PajamaNation Blog

Where are they now?

2008-04-27T14:12:00.000+02:00

What's Walter working on these days, I wonder.

TECHNOLOGY NIGHTMARES

2007-10-22T16:52:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-11T17:15:00.000+02:00

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?

2007-10-10T16:28:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-09T16:12:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-05T15:33:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-03T16:20:00.000+02:00

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 :-)

Advice-over-Paypal. You can now get paid for Expert advice using services such as Bitwine,
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.
Domain names. Invest in domain name portfolio
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.
Writing a Facebook app and selling it on Ebay
Setting up a business and selling it on Ebay
Do business on the Amazon marketplace
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.
Launch a Podcast. Akamai has a nice brochure here
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

2007-10-02T17:19:00.001+02:00

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

2007-09-27T12:10:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-26T15:44:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-25T12:48:00.002+02:00

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

2007-09-24T17:15:00.000+02:00

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."

2007-09-24T15:37:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-20T22:31:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-17T15:49:00.001+02:00

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-

2007-09-14T15:40:00.000+02:00

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?

2007-09-13T17:53:00.001+02:00

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

2007-09-12T17:14:00.001+02:00

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?

2007-09-10T22:22:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-10T17:27:00.001+02:00

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

2007-09-09T16:09:00.001+02:00

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

2007-09-05T18:04:00.000+02:00

NEVER JOIN A CLUB THAT WANTS YOU AS A MEMBER

2007-09-05T16:30:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-04T15:18:00.001+02:00

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

2007-09-03T11:48:00.001+02:00

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

2007-08-30T21:47:00.000+02:00

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

2007-08-30T01:08:00.001+02:00

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

2007-08-27T19:24:00.001+02:00

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

2007-08-26T11:46:00.001+02:00

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

A little bit of Steve

2007-08-24T15:01:00.001+02:00

A little bit of Steve

At this very moment, we are all entrepreneurs doing an entrepreneurial project together, Pajamanation. But this is only the beginning of our entrepreneurial activity. Think of what we will be in a year. They have asked me about the size of our market, so we put something together and said a couple of millions sure, 20 to 30 perhaps. But all this is aiming too low. Really too low. We should not look at our new economic agenda like a botanist who says how many potential homeworkers will there be? A botanist does not make any sense in the Cambrian Explosion (the mashup world of today). There will not only be homeworkers making use of Pajamanation, or consultants with a home office or freelancers, or women staying at home with the kids, or the kids themselves outsourcing ideas or school papers. There will be many more, think of the disabled, think of the sick, think of the unemployed, think of the economically challenged worlds out there, think of people in their day job quickly doing a microjob on the side (sunlighting), think of moonlighters (people who have a day job and do a microjob in the evening), think of teleworkers who are looking for a pause and do a microjob instead of playing solitaire, think of SMEs who will outsource all their bottlenecks in the form of microjobs, think of corporations where internal entrepreneurs will outsource feasibility projects, think of individuals, think of families as a whole who are doing microjobs.

The right question for PajamaNation is: how many people on earth have creative ideas, at least one a year. A wild guess: one billion. But this means that I exclude 5 billion and label them Zombiestan and it also means that people normally only get one creative idea a year, which is nonsense.

Critics of course are saying that they need access to computers. But talk to young people nowadays, wherever you are: they cannot envisage their lives not having a cyberspace. They will live digitally.

Lately I have been feeling a bit like Steve Jobs (I wish ☺ launching the iphone. I have been approached by people wanting to make products, services and even companies for the sheer mass of people we are going to reach and this is good. This is very good. Here come the apps, de dev kits, the links, the services, the cross-fertilization. Yummy.

As I told you before we have been talking to www.worldlawdirect.com. They want to set up a legal desk for homeworkers, they want to do micro-insurances for us, they want to do escrows for us. They smell the potential. One of our greatest deals www.lulu.com said yes to an alliance whereby all our members can publish their books. Lulu is more than famous, they smell the potential. Yosi found two other companies that want to offer services www.zira.biz and www.websplanet.com

But recently I have been approached by others with more ideas. Nasir, our manager of Malaysia came up with a good idea for our pajamadomains and is now thinking of a venture to involve all country managers to be the biggest second-level domain shop next to www.marcaria.com. Charles Palanco, the CEO of www.paltrust.com is not only convinced he should join us with P2P lending he also came up with two new products (PeopleTrust and Cardtrust) for our specific audience. An interim office in Montana wants to add us as another line of business. I told you about the great project that Stephen Wolfram offered us.

