A Fresh Start (up)

Sorry for my English-speaking readers (according to my stats you represent 17% of my readers!) but I will comment on a French website, one of the most unuseful ones, but I really love it: with Miniville (Minicity in English) you create your online city in one click, and then you invite people to visit it. The more clicks you get, the more money you have to develop your city, and the more industries you can create.

Thanks to Fred Cavazza for having made me discovered it. But unlike him, who already has 200 inhabitants in his city, I have only 3 in mine, and of course no habitations as you can see! So if you have pity on me and want the city “Fidjissimo” to become a touristic destination, please click here to visit it!

I have just made a review on Tech IT Easy of the different types of artistic expressions (creation or presentation) that can be found on Second Life and virtual worlds in general.

To sum up: 
- some artists or galleries just reproduce their exhibition on SL
- some other artists use SL to sell online some of their offline pieces of art thanks to scanning
- some artists use SL as a creative place in itself.

Of course my article details all these types and gives examples, in order to answer a big question: in what measure these initiatives will contribute to dynamize and democratize art?

I just went back from the FEVAD (French e-commerce federation) conference at Four Seasons Hotel George V (gorgeous). The 2 debates were quite interesting, and I have kept in mind a few things, sorry if they are a mess.

About the Internet in general:

- Internet brands are becoming a “patchwork”; it is stupid to try to gather a brand image in one and the same place (meaning that distribution becomes far more relevant than destination);

- The consumer in an information trader: there is no absolutely reliable information on the web (prices for example evolve all the time), so users now deal with statistical significance to get their information. 

About e-commerce:

- Multichannel is everywhere, the term “pure player” is really old fashioned (best example: Pixmania opening offline stores)

- Jean-Emile Rosenblum (Pixmania founder) said that the fast development of ecommerce in other European countries is due to the right to sell at a loss, which is not allowed in France. Of course I understand this interdiction is a pain for major players which would like to use it as an investment on prices to grasp market shares, but I think this is why the French market is so buoyant: small companies still can enter the e-commerce market without fearing that Amazon would launch a price war, as it has done in other European countries.

About advertising:

- When talking about advertising on Google, we differentiate natural search (free) from sponsored links (paid). But this differenciation is not relevant anymore because there are so many sites on the French market that this is becoming harder and harder to grasp good positions in Google natural search, which implies hiring more employees to improve the natural search of a website. So at the end, natural search is all but free for e-merchants. For example, 20% of Pixmania employees are dedicated to improve Pixmania ranking in Google main result page!

And to finish, congrats to Jacques Antoine Granjon, who won the FEVAD award, for being such a great and simple guy. He is one of the first entrepreneur to say without any complex nor arrogance: “we have all the market, we are doing fine, we have no particular threats, and we don’t need any investment” ! 

I just want to share this great discovery with you. Blogumenta is a projet launched in reaction to big art fairs taking place in Europe (ex: Documenta) and aims at proposing other ways to create an art fair thanks to social networks.

Blogumenta has created a group on Facebook to gather some art pieces and become the first Facebook art fair.

Just an explanation form Robert, the “admin”:

“There are different ways to contribute an artwork:
- upload a photo to the Blogumenta group photo section;
- contribute a text piece by writing on the Wall;
- contribute text in the Discussion area;
- there may be other ways I don’t know about yet, let me know.

Once a critical mass of artwork has been assembled, the “fair” itself will be scheduled as a Facebook event, limited by FB to one month in duration.”

You know that I am very interested in the democratization of art, and this can be an amazing evolution if it works: it will facilitate the access of artists to the mass market, and give access to everyone to great pieces of art during an event.

A lot of initiatives like that are taking place in Second Life, I will comment them for sure later on.

I am currently starting a thesis on “the democratization of contemporary art” (theme will probably evolve a lot), which is mandatory to graduate from HEC. It is a great theme, highly linked with Internet evolutions.

