I’ve just read a blog by Scott Anthony who leads Innosight’s Asian operations and is of course an expert in Innovation, while he is undoubtedly a leader in the subject, I can’t help think a little different.
If you’ve read Steve Job’s bio, you will resonate with this that most successful innovators are consistently portrayed as possessing a passion that borders on dogmatism, as like Steve Jobs, they work tirelessly to bend reality to achieve their vision. Steve Jobs and his “reality distortion field” serving as the prototypical example.
Quoting Rosabeth Moss Kanter ”that “everything can look like a failure in the middle” and Mike Tyson that “Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face.” Passion is necessary to keep pushing when the punch inevitably lands.
While he quotes and agrees that passion is a critical component of innovation and that innovation is awfully hard work, with plenty of false starts, he believes that passion only matters if it leads to an innovation that delivers impact, measuring that impact in revenues, profits, improved process performance, or something entirely differently!
I believe in that “something entirely different”. Some of the most important and basic research that bring about disruptive innovation, are the ones that have come about from passion and ideas that were impossible to prove with mounting evidence and bills that may have suggest otherwise, but at the end every peace of work and passion finds its place, high or low and finally leads to a disruptive innovation, directly or indirectly.
Follow your passion, bend the reality and make it happen…
February 14th, 2012 by Ali ParandehNew or Upgrade
December 15th, 2011 by Ali ParandehChristmas time is probably one of the most difficult times for making a decision on what to do about your aging computer. With new power hungry software and constant updates most computers feel out of date before you’ve even walked out the shop. Furthermore the credit crunch, euro crisis and the never ending Christmas shopping list makes it ever harder to decide what’s best. So where do you start and how do you decide? Difficult question but generally this is how I personally would tackle it.
First question is how old is the PC and was it new when you purchased it? If the PC is under three years old and it was new, then your best option is to maybe upgrading it or just simply having it fully reinstalled. Often PCs slow down because of all the programs that have been installed and not removed, the windows registry becomes overloaded, the files are fragmented and no simple clean up will help as much as a full re-installation from scratch. It will feel the equivalent of you having put a new engine in your car. In this process changing the hard disk and upgrading the memory is often cheap and very effective in speeding up your PC. Expect to spend around €150 to €250 for a good job, that includes backing up of all your existing data, replacing the hard drive with a new one, installing windows and all the programs you had, copying your data back into your PC and also giving it a good physical clean, in particular the fans and the power supply. This should easily give you a good PC to use for another 2 to 3 years, increasing your PC life upto 5 or 6 years.
If your PC is older than 4 or even 5 years, you really need to start looking at a new or even a refurbished machine that’s no older than 1 or 2 years. When deciding on a new machine consider the following: If space is an issue, you may want to consider All In One machines. These are PCs like the iMACs where everything is in the monitor and you get a wireless keyboard and mouse. They are usually touch screen and power full machines that come with a lot of extra costing around 1000 euro. Then you have the standard desktops, which are a bit bulkier, take up more space, but on the other hand they tend to be cheaper, more easily repairable and will set you back around 500 to 600 euros. Finally you’ve got the laptops which are forever dropping in price. The downside to laptops are upgrading and repairs are always considerably more expensive and the screen size is often 15.6” which you need to keep in mind if keyboard and monitor size are an issue.
So, a few simple considerations and hopefully you should be able to make the right decision.
Good thoughts, Good words and Good deeds.
November 14th, 2011 by Ali ParandehIt is popularly believed that the Parsis are sun worshippers or fireworshippers. This is a fallacy, confusing the symbol with the idea it represents, like the shadow for the substance. In brief, fire is always fire to Parsis, but it is sacred in so far that it symbolizes the great truth of purification and fire temples, where fire is kept constantly alight by burning sandal-wood and incense, so much frequented by the followers of Zoroaster, are symbolic and intended to remind them of the wise maxim, “Try and live a pure life by Good thoughts, Good words and Good deeds. This maxim indeed containas the whole essence and substance of the zoroastrian teachings.
A life is led most perfect, physically and spiritually, if it be pure. Fire the great purifier “whe all poison is burnt up”, is the truest symbol of purity. Thus the same element stands for life as well as purity. To hold fire therefore an object of adoration, as it is held by the Parsis, is equivalent to holding life and purity as the cardinal points one’s existence in this world and the next.
