This video will tell you all you want to know about the rigging of historic sailboats (tall ships excluded) with just enough detail to make it a learning experience rather than an overview. And if you want to see more of Leo and his amazing project rebuilding the historic gaff cutter (yep, it will be explained) Tally Ho, go here. If you want to support him, go here.
Category Archives: Entrepreneurship
Interesting interview with Rodney Brooks
Boingboing, which is a fantastic source of interesting stuff to do during Easter vacation, has a long and fascinating interview by Rob Reid with Rodney Brooks, AI and robotics researcher and entrepreneur extraordinaire. Among the things I learned:
- What the Baxter robot really does well – interacting with humans and not requiring 1/10 mm precision, especially when learning
- There are not enough workers in manufacturing (even in China), most of the ones working there spend their time waiting for some expensive capital equipment to finish
- The automation infrastructure is really old, still using PLCs that refresh and develop really slowly
- Robots will be important in health care – preserving people’s dignity by allowing them to drive and stay at home longer by having robots that understand force and softness and can do things such as help people out of bed.
- He has written an excellent 2018 list of dated predictions on the evolution of robotic and AI technologies, highly readable, especially his discussions on how to predict technologies and that we tend to forget the starting points. (And I will add his blog to my Newsblur list.)
- He certainly doesn’t think much of the trolley problem, but has a great example to understand the issue of what AI can do, based on what Isaac Newton would think if he were transported to our time and given a smartphone – he would assume that it would be able to light a candle, for instance.
Worth a listen..
Smarthelp: Locating and messaging passengers
If you are a public transportation company: How do you tell your prospective passengers that their travel plans may have to change?
Public transportation companies know a lot about their passengers’ travel patterns, but not as much as you would think – and, surprisingly, they know less now when ticket sales have been automated than they used to know before.
RuterBillett – a ticketing app
Let’s take a concrete company as an example: Ruter AS, the public transportation authority of Greater Oslo. Ruter is a publicly owned company that coordinates various suppliers of transportation services (bus, tram, train, some ferries) in the Oslo area. The company has been quite innovative in their use of apps, selling most of their tickets on the RuterBillett app, and having many of their customers plan their journey on the RuterReise app. The apps are very popular because they make it very easy both to figure out which bus or train to take, and to buy a ticket.
The company has a problem, though: While they know that someone bought a ticket on the ticketing app, they don’t know which particular bus, tram or other service the passenger took (a ticket typically gives you one hour of open travel on their services, no matter how many of them you use).
RuterReise – a journey planning app
They could get some information from what people have been searching for, but the two apps are not linked, and they don’t know whether a passenger who searched for a particular route actually bought a ticket and did the journey – or not. There are many reasons for this lack of knowledge, but privacy issues – Norway has very strict laws on privacy – are important. Ruter does not want to track where its customers are travelling, at least not if it in any way involves identifying who a passenger actually is.
Not knowing where passengers are is a problem in many situations: It creates difficulties for dimensioning capacity, and it makes it difficult to communicate with passengers when something happens – such as a bus delay or cancellation.
Identifying travel patterns and communicating with passengers
The problem for Ruter is that they want to know where people are travelling (so they can figure out how many buses or trams they need to schedule), they ned to know who regularly takes certain journeys (so they know whom to send a message to if that route is not working) and they need to know who is in a certain area at a certain time (so they don’t send you a message about your bus being delayed if you are out of town, for instance). All of this is easy, except for one thing: Norway has very strict privacy laws – already quite similar to EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect in 2018 – and Ruter cares deeply about not being seen as a company that monitors where people travel.
In short, they need to know where you travel, but do not want to know who you are.
This is a seemingly impossible challenge, but Smarthelp Secure Infrastructure, in combination with Smart Decision Support, makes it possible. The communications platform creates an end-to-end encrypted communication channel between a central system and the smartphone. Using technology developed because we had to solve the problem of medical-level encrypted communication between emergency centers and individual users, Smarthelp has technology that allows someone to track specific information you allow access to – say, the fact that you are in a certain area, or that you regularly travel certain paths – without sharing other information, such as your name.
This would allow Ruter, when something happens, to send a message to people who a) regularly takes, say, bus route 85, and who b) is in an area where it is conceivable that they could take the bus, given their prior patterns, the time of day, and so on. For the individual passenger, this would mean that you only get pertinent messages – you don’t get messages about bus routes you don’t normally take (unless you actually get on the bus), and you don’t get messages when you are far enough from the bus that it is clear you are not going to take it anyway. In a world of information overload, this is extremely important – flood the user with many messages, and they do not read them.
