipated social component (an updated version is coming soon),
* the new ecosystem with more tools for developers and better stats,
* the sponsored widget ad network
* and last but not least, our open source widget platform that will provide an incredible opportunity for developers to connect and mash our technology up. I will follow what will come out of this very closely.

In my experience, finding a good business model is not easy: you need to experiment, measure, understand what the client wants, have inventory and drive adoption, all a part of the key knowledge that makes Netvibes invaluable vis-a-vis the widget economy. Freddy and the business team have been instrumental in this phase and it is now the time to unleash the full potential of this opportunity.

With an incredibly dedicated team we have made all the changes needed to see Netvibes play a major role in the widget economy. The coming challenge is very exciting and I am highly confident that the team will succeed. I will be available to help the team in whatever way possible.

• http://twitter.com/tariqkrim
• http://www.tariqkrim.com/

Why not Twitter the Protocol?

Biz Stone (left) and Evan Williams

A thought which was and is always surrounding my educated reasoning.

TechCrunch posted photos from the new Twitter HQ via Twitter’s Flickr account and employees tweets, and I had again this internal process of questioning and reasoning the moves of Twitter as product and company (Vision, Mission, Objectives). I may not be versed enough into internals of Twitter as product and company, and TechCrunch & others tend sometimes to make more up and want the re-tweet (clicks) at any cost than to inform and give insight. So I am sorry in advance when I make here a call and it turns out, in hindsight, that it wasn’t or isn’t or couldn’t be so. You shall forgive me reader.

Out of the occasional Fail Whale in the past grew the demand for a distributed service of Twitter from the userland. Like Yammer! does. A Twitter like service for companies to host in their environment for internal communication. A self hosted/maintained and safe internal economy. While I was working at IBM, they adopted Twitter as service quiet fast on their BlueGroups Community and Services platform. It didn’t grow beyond early adopters like Twitter itself and I left in September 2008, thus can’t report any progress on that.

It is interesting to observe where they (Twitter) are going, now that the Twitter team is beyond (a critical) product phase (scaling./stability) where they had the growth problem. They work hard under the hood of the product in the past, and the founders have stated that. Because it was ruining the experience…  Thus, the blog posts about Twitter should opening up its product and building a protocol out of it like e-mail (IMAP, POP3) are on the low tide, now that they can have a nice and smooth product experience. Especially that they are showing progress on the front-page; lists, re-tweet, geolocation, display of new tweets on front-page while logged in as user.

 

Question time: What would have been the (i) advantage or (ii) disadvantage of a Twitter protocol?

• (i) Distributed services & self hosted equals reliability
• (ii) Community around the development of the protocol equals lots of management because of the noise, would have slowed down the progress eventually
• (ii) Time consuming, maybe waste – switching from platform&service to protocol instead of working on the scalability and stability of the platform&service. And the scalability of the eventual protocol would not have been solved (maybe). And then there would have been the lack of features. Incoherent experience possibly because of different service providers. Changing the strategy because pundits scream for it would have cost Twitter lots of credit points.
• (i) They could have had revenue early by having a licensing model/fees of the protocol. But diminishing returns over time. Would be hard to justify to ask the license holder for $10k more each year after 4 years just because inflation and shareholder pressure to increase revenue. Being a public traded company or being venture backed have a bittersweet taste.
  • (ii) Innovation couldn’t then come from inside or from the outside though users, as a protocol has to be a standard, and updating a standard because of every new feature every 3-6 months – impossible. The innovation process would have had to be transported to the license holder building on to (like now API, experience would then again be different to each other), and growth just by growing the amount of licenses is a limited income source. Clearly they had to have to care about their investors interest too.
• (i) Being the sole and proprietary provider of a popular service with a diverse user base offers (almost) better revenue models and projections of revenue over time.
• (i) Being a monopolist is great and has many advantages than being a price taker.

