Here’s the thing, it’s nothing new! Sony Ericsson had a video calling phone more than a few years ago. A colleague at Yahoo! reminded everyone about this with his tweet and link to some Germans on YouTube making avideo call using the Sony Ericsson k-800.

The difference is that the experience is way better now than it was then. The resolution, the camera’s and wifi mean that you’re not dependent on network access and it can be a pretty good experience. That’s all pretty big. Overall the technology is ready for mainstreaming, and Apple is great at releasing a technology when it’s ready for mainstreaming.

Launch a service too early and it’s restricted to the UberGeeks’s of the world. I have friends who had Sony Ericsson phones with video calling capability, problem was as most of us weren’t ready for the calling capability these friends spent most of their time using the phone and texting rather than video calling. It’s like people using email in 1991, facebook in 2001, twitter in 2008 etc. If the network isn’t ready for the technology it’s not going to really get adopted. I call this my technology mainstreaming theory and I’ve drawn up a little visual explaining the principle and how this might apply to video calls. Apple is potentially right on the money, launching right when the technology is ready for mainstream, I expect Android to follow suit quickly, and the fine folks at RIM, Windows to lag a bit – don’t even get me started as to when Nokia and Samsung will catch on.

(Note – if you have trouble seeing this, click on it for notes on the flickr page)

This seems to be a general trait with Sony Ericsson, they seem to be great at creating things when the technology is there, rather than when the technology has matured to a point where it becomes a really good experience. Which is what Apple’s doing here and done since their foray into smart phones.

As well, by launching Facetime as an open standard Apple’s hoping other phone manufacturers will build on it, but I’m sure they’re banking on most people wanting to buy and use the video calling capabilities on the iPhone 4. Not a bad bet by Apple.

Personally, I think the idea of eating your own dog food is bull. If you’re a dog maybe this works but if you’re a human being with some idea for taste, quality, performance and functionality dog food is just that, food for dogs. How do you get better than the competition if you don’t know just how good the competition is? How do you succeed if you’re not familiar with what works in the market?

My belief is that employees should be charged with making products they want to use, and that the aim of the corporation to be to build products so much better than the competition that people inside the company don’t want to use other products, but rather become evangelists for your products to their friends and contacts outside of the company.

If you work in a company where people within the company are using your competitions products or services, don’t out law it, charge them with the idea to build products better than the ones their using now. Get people to build something, use it for two weeks and then see if they switch, if not, why not? Can you fix it, can you make it better, do it, switch again, and now? Repeat often until your employees switch to your own product by choice. I call this the “stop eating dog food and start making caviar” or “caviar” approach to product selection and development in an organisation, i wonder if it will stick.

Now this is Jim Joyce, an umpire who made a mistake on a baseball play that costed Armando Galarraga a perfect game, he’s contrite, he says things like “I missed it… I kicked the sh*t out of it, nobody feels worse than I do, I took a perfect game away from this kid”…:

When you mess up, take responsibility and apologise. Be honest and upfront and say you’re sorry. Joyce did this, he found Galarraga and apologized after wards and everybody was big and understanding.

Zuckerberg and Facebook continually do things with privacy and instead of being honest and quick with an apology they act defensive and put the blame on users rather than accepting the issues on their site. This is one of the reasons why my pictures will be on flickr, my blog posts will be here and not on Facebook and my status messages will be on twitter and linkedin as well as facebook. I’m not naïve, I’m not going to quit Facebook, it’s too big a part of my communication with people, but it won’t be the only place I store information and a lot of this decision has to do with the way the company handles themselves and their apologies.

3. Why set up your start-up in the UK? Especially in the current environment of higher taxes (VAT, capital gains, etc) and reduced government spending?

Here’s something controversial for you, I don’t mind paying taxes. Especially for things like education and health care. As someone who grew up with a single mom who worked very hard, I had to take on a huge debt to go to University and then graduate school so I appreciate everything the state does and if that means that I take a little bit less home so be it.

At the same time London is one of the most active entrepreneurship and digital centres so anytime you can get a mix like that you’d be mad not to take advantage of it.

The capital gains tax hits entrepreneurs and investors hard, but I do believe the government won’t take it higher than 40% which is what it was a couple of years ago. Hopefully, the government will include some breaks and exemptions for entrepreneurship.

