justmy2p: How to start a new venture

The new winkwaves blog

2006-02-21T16:19:00.001+01:00

We decided that it would be a good idea to merge this justmy2p blog into our corporate winkwaves.com site. So, today I copied all my former posts into our new winkwaves blog, and from now on we will stop posting on this justmy2p blog, please update your favorites to our brand new blog: blog.winkwaves.com.

If you use RSS, please update to feed://blog.winkwaves.com/.

Thanks for your time, attention and comments, and hope to see you soon on blog.winkwaves.com :)

It has been my pleasure!

--Rene.

The new winkwaves blog

2006-02-21T16:19:00.000+01:00

We decided that it would be a good idea to merge this justmy2p blog into our corporate winkwaves.com site. So, today I copied all my former posts to justm2p into our new winkwaves blog, and from now on we will stop posting on this justmy2p blog, please update your favorites to our brand new blog: blog.winkwaves.com.

If you use RSS, please update to feed://blog.winkwaves.com/.

Thanks for your time, attention and comments, and hope to see you soon on blog.winkwaves.com :)

It has been my pleasure!

--Rene.

Some google fun

2006-01-30T09:07:00.000+01:00

Always fun to check how well your company scores in google.

I posted earlier why we chose winwkaves as our new company name. One of the nice advantages was that winkwaves scored a ZERO RESULT in google, meaning that we were really the first winwkaves on earth!

Wanna know how many hits winkkaves currently has? Just google :)

Last night google bot checked watvindenwijover.nl
So, I just checked with google "wat vinden wij over web2.0" (meaning: what do we think about web2.0), and see: we're number one hit to explain what all of us think about web2.0, cool!

First Dutch blogger to refer to watvindenwijover.nl

2006-01-28T02:09:00.000+01:00

Today a first Dutch blogger refered to watvindenwijover.nl. Vincent, I quoted him earlier because of his interesting posts on web2.0 and attention xml.

Read his review and opinion about watvindenwijover.nl (sorry guys, again in Dutch, isn't it about time to start to learn Dutch? :)

Hating the term web 2.0

2006-01-28T01:50:00.000+01:00

Today one of our beta test users posted an interesting link to Harry Pierson's blog post titled Hating the term web 2.0.

If you check our homepage, it states: Winkwaves brings web2.0 to the business market in the Netherlands. So, you might easily be mislead and think that we love the term web2.0

Let me be honest with you: I hate the term web2.0 as much as Harry does. However, we have two simple reasons why we decided (for now!) to use it in our marketing communication:
- On the contrary to some opportunistic companies who just try to jump on a potential new hype-train, we do have a vision how web technology enables the creation and development of communities of practice, and can be used internally within companies to enable smoother cooperation and knowledge sharing. If people wanna label social bookmarking and blogging as "web2.0", that's fine with us
- we are opportunistic enough to try to benefit from surving the web2.0 media attention these days ;)

So, I would like to invite everyone to judge our vision and our products, not our opportunistic use of a communication label :)

Public beta!

2006-01-28T01:30:00.000+01:00

This week we finalized the work to make our first web2.0 service IE compliant. Oh my god, how much time we had to spend on creating fixes around IE bugs (I'm afright MS insists to call these features). If we could only charge this additional work to MS we wouldn't need investors anymore...

But anyway, the good news is, we decided our service is mature enough to go into public beta. Therefor, I would invite all dutch readers to check watvindenwijover.nl.

We are very excited to bring the first real web2.0 service to the Netherlands (and sorry guys, that's why it's al in Dutch, to stress the Dutch nature of this service...). Watvindenwijover.nl is a combination of light weight blogging and social bookmarking.

I posted as well a white paper on how to use web 2.0 for knowledge management on our corporate site. This white paper explains as well the basics of "watvindenwijover.nl".

Our business model is pretty easy: Anyone can use watvindenwijover.nl (of course) for free to manage his own bookmarks, share them with others and publish his opions like a lightweight blog. In March we will introduce a paid version for the business market in the Netherlands. It will offer the ability to control the access of your information to a small group of friends, some collegues, your deparment or even your company.

Next week we will try to get some attention in the Dutch press and of course we hope to raise the interest of some bloggers in the Netherlands...

We will as well continue to fine tune layout and functionality, so any tips or suggestions are appreciated (you'll find the contact details on winkwaves.com.

End of the virtual era

2006-01-21T19:55:00.000+01:00

This week we encountered the end of the virtual era. No longer just a digital existence for Winkwaves. Why? We bought a printer. Strange, we have been working for quite some time now and could pretty much live without a printer. But now we are entering the era of contracts. And contracts are physical things you know. People like contracts on paper. With signatures. And stamps. And spoiled coffee. God knows why people are so fond off paper...

And secondly, we recieved our new winkwaves business cards and winkwaves letters (until now we used the former bPerform ones of course). Thanks to good old Andre, who designed them for us. Thanks Dre :) Wanna learn more about Andre? His web site contains an extensive presentation of his work... (kidding)

So, now you understand what I mean with: the end of the virtual era :)

Energy!

2006-01-14T18:01:00.000+01:00

Well, to start simple: I experience a kind of overflow of energy these days!

Well Rene, you might ask, I haven't read many posts from you over the last month, so what's the excitement all about? Right, that's true, so let's bring you up to speed again and give you a short update of the last few weeks.

In December lot of things happened. Until then we were working for my holding company, but since December we are officially a company dedicated to bring web2.0 to the business world in the Netherlands (and afterwards to the whole world of course ;)
But, just a few days before we went to sign all the official papers for starting this company, we realised that we had to change our name. bPerform simply wasn't the best name for us. We have a "board of inspiration" and they suggested us to reconsider our name. Well, so we did. Since December last year we are called: Winkwaves.

