Who is Farhan Lalji?

A lot has been made about the (semi) new Facebook beacon. MoveOn and others are up in arms talking about the lack of privacy.  There’s even a Facebook group against the beacon.  I can see the value of the beacon and why Facebook are doing it. Although I’m not completely enraged by the impact on privacy,  I do think that they need to change it to an opt-in service.

Thinking about this and my recent move, recent troubles getting internet at the new house (more on this if it persists after this weekend), recent troubles with my bank, all got me thinking about how we, the community, can reverse this on to the companies and facebook. I want to wreak my vengeance on the companies who over promise and under deliver. I want a facebook wreakon!

I want an application which I can use when a company ticks me off. Orange is ticking me off with poor costumer service and not delivering me the internet service they promise, I want a way to let EVERYONE know. HSBC is ticking me off, cancelling my card when I travel, thinking that when I use Paypal its fraud, once again I want to let EVERYONE know!

The blog is great for that. But a simple facebook app that allows me to rant and rave and collects data on which company’s suck, now that would be great! Who wants to build it for me?

The New York Knicks basketball team and the English football side are both sporting disasters. New York has one of the highest payrolls in the league and finds themselves last in the weakest division in basketball. England is full of superstar players and personalities, but just paid their ex-coach 2.5 million pounds to bugger off.

The Knicks – a team I’ve supported since 84, when I got a Knicks hat as a kid, to 99 when Toronto was given an NBA franchise – really stink. So does England. Both teams are struggling having implemented the same strategy. Load up on big name stars and talent will win. What both need is to build a consistent, cohesive, supporting team.

Isiah Thomas has gone out and signed or traded for every big name he could sign for and he’s got a team that on paper could beat a lot of other teams on a position by position basis. The England squad have the same strong line up in comparison to other nations. And yet both teams lose, badly, to teams they supposedly should beat.

The problem is neither of these teams is actually a team. They’re both a bunch of individual players. Not a team. Both teams are full of guys who play one way and can’t adjust to playing with the other players they’re on the court/pitch with. And so both lose, badly, to teams they should beat.

Here’s my solution. Blow them both up. Starting from the Head of the FA and the President of the Knicks. Get rid of both managers – at least England has already done this, I give Zeke till the end of the year. And then figure out what kind of teams you want to model the squads after and get players who fit the mold, play that style and want to win. Look at teams like San Antonio, Detroit, Dallas in the NBA and squads like Italy, France (when they were winning everything) and figure out systems that work. Then go out and stick to a playing strategy and play that strategy.

The problem is it’s easier to say this is what you should do and it’s harder to actually do it and finding the right guys to do it is almost impossible. England is talking about a bunch of guys who have never managed an international side! NYK is looking at peple like Chris Mullin, who haven’t won jack!

This is especially difficult when there’s so much money involved and most of the decision makers are more focused on the bottom line then they are on winning. The only people who seem to really care are paying for their seats to watch these sad states of teams play. And that’s a real shame.

All of this makes me wonder if the guys behind myfootballclub.com, where supporters get together and buy a team, had the right idea. The fans and their community probably would do a much better job then the guys with the suits!

Kindle’s clogging up the blogosphere and the airwaves right now. As I wrote, and N and Cathy commented, the other day it’s probably a crummy idea. But some people have been making some good points so I thought it would be good to point out the other side – and to give my take on why I don’t buy it.

• They said the same thing about digital music, that people wouldn’t want to listen to music electronically or store their files, that the album, 8 track, tape, cd would never succumb to the mp3. Difference is people like to announce the books their reading to the world. Reading Harry Potter is a badge of honour. Reading Owen Meany is inviting me to comment, “what a great book, love that story”. Also reading a book is – usually – a one off affair. You read, you put it on the book shelf or you pass it on. Where as a CD is a repeat experience. I know some people read the same book many times, but it’s far less likely to happen then listening to the same album. Also, the medium for music was crying for innovation, hence we went from the album to the 8 track to the tape to the cd.
• Being able to carry a number of different titles on the go is better then having to lug all your books with you. I think this is a pretty good argument. But, I can’t remember the last time I thought to myself wish I had another book right this instant. If I finish a book, I like to discuss it with someone, or try and think about it a bit. I don’t feel this pain, but I’d welcome hearing from people who do.
• Its better environmentally. This one I can give you. But if the kindle comes out with a number of different models, and people dump their old kindles I think the environmental factors might be a wash.

I still don’t like it. Still can’t see it growing the ebook market. And I still can’t see anyone spending $400 to pick up an ebook reader.

So Amazon’s releasing a ebook reader, calling it Kindle, and hoping that it will get the ebook market going. I don’t – and won’t – buy it.For some people who like the experience and have already started reading ebooks, and after reading Michael Parekh’s blog I was amazing to find that there are people who do indeed fit into this category, it’s a good step up from your Sony reader. But for people who prefer the paper copy I can’t see this being a likely substitute.

To begin with there’s nothing really wrong with the classic book reading experience, sure carrying multiple titles with you might be attractive, but how often have you thought “wish I had another book with me”. Finishing a book and not having an alternative might in fact be a good thing as it gives you some time to reflect and meditate on the book.