But you? Ask yourself what you can do for your nation ☺)
A killer product you can offer to all of us, someone in your country we should talk to, a service that is badly needed. Be creative, before somebody else is, because before you know it we will be booming and then it is too late (although you were on the front row).

Walter

It is Amazing, is it not

2007-08-22T20:23:00.001+02:00

On the beach of Cap d'Antibes

Today I was sitting at the beach of Cap d'Antibes (that is in France by the way) with our Pajamanation manager of Austria, Markus Schuller. We joked about the many directions we took with PajamaNation. It is quite extraordinarily, when you come to think about it, that we still exist! That is probably the most astonishing fact of our endeavor; we seem to survive against odds. And while we are debating that we need a better site and better systems, customers come and go, they are not bothered, not even conscious about our problems. They just post microjobs (which is not easy, believe me, I tried it), they do microjobs for others, they leave their profile, they register. My God, they have guts and patience! This is certainly the best proof of our future success, that with such a lousy site and such whimsical management (I target myself here), we grow every day. Amazing.

But actually we did the same as our customers, while some of us were debating, others worked on it and when the workers stopped and started debating, the debaters started to work and this is the result, let's sum it up.

1.   We have companies with VAT numbers, with shareholders, with bank accounts
2.   We have a great mission statement which makes me feel proud and a good positioning too as Entrepreneurship 2.0. Open the source code of entrepreneurship to the world (difficult? Of course this is difficult! Changing the world has never been easy)
3.   We have 84 trademarks worldwide and a great name (which makes people smile when you say it)
4.   We have more than a hundred second-level domain names in these countries (and for the Spanish-speaking countries we have an alternative name –pyjamanation- because pajama seems to mean masturbation which could trigger the wrong sort of 'microjobs'
5.   We have more than 60 country managers (as Yosi says 33% are doing their best, 33% are doing something and 33% are doing nothing). Fair enough, that is a reflection of the world as well. We are human, not superhuman.
6.   We have customers, more every day, hits in more than 50 countries (Venezuela and Kenya on top, which means that we have rescheduled the world as we know it), microjobs from a lot of countries (I have not seen this in any site) and 3000 people who registered and left their profiles. We even had to pay money back to people who paid mistakenly, how about that!
7.   We have the best architecture in the world (our new system works with catalyst and Mason- not that I really know what this is, but Chris tells me it is the Bentley of programming) and we paid the top guy at Amazon to work that out for us. We only had him on our payroll for two months, but God that hurt!
8.   We have a great management team who work for free
9.   We have a blog (which I write every day and I love to read it too, it is actually one of my favorites), a wiki, a group on Facebook, several movies on Youtube in two languages; we have been on TV in Portugal and Venezuela and shortly in India (I love the way Ricardo sat their in pajamas, that is the kind of brand we need, it should be in the contract that all our managers have to wear pajamas during interviews)
10.   We have closed great partnerships with www.lulu.com, www.bitwine.com, www.paltrust.com, www.worldlawdirect.com, and some others are in the make
11.   www.Wolframscience.com has a three-year job for 1000 microworkers for us which will get us global press when our new system is out. It is a great assignment believe me.
12.   In September we will have our own server farm in Sweden and a series of new contracts made by our lawyers, which will solidify our positions towards licenses and option agreements.

Amazing, is it not, that we sometimes think, that we do not really exist, although even a passing thought, it is a wrong one. We are changing the world, but our pace could improve.

I would like to end with the lyrical words of a Skype email I got today and it made me think of all of you, so here it is:

When the unexpected happens, it's important to remember the people who stuck behind us and whose loyalty humbled us. I want to thank everyone for their support, patience and being part of the Skype community. And for those of you who missed out on using Skype last week - I want to especially thank you as well.