Sounds good, right? Wanna know what the name means? Just check our homepage at http://winkwaves.com...

Then, we benefit from raising the interest of an investor. Lovely, since this enabled kick starting our activities. Mark and Hans are since January 1st officially working for Winkwaves (and of course, so am I since we officially launched Winkwaves...).

So, we needed an office space to work from. Working from Hans apartment, Mark's house and my house simply didn't work anymore for full time work. So, we found a very interesting office space in the former Cabellero Factory in The Hague. Since they are still in reconstruction phase, we found a temporary office next to the prestigious Malieveld in Den Haag, a beautiful old style Dutch "herenhuis" from our glory years (that is around 1600, remember the "VOC", when we, yes "we" discovered America and founded New York... Interesting twist of history right ;)
Anyway, that's where we will be based until March 10th, when we will get the keys of our own brand new office!

But, that ain't everything: we are in the final beta stage of our first web 2.0 service, that will bring web 2.0 to the Dutch business market. We will send out our press release next week, and in a few weeks we will present it to you! It is really exciting to realise that we might indeed be the first agency that brings web 2.0 to the business market in the Netherlands...

So, if you read between the lines you might realise why we are so excited these days!

Will keep you posted...

Microsoft and flows: about attention

2005-11-25T17:16:00.000+01:00

With the design of bPerform we try to enable the user to work in a "flow", a state of mind that enables you to work highly efficient and effective. I recieved a nice link to a blog on this topic, explaining a Microsoft research project on attention and life-hacking.

The strong point is that this guy understand the essence of usability: prioritize information instead of filtering information. Interesting! Thanx for the tip, Vincent...

bPerform on the right track, just need some more PR

2005-11-25T17:10:00.000+01:00

Just bumped into a nice article on Frankwatching, a nice blog on web2.0. This describes exactly what we are doing, we need to work on our PR asap, that's for sure :)

Major steps...

2005-11-25T16:30:00.000+01:00

It has been a while since I posted. You could ask yourself: is that good news or bad news... I would say, optimistic as I am, that's good news :)

We have been quite busy over the last few months, and made several very important steps forward:

We found an investor who understands the importance and fun of doing business in the knowledge economy and web2.0 world. We are really happy to have him aboard!
Our team is now strong and fully focussed on delivering excellent web2.0 services. We have capabilities available according to Alan Coopers golden triange: understanding users and usability, understanding business and commerce, and understanding the enabling technics.
We have created our first web2.0 service. It is running alpha these days, expected to go in beta next week. This service will create a major breakthrought for web2.0 in the Netherlands, and we can hardly wait to show it to you!
We were able to acquire some very interesting projects. Will tell you more about this in later posts, but expect some fireworks ;)
We set up a nice "board of inspiration". A board of very interesting people who are willing to act as sparring partners every now and than, to keep us awake, sharp and focussed on our promise to our users: "perform with a smile"!

So, the fact that I didn't post very often, is just a result of priorities. Priorities in setting up and running the business. But to avoid that this blog is falling asleep, I invited the other team members as well, so you might expect postings from them from now on as well. And if you just wonder how we are doing: drop us an email or come over for a coffee or a beer!

Attention XML and the Big Brother fear

2005-10-26T23:34:00.000+02:00

Today I received a nice mail from Vincent, author of the Zesser blog. He pointed my "attention" to his posting on Attention XML.

Attention XML follows the kind of the same methodology as bPerform does, in a sense that it monitors users behavior, to enable the easier "re-finding" of information you once read. Secondly, it enables to suggest (pro-actively) content that might be interesting for you.

His post reminded me on a topic that I wanted to discuss with you for quite some time, what I will call the Big Brother fear: Today in the Amsterdam subway, I bumped into Maureen, a nice girl who used to sing in one of my former bands. I hadn't spoken to her for quite some time, so we had a nice chat and a good laugh. After a while I told her about bPerform and what we try to achieve.

When she learned from me that bPerform will kind of monitor what you do to be able to pro-actively guide your attention and focus to information that might be interesting for you, she reacted like "oh, mmm, so, my manager will have a powerful means to monitor what I am doing? I would hate that!".

I explained to her that the objective is definitely not to "monitor and punish". I heard about this fear earlier, and this fear is actually an important reasons why we offer our product in combination with training and coaching of both the knowledge workers and their managers. If managers should use web2.0 to monitor what their people are doing, they will reduce the willingness of users to share information in a web2.0 way, and by that, remove all the advantages that web2.0 offers to all of us.

During this discussion I realised two things:
1) The Big Brother fear should be addressed in both the software and the marketing communication of our product
2) that our product is most suitable for organisations with "new types of managers". The former "command and control" managers will not realise any benefits with web2.0, but I am sure the new generation managers that understand the essence of the knowledge economy will not use bPerform to control their people, and by that, will benefit greatly from improved information sharing, community building and happier employees...

Social browsing

2005-10-21T19:34:00.000+02:00

"Social browsing" and "web 2.0" all around the news last week. Even my general management newsletter Fem (sorry folks, in Dutch...) had an article on web2.0, stating that a new internet hype is starting up. But the big news was of course the availability of the (pre-alfa-developer-not ready-be-carefully-expect-bugs...) new social web browser, Flock.

Flock is in my humble opinion the next generation browser: it makes posting to your blog a breeze, it included bookmark sharing via delicious, and is a pretty OK browser as well. It is based on the same engine as firefox.

So I downloaded it today. Installing was, as always, very easy on the Mac: just drag the executable to my application folder and done. Started it... Mmmm, took quite some time to startup. But after a minute, my good old powerbook showed the new browser. Smart, on the default homepage that loaded, an explanation of the basic functionalities and how to configure the social stuff like blogs and delicious. Configuring delicious was easy and yep, there were my delicious bookmarks, right in my favorite menu. Well done guys!