The future of public transportation
A selective message and geolocation service, such as Smarthelp provides, is an evolutionary step, an optimization of the current way transportation is coordinated. In the long term (especially if we start to talk about seld-driving vehicles), the whole way we coordinate public transportation will change. As one Ruter employee told me: A public transportation company is “someone who takes you from a place you are not to a place you don’t want to go.”
The next step in public transportation is that the users tells the company not just that they want to get on the bus, but also where they want to go. I have been told that in an experiment, Telenor found that, one sunny summer afternoon, fully half of their employees (located at Fornebu outside Oslo) planned to go to Huk, a public beach on Bygdøy. The distance from Telenor’s headquarters at Fornebu is 10 minutes by car, but takes more than 30 minutes by public transportation, involving two bus routes. If Ruter had known about these travel plans, though, it could have just rolled up some buses and driven the employees directly, vastly improving the service – and avoiding clogging up the regular buses to Bygdøy.
And that is the future of public transportation: Instead of planning where you will go in terms of geography, you will tell the public transportation company where you want to go, and they will get you there. With self-driving cars, they will be able to tell you when you will be at your destination – but, perhaps, not willing to tell you the actual route. As a passenger, you probably will not care – after all, what matters to you is when you arrive, not by which route.
That would, in effect, mean that we have transitioned public transportation from line switching to packet switching, effectively turning the bus into the Internet. But that is for the future.
In the meantime, there is Smarthelp.
(I am on the board of Råd AS, a company that has developed the platform SmartHelp for Norwegian emergency services, allowing shared situational awareness, communication and privacy. The company is now seeking customers and collaborators outside this market.)
Smarthelp is a platform technology consisting of, at present, three elements: Smarthelp Rescue, an app for iPhone and Android that allows users to transmit their position to an emergency service; Smarthelp Decision Support, a decision support system which allows an operator to locate and communicate with users (both with the app and without), and Smarthelp Secure Infrastructure, a granularly encrypted communications platform for secure, private communication. If you want more information, please contact me or Fredrik Øvergård, CEO of SmartHelp.
The foundation and future of Sophia Antipolis
This week, I am hosting a seminar on “Digitalization for Growth and Innovation” for the Norwegian Business School, at Skema Business School and the Accenture Interactive Innovation Center and Technology Lab in Sophia Antipolis. We asked Skema if someone could talk to the participants (managers from Norwegian companies) about the founding and evolution of the Science and Technology Park in itself. We got a very interesting discussion by Philippe Mariani, responsible for Strategy and Development of the Sophia Antipolis Foundation – and (drum roll) a visit by the founder of Sophia Antipolis himself, Senator Pierre Laffitte.
Sophia Antipolis (sophia = wisdom, antipolis=not a city, actually an old term for Antibes) was founded in 1969, by Pierre Lafitte, who now is 91 and still involved in the development of the area. Back then, his idea was seen as a utopia, with plans for 20000 researchers in 20 years, but it garnered lots of attention. Now it pretty much is reality, genuinely a dream come through. There are 1400 companies with 30000 employees, 60000 people if you count supporting services. The whole place is laid out as a park, no straight roads, lots of threes – and it can actually be difficult to think of it as a city if you look at it from the air:
Sophia Antipolis works as an ecosystem, and attracts more revenues than the tourism industry in the south of France. SKEMA, the business school, is an important part of the ecosystem. In the beginning, it was very difficult to convince somebody to come and start here, one strategy was to utilize the strength of the network, arrange a concert in the middle of the forest, using the newspapers to attract attention, running specialized conferences on biotech, nanotechnology, etc., inviting 15-20 high-level people, do proceedings, these people then became ambassadors for the area.
Pierre Laffitte instituted some principles for the area:
1) that there should be no skyscrapers, no building higher than the hills. As a result the area feels like a park, and also feels quite small, even though it is large.
2) There should be no fences around companies, in order to facilitate cross-fertilization (a concept which is very important to the people building the area. In the beginning this even extended to asking companies not to have closed lunch areas, but invite others in.
3) As much as possible, a company settling in SF would have to have someone on the board with a different background – a writer, teacher, artist – in order to be critical, a devil’s advocate, and to foster innovation.
Sophia Antipolis is now a brand name, people here identify with the place, call themselves sophiepolitans – there is a sense of belonging, employees want to stay in the area. It is relatively easy to put up your own company, you will find a market, so the place is growing. There are strong anchor tenants, such as Amadeus, but also many small technology companies who sometimes start as vendors to the anchor tenants and then expand. It is not really a French place, but international to a very large degree.
