Quick summary: Telephony 2.0 is about money – Web 2.0 is about users (aka fans).

Rock and Roll was about both.

Phonefromhere.com (our startup) bridges the web and telephony, so I spend time in both camps. 

Lets look at their Rock Stars:

Web 2.0 has loads of stars    
• Diggnation team  
  

  Kevin and Alex at FoWA London 08

• Mahalo’s CEO  

Telephony has few, the only one that comes to mind is Mark Spencer   
• Digium Inc  
  

  Mark Spencer, Tim Panton and Duck

Who looks more like a rock star ?  (It certainly isn’t me!)

What about money ? Telephony is a vast business 1 Trillion dollar allegedly. Telco’s monetize everything down to the second, Web 2.0’s Achilles heel is the inability to monetize anything except via Google.

So maybe neither is the new Rock and Roll.

I’m thinking it is the crossover between the two that is exciting. Not just the upmarket smartphones. In huge parts of the globe the primary access to the internet is via the mobile phone. That trend is only going to intensify. 

The innovation isn’t just coming from the mobile web either. Take a look at twittervotereport.com or fonolo.com to see neat stuff done with phones.

Just got back last night from TC50. Is it just me, or was TC50 a sham of massive proportions? Sure, they let the companies pitch for free (unlike DEMO), but at $2500 per attendee (like yours truly), you would think that they could afford chairs that are comfortable. This, dear readers, was not my biggest beef.  Here it is: If I have to listen to one more Arrington / Calcanis story of who was more drunk / stayed out late / partied harder, I might implode.

The problem is simple. There are business conferences. There are tech conferences. But there does not seem to be any for business people to actually learn about technology where it doesn’t seem like a bad rerun of Animal House. I enjoy a good time as much as the next guy, but could we all grow up a bit please?

One of the best highlights of the show was the demo and Q+A with Tonchidot. This was one of the funniest tech moments I have seen in years. This moment could not have been scripted any better. Enjoy

Entrepreneurial Insanity: Why good is the enemy of the great

Yet another interesting presentation by Jason Calacanis. It’s a follow-up to the previous blog post.

Date of presentation: May 2008, Place: CeBIT, Sidney.

-see the rest of his presentation here.

Διάβασα το εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον ποστ του Calacanis, How to save money running a startup όπου περιγράφονται απλοί τρόποι διαχείρισης των οικονομικών μας ώστε να γλυτώσουμε πολύτιμους πόρους στο ξεκίνημα (και όχι μόνο) μιας νέας επιχειρηματικής δραστηριότητας.

Ξεχώρισα τους παρακάτω

1. Μην αγοράζετε γραφεία ακριβά αλλά επενδύστε σε καλής ποιότητας καρέκλες.
2. Αγοράστε 2 μόνιτορ για κάθε θέση εργασίας ώστε να αυξηθεί η παραγωγικότητα των χρηστών.
3. Χρησιμοποιήστε το gmail για τα εμαιλ σας γλυτώνοντας το κόστος και την φασαρία των mail server
4. Μην βάζετε σε κάθε υπολογιστή Microsoft Office, αντίθετα χρησιμοποιήστε το Open Office και το Google Docs

Ενδιαφέροντα άρθρα σχετικά με την εξοικονόμηση χρημάτων μπορείτε να βρείτε εδώ

σημ: Με την ευκαιρία σας προτείνω να ρίξετε μια ματιά στο http://www.mahalo.com αυτή η νέα προσπάθεια για μια “ανθρώπινη μηχανή αναζήτησης” ίσως να σας ενδιαφέρει

A recent shit-storm of inane debate was kicked up across the internets caused by an article from Jason Calcanis, CEO of Mahalo. For anyone who doesn’t start frantically jerking off whenever they see a shiny, reflected logo or a bright, shiny BETA symbol, Mahalo is one of these fancy, web 2.0 start-up thingies that is vaguely described by its creators as a “human-powered search engine”. When I performed a search for Crunkfish on Mahalo, however, I received no results so perhaps a “far-shitter search engine than Google” would be a better description.