So I have decided to find and promote on this blog all types of art that are Internet-related.

For this first article of the serie “Pieces of art”, I have found a really cool app giving you a visual reprensentation of your website. So this pictures represents A Fresh Start (up). 

Of course there is an explanation. Here is what the colors stand for:
blue: for links (the A tag),
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags),
green: for the DIV tag,
purple: for images (the IMG tag),
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags),
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags),
black: the HTML tag, the root node,
gray: all other tags.

But what is more amazing is how this type of art, based on the creativity of developer who has probably no “standard” art skills (correct me if I’m wrong), is how rapidly it has spread. More than 2,000 “websites as graphs” are registered on Flickr, you can check it here; some websites’ visual representations are really amazing, I am quite jealous actually!

So should I try to make an interesting blog or just a “beautiful” one ?

If you have other examples of Internet-related art, please let me know and I will definitely write about them!

As you may have noticed it if you have taken a look at my Linkedin profile, I am currently doing an internship at eBay finishing at the beginning of July.

On Friday morning I was wondering: why am I so happy to go to work today? Of course people are really cool, I have an amazing manager, eBay is a very dynamic company… but it is not sufficient, there must be something else. Why do I always defend so vigorously my company when somebody highlights its shortcomings?

Then this week-end I read Guy Kawasaki’s book, The Art of Start. He basically says that great companies are created to make meaning, to change the world, to make the world a better place. eBay is exactly that: it has been created on the assumption that people are naturally good and honest, and that they can be trusted.

So when I go to work every morning I have the feeling of doing something good, the feeling of helping create an efficient marketplace, based on people’s honesty, relying on a strong community of passionate people. I have the impression that the development of eBay’s ecosystem is not only right because it generates additional profit but also because it helps people to create a trading activity more easily, giving them access to millions of customers around the world without supporting high fixed costs. And I can’t help feeling proud of what I am doing when I hear from an entrepreneurial success, or people having met great other people (and sometimes the love of their life!) thanks to eBay.

Guy Kawasaki is definitely right: making meaning is key when you create a company.

And you, do you have the impression that your company is making meaning? Why do you like it if it doesn’t?

I have a great passion for innovation mechanisms, and I try to understand how to achieve payback through innovation. It raises a lot of challenges (cultural, social, organizational…) and it seems that it is quite hard to get the perfect mix of all those criteria. I will speak about all these challenges in more details in other articles, but I wanted to start with the obvious: how to choose the right model to manage your innovation project? How to deal with your ecosystem?

I have based my thoughts on a really good book (even if it is a bit too academical for me) : Payback (James P. Andrew, Harold L. Sirkin). It gives a clear vision of the three different innovation models: integration, orchestration, licensing. I have shared these thoughts and examples with Tech IT Easy’s readers here.

As you may know it if you have read the page “About this blog and myself“, I will work in January in the investment fund of a French entrepreneur (Nate Cohen) in Miami.

Nate and his partner Yonathan Arfi have had the amazing idea of giving French artists access to the American market, thanks to their knowledge of French expatriates. With their company ARCO Prod, they have already managed Gad Elmaleh’s and Julien Clerc’s tours, and are now in the middle of Patrick Bruel’s tour, which has been a huge success in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

So if you are in Miami on Tuesday, on New York on Thursday or in Washington on Friday and want to spend a really cool night, go there to buy your tickets online!

Here is an amateur video of the show in Los Angeles:

Unfortunately this article is extracted from my personal experience, and I can tell that I could hardly have done things worse, so do not hesitate to do the exact contrary if you are creating your company!

1) Choose the worst timing

For example, useless to say that if you are in 1^st year of a master in management, president of two associations and treasurer of another one, and if in addition you work part time in a consultancy, it is definitely not the right moment for you to create a company, even if you think that your idea is amazing… Because all your partners will have strong doubts about your ability to keep a company on track while doing so many things, and will immediately think that you are trying to minimize the risk: it is exactly not what an entrepreneur should show.