It might be a bit harder to formulate a coherent B2B revenue stream without tapping into the traditional, automatic ads market. Sourced by meta data, context, user, following list, geolocation. And when they are on the same wave as I am, and know that advertising is a declining model for customer acquisition and a volatile model for revenue – they might not put ads at all into the product I love (and want) for its simplicity and non-intrusiveness.

Here is the take-away.

The ordinary user and the ordinary tech columnist aren’t business (or economists) people in flesh and blood. That is why they read the news or write the news but don’t make the news.

What Peer-To-Peer Means For Me And You

A short historical account of Peer-To-Peer. And where Free Press has to go.

The Pirate Bay crew just announced today that it has “decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date.”  They have put the “server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.”

This is something we should celebrate, I think it will pave the way for more to come from us.

No Big Words, Many Small Steps Forward

Solid change, change that lasts and changes the world, builds up from the bottom first. The Peer-To-Peer (P2P) scene was and is a driver of technological change to distribute information (data) in the most reliable, robust, resource efficient and effective way possible. Modern P2P is a system with checks and balances and economic incentive system.

At the beginning, the tracker was needed as limitations in capacity, bandwidth et cetera existed. A checksum, balancing, coordination, peer discovery had to be centralised because of limitations to get it organised. Cumulative Peer capacity couldn’t handle it. After Napster, the first centralised Peer-to-Peer network, was ‘closed’ in July 2001 (and eventually re-opened as pay service in October 2003 and still running), a whole legion of encouraged individuals and groups were formed around the idea of a safer and better Peer-to-Peer protocol to distribute information.

It is safe to say that without the hard rulings and interventions of big corporations against individuals – eDonkey, Gnutella & Gnutella2, now-defunct Kazaa, and finally the great triumph of BitTorrent would have never happened. David won – in a technological sense, and looking at the horizon.

The Largest Hockey Stick in the World. Sort of.

GenBank Growth. The Biggest Hockey Stick.

The GenBank sequence database is an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. This database is produced at National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) as part of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, or INSDC. GenBank and its collaborators receive sequences produced in laboratories throughout the world from more than 100,000 distinct organisms. GenBank continues to grow at an exponential rate, doubling every 18 months. Release 155, produced in August 2006, contained over 65 billion nucleotide bases in more than 61 million sequences. GenBank is built by direct submissions from individual laboratories, as well as from bulk submissions from large-scale sequencing centers. (Wikipedia)

The Next ‘IT Industry’

When technology was given individuals, growth and innovation turned out to be exponential. Now we are reaching the stage where an individual can fabricate and re-design biological components and systems that do not already exist in the natural world at a fraction of the cost 20 years ago.

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Further Readings:

• Singularity University Blog
• Singularity Institute Summit Blog
• Video – Singularity University Executive Program: Ray Kurzweil’s Opening Address
• You will find on YouTube many presentations on (Technological) Singularity, especially from Raymond Kurzweil.
• Reading list to Singularity in the IT Industry and Biology and other aspects
• Free University Stuff — Open Course to Synthetic Biology [Very Cool]
• The actual largest Hockey Stick is in Vancouver, Canada.
• The New Yorker – A Live of its own
• Movie – Surrogates

Milton Friedman Series – Free To Choose

Without any introduction, here is the PBS Series of Milton Friedman – Free To Choose. About free markets and every corner of it.

Use Google Search “Milton Friedman PBS Free to Choose 1980 Vol [1 to 9] of 10” for the complete series. You might wonder why they include debate round tables in the series. Well, Milton Friedman was an excellent debater and speaker.

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Further Readings:

• econlib.org Search:Milton Friedman

Writing All lowercase Versus CAPITAL Letters.

Writing in English as your 2nd second language can be really hard, especially when you try to make your point and argument clear and precise in a stylistic and shortest way possible. Hello blogging versus rant versus academic writing. I know that Jerry Yang was (and is as uber Yodel and Chief Yahoo) writing his memos to Yahoo! employees in lowercase letters, only (but blogs on Yodel Anecdotal normal). So I tried that, to be able to pay more attention to the topic and not to lose touch while reviewing grammar and style on the go.

