TECHNOLOGY NIGHTMARES

IN TROUBLE

I have been gone a couple of days from my blog because of a conspiracy of Apple, Google and Mozilla, the cause of which is my upgrade fever.

Migrating from Blackberry to Iphone was not so smooth as I thought, but let me spare you the details.
I do not know what Google is up to these days (or rather I do know what is communicated) but (as is debated on Google Forums) iGoogle betrayed me. I am no longer able to view iGoogle in four tabs and the company makes me angry every time I log on by re-arranging my widgets.
I started using Google Docs, but this also proves more difficult than the video. Sharing docs often meets with a 404 or an unrecognized page URL (when you send a URL to partners who have to ask for permission to read it). What is more, in one of my spreadsheets I mentioned a competitor and put the spreadsheet URL in my Google Presentations. The spreadsheet URL proved not to work but the text link ad underneath did, guiding readers to my competitor!!

At last, I downloaded the latest Firefox version but did it in Afrikaans which is the first language of the download. I have learned quite a bit of Afrikaans by now and it keeps being an intellectual challenge to find out what my machine really means when it returns Afrikaans processed by an English Textexpander and a French keyboard.

But tomorrow I am back. My woriirseser arere almmoset ovover.

Walter

100 WAYS TO MONETIZE YOUR MACHINE

TEN NEW WAYS TO MAKE MONEY USING YOUR MACHINE (41-50)

1. Teaching. Working at home is very efficient and leaves time enough to study again. Plan a teaching career, go back to university, take the degree and apply for a teaching position as a freelance professor. Here are some free courses. There is a big market out there for academics who want to be paid on invoice. Academia is opening up and degrees are going online
2. Hand holding. Do not say 'no' too soon when you are offered to do a project that is out of your skill zone. See it as an opportunity to learn. Find an expert and let him guide you through the motions, in that case you have a win-win: you have accomplished the project, it was done by an expert and you were taught on the job. I once did this with a project on financial engineering. After this assignment, I can do this project over and over again. It has become one of my assets. I have also offered the expert to do future projects together with me on a fifty-fifty basis and he agreed.
3. Structuring (sell and rent back). The trouble with starting a home business is that you need starter money equivalent to at least a year’s income. Lately I have seen a lot of people who have sold their real estate (their house) and rent it back. When they have successfully deployed a new home business, they buy another house or the same again.☺
4. Chase Subsidies. There are subsidies for almost anything when you start to look for them, there are even subsidy consultants who write the papers for you.
5. Tax Relief is also income: 46 Tax deductions Bloggers overlook.
6. Set up a Virtual company with a good domain name (and some email addresses), a logo and a simple website and then let them mature. These are called Shelf Companies. Maturity is good for credit rating. If you can, add a bank account. I normally use www.corporate.com as my agent. I take a resident agent and mail forwarding as extras. Sometimes even a receptionist who picks up the phone and transfers it to my mobile. These companies are hot items to sell.
7. Become a virtual assistant.
8. Become a Web 2.0 consultant. You would be surprised to find out how many people are still in web 1.0 time and how badly they want “the new stuff”. This is your pitch. Start with validating ☺
9. Give a Talk. It is very hard I find to get real money paid to talk somewhere but I find it stimulating and the organizations always pay transport and hotel. It is good to be out of the pajamas now and then ☺
10. Trade services. Yesterday I talked about microjobs. Ask yourself what is added value to a solution. It is most of the time coordination, presentation and organization. Use microjob sites such as www.pajamanation.com, to outsource the assignments you bring in and oversee them. You will make a lot more money. Heard about Tim Ferriss Four-hour work week?

DOES YOUR JOB HAVE A FUTURE?

The Future of Jobs: Decentralizing the labor experience

Today is a theoretical day. Pause from practical examples (I know I owe my readers another 60 opportunities in order to win the challenge).

Employment is the biggest industry in the world and it is about to change drastically.

Globalization and decentralization go hand in hand. You cannot have one without the other.

Let me take you back to my field of study: semiotics, more specifically narratology, the study of stories. Everything is story; it is the social texture of our society. We used to live by Grand Narratives, stories that explained the world to us and which subdued all subversive voices because an industrial world where the engines of production where locked in a shed by employers, required standardization. Now that the people own the means of production and have access to a worldwide distribution network, things are de-industrializing.

It is a matter of common belief thatglobal grids are replacing the torn-down local grids, but just as on any building site, construction takes place at the same time as deconstruction.

The Grand Narratives are being deconstructed in:

• Socionarratives (wiki’s)
• Micronarratives (blogs)
• Nanonarratives (tweets)
• Femtonarratives (IM/SMS)

We are reconstructing this experience again via RSS feeds or Atoms. In my RSS reader (Google) I have different feeds which I can subscribe to via RSS daily. But these are only crude reconstruction devices.

Second-generation systems will be smarter to better manage the information overload. Features of these systems will be: double detection, summary, search features inside bookmarks, attention profiling, tag proposition, tag cloud organization, collaborative filtering and recommendation and extend to websites, publications, wiki’s, tweets, mobile, video and audio. In that way we will be able to digest thousands of ‘posts’ per day and socially reconstruct our own Daily Grand Narrative. Changing our minds will be the supertrend to follow which will create flash products, flash audiences and pop-up entrepreneurs and investors.

Now let’s use this trend towards jobs. The job-for-life (JFL) will be deconstructed in:

• Sociojobs: social networks, volunteering, open-source
• Microjobs: small jobs working with purchase order
• Nanojobs: drone work such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk (US only)
  
• Femtojobs: jobs only paid by the ticket

We will reconstruct this decentralized job experience via global job feeds which do not exist yet, and which is the mission of PajamaNation. The daily job experience will be a combination of sociojobs, interim jobs, freelance jobs, microjobs, nanojobs and femtojobs.

These decentralized jobs will result in a decentralized identity where people will have several emails, IP addresses, profiles, nick names, handles etc.. The analogy of Feedburner to the job industry will be a destination site where you can find these decentralized jobs and reconstruct them again using various identities.

In other words, people will be working online and aggregate themselves in several virtual entities (companies) often with no legal status. The purpose of these entities will be to take on more complex jobs and eventually compete with the brick and mortar world of cubicled corporatism.

Second-generation job feed systems will aggregate virtual identities in virtual keiretzu’s so that the boundary between the physical world and the online world will be blurred. Ontology will therefore be the science of the future and i-brokers, the powerhouse of the future. They will become more important than banks.

Does this make sense? If not, read my The Biology of Language, Tilburg University. I’ll send you one of my unsold copies if you want ☺

Walter

100 WAYS TO MONETIZE YOUR MACHINE

10 MORE MONEY MACHINES

Here we go from opportunity 31 to 40 today.

Maki’s Doshdosh survey was an inspirational gift from heaven. I learned about ten new money machine that had escaped my attention.

31. Only Marketing Survey Panels. Paid marketing surveys have always sounded a bit dodgy to me, but Jim’s idea changed my mind. "I have an IT background, and in my case I became interested in Market Research Surveys Online, after participating in several paid Information Technology Surveys hosted by Fortune 500 companies. I quickly learned that if you are knowledgeable, and willing to share your honest opinions, people will pay you for what you know. After joining several good market research panels, the light turned on: If I can make money taking surveys, I can probably make money promoting good survey panels."