Regardless, this article isn’t about the pretentious, pointless and presumptuous conceit of Mahalo – it’s about work ethic.

Calcanis offered some advice for fellow start-ups about how to save money on his blog. To be fair, his pointers aren’t bad – even if they do start to resemble those penny-pinching tips sent in to weekly women’s magazines by people who wouldn’t hesitate to save on expensive face lotion by starring in their own bukkake movie – but some of what he had to say came off as pretty good-damn extreme. In short; they may be quite effective (I don’t know, I haven’t tried them), but so was Stalin’s rapid modernisation of Russia in the 1930s (and I’ve tried that – very messy).

The money-saving tip that proved the most contentious was number 11: Fire people. Although Calcanis has since toned down the language, it originally read:

“Fire people who are not workaholics… come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. don’t work at a startup if you’re not into it–go work at the post office or stabucks if you want balance in your life. For realz.”

I could join the debate by offering my thoughts on this issue and saying something antagonistic like, “if your staff isn’t motivated to put their all in for your cause, maybe you should try encouraging them more so they actually enjoy working for you, you draconian bastard”. Instead, I’m going off on a bit of a tangent with the intention of laying down the law about how much you should actually work…at work.

First off, the average salary in the UK is £22,000. This is the benchmark. If you earn 22k a year it means you start work at nine, finish at half-past five and take an hour for lunch. You are obliged to take a coffee/fag break in the morning, another one in the afternoon and shouldn’t feel guilty for spending some downtime on Facebook. Evenings and weekends are work free and, if you don’t meet that impossible deadline last thing on a Friday, it can well and truly get fucked until Monday morning. Finally, when it comes to the Christmas party, you can take advantage of the free bar, charge your taxi home to the company, and have sex with anyone who earns less than you.

Sounds fair, right?

Well, if you get paid any more or any less than this standard, you must expect to change your work ethic to adjust. Let me give some examples:

£50,000 +

You should be earning the hatred of every cleaner in your office for the number of half-drunk cups of coffee left on your desk and the sheer immovability of your ulcer-ridden body. The moments between work beginning and work ending is a half-noticed blur, largely consisting of detached arguments with the spouse and confused bouts of emotion that hit you when those strange midget creatures who call you ‘parent’ cry bitter tears after you cancel a promised trip to Legoland for the fifth time. You should hate your life but it’s ok because you don’t have time to live it. At the Christmas party, you are joined with your partner and sit with all the other execs and their partners to talk about work – pretending this is in a far more jovial way than it normally would be. After your spouse gets drunk and makes a scene/screws half the warehouse staff, you pay for a taxi home – though you do have to pop back into the office to finish off a few things and end up staying there past the New Year. Which is better than spending it at home.

c. £30,000 -

It is your duty to greet all junior members of staff with a smile as they enter the office – after you’ve already been there for half an hour. You make a point of NOT letting everyone know that you start before them and finish after them, although they MUST have noticed. Even though you are expected to start earlier and finish later than those earning less than you, there’s no real obligation to spend all that time actually doing any work. An hour-long lunch break has been subtly replaced by regular cigarette breaks, in which you discuss important work stuff with your chain-smoking, fellow 30k-ers – much to the annoyance of the tar-free suckers who are still sat at their desk angrily drafting letters to HR that they won’t have the guts to send. You’re too busy and important to take any coffee breaks on top of this, but that’s what the grunts are for – they love any excuse to get away from their desks. Expect your evenings and weekends to be intermittently interrupted by work issues. It’s a pain but, hey, that’s why you’ve picked up the coke habit. At the Christmas party, you largely avoid the bar (sticking to your own class-A pick-me-ups) and spend the night looking for someone who gets paid less than you to suck your cock (men), or for someone who gets paid more than you to suck their cock (women).

c. £22,000 - This is the standard (see main text).

