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January 31, 2006

Banking on Open Source in Europe

A piece I wrote about last week's "Open Source meets Business" conference is up over on the Open Resource blog at Infoworld.

Posted by Matthew at 08:13 PM | Comments (0)

Internet Explorer 7 Beta Public Preview

IE 7 is revealed to the public.

Posted by Matthew at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)

January 30, 2006

HP iPAQ 6500 ROM Update not for everyone

I downloaded the ROM Update 1.12 for my iPAQ 6515 only to discover that you can't install the US version on a German iPAQ. There doesn't seem to be a German version of the update available - yet.

Posted by Matthew at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2006

Open Source sausage meet

I arrived back home with a mixed bag of impressions from the "Open Source Meets Business" conference that took place in the German sausage town of Nürnberg. In all, I found the speakers sending some mixed messages as to how they view their use of and their role in Open Source. Here some quotes (translated from my written notes):

And did you know, that each day, around 8 million of the famous Nürnberg sausages are produced in and around the city? You do now.

Posted by Matthew at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2006

Business meets Open Source - some for the first time

I decided to go for the 2 hr WiFi for 9€ in the hotel, so now I at least can catch up on my email and blog some initial impressions from the conference.

About 400 (mainly male) attendees dressed in suits attending an Open Source conference is kind of strange - but you get used to it. This really is more of a conference where business types are finding out about Open Source from other business types. The sessions are almost completely held by companies who are using Open Source (mostly Linux or LAMP) in some way and who are sharing their views and opinions on the subject.

While in general, most companies are now favorable to Open Source, they are still not quite "there". In particular I get the distinct feeling that while many companies profit from using Open Source in their IT infrastructures, they are not (yet?) prepared to really become full members of the underlying communities. A couple of quotes from speakers showed that they expect the community (i.e not themselves) to adapt Open Source for enterprise scenarios. They were quick to add that "of course" they provide bug-fixes to the community but when it comes to extending or adapting the software for their needs, they expect the community to do that for them. Audience members were quick to point out that everyone is part of that community. However, Open Source fans in large corporations, such as banks, are still finding it difficult to get management to agree to a deeper participation it seems. Hopefully that will change soon.

In all, it is a very formal affair, and I'm already looking forward to OSBC, when I can hopefully leave my suit on this side of the Atlantic.

Posted by Matthew at 11:37 PM | Comments (1)

January 24, 2006

Pixar goes Disney

Disney takes over Pixar for a reported $7.4 billion in stock. Steve Jobs gets a seat on Disney's board and becomes their biggest shareholder.

CNBC is asking what this means for Apple - and that should be interesting to watch over the next few months.

Added: Steve Jobs' commencement address at Stanford is available as a video.

Posted by Matthew at 10:52 PM | Comments (0)

Light blogging ahead

Tomorrow I head down to Nürnberg for the "Open Source meets business" conference. Due to the high cost of the Wifi there, I guess blogging will be light to non-existant until Friday. Perhaps I'll be able to find a cheaper way to get online somewhere.

It will be interesting to compare this conference to the next one I'm heading for in February. Although both have the same subject, my guess is that they will be completely different.

Posted by Matthew at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2006

Ghost in the machine

Over the weekend I purchased a couple of CDs albums tune-bundles from the iTunes store. They represent a couple of albums I used to own (by these young men) - back when the color of music was black. Actually I get a shock each time I read the release date of these records, but there you go.

Anyway - listening to the great tunes from records such as - Ghost in the machine - brings back memories or associations that seem to be mapped to actually having owned the record (i.e. having experienced something physical). Hard to explain, but if you're my age, I hope you're still with me.

Now that music is digital - will our children still associate particular times and emotions in their life when they listen to something that was digitally downloaded and digitally stored after nearly 25 years?

Granted - the music will be the same - but isn't our ability to associate music with specific emotions also coupled with the experience of actually having a physical thing to touch and smell?

Posted by Matthew at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)

Books go Beta

Get early access to books from O'Reilly. Tim announces RoughCuts.

Posted by Matthew at 09:41 PM | Comments (1)

Open Source - the money keeps flowing

More and more money seems to be flowing into Open Source businesses these days. Today, SiliconBeat is leading with information from PE Week that SpikeSource has secured another $15 million in funding.