TRANSPARENCY TOTAL

2007-08-22T02:40:00.001+02:00

Day 8: Transparency (let's kill another taboo)

I think we covered a lot since 7 blogs. This one gets a bit more practical. In order to do everything what we want to achieve, we need to rethink our model. Originally I had enthusiastically promised 50% of the company to the country managers. This is no longer a viable position for VCs to come in. So, we restructured that position in ways where everyone still benefits: 20% for country managers and 10% for management, together 30%.

An option pool will be created for country managers of 20% or 45,000,000 shares. The option strike price will be fixed at 0.01333 Euro so with 225, 000,000 shares it is set to when the value of the company is 3M€. When we sell or do an IPO the option pool will be exercisable, that means that you get the difference between the strike price (0,01333) and the purchase price (hopefully 2$ :-). The option pool is dilutable as are all other shares.

The CMs will receive 30% (net) of the revenue. If a merger is being made, 25% will go to the company which brought the users and 8% will be retained by the CM; so we give 3% extra to the CM because we know he is adding value for the rest of us.

It may seem less, and it is of course, but in the end positions are meaningless. I ended up with 0.6% of Qwest Communications and this was more than enough.

At this very moment we are also consolidating our management team, all of which I must add, work for free.

•   Walter De Brouwer, ceo (Belgium)
•   Yosi Dagan, Sales and Marketing President (Israel)
•   Chris Vertonghen, CTO (Belgium)
•   Andy Roberts, Country Site Coordinator (UK)
•   Jean-Antoine Bord, Vice President Africa (Kenya)
•   Ricardo del Rio, Vice President South-America (Venezuela)
•   Paul Velho, Vice President Europe (Portugal)
•   Chanterria Mc Gilbra, PR Officer
•   Sunita Raho, Design

We still have openings for VP Asia, VP Pacific, VP Eastern Europe and VP USA/Canada but we will fill these in later. Of the option pool for management we have reserved until now: Yosi (4,5m), Chris (4,5m), JA Bord (1m shares), Ricardo (1m), Paul (1m). Of the 22,500,000m shares we have reserved 12m shares and there are still 10,5m in the pool. Also note that at this point, none of these have vested.

What will happen now is that Worldlawdirect, Brad Haskins, is going to put this in contracts (country managers, Vice Presidents, staff, option contracts) so that our legal dashboard is in order.

I think what would be cool now is to hear from our three new vice presidents how they see their new role. I would like to invite Paul Velho to be the first.

Walter De Brouwer

Day 7: God spoke to us and apologized

2007-08-21T10:52:00.001+02:00

Day Seven: Never thought this would happen

Google apologized!!

We take pride in moving quickly, and we think this philosophy helps to create lots of new and innovative products. But it also leads to errors that -- upon reflection and your feedback -- we need to rectify. This was one of them. We make mistakes; we do our best not to repeat them -- and we really do try to fix the ones we make. That said, the very least that our users should expect from us is that our mistakes be new and innovative, too. ;)

Customers not happy with Facebook's Open Doors Closed Policy (we should learn from this, open up, no closed platforms)

For those of us that use normal email for our day to day business, getting Facebook messages is more of a problem than a feature. That's because Facebook makes you log on to the site to read messages/emails from your friends. They'll send a note to your normal email address when a new message comes in, but they make you log on to Facebook to actually read it. I rarely do that, and have missed some important messages from people trying to contact me. As a next step, I think Facebook should offer to forward the actual messages to an outside email address (and/or provide a password protected RSS feed). Eventually Facebook should offer full POP or IMAP support for their email. They can still restrict it so that you can only receive messages from friends, but at least you could access it from your desktop or web based mail application.

Thank you for your comments in email, but now, thanks to Andy and Yosi, the comments on the blog are enabled, so comment freely. You asked me how the coops would look like, well this was my original idea for people setting up a virtual company. What do you think?