32. Online Import-Export, according to Michael Walter, is not all that different from the real thing.

33. Build a Review Blog by Tobsy (and have ‘review’ in the URL). Focus on a broader niche. Like digital photography (it’s overrun, just an example). Write lots of helpful (!!!) reviews of products, websites, services,… Start monetizing right away. Put 8-10 125×125 banners in a sidebar, link to matching affiliate partners. When you get enough traffic, put up an advertising page and rent out the banners that don’t perform well. Look for affiliate partners for direct links in your reviews. If you’re offered free samples to review, take them. Write the review and give the sample away in a contest. If you can afford it, order reviews for your site. Be critical. If you promote crap, your readers will stop trusting you.

34. Options Trading. Apparently, it is easier than we think. The leverage is very high. Very low starting capital required. (You can start at as low as USD500) and generates an interesting passive income. But don’t do this at home ☺: you must have extensive knowledge prior to engage in real trading.

35. Invest in the Million Euro Wiki. An interesting suggestion by Matt Jones, Blogging Fingers) who auctions off his 'blogging page'

36. Sell Traffic, says Allan in Ideasbeta (a blatant act of self-promotion, as he calls it himself :-) His system seems sensible. If you generate 40,000 pageviews a day, you can make around $4,000 a month… I advise anyone who wants to quit his job to calculate his own target, and work to reach it. Believe it or not, but I first worked hard to reach that goal, and now I have the possibility to take a month off and go doing whatever I want. And those figures I’m talking about can even be higher when you start to optimize your pages and use affiliates instead of Adsense.

37. Buy Death. Dean Mapa, "One way I do it is watch out for expired domain names that are receiving traffic. I then purchase the domain name, build a website around it, build a bit more traffic to it, and then sell it through eBay.People like to see what they’re buying and it helps that a site is already up and receiving traffic even if I’m just selling the domain name."

38. Product in a Blog. An idea by Patrick Meninga of Spiritual River. Use your traffic and expertise to build a product and sell it via your blog.

39. Build Authority.
First and foremost, the bigger your site the easier to land direct advertising deals. And these are the best form of monetization.
Secondly, having 1 established site will give you the opportunity to launch many others, “lurking” into the success of the existing one. Just take a look at the “Crunch” network created after TechCrunch.
Finally, an authority website will also put some lights on your person, and you as a brand. This, in turn, can also give birth to many other wealth-generating projects.

40. Real Estate Income. This is an old-school idea. Buy a cheap property, renovate and rent it out.

Tomorrow, we are going to see the end of the first fifty opportunities for our directory of online money.

100 WAYS TO MONETIZE YOUR MACHINE

MONEY MACHINES : PART THREE

Just a quick list of the first 20 money strategies for workers from home linked to a machine (let’s call them micropreneurs).

1. Blogging.
2. Mobile consulting.
3. Get Paid Per Post.
4. Navizonate.
5. Wiki journalism.
6. Investing on the Stock Exchange.
7. Create your own magazine
8. Publish offline and online (lulu.com)
9. Set up your own Fedex-clone.
10. Freelancing
11. Paid Advice-over-Paypal
12. Pre-legal work
13. Domain names brokerage
14. Broker eMail folders
15. Writing a Facebook app and selling it on Ebay
16. Setting up a business and selling it on Ebay
17. Do business on the Amazon marketplace
18. Mash up a widget using the Intel Mashmaker and monetize the widget on a network
19. Launch a Podcast.
20. Become a movie producer of Youtube videos

Do you remember Dosh Dosh, I talked about in my earlier blog. Well, Maki just started a global survey: the best way to make money online, this will help me in my challenge to come up with 100 ways. Here are the next ten.

1. Making fApp (Facebook app) with Facebook venture money

2. Become a digital lobbyist. Organize petitions and signatures as lobbyist for a company using Livepetitions.

3. Become an internet board member. Find a non-exec directorship in an internet startup by mailing around to any company that seems interesting to you and which is in your neighborhood. Information junkies on web 2.0 are precious to a board meeting, look for a non-executive director board function. It normally pays 10K€ a year for 10 meetings and you are enjoying the acoustics of your ideas spread in a meeting with Luddites ☺ We all need an audience.

4. Write Business Plans. People hate writing business plans. Do one for them using this software for instance.

5. Make pre-order lists. One of the key disruptions of web 2.0 is that everybody seems to set up websites where you can leave your email address and when the list is long enough they start developing the project (don't call us, we'll call you). I am sure if you would set up an advanced order list for a sexy product, where people could sign in for free, you could sell that list when to anyone who wants to build it.

6. Become an SEO. It is just a matter of the right toolbox. You can send potential clients a free assessment using Website Grader.

7. Introduce widgetBucks into your content. WidgetBucks is a shopping widget that you can place on your website or blog. You earn money every time someone clicks on it. Widgetbucks is contextually based according to your site’s content. From there, readers and site visitors can see various information regarding certain products, such as the lowest price available, and from which online retailer.

8. Virtual franchises. As there are more and more virtual companies, there are more and more virtual franchises which you can do from your home with a machine linked to the internet. But first read these expensive mistakes to avoid.

9. Firesales. Let people know that you are to do a fantastic job in 48hours without any sleep if the money is right. Show them also that you have complex skills. I do about three of these every year and they make my year. I have specialized in one niche: I write circulars and private placement memorandum completely with quantitative marketing research, legal documents, marketing plans, financial spreadsheets and all done in perfect printed book quality together with spreadsheets and PowerPoint's. It is a hell of a job (and I outsource to other specialists) but nobody wants to do that. If a company or VC wants to start raising money, the amount that is paid to you is peanuts. Remember that people who have the purchasing power for your services are people who are very good at sales but who cannot sit still for more than 15 minutes to produce something coherent.

10. Clothing Label Crafter. Webworkerdaily helped me on my last opportunity. Third party fulfillment services for items like t-shirts: Cafepress . But given the explosion of blogs dedicated to the subject and the now universal acceptance of purchasing things online, small boutique shops can thrive. And a degree in graphic design isn’t necessary to make something that sells.

THE MONEY MACHINE

THE MONEY MACHINE


As promised here are the second ten ways (11-20) to make money with a machine on the net.

(I am keeping my best tips till last :-)

1. Advice-over-Paypal. You can now get paid for Expert advice using services such as Bitwine,
2. Pre-legal. Most business transactions are document-based and entrepreneurs hate docs, so they normally overpay overqualified lawyers for this. You can do Pre-legal work and reduce the legal costs to a bare minium using one of the free docs site which you customize.
3. Domain names. Invest in domain name portfolio
4. Broker eMail folders. Organize your email in folders and maintain them well. Here are some tips to start off. Alternatively, lists are getting more prominent on the net, look at Listphile and listsofbests.
5. Writing a Facebook app and selling it on Ebay
6. Setting up a business and selling it on Ebay
   
7. Do business on the Amazon marketplace
8. Mash up a widget using the Intel Mashmaker and monetize the widget on a network such as Wildfire that will allow widget producers to directly embed their widgets into the bigger social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, Xanga, Blogger and Tagworld are currently supported) or WidgetAvenue which has a new product called the Shaker.
9. Launch a Podcast. Akamai has a nice brochure here
10. Become a movie producer of Youtube videos; now you can even use the Flip Youtube Camcorder costing merely 100$
    

100 WAYS TO MONETIZE YOUR MACHINE

100 WAYS TO MAKE MONEY ON THE INTERNET

Lately I find more and more people asking for my help to find a consultancy job so that they can pay the rent. This is a reactionary idea in a progressive time: the jobs they are talking about, no longer exist. And if they do, people do not pay for it. In one conversation yesterday, I accepted the challenge to come up with 100 ways to make money on the internet to pay the rent. Today I present the first 10.