Posted by Matthew at 09:35 PM | Comments (0)

West Wing canceled after seven seasons

The week is off to a bad start already.

The series will end May 14 with the inauguration of the successor the fictional Josiah Bartlet as president.

Posted by Matthew at 07:27 AM | Comments (1)

January 20, 2006

Wine Country Tour

While I'm in San Francisco this time I want to take a trip up to the Wine Country. It will probably be limited to a day trip - so I can't do a Sideways. There seem to be plenty of day-tours available but I've found little feedback from people who have actually been on them (i.e. are certain tour operators better than others?). I realize that the organized tours are probably not really the best way to go - but I reckon that's the best alternative at the moment.

Any tips or pointers welcome.

Posted by Matthew at 06:00 PM | Comments (4)

We should teach kids to POKE

Sam posted this funny account of what it was like to grow up back in the days of old. Like Sam, I'm over 40, so boy do we still have tales to tell. And our kids will hear them all.

Actually, I disagree with one little statement from that post -

We had the Atari 2600 with games like “Space Invaders” and “Asteroids” and the graphics sucked ass!

No they didn't. We thought the graphics were really really cool. Especially because we had to write the games ourselves (or type them tediously out of magazines) and design the graphics by filling out pieces of squared paper and mapping that to lots and lots of POKE commands. Seeing that "little square" then move across the screen because you had written the correct lines to make it do so was just so exhilarating.

Posted by Matthew at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)

Open Source meets business - first impressions

The conference hasn't even started yet (it's next week), but already I'm getting a distinct impression of what it's going to be like. Yesterday the attendees received an email with "instructions". Here a sampling:

I'm pretty amazed that a conference like this has to charge that amount to WiFi. Heise obviously isn't interested in anyone covering the conference in blog-space. Any other bloggers going?

Posted by Matthew at 09:38 AM | Comments (2)

January 19, 2006

Flying WiFi

Martin points me to the fact that my Lufthansa flight from Munich to San Francisco on the 10th of February probably has Wifi. Should be fun.

Posted by Matthew at 03:54 PM | Comments (1)

January 18, 2006

Differentiate yourself

Dave Rosenberg writes about how SpikeSource may be changing their business model "on the fly" to a channel approach. He is also doubtful about whether that will work - because system integrators can in the end either build and distribute their own stack or get a stack from somewhere else.

Perhaps he's right in that products lead to services and not vice-versa but I think the problem lies more in "differentiation". A company that is able to combine Open Source with vertical/industry know-how is in a far better position to provide that one-stop offering of stack and services to a corporation than companies like SpikeSource or SourceLabs can. Their current stack offerings are too easy to copy. Where's the barrier to competition? Wait a few more months and there will be oodles of LAMP stacks out there.

Companies like MySQL, Alfresco, Funambol or JBoss have Open Source products with which they can differentiate themselves - both in terms of software and the corresponding services.

So what can companies like SpikeSource do to differentiate themselves? That will be key question in the coming months when it comes to their offering - not their sales model.

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Posted by Matthew at 08:38 PM | Comments (1)

Open Source meets Business

I think it's worth bringing this up again. Next week, I'll be down in Nürnberg attending the "Open Source meets Business" conference. I first heard about the conference in September and was impressed that the focus was to be on corporations talking about their experiences with Open Source.

Take a look at the sessions for next Thursday for example. It should be pretty interesting to hear some of the leading names in German financial institutions like Deutsche Bank, Noris Bank, Sparkassen-Informatik and Bayerische Hypo- und Vereinsbank in back to back presentations on what they are doing with Open Source. And that's only one track in the conference. Other companies lined up to talk are Vodafone, Bayer, Linde Gas, Audi and Volkswagen.

I just hope the whole thing lives up to its promise.

Posted by Matthew at 06:47 PM | Comments (0)

EuroOSCON 2006 - Call for Participation

O'Reilly's EuroOSCON will be opening its doors for the second time from the 18th-21st of September in Brussels, Belgium. The Call for Participation is now open.