How do I set up Me Inc. in 15 easy steps?
1.   What will be the name http://www.domainsbot.com/
2.   Write the 1-Pager containing:
•   Launching date
•   Ownership
•   Mission
•   Vision
•   Contact
3.   Make a preliminary spreadsheet of the first two years (P/L) and see how much money you must lend from F3 (Fools, Friends and Family) not to have to worry about cash flow
4.   Write the contents for a website and
•   register a domain name www.pajamadomains.com
5.   Choose a logo and house style (business cards, stationery, email signature) www.pajamaproducts.com
6.   Find a template for your website www.pajamaproducts.com
•   find a host provider www.pajamahosting.com
•   add some digital pictures www.istockphoto.com
•   introduce payment software www.paypal.com
•   Keep the statistics to adjust what you offer www.google.com/analytics
7.   Open a bank account (online or offline)
8.   Find an accountant online to provide you quarterly with three statements (P/L, cash flow, balance sheet) and make him do the tax formalities www.pajamaproducts.com
9.   Find a lawyer for a cheap lawyer on monthly subscription www.worldlawdirect.com
10.   Create your tiger team and divide the labour
•   secretary www.pajamanation.com/cybersecretaries per hour
•   Translators www.pajamanation.com/translators
•   Credit Collection www.pajamanation.com/creditcollection
•   IT remote help www.pajamanation.com/ITremote
11.   Select your marketing mix:
•   lead generation www.pajamanation.com/leadgeneration
•   Internet Marketing
12.   Collect your Business docs and contracts library www.worldlawdirect.com
13.   Build up your confidence with some merchandising (cap, T-shirt, mug) www.cafepress.com or www.zazzle.com
14.   Lend money from the community www.paltrust.com
15.   Become a member of www.linkedin.com and www.facebook.com Pajamanation Groups

Darwin's Coops

2007-08-20T22:37:00.001+02:00

Darwin's Coops

I started this blog by stating that companies need to evolve, and if they are not prepared to do this, they will go to the dogs. If you look at our original idea for Pajamanation, we can safely say that we have not been afraid to evolve together with the rapid pace of evolution of the internet.

Andy in his invited blog, says that not only companies need to evolve, also we, the members of these companies need to evolve, in other words, we need to learn new things faster than before. That is why I like his idea of being the mentor of a group of country managers ready to evolve to new heights.

Yosi, in his blog tells us that our choice of partners should focus on whether they are ready to evolve or not. That is three times that we pay tribute to Darwin: our company, ourselves and our partners.

Let me now introduce a fourth stage of evolution: our clients, our customers need to evolve. Great companies predict what their customers will need in future, but the greatest change what they need. That is partly our mission: to change what our customers think they want. Therefore, I would like to introduce the concept of "coops". The idea centers around the leveraging of our identity. As a homeworker we can have several identities: ourselves, our incorporated self, an alternative identity, etc.. but there is more. We have to show our customers the way to a higher level of identity leverage. Besides their personal identity, in our future pajamanation platform they can choose to have one or more virtual companies. A virtual company is a digital entity, not necessarily a legal one. For instance, I am a copywriter and I make a living working from home for clients who need my services. But I can crave for something bigger so that I can pitch for more complex jobs. So I set up the virtual company BROCHURE. Via pajamanation I let the world know that in that company I am looking for three partners: a designer, a translator and a printer. Together we can deliver products such as brochures or websites or power points, which on my own I could not do. Therefore I have created a second opportunity to get homework for myself.

In future we are going to set up a third level of complexity (1-self, 2-virtual company): the supercoop. A supercoop is a collection of virtual companies. Suppose that one day we see an appeal on pajamanation that MEDIA (a supercoop) is looking for virtual companies doing brochures, advertising sales, ad metrics, SEO etc.. We can then apply with our virtual company to do even more complex jobs and so pitch against global media companies working for global clients. The only difference will be that we will do it at a fraction of the cost that the brick and mortar companies will do it.

Anyway, that is my rant for today. Does that make sense to anyone?

Summary
There are three wizards to be build:
1.   Me Inc, individuals becoming personal multinationals working from home (for instance a translator marketing his services and connecting with other translators in other countries)
2.   Coop, Me Incs working together in a virtual company to do more complex jobs
•   translator + copywriter + designer + printer (brochure makers)
•   SEO + internet advertising + linking (internet marketing)
•   Journalists + advertising (publishers)
•   Public Relations + Marketing (internet PR)
•   IP radio station + IP TV station + banner ads + text ads (internet ad agency)

How to build a Win-Win partnership and leverging the power of more than 50 country managers

2007-08-17T20:38:00.000+02:00

I would like to thank Walter for inviting me to post on his blog. I really appreciate this blog as it expose the ‘behind the stage activity’ in Pajamanation.

I would like to write about partners and partnerships, but before going into that we should look on the value that we can bring to table.