Right now you have to be where your market is and where you can build a business, if you get to a point where you’re worrying about how much of your profits are being taken by taxation you’re going in the right direction. For me, the amount of connections, meetings, clients, advisors, investors you have in the UK and especially in London is phenomenal. People always talk about Silicon Valley and that’s great if you’re a tech company, but in places like London and New York you’re closer to the real world, where most people look at you funny when you say you “tweet”.

More on the Nestoria blog

“1. the marginal cost of a newspaper is zero. 2. there is perfect competition. conclusion? zero industry profit, paywalls or not.”

I’m sure I’ve written about the eventual doom in the newspaper industry as well but no one ever talks about how they could make it work and what would need to be done. Don’t get this twisted, I don’t think pay walls are a good idea, but I do think they could, repeat COULD, work if done right.

So here are my thoughts, I believe there are three principles to make payment for news content work:

1 – offer superb editorial/analysis/content that is unavailable elsewhere
2 – keep it cheap and painless to pay
3 – Consistency across competitors

First, pay walls work when you have superb analysis or original great content like the WSJ or the FT. Where people aren’t paying for the “news” they’re paying to read commentary and gain insights. It works for people like the economist and monocle for content creators with a large, affluent readership. If you don’t have content that is killer odds are you’ll put up a pay wall and users will go elsewhere.

The other element that could help a pay wall succeed is making it dirt easy to purchase. Think of iTunes, how easy is it to buy music on iTunes? How easy is it to do a purchase on Amazon. One click and you can purchase. For a pay wall to succeed you’ll need to make it super easy to for users to pay. Make it even a little complicated and the users are off. iTunes might be more expensive than some other 3rd party websites, but the fact that you can make the purchase easily means I save time from interactive with the complex shopping basket functionality that you see on other sites.

Lastly, if you don’t have specialist content you better make sure that your competitors are not close enough to you in terms of content and aren’t giving the content away for free. In the UK the BBC is likely to always give content away as long as that’s the case it will be difficult for anyone to really put up a viable pay wall. To really make it work you need consistent pricing policies but most people would call this collusion. So if you’re a news media company don’t bank on this third principle.

The Irish News really failed across the board, they didn’t provide great analysis and content that was original, they didn’t make it easy to subscribe and their price point was all over the place. So to make it succeed, focus on creating great content, providing analysis and features that people value and making it dead simple to purchase and don’t price it at a point where it becomes a competitive disadvantage and pay walls might, I repeat MIGHT, have a shot.

Two bloggers/business folks I trust, were on either side of this issue last week
First, I came across a tweet by Umair Haque last week which said:

“every great company reaches a transition point: founders must cede to professional ceo’s. that’s facebook’s real problem. google did it.”

I don’t agree. We had a bit of friendly back and forth on twitter which ended with a great analogy of comparing Zuckerberg to Jobs as being like comparing NWA to T-Pain.

Another blogger/entrepreneur/investor writing about a similar problem was Ben Horowitz (of Andreesen Horowitz) who wrote a blog post about how worrying that whether an executive’s ability to scale is can be corruptive.

Let’s look at this specifically (in the case of facebook and Zuckerberg) and philosophically.
In the case of Facebook – Zuckerberg might not be Steve Jobs and he might not be Gates or any other founder-turned-exec who managed a company that he founded and turned it into a multi billion-dollar company. Doesn’t matter, what matter’s is that he has a solid advisory group around him as he learns. Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO) is pretty frakin smart, as is Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel and the folks at Accel and Greylock who are either investors or advisors in the company. Not to mention the numerous managers and leaders that Facebook has brought on board from Google and other large well established players.

To say that Zuckerberg is running the ship on his own is like saying that Jobs didn’t get any assists from the likes of Jonathan Ive or the other designers/engineers/leaders within Apple, not true.

Philosophically speaking, people learn throughout their whole life, as young people we learn with mentors and structures to help us learn the lessons others have learnt before us. Or we learn through experience. The first time entrepreneur or the executive learning to lead. And we continue learning throughout our lives, whether as a pensioner learning how to put videos on YouTube, or a grandparent figuring out Skype.