Posted by Matthew at 01:52 PM | Comments (0)

HP wants part of the action - maybe

Maybe it's too early in the morning for me, but I've just read this article (via Dave) and I'm scratching my head wondering just exactly what HP is planning to do. The first paragraph of the article seems interesting:

Hewlett-Packard is considering selling services designed to ease customer participation in the open-source programming community, the company's new open-source boss said.

Although I sort of wonder just what exactly those "services" could be, I guess it will be explained in the next part of the article. But things get more confusing:

"Across HP, there are thousands of people who contribute to open source. We have a number of processes and tools we've developed to allow different folks in HP to interact with the open-source community that protects our intellectual property and is done in a community-friendly way," said Christine Martino, who became vice president of HP's Open Source and Linux Organization in November. "We needed to get some pretty crack procedures together. The team doing that has developed some interesting tools."

Well, our customers have been interacting with the Open Source community for nearly as long as we've been in the Open Source business (5 years). The tools they use - subversion, mailing-lists, wiki and community-gettogethers. No rocket science there.

Some education at the beginning to get them to see the value of getting involved - but apart from that. Sure, licensing issues and IP legalities have to be thought through - but normally every company is already purchasing and using software from somewhere and has already got the necessary legal stuff in place. Giving back to the community is new to most organizations - but my experience hasn't really shown that special tools and/or services are needed. Sometime we act as a proxy between corporations and the Open Source communities, but most often, they are visible themselves and active participants.

The rest of the article then basically loses me as it focusses on how Christine Martino wants to do more in the Linux and JBoss space - which sounds more like HP than the beginning of the - what seemed - promising article.

Hopefully there will be some discussions about this sort of thing at OSBC, as I'm certainly interested in hearing other angles.

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Posted by Matthew at 07:49 AM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2006

West Coast travel plans

My annual trip to the West Coast is now set. I'll be flying Paderborn / Munich / San Francisco on the 10th of February (arriving in the evening) and leaving a week later (on the 17th). I'll be at OSBC on the 14th and 15th.

So, if you're in that area and want to meet up then feel free to drop me a line and we can work something out. One thing I would really love to do is go out for Sushi. I've never tried it and I guess San Francisco is a good place to start. Any suggestions?

Posted by Matthew at 07:36 PM | Comments (1)

January 16, 2006

FrOSCon Call for Papers

On something of a conference roll at the moment. Sebastian sent me an email to say that the Call for Papers for FrOSCon has opened. Here's some background information on the conference.

The first Free and Open Source Conference "FrOSCon" takes place on 24th and 25th June 2006 in St. Augustin, near Bonn, Germany, Organized by a commited team, it aims to become a significant event for free software in the Rhineland. The conference is hosted by the faculty of computer science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in collaboration with the student body and the Linux/Unix User Group St. Augustin.

There is a business track - so I'll be submitting something.

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Posted by Matthew at 07:47 AM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2006

OSBC and the changing face of Open Source

Speaking of conferences, OSBC will be happening in a few weeks in San Francisco. Matt and the rest of the OSBC team have put together another fantastic program for this year. Attending last year was a real eye (and ear) opener for me. Although having spent several years moving Open Source into the enterprise via many projects in some really high-profile companies, I think OSBC was the first time I actually heard senior management level people speak openly about their use of Open Source. Open Source companies such as SpikeSource and Optaros came out of "hiding" at OSBC. Companies that were betting their complete business model on Open Source. I'm sure there will be more of the same at this year's event.

The conference is still unique in the fact that it manages to combine both the business perspective with the community, development and licensing aspects of Open Source without compromising on any of the individual subjects.

Something that I didn't really expect was lack of influence OSBC has had in Europe. Of course OSBC is a very US-centric conference (still no sign of an OSBC Europe anytime soon), but the subjects discussed there are certainly global in nature. And yet, Europe still seems some way behind the US when it comes to enterprise Open Source. Maybe I'm wrong on that - and it would be interesting to hear what companies like the above have to say on how their business models are perceived in European organizations.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like I'm going to make it over to San Francisco this year (I'm really going to miss going bridge-watching again). My wife thinks we have other things higher on our budget-priority list at the moment - and she's probably right.

Update: Looks like I may get to go after all. Stay tuned.