We have country managers in more than 50 countries. Pajamanation’s country managers are special people with talents in various fields and with entrepreneurship soul.

The power of our organization is when we can leverage the power, efforts and knowledge of the country managers.

When I look on any activity that we are doing on global level, I ask myself if it can be leveraged by the country managers. If it is not, it is a waste of efforts from my point of view. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do activities that are good ideas for a specific country and maybe , on a local level, but then it will be handled by the country manager and not by the corporate (and it might be that other country managers will learn from it and follow it).

Real good and long lasting partnership means to build a Win-Win situation.

What can we bring to a partnership:

1. Local promotion in more than 50 countries
2. Local PR activity in more than 50 countries
3. Our growing user base
4. More revenues

Now let’s look on what we can get from a partnership:
1. Best services in the world for our visitors to improve the quality of their life and to professionalize their home services, integrated into Pajamanation
2. More revenue
3. More users
4. Promotion and good story

I believe that a best service is evolutionary and not revolutionary. There are new services that are revolutionaries ( the same as our www.pajamanation.com), but the best service will come as the service evolved and changes according to new views and experiences of the users and management.

When we are looking for best service from potential partners, we are looking on the current best service and try to see if the potential partners are open to evolve.

Then , if the service is the best and has a value, people will likely pay for using it.

As we moved into the free model, and we are selling services around our core business, we need to have many users. At this stage, the best we can get from a potential partner is more users.

The partners that we are selecting now are partners who want cross-promotion.

Cross-promotion means that they are going to promote the partnership via the press, their user base and other means and we are going to do the same with every country manager.

And you know how it is in life, if someone is easy to get, probably the value is low, and if someone is playing hard to get others are eager to get him/her J and probably the value is higher.

The same is with partnerships. If it is just “put our link or widget on your web page and start earn money” the value is low.

We are aiming to meaningful partnerships, and this takes efforts, understandings and misunderstandings, agreements, technical coordination, development and business coordination but the value is much higher.

We should be proud of the wonderful team of country managers and in the business we have built so far. We should be proud in our noble vision and mission of changing the life of many people around the world. Look on our mission on the right side of this blog and you will see how great it is.

And I can tell you, my dear friends, that many of the potential partners I’m talking with, are very interested in what we are bringing to the table and see in it a lot of value for them and for the society.

Together we WIN BIG!!!

Day Five: Namaste Gary

2007-08-17T13:51:00.000+02:00

Day Five: Namaste Gary

New Jersey, May 2004. A Saturday evening just after nine o’clock. An engineering student from Bergen County Technical High School in Teterboro (ok, a ‘nerd’) just installed a new toy, a webcam. He is playing around with it and makes a webcam video of himself miming to the song "Dragostea din tei" by Moldovan pop band O-Zone. Little did he know that the following 1:40 minutes were not only going to change his life but also the complete direction of the internet economy.

The video became such a phenomenon watched by millions of people and downloaded more than 1,000,000,000 times. It switched to YouTube for sheer mass. On YouTube itself in the first month it was translated in 87 languages by 263 performers out of 148 countries. There were derivatives of this song as rap, country, rock.. all done by internet consumers, not professionals. Gary Brolsma became known as Numa Numa, after a phrase in the song. He was with Ophra, ABC's Good Morning America, NBC's The Tonight Show, and VH1's Best Week Ever. The unwilling and embarrassed nerd became a mainstream celebrity, subject of a large article in the New York Times and frequent guest of NBC Today Show. Gary’s Numa Numa song is the most downloaded song on earth now.

Gary Brolsma is credited with singlehandedly
• justifying the existence of webcams
• the power of YouTube
• the proof of viral marketing
• the impossibility of a record house to uphold their copyright when all the world is singing their song.

What made Gary universally viral was the fact that he was genuine, that he was totally happy with the new toy he just installed but above all Gary was a “Mensch”. We recognized ourselves in him.

Today I was going to tell you how we are going to go to millions of visitors. We will be able to if we are genuine, if we are proud of what we do and if we are “Menschen”. This is very, very difficult and most viral programs fail, because they do not have these ingredients. Faking reality if a lot harder than you think (although at my age the difference between stimulation and simulation becomes blurry :-).

