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Posts from the ‘Business Excellence’ Category

Jul 15

apple-iphone-3g
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iPhone 3G Launch — Frustrations of a loyal Apple customer

apple-iphone-3gWhere to begin? Do I begin with the 4 hours waiting in lines at two Apple stores, the lack of pre-sale information from Apple, the friendly and well meaning, but essentially non-helpful Apple store employees, the unfriendly, unhelpful and annoying AT&T retail employees, the constantly changing information about iPhone 3G inventories, the useless Apple retail website?

I can’t think of many ways Apple and AT&T could have bungled the iPhone 3G launch more than they did. And in doing so, they are alienating the very loyal customers they need to be successful. I am certainly not alone, the WSJ blogged about the launch calling it “chaos”.  I couldn’t agree more. Let me explain… Read more

Jul 8

CafePress acquires ImageKind

Congratulations to ImageKind and to Kelly Smith of Curious Office on this announcement today!

Imagekind, an online art and poster site that also offers customized framing services, has agreed to be sold to CafePress for $15 million to $20 million in cash and stock, according to a person familiar with the deal.

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The Seattle startup had raised $2.6 million from Curious Office Partners, German book publisher Holtzbrinck, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Crosslink Capital and angel investors.

The company is led by Kevin Saliba, a former Expedia executive. It was originally incubated by Curious Office Partners, a Seattle angel investment firm founded by Adrian Hanauer and Kelly Smith.

May 2

Are gadgets killing the internet?

From The Guardian online:

Jonathan Zittrain, the amiable but intimidatingly brainy 38-year-old professor of “cyberlaw” at both Oxford and Harvard universities, thinks we shouldn’t forget the Hush-A-Phone story: it shows that unimaginable future innovations depend on our present-day technologies being “generative”, or open to being fiddled with. (A personal computer is generative: it can be programmed to do things the manufacturer could never have predicted. A coffee-maker is not.)

But things are looking grim, Zittrain argues in his new book, The Future Of The internet And How To Stop It. While we rightly fret about censorship of the web, a cause with which Zittrain has been closely involved, we’re missing another serious problem, beneath our noses. To put it briefly: those gadgets you love so much — your iPod, your iPhone, your BlackBerry, your PlayStation, your Sky+ box — may be killing the internet.

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Apr 29

Gin, Television and Social Surplus

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has posted on what he calls the “social surplus” or the time we gain by participating in the culture versus just sitting back and watching it pass by pursuing activities like watching TV.

Clay specifically cites TV, and singles outs sitcoms, as a sort of glue holding society together as we transitioned from the Industrial Revolution to post WWII society with higher GDP per capita, better life expectancy and more free time. Now imagine if all that time spent watching TV could be put to use and benefit of society–the social surplus. Read more

Apr 6

Joost Disappoints as Next YouTube

Internet TV startup Joost, backed by CBS, was supposed to be as big as YouTube. Instead, it’s in danger of being squeezed out as the networks scramble for a billion-dollar payday.

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Mar 26

2015 Laptop

Hello, gorgeous! Meet the laptop you’ll use in 2015

2015 LaptopCheckout this March 2008 Computerworld article (online) describing the laptops we’ll all be using in 2015.  I love these futurism articles. Does anyone go back and see how close to reality they were?  I’ll set my alarm clock and watch and come back to this article to see just how much they got right!  Only 7 more years to go!

A lot has changed in the 20 years since the first laptop computers appeared, including gigahertz processors, color screens, optical drives and wireless data. However, one thing that has stubbornly stayed the same is the conventional clamshell format with its hinged display lid that opens to reveal a mechanical keyboard.

That’s about to change. The rules of notebook design and the components that go inside are being rewritten to make the road a better place to work and play.

The CPU’s front-side bus will likely disappear by 2015. The bus acts like a traffic cop, sending data to the different parts of the system at a slower speed than the computational core. In its place will be an integrated controller that makes this distribution of data much more efficient by operating faster.

Currently, adding 64GB of solid state capacity to a notebook’s hard drive runs an extra $1,000. By 2015, the typical mainstream notebook could be outfitted with a 2TB hard disk drive, which should be plenty of room for even the biggest data hog, the experts speculated. For smaller and lighter machines, look to having something like 250GB of flash memory at your disposal, but it will likely come at a small premium.

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Mar 26

DRM, Digital Content, and the Consumer Experience: Lessons Learned From The Music Industry

DRM, Digital Content, and the Consumer Experience: Lessons Learned From The Music Industry

Mar 5

12 Learnings From My First Turn As Startup CEO

Jason Goldberg, founder and former CEO of Jobster (now vice-chairman) has put together one of the best lists of learnings I have ever seen on leading a startup. It is well organized, thoughtful, and clearly is borne out of experience–the kind you get by making mistakes, learning and moving on.

Here are a few of my favorites:

  • The CEO’s job is to create value.
  • Technology companies are all about the product. Getting the product right is critical before aggressively going to market.
  • the rapid iteration model (ship early, learn from usage, adjust) works well for consumer services but works not as well for B2B services. Consumers will let you learn with them over time. Paying business customers, however, have less patience for your learning on their dime.
  • You must get close to your users and customers and live their personas.
  • Hire people who are passionate about the specific problems you are trying to solve.
  • The value of your company is directly related to your capital efficiency. Spend every dollar like it is equity. Preserve cash! Preserve cash! Preserve cash!
  • Have fun.

You can read the full post here.

Mar 5

The trouble with Steve Jobs

A friend of mine pointed me to an interesting article about the personality traits/flaws of Steve Jobs and the impact, both real and imagined on the stockholders of Apple (for purposes of disclosure, I am a stockholder). The article is worth reading and raises several issues germane to the issue of disclosure to shareholders. The core issue is summarized in the prologue:

Jobs likes to make his own rules, whether the topic is computers, stock options, or even pancreatic cancer. The same traits that make him a great CEO drive him to put his company, and his investors, at risk.

My reaction is typical of these pieces. The author, Peter Elkind, is a typical investigative journalist who has never sat behind a desk as an executive of a publicly traded company and endured the kind scrutiny he forces on others. He of course, has the advantage of hindsight to assist him as he passes judgment on decisions made by executives with less than perfect information.

It will be interesting to see if Jobs in another case of a celebrity (in this case a celebrity executive) built up by the media only to be torn down. I guess this would be the second time for Jobs.

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Mar 3

Belgacom Reports 2007

Belgacom reported a solid business performance for 2007. As many of you know, Belgacom was the first Tier 1 operators to deploy the Myrio IPTV platform. Based on the lasted subscriber numbers below, I believe this represents about 20% of the total addressable market for BelgacomTV. Not a bad penetration rate after less than 2 years. Congratulations to the excellent team at BelgacomTV and kudos to the Myrio/Nokia Siemens Networks team.

Here are some key numbers:

  • Belgacom proves to be a strong iDTV market player with very solid results for Belgacom TV, adding in total 165,654 new customers in 2007.
  • Belgacom proves to be a strong iDTV market player with very solid results for Belgacom TV, adding in total 165,654 new customers in 2007. This brought the total TV customer base to 305,319 at the end of December 2007, with an ARPU of EUR 16.1
  • Since the launch in April 2007, about 153,000 packs combining Internet with TV and/or mobile services were sold by Belgacom

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