Posted by Matthew at 06:05 PM | Comments (2)

LinuxTag - CfP closing this weekend

LinuxTag takes place from the 3rd to 6th of May in Wiesbaden, Germany. The Call for Papers for the "Free" (ahem) and "Practical Linux" tracks closes this weekend. There is also a parallel congress for the "Business and Public Sector" but you don't seem to be able to "just" submit a session for that as the details read that "sessions are mainly invitation-only". What does "mainly" mean and how do I get invited to do a session like this one?

Posted by Matthew at 05:21 PM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2006

Ready for JSR286

Open Source and standards are a natural fit. We have been spending a lot of time over the past years establishing the Cocoon portal as a standard (JSR 168, WSRP) compliant portal engine. Of course, Carsten has been doing most of the work and has made a bit of a name for himself in this area.

Recently (and he is too modest to blog this himself), Carsten was asked if he wanted to participate in the expert group of the upcoming Portlet Specification 2.0 (JSR 286). We joined the JCP last year and as such are really pleased that Carsten will soon be helping to drive the standardization in the portal space!

Hopefully this will increase the visibility for the Cocoon portal even more and we can show just how powerful it is.

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Posted by Matthew at 06:08 PM | Comments (0)

Microsoft Flight Simulator X on XBox 360?

I've always been a fan of flight simulators and Microsoft's Flight Simulator was often a "must have" back in the days... So, now we have a shiny new XBox 360. I'm wondering if Microsoft will be bringing the new Flight Simulator X (check out the visuals) out for that platform too. Anyone know?

Posted by Matthew at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

January 11, 2006

Lessig is Slidecasting

Lawrence Lessig has released an MP4 version of his presentation on Google's Book Search - "Is Google Book Search Fair Use". The presentation combines his slides with a synchronized talk. Extremely interesting especially when he details the consequences that go far beyond "just" books.

And I decide to call this: Slidecasting.

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Posted by Matthew at 07:45 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2006

Can we remember it?

Quote of the day.

That's the way it is now. They don't ask you if you'll do it - they just ask if you can remember it.

Jackson Browne - Solo Acoustic, Vol. 1 - Intro to "The Bird of St. Marks".

A lengthy drive to Berlin and back today gave me plenty of time to listen to this great CD. Thanks Frank.

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Posted by Matthew at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)

Apple goes Intel

Steve Jobs announces a whole bunch of stuff at MacWorld. Check out Engadget's report for details. Main news I guess are the new iMac and MacBook Pro as the first new Intel based computers. The MacBook Pro is quoted as being 4-5x faster than the "old" Powerbook G54. Especially for Gianugo.

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Posted by Matthew at 07:50 PM | Comments (1)

January 09, 2006

Media globalization - don't hold your breath

Google's announcement of providing pay-for video content soon in the Google
Video Store is another sign of the growing market for on-demand video. With
this, other offers like Apples iTunes store (maybe we'll see that renamed
tomorrow to Apples iMedia Store) the days of traditional broadcast video
seem to be numbered. After all, the personal DVR already allows us to watch what we
want to - when we want to.

The current video store offerings all suffer from the same problem at the
moment - global rights management. And no, that isn't digital rights management
either. As the press release from Google reads: "however purchasing premium
content in the Google Video Store will only be available in the US". A
German Google spokesperson is quoted in today's press with "we're working on
that."

I bet it's a fun job (not) sorting out the rights issues of providing media downloads at Google or Apple. Especially on stuff like the episodes of TV shows - I've been into that before. In the US, things are pretty clear. Once the episode has aired, then it should be pretty simple to provide the episode for purchase. But as TV series can take years to reach this side of the pond, I guess the episodes may never be made available for people outside the US (even to buy). It would prove really difficult to keep tabs on when which episode airs in each different country and then provide it so that only that country can then download it.

No, I don't see that happening anytime soon. Luckily there are other options.

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Posted by Matthew at 07:40 PM | Comments (0)

Dell and Google - in bed together

Dell are using the Google "you can personalize this" homepage to provide their own branded "portal" running on Google (via John Battelle).

Posted by Matthew at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)

Backups - Mac and XBox

I rarely do backups. However, every now and again I think I should *ahem*. Making backups should be baked into the operating system so I don't have to worry about actually having to do them. The operating system can download updates in the background - so why not just get on and do the backup for me?