c. £17,000 –

For 17k you are entitled to turn up late every Monday and duck out early on Fridays. Although you get no official extra time for cigarettes or coffee, you are expected to spend a good forty-five minutes or so (both morning and afternoon) flirting with the temps. Unless a major deadline is impending, Scrabulous takes priority over your, more menial, duties and a reasonable amount of time is alloted to allow you to forward that funny video of somebody hoovering a cat’s face to everyone you know. At the Christmas party, you rinse the free bar and smuggle out a few bottles of wine before you leave early to hit the local slut-hole and rape-box you call a club.

c. £13,000 -

If you’re earning around 13k and actually working, you’re as stupid as your salary suggests. Most likely there’s a machine that can do your job more effectively than you can and your employment is only part of an unspoken agreement between companies that they need uneducated fuckwits to earn money and buy the crap they’re producing. If you do turn up on Monday morning, you should do so still recovering from the hangover from Saturday night and, at the end of the week, if you’re not doing fuck-all except complaining that your office should have a ‘dress-down’ Friday, you’re dressing-down and doing fuck-all anyway. The other days of the week are a mixture of whining that you’ve got too much to do, bitching about what’s expected of you, and whining like a bitch because your current responsibilities do not rigidly follow what has been laid out in your job description that you spent the whole of Tuesday meticulously reviewing. Whenever you come back late and drunk from a lunch at the pub, the afternoon is then wasted writing a nasty response to your line manager’s “friendly telling-off” about such transgressions in which you point out that you’ve wasted an afternoon writing this email. At the Christmas party, you turn up late with all your mates in tow – each packing a hip flask full of White Lightning – and proceed to decimate the free bar, call your MD a cunt, and pass out on the street knowing that someone else will make sure you get home alive. Courtesy of the company, of course.

This is the way things should be. How does that stack up with your work? Name and shame those bastards earning more than you but not working as hard as you in the comments section below.

Jason Calcanis has an excellent post noting that Facebook madness has become so absurd people are now seriously suggesting that a company with 100 million in revenues could be worth 100 billion.   

Ha – only a year ago knowlegeable people were scoffing at the notion that Facebook  is even worth a billion dollars.   Although Facebook has grown a lot in this past year and has distinguished itself as a brilliant Web 2.0 juggernaut powerhouse in social media, the hype is almost nauseating.  

Unless, of course, you own a piece of the action….

Bubble investors better pack a a golden parachute, because it seems with all these low revenue sky-high valued companies it could all get very ugly very fast. 

Jason Calcanis, conocido por tener la potra de vender su Weblogs, Inc por una pasta, y por poco mas, nos salta con una estupidez soberana en forma de definición de lo que es Web 3.0.

Contra todo pronóstico, la definición se ajusta a la perfección (sorpresa!) a lo que él quiere hacer con mahalo.com, un servicio de búsqueda en internet manejado por personas, por oposición a Google, por ejemplo, que está manejado por máquinas y algoritmos de búsqueda.

Dejando a parte la tonteria de pretender que eso es Web 3.0, cuando aún estamos intentando entender que es lo que puede suponer la tecnología alrededor de la Web 2.0 para las empresas, por ejemplo, no perdamos de vista el objetivo final del pollo éste, que no es otro que hacer ruido con la novedad a ver si alguien le compra mahalo.com antes de que se demuestre que no puede funcionar como negocio a gran escala.

Y es que ése es el problema eterno en éstas cosas, es también el secreto del éxito de Google (no tan secreto, claro), y el motivo de la caida de Yahoo! como índice: la escalabilidad de un entorno se ve severamente impactada si depende, al 100% como Mahalo, de gente.

Y si uno fuese malo de verdad, probablemente asociaría esta tonteria de Jason a la caida en las páginas vistas de mahalo.com, caída que probablemenete se compense de sobra con el ruido que ha hecho con ésto:

De paso, y para poner en perspectiva esto de la Web 2.0 y 3.0, conviene recordar unas cosas escritas por Jeffrey Zeldman nada menos que en enero de 2006 y de las que hablamos en su momento.

Asi que el bueno de Jason seguro que acabará vendiendo la burra a alguien, pero que nos deje en paz a los demás.

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