teCh poVerA

Banks in crisis!

2007-09-14T02:36:00.000-07:00

Marc Andreessen, as usual, a great source of inspiration. With lots of posts lately about banks in crisis.

Just visit your favourite bank's website. Some laughs are almost guaranteed. Here is mine, EuroBank (www.eurobank.gr), one of the largest banks in Greece. Check out the funky welcome flash presentation. I couldn't resist messing around with it with the aid of pikistrips.com.

Europe finances the google killer search engine.

2007-07-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

LOL LOL LOL

Stefan Glaenzer the chairman of last.fm and one of smartest angel investors in Europe thinks that

Europe is two and a half years behind the US

I believe he is wrong. How about 10 years behind? That sounds better to me.

Theseus is a German based project that just got funded by the German government by $165 million. The project aims to build "the world’s most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet. Theseus was inspired by a perceived need by European countries to challenge American hegemony on the internet by Google".

How typical of Europe. We are so used to wasting government money or just sit on our butts and complain about no government support instead of building things, trying to hit existing markets, invent new ones, fail, or succeed.

But it gets even worse. France also wants to build the next google! France is discussing a similar subsidy plan with the European Commission that is aiming to give $112 million to a French Google competitor named Quaero.

If you look behind the irony of this post, there is very sad fact. There's no light at the end of the long tunnel. We live in our small world and refuse to face the facts. Here in Europe entrepreneurship is dealt with bureaucracy and is discouraged, +plus we refuse to understand why google or anyone else got so big while we try to fund innovation to be born!

Marc Andreessen has once again hit the nail right on the head:

And way off in the distance, $165 million is tossed into an incinerator...

True innovation will rize from tech povera startups. This is what history taught(?) us.

The difference between A-List bloggers and the rest...

2007-07-11T01:30:00.000-07:00

This is the second paragraph of one of Robert Scoble's blog posts (A new journalism tool? Twitter?):

Using my Nokia N95 cell phone, and TwitterGram. I have a phone number to call, hear a beep, and can record. Then I take a photo and upload that automatically to Flickr. Finally I get back to my computer, write a blog post, copy and paste some HTML, and we have a nice set of reviews.

No wonder why Robert is up there on the A-list.

Thoof is getting spammed big time

2007-06-28T03:33:00.000-07:00

I received an email today from thoof.com:

After 12 days in private invite-only testing, Thoof is now ready to
go public. Anyone can now go to http://thoof.com/ and use the site
without an invitation

After only 12 days of beta testing and o few months of initial development personalized digg-like service thoof launched officially today. Michael Arrington reviewed thoof and argued with thoof founder about the usability and success of personalized news services.

I disagree with Mike about the usability of personalized services and I believe the main problem thoof has to face now is the digg-like way of submitting stories. This model is prone to spam attacks and digg has so far survived from it due to its large user base.

Logging in today with my beta account I was faced with this screen:

My thoof history only had an article about poverty in Africa and nothing else.

The site is obviously under heavy spam attack and this for me is one of the problems personalized services are supposed to solve. Unless they find some way to solve this problem now, it’s quite possible that the user base might never take off. In my opinion the digg model should be abandoned. An example of the same service but with predefined news sources is findory.com which handles spam quite successfully.

You can also read one of my older posts about why personalization can sometimes suck even with google’s and amazon’s services.

Rumors about new German laws. One more step behind for Europe.

2007-06-24T03:33:00.000-07:00

A bit of lazy blogging today. Some sad news I just read. Techcrunch reports that "Google may shut German users out of Gmail in response to new laws passed by the German Government that would force Google to maintain personally identifiable records for every German Gmail account".

How sad... Europe constantly taking one step forward, ten steps back.

Doodling in meetings! (an ancient but widely un-recognized art)

2007-06-19T09:24:00.000-07:00

People of the world!