Running OSX there should be some nifty application that pops up, let's me check what I want to have backed up (my purchased music on iTunes, my photos, my documents), asks me where I want the backup sent to (a disk-drive hooked up to this) and then silently gets on in the background and does the backup. Regularly.

There probably is an application that will do this and in the time I spent writing this I could probably have found it. Ah well.

Speaking of backups - does anyone backup the hard-drive of their XBox 360 or can't you? What happens if the drive crashes and you lose the purchased games?

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Posted by Matthew at 07:17 PM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2006

Xbox 360 and Apple

The Xbox 360 can play music from MP3 players that are connected via USB. However it will also play music from the iPod Shuffle - no problem. Just by sticking the Shuffle into the USB port. Which I thought was kind of neat. Now if only I could stream stuff to the XBox from my other Mac hardware...

On a side note, my wife is hooked to the Xbox Arcade games (Zuma etc.). She even made me buy the full version of Zuma as she was getting bored with the "test" levels.

Posted by Matthew at 07:58 PM | Comments (0)

January 05, 2006

Is it a bird..

..is it a plane? No, it's iWeb. Coming soon, maybe. From Apple. Expect more of the same - from now until Monday.

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Posted by Matthew at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)

An Open Source VC experience

I don't often blog something someone else has written, but this is an exception. A friend of mine has been spending the last 8 months or so trying to find VC seed funding for an Open Source related venture. He has been telling me his experiences and I got him to write it down to share, as I figure others can profit from what he's been going through. Obviously your mileage will vary and there is probably some difference in doing this in Europe compared to the US.

And no - they haven't found the funding yet.

The long and winding road

Are you prepared for how long your fund seeking will take? No, are you really really prepared? Unless you're very lucky, it is going to take you a long long time. Months, if not a year at least to find funding. If at all. You will go through the process of approaching a VC (or being approached yourself) then you will jump through the hoops of:

Sending your pitch and business plan, presenting, doing your homework (you will have homework), sizing the market, finding initial customers, building a prototype, presenting again, and again..

All this to then hear from the VC who was "really interested", that you're just not quite right for their investment strategy. And this can take 3 or more months to happen.

And then you start pushing that rock up the hill again.

So, you still want to get started...

Build the VC deck

20 slides are your friend. Certainly not more.
There are plenty of tips out there on what should be in there and exactly what you put in depends on the stage of your venture. Start out with:

1 slide summary at the beginning (we know VCs only read this far - right?)
Customer or market pain
The solution
Why you
The market
Sales and Marketing
The team
Financials
The exit strategy
Next steps

Make sure you don't have anything in there you can't really talk about. If you don't know how big the market is then leave the figures out at the moment (but see below on this). Make sure your presentation contains exact information on how to contact you (VCs still use the phone a lot - so list a number where they can reach you).

The first VC meeting

Be honest and open when talking to a VC. Try not to do any handwaving or flashy presentations. They've heard and seen enough of those. Be short and to the point. Always go to a VC meeting prepared to present (even if they don't ask you to explicitly, when they invite you). Make sure your laptop works and you have all the necessary dongles. Your laptop won't work with the beamer (believe me, it happens) - so take a copy of the presentation on a CD or flash-drive.

Even though you sent the VC your slide deck and other documents - they haven't read them. So also take hand-outs with you and be prepared to start right at the beginning.

When you don't know - say so

Choose the pragmatic honest route when pitching to VCs. If you didn't know something then that is what you should say - and it should never really be a problem. Actually, better than just saying "We don't know", formulate it as "well, we don't know that currently but if it is important then we can work to find that out for you".

Hitting the "hard stop"

VCs don't have any time for you. Which is why the initial summary slide in your deck is your key argument. VCs will come to the meeting and tell you that they have so many other companies to see that day and that your meeting has a hard stop. Meaning you should ask before pitching how long you have. In many cases you will have been told how much time you have beforehand. But remember you have to build in time for discussion (yes there will be discussion) So go back to the “Build your deck” – 20 slides is really the maximum number. If a VC has questions he will not necessarily wait for the appropriate slide in your deck to appear before asking the question – so prepare to be flexible. Answer the questions when they're asked. Try to avoid saying "I have that on slide 13 - let me show you". The VC doesn't want to see slide 13 - she wants the question answered. Now.