Re-written from “The teachings of Zoroaster
Copycat or Original? The future of European IT and entrepreneurship & Malaga Valley
November 6th, 2011 by Ali ParandehRecently I came across an article by Davor Hebel, http://realdeals.eu.com/blog/the-future-of-european-copycats, in which he argues that there is nothing wrong with copying, pointing to the Samwer brothers, who accordingly perfected the craft and created a fortune by building a number of clones including Alando (clone of Ebay), Jamba (clone of NTT DoKoMo), Zalando (clone of Zappos), and CityDeal (clone and now acquired by Groupon).
This he says in defense of, the fact that European entrepreneurial community often comes under fire for being prone to copying successful ideas from the US and importing them over here. For one he is right, we can say there is nothing wrong with copying when you make it better. Take Google and Skype for example, prior to which there were enough search engines and VoIP services, yet a new and better concept with the right sum of investment made them the leader.
Mr Hebel argues quiet rightly that it is not just the idea – but the execution of that idea – that creates a unique proposition and often redefines how a problem is solved.
However why should European entrepreneurs be copying rather than being original. I believe that part of it is how they are pushed into it. The US is built for allowing an entrepreneur to risk, build and repeat, but Europe hardly allows for that. Risk taking in Europe is discouraged and looked bad upon. The entrepreneur centres are equally, limiting and the funds have so much restrictions that any entrepreneur will find it impossible to get access to.
In Spain for example, the several funds available to entrepreneurs require bank and repayment guarantees, or are based set criteria for one being unemployed, single mother and so on.
What the governments forget, is that Entrepreneurs are not a particular breed of set age, sex, wealth. Good ideas come to all, young and old, male or female, poor or rich. The difference is that in the US, everyone is encouraged and welcomed, yet in Europe the band is closed, in fact so strapped that it hardly allows for any originality to flourish.
Furthermore, there is always a set risk to originality. Afterall an original idea is one that is not tried before, it may work or it may not. It is all based on assumptions, so who is to say what is a good idea and what is a bad idea? Yet again, European banks, investors and entrepreneur centres request such proven models and financial forecasts and high expectation of profit margins that there is hardly any room for trying and failing.
So where does originality go. Well, when I first started university in 1990, I became hooked on BBSs (Bulleting Board Systems). In those I used to sit behind a dumb terminal, (in fact three) login to different boards, science, leisure, etc, etc and chat with other students around the world (mainly US and UK). As I was in London, the one question I constantly got asked by the American studens was “Can you recommend me somewhere to stay in London?” Well of course, there was loads of bread and breakfast and cheap hotels in and around the kensington campus of Kings College. So after answering the question 20 or 30 times, I created a ready made list which I used to email to them. Later that year I printed 500 letters and offered each B&B the chance to be on my list for 20GBP per year. Unfortunately I had no interest with several responses, thanking me that they can’t see the benefit. Was I too early for the system?
The same thing happened, when Internet opened up in 1994? I knew that just selling access to the internet should be lucrative enough, unfortunately at that time I was in the midst of my PhD so the project got the lesser of my attention.
In 2005, I found myself in the same situation again. I had a great idea. Just joined our committee for the community I lived in and I found that there is nothing to help deal with the communication system. It is all paper based, once or twice a year and that’s it. So I set about testing with different systems and. Some found it a good idea and some thought it was stupid and adviced me against. Against all odds and the expense of selling my property investments and spending all my savings, I finally created a website service for communities www.ocm-online.com. I pushed forward from 2007 to the recession in 2008 and 2009, in between others came along with similar ideas like mycasaonline.es & opendoors.es and left the race and I carried on. 2010 was a small breakthrough were a small business investor helped us with some cash injection, pushing the project forward. Now nearly 6 years later, I am still riding against the tide, but despite all those who advised against the idea, I can now see the light. Signups from Madrid, Zaragoza, India and Venezuela. They are all property owners who want to be informed about the issues in the place they live in. They want updates and transparency and power to decide and that’s what we give them.
So, original ideas, there are plenty of in Europe, but European investors need to learn from their US counterparts to take more risks and open the door to entrepreneurs without restrictions of age, sex and idea. As Mr Hebel puts it; “it is not just the idea – but the execution of that idea” but equally having the chance to execute it.
The future of Europe’s entrepreneurship and originality depends on the receptiveness of the governments allowing and enabling entrepreneurs to take risk without penalization, reducing setup costs and overheads, and above all opening their minds to new and untested ideas.