More problems with the blog configuration. I tried to link this justmy2p blog account, it connected to blogger, I gave my username and password, but then... Five minutes of that nice colorful skippy ball (don't know how you guys call it officially, but you know what I mean right) indicating that my Mac was doing "something"... But five minutes is a long time, so I forced the application to quit, and tried again. Same problem. So, that still needs some improvement...

Conclusion: I think tools like Flock do definitely have a future. Of course this was a pre-release so with bugs and performance issues, but they have my vote!

Social software going mainstream?

2005-10-07T09:36:00.000+02:00

Looking around on the internet I see more and more attention for web 2.0 or the so called for social software. Many blogs are discussing tagging, and quite some people are getting used to working with sites like Flickr, delicious, furl or last.fm.

The main concept of these site is: a low barrier way of sharing information with others. For flickr you share photo's, with delicious and furl you share bookmarks, with last.fm it is about music. Just to make sure: last.fm is not just another napster / kazaa like sharing environment, no, instead you only share your favorite playlists: what music and what artists do you like.

Looking at the vast amout of users who wanna share tagged "things", it seems reasonable that we indeed grow more and more to a knowledge economy where information is the means of exchange, as economics would say. You could say: "knowledge is power" is old and boring, "tagged sharing" is hot.

If I'm right by saying that tagged sharing is hot, we are very much on the right track with bPerform. Only thing I hope is that we will be quick enough to win our share of this interesting market. Why should I doubt? Well, most recent development regarding social software is of course ning. Ning is the new venture from Marc Andreessen, remember, co-founder of Netscape, who brought web browsers to the mass.

Ning offers a kind of meta-meta approach to social software: it offers a social software based environment to create... social software! The trashhold for creating shared environments is vastly reduced with ning. They have an interesting weblog about ning as well. Interesting!

My next book

2005-09-20T22:15:00.000+02:00

Last week I was on a friends birthday party. I chatted for a while with his sister, who was considering to do a PhD research. She asked me whether I felt my PhD research had been beneficial or not. I thought about her question. I did spent quite some nights, weekends and oh yeah, days of course, on my research. I obliged myself to work every evening at least half an hour, even if I was tired and wanted to relax, and I permitted myself 2 evenings of fun per week (like playing in my band). As we all know now, I managed to finalize my PhD research in about 2 years, doing it in part time next to my commercial job (again, thanks to the help from all collegues and students from the University of Amsterdam who supported me, and thanx as well to Capgemini, Bortiboll Communications and Bit-IC who funded part of the research).

So you could say, I could have done a lot of other things during those late night hours. Was it worth it? Yes, definitely, I said to my friend's sister. I think I owe quite some interesting projects I worked on over the last years (i.e. the DHL web site) to my PhD thesis and the authority my research gives me.

However, I think if I could do it again, I'm not sure if I would go again for a PhD thesis, or rather write a business book (like I wrote earlier with Martijn Hoogeveen and later one with Monique van Berkel). It is easier to write a business book, since you can focus on your message and the practical relevance of your message, instead of the focus on scientific relevance. And suddenly a thought came to mind: it is about time to write my next book! I should start writing about my bPerform thoughts. About the business impact of Web2.0. What are the problems that managers of knowledge intensive firms run into. And what are the problems that individual knowledge workers run into? I realised that the current books on knowledge intensive organisations don't cover the whole story I want to tell (I realized myself how difficult it is to find good literature for teaching my courses at the University of Amsterdam, remember, the course where we started a nice blog about all aspects of managing information and knowledge).

So, OK, let me think: I plan to interview, let's say, 20 managers and 20 individual knowledge workers. And I am going to ask them questions like:

how important is knowledge for you to survive, and to create competitve advantage?
what are the main challenges facing you as a knowledge intensive firm?
how do you currently manage knowledge? What goes well, what needs improvement?
how do you benefit on a strategic level from ideas and inspiration of your knowledge workers?
what support do internal and external systems offer you, and is their support satisfying?
how do you deal with the fact that knowledge workers are professionals that want to manager their own live and their own work, and that they often share knowledge in peer groups outside the company

And I realise myself that these questions are just a beginning, I need to think more about the real important questions. I need to define some objectives, hypotheses, a research framework... Damn, it's gona be another PhD thesis!! But... With a more practical focus, although I consider to write some scientific articles based on this research as well. Cool! This gives me energy! And it is important for all of us to better understand what is happening in the knowledge economy, so let's go for it! Any suggestions for questions? For people to interview? Just let me know....

Collaboration via Wiki

2005-09-15T17:03:00.000+02:00

The nice thing about posting to this blog, is that interesting people read it and send me emails, specially since google introduced its blog search software. Today I recieved an email from Isaac Garcia. You might know Isaac from the centraldesktop blog. I quote his profile information here: "Isaac co-founded Upgradebase in 1997, a leading product data provider to the Computer and Consumer Electronics industry; and Vendorbase in 1999, a B2B Marketplace for Computer Resellers. Both companies were acquired by CNET Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: CNET) in 2002. During my 3 year tenure at CNET, I served as a Director of North America Enterprise Sales for CNET Channel."

Isaac told me about his new initative, Central Desktop. I visited their site today. It is an interesting collaboration environment based on Wiki. What I like about it is the thougth of a semi-structured, semi-unstructured shared environment, a bit like basecamp, but then completely different :) They use the nice pay off: "reduce team spam". And I think most people in corporate environments, working on major international projects, recognises the spam in their email boxes. And Web2.0 is indeed a perfect way to improve team communication and collaboration, without increasing the number of mails in your inbox.