For us this means that we need to be proud of our product, install it, be so happy with it that our passion and our enthusiasm flows over in the cups of millions of others. Mensch to Mensch.

P.S Gary graduated but still every day, millions of people download him and more than a hundred new versions appear on YouTube. He was voted the Number 1 Internet Icon by 40 Greatest Internet Superstars on VH1.

My comments to Pajanamation Concept 2.0

2007-08-16T20:34:00.000+02:00

Hey, way to go for Pajamanation!!! This is Ulises from Mexico

I completely agree with this premises:
Pajamanation should be Free
Pajamanation should be Miscellaneous
Pajamanation needs to have a higher purpose
Pajamanation should not focus on profiles
Pajamanation layout was stiffy (inflexible)

I think mixing the power of the Toffle's "prosumer" with the higher purpose of developing entrepreneurs we can do that the people using PJN will virally extend the use of it and will be willing to retribute in money the service they are getting.

The model of suscriptions is very hard to virally grow, perhaps a model in which the user pay for results. In our CPA, CPC, network the growing has been astonishing cause we are helping the people to make sales, and they are willing to invest without a top if they get real buyers for a ROI logic price.

The question is how to charge in a micropayment form, how do we get to all that people that is not willing to give his credit card or doesn't have one in the many countries we have? How do we find an easy way to collect money from the millions of users we are going to have?

perhaps collecting money from the providers of solutions allied with us will be easier, cause eventhough marketing budgets are growing worldwide we can't rely 100% on them.

Greeting to all!

The Cambrian Explosion (Day Four)

2007-08-16T14:52:00.001+02:00

Day 4: The Cambrian Explosion

The Cambrian is a major division of the geologic timescale that happened about a million years ago. During this time, roughly fifty separate major groups of organisms or "phyla" emerged suddenly, in most cases without evident precursors. Fish with legs, lizards with one wing, organisms who feed through their arse. This time of hypercreation where survival of the fittest was in full range is called the Cambrian explosion.

Nowadays, we live through that Cambrian explosion again in cyberspace, we call it Mashups. My RSS reader is daily filled with 100+ articles about new ventures: some interesting, some outdated before they begin, some have spend a lot of time reinventing something that exists already, some are just lost efforts looking for the bigger fool to get their money back. My average of interesting items per day is 3, but lately this has gone up to 8%. A whopping 5% increase in the holidays!!

Let me tell you what I found interesting today for Pajamanation homeworkers: www.asksunday.com (a personal assistant but only for the States, this can be replicated by our team of 60 countries); the new wikiscanner (to know who keeps on deleting our stuff about PajamaNation on wikipedia ☺; www.pikipimp.com (to pimp photographs); www.webresizer.com(to adapt our pictures on the web before we send them to a social network); www.peopletrusted.com (these guys are specializing on trust, which we might need) and www.emurse.com (a resume maker). For my own pleasure I also downloaded http://www.ted.nu (TV series downloader) and www.vconvert.net (easy converter of youtube to any format).

I promised you today to tell you how we are going to make money by being totally FREE. Suppose we reach millions of free visitors, (that is the idea), in that case, we are going to make money by dealmaking. We are going to select the best services in the world for our visitors to improve the quality of their life and to professionalize their home services. We will partner up with these new services and slipstream them in our package for free as tryvertising. They will try it out and when they like it, they will buy it and we will get a commission (CPA). At this moment we are finalizing contracts with five of these partners: www.lulu.com, www.bitwine.com, www.worldlawdirect.com, www.globalpaynet.com and www.spongecell.com. In our contracts it is stated that we want cross-fertilization of our contacts, so that we get new streams of visitors to our site and vice versa. I invite Yosi to write a blog about this, since he is our dealmaker.

But how on earth are we going to get millions of visitors in the first place? That is the subject of tomorrow's blog.

I would like to thank Andy for his great invited blog. And as in a mysterious web of correspondences, Chanterria send me the following link today (how to make money while blogging) http://erevenueselect.com/freestepstepprofitablebloggingcourse

So, tomorrow, the big answer. Stay tuned.

Joining the conversation

2007-08-15T22:52:00.000+02:00

Thanks for the invitation to guest write on your blog Walter. Isn't it great that Pajamanation now has a real blogging CEO! In time this will build an enormous amount of good will because the community of pajamaworkers and microjobs posters will be able to see the real human thinking behind the struggle to grow our global network, and not just some faceless machine.