1. Blogging. Write a blog and develop an audience. See that you get in Technorati one of the new verticals Look at these strategies and read my previous post ‘Wow Your Blog’

2. Mobile consulting. There is a new consulting niche: mobile web and a lot of SME’s will soon want to join the bandwagon. Propose to make their website mobile and use Adsense to monetize it . The conversion from web to mobile demo of Mofuse is very promising.

3. Get Paid Per Post. Get paid for blogging (brrr..). I am not promoting it, just reporting it. Everyone is waiting for the new product codenamed Argus.

4. Navizonate. Make money with your iphone wifi access points in the faux GPS Navizon (peer to peer GPS)

5. Wiki journalism. Wikinomics is a secret discipline. Everyone wants to be on Wikipedia, but you cannot write about yourself (not even critically) certainly not now there is a wikiscanner. I would avise becoming a respected editor at Wikipedia and people will ask you for your help in editing sections on themselves or their company (but observe the wikinomics oath of objectivity or they’ll flush you out). As the founder says: the truth is arrived at when it is no longer contested. To have an idea what people find important on Wikipedia look at Wikirage.

6. Investing on the Stock Exchange. Investing in stocks never worked for me, but some people still believe in it. I never made any money doing so, because I do not have the discipline to care about what goes up when and what should go down when. But this guy apparently has.

7. Create your own magazine

8. Publish. Publish your offline book (print on demand). Not that you will make any money on it, but you can use it instead of a business card. Royalties are over.

9. Set up your own Fedex-clone. There is a lot of software, music, movies and digital stuff that has geographical restrictions (States only). You need an address in the states where you can ship such as USAme. You can buy an American telephone number on Skype. An American bank account is very difficult (though services such as these claim it is not. I would recommend a major credit card or Paypal.

10. Freelancing on RAC, Guru, Elance or Pajamanation

We are the machine

I never left the Internet. Or so I thought...

After all, I read emails almost everyday for the past 15+ years, and thanks to Google with its free I-never-have-to-delete-any-emails 2900MB-and-growing inbox, I now know that a single person like me is able to amass over 30,000 emails in three years (since I first migrated my primary inbox to Gmail in late 2004) -- That averages to 1,000 emails per month, not including the 5000 spams that got filtered out to spambox every month. (Of course, I never get to actually open 60% of those 1000 emails/month.)

It turned out that things were moving faster out there. True, over a hundred million of Internet users out there have embraced Web 2.0, or have at least used one of plethora of these recently unleashed beastie applications. So, what happened to the other 800+ million Internet users? Is Web 2.0 an exclusive party?

I know I was in the dark myself for a couple of years while completing my postgraduate studies in a cyberzone-status institution. I have been blogging, social & business networking, participate in poll & surveys, syndicating contents to portals & blogs, and crowdshopping, yet until early this year, I wasn't aware that such activities can be grouped into a 'classified' global phenomenon. Last week, in a seminar I attended filled with nearly a hundred ICT entrepreneurs, when a speaker asked if anybody is using Web 2.0 applications, practically nobody bother to raise hands. But when asked if they were using Friendster (which commands about 20% of its users from Malaysia), many hands were raised this time.

So, how do you make an elevator pitch on what constitutes a 2.0 to an average Internet user? You can be creative.... or you can just borrow and share Michael Wesch's "Web 2.0 in just less than five minutes" piece:



Nasir
Malaysia

Tribals Times are Back

Sociologists are trying their taxonomy profiling on bloggers all over the conversations on the net. Apparently, most are American, male and Einselsgangers (cavalier seul), mavericks, lonely individuals writing off their frustrations in moments of solitary seclusion, caesuras of desperation. I think that there are a lot of people out there jealous of all the fun we have producing these rants of freedom :-)



Blogging is seen by some progressive academics (three years ago they would not touch the stuff afraid of a deadly career move) as an example of social media typical of web 2.0. But there is a wider perspective, there is more going on than just a new way of conversation. Grand Narratives are losing their authority to the crowd and disintegrate into micro-narratives (blogs), socio-narratives (wikipedia), nano-narratives (twitters, IMs, SMS), meta-narratives (feeds) and femto-narratives (tags, blogrolls, links). All of these decentralized narratives proliferate semantic entanglements which result in a flourishing memetic ecology (which academics will very soon make into a new discipline, probably called Semasiology. I'll will be candidate for the sponsored professor chair of course :-)

To say that this narratological revolution is WASP (acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) is bullshit (most of my friends are in the US, particularly West Coast and I can tell you for a fact, they are not WASP, although some wear white shoes ☺

Let me give you a peep at my RSS feed (it is public of course ☺

Dosh Dosh is a blog about ways to make money online. Topics commonly featured on this blog includes professional blogging, affiliate marketing, get-paid-to programs, advertising networks and social media monetization. Maki, the writer ia a Political Science and Philosophy student in Toronto, Canada. He says a lot of instructional material on How to get traffic and links from popular blogs. How to use blogrush and widgets for blog traffic.

Bloggingbits.com is from a very interesting and intelligently written blog of 23-year -old author in Pakistan; read his "Five ways to get bookmarked on Deli.cio.us"

And not everyone is male, although I must admit the majority is. But eMoms at Home founder Wendy Piersall is certainly one of the people I follow almost daily.
She is (like me) a fan of the idea that people should work from home and wrote the beginners guide to make money while blogging.

Blogging is also becoming more and more professional. There are a lot of team blogs popping up such as Problogger. They have just published the Top 5 timesavers for bloggers (their advice: write less and read more; I am trying to follow that rule, but not always easy, suddenly everyone in the world has so much to say after centuries of silence and reticence :-)

Dailyblogtips.com team blog gives SEO advice for blogs and just published 10 easy ways to improve internal linking.

I particularly like their blog on pajamas, but perhaps I am biased.

Does it not remind you of tribal times where people sat around the fire exchanging tools? The only difference: everyone wants his/her own tribe :-) (I'll join yours, if you join mine)

GOOGLE's OMNIPRESENCE

Google’s Omnipresence

I will not talk about the Google Lunar Xprize the virtual world project, their bid on the 700 Mhz spectrum, their naughty plans for Facebook, their telecom aspirations, their pacific sea cable project, their sky and progress in street view project etc..

This blog is about something so simple that it is revolutionary in its elegance. Please look at the video. This is what homeworkers and Pajamanation needs. I propose that very soon when we launch we will present this to the millions out there to be their application of choice.



TechCrunch reports that Google will “announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle ... and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.”

Penis Trauma

PENIS TRAUMA: Does God have Human Flaws?

Today I read in a story on Ananova (an Orange company), that the Great Entrepreneur Himself reacts emotionally when somebody pisses on His creations and gives them a public beating.


A Croatian motorbiker's penis was zapped by lightning as he stopped beside the road to take a leak.
Ante Djindjic, 29, from Zagreb, said: "I don't remember what happened. One minute I was taking a leak and the next thing I knew I was in hospital.
"Doctors said the lightning went through my body and because I was wearing rubber boots it earthed itself through my penis."
Djindjic, who suffered light burns to his chest and arms, added: "Thankfully, the doctors said that there would be no lasting effects, and my penis will function normally eventually."

