Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

A certain business partner of mine just posted this shareable slide deck on our internal Firestoker tool. Of course, my first thought is wow, we should add to our list some feature or process to immediately post through this sort of great+publicly-sharable stuff from the internal discussion space to our external blog/site as well. But for now, the manual approach. Anyway, this deck by Paul Kedrosky is both entertaining and quite prescient. And, as the deck is visuals only, it’s also fun fill-in-the-blanks sport to imagine what Paul would have been saying to each point.

Point #2 You are learning from a deck presented just 4 days ago, at a conference you were probably didn’t know about, from an important thinker you may not have been aware of before (a. isn’t social media great?) and now b. I’m doing my best/bit to help propagate these meme through the blogosphere. To get this chain of events started, Paul must have uploaded it to “SlideSharebeta” which is clearly a YouTube for Powerpoints (I hadn’t seen this service it before). And in turn slideshare is excellent example of Enterprise2.0, a powerful idea (YouTube) proven out in the consumer web and now jumping the shark fence to become a completely new (and pretty cool) application in a business context.

Jevon convinced me today to sign up for VOIP with VBuzzer. My understanding is that it’s like vonage but ( preposterously) $2/month rather than $24/month (or whatever vonage is). I can sign-up for a local (416) phone number, buy a subsidized (by vonage!) $10 broadband adapter thingy from future shop, unlock it using some free utility (good thing we have no DMCA law in canada?), plug in a plain old telephone and bob’s my uncle. A $2/mo landline.

Only trouble is I don’t own a telephone. I’ll have to go out buy one this weekend. went mobile + skype a long time ago.

this reminds me of a conversation I had visiting my parents for dinner the other day

Parents: have you seen that annoying commercial on the television?

me: I haven’t seen a commercial on the television in a few years (downloaded tv doesn’t have commercials)

well what about the radio commercial?

I don’t listen to commercial radio (just CBC and/or podcasts)

So what else do you listen to when you drive, just CDs?

I don’t own any CDs (switched to exclusively mp3, vinyl years ago)

So you just plug in your iPod when you’re driving?

Oh, I don’t drive anywhere (except in summer. To get where I need to go I take bikes, taxis, transit or airplanes not my own car)

parents: [no small skepticism] hmmm

Do you get the feeling the world is changing. Do you get the feeling that it’s not yet affecting everyone equally? am I an oddity or the prototypical future consumer? (I suppose I could be more-than-a-little of both)

song of the day: Bad Religion 21st Century Digital Boy, (a clasic Punk Rock lament for the digital future). click to play:

#Oracle’s Web2.0 in the Enterprise Announcement

some potentially big news from Oracle today, they have seen the light in Enterprise2.0 and they’re not selling it for cheap. This is great news for most of us in the industry and here’s why: Not only will Oracle be helping to validate and evangelize the space, but they are also setting the bar high in terms of pricing. In the valley, I saw far too many “Office20” companies giving away too-small sets of widgets aiming for too low a price. It’s time, as an industry we start aiming higher and look to the real value that these technologies have to offer. Because it’s real. Now, Enterprise2.0 pundit Jerry Bowles expresses some reservations about Oracle’s actual implementation in practice, but then, in terms of them still leaving ample room for competition, I’m fine with that too 😉

“Today’s announcement that uber-shark Oracle has come up with a “new” product called Oracle WebCenter Suite that “uses Web 2.0 technology to create a context-aware interactive environment that supports the intersection of people, processes, and information across multiple channels to enhance the productivity of information workers” is an outrage to the English language but a sure sign that the battle to integrate Web 2.0 technologies in enterprises has begun in earnest. “

#Union Square Ventures on small deal sizes

Other encouraging news for startups, and on the other side of the money scale, at least one leading VC‘s has woken up to the cost-realities of modern software development. They’re making deal sizes smaller. One of the great barriers to financing startups is that VC (esp conventional/generalist VC esp in Canada) are often not well set up to cater to the much lower (initial) capital requirements of startups. Traditional VC is often focused on placing deals in the 3-5M range as opposed to the 1M or less I often see software firms looking for to get to initial market. Union Square Ventures is a firm that is changing the traditional model placing more, smaller deals, and they believe in so doing better allocating their capital at better risk (more diversification and not giving early companies more than they need). From their blog post on the subject:

“The most important factor, however, is the capital efficiency we are seeing in our portfolio companies. They simply don’t need as much money as the companies we backed 5 years ago, 10 years ago, or 15 years ago. They may need as much capital when they become big businesses and need to invest to grow. But the clearly do not need as much capital to get from idea to commercial launch and to revenues.”

Link to Union Square’s Post