You probably know me, Andy Roberts from the UK. So I'm going to be working with country managers to help spread the blogging habit, and linking in the local country sites to the new microjobs exchange 2. We're going to work together to find a way that can suit everyone, but not necessarily exactly the same one. To those that have registered with blogger in order to accept Walter's invitation here, I would urge you to experiment with creating a blog of your own right away. A personal blog, for the story about yourself. You already have the account setup - take it for a test drive, create, write in your own language, invite readers. That's how we'll learn. See if you can figure out how to receive all the blog feeds in a reader such as bloglines or google reader. But don't worry, I'll be organising a course about all this next month so we can really push forward as a growing network.

I've been working with blogs, wikis, screencasts etc for a few years and I write about PajamaNation mainly on DARnet. I've been experimenting with enhancements to WordPress recently and I'm very confident that we'll be able to get the simplicity and flexibility we are going to need from this popular and mature open source platform. If you'd like to be one of the early adopters then just let me know. But building the PajamaNation is not really a technical task, it's a social one. I'd like to get the idea across that we are not so much involved in the old attitude of publishing content here, but taking part in a conversation. A public conversation involving managers, customers, CEO, the general public and bloggers on the internet. We're going to need to learn how to listen and learn as much as how to write and respond. And it's going to be fun!

Day 3: Free-dom

2007-08-15T21:20:00.001+02:00

Day 3: Free-dom

Today two more members joined the party, found their way to Facebook Pajamanation Group and thanks to Andy and Ricardo we have flash-player enabled videos embedded. The Sony video is pretty funny for homeworkers by the way ☺

Some of you have emailed me and I will respond in this blog, but it is better to leave comments on the blog itself, that is what it is there for so that everyone can see what is being discussed.

You asked me what I meant by "Pajamanation must be free". You are right; I needed to be clearer on this. I mean no subscription fee, nothing, zero, nada, not now and not ever. I have thought about this a long time. What is the universal currency for the world which is still divided in old political regions as first, second, third and fourth world? I have tried the Big Mac index ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index) , but it was no good. There is only one price that is fair for the world at large and that is zero $. Zero$ is the same in Nicaragua as in Denmark as in Congo. So that is what we should charge to become a member of this network.

But this is not all. I also frown on transaction fees. Most of the freelance sites charge something like 15% fees if a job is taken and the freelancer has to pay this (elance.com, rentacoder.com, guru.com, trabajofreelance.com, freelance.com). We will not do this. We will be free all the way. No subscriptions, no transaction fees, no boundaries, no limits to how many jobs you can post, no credits, nothing. This is perhaps hard to digest, but think of the opportunity. Think of a service all over the world that make this happen. How will this change the world? How will change the economy?

I know what you are thinking now: but how are we going to make money? That is for tomorrow, suffice to say, that if we succeed, the world will beat a path to our door and we will be swamped by people who offer us money. How about that for a nocturnal thought?

Day 2: WayBack Machines

2007-08-14T17:59:00.001+02:00

The Internet Archive was set up by Brewster Kahle (the internet entrepreneur behind Alexa, sold to Amazon). The term "Wayback Machine" has been enthusiastically adopted by popular culture as mechanism to suggest transporting one's thoughts back to a historical time and place. There is a reason why I mention Brewster Kahle (in day 5 I will talk more about him) and the Wayback machine, bear with me.

Let's go back in time in our own wayback machine (our brain). Let' go back where we started from when we launched in January 2007 (actually 27 December 2006).
Pajamanation was a web 1.0 system where people had to sign in and put jobs on the network. We were going to sell subscriptions to our portal and get money partly from banner advertising. Our engine was based on a taxonomy we built ourselves around microjobs to give people an idea of what microjobs were. These microjobs would be awarded via auctions in a free-market model and every country manager would have his/her own site in native language programmed in Joomla. We thought the assets of our company would be the profiles which we gathered and which we would convert to paying members.

This is 8 months ago and I gradually changed this belief system because I am convinced that it is wrong. Not because I am capricious (which I certainly am).