Digital Life

Only recently I began to read Merlin Mann’s blog for 43folders and I came to like it a lot. It is no longer just about productivity, which I find a bit boring really, but the blog and Mann himself, has evolved into a higher level of digital awareness, which I like to call Digital Life. Digital Life was actually a tagline invented by Nicholas Negroponte at the MediaLab for a consortium where I was in the programming board as a sponsor.

I like Merlin Mann because of his original ideas (like me he believes that Google and Apple will do something together), his personality, but also his sense of humor. He just tagged a youtube video about ‘business life as a youtube video’. It is extremely funny.



There is another youtube video, which gives you a summary of how youtube has really changed our lives. It is called Internet People


More and more technology recedes into the background and becomes invisible; the only thing that we are left with is a cultural phenomenon of unbearable lightness, volatility and cyber minimalism. This colors the new companies that are being set up. If you look at (one of my favorite groups- Coldplay) music clips, they are a mirror of what our companies today look like.

V.C 2.0

V.C 2.0

Nowadays there is talk about anything 2.0.  Not surprisingly in California people start to talk about VC 2.0, reforming the VC industry.  In fact it is already reformed, EVCA exploded and The Funded are now everywhere, the users (entrepreneurs) decide on which VC is the best (not a blabla forum).  But apparently this is not enough, Dave Winer has this magnificent idea post about VC 2.0.  Let the user decide. 

So let's start a new company, with Rick Segal as the CEO (if he'll do it) called User Internet Capital Corp or something catchier. File all the right paper with the SEC, and do an IPO. You have to, because we're going to be selling shares to the public right at the start. This thing will be public from day one. The purpose of the company will be to invest in promising young Internet companies, chosen by the users, nurture them through startup, get them liquid through acquisition or IPO and distribute dividends to the shareholders accordingly. Retain some cash for overhead and (I insist on this) a small percentage for pure technology research and development, so there will be new ideas to base the startups of 2009 and 2011 on.
That's it. Never stop investing. All you have to do is listen to the users, who also happen to be the owners. How about that?

Yeah, count me in.  So who's going to do it?

Walter

P.S Rick Segal is the Canadian blogger behind Post Money Value (the VC loonie with the toonie)

HYPE IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE

Hype is not what it used to be

Today is a day of stress.  We have to get the new BETA closed version of Pajamanation online.  We target this evening.   I am working on the homepage, trying to make us of one screen of real estate to put out our entire economic agenda.  Creating hype is a lot more difficult than it used to be.  

1.    We used to compete in our country but now we are competing beyond continents, with the world at large and there are some smart people everywhere.
2.    There is so much out there that it is getting increasingly difficult to be original.
3.    Customers no longer want you to give them what they want, they want you to change what they want
4.    Time for eyeballs is shrinking to a mere second, when people read one line about an announcement in 300+ RSS feeds a day
5.    Online Publishers are overwhelmed with new announcements.
6.    Website visitors do not scroll, they look at one page only and when they do not like it, they never come back. 
7.    VCs are doing one web 2.0 deal after another.  Selling Money is a sellers market, no longer a buyers one.
8.    The investment community knows that deals are binary: or success happens or it does not, there is no middle way.  The deals are getting both bigger and smaller, the middle has fallen out.
9.    Competing with the world tends to be more expensive than one thinks and the problems accumulate (currency, payment, compatibility, law, IP, staff..)
10.    This is quickly becoming a world of rhinos and microbes, where the first does not see the point of talking to the second.

There are many companies like us who have worked long on their project and when they come out they have to trigger the first step of hype cycle.   According to Gartner it is the "Technology Trigger" or breakthrough, product launch or other event that generates significant press and interest. 

To have a good idea of how hype cycles work you can RSS to Wikirage.  This site lists the pages in Wikipedia which are receiving the most edits per unique editor over various periods of time. Popular people in the news, the latest fads, and the hottest video games can be quickly identified by monitoring this social phenomenon.

And if that frustrates you, take a gun and shoot some paint balls at a site with NETDISASTER.

To end this blog with some good news: everyone who is dieting can stop now: the kilogram itself is losing weight.  We are all getting slimmer by the second.

Walter

-666-

THE MARK OF THE BEAST

Revelation, Chapter 13 speaks of the beast and how to identify his followers. According to verses 16 and 17 of Revelation, Satan and his followers will have the mark or the name or number of the beast on their right hands or foreheads. Verse 18 introduces the number 666: "Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six."
Great semiotic stuff the Book of Revelation.  Lately it is in the news again with the Californian ban on implanted RFID in humans.  For some religious organizations, it is the sign of the devil, for researchers it is linked to cancer.  More than enough information for California to ban it in future.

I am not a fan of RFID, but speculating about it, is quite fun.  
First of all, can it be linked to cancer?  The article in question says that glass-encapsulated RFID transponders developed malignant, fast-growing, lethal cancers in up to 1% to 10% cases.  The tumors originated in the tissue surrounding the microchips and often grew to completely surround the devices.  In fact: the real research report does not say that.  It is another proof that o the internet today one can basically argue anything and nobody bothers to check the original source anymore.  The research reports speaks of abnormal tissue: that is rather vague.   There are only two kinds of tissue: benign (scar tissue, necrotic tissue) or malign (tumor tissue).  The second metastases and kills you.
TFA only mentions two cases out of hundred DOGS (not humans) and only one case is there a 'possible' connection between 'abnormal growth' (RFID's are coated to attract scar tissue to connect to the foreign device) and 'RFID' and RFIDs do not emit RF, they get RF from the reader and are only warmed up by that energy.  

Now that we are reassured, let's think of an RFID world.  Wouldn't that be fun?  (I am joking of course, just Spielerei).  Let's say everyone gets an RFID at birth and we combine these in a mesh network where data is routed between the nodes.  A mesh network whose nodes are all connected to each other is a fully connected network. Mesh networks are self-healing: the network can still operate even when a node breaks down or a connection goes bad. As a result, a very reliable network is formed.  This would be Minority Report, would it not?  Think of Forensics, it would be the end of crime because a dead body would contain the information of the nodes he/she was in his vicinity the last hour.  

Think of the e conomics of the idea. This would be a paradise for homeworkers and freelancers.  We could take up our nomadic state again.  Freedom would reign once more.   There would be no more national tax but a global tax system where everyone would be taxed by the day and whereby countries have varying tax systems.  You would get a tax bill that would read like this:

Venezuela-88days-2000$
Hong Kong-20days-3300$
USA-231days-4500$
Carribean-2days-0$ (discount countries)
Monaco-12days-1200$
Egypt-3days-30$

Total: 11, 230 $

Yep, simple solution, tag everyone.

Walter

P.S This is an ironic piece.

How long do I still have to live?