And sure there are environmental concerns to buying lots of books, but if you buy books from used book stores and give books to used books stores then the environmental impact has to be minimal when compared to, oh I don’t know, cars and airplanes perhaps!?

I also found it really weird that Amazon decided to go into this market (as a manufacturer), they don’t have the experience or the knowledge to manufacture customer goods. And if Apple releases some ebook software for the iPod or the iPhone, heck when the SDK comes out in Feb if someone releases a software program for the iPod or iPhone, that’s got to be more useable, useful and probably will end up more used then the kindle.

Manufacturing consumer electronics isn’t cheap, and the fact that this was a first for Amazon probably meant they started from scratch, lots of costs. With a price point of 400 USD wonder how many they’ll have to sell to actually be ROI positive. Sure the ebooks will help the bottom line, but if the apple devices have software that reads ebooks surely this would have come down their pipe anyway. Anyway will be interesting to see if we’re all using kindles to surf and read books in a couple of years. But I doubt it.

During the MBA I liked to contribute in class. And now it seems like this contributing nature has got me a bit of infamy.I’m on the cover of the EMBA information brochure from London Business School! After hearing about it for a couple of weeks I finally managed to download it on the school website. Not that I mind, I never was one to shy away from a little self-promotion!

It’s kind of odd having my face on the cover now that I’m not at the school anymore.  Especially since my face never made it into any of the brochures while I was there!  Almost gave me a complex.  Oh well, better late then never I guess.

Judging from the look on Yana’s face behind me, whatever I said must have been pretty funny!

Recent events have had me thinking a lot about my future and how to get there. For a second I was thinking about how I wanted people to describe me in ten or fifteen years time and was toying with the idea that it would be nice to be considered a serial entrepreneur.

So, I found Glen Kelman’s post on TechCrunch and Guy Kawasaki’s follow up yesterday really timely. In a nutshell, Glen argues that the second time around entrepreneurs’ success may be limited. Guy follow’s up with a dissection of the investment in second time rounders versus first time give-a-goers, concluding that guys under 30 building a product they themselves would use are the ideal. So, is there entrepreneurial life after a first success? Does the fact that you’re doing the entrepreneurial thing after having done the entrepreneurial thing mean that you didn’t get it right the first time?

Maybe the reason why the wikipedia entry for “serial entrepreneur” is so short compared to the entry for “entrepreneur” is that successful serial entrepreneurship doesn’t really exist. A little more digging around lead me to a post from Paul Kedrosky on “The myth of the serial entrepreneur” which he wrote over two years ago. Personally, I think there are such things as serial entrepreneurs, but a serial successful entrepreneur may just be a myth.

So would I still like to be considered a serial entrepreneur? Hopefully being considered an entrepreneur is good enough.

I like Jeff Jarvis.  I think he’s smart, articulate and he usually has some really interesting things to say around technology, business and journalism.  I used to read Buzzmachine, his blog, quite a bit, but in recent times it’s fallen off my radar a bit.  So when I read his comment piece on the Guardian about advertising, I felt like I was catching up with a good friend.  Until I started to think about what he was saying, and realized that he’s way off on this one.

Jeff, and the good folks at Advertising Age whom he cites, believe that advertising spend will decrease.  They both talk about supply increasing and demand meeting it somewhere with prices paid and spend dropping.  Interesting and totally plausible, but I don’t see the game unfolding like that.  Here’s how I see it.

Targeting will get better and suppliers will be able to reach the right audience in a more targeted manner.  Spend will increase because the supply of targeted ads leads to an increase in the market advertisers can attract to goods and services.  I see spend increasing overall in advertising – especially when you take into account things like social networking and the creation of things like groups and networks, although these might be fiscally free, they have an opportunity cost and a people and time investment.

I don’t see the new advertising model and age being a classic case of supply and demand, I see it more the pie – potential industry earnings – increasing a lot, and as a result spend increasing to try and capture more of that pie.  Sorry Jeff.  But it was nice seeing you again.

I got a couple of slices of toast this morning from our café. I also had sushi for lunch down the road. The food was great, the packaging sucked.

I hate polystyrene packaging. Hate it. I get that it’s cheap and that for packaging cheap is good. But the fact that it takes forever to decompose (if it ever does) and that the environmental concerns around it are vast, to me means that it’s just not a viable product in the earth’s long run. Not only that but the alternatives are just nicer, a paper plate or paper container is not only classier but food, for some unknown to me reason, just tastes better.

So why do places, like Yoshino at the Japan centre, continue to serve there goods in polystyrene? If McDonalds can eliminate its polystyrene containers, why can’t others?

Obviously it’s about the bottom line and maximizing the bottom line. But when commerce acts in a way that’s against the greater good government needs to step in. Some have, some cities in the US have had bans on Polystyrene for nearly 20 years, why has the rest of the world taken so long to catch up?

Personally, I would love to see the UN step in, or heck even the EU or any other multilateral group, call for a ban on Polystyrene. Anyone know someone I can email about this?

UPDATE : Thanks to Natasja, I managed to find a ban polystyrene petition on the PM’s site. Please join me at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/banpolystyrene/

And I’ve created a facebook group calling for the ban, please join!