About the author
Ali Parandeh is the founder & CEO of Urbytus, providing self managed websites for communities and administrators. He has a member of the London Institution of Analysts and Programmers and he has written 5 books and numerous articles on topics ranging from Genetic Engineering to Internet for Business.
Wine a source of inspiration and delight, discovered in Shiraz by King Jamshid.
October 9th, 2011 by Ali ParandehWe have spent the past 9 months, working for a new company, that is bottling and distributing wine from around the world. As such every restaurant we go to and every time we go shopping nothing is more important than to analyse the different bottles of wine, their design, bottle, paper and marketing campaign. Along with every article I read that has anything to do about wine, wine and wine. So I found it most amazing when I read the following remark about wine, in the book of “The teachings of Zoroaster, and the Philosophy of the Parsi Religion” published in 1913. Wine has been the source of delight and inspiration, from khayam to Hafiz, their work is filled with peoms of love, wine and the soul.
So legend has it that wine was an accidental discovery during the riegh of King Jamshid. A lover of fresh fruit and in particular grapes which were grown in abundance in famous area of Shiraz, a large supply of the fruit was always kept in a special jar. As time passed the grapes fermented and as such became unfit to consume at mealtime when it was usually served. As such due to the bitter taste and the intermediate phase during the fermentation (aldehyde) that was nothing less than a nasty food poisining, the jar was labelled poison and as such was stored for its new found purpose in a secular part of the palace.
Now a favourite lady of the king’s household wished (for reasons best known to herself) to put an end to her life, and knowning that this deadly poison lay so close at hand she took a huge sip from this jar and boldly courted death. However she merely became intoxicated and fell into a deep sleep. Upon wakening she found herself very much more alive than dead. She repeated the experiment again and again, and to her surprise each time she felt more and more alive until she regained her former cheerfulness.
Such a change did not pass unnoticed by King Jamshid, who inquired the cause of this change. The lady unwillingly confessed that in order to put an end to her miserable existence had resorted to drinking the poison but to her surprise the poison had freed her soul from her troubles.
From that time onwards, large quantities of this poison were ordered by King Jamshid, who in company of his courtiers took great pleasure of posioning themselves, renaming the bitter drink “Zahre khosh” or the “pleasant poison”.
So enjoy, drink the pleasant poison and free your souls.
Is Volvo what it used to be? Service failure and assistance…
September 20th, 2011 by Ali ParandehIs Volvo for life? Apparently not, nor would they like it to be. Sick and tired of the long waiting list for BMW service in Marbella, I decided that I should maybe try something different. Pick a safe car from a small dealer, that can handle its customers. How wrong could I have been. The first issue was that the front right hand tyre would scratch against the body everytime you did a full left turn. After numerous visits back and forth and wasting a good 2 to 3 hours each time, they finally admited that it was a known manufacturing issue. They proceeded to reduce the turning point of the steering wheel to fix the problem. If you thought it was parking it easy before, now it turned into a 2 minute job. Next was the in built mobile unit, which constantly jammed and most of the times dialed or repeated the second number that you dialed twice and omitted the first number. The result: it took you two to three trys to dial a simple number, not to mention the increased risk of accident.
Forget the issues with the car which were nothing but surmountable compared to the service or (no service) that followed. Less than 3 months after I had purchased the car, I was unfortunate enough for some to drive into the back of the car. While the car was fine, the boot could no longer be closed. It took the Volvo dealer in Marbella no less than 2 months to fix it. Their excuse was that I did not have an appointment for the repair. The repair job was bad and a car left so long in a garage is expected to come back with a few dents and scratches that of course any good dealer will deny.
No later and no sooner than a year, driving at 20kmph I bump into the a range rover with a tow bar. My car practically undamaged, but the tow bar has gone through the plastic bumper which has then bent a main security bar and put a hole in the radiator.
So Volvo assistance kindly offers to take the car and offer me a taxi me home. As it was a Saturday they keep the car in their service area where their guard dog proceeds to jump on top of the car, scratch it all and crack the front screen. This was really nothing. It took Volvo dealers from September to December to fix a radiator and the security bar that was bent. After months of fighting they finally agreed to paint the car and offer me a free oil change as courtesy for all the troubles.
One must be mad to think a Volvo is for life or that they would like to offer anything such as a customer service. Their attitude we will ignore the issue until you get tired and leave us alone.
