Published June 30th, 2006
in Thoughts.
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I’ve been thinking about my friendships lately. I’m becoming more concerned with the idea of not only losing friends, but friends of friends. Since I’ve been working on the gather at project I realize just how important that “link” is. Every friend you make opens you to a world of other people. For every one friend you make you have the potential to gain six more on average using the Nuwere Method of friend estimation™. But most people don’t think like this.
Friend thieves don’t think like this. These are people who become your friend, meet someone in your network they think is of higher value, cuter, hotter and instead of focusing on improving your friendship; they try to bypass/exclude you and deal directly with your “cooler” friend. This happens in business and a lot if you are a socially connected person. Which if you believe in the Nuwere Method of friend estimation is a bad idea because in stealing one friend you lose 5 others.
Next there are friend hordes. These are people who have really cool or influential friends but try very hard to prevent you from meeting them. Recently I have come to the conclusion that anyone who is a friend horde is most likely a friend thief. But I could be wrong. The friend horde/thieves tend to burn a lot of bridges but to the frustration of those they have irked they continue to move up in the world, one friend at a time. The negative side however is that instead of having say, 30 friends they only have 5.
The best person to be is the connector. Connectors are influential; they bring friends together and are highly regarded or prized in their social community. Generally 10% of the population are connectors if gather at can enable another 20% to become connectors that would be kinda cool.
Published June 26th, 2006
in FON.
I joined FON with no commitments and a very vague description of future compensation that changed dramatically after the company was funded (a fairly normal occurrence in startups). The only thing that was guaranteed was the excitement of getting in on the ground floor of a interesting project. I was passionate about the idea and the possibility of helping people, providing affordable access and putting an end to the WiFi rip-offs that consumers suffer from today. I was also passionate because Martin was passionate and passion is contagious.
In a startup you lead with passion and follow through with product. But without passion your team won’t be there for you when times get tough. Once I was hiring a developer at Securitylab when I first started the company. He wanted a salary of 100K plus options when at the time I was taking no salary and was working out of my apartment. In his defense he did have a family and a mortgage so I can’t blame him all that much but it was clear he wasn’t prepared to sacrifice anything for a new employer, especially his family. I respect him for that. But with startups you have to be prepared to make some sacrifices if you really believe in what the company is trying to do.
Nearly all of the employees who joined before the company was funded sacrificed something because they believed in Martin and they believed in the companies mission. I had a number of friends tell me FON would never work, never get funded and never get off the ground. I ignored them and pushed forward and FON did get funded, it did get off the ground and I went on to build the largest division of FON (FON USA has the largest concentration of registered users in the world).
When everyone around you tells you that you are bound to fail the only thing you have left is your passion for the idea. They say entrepreneurs and successful business people can be very arrogant and difficult to deal with, but if you lived your life constantly proving people wrong, can you blame them?
The FON concept is not new. The only thing that made it successful was the employees who sacrificed, and believed in the concept and Martin’s ability to pursue his vision. Those who decided that proving everyone else wrong is a pretty damn cool.
So why did I leave FON? Passion doesn’t last forever and when it whines down and you have a better view of the landscape, tough decisions have to be made. I’ll finish this piece later in the week but please don’t expect me to drop some bomb about an imploding FON. That wasn’t my reason.
Published June 21st, 2006
in Technology and Thoughts.
I looked into the FlexGo system in response to Ethan’s post and question about my opinion. I have two thoughts. First I don’t think “rent-to-buy” financing models are bad. Rich or poor we pay for objects based on their perceived value to us, not their actual value. When I decide to buy a $1400 laptop from Apple, what it actually cost to make is irrelevant to me as long as I feel as though I’m getting a good deal. If I decide to pay $15 a month for 2 years for a piece of furniture that actually cost $100, it’s because I feel that financing it is a better deal for me at that given time. I don’t consider furniture rentals predatory if the rental fees are within financially acceptable means for the borrower. While paying $360 for a $100 table is stupid, it’s not necessarily predatory if the person has the means to pay it. In my opinion the same applies to rent-to-buy computers. If you sell a consumer a $200 computer for $500 and the user has the means to pay the $500 overtime and feels like it’s a worthwhile investment, let it be. If the consumer thinks they are getting screwed someone else will develop a better business model.
I do have concerns with the concept of “pay-as-you-go.” When I was a child once a month we would get government food stamps that enabled us to buy food to feed ourselves. Sometime between the late 1980’s and the early 1990’s they switched from paper food coupons to an electronic card and by then I was old enough to realize our predicament. We didn’t control our lives, a computer did. If the electronic card was cut off for any reason we wouldn’t have been able to eat. Is access to information a new staple?
I can imagine feeling the same way if Microsoft or my ISP controled my data. Our data is our life and poor families are becoming increasingly dependant on technology, as my family had during the early 90’s. Using FlexGo poor families could potentially become hostage to the machine. Microsoft says:
The buyer agrees to purchase 800 hours of time on their PC at a low hourly rate - they can add time as frequently or as infrequently as they choose and take as long as they need to purchase the hours. The cost of the 800 hours covers the re-payment to the financial institution (including interest).
So the user is paying for access to their data and THAT seems predatory. “Want to read your email? PAY US!” “Want to print your resume? PAY US!” “Need access to that college application? PAY US!” Using pay-as-you-go poor people won’t control their data, a consortium of loan officers, Microsoft and ISP’s would and that doesn’t sit well with me.
Published June 21st, 2006
in Technology.
Microsoft is about to implement a new “pay as you go” computing model world wide after its success in Brazil. I think the concept is good and the future of computing will mean consumers own their data but not the hardware. You may rent or lease a desktop or cell phone but the data will be centralized and wholly owned by you. I think Flexgo is the first step in that direction but Ethan Zuckerman explains that it may not be all its cracked up to be:
Of course, there have always been businesses that sell to the poor. Short-term lenders, pawnbrokers and check cashers have found a highly profitable business in providing services to the poor, usually balancing the (presumed) increased risk of dealing with poor people by charging extortionate interest rates. Prahalad’s hope is that there’s money to be made assisting the poor - there’s no doubt that there’s money being made exploiting the poor.
Which brings us to Microsoft’s recent announcement of FlexGo(TM) “pay as you go computing”. While FlexGo is endorsed by Prahalad in Microsoft’s press release, it appears to me that it’s far more likely to be an exploitative than a liberating technology for most users.
Continue readings Ethan’s thoughts on Flexgo
Published June 20th, 2006
in Technology.
I’ve been in Boston since Monday (leaving tonight) attending the Identity Mash-up conference. While the conference is mostly academic in nature I find the discussions about centralizing identity systems fascinating. Today I had to speak up since someone from the DOJ started talking about a national ID system, others have been talking about intergrating your credit cards into a single centralized card. So I spoke about my experience auditing Japan’s national ID system and all of the problems I discovered with their system and I asked two simple question, are you familiar with these problems and have you prepared for them? The panel went silent. Scary.
The US and American companies are thinking about how cool a homogeneous database with everyones verified info would be and all the benefits that come from it but not enough people are thinking about the dangers of such databases. What would the social security system look like if we took into consideration identity fraud before building it?
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