Come out and show us the artist inside you. I attended a VERY long meeting today at work and I was doodling all the way. Every single person I know (especially geeks) does that. There must be millions of lost masterpieces out there. So I will take the first step.

I scanned two pages that clearly depict my state of mind as the meeting progressed.

The beginning of the meeting. I was relatively in a good condition. I had just seen a video from blaugh. "How to draw a cat":

As the meeting progressed, I started to get worse...

The meeting got worse and worse...

No light at the end of the long tunnel. The end is near... My End. (I doodled this in 3 seconds; I couldn't even doodle any longer)

Heart shaped cat... expressing what I felt at the moment...

A tribute to gaping void. The poor guy is in a meeting, and shouts "I can't stand it any longer!"

This is my last living sign. I managed to draw these talking figures. Everybody knows it. It's over for me. Hundreds of thousand of brain tissue went bad during this meeting.

Everyone should upload your "doodling in meetings" art for everyone to see. If you know other "doodling in meetings" artists, please say so in the comments. Arte Povera in Tech Povera.

Angel investors in Europe. Where are they ?

2007-06-15T17:05:00.000-07:00

I just found on techmeme.com a story about Stefan Glaenzer, a name I had never heard before, about the sale of last.fm to CBS. Last.fm is based in London and Stefan is German. He is now very rich and is probably going to become very famous for being the first one to invest on last.fm, as an angel investor.

Total profit for Stefan was around 22 million pounds (around $43m (US) if I’m not mistaken) after investing “a few hundred thousand” pounds in 2004 in last.fm.

I’m not familiar with the exact numbers but we don’t see many angel investors here in Europe. Risk taking is dealt so very conservatively in Europe that Stefan stands out as an amazingly brilliant investor. He invested some of his money in a start-up he liked! Really liked, because of his past as a DJ in the 70’s!

What's really funny is the way he became the chairman of last.fm. He emailed the guys who were building it! Then got to know each other... Then one thing lead to another:

Mr Glaenzer found Last.fm via a German blogging site that he had created and, with a love of music – “I’d been a DJ at university in Hamburg” – he signed up, and soon after sent the founders, a London-based German, Austrian and Brit, an e-mail.
...
Having German roots helped him to win confidence, and Mr Glaenzer became chairman of Last.fm in 2004,

I just have to quote some of Stefan’s words that depict so well the tech povera state of web entrepreneurship in Europe:

There was an approach about once a month for the last 12 months. All of them were US companies; it reflects the fact that Europe is two and a half years behind the US.

People like Mr Glaenzer is exactly what Europe needs. People with money should take the risks, and invest in internet start-ups. Mainly for things that they love (like music for Stefan) or even not! They just have to believe in it. It's all business in the end. And the potentials are huge.

Another one bites the dust. Loic Le Meur moves to the valley.

2007-06-13T03:02:00.000-07:00

A funny thing happened today. Michael Arrington reports that Famous French blogger and entrepreneur Loic Le Meur has decided to move to Silicon Valley for his next venture. Among other reasons for his decision he says:

He also says he likes the acceptance of failure in silicon valley. “If you succeed it’s great, if you fail try again that’s ok, you learned. In Europe it’s usually if you succeed hide and if you fail you suck, so don’t try again,”

You can also check out Scoble’s interview with an Austrian developer saying exactly that.

Although this is also my perception, we have to admit that this is not always true. If you are already a successful entrepreneur (Loic has 4 start-ups already) you are certainly given many second chances!

Good luck to you Loic. I’ll quote your words (according to techcrunch.com): “Silicon valley is the center of Internet innovation”. Europe in tech povera!

Amazon and google... a personalization mess!

2007-06-11T09:38:00.000-07:00

Robert Scoble has a very interesting post today about personalization and google. He was getting his search result pages in Spanish because he was probably traveling to a Spanish speaking country.

I very strongly believe in personalization and what is can do for us (the users) if done right. The problem is that too many times services like google (amazon, netflix, etc) focus on very wrong parameters instead of things that should matter most for the users.