There have been many attempts at building technology parks, and Sophia is one of the places that work. Much of it has to do with establishing a culture – many other areas are currently trying to invest a lot of money, but it is not working because there is not a culture of sharing, communicating and starting projects and companies.
One difference from Silicon Valley is that there are fewer venture capitalists and angel investors, which is indicative of Europe in general.
Question to Pierre Laffitte and Philippe Mariani: What is the role of government in the creation of technology parks and new companies?
Governments give money to big companies, in the US they have the small business act. We need something like that in Europe – bottom up, now top down. There is much good will from governments in Europe, but they have not found a good way to help small companies. Also, Europe has more interest in fundamental research, not the research between the industrial and the fundamental. We need to put together the managers with the people with ideas and research.
Q: Other differences between the US and Europe — what can we learn?
In the US, if your company fails, you are not considered a failure. In Europe, the banks will not finance you if you have had a company failure, which is why Europe has fewer serial entrepreneurs. We also have fewer business angels, and most of them are not so rich.
Q: Challenges for the future of Sophia Antipolis?
Two challenges in particular: One is developing ethics for a numerical (digital) society. There has been a transition from family capitalism to most short-termism. Now you have to make money in the face of short-termism, should be more open to other types of people than the shareholders only. We need to have another type of capitalism more about stakeholders than shareholders.
Secondly, there is an acceleration, the lifecycles are shorter and shorter. Our form of cross fertilization has worked for 40 years, but that won’t last, we have to reinvent a way to exist as an ecosystem. We are launching initiatives on ethics and “numeration”, cybersecurity, cyberhacking. want to become a think tank for exploring the digitalization, allowing it to continue to evolve – for one thing, the the government does not understand and the only thing they do is forbid it.
Q: What was the most important getting Sophia Antipolis started?
Having lots of friends in good positions who did not think it as stupid as many people thought! Innovation is always connected with difficulty to change, you have to convince people that it is positive. We wanted to develop something that did not create pollution, to create something connected with the future and the brain and to balance, not only to raw materials.
Q: How do you get get people together, so it is not just a park with businesses?
There are many ways to get people to come together. We asked companies not to have closed cafeterias, people having lunch together from different companies. We have the veteran companies meet with the new companies when they come in. We have common breakfasts, like small conferences. We also have clubs set up for various subjects and interest groups – there is even one called the Nordic Link for wealthy individuals from the Nordic countries who settle in the region and want to get involved in technology companies.
It doesn’t happen by itself, many cites think that it is just the structure is the enabler, The Foundation is here to do what the companies cannot do because they have no time. You have to push to make this happen, not easy because the benefit of the activity is hard to quantify. One thing that has not worked as we hoped is to have have cultural activities, tried to be the Florence of the 21st century, but because art was seen as an add-on, something separate, that did not take off as we had hoped.
And with that – a group picture:
Elon Musk biography
Elon Musk: Inventing the Future by Ashlee Vance
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is an interesting biography because Elon Musk is an interesting person. Very capable description of the various business ventures (including a very succinct analysis of why and how Tesla is disruptive to the regular car industry, and, even more so, SpaceX to the space industry. But much of Musk as a person remains an enigma, partly because Musk keeps his cards close to his chest. This is an attempt to create a balanced account of Musk as a businessman and person, and it is worth reading to get the background of what Musk has done and how he has done it. But I doubt if I will reread it…
Education as a way out of poverty
Found this video of my former classmate Sarah Mavrinac giving an impassioned speech on the need for education as a way out of poverty for migrant workers – and a plug for aidha, the charity she leads:
There is one person with the fortitude to put her money where her mouth is, I say…
Posner and Becker: Let the Big Three go bankrupt
Both Posner (who has changed his mind) and Becker agree that the Detroit Big Three automakers should be allowed to go bankrupt rather than continue to suck up subsidies and produce cars the world market do not want. It is hard not to agree on principle, and in this case, also in practice.
The thing is, if the big three go bankrupt, this does not necessarily mean that Detroit is finished when it comes to producing cars. The designers, workers and machinery will be put to use – if nothing else, other automakers as well as entrepreneurs will come in, buy up the assets (free of dept), and start to compete by producing the most popular models, licensed models from other auto makers, or new ones.
The failure of the Big Three is complicated: A disastrous decision back in the fifties or sixties to make pensions the responsibility of individual companies rather than the government, short-sighted management, ossified unions, overfocus on automation (GM in the 80s), bad product quality, old-fashioned or just bad designs, short-term product development, financial rather than real innovation, slow product development (7 years per new model vs. the Japanese 3-4 in early 90s), too much focus on the domestic market, focus on what you can measure (such as parts commonality) rather than new customer needs and segments, political lobbying as marketing, and on and on and on….