Ask questions

Don't be afraid to ask your VC questions. How does she think she will be able to help you moving forward? Do they really do seed-funding? (I´ll come back to that later) What is their investment experience in your target market.?

Write, rewrite and write again

Be prepared to write and rewrite your plan over and over and over again. In fact you will do this so often that you will eventually become so sick of seeing those slides. No, really sick. After every talk with a VC you will recognize which part of the plan is actually missing and you need to work on again. It helps to present to someone who hasn´t spent tireless hours poring over the slides (like you have done). Find a sparring partner who can give you feedback from an outsider´s point of view. You´ll probably often say “they just didn´t get it” – remember VCs are smart people – if they didn´t get it it´s because you didn´t manage to communicate it well enough (or to put it another way – you need to be self critical .. really self critical)

Summarize, summarize

Make sure your business plan has an executive summary at the beginning. In fact make sure all your documents have a summary at the start. On presentations, make that summary no more than one slide. In a document, make the summary no longer than a page. Make sure your summaries contain all the information needed to grok your plan. In particular: The pain, the cure, why your cure (what´s the USP - yes VCs use that term), why you, the team, the market, sales and marketing strategy, financials, next steps.

PDF is your friend

If at all possible send your documents out as PDF. Using Word as a format is not a Good Thing - if only because Word documents can contain stuff you originally thought about but then realized was crap. Or to put it another way, if you've constantly been updating your business plan then you may not want the VC to read the original version hidden in there.

It'll get emotional

You will also go through emotional loops of thinking you're either finished and ready to go or don't stand a snowball's chance in hell or something in between. There will be weeks when you will keep hitting the "reload" button on your email client - just to see if maybe some VC has sent you a reply to one of those business plan emails. Sleepless nights ahead. In fact you'll soon be jumping round the room in joy when you even get an email that says "thanks, but no".

Most times you will not get a reply at all. Deal with it.

You will need people whom you can talk to to keep you motivated. And you will need to play the same role with your business partner.

The VC network

VCs are involved in various networks. It is not uncommon for them to pass the deck or plan around and on to other VCs in their network. So don't be surprised when you hear from a VC you didn't actually send the plan to. Your targeted VC may not be interested in your particular venture at the moment but has passed the plan on and will want to get involved when things move forward and at a later stage.
The VC who receives the slides can be very inventive as to how he then reaches you to talk. Make sure your wife knows you've been sending out business plans when the VC calls at home.

Advanced tactics: Size your market, yes really

Sure, so at the start you're all hip on how big your market is. I mean how long is a piece of string right? In the first talk you have, the VC will probably skip over the market sizing slides (you made them up after all didn't you?). In fact it is probably better to leave those slides "intentionally" blank and explain that you will be doing that as a next step. And maybe even with the VCs help. If you do decide to put figures in there then make sure you know where they came from. And don´t forget the link to the sales and marketing piece “So we size the European market at €270 Million” – Fine but what´s your strategy to win a piece of that great big market ? And when you´re thinking about what funding you need to get that piece of the market make sure you look at a 18 month to 2 year time frame and not just the initial product development phase.

Final word

Once you have been through all this, never ever go back and read what you initially sent out to VCs. You will kill yourself for being so naive.

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Posted by Matthew at 02:57 PM | Comments (0)

January 04, 2006

Nearly there

Carsten is spending some time getting the Cocoon portal through the JSR 168 TCK tests. Not far to go!

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Posted by Matthew at 07:07 PM | Comments (0)

When $80 billion just isn't enough

There is currently some speculation that Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo - but has been turned down because of the low offer.

And you thought Russe!! switching back the Windows/PC world was just one of those things.....

Posted by Matthew at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)

The commoditization of cooking

Over the past couple of years we have seen TV cooks, like England's Jamie Oliver or Germany's Tim Mälzer, take good cooking into the home and make it available for people like you and me to be able to understand and reproduce. Yeah, that's glossing over the burnt moments for a second.

This new breed of cooks thrive on combining good, readily available produce (and often cheap too) with simple cooking methods to produce meals or dishes that you could also expect to find in an expensive restaurant and pay a lot of money for. The cooks are great personalities, know how to communicate and have managed to create very personal brands.