• Pajamanation should be Free, everything is free in the Gift Economy (subscriptions and banners are web 1.0). We need to have a product we are proud of and we need millions of people that come to that product and enjoy a better life because of it. For this reason it has to be free. How we are going to make money is the subject of the next blog. And I assure you once you have millions of visitors, making money is not so much of a problem.

• Pajamanation should be Miscellaneous: no more categories, we will sort on the way out with datamining analysis and not on the way in (that again is web 1.0). As Weinberger said in his new book (Everything is miscellaneous): Information just does not want to be free, it wants to be miscellaneous. Instead of everything having its place, it is better if things can get assigned multiple places simultaneously. In other words, everything has its places. Computers store information in different ways than it is presented to us : everything must be metadata.

• Pajamanation needs to have a higher purpose. I have called it the Nash-equilibrium: in short it means, no more auctions. Auctions are crapitalism. People do not like auctions, let's top copying Ebay, skills are not flower pots. That is why Yosi, Chris and I have slowly repositioned our brand as Entrepreneurship 2.0. I feel very good about this. Like so many people, I love to help others and entertain (perhaps) the illusion that what I do matters. See youtube http://youtube.com/watch?v=j05EpSQzNy8 (English) or http://youtube.com/watch?v=XKV4yqB_Ep4 (Spanish)

• Pajamanation should not focus on profiles. Every one else does that, Facebook, Plaxo, Linkedin, etc.. This is the side of web 2.0 that specializes in relationships. We should be the other side, that specializes in transactions (job engine). Then we can work with all social networks and offer them something that they hunger for: transactions. All these people connected to each other needs something to do.

• Pajamanation is too inflexible. We need simpler country sites that encourage creativeness in the country manager and not confront him with a learning curve that discourages him/her. We need a community-building champion (and I am sure he will object to me using this metaphor), and I have found Andy Roberts (Pajamanation manger of UK) ready to take that task upon his shoulders. Let everyone decide on this process and come up with the ideal country site, simple and adaptable without learning curve. I will ask Andy to write the next blog about this.

Yesterday I tried out two new applications: www.Spock.com and http://Me.dium.com After initial fascination, I was so annoyed that I threw them off my system, they are a nuisance. At first they seemed fantastic because they are interested in all your identities on the web, but then Spock gets confused and you find yourself in an existential phase (which identity am I). Me.dium is even worse, it piggybacks on your browsers and projects you in a universe with kindred spirits which you do not want to meet.

Chris showed me something which is a lot better: frictionless. Pajamanation is going to be an OpenID-enabled sites, web users do not need to remember traditional authentication tokens such as username and password. Instead, they only need to be previously registered on a website with an OpenID "identity provider", sometimes called an i-broker. Since OpenID is decentralized, any website can employ OpenID software as a way for users to sign in; OpenID solves the problem without relying on any centralized website to confirm digital identity. OpenID is increasingly gaining adoption among large sites, with organizations like AOL acting as a provider. In addition, integrated OpenID support has been made a high priority in Firefox and Microsoft is working on implementing OpenID 2.0 in Windows Vista.

We will set up our own OpenID server site and you will all be able to try it out soon. Talk to you tomorrow.

Walter De Brouwer

Invitation to the party

2007-08-13T16:04:00.000+02:00

I think we have been exceptionally good at thinking ahead in our business and changing strategies when it made sense. We have also been good at getting a team of avid country managers all over the world. But I have not been able to keep any deadline in development, in fact, my development team was consistent only in the breach of deadlines. I regret that, but the web is a fast-moving medium and sometimes it was faster than we were.

But this is not a time to whine but to rejoice. We will all have a product we can be proud of because we are going to finish this together. At this very moment Chris is doing the final programming and tries to get all the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent system online. When this is done, our collective innovation starts: we have to tackle the user interface, debug the system, do the design and make the country sites around it. All of this, I want to make a collaborative effort.

At the end of each blog I want to give you something to do. Step by step, it will only take 3 minutes. Here is the first task: make a party on Facebook. I invite everyone to go to these coordinates: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2411675966&pwstdfy=4257079ecfd4daee6218901e2f68d125
Become a member of the Pajamanation team on FACEBOOK, add your pictures, your videos, your quotes, your questions, your music and what have you. Have fun and see you on the other sight of my night. La Vida es un carnaval

Walter De Brouwer