Finally last week, both head light blow out; at the same time. So after trying for nearly 1 hour, I decided it is not something, but since I had paid for an extended Volvo on road assistance service, I decided to call upon their service. After about an hour they proceeded to send me a tow truck to have the car towed to a nearby garage as Volvo assistance did not have anyone who could change the light bulb of their own cars.
So, thinking about buying a Volvo. Think again.
To Biz or Not to Biz?
August 18th, 2011 by Ali ParandehI have just read a very interesting blog article by Martin Varsavsky about his brain storming session with the Spanish presidential candidate Alfredo Rubalcaba.
I was actually in the process of doing some search before writing a letter to the Seguridad Social and Hacienda and offering them one of two options. I was actually going to give them one of two options:
1) They either help small companies by reducing social security costs and taxes, or
2) Risk having hundreds of top technicians, managers and programmers on the street collecting unemployment!
Well it may seem like blackmail, but I don’t see it that way.
At the moment Spain is suffering from one of highest unemployment rates in Europe. One reason is; it is too expensive too hire and it is cheaper to outsource to other countries, in particular if your in the IT industry. Second reason is, there are already lots of people collecting unemployment and still working but not declaring, because either their employee can’t afford to pay their social security and their salary or because they just can’t afford them on contract.
So what has the Spanish government done about it. Well they have created lots of incentives, for example they help employees by giving reduced rates for social security. Great that’s exactly what I was talking about, but when you actually look at, you will have to employ an employed mother of two, who is over 50 and has been unemployed for over two years, or a disabled person with no hands or legs, and hundreds of other criteria and once all those criteria have been met, you can then start looking for someone who can actually look for one of them who could be a competent programmer, accountant or sales rep. Hmmm. What if I’ve already found a talented person who is out of job but doesn’t match this criteria! Well tough luck? Doesn’t creating employment get you anything? Yes: IRPF, taxes and of course the social security system which afterwards awards time off and all sorts of incentives to the employee not to work. Perfect. That’s all you need to run a business.
So as an entrepreneur, I am now at the dilemma point. Where would Spain rather have the money? Going to Spaniards in Spain or outside to India and China? Should I close the company just to make a stand? Will they be even bothered if hundreds of people lost their jobs!
Unfortunately Spanish authorities and the politicians do not see this simple side. All the talks about their help to small companies and entrepreneurs are nothing but hot air promises and we can tell you from experience.
The sad thing is I know what the answer to my letter is going to be, but I am going to blog this so that one day someone help entrepreneurs and businesses flourish in a country that could do with promoting businesses rather than hindering them!
iEverything, resistance to change and the future PCs
July 12th, 2011 by Ali ParandehAs Apple announces the arrival of their iCloud they also predict the death of PC. It is not too difficult to see that the trend has been a move back to the old days of dumb terminals. Netbooks once developed for helping the developing countries are selling better now in the developed countries mainly because for most people, all they need is a dumb terminal to connect them to the internet where all their emails, pictures, files and information is held. At one of my companies, Urbytus, we have dedicated the past 4 years developing several websites that allows property owners, committee members, presidents and community owners just that; an online system that centralizes all their information.
Yet the resistance to change from paper or old fashioned email still exists. As best put by an entrepreneur developing application for iPhone “Most people need it, they just don’t know that they need it yet”. This is a fact that is confirmed to me on a daily basis. In fact last week at a meeting while I was doing a presentation, I tried to emphasis that with our product there is no need to worry about data backup as all data is backed up on our servers, instantly the client interrupted me to say “well that’s a useless service as we don’t keep anything on our computer, everything is kept on good old fashioned paper and it will never get lost. ”!
The above statement proves the resistant, from many and not just this particular client, to change, not to mention their ignorance about the fate of paper records. However with every new product this resistance will exists. Just less than 10 years ago, people resisted mobiles and emails; now they have become a necessity.
The reality is that the “i” has happened and PCs will be a thing of the past in the near future. In fact my ideal future PC would be one that I envisaged in 1997. A hardware that I can stick my hard disk or nowadays DVD or USB stick and it would boot with all my offline programs, or a PC that has no keyboard or screen and is only a small box with processing power and a projector for the keyboard and the display.
It might sound futuristic but prototypes already exist and with the advance of internet it won’t be long before most data will be held in data farms and PCs once again become dumb terminals.
They don’t know that they need it yet.
