Is This a Feature OR a Company?

I have often heard people (including myself) say “That isn’t enough to build a company on. That is just a feature”. In theory it is good to think about this. Is your idea or technology something you can build a company on or just something interesting that might be added to another company or product?

But in reality things work differently. Yahoo started as a page with links to websites. Can you imagine that someone said “Yeah that is nice. But it is just a feature. You can’t build a company on a page with links”.

Or take Google. All they had when they started out was a better technology to index pages called ‘BackRub’. They tried to sell this ‘feature’ to a few established search engine companies. These companies weren’t interested so they started their own search engine to show off their technology.

I think it is dangerous to dismiss ideas as only ‘features’ and have decided to stop saying this to people. Great companies are built on simple features. Lets respect that.

If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting and I am looking forward to hearing your comments!

Want to ask me a personal question? Contact me at boris@bomega.com

 Subscribe to my Feed!

New projects: WordPress Plug-in & Captchatising.com

I started working on two new projects today.

1: Captchatising.com
As you might have noticed on The Next Web Blog we use the names of our advertisers instead of random characters. Easier for people to understand, great for our advertisers and just as hard for spammers. Today Diederik persuaded me to actually start a new project to develop this for other blogs too. We will build the platform and try to attract advertisers to advertise on blogs hosting our CAPTCHAs. Now we only have to find someone to build it and someone to manage it. Interested?

2: 100 SEO Tips
This project is a lot less ambitious. With every WordPress install comes a plug-in titled ‘Hello Dolly’. It displays random sentences from the famous song with the same title. I took a look at it today and figured I could do something more useful with that technology. So I started a public spreadsheet at Google Docs titled “100 SEO tips” and asked people (via Twitter) to contribute Search Engine Optimization tips there. As soon as I have 100 tips collected I will publish this Plug-in to Wordpress.org. If you want to contribute (I will link to you as a contributor) contact me and I will invite you to the document as an editor.

The Next Web Blog

This has been a busy week. Last night I visited the Hyves party and a few people mentioned that I didn’t blog much this week. Vincent Everts told me he assumed I was on a holiday because of the silence. Well, no holiday for me! Just busy with a few of our new projects. One of them is the The Next Web Blog. As you know we organize The Next Web Conference and we also kept up a blog for each conference.

These conference blogs are very popular the few weeks before the conference but are hard to maintain after the conference ends. We all get back to our other jobs and we know that keeping up a blog is a full time job.

But we also think we have a lot to talk about regarding the future of the web and the people building it. So we decided to take a chance and hire a full time editor for TheNextWeb.org. Our plan is to blog, a lot, about events and people that influence the direction of the future of the Web.

We won’t officially launch until January and use the following weeks to get up to speed and add features and content. I hope you can check the blog out, subscribe to the RSS feed and give us some feedback on the posts:

http://thenextweb.org

My Blog on an iPhone

If you own an iPhone you can now read this blog optimized for it. I installed the iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme by ContentRobot which automatically shows you an optimized theme if you are visiting this blog on an iPhone.

Installing it was very easy and my blog looks very nice on the iPhone now. They should offer this software to every site owner…

The Ultimate Diet Formula

I love diets.
They are the ultimate self fulfilling prophecy.
Once you start following a diet to lose weight, you actually start losing weight!

How incredible?
Not really!

It is just the Hawthorne Effect doing its magic:

An attempt was made to measure the difference between two methods of management during the 1930s at the Hawthorne plant. The attempt failed because the workers impoved their efforts immensely for both methods. This was because they knew they were being watched carefuly. Since then, the term Hawthorne effect has been used to describe the improvement in a situation that occurs just because an experiment is being run.

The same appliesto diets. There have been hundreds (maybe even thousands. Dieting dates back to the stone age) of different types of diets. Every two years or so a new diet becomes popular that everybody swears will work and which actually works for a while.

That is, until everyone stops paying attention to his or her eating habits, gains weight again and a new diet is invented.