The Life Expectancy calculator really made my day.  According to this new site I am going to be 95 and if I stop drinking coffee, 100.  I just love good news and I hate bad news and those who bring it.  There are two sorts of people: those who love bringing good news to share the joy and those who love bringing bad news to feel superior towards someone cracking down in a weak moment.  Sophocles was wrong and Atilla the Hun was right: Kill the messenger!
The site though has its weaknesses.  I had to choose if I was an American or over 49?  That is probably the American definition of our graying population in Europe, but it was weird.  After I filled in everything I was suddenly informed that I was over 50 and I had to go to another site: Eons.  There I had to to fill in everything once more but I needed an American zip code.  I went to Bugmenot.com and faked a New York zip code and then it worked : 95.  It does change your perspective about everything: relationship (let's have more sex, I am young), age (I am only at the end of the summer holidays, autumn is only starting and it is the most romantic season), travel (I will see the complete world other than on Google maps), investments (I'll hold), legal problems (shit I will still be alive), financial security (can i afford to live that long?), markets (I will live to see another bubble!). 
But sadly this morning I heard that EONS is in trouble and they had to lay off 25% of their staff, apparently people are not dying to get in there.  Good news does not pay, bad news does sometimes.

Today I announced our new version of Pajamanation.  It will be ready for closed beta (Country managers only) on Monday.  My joy was multiplied by the announcement that
Mechanical Turk closed for non-US residents.  Well we are not, wide open market for us. 
I like the idea of CHI   CHI is a programming language to query a global brain, tackling previously impossible-to-automate problems. 
This is what I want to implement eventually in Pajamanation.  A compiler and an assembler strategy.  Like Grid Computing, Chris says.

As I explained yesterday in my forum talk.  Our future strategy is based on outsourcing to homeworkers, but it is a lot more than that. Outsourcing is just a word. Southsourcing would be better, because the future of what we do lies in the South. In Africa, in South America, in South and South East Asia. But even that is only the first line of defence.
The second line of defence is about the first, second and third worlds setting up virtual companies together and start to live artificial (internet) lives thereby competing with existing economic structures of cubicled corporations: our coops and supercoop strategy.
However, Pajamanation has a third line of defense: it is about identity and identity leverage. Very soon you will see, that people will realize that "identity" is the most popular word of 2008-2009. It is the last line of defense, the last leverage is the leverage of identity. We have leveraged everything else, besides that. That is the gate to growth beyond our imagination and that makes me so full of confidence and faith, so that I am patient.  And patience is not in my nature.
Walter

P.S "Don't kill the messenger. Don't blame the person who brings bad news. This idea was expressed by Sophocles as far back as 442 B.C. and much later by Shakespeare in 'Henry IV, Part II' (1598) and in 'Antony and Cleopatra' (1606-07)

One day in the overheated market for mashables

All free WiFi projects are said to be unfeasible because they are not economically viable.  Let's think of some alternatives. 
I can think of one right away: let us all not protect our bandwidth like schoolboys and let the others enjoy WiFi too.  In urban areas there will be little open spots which boingo could cover in their hotspot directory.  In rural areas the only possible solution I can think of is mesh networks where the user is client and node. 
But Engadget today gave me another idea: let the police for it!  They did not exactly say that, but they reported on a security ramp up in England. Apparently in England hovering surveillance drones, camcorder-wielding traffic wardens and helmet cam-equipped officers aren't enough. London's city of Westminster is apparently looking to "install networked security cameras that can recognize parking permits and the plates of offending vehicles." Essentially, the system would enable parking violators to be ticketed without an actual human witnessing the offense, and it's being dubbed "the most significant application to be deployed on the Westminster's WiFi network." Eventually, the council plans to roll out about 250 of these sure-to-be-hated cameras, and it should ruin enough people's days to "pay for itself in two to three years."  So we might as well take the most of the situtation and let the police pay for our WiFi.  It is a win-win.

Techcrunch today came up with a great idea.  They call it the Holy Grail of Mobile Social Networks.
Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting - quick LinkedIn type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.
It could be done: we have cell phone tower triangulation and bluetooth to solve a lot of the problems of locating users and transmitting information between phones.  Techcrunch looks at 3 companies in Europe (US carriers do not allow user-based installs of java: Aka-Aki (Germany), Mobiluck (Paris) and Imity (Copenhagen). 

Satisfaction Unlimited is a neat idea about crowdsourcing support amongst one's customers. They do online support for Twitter, Pownce and Slideshare and have opened up a public beta.  It makes sense:  if you are a fan of a gadget you quickly become an expert yourself and make some money on this new skill.  Although I am under the impression that crowdsourcing's popularity as a jargon hype word is going down rapidly, recently there have been a few capital injections for crowdsourcing companies such as Powerreviews and Bazaarvoice.

Yesterday I said that If I see another announcement of yet another social network in my RSS reader, I was  going to vomit.  Industry analysts seem to think that the rule of three will apply and that only tree big ones will remain.  I am afraid this is 1.0 thinking.  Perhaps only three big elephants will remain but they will have no soul only a massive body.  The new social networks are coming bottom up and not top-down.  They are niche players such as iGuard (a network for people who take multiple medicine), Sermo (a network for physicians), TeeBeeDee (a network for +40), Circle Builder (a network for church networks). 

Talking about search engines: do you remember me speaking about Cuill, the super-stealth search hype from SF?  They were apparently self-financed.  Not true: Greylock Partners gave them 4m$.  You can do a lot of stealth marketing on 4m$.  

I have just installed Growl and I am very happy with the new notification software which makes your desktop dynamic but something struck an emotional chord in their message on their new version.

So with Growl 1.1 the single biggest feature took about 2 years to make. I made a point of making sure this was in the changelog, the knowledge that it took 2 years is something that should either make users proud that we worked on it for so long to perfect it, or scared that we did, or just go "wtf". This guy certainly did the wtf (on tuaw and on macupdate).

I hear you, guys, I hear you.

P.S If you do not know what to do this weekend, here is some homework.  Mashable came up with 5000 tools to make the most of the web.

http://mashable.com/2007/09/08/5000-resources-to-do-just-about-anything-online/

How can we stand out?

What do Homeworkers need? What are the Homeworking trends now and what will they be in 10 years?. I honestly think that ALL Country Managers should read “Free Agent Nation” by Dan Pink. Dan Pink’s book really gives you the BIG PICTURE needed to get Pajamanation on the right track. Think BIG, Win BIG!

Since many people will be new to the Homeworker's world, they will have to be educated. They will have to learn things such as:

• How to use the web – for some
• Electronic Commerce
• Being a Homeworker
• Homeworking; concepts & technologies
• Virtual teams
• Communicating in a virtual environment
• Homeworking project implementation
• Homeworking Management
• The Homeworker and IT

These are some of the most essential needs for people to pass on over to the Homeworker's world. We can offer them this through e-learning and through a partnership. Just for laughs, take a look at: http://www.pajamadiaries.com/samples.php . Here you can get a glimpse of what Homeworking is all about. There is also Adam@home. I know what some of you are thinking! Don't even think of having a comic strip on the Pajamanation site! It will spoil the professional look that we have. You can put it on your FaceBook profile.

The experienced Homeworker will have other needs such as a Homeworkers Syndicate. I can elaborate on this some other time. The idea is to add value to Pajamanation by filling in the Homeworkers needs. In 10 years time Pajamanation will have set the trends. You can put your money on it! Walter stated: “Google together with Apple will be responsible for a renaissance of micro-entrepreneurship and a return of work to the homes”. Is this an idea that they already have or can we introduce it to them? There is http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/ , but I think we can beat them in this field.