Why not just let it die, and have something more sustainable (both in business and environmental terms) rise from the ashes?
Brad Feld on history and future of computing
Good talk at MIT – the good stuff comes towards the end, where he starts to talk about the future. The rest is useful for my students….
Masterstudies at Hawaii
I have just (well, last Friday) come back from the AACSB conference in Hawaii. As previously noted, I am on the board of a small but quickly growing company called Masterstudies.com, and this was our first “in the flesh” meeting with customers and partners. I tagged along on the theory that since I am an academic, I probably know how to talk to academics as well.
I am no stranger to academic conferences, but attending it as a vendor, not a regular participant or speaker, was new to me. I usually walk through the vendor section of a conference with downcast eyes, trying to not be cornered and pitched to. It was very interesting to stand there and see other people trying to avoid you – as a result, I have resolved to be much nicer to salespeople from now on.
That being said, the conference was a resounding success for us as a company – we talked to more than 60 universities and many of the other vendors and conference partners came over to our booth to congratulate us on the high interest and many compliments we got for our product. And I found it rather fun to market something – especially when it turned out we had a service that addressed a real need for many of these universities.
Recruiting blues
The problem with recruiting students is selectivity and quality control – you want students that are both good (in the sense that they have good grades and other qualifications) and also are environmentally compatible (for lack of a better term) with the other students. The first criterion is pretty easy to test for – grades and GMAT scores provide good indicators. Ensuring a proper mix of students for a program is harder.
For the prospective students, finding a school can also be very hard, since few students (at least outside the US) know more than a few business schools’ names and nothing about their quality. The result is a power law of prestige: At the top (“the fat head”), you find a few extremely well known schools (such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, LBS and IMD) with thousands of extremely well qualified people applying and very few getting in. Harvard, for instance, tend to receive 10 times as many applications as they have spaces, and of those people applying at least half of the people are good enough to make it through the program, if they only got in. At the top, finding students is not the problem – selecting them is.
For the students, another problem is avoiding the very bottom of universities: The outright frauds and degree mills that will sell you a certificate for a fee and an overview of your “life experiences”. (See this list for some suspects, but they tend to pop up like mushrooms after a rainy night.) A degree from a very weak place is not something you want to attach to your CV at all.
Most schools and most students fall somewhere in the middle, though: Decent schools providing good programs, and reasonably smart students prepared to do the required work to obtain a degree. Masterstudies.com provides a service here by maintaining a database of quality-controlled schools which prospective students can search without having to go to each school’s web site, and quickly submit requests for information to interesting schools.
Selective international recruiting
If this was all we did, we wouldn’t provide much value, however. Most students can search in Google for business schools, and listings abound. The problem for schools trying to recruit internationally is not that they don’t get responses when they advertise on the Internet – it is that they get hundreds or thousands of “leads” from people who clearly are not qualified to be admitted, either because they don’t have the background or the finances.
In certain countries, such as a large African country beginning with N, most of the requests for information have nothing to do with getting an education: Enterprising men request glossy business school brochures to show women, saying that they are applying to a prestigious school and thus are attractive partners. Given the cost of an information package, this is clearly not a service most schools would want to provide.
To avoid this, we have the students put in their characteristics (education, work experience, managerial experience, age, desired industry they want to work in, etc.) and then match them to schools where they have a chance of getting admitted. The schools can filter the incoming leads so that they only get students they want, doing things such as selectively market in certain countries – say, perhaps they have enough people from Northern Europe or India, but want more from China or Southern Europe. Since we track where the prospective students log in, we can filter based on geography as well.
It works surprisingly well, which is why I am willing to be on the board. It is also very cost-effective: We charge the industry standard price for a lead (i.e., a prospective student), but the lead is qualified, meaning that every reference that comes from us has passed the hurdles the schools have set up themselves. That means that information packets go out only to students that actually a) have the requisite quality, and b) are in target markets the school want to serve.
(Of course, since I have read Shapiro and Varian, we also have a Pro package, where schools can pay a little extra and get promoted on the front page and so on – perfect for that newly launched MBA with a special twist that you secretly worry filling up.) As we start to build up good logs (we have had more than 100,000 unique visitors and growing per month since the new site launched in January) we should also be able to provide some pretty good and detailed overall statistics. For my own research, I am thinking about doing text analysis on the language in the program descriptions, to see what the main differentiating strategies of the schools are.