This is my story: Last month I placed an order for 4 books in amazon.com. My last order at amazon web store was back in 2003. Logging in with my account after almost 4 years, I was faced with a link on top of my page:

Hello [my name]. We have recommendations for you.

Clicking it, I was sent to a page where a message on the top said something like (I missed the chance to capture it):

Sorry [my name]. We have no recommendations for you today.

:)... and the rest of the page was full of useless gifts and other items for me to buy. Isn’t it a bit stupid that amazon gave me the link for recommended items before checking their database to see if any existed for me?

I continued shopping, found a book I wanted to place on my shopping cart, and a fancy message appeared on top of the page:

Your order qualifies for free shipping! (Some restrictions apply)
Make sure to select FREE Super Saver Shipping as your shipping speed at checkout.

VERY NICE! I clicked on "Some restrictions apply" (smaller font size link). A page full of legal jargon appeared. A couple of page-downs revealed the truth:

Applies to U.S. delivery addresses in the 50 states only, including Alaska and Hawaii. Geographic shipping restrictions may apply to particular products; for example, some Tools & Hardware items may not be shipped to Alaska and Hawaii using FREE Super Saver Shipping.

I wonder... How difficult is it for amazon to check my GeoIP or my VISA billing and shipping address, only to see that I live in Europe?

Ok, so let’s say I live in Europe but I am on vacations in the USA and want to shop from amazon. This would make me eligible for super free saving. It would be a great waste if I missed this offer, so amazon thinks that "free shipping" must always be displayed. That’s fine. There is a way for me to escape the hustle clicking the link and being faced with all this legal jargon, by having a link that said:

Your order qualifies for free shipping! (For U.S. shipping addresses only. Some restrictions apply)

Having the best personalization algorithm in the word, while making me wonder helpless around amazon’s pages (full of literally hundreds of links) is crazy!

Badly designed pages, is another thing. I believe amazon has got it all wrong with the design lately. It has become a store full of cluttered pages with information and links everywhere, confusing me more than helping me. But I’ll leave this for a future post.

Scoble’s story and mine prove that many times we see the tree but miss the forest. I really strongly believe that the future of the web lies in personalization (some will call it web 3.0 I guess). But searching for Chinese restaurants does not make me a Chinese speaker.

The truth about venture capitalists... by Marc Andreessen

2007-06-11T01:23:00.001-07:00

Michael Arrington introduced us all to Marc Andreessen’s blog - the co-founder of Netscape and currently the co-founder of Ning among many ventures. I was really amazed to read his blog posts about Venture Capital-ism and VC’s in general.

Absolutely a MUST READ material for any startup considering raising venture capital money. Check out "The truth about venture capitalists" (3 parts):

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about.html
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about_1.html
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about_2.html

My favourite quote from these posts comes from the last paragraph of the third part:

And that's why, from where I sit in Silicon Valley, there are probably 200 venture capital firms within 20 miles with likely over $20 billion of capital at their disposal chasing a very small number of good potential investments, despite terrible average returns for the asset class over the last seven years.

I love this country.

I wonder how far I’m now sitting from the closest VC firm offices right now! Maybe about twenty miles... And there are considerably less than 200 VC firms in my region. Most probably less than 10!

Paul Graham's blog considered harmful by Google... [false positives and their consequences]

2007-06-08T03:04:00.000-07:00

For quite some time now, Google has focused in on-line security. One major goal to achieve is identify potentially harmful sites and report them to the users before they visit them. To do that, a link is displayed in the search results page under suspicious pages saying "this site may harm your computer".

Shelley Powers wonders on her blog:

Of course, then that begs the question: how accurate is Google's algorithm when we can't, yet again, see what factors it uses on which to base its decision? There's a major difference between a site having low page rank, and marking a site as potentially harmful.