After taking a look at the links concerning Pajamanation's competitors, that Andy and Walter supplied, my idea regarding added value services on Pajamanation was reinforced. No matter how many job posting/bidding sites there are, there are no sites that offer additional services that the average Homeworkers can use. Walter asked for us to take a look at http://ejobfairs.net/ , a “Live, Fully Interactive Electronic Job Fair”. The animation even looks like Walter (HA, HA, HA)!!! If we are only going to post jobs and be “a unique and easy way for job seekers and employers to connect”, we’ll be exactly like these guys and everyone else. So you can compare these other sites with a grocery store; limited choices due to limited offerings. Pajamanation on the other hand must be the Homeworkers Supermarket. Besides job posting/bidding we can have other services that Homeworkers can use and we can do this by joint ventures and/or partnerships. Thus bringing in and referring new customers.

Walters mentions “top Internet companies or the below-the-liners...?” for partners on his “NEVER JOIN A CLUB THAT WANTS YOU AS A MEMBER”. I say; let’s go for both! The worst the big boys can say is NO. While on the other hand, there are some below-the-liners that have very good services that our PajamaWorkers could use and the below-the-liners will have a very hard time in saying NO. So here again I call for BIG PICTURE thinking. Pajamanation along with the below-the-liners like us, can create something that everyone can use and will want to use. “The sum of its parts is greater than the whole”

Before you go to the BIG BOYS, you should pay the Belgium Consulate a visit and inform them that you represent a Belgium company in your country. Ask them for help in disseminating Pajamanation amongst the top officials and the media. After which, I am sure you’ll find doors that were once closed, fully open. You have to seriously think politically. With Pajamanation there is no way around this. So you might as well go with the flow or you’ll drown. Seriously!!!

Here is an example of a possible joint venture that we can arrange http://www.homeworkersww.org.uk/ . This is a group that I requested to join on FaceBook. Here is the email that I got back:

“I had a look at your website and I don't think your profile fits with that of homeworkers worldwide. We are a campaigning organisation for the labour rights of homeworkers working mainly in manufacturing and handicraft work. It looks like you offer work/ workers in the professional domaine. Please check out our website http://www.homeworkersww.org.uk/ . If you still think there is overlap, we could discuss further.” I think they would make a great joint venture, they just don’t see it yet. ;^)

There are several other companies, associations and organisations that we could establish a joint venture with. FaceBook and Skype would be a perfect joint venture. BTW FaceBook has a Skype app that allows you to use Skype on FaceBook. I’m not sure how it works, but it would be nice to have something like that on Pajamanation or FWD like Yosi suggested. Pajamaworkers could use the FaceBook profile or something like that on PJN. This would need serious brainstorming from all CMLT (Country Managers Leadership Team). The point is that we can fill in their (job market) gap and they could fill in ours. Joint ventures and partnerships ARE crucial for our success.

Now here is the pièce de résistance! (Here we can be in league with the BIG BOYS) There’s a great resource for education that allot of people aren’t aware of . People should really be aware and taking advantage of it. The media doesn’t give it the coverage or attention that it disserves. I’m talking about the MIT Open Course Ware project. http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm and it’s international consortium: http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ . This is the equivalent to a global 21^st century Alexandria. What is happening is that MIT, with the help of some organizations and other international member universities, are putting all of their courses on-line and FREE for the public to use. You can get a $$ MILLION DOLLAR $$ education for free. You can’t get a degree for free on-line, but you can get the same education people are paying tons of money for. It’s just a wealth of information. You can see for yourself that you can study all kinds of interesting fields. Best of all, you can do it at your own pace and at HOME in your pajamas! =^D

So Walter get on the phone and set a meeting with MIT’s President Susan Hockfield!!! ;^)

Now this really needs to be disseminated just as PajamaNation needs to be! Instead of people wasting their time talking about the war and other problems, they should be looking at the solutions! Now, can you imagine Pajamanation and MIT’s OCW together?!?! This is literally a world-wide revolution in both education and labour! We could help MIT in disseminating their project and MIT could support Pajamanation . Not only at MIT, but through their member universities as well. Students could be part-time PajamaWorkers, so they could get that extra cash for beer. =^P

I agree with Chris and Jef, the mission statement and the USP are two separate things and should not be confused. The Mission Statement can be placed in an area that states “Our Mission”. The USP on the other hand is a fundamental marketing tool and we should not set it aside. All you need is to do is write down in two columns; First column : “You know how…” , Second column: “Well, what I do is…” this will help develop a USP. Like the “People Per Hour” site. Their USP is really good: “Bringing together people who need things done with people who can do them” and they emphasize on “Bringing together people with people”. So how’s about the CM’s brainstorming up a killer USP?!?!

Good Things Are Getting Better

When I was a child I remembered my grandfather telling me that 60% of all conversations in Europe had the name Brigitte Bardot in it.  He did not divulge his sources (and Alexa was not there yet), but the statement stuck in my head.  I think Brigitte Bardot has been replaced by Apple now or Iphone or Steve Jobbs. I am so happy to have switched to Apple at the beginning of the year to belong to the illuminati instead of to the Delldrones.   Immediately after the announcement I ordered with a friend going to SF an Iphone at 399$ and an Ipod Touch plus AV cables.  I am in passionate anticipation.  Life is a gadget beach.

I not only switched to Apple, but also to iGoogle for everything: mail, blog, documents, spreadsheets, accounts, search, reader, analytics, talk etc..  Today I was pleasantly surprised to hear that there is finally a search in Reader, a Google Translate (better than Babelfish, and not working with Systran) and the announcement that Cap Gemini is going to be the major distributor for the office suite Google Apps, thereby targeting MS 12bn$ a year revenue.  Google took the right decision: not desktop but webtop and not feature listing but collaborative tools.  Bits instead of Atoms.

Another good direction in my life was start writing a daily blog.  More and more widgets and apps appear daily to help blog writers.  We can now make a link cloud from any RSS feed and embed it anywhere, we can create interactive timelines from our RSS feed and then cut an paste it into our blog, Triond is offering us monthly royalties and Blogkits wants to marry blogging with affiliate marketing.  For the widgetfreaks among us, Mashable (the latest news on social networking) came up with 50 useful widgets to add to our blogs, some of them are yummy: Linebuzz (inline comments for your blog), 3Jam (readers can send messages to your mobile phone without knowing the number), Technorati link count, Delicious Tagometer, and Plazes (shows your current location).  

Of course one of the better decisions in my life was setting up Pajamanation (although it does not seem that way now, but I know what is under the soil).  The memes of our economic agenda are getting spread: Entrepreneur.com has several articles on homework this week.  One (by Lisa Druxman – Hire my Mom) treats of "mompreneurs" (according to the US Census more than 5.4m moms will put their career on hold to stay home with their children and are looking for flexible solutions).  Slashdot made my day when reporting that I ndian Software firms outsource jobs to US.
Two new sites have launched that will greatly benefit our movement: Skilltip.tv (videos that upgrade your skills) and redhotfranchises.com (this is also part of the homeworker community).

Yes, we live in exciting times, but I must admit that some things get boring.  If I see another announcement of yet another social network in my RSS reader, I think I am going to vomit. 

Three Questions You Should Ask at Parties

Three Questions You Should Ask at Parties

When you are at a party, ask people how we measure time.  I'll bet you they'll say by the stars.  Wrong answer of course, it is no longer fixed by astronomical reference points.  We have shifted from stars to atomic beams in vaults.  Particles are steadier than planets.  We are in the epoch of the nanosecond and during a nanosecond everything is motionless: bullets, droplets, everything.  That is how I feel sometimes: things appear to slow down while they speed up.  Pajamanation is motionless in the nanosecond.