What I feel, looking at centraldesktop or Basecamp, is the huge need for better collaboration suites than the main providers like Microsoft offer us. So, join the group of people who make the online collaboration world a better place to be, join centraldesktop or bPerform or any other of your favorites, just quit using old fashioned cooperation tools and environments, just wake up and have fun, join web2.0!

My good old powerbook...

2005-09-12T00:34:00.000+02:00

Do you see any difference between this post and previous posts? You should. This post is made with a veeeery big smile on my face. Let me tell you: about 1,5 year ago I had to exchange my lovely titanium powerbook for a dull IBM (nothing wrong with it, a good laptop, but no real identity and a pretty dull image) since Capgemini forbid me to work on my preferred platform. Policy rules and standardisation. So you think a standardised platform helps? I was working on a Capgemini project in brussels for DHL, when my IBM laptop broke down. So, I went down to Capgemini Belgium, about 250 meters from the DHL building where I was based. I showed them my laptop and asked if they could help me. I felt lucky, since I could see a stack of exactly the same laptops behind the service desk. The joy of standardisation. But, it wasn't it good as it seemed.They felt sorry to say, but since I was working for Capgemini Netherlands they couldn't help me, there was no international SLA to help me...

But now the good news: today I configured my good old powerbook again. What a joy, MacOS 10.4 is excellent. I like spotlight, I like the dashboard, I like the rss feature in Safari, I like it all... Mmm... Sorry, I just got carried away enjoying to work with apple again. If you are an apple user, you know what I mean. If you are not, you will not know, and might never understand what I mean. Then, you just better ignore this post, I promise the next posts will be less promo again :)

Consultancy takes too much time...

2005-09-08T16:21:00.000+02:00

You might think, wow, normally Rene posts several times a week to this blog, and now it has been weeks... Is he alright? Is that startup alright? Yep... Alright... The only thing that happened is that I started again with a consultancy job for a few days a week, a startup needs some cash flow of course. And what I already foresaw: it is hard to keep focus on bPerform if you are in consultancy again... However, the good news is that I had again some very good interviews with banks and informal investors, and I feel like being pretty close to a good deal, a deal that should enable the full flash focus of my two brothers in arms. And that's very good news!

Secondly, I am again teaching a nice course at the university of amsterdam. Needs to keep my thinking and inspiration alive, hey! For those of you speaking (or at least understanding) the beautiful Dutch language (smurf language as my UK friends call it), in a few days you might check the blog we started around the theme of the course: management of immaterial values. The students will post their thoughts on the knowledge economy, the information economy, tagging, and all those nice subjects that we are making money and fun with these days :)

So, will update you shortly on some news coming up around bPerform, will keep ya in the loop!

The medium is no longer the message...

2005-08-22T12:13:00.000+02:00

It is always nice if you are working on an idea for months and months, and suddenly someone knows a good label for what you are doing... Mark pointed me via his delicious social bookmark system to some nice links regarding Web 2.0

Until now, I stayed far away from those terms that people tried to apply to new versions or new trends on the internet. To me it isn't really about terms, it is about the underlying trends. However, this Web 2.0 label is pretty much covering what we are working on with bPerform.

What is web 2.0?
We can define web 2.0 compared to the web 1.0 (as we all know it) as:

Many to Many
Whereas the web 1.0 was mostly a few publishers and many readers, with web 2.0 the barriers to publish information, react on information, discuss information are so low, that nearly all users are contributors (or: publishers) as well. This trend started with the commoditization of Content Management systems, but really started of with blogging and wiki.
Syndication and Aggregation
Publishers of information create little chunks of information, that can easily be distributed via media like RSS. By distinguishing between presentation and content, the medium (XHTML) is no longer the message (XML). This goes as well for applications and services. Applications are opened up to link into them and develop new or additional services. Amazon and eBay for example, provide application programming interfaces to their core operational systems, enabling other companies to offer new services (i.e. check out the successful Andale service for eBay). Because information and applications are opened up, you can aggregate content and functionality to offer new services. This links into the core of "the digital economy" or "new economy": increase the value of content by enabling reuse through bundling.
From static information to dynamic knowledge
Whereas the web 1.0 was filled with static content, hidden in HTML pages, web 2.0 is dynamic. Users are continuously tagging information, bundling information, discussing what happens in the world and on the web via blogs or flickr, creating an always changing dynamic snapshot of the world we are living in.

Now assume, we bring these ideas of web 2.0 to the corporate environment. That is exactly what bPerform is about... So, we have a new descriptor of our business. Tiny little issue: most people don't know what web 2.0 is all about... So, spread the word! Send out those links, stories and best practices :)

Read more about web 2.0 via social bookmarks (yep, that is meta-meta you know, reading about web 2.0 via a web 2.0 medium as delicious ;)

Remark: you will find out that most stories about web 2.0 are still about technology and how to make it work. It is up to you and me to bring these ideas to the business environment!

Scam the scammer 404

2005-08-17T13:17:00.000+02:00

We all know some people try to break all rules, and get rich without working. I read a lovely scam the scammer story this morning. Hilarious! Have fun :-)

How to make a letter of intent (101)

2005-08-09T23:32:00.000+02:00

A good friend of mine, who is starting his own company as well, asked me: "Hey Rene, do you have tips on how to write a letter of intent?". My answer was simple: ask your lawyer. You know why? A letter of intent is not needed when you start, since all parties have good intentions. However, like all contracts, a letter of intent becomes important when things don't work out the way expected. And in that case, all detailed phrases matter, and a lawyer is the only person really capable to phrase those details...

However, before you go to your 200$/hour charging lawyer, you can of course start to discuss with your potential partners what you would like to arrange for in your letter of intent. Then, you can take these agreements to your lawyer and ask him to create a sane letter of intent.