Check it out for yourself – though if you are a school, you should probably contact Linus, our Irish CEO (a former professional racing biker), or Bernt, our VP of Business Development (who tried to teach me to surf in Hawaii, with decidedly mixed results) to get a peek under the hood, at the statistics and filtering pages which allow schools to select carefully and measure the results of their marketing.
And now, back to our regular programming….
Masterstudies.com
I am involved (board member) in an exciting startup, a company called Masterstudies.com. We offer potential students a way to find suitable MBA and other Master level programs, and universities and business schools a way to find good students.
So far it has been a fun little project which has involved helping to specify functionality and interface, interacting with the very competent management, and talking to investors.
I think the company has something very useful to offer – there are literally millions of people around the world trying to find their way among the thousands of MBA and other Master level programs in business and related areas. One of the ways we differentiate ourselves from the competition lies in the way universities can specify what kind of leads they want – if you want details, contact our CEO, Linus Murphy.
We have spent the Fall making sure the product is good enough (partially with input from some of my students) and the database large enough (currently at 6,700 different programs) and now is the time to softly launch. There are still bugs to work out, but prospective students can now sign up, fill in their details, select schools and programs based on their preferences. Even though we have not marketed it at all, the traffic figures are promising, the number of leads sent per day is in the hundreds and it is rather exciting to see the details flying by – we are getting leads from all over the world.
I am rather optimistic that this company will succeed in providing value both to universities and students. In the words of our intrepid chairwoman, the student-to-university market is one of the few inefficient markets left, and it is high time someone does something about that. That’s us!
So – why don’t you check it out and tell me what you think?
Building a market for digital movie rental
Seth Godin has a brief yet thoughtful take on the digital movie rental market.
Just about the first thing you learn in microeconomics is that over time, given competition, the price of a product will come close to its marginal cost. Understood by economists for hundreds of years, but not yet understood by the movie industry. Over time, their machinations will make as much sense as the British red flag laws (mandating a person walking in front of motorcars with a red flag) at the beginning of the 20th century. Until then, it seems the content industries will make the same mistakes – first the music industry, then movies and TV, then book publishing.
Frustrating, yet seemingly inevitable.
One of the things I used to wonder about was what would happen when the theory of disruptive innovation (see various articles by Clayton Christensen) became known. Would the effect disappear, like a Heisenbergian attempt at measurement, because managers now knew how it worked? After all, if you understand and recognize a pattern of development you can anticipate it and create a new business model. That is, if you are smart enough to read theory and willing to apply it to your industry rather than find excuses.
I think we see the answer in what is happening in the media industries – a truly disruptive innovation will ruin your business even if you know about it, because (as Weick phrases it) companies select and enact their environment. In other words, they choose what they want to see and discard anything that indicates a deviation of their prejudices. The death-spiral of the RIAA is but one example, with its desperate attempts to turn back time and preserve an anachronistic business model.
At least we now know that disruption is real, hard to prevent, and, for companies with no current stake in the business, a great opportunity, exploitable less for the novelty of the innovation than for the blinkers of the incumbents. Fun.
Open position: Web designer/architect
I have the pleasure of serving on the board of a startup, Masterstudies.com. As the name implies, we are aiming to link potential students (from all over the world) with the universities they want to attend. The company has well known international partners, a rapidly populating database, a new and experienced CEO, a very international work environment, funds and (ahem) a very competent and motivated board.
Our web site is moving from concept to industrial-platform launch, and we need a full-time web designer/architect to help us in that process. Location Oslo, start ASAP, standard LAMP platform. We are looking for an experienced and enthusiastic person, excited about the opportunity to get into an exciting company at an early stage and influence its technical and business direction.
If you are interested or know someone who might be, take a look at this job announcement (PDF). Send a CV to Sven Thome, and if you have questions, contact either Sven (+47 975 37 262) or me (+47 4641 0452) directly.
Paul Graham on conditions for entrepreneurial success
Paul Graham, one of the finest essayists to ever publish on the Internet, has two stellar examples of how to take a complex issue and present it in a clear and consistent way:
- How to be Silicon Valley, about whether you can create (or at least not stand in the way) a Silicon Valley somewhere else.
- Why startups condense in America, about why the USA is such a hotbed of innovation and its commercialization and other places, by comparison, are not.
As usual, Paul does not leave out the difficult parts or avoids pointing out the faults of the current model. Both essays are reworked from a keynote he gave at Xtech.
Excellent stuff. Read it. I will assign it for classes.
(Via Dragos.)
How to write a business plan
To all my students, past and current, who want to know how to write a business plan: Brad Feld is about to tell you.
Smarten up. Pay attention. For some of you, there might be a test later.
Applied Abstractions 