But then I think back to my other companies.  They have all taken a long time in suspended animation.  With a long time, I mean more than 5 years before they actually became interesting.  Time is linked to destination (where you want to be) and destination is often linked to place, as in GPS technology.  An error of a billionth of a second means an error of a foot, the distance light travels in that time.  So if Pajamanation is an economic bomb, let it drop where we want it to be and cause no collateral damage. 

Patience, I am not very good at it, but I force myself.  We started Pajamanation in 2002, we are now practically 2008, the date I projected for us to fly above the radar and capture the imagination of other people like us.  Some tell me that is a long time for preparations. 

They forget the big successes out there.  When do you think Google started?  That is the second question you should ask at parties.  Most people will say after 2000.  The right answer however is January 1996.  In 1998 they got their first capital injection: 100,000$.  In two years' time they had 10,000 queries a day (which is not a lot at all).   Once the first money was in, they moved into an office (now the Googolplex) and were able to get multiples of queries of 50 (500,000 queries/day). Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising $1.67 billion, making it worth $23 billion.  Google is 12 years already.  There is an interesting article on them in Wired on the date, September 7, for Google, when they got their first check.

When I started my first company in 1989 (Riverland sold to VNU in 1996), people asked me how I was going to go from one subscription to Computer Magazine (myself) to 10,000 subscriptions in a year's time?  Well, it is easy I learned that from the big masters of viral marketing and subscription management: the politicians. 

You do it one vote at a time and you are everywhere, and everyone who works with you should do as you.  In the company we had a scoreboard showing how many subscriptions and who brought them in.  We all spent one hour a day just phone people in for trial subscriptions.  That is how you make pyramids, one block at a time.  No miracles, just a clean and straight marathon where you know you will suffer and you try to keep reserve strengths for the downtimes and the dignity at the end of the line.  And afterwards you say, that it was easier than you thought, because we are all optimists (a survival bias).

And the final question you should ask at parties is obvious of course?  Do you want to try out Pajamanation and help us change the world?

It is a no-brainer, I assure you.

Miss Teen South Carolina

NEVER JOIN A CLUB THAT WANTS YOU AS A MEMBER

NEVER JOIN A CLUB THAT WANTS YOU AS A MEMBER

There is so much happening today, that there seems to be very little to say.  Everyone is waiting for "The Beat Goes On" and for Steve Fossett to return home (who the hell is this guy, when I am gone for two weeks nobody notices?).  

Technology news is getting weirder by the day but we are beyond paying attention to it.  California opposes companies to implant RFIDs in employees, Synthasite is giving shares away to subscribers, games manufacturers will use BCI (Brain Computer Interface) into their games so we can steer with our thoughts and a new hype is coming in the Valley (like powerset which has just parsed Miss Teen South Carolina (was that mean or what?).  The new hype is called cool but written in the new Californian spelling as Cuill, according to Techcrunch a super stealth search engine that worries Google (frankly I do not think they lost a lot of sleep over this).

Miss Teen South Carolina
<object width="425" height="353"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/WALIARHHLII"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/WALIARHHLII" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="353"></embed></object>

When I talked yesterday about Google slowly taking over the complete web analytic market I forgot to mention that they opened the beta platform for Analytics AIR.  I have enlisted as beta tester and will report on it when they start. You can also sign up here if you want.

There is also a new cool maps app called maps.amung.us. This is again Californian spelling, the West has always pioneered itself out of saturated situations by changing the rules of the game: when all the domain names are gone, just change the spelling.  

One of our country managers asked me an intriguing question: we are under the radar for the moment and will be so for the next months, so who do we approach as potential partners, the top Internet companies or the below-the-liners like us?

Universal Darwinism (Richard Dawkins, the Selfish Gene) asserts that any system will accumulate complex traits that favor their reproduction if the system can negotiate variation (with better genomes), makes the right decisions (selection) and has the ability to replicate.  There you have the answer.  To put it in Groucho Marx immortal words: "I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member." There is no progress in that, shoot higher and if they say no?  So what?  Call the whaaaambulance.

And you do not need money for asking.  In our situation there is nothing we cannot do, just because we do not have any money.  Take advantage of it, as long as it lasts, because I feel the oil coming ☺

WOW

WOW YOUR BLOG

The English have a nice word for it: flabbergasted.  Amazed, I was when I saw who reads my blog.  I thought less than a hundred people, but thanks to the English language and Google, I get readers from all over the world.  I just integrated  FEEDJIT which gives you  (dixit Feedjit) real-time traffic data on your blog. No registration required and it's completely free. See where your visitors are located in the world, which websites they're arriving from and what they're clicking when they leave your site.

You can even do better and try out Google's Touchgraph TouchGraph's powerful visualization solutions reveal relationships between people, organizations, and ideas .  If you type in 'www.pajamanation.com' you get a wow effect. 

Further tools for our website and blog continue to appear: Builtwith to find out which software was used to build this site.  Webgrader gives you SEO tips and checks out every mistake you have made.  Google is ready with the Google GWT (Web Toolkit)

Entrepreneur.com gives 6 tips how to SEO your blog which are very useful and to monetize your blog look here : http://www.sizlopedia.com/2007/09/02/complete-blog-statistics-for-august-2007/

The only thing that frustrates me is Treppenwitze, l'esprit de l'escalier, staircase wit: I should have used Wordpress!
http://www.sizlopedia.com/2007/08/28/blogging-tookit-12-best-developer-tools-reviewed/

On Ideas, Ideation and the Ideals in Men

Ideas: assets or liabilities?

I got a lot of response to my blog about hypernumerals yesterday, but mostly in my email.  Please be adviced that the comments are on so you can answer in the blog itself.

I do not agree with some of you that there not enough ideas around.  In Slashdot today: "Ideas are really the sexy part of innovation and there's rarely a shortage of them. If you look at the biggest problems around innovation, rarely does a lack of ideas come up as one of the top obstacles; instead, it's things like a risk-averse culture, overly lengthy development times and lack of coordination within the company."

The question is whether an idea is an asset or a liability.  
When I said I am giving ideas away, it is because otherwise they become a liability since I do not have the financial backing to exercise them all.  If I do not give them away, they accumulate as to-do lists in my head or like save-bookmarks.  So, better that somebody else does it then, so that I am rid of them.  Invention without a financial return is just an expense. Ideas without the power to exercise them become frustrations.

Whether there is job in gatekeeping or idea-production for companies?  I doubt it very much.  Although I love ideas, thinking, philosophy and abstract objects, basically ideas are worthless.  It is 10 times tougher to come up with a prototype; 100 times tougher to come up with a company around it that is working  and has real customers; 1000 times tougher with a company that is profitable and keeps evolving and 10,000 times tougher to do an IPO around that company and finally 100,000 times tougher to exit as a multi-millionaire.

Walter

The Hypernumber Idea

Hypernumerals

"It has never been easier to start an Internet company. Create a Web site, begin a "viral" marketing campaign to grow word-of-mouth and acquire an audience, garner some ad revenues, generate venture capital funding and sell out to a Web giant such as Yahoo! or Google."  