I’m working on my own diet. I’m going to launch it in a year or so and trust me, I can guarantee you it will work and it will make me rich! No need to mark my words, they will be right here.

The reason I am mentioning this is because the Hawthorne Effect might also be a factor to think about when it comes to your own business. Just consider the facts: if you change something, it will make people pay attention to, and aware of, their habits. What can you change about your business to make people aware of it?

Could you change your name?
Your logo?
The way you interact with your customers?

How can you use the Hawthorne Effect to YOUR advantage?

40 More BeFunky Invites!

My blog still gets a lot of visitors who are looking for BeFunky invites. My blog is the first result in Google if you search for Befunky Invites and it is also listed on Mahalo.com at the general BeFunky page there.

Today Tekin Tatar emailed me 40 (!) new invitation codes to hand out! If you want one simply send me an email and I will email you one back as soon as I get a chance.

Here are 10 invites just to get in the mood:

BOMEGA38260
BOMEGA23489
BOMEGA15145
BOMEGA65455
BOMEGA61432
BOMEGA50675
BOMEGA96264
BOMEGA34204
BOMEGA47160
BOMEGA82006

Please leave a comment with the code you used for yourself.

Contact me for the other 30 invites!

Wakoopa Tracks iPhone Software!

Wakoopa, a company I own shares in, today announced a new product/service. They now track usage on iPhones too. We all own iPhones at the office and I think it is a smart move to take advantage of the iPhones popularity this way. Here is the official press release:

PRESS RELEASE - Amsterdam, October 22 2007
Software startup makes iPhone usage transparent
Amsterdam-based company Wakoopa has announced today that it’s tracking worldwide iPhone usage. Since January, Wakoopa has been developing an online social network where software usage can be tracked. Next to Mac and PC software, it now also monitors applications for the new Apple handheld, the iPhone.

Social network
Wakoopa (http://wakoopa.com) is a social network specifically for software users. Wakoopa’s service enables people to track and designate what software they are using. This creates a “view rating” or usage indication of software. Visitors and members of this community can look at what software has been used for how long in their social circle, and which type of software is most popular at a certain moment.

Better choices
Wakoopa founders Wouter Broekhof and Robert Gaal want to make iPhone application more transparent with this new addition. Broekhof: “The iPhone truly is a revolutionary device that has inspired developers worldwide. We want to make the usage of these applications more transparant. Not only for developers, but for our users who will be able to make better choices when it comes to software”. Apple announced last week that developers from outside the company will be able to create iPhone applications in the future. Currently it’s already possible to create iPhone software in the form of web applications. Both these types of applications can be added and tracked on Wakoopa’s iPhone site (http://i.wakoopa.com).

Wakoopa
Wakoopa launched in May this year and has welcomed over 20.000 unique members since. The Dutch Creative Industry Fund (DCIF), an investment fund founded by the three largest Dutch media companies, invested in the company earlier this year. Shortly after, BusinessWeek awarded Broekhof (23) and Gaal (22) as “Europe’s Top Young Entrepreneurs 2007”.

Even if you don’t have an iPhone Wakoopa is still a great service to check out. I use it on my Mac and display a widget on my blog here showing what applications I use. When I visit Wakoopa I get suggestions of other interesting applications I could use besides or instead of my current software.

Steve Jobs: Design & The Washing Machine

As you might know I have a huge (complete!) collection of Wired Magazines. Regularly I grab a random copy and browse through it. Today I grabbed a 1996 issue with Steve Jobs on the cover. I only read half of the article but was thrilled when I found a quote that made a huge impression on me when I first read it.

The last question that Gary Wolf asks is “Is there anything well designed today that inspires you?”. Steve Jobs then tells a very personal story about his ideas about design and how he and his family deals with technology.

I can recommend reading the whole article but i also want to quote this one particular part here:

Design is not limited to fancy new gadgets. Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn’t have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better - but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer.

We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.

We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They’re too expensive, but that’s just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.

From an interview by Gary Wolf with Steve Jobs for Wired Magazine in 1996 titled “Give The People What They Want“