Marketing

Frederik Andersen of Goodmorning Technology in Denmark gave a great talk last night at Innovation Center Denmark in Palo Alto on the speed of innovation.

His design firm is working on all kinds of interesting projects using a method which I found very reminiscent to what we do as agile web application developers.

Firstly Frederik said his clients always want them to provide a straight path to a successful product design. He says that this is pretty much impossible due to what he calls the dual speeds of innovation going on in everything.

What this means is that designers (and developers) have traditionally focused on features. Features are basically lead by the designers or developers of the project, thus the speed of feature innovation is pretty much up to the designers. However as he says there is another slower path of innovation which is much more evolutional, which in particular involve peoples habits and cultural changes as a whole.

This is a lot harder to control and while new features can help nudge things in a direction, it can’t control where you’re going.

His recommendation is to not go straight for the end goal, but rather realize from the beginning that your current goal is but a point in a probably unpredictable future path.

An example of this was the whole Virtual Reality craze of the 90’s. The technology was there (VRML) but the cultural changes weren’t quite there yet. Now Second Life has taken off in many peoples imagination, although he as well as I think it’s probably not anywhere near the final point along a very wiggly path.

So what can you take along from this? Basically you need to keep innovating and keep testing. Smaller less obvious paths, might be better rather than trying to change the world in one go. This is of course what agile development is all about as well. See if features work, if they help the culture or the market to evolve.

This is pretty much what we are doing with Agree2 as well. It is now very different from what I envisioned a year ago. I’m sure in a year once we have real users using it will have evolved some where I haven’t planned. That said we do know what direction we want to head more or less and in particular where we don’t want to head. The path though is not entirely up to us.

For those of you who haven’t yet heard of FON, they are a very cool Spanish WIFI startup, who aim to make their Wifi network ubiquitous throughout the world. So how have they taken up the challenge of the worlds telecoms companies?

Well they’ve created what they call a social router. This is basically a Wifi Access point with two completely separate SSID’s – one public and one private. The one above is mine. If you hurry up you can get one as well for 5 euro or US$5. This offer ends on the November 8th after which you will be able to get them for $29. Martin says the cost of each router is $28. They say that they have 20,000 routers connected.

I’m not sure how many they have actually sold, but assuming they have sold 20,000 routers that means the direct costs for the routers have been at least $460,000, not including development and marketing costs. I think this is a fantastic sales strategy and one that could only be done with VC funds.

This is similar to the $10 gift certificates that helped grow PayPal like crazy during their first year. This was also a very good use of venture money.

They also show that there are definitely uses for Venture Capital. I still believe though that until you reach the point where you have great plan like this, it would be best to stick to bootstrapping or angel funding.

It’s funny how things turn out. I designed WideWord as a collaborative tool for small business. It was essentially based on my frustration of sending word documents back and forth between people while working on business plans and other collaborative documents.

There are lots of web based word processors out there and WideWord never became as big as I wanted it to. Writely is probably the most famous of my competitors and has now as everyone knows been bought by Google.

However it turns out as I have discovered from the active users that I do have of WideWord that it and it’s sister service WideBlog actually have most of their users within large companies and government projects. I don’t normally pry in what people are using it for, but a couple of users have told me that they use it mainly for multi company projects, where they can’t use their intranets.

Many of them consider it more secure than other offerings and while I don’t think anyone has gone and had WideWord certified by their corporate security departments, they feel they can trust it more than say google hosted projects due to it’s strong encryption. One Belgian government user told me they had problems sending word files back and forth due to anti virus filters and used WideWord out of necessity as it was the solution that was least likely to get him trouble with his IT department.

I never in my wildest dreams figured that enterprise users would end up using WideWord, but that just goes to show that markets somehow have a way of sneaking up on you. Now to figure out a way of monetizing this market.

As you might have seen I tend to write in a very rambling mode, with probably one too many semantical and grammatical errors. Now is the time to tighten up the front page of WideWord to help sell the service. I need it to show some of the main features without being pretentious and fake in the typical marketing style.

So I’ve made my first attempt and put it live. I would really appreciate comments either here or privately to pelle@neubia.com. I received lots of great feed back on the WideWord User Agreement which really helped me out.

In the blatant self-promotion department and because people have been asking me about it I have updated my Who am I section over the last couple of weeks.

I currently have a long but bound to eventually be embarrassing Rambling Bio, where I go into way to much detail than I probably should.

Also see my client list (which isn’t complete) and my open source projects list. I need to further add a list of my own projects, but current projects can be found from the main Who am I page and some of my older projects are listed in my Bio.