Some questions and topics you might wanna address:

Value to be delivered by both parties
Preferably this value is phrased in output terms instead of input terms, since no-one makes money with just input or effort, it is all about the deliverables. Define some milestones to be able to measure the progress in value development;
Number of shares
Define when (date or milestone) each party is able to buy shares, how many they can buy and for what predefined (nominal) price;
Planned exit: Duration of the letter of intent
Since it is a letter of intent, you will most probably want to convert this intention into a real contract. Define for what period of time the letter of intent applies, and plan one or more checkpoints to consider conversion;
Ex parte exit (one-sided)
Define for each party how they can initiate an exit from the letter of intent, and what the penalty is (i.e. how will you value non final deliverables to determine buy out fee)
Violation
Define all types of violations and the penalty for each violation (i.e. not able to buy shares anymore)
Intellectual property and Non Disclosure
Who will own the intellectual property of each deliverable, even if the letter of intent is broken? And for what period of time does the Non Disclosure apply? What is the penalty for breaking the Non Disclosure?
What Law applies
Especially in international cooperations, make clear what law applies (this can be tricky, since local laws might not enable lateral international contracts)

Finally (I might have said this before...): When you are aligned with your potential partners, hire a lawyer to phrase the definite letter of intent, to avoid unclarity in case of any problems (and be real, those problems will arise. Sorry... Did I ruin your dream? No-one said it is going to be easy. However, believe me, in the end it still pays to work for yourself. That feeling is invaluable, so go for it....

ING - The sequel

2005-08-05T15:45:00.000+02:00

When I checked my stats this morning, you know, that's one of those nice first things in my morning ritual, drinking coffee and checking my stats (soon I hope to be able to check my actual turnover of course, even more interesting), anyway, when I checked I found out that ING had found my posting and visited this blog.

And yep, this afternoon I was called by the manager of ING Entrepreneurial service for North Holland (the area of the Netherlands where bPerform is based). Although he couldn't explain why this happened (I still think they need to do some process checking with mystery customers, and update their processes and systems based on these findings), he appologised for the inconvenience and stressed that ING definitely would like to help starters...

He explained that they offer loans to starters comparable to "personal loans" based on criteria like:

Height of income from previous job
Level of Education
Business Plan
The entrepreneur himself

He offered to have a face to face chat and discuss how this would work out for bPerform. So, let's have a chat with these guys. Perhaps I can even sell them some consultancy on how to improve their customer experience :-)

Pffff ING Bank...

2005-08-03T23:00:00.000+02:00

Over the last few weeks I realised myself again, that big institutions like banks are really not able to deal with customers. An example. I tried to get in touch with ING Bank, one of the major banks in the Netherlands. I was triggered by their nice radio commercials, that many of their major customers started off with a small question for a second opinion. I thought, well, as a high tech startup, let's have a chat with these guys.

So, I turned to their web site. An obvious link "starters click here and we will call you for an appointment" was available. Well done guys! So I filled out my information, clicked submit and bam, yes, a confirmation email that they will call me back within 3 business days (what, THREE business days?! Talking about the on demand economy...). Anyway, two weeks later, I still hadn't heard anything, so I visited their site again to try to find a phone number. Only three clicks deep into the site I found a dull downloadable PDF document with phone numbers. Awful! Anyway, let's call the representative in my region. Ring... Ring.... Ring..... Phone not answered. Mmm, let's try tomorrow. Next day, same Ring... Ring... Ring... Mmm, let's try the overall number. "Hello ING Bank, how can I help you?" I explained about the unanswered contact request via the site, that I couldn't contact my regional office by phone, and if she could help me. No sorry, I can only give you the number from the regional representative, sorry..."

Mmm, since I couldn't reach them by phone, I thought: let's again fill out that web form, perhaps it was just bad luck the first time (too bad I had to fill out all my information again...). Same prompt automatic email response, same radio silence for another three weeks now.

You understand, I give up. No new customer for ING Bank. They simply don't deserve new customers. I really don't understand how companies like these can be so arrogant though dumb, to simply ignore a prospect who is really trying over and over again to get in touch and become a customer...

If they need advice on how to improve their customer experience, they can call me. I always come back to phone calls or emails. Specially if ING-bank calls me, since they really really really need advice...
(or they can check out that nice service offering to improve customer experience from my friends at Innberg)

bPerform at the Beach

2005-07-21T17:42:00.000+02:00

I live very near the Dutch beach. Right from my window I can see the beautiful dunes. A stiff walk through the dunes brings me to the sea (Since it is a stiff walk I often prefer my car, yep, I am a bit like: doctor said I needed more fresh air, so I bought a Convertible...).

Anyway, on this beautiful beach I had a nice chat with Robert. Robert is one of those highly appreciated - difficult to get access to - expensive - though charming "Database Administrators", you know, the ones that can make or break the performance of any major database system. Robert recently started his own company as well, Continux IT Solutions. His vision:
Continuity of business = Security * Availability * Integrity

I told him about bPerform, and he offered some sparring regarding our data model. We had a chat regarding topic maps, RDF, and how well these semantic networks fit into the tabular data model from MySQL or Oracle. A very valuable contact, again...

People management

2005-07-20T10:56:00.000+02:00

Today I read an interesting quote regarding People Management. Carin Wormsbecher, director of the publisher "Wedding" (For the English speaking readers of this blog: nothing to do with marriage...) in the Netherlands won a price for her HRM policy. Carin's advice for good people management, and how to motivate your people:

Listen to them
Give them the ability to grow
Give them tasks that are opportunities for them
Give them responsibility

Wow, sounds easy right :-) Let's wait and see if it works for the future of bPerform. At least, it matches my opinion of good people management...