This is how an article in Forbes starts, with the title: Good technology is nice, but a Good idea is better. http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/2007/08/09/google-yahoo-youtube-ent-fin-cx_kw_0809whartonvc.html?boxes=relstories  I cannot agree more, but since my RSS reader is daily filled +100, I tend to have too many ideas, so I started to give them away for free, thereby contributing to the emerging Gift Economy ☺

For instance, Techcrunch announced today that one of the finalists of Seedcamp, a European Y Combinator-like seed fund and mentoring program is a Scottish Project Fairplay which states that they want to do something with hypernumbers such as hypertext does with words.  I tried to find out more, but strangely the new company has no website hyperlinked to their name ☺

Hypernumerals is an old idea, but nobody has ever touched it the right way.  Everyone says it is too much of a niche market, but I disagree.  

When I think of hypernumbers I do not think in algebraic systems where they are called hypercomplex or numbers with dimensionality (axes).  My view on hypernumbers should do to numbers (or numerals) what hypertext does to text.  This opens up a whole array of opportunity.  One could set up a new advertising concept around "number advertising" instead of text advertising.  The advertisement syndication or ad serving platform could be called "Addsense", for instance (instead of Adsense).  One could generate frequency tables of numbers in texts ("Adnumbers" versus Google's Adwords) so that it would be possible to make a top 20 of the most popular numbers in the world. Let's not forget that any text which consists of tips and is numbered is immediately taken up by Digg or other content synidcators, people just love numbered lists.

 Just like Adsense people could bid (why not a simple Vickrey auction?) to sponsor a certain number or cipher in texts all over the world in for instance a CPA model (cost per action instead of cost per click as Google now does which would lead to price discovery in this niche market).  This would require a new search engine (let's call it "Numeratica"), for numbers only, which could be an add-on to Firefox and an alternative to wikipedia.  The field of numerals should include both the idea of numbers and symbol for numbers (so that I could for instance sponsor a variable number such as the US debt).  My definition of numberals would also include zero, negative numbers, rational numbers, irrational numbers, and complex numbers.  

The idea is infinite.  Just like numbers and our imagination.

Never Jam Today

NEVER JAM TODAY

I have talked about Pajamanation extensively in more than 12 blogs in a qualitative way and if you want the quantitative appraisal of Web Grader you can find it here (I have made it particularly tough for us by comparing us to two giants www.guru.com and www.elance.com).  Here is the report http://www.websitegrader.com/wsgid/192307/default.aspx

Now that the end of the holidays is approaching, we need to prepare some action.  We have nine milestones to go before we are ready to leave Terra Incognita (nomad's land)
1.    V2 should be ready
2.    The new contracts should be ready and send out to the managers
3.    We need a Web Farm
4.    V2 must be tested by all of us (and perhaps even by www.inviteshare.com) and all the suggestions and glitches have to be incorporated
5.    A designer must make the site extra yummy
6.    A copywriter must look at the texts
7.    The SEO must be done
8.    The country sites must be ready
9.    A global press release must be done by a PR bureau

These milestones must be done in the next six months and then we will be ready, but we will emerge in a complete new landscape.  Let me just tell you about what I think are three of the new parameters:

Apple
The iPhone will change everything: it will boost web mobility and search will move from the laptop to the handheld, it will boost mergers between manufacturers and providers (10% margin deals by Apple), Apple will be the number two computer sold in the US (it is now just in number three place having increased its sales enormously) and there will be an ever greater amount of switchers (from pc to Mac) by the pressure of consumer technology such as iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPhoto etc..

Google
Google will probably take over Firefox in the browser market, Gears will fill the disadvantages of desktops versus webtops (offline), Google will push its webtop strategy as an alternative to MS, the Gphone will gradually displace GPS systems because Google will have its own phone OS (through the acquisition of Android).  Google together with Apple will be responsible for a renaissance of micro-entrepreneurship and a return of work to the homes.

Venture Capital
VC money will become tougher to get hold of because of the amount of high quality deals, the uncertainty of stock markets and the nervousness of their shareholders.   The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today
 (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass)
☺

META time

META

Sunday, September 2, 2007.  That is the date, when I will tell you the date for our launch. I do not want to break another promise, I will make this deadline, but therefore I need to be sure.

I have also discussed with Yosi, the openness of our dialogue.  We let the world see the teenage mentality of a young global company, I quite like it.  It proves that CEOs are mere mortals, companies make mistakes, and entrepreneurship is closer to art than science.  Above all, it sets one thing right: leadership comes from the bottom up, the CEO only moderates it.  But shall we close the blog or leave it open.  As a Belgian, I am a man looking always for a win-win.  Therefore I have decided to daily write two blogs starting from Monday: one for the CMs which will be closed, and one for the public and the users, which will be open.

In the beginning when I talked about Pajamanation, I told people the philosophy that was behind it, but now, I don't anymore.  Because Pajamanation is a Black Swan (Nassim Taleb just wrote a book about the Impact of the Highly Improbable).  "We produce 30 year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for the next summer."

He is right, we are a young, reckless, superficial and very unfair race, but we have our moments of grandeur and vision.  You need a story to displace a story.  We are building this story together.  Ideas come and go on web 2.0 but I believe our story will stay.  The desertion of corporate cubicles for the home office, the renaissance of entrepreneurship at the individual level, the leapfrogging of the third world, the opening up of the source code of entrepreneurship, the final Maslov level of self-realization, the unsustainability of the present unfair model of social structure, the displacing of a decennium of jobtakers by a new decennium of jobmakers and the feast of creativity.  This fills me with joy and anticipation.  It is a great story and one I love to tell.

Red Queen

Red Queen in Wonderland

Yesterday I have been thinking about the Dagan rule: 33% are doing all the work, 33% do something and 33% do next to nothing.  Last time I said that this was a reflection of the world.  But there may be another explanation. 

If you look at the people subscribed to my blog and our Pajamanation group at Facebook, the Dagan rule holds: 33%, those that doing all the work.  But I cannot believe that 66% are unconcerned about our efforts. 

Suppose (like Chomsky's formal grammars) there are four types of people nowadays: Type-0, Type-1, Type-2, Type-3 and these types reveal the way that technology is digested buy them.  I mean, our world is not any longer a reflection of the world five years ago, it is a world filled to the brim with technology.

• Type-0 people are like Chris, our CTO, they span the complete horizon, there is very little gaps in their knowledge, they have been TO almost from birth.  
• Type-1 people are like the 33% who are reading my blog.  They are extremely updated on all the new technologies and apps that come out every day.  They probably spend 60% of their day learning just to keep up.  
• Type-2 people are like the 33% who do something but not enough.  Perhaps they are like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, they are running very fast to stay in the same place.  Perhaps they want to read my blog but do not know where it is, they want to read it daily but do not know what an RSS reader is or how to configure one, they want to join the party on Facebook but they do not find 'groups' and if they do, they do not find 'join'.  
• Type-3 people, probably have intermittent access to the internet and are just e-mailers and all the rest escapes them.  

This may be an alternative reason why we only have 33% who are up to speed.

For type-2 and type-3 I would suggest that they buy a Macbook and get an DSL connection and then configure their i-google page.  They outsource their mail address to Google, join Facebook, put their itunes music on igoogle, their youtubes videos, the alert page when their name is mentioned, the weather forecast, babelfish and of course, the most important Google reader, so that they can daily read all the articles they want from all the magazines they want (and my blog!).  If they are temporarily out of signal, they can use Google Gears to read them offline.

In short: it is to us Type-1's, to educate Type-2's and to Type-2's to educate Type-3's.  But first we have to know, if this premise is true.

Tomorrow is a special day: I will tell you about the date when we become Overlords, a frequently delayed operatation to gain a foothold on in cyberspace.  When D-Day?

Walter