It’s not always easy or intuitive but that doesn’t mean that skills can’t be learnt. What people need are people to mentor them and the structure to learn effectively.

According to multiple free online dictionaries equanimous means:
“Calm and composed; of stable disposition” or “having or showing equanimity; even-temperedness”

The reason why I’m writing about being equanimous is two fold, firstly the celebrations/riots in Montreal after the Canadiens won a playoff round (that’s right, a playoff round, not the Stanley Cup, not even the conference championship, the second round). As well our stroller was stolen (we think, it may have been taken in mistake) from outside our flat. Two pretty big things, one very positive and one very negative but in both instances being equanimous is very important.

Things can go very well, and things can go very badly. But as long as you’re equanimous you can move on and move up. For Montreal, there are still two rounds of potential playoffs to win before they can declare themselves champions. For us, we still have our default stroller, and we’re okay, our daughter is very happy and we’re still blessed overall.

This is a lesson in business as well. I’m reading Blue Ocean Strategy right now and the interesting thing is that the authors research has shown that no company remains successful forever. Companies that do remain successful for extended periods reinvent themselves repeatedly.

I believe being equanimous in life and in business is one of the keys to happiness and every day I struggle and fight to remain equanimous. I’m glad Tasleem introduced me to the philosophy.

When you allow an advertiser to buy the whole page, change your background and put some crap over your content, here’s what I believe you’re saying – “Your advertising dollars are worth more than our costumers experience and our product, so allow us to bend over while you have your way with both”.

Here’s a bolt of reality to media owners; consumers, costumers, PEOPLE don’t like advertising, they tolerate it. We understand that there’s a need for businesses to make money so heck show some ads, some body somewhere will think that this Vodka ad on the side of my NBA scores page is relevant and someone will click, it just won’t be me.

Your content, product, whatever you own, better be twice as good as the competition if you’re going to submit your audience to a takeover of your content by an advertiser, because if it’s not, odds are that some portion of your audience won’t come back. Cause wherever you have people doing it for the money, you have people doing it better for the content and for the audience.

So here’s my advice, stop pimping your products out to advertisers. Stop bending over to make an extra couple of bucks. Start offering advertisers better alternatives, creative widgets or whatever that don’t harm the consumer experience but rather enhance it. Start really focusing on creating a better experience for people. Or accept that you’re lazy, don’t care about the people using your product and are out to make a quick buck and watch your product suffer in the long run.

Socially, we’ve met up with friends, gone out without the baby and been spoilt for choice for take away and nights out. The Bee’s made a friend and been invited to a baby group, so it’s been great to be back.

Professionally, I couldn’t be happier. Being at the London Business School entrepreneurship conference last week was definitely a highlight. Meeting potential investors, potential partners and potential clients for the business I’m working on launching was great. Being able to set up meetings all week and get stuff done was awesome. Also not being forced to squeeze a months worth of meetings into two days is such a relief.

I’ve been reading Drive by Daniel Pink, and I totally feel driven right now. Pink talks bout the three pillars of motivation being Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. I wouldn’t say that I was totally deprived of these three over my last three-five years, but I was awfully close. It’s nice to have motivation back.

Finally, I’m back to blogging as well, it’s my intention to blog better and more often then ever before. Wish me luck.

I’ll always have a soft spot for Yahoo! it was part of the reason I joined. Having taught myself html on geocities, signed up to Yahoo! mail in the 90s, using flickr, delicious and mybloglog all before they were acquired, I loved Yahoo’s products. And in my 3 years with the company I have met some really great intelligent people that I know I will be contacts for life. I’m not leaving because I don’t believe Yahoo! will bounce in the right direction, I’m leaving because I’m excited about doing my own thing, something different and something where I believe I’ll be having a tremendous impact.

To all the Yahoo!’s I’ve worked with thank you for making the last 3 years such a blast. And I’m sure our paths will cross again. To all the haters out there, I’ll remind you that the in 1997 Michael Dell said that Apple should close down and return money to shareholders, think Steve Jobs is glad he battled through all the haters. I’m not saying that Yahoo! will have the market cap that Apple has, but I do believe when it comes to the internet market game it’s not even half time.