Getting things done...

2005-07-15T09:35:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I had a nice long chat with my old friend Lode Broekman, working as a CRM guru for Paul Postma Marketing Consultancy. Lode is running the excellent blinkz blog on marketing topics (mainly in Dutch).

It is interesting, it seems like really a lot of people adopted the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology we wrote about earlier, as their primary time management based way of working. Lode pointed me via his blog to some nice links, so let's have a look:

The Hipster PDA: back to good old paper work. Mmm, for now I have a tremendously preference for my good old Treo...
GTDTiddlyWiki: The purpose of GTD Tiddly Wiki is to give users a single repository for their GTD lists and support materials so they can create/edit lists, and then print directly to 3x5 cards for use with the HipsterPDA.

Although I like the idea of GTDTiddlyWiki, I don't like the fact that Firefox comes up with all kind of security alerts, so let's have a look at the other links Lode gave me.
Nextaction: This is as well a web based implementation for Getting Things Done. The layout is cleaner than the GTDTiddlyWiki, what I like, and no error messages so far. However, it still looks so damn complex and it looks like I have too much on hand...
You might as well wanna read the more extensive discussion on Nextaction (and other Getting Things Done tools) on the popular 43folders blog.
Backpackit - TaDalist and Basecamp: Slightly different in scope, but very popular are these tools from the inspiring 37signals company. We used Basecamp for several of our previous projects and this is really an excellent environment for managing group tasks and sharing information.

For the time being, my best advice is still Basecamp for getting things done... (until bPerform is available of course ;-))

Offshoring

2005-07-15T09:12:00.000+02:00

Our ambition is to keep bPerform a lean and mean organisation, that focuses on concepts, marketing and sales. The development of our software will be done via partners, possibly situated in other countries like Romania, Serbia or Yugoslavia. An interesting starting source (in Dutch) for a first orientation on offshoring can be found on Zibb.nl. I specially liked the site about offshoring in Hungary.

Outsourcing the development doesn't mean we don't need any local technical expertise. Although I can do quite some stuff myself, as a matter of fact I still do have my masters in computer science ;-) I had an interesting chat with a possible CTO today. He asked me a lot of questions about our go-to-market strategy and how we think we are going to make money. The story must have been convincing, since we decided to make a follow up appointment...

Another user reality check

2005-07-12T00:47:00.000+02:00

This time we spoke with Caroline, a senior communication specialist working for the Dutch government. In their impressive building in The Hague, where we could see the beautifull summer gardens of the Peace Palace, we presented our thoughts and plans. Well, it might become a little bit boring (and I promise myself (and you) that I will not post all these presentations anymore) but Caroline loved our ideas as well.

However, Caroline pointed us to an important issue we heard before, and that we still have to solve. She stated "Well, to say we are having a problem is not really true. However, it is for sure that things could be improved". So from a sales perspective, we have to convince our potential customers that things will improve, even if they are not really aware of having problems. And she continued: "You have another communication challenge. Since bPerform offers such a broad range of functionalities, ranging from communication, via projectmanagement to knowledge management, you will find quite a diversity in your potential user groups. Project managers will be triggered by marketing communication about the project management parts, but a general manager might be more interested in knowledge management. How are you going to solve that in your marketing communication?"
Mmm, good point, thanks Caroline, need to think about that...

Tough decisions...

2005-07-12T00:07:00.000+02:00

There has really been no boring day at all since we started bPerform. The positive results from the last few weeks, like positive feedback in the user reviews, interest from investors and nice publicity in the Computable last week (Thanks to Rene Rippen who wrote a nice article about us) gave me a lot of energy. However, something very sad happened as well. Over the last few months it turned out that my old friend David, who joined bPerform from the start, was less and less on the same page as Mark and myself regarding focus, priorities and approach for bPerform. I tried several times to get ourselves on the same track again, but unfortunality we had to decide that cooperation with the three of us was no longer an option. I feel especially sad since David is an old friend, and it is disappointing to realise we can drink beer together, play pool or darts together, but can't work together. I have always said "I never wanna be in business with friends". For once I didn't stick to one of my basic rules and see what happens... I've really tried to make this work but have to conclude it simply doesn't work.

Of course Mark and I are continuing with double energy. We are already discussing several options to fill the gap. Most likely, we will change our business model based on this new reality. I'm considering to make the bPerform organisation a "lean and mean" concept-marketing and sales organisation, and do all the further development off shore. This would lower our operating cost, offer higher flexibility and we can survive with a lower cash flow. Our first thoughts are that this approach is an even better plan than our original busines plan. Coming week I've to present our new business plan, so a few more days (and nights!) to discuss with potential partners and make plans for this new direction...

Second potential user check

2005-07-12T00:00:00.000+02:00

We have a launching customer!

Last week I had another reality check with a potential user. We spoke with the controler of an insurance company in the Netherlands. They are currently merging two companies and really recognised the communication and knowledge management issues we want to solve. He told us: "Since the culture of the two companies differs, we will need to spend a lot of time on communication and sharing experiences, to build "one company" out of them. It sounds like bPerform can really help us here". When I am writing this quote I realise myself this might sound like a cheap commercial, but I am really enthousiastic about this, since it means we have a first customer who is willing to try our product, even before it is on the market! That's good news in these hard days... Hard days? Well... read the next post...

Freedom to...