It's common knowledge that google can destroy (or severely harm!) your web business in seconds just by lowering your PageRank. Now imagine labelling your site as potentially dangerous for the users. Just marking it as harmful could already be a huge damage for your web business. But it doesn't stop there. G almost completely eliminates the possibility a user ignores the warning and visits your site by clicking on Google's result page. To actually visit a site that google thinks wants to harm you, you have to copy and paste the url from google's warning page to the browser's location bar (by the way, a very large number of web users have no idea what a location bar is!)

Two weeks ago, I captured a photo of google's result page identifying Paul Graham's blog at infogami as a site that may harm your computer!!!

This lasted for at least 3 more days after I noticed it. It is now fixed. This is pretty crazy. By examining Paul's blog source code, you can see it's only pure html and text! Text about startups, web businesses, acquisitions, money, life, etc. No weird javascript, annoying pop-ups or redirects.

Google is fine tuning a lot of things daily in their search engine that almost nobody notices. I only noticed this was corrected rather quickly because I was checking it every day.

But I couldn't help but wonder what a false positive would mean if it happened to a small struggling to succeed tech povera start-up.

Launch your own startup for $12,000 …if you are Guy Kawasaki!

2007-06-05T03:20:00.000-07:00

Guy Kawasaki has a detailed blog post about how he launched his own startup for a mere $12,107.09. If it's that easy for Guy Kawasaki, it must be that easy for everyone, right?

Of course Guy forgot to mention that he is a very well known VC / blogger/ Evangelist / whatever (which is good for him, he really deserves it) in the valley and worldwide. Michael Arrington would link to him even if he was starting a business selling land on the moon, he would post leaked photos with REAL excitement... because GUY is behind this plan...

He paid $4.5k for the total software development. Of course this is because there was not any "real" coding. The wheel is already there, why re-invent it. Wordpress with plugins for digg like functionality. I would say he paid a fair price for setting up a template, customisations and whatever else was needed.

This could really be a true tech povera (cheap technology) story... but, try building (or outsourcing... whatever) code for something more innovative. Let's say something that uses spiders, spam detection, automatic text / link analysis, or any other complex web service, and you will soon find you have to deal with scale issues (something that truemors will probably have to deal with soon), weird bugs, the need for dedicated hosting and so many other technical problems... and then you will find out that $4.5k worth of outsourced development and 7.5 weeks to launch a beta is not really enough, unless you are yourself a developer and have your first hart attack before you reach 40.

No wonder truemors got hacked in 3 hours. Most probably a script kid hacked him. Truly open source software (like wordpress) with open source third party plugins, are prone to hacks! Sad, but true. He got away with it (having his startup hacked 3 hours after launch time) because he is Guy Gawasaki. If this happened to any other un-hyped startup, not powered by one of silicon valley's darlings, it would have all this negative, but REALLY negative PR. TC deadpool would approach really quickly!

I’m a huge fan of cheaply built products. It has been done in the past by a lot of people (digg.com being the most notable example). But sorry Guy, you have so much free press because of who you are and this is a very simple idea to implement, no innovation. I hate to sound negative, but all I want to say is that it’s not always that easy and certainly not for everyone. Especially when you live in Europe or anywhere outside the valley, and you are not already a successful entrepreneur.

About Tech Povera - technology as an art form.

2007-06-04T06:53:00.000-07:00

Hi world. I am a 32-year-old entrepreneur living in Europe. The title "tech povera" was inspired by the art movement called "arte povera" back in the late 60’s. Reading the term in wikipedia reveals:

They [Artists] were working in radically new ways, breaking with the past and entering a challenging dialogue with trends in Europe and America. The artists would use any medium they could get for free or very, very cheap

This is exactly how I feel. Being an aspiring web entrepreneur, but living outside Silicon Valley (in Europe), where innovation or even risk taking is dealt in a completely different manner, I often find myself using any medium I can get for free or very, very cheap...