Sounds familiar?

Combining readily available (cheap/free) components, adding value that woos your target audience and producing something that is served with a touch of your personality (and isn't hidden behind an anonymous corporate brand) - sounds like a recipe for success. In any business.

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Posted by Matthew at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2006

Keeping the fires alight

Jason Fried from 37signals has posted a list of tools the company use to build their products and run the business. They obviously eat a lot of their own dog-food (as they should) but the stuff on the list is definitely worth taking a look at if you're just launching your own.

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Posted by Matthew at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

Open Source meets Business

Heise Verlag are hosting the "Open Source meets Business" conference in Nürnberg, Germany from 25th - 27th of January. I'll be going so if you're interested in meeting up then drop me an email.

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Posted by Matthew at 02:16 PM | Comments (0)

January 02, 2006

Digg - disrupting what we call news

Digg seems to be the new black when it comes to audience built news sites - for tech news anyway. The concept lends itself to other themes - such as building an audience powered site for "real" (i.e. non tech) news (check out 180n for example).

Sites like the German Focus.de now also allows readers to rate news articles (they call it "voting") and then displays the "top 20" news items on a separate page.

How long before we see audience generated main pages appear on traditional news sites - not long is my guess.

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Posted by Matthew at 11:27 PM | Comments (0)

An Open Source New Year

Matt posts an email from Marten Mickos (MySQL). Well worth a read to get into the swing of things for an Open Source 2006. I'm glad to see more companies realizing that offering just Open Source services is not going to be enough to maintain a sustainable business model. Matt has written about this before and Marten echoes the same in the email.

In fact I've been thinking more about this over the Christmas/New Year week. Open Source provides plenty of opportunity for business but finding a sustainable model is so much harder. The very nature of Open Source means you need to rethink your business model for each new customer. Some customers will only require support to get up and running, some will require ongoing support over a number of months or years and still others will be out to cherry-pick your know-how. Especially if you are a key member of the Open Source project in question. Your business model will also need to be agile to evolve/adapt to changes in the underlying Open Source projects. And you'll just hope the project you're providing support for doesn't shrivel up and die.

In 2006 look to more companies combining/packaging Open Source components into compelling vertical solutions (I hope the other "S" word goes away) by adding that special ingredient needed - either by the targeted industry or the particular customer. Combine a solution built on Open Source with the necessary services (not just support !) and you should be well set for the coming year.

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Posted by Matthew at 06:06 PM | Comments (0)

Open Source companies blogging?

I did a little bit of research today into how the "new" Open Source companies are doing blog-wise. To be honest, I'm under-impressed and would have thought that by now each of the following would at least have a well-maintained company blog. But they don't.

SourceLabs

SourceLabs doesn't seem to have a company blog (or I couldn't find it). Here are some management/employee blogs:

SpikeSource

SpikeSource has a company blog (last entry in September 2005). Here some additional employee/management ones.

Optaros

Optaros doesn't seem to have a company blog (or I couldn't find it). So you'll have to check out these instead:

Update: Alex Bosworth corrected me, he cross-posts to his company blog and the one on Swik. He also pointed out that I forgot Bruce Perens.

Posted by Matthew at 03:11 PM | Comments (2)

January 01, 2006

XBox Live - the missing API

XBox Live is accessible from your XBox (obviously) and also online (via My XBox). However only a subset of information is available via the Web interface. Wouldn't it be cool if you could also check out say ongoing PGR3 races via the Web? Say via an RSS feed.

But you know what's really missing? An API. Then I can imagine some really cool mashups resulting by combining the XBox Live API with say Google Maps. Anyone know if something like this is being planned?

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Posted by Matthew at 07:15 PM | Comments (1)

In the mirror, sadly

In the mirror

(Nicolas burnt his thumb during "fireworks time" and this was taken with our new Canon EOS 350D)

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Posted by Matthew at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

The year that is

I figured starting the new year off with this post was kind of fitting. Here are some reflections on my goals for this year.

So, hopefully, I'll succeed with a few of those points. Others are of course - for dreaming.

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Posted by Matthew at 12:52 PM | Comments (1)