2005-07-06T12:31:00.000+02:00

Yesterday evening I had a nice wining-and-dining with Martijn Hoogeveen, CEO of TakeitNow, a successful e-commerce initiative in the Netherlands. Martijn used to be one of the professors in my PhD Defense committee, and it is always inspiring to talk with him.
Since we hadn't spoken about bPerform yet, he asked that question that always comes back when you are starting your business: "So, what is the essential problem of users that you are solving with bPerform?" I started to take off with my basic answer to this question "we help users save time with basic tasks, so they can focus on what really matters to them, and we help organisations to better make use of the available (often hidden) knowledge in their organisation..." Martijn responded "Good consultancy talk, but... you didn't explain to me the real underlying concept"

An interesting conversation followed. I told Martijn that Mark and I are firm believers that each successful innovation need to improve the freedom of people, and often has a social component (interesting reading on this topic is from Rheingold). I quoted the example of the Apple iPod: according to this theory the iPod is a success because it offers ultimate freedom in listening to your music. That's the difference with an old fashioned walkman or a simple 256Mb player: you have all your music available, everywhere...

So, what does bPerform has to do with freedom and sociality? I realise my self we offer four types of freedom, and they all have a social component (pff, sigh of relieve... ;)

Freedom of commitments
We don't offer a simple "task manager", no, we offer you a tool to manage your commitments. Commitments with your manager, your team buddies or with yourself. We enable to ask for commitments (could you please...) and we enable the acceptance (or decline) from commitments (sorry, cannot...). So, we give more freedom to managers (less hassle, less phone calls to verify commitments and progress), and freedom to decide how you want to spend your time. Very important for our target group: professionals and knowledge workers, who are really looking for freedom in managing their own work "I wanna do it my way, scheduled when I wanna do it and at the location where I wanna do it, my commitment is only that I will do it - in time...".
Freedom of sharing
It's a sharing economy. "knowledge is power" doesn't stand anymore. If you share knowledge, you still have it, someone else has it, and together we are stronger. bPerform enables sharing of information. Sharing of your publications, your thoughts, your reports has never been easier. But you are still in control: You decide if you want to share, and with whom you want to share.
Freedom of listening
In this information and communication society you are spammed and overwhelmed with awful amounts of requests of attention. bPerform will help you to decide yourself: to whom do I wanna listen, and when. That sounds like... Freedom again :)
Freedom of speech
One of the main aspects in the Dutch constitution (and others of course). Perhaps this is the same as Freedom of sharing. It offers you a platform to make yourself being heard. No matter if that's done via blogs, mails, sms, chat...

Well, seems like this might be an interesting topic to write a white paper about...

First potential user check

2005-06-26T12:58:00.000+02:00

As a reality check, we had our first "potential user review" last Thursday. We spoke with Hans de Graaff (you might know him from his excellent index on human computer interaction and his work for SIGCHI).

Hans and I go back quite some time, since we initiated MMUIS about 10 years ago. MMUIS used to be a group of PhD students, having bi-monthly meetings on topics like Multimedia, User interfaces and information retrieval. Since we are all graduated these days, MMUIS still exists as a group of friends :-)

However, when Hans learned about bPerform, he sent me an email saying he had some thoughts on next generation e-mail and time management himself. He embraced a time management approach called "getting things done" from David Allen some time ago, and he is very enthusiastic about following a good time management philosophy: "it gives you a much more relaxed feeling".

So, we found ourselves last Thursday, drinking a lot because of the heat wave (very rare in the Netherlands), discussing our sketches for bPerform. Hans was pretty enthusiastic about our approach, making statements like "this is LinkedIn as it was meant to be" (LinkedIn is a pretty popular social software solution for business environments, pretty much equal to OpenBC) and "good to see there are people working on the MS Outlook of tomorrow".

Although we planned to talk for an hour, we got so enthusiastic that we spend over two hours in our office discussing the pro's and con's of our approach. Then we decided to continu our discussions in the pleasant city center of Delft, in the sun, having beer and some food. His comments were very valuable, and we will take his comments seriously to further improve our design.

His final conclusion was that he would definitely consider to use bPerform as soon as it is available. This first reality check with an "outsider" gave us confidence for the following sessions with potential users, planned for the next two weeks.

InnoBizz

2005-06-25T10:46:00.000+02:00

This Thursday David and I went to Innobizz, an interesting event where (starting) highly innovating entrepreneurs can meet each other and potential informal investors.

Was a very interesting day. We got in touch with people from NEBIB, an organisation that matches informal investors and business angels with entrepreneurs. Interesting organisation, if you are in need of informal capital in the Netherlands, check them out!

We were able to present our bPerform ideas in front of a big community of fellow entrepreneurs and investors. Result: several opportunities to discuss in more detail our business plan and ideas the coming weeks. We were even interviewed by the Computable, a well known Dutch magazines on ICT. Might be published in a few weeks.

We got as well in touch with several organisations that offer support in acquiring money and subsidy from the Dutch state and from the EU (like Cordis and Senter Novem). You might consider to check out www.subsidieraad.nl, www.pwl.nl or www.vectrix.nl if you want support. I found out that these companies often offer a no cure no pay option, where you pay between 10% and 15% of the total amount, only if they succeed. Another good source for information on subsidy is from Elsevier.

If you would like to double the money that investors invest in your startup, you might point them to www.technopartner.nl. This organization is funded by the dutch ministry of economic affairs, and doubles the investment budget of an investor (only for high tech investments that is).

Another useful initiative is LiveWire. This initiative, operated by Syntens and sponsored by Shell, Radio 538 and BDO accountants, offers free coaching services to start ups. They even have an award program where you can win money and free commercial time on radio 538.

Last but not least we met the people from NextStage. They organise networking events for innovative entrepreneurs. Nice guys.

Perform with a smile

2005-06-21T21:10:00.000+02:00

Over the last few weeks we have made quite a few walks around our office facilities in Delft. You know Delft? The Dutch Technical University is based there. Lot's of very intelligent people around, might be useful in the future when we need some more hands and brains...

