Isegoria

While discussing how technology will change education, Cringely makes a side-comment about Reputation vs. Certification:

I’ve written about this for years and nobody ever paid attention, but ISO certification is what destroyed the U.S. manufacturing economy. With ISO 9000 there was suddenly a way to claim with some justification that a factory in Malaysia was precisely comparable to an IBM plant on the Hudson. Prior to then it was all based on reputation, not statistics. And now that IBM plant is gone.

It’s the Indian IT firms that find it worth the time and effort to get certified as “level 5″ software shops.

The Flip Ultra Camcorder Brings Zen to the Shoot — which, in classic disruptive innovation style, has led it to capture 13 percent of the camcorder market:

It’s the Flip: a tiny, stripped-down video recorder the size of a digital camera (but you hold it vertically). And in the year since its invention, it has taken 13 percent of the camcorder market, according to its maker, Pure Digital. The latest model, called the Flip Ultra, had its debut six months ago with slightly improved video quality, greater capacity, a tripod mount and better looks (available in white, black, orange, pink and green). It’s been the best-selling camcorder on Amazon.com since the day of its debut.

Now, understanding the appeal of this machine will require you not just to open your mind, but to practically empty it. Because on paper, the Flip looks like a cheesy toy that no self-respecting geek would fool with, let alone a technology columnist.

The screen is tiny (1.5 inches) and doesn’t swing out for self-portraits. You can’t snap still photos. There are no tapes or discs, so you must offload the videos to a computer when the memory is full (30 or 60 minutes of footage, depending on whether you buy the $150 or $180 model). There are no menus, no settings, no video light, no optical viewfinder, no special effects, no headphone jack, no high definition, no lens cap, no memory card. And there’s no optical zoom — only a 2X digital zoom that blows up and degrades the picture. Ouch.

Instead, the Flip has been reduced to the purest essence of video capture. You turn it on, and it’s ready to start filming in two seconds. You press the red button once to record (press hard — it’s a little balky) and once to stop. You press Play to review the video, and the Trash button to delete a clip.

There it is: the entire user’s manual.

GM says, We’ll Lose Our Shirts on the Volt, But That’s OK:

The Chevrolet Volt might just prove to be the game-changing car its supporters say it is, but General Motors expects to lose money on the car “for years,” said Vice Chairman Bob Lutz.

Maximum Bob‘s frank admission isn’t terribly surprising given the resources GM is pouring into the Volt and the expense of the technology behind the range-extended EV, but you’ve got to admire his honesty.

“We won’t make a dime on this car for years, and the board is OK with that,” he told a group of Volt enthusiasts at the New York International Auto Show, according to the Detroit News.

Paul Kedrosky goes on a “VC Mini-Rant” about The Trouble with Commercialization Funds — that is, funds to commercialize university technologies:

Granted, I see the superficial attraction:

1. There is lots of technology in universities.
2. We all love the cheery stories about university-based technologies that made it big, i.e., Google
3. Universities do a crummy job of turning technology into commercial companies.
4. It doesn’t seemingly require a large fund, so you could get by with a seed-ish fund, which is easier to raise from friends and acquaintances and individuals.

The trouble is, it’s a sucker trap. Here’s why:

1. University technologies are more nascent than naive investors think, so there is immense scientific risk.
2. Technology is 5% of the story. Managers are 95%. And most sane managers won’t touch university startups with a pole-vaulting pole. Further, most qualified candidates don’t live anywhere near East Wherever University, Iowa, let alone in Peru, etc.
3. Far more money is typically required than uninformed investors think, making a seed fund inappropriately-sized.
4. There is a lot more technology available to be commercialized in any given area than you think, and most of it sucks.

The Economist expects online social networks to end up everywhere and yet nowhere:

So it is entirely conceivable that social networking, like web-mail, will never make oodles of money. That, however, in no way detracts from its enormous utility. Social networking has made explicit the connections between people, so that a thriving ecosystem of small programs can exploit this “social graph” to enable friends to interact via games, greetings, video clips and so on.

But should users really have to visit a specific website to do this sort of thing? “We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy. Future social networks, she thinks, “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.” No more logging on to Facebook just to see the “news feed” of updates from your friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic address book can automatically get them.

The problem with today’s social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. The big networks have decided to be “open” toward independent programmers, to encourage them to write fun new software for them. But they are reluctant to become equally open towards their users, because the networks’ lofty valuations depend on maximising their page views—so they maintain a tight grip on their users’ information, to ensure that they keep coming back. As a result, avid internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging sites, and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other. They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a drag.