Besides, having no single penny to invest (precisely because you are still a student) and believing that business angels will see the potential of your idea right away is also a wishful thinking…

Having absolutely no money (I was investing my part time wage in my company!) leads you to make all the tasks half way, without being able to show all the potential of your idea. Of course you do not need to have a lot to start a company, but more is definitely better than less especially if you have no network to help you concerning the basic starting costs.

2) Keep your amazing idea really secret

One day I wanted to take advice from Frederic Iselin, manager of HEC-startup, and I started my speech by “I expect you not to repeat my idea”, and I remember the kind of look he gave me. At the time I thought that he did not understand the huuuuge potential of my idea, implying that a lot of people would want to steal it. If only it could have been that! If you read this, please forgive me Mr Iselin!

I have understood that if the simple fact of letting people know your idea could endanger your project, you should definitely reconsider it.

First, because if the concept is so easily reproducible, you will not be able to protect it forever (unless you do not communicate on it and therefore do not have any clients!). Loic Le Meur explains in a famous article that the value of a project is in the execution and not in the idea, and he is perfectly right. Despite the big failure of my company creation, I keep thinking that the idea was interesting, but the execution was…crap.

Then, because you cannot start a project without challenging its viability with more experimented people. However, I totally agree with this article of Guy Kawasaki: confronting your project to different point of views must help you improve it but not drop it; we expect entrepreneurs to have convictions! And the ones who criticize the most your idea are never the ones who make things better than you but just people who do…nothing at all.

3) Believe that having a concept that fill a need will be sufficient to have customers

First: how to make people know that you are here to fulfill their need?

People often acknowledge having a need if other people acknowledge having the same: so how to get your first clients without any money to invest in basic advertising, and no time?

Secondly: again, is the execution good enough to make people use your tool rather than keep an unsatisfied need?

My company creation which provided a tool for small businesses or associations to interact through a blogging platform seemed to fulfill the need of small businesses to go out of their isolated situation thanks to easier and convenient tools.

Perfect on paper, but what if the blogging platform does not look corporate at all, precisely because you have no money to invest in design?

4) Enlarge your target with no limits

That is exactly what happens when you start feeling that you are falling behind results. You try to enlarge your target to see if other prospects should be interested by your product, and finally you loose all the consistency of the core concept. That is how I ended up by having “Le Club des boules de Satolas” (in English: the petanque club) as a client on my blogging platform: not such a prestigious reference when selling your product to IT start ups…

5) Hire no accountant or lawyer

Linked to the “no money problem”, you think that you have can do everything by yourself. It is true to a certain extent: if you start delegating all the administrative work because “it is too complicated”, you must think about doing something else.

But there are definitely tasks that you are not entitled to do, even as an entrepreneur. Being you own accountant is so hard that you start thinking that it is better not to make profit just to have less forms to fill (personally, it was not even a question, as I had no profit whether I wanted it or not!).

And if I had hired a lawyer when I have wanted to sell my company, I would have made a juicy operation: indeed, a potential acquirer told me that he was buying my company for 14K for sure (with no clients, no design, and an investment of 1K). I was delighted and I gave him the logins to verify the code of the website. Three days after having copied everything, he told me that he did not want to buy my company anymore. A lawyer told me after that a simple signed preliminary sales agreement would have prevented me for that kind of experience… So think twice when trying to save money!

After reading that, you may think: my god, what a looser! You are not so wrong, but knowing what NOT TO DO is often what makes winners after… Let’s hope so!

I have always been amazed by Google’s strategy in advertising and its progressive introduction on all advertising markets. I have just written an article  to sum up all the ad markets where Google has already taken positions  on Tech IT Easy just here. Do not hesitate to contribute if you think I have forgotten some Google’s initiatives; I want to be exhaustive to give a map of Google’s strategy.