June 8th, 2011 by Ali ParandehI have just read an interesting article in the Financial Times about Apple’s App developers.
The most interesting part of the article to me is that how much creativity there is and how many startup companies are ignored or just copied. As I find ourselves in a similar situation, it is interesting to see how good ideas are at first totally ignored and then taken up by bigger companies or copied. Marco Arment, developer of Instapaper is a good example of this. He wrote “Today, fewer than 1 per cent of iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch owners are Instapaper customers. The potential market is massive, but most people don’t know that they need it yet.”
The same could be said for Electricity and many other invetions. In fact most visionaries and entrepreneurs are in the same boat. Sometimes they know the scope of their application and sometimes they are just creating for the sake of it but most investors will tell them that there is no market for it.
While our online web portal OCM is gradually winning ground and being adopted by communities, when we came up with the idea it was totally written off by most Venture Capital companies. It is only in the past year that they have been showing interest but still cannot grasp the real potential of the market. I can only repeat Marco Arment comment: “The potential market is massive, but most people don’t know that they need it yet.”
How did facebook reach 500,000,000 users!
May 15th, 2011 by Ali ParandehUnlike iPod where one has to actually make an investment and pay for the product, Facebook is a free service where you can use it whenever you like. There are a number elements to consider in here. For a website to grow organically it will take a lot longer than it has taken Facebook to reach its current users. So other methods have to be adopted.
Facebook’s first and foremost way of getting more users to its website is through scanning your address books. As you sign up to Facebook for the firts time you are asked if you would and allow Facebook to scan your address book and find friends that might already be on Facebook. That’s fine, because you always would want to link to your existing friends and if they are on the same network that you have already joined then even better.
The second part of their methodology is that all these email addresses that have been scanned from your address book, which you had already given permission for, are kept in Facebook’s database and as soon as someone signs up to Facebook next, if their email address matches one in your address book, they are automatically sent an email via Facebook, stating that “John Smith would like to friends with you on Facebook”. Now that’s not necessariy true. First of all you have hundreds if not thousands of email addresses in your address book and not all of them may necessarily be friends and even if they were at the time you signed up to Facebook, they may not necessarily remain your friend for ever. If a certain person in your address book happens to sign up to facebook later than you and at the time they sign up to Facebook, let’s say you and this person have had an arguement and are no longer friends, then this presents a problem. The issue is that at the time you signed up to Facebook you consented to Facebook scanning your address book and inviting all your friends on your address book, however the message that is sent at that later date, directly via Facebook, is not necessariy approved by you at the time that it is sent. This may create an unwanted situation. Why should you invite someone you are no longer friends with to be your friend on Facebook and see and share your private life.
Let’s look at an example and something even funnier. I signed up to Facebook some years ago, but given all the privacy issues and the fact that I did not want to receive hundreds of message on a daily basis at work, I created and used a new email address for my Facebook account. I then logged into Facebook and did not allow it to scan my address book. So far so good. I connected to a few people that I wanted and only emails from those people who would search to find me by name.
More recently, I updated my profile and the Facebook profile application suggested that I should provide a secondary email, just in case I should forget my password and if the primary email account fails to work then it would be difficult to recover the password. Good suggestion, so I updated my profile and added my work email address.
In less than a few hours and all in one go, I received over 10 emails from people I know stating that “They would like to be friends with me on Facebook”. Now several questions ran through my mind at that point!
1. Do people have really nothing better to do than spend their whole time on Facebook looking for new and old friends?
2. Even if the above was true, were all of these people searching for me and wanting me to be their friends at the same time?
3. Finally many of these people are my clients! Do they really want to be my friends?
The answer to all of them is NO.
As sad as it may sound; No one was searching for me and none of them had specifically asked to become my friend on Facebook. It was merely that when they signed up to Facebook, they allowed the website to search and keep all the email addresses in their address book and then link them to anyone new who signs up or updates a profile.
While it does not take a PhD to work the above methodology out, what confirms Facebooks methodology is the fact that I received the same invitation in the list of 10 emails I received from a client who had died about a year earlier.
So Facebook’s strategy to find your friends for you is an interesting way and it has allowed the website to become the biggest social networking site that it is today. However this method poses some issues and as I mentioned earlier on Facebook’s notifications for adding more people to your friend list and their network is sent at later dates without your knowledge and consent at that particular time, leaving you vulnerable to issues and encounters that you may not have otherwise expected.