Anyway, our office is just outside Delft, so we can walk along the farms, green lands, and have some interesting conversations with cows :)
During one of those walks we have been thinking about the proposition for bPerform, what is our promise to customers? We ended up with "perform with a smile"

I am pretty thrilled about this "promise to our customers". It is indeed something we want to stand for. We want to make great products for great people. And let them shine. When they use our products for their work, it should not block them or demotivate them (like many tools do right now, with their bad usability). No, our tools should help them, support them, they should be able to do their tasks with a breeze, easily, with a smile. And have some time left for some fun...

Reality Checking our ideas

2005-06-21T20:58:00.000+02:00

Capgemini showed to be a good employer when I told them about our ideas. My boss suggested me to take a sabbatical and work on my plans. If it should work, go for it, if it would fail I was more then welcome to rejoin the User Experience Team that I was working for. Thanks, RJ!

I took a nice short holiday with my girlfriend to Tobago to forget about the previous Capgemini projects and get a fresh head and energy to kick start bPerform...

Since I had all time to work on bPerform now, and Marcus and David could make themselves available some time as well, we started to work on a presentation that outlines the breath and depth of our ideas. We will use this presentation to test our ideas on some potential customers. If they will like it, that would prove our concept. If they really don't know what problems we are talking about, and don't understand our solution, we have to reconsider if we are perhaps to enthusiastic ourselves and see the world through nice, pink sun glasses. First presentation is scheduled for this week...

The business plan

2005-06-21T20:35:00.000+02:00

Because I had worked way to many hours in 2004, I could afford myself to work for Capgemini for only 2 days a week. This opened the possibility to start to do something. Our thought was to write a business plan, get some investors interested and kick off the real design and development work. It took us several weeks to write the first version of the business plan and make all the financial calculations. We then presented it to some of our friends who had some kind of track record in the business plan area. Their very useful input was used to update the business plan.

We managed to present our thoughts to two informal investors. They were enthusiastic about the idea. But, they expected this investment to be pretty risky: we had only a plan and our blue eyes, no customers yet, no product yet... They suggested us to come back later. Perhaps, we will, perhaps we won't...

We're alive!

2005-06-21T20:30:00.000+02:00

If you are on the web, you are alive! May 9th, our web site went live at www.bperform.com.
Sorry, for now the site is only available in the Dutch language. As soon as we have stuff to share to a broader, international audience (I expect around August this year), we will of course upgrade the web site to serve your needs :-)

Not on my own

2005-06-21T20:22:00.000+02:00

I started to share my thoughts with friends. Lot's of them recognised that they spend hours and hours a day behind their e-mail program, and yes, they all had thoughts about improving their current tools (most of them use Outlook).

It was just a few weeks later that I bumped into an old mate, let's call him David, who happened to have his own ICT company. I told him about my thoughts, and he was pretty enthusiastic about it. Let's work on this together!

Once in the office, I used to work for Capgemini those days, I shared my thoughts with some colleagues as well. One of them, let's call him Marcus, was already a sparring partner for me for years. We worked together on several projects over the years, and Marcus happens to be one of the best usability and interface designers I have met so far. So, that would make a perfect trio together: having the ICT and business knowledge from Dave, Marcus for the design of the software, and myself for the main concept, business and marketing stuff.

Since we all still had a full (or more than full) daytime job, and were based in different locations (I used to live in Brussels those days) we met several times in the evening hours. We ate a lot of Chinese and Pizza to discuss if we would really like to start a company around our thoughts. Looking back, those days were necessary to build our interpersonal trust, but we didn't really make lots of progress yet. It turned out to be pretty difficult to make progress late at night, especially since we were all pretty tired from our busy daytime schedule. Something needed to change...

Woke up at night

2005-06-21T20:07:00.000+02:00

About a year ago, it must have been May 2004, I woke up at night with a thought...
Isn't it sad: we are working hours a day on our computers, but computers are still based on some computer metaphores that were designed more than 20 years ago. Computers just know about:

Files
Folders
Applications

Our desktop is actually nothing more than a combined “file browser and application launcher”.

I am a knowledge worker, and I am using my computer to manage my daily work. I am not really interested in files or folders. To me, relevant concepts in my work are things like:

Projects
Tasks
Meetings
Contact persons
Messages
Reports
Etc...

The gap between the computer world and the user is filled by applications like Outlook, Palm Desktop or Lotus Notes. These programs act like the “new” central desktop: We find ourselves managing our daily life from an email program.

So, what's the big deal? Well, I think we would benefit from having something like a next generation email program, that would be build based on concepts and tasks that I am familiar with. A program which would not block me, but supports me.

So, there you got it, my idea. Sounds straight forward, right? But I realised myself that this was enough inspiration to consider to start my own company and solve this problem. If I would not succeed, at least I would have created the perfect working environment for myself. And, if I would succeed, well, the world would be at least a slightly better place...

How it started

2005-06-21T19:45:00.000+02:00

I have been thinking about starting a weblog for quite a while now. I am starting my own company and thought it might be interesting to share my experiences with whoever is interested. We live in a knowledge economy. We compete on knowledge. So, would it be wise to share all my experiences, even with (potential) competitors? We will only know when we are old and wise. For now I hope that sharing experiences will lead to inspiration and cooperation. So, feel free to react on any of my future postings. I might or might not decide to share information that might be seen as my personal "intellectual property". But isn't everyone's knowledge a combination of all knowledge, experience and inspiration that was offered by others? So, wouldn't it be fair to share as much as possibly appropriate? For now I think so! Let's go out and have some fun...

PS:
I have to give my warmest regards and thanks to the guys from blogger, they have created a really excellent environment, a school book example for usability!