Historically, online media tend to start this way. The early services, such as CompuServe, Prodigy or AOL, began as “walled gardens” before they opened up to become websites. The early e-mail services could send messages only within their own walls (rather as Facebook’s messaging does today). Instant-messaging, too, started closed, but is gradually opening up. In social networking, this evolution is just beginning. Parts of the industry are collaborating in a “data portability workgroup” to let people move their friend lists and other information around the web. Others are pushing OpenID, a plan to create a single, federated sign-on system that people can use across many sites.

Apple sales soar to capture 14% of US PC retail sales — unit sales, that is:

Mac sales have now soared to account for 14% unit share and 25% dollar share of all US-based PC retail sales, that’s according to market research firm NPD.

Those numbers are up from 9% and 16% last year.

Fast Company finally looks at The Curious Genius of Twitter — which was just a side project:

It’s happened a couple of times where side projects have become the interrupting thing. Blogger and Twitter were both side projects. In both cases, they eventually became more compelling than the main thing we were working on. But because they were side projects in a company that was ostensibly doing something else, they didn’t need to be questioned a lot at first — other than, “Why aren’t we focusing on the main thing?” They didn’t need to be justified as whole businesses in themselves. A lot of ideas die when they’re questioned too much in their early stages.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams created Blogger, which was acquired by Google, where he then worked for over a year:

I’m just much more of a startup guy, and Google was pretty big by the time I left. Maybe I could have started something new there, but there wasn’t a lot of reason to — I could start something new elsewhere. Google has a lot of resources but to get those resources you also have to have skills that aren’t necessarily my skills.

You might call Michael Bissonette’s new company, AeroGrow, an example of seed capitalism:

Originally developed by NASA, aeroponics accelerates the speed at which plants grow by drizzling nutrients onto their roots, which dangle in the air instead of being planted in soil.

Commercial aeroponics systems have long been available, but they were big, clunky and expensive (at around $900 each)—not consumer friendly. That was because they were bought mostly by the geeky criminals of the crop-production world: people who grow marijuana at home.

They cared neither about the look of the product nor about its effectiveness at growing anything other than cannabis. But with the demand for fresh, organic produce booming, Mr Bissonette saw a potentially huge market for an aeroponics system that looked good, was easy to use, and worked with the kind of crops (tomatoes, strawberries, legal herbs) that home kitchens need.

Sean Ammirati shares some Lessons Learned at 37 Signals from Jason Fried’s SXSW presentation:

1. Ignore The Great Unknown
   Optimize for today.
2. Watch Out for Red Flags
   Be careful with the words need, can’t, easy, only, and fast.
3. Be Successful and Make Money by Helping Other People be Successful and Make Money
   Spot chain reactions and be the catalyst.
4. Target Nonconsumers and Nonconsumption
   Jason borrowed this concept from Clayton Christensen’s Innovators Dilemma and Innovators Solution.
5. Question Your Work Regularly
   Why are we doing this?
6. Read your Product
   People pay too much attention to pixels and not enough to words.
7. Err on the Side of Simple
   Start with the easy way.
8. Invest in What Doesn’t Change
   Principles can last.
9. Follow the Chefs
   You become famous and successful by giving knowledge away.
10. Interruption is the Enemy of Productivity
    Favor passive communication like email over things that are instantaneous but interrupt your workflow.
11. Road Maps Send You in the Wrong Direction
    Road Maps lock you into the past.
12. Be Clear in Crisis
    People love you even more if you are open, honest, public and responsive during a crisis.
13. Make Tiny Decisions
    When you make tiny decisions, you can’t make big mistakes.
14. Make it Matter
    Everything you do should matter.

David of 37signals says, Optimize for now!

One of the easiest ways to shoot down good ideas, interesting policies, or worthwhile experiments is by injecting the assumption that whatever you’re doing needs to last forever and ever. Which means that the concept has to scale from 5 people to 5,000 or from 100,000 users to 100 million. That’s a terrible way to get from those 5 people to 5,000 or reach those 100 million users.

To reach the top, you have to be willing to use all the tricks that makes sense at the earlier stages. That’s your advantage over the guys who are already sitting up there. So you’re not Google and don’t do a billion dollars in profit every quarter. But I bet you that you’re way more capable of quick, sweeping changes. When you have 100 million users on your email platform, you can’t do the same quick iterations that constantly push upgrades out. When you just have your first few hundred or thousand, you can.

So stop worrying too much about whether giving everyone in your company a credit card at 10 people is going to work when you’re a hundred times bigger. If it doesn’t, you change, come up with something that does work for that size.

The same with your infrastructure. We started on a single server for everything when Basecamp was first launched. There was no point in growing a huge farm of machines if the thing was going to flop anyway. Today we have many more machines and redundancies and surveillance and more because we’re at a different level.

The best way to get to the point of needing more is by optimizing for today. Use the strengths of your current situation instead of being so eager to adopt the hassles of tomorrow.