Time Constraints Versus Quality.

It saved me time writing the posts, as intended. But after some couple of days passed and re-reading it, I discovered that it reads terrible. So I wanted to let you know about the failed experiment. Not only might my readers having a hard time reading along the lines, but I can imagine that readers think I am lazy to use the shift key, or that I am not familiar the English grammar rules. Let me put it that way, I am not a professional.

The Economic Part. The Bright Side.

Thanks to technology, my effort (and failed experiment) wasn’t worthless, now that you know all. You don’t make the same mistake, as you have read and learned (and you even had not to leave your home to learn this), and saved lots of your resources.

Example; considered time as finite resource and everything else held constant. Because of advances in medical technology, an increase of life expectancy means your time is not finite anymore. With even more time into the future of medical discoveries, infinite life (a reversal or stopping of cell damage) is maybe possible. Not necessarily for my generation, but for my kids who take a tour to Mars every now and then.

Glad to be of value. MJ.

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Further Readings:

• London School of Economics (LSE) has a style guide for its web presence.
• Associated Press (AP) has dedicated a whole book and web presence and Twitter account. You might want to have a look at scribd too.
• There is a GNU style checker.
• A little googling will give you some ideas, what to look for when you are writing, um, blogging.
  • Good Blog Writing Style.
  • Ten Tips for writing a blog post (ProBlogger.com).
  • The 4 Pillars of Writing Exceptional Blogs (ProBlogger.com).
  • Blogging Tips for Beginners (ProBlogger.com).
  • Writing Style to Keep in Mind for Blog Posts.
  • Blogging Techniques for Getting More Hits.
  • 20 Usability Tips For Your Blog (check out the follow-on resources).
  • George Orwell’s 5 Rules of Effective Writing (check this out too).

Our Technology For The Betterment Of Our World

In austria, students use twitter, ustream, qik, facebook and other ‘over the wire’ communication tools to organize their protests, flash mobs and events for

• higher education for everyone who want to pursue higher education, no entry barriers.
• against planned tuition fees.
• improvements in the education and university environment at large with more government funding.
• reform of the bologna reform (masters and bachelors which are practical orientated and tuned towards speedier graduation).

US Health Care Reform Done Right. The Liberal Way.

Here is the same about education in the US (with empirical evidence).

Internet Age, Our Own Industial Revolution, And More.

The Big Switch

nick carr, the author of the big switch, spoke recently (YouTube) at an event organized by google about cloud computing. which really reminded me again about the transformative time we are in. not only will we end up within ten years with a different economic system (partially), ecological system, cultural environment, and technology we use as necessity during the day to get over the day but don’t necessarily perceive as technology. one way, I can think of this theory is, how we use technology to get rid of paper. to use flexible and foldable oled technology that I can put in my pocket, that has wifi (or any other futuristic over the air communication) and a longer battery life the the duracel bunny. which means that there will be no printing press in 20 years, receiving a print edition will be a premium for the reader in the future. news stands you know on the street will be made obsolete. period. another thing which nick carr picks up in his presentation is the shift where information is stored, and when the wire becomes as powerful as the processor, then something big will happen. imagination and innovation off the leash.

The Economics

you wonder what that has to do with economics!? well, think about markets; monopolies, oligopolies, regulated markets, competitive markets, and perfectly competitive markets. the future markets of the internet (and everything in it consisting of bytes only), will be (and are) perfectly competitive markets.

@TwtTimes could you integrate Twitter Lists?

The Twitter Tim.es

This post was origanlly published on my tumbler here. But due to some requests and the problem that nobody can leave comments on tumblr, I’ve deceided to post it here again with a poll. Thank you all twittertim.es fans and userland in advance. Michael.

Hi @TwtTimes,

I have some of my own lists and some lists subscribed to which I would love to see integrated into The Twitter Times experience. Either as Tabs or into the header. I would prefer Tabs. But having it on the right hand side as extra object above “Top News History” would suit the flow even better (I think)