OpenLife

Check out the numero uno photo sharing of the web: 23 - the brainchild of Thomas Madsen-Mygdal and others. It has just launched a redesigned version of the web-site. Notwithstanding that Thomas is a good friend, I honestly think that 23 is the best choice for online sharing and storage. Keep of the good work guys.

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thomasmadsenmygdal, 23hq, photosharing

My friend Dan Trampedach is looking for people who can help him to develop the potential in DABGO which is a free online network for Danish business professionals. Dan is one of the co-founders of the network.

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dantrampedach, dagbo

In my humble opnion, one of the best presentation at Supernova 2008 was clearly the keynote by Jonathan Schwarz of Sun Microsystem. The best take-away from this was to me - having an open source perspective - Jonathan Schwarz’ four key points to Sun’s open source business strategy:

1. Open source your code (this is ofcourse self-evident for any oss strategy)

2. Collect all the data that you possiby can about interactions with servers, web-site etc, even though you don’t know at the time of collection what to use the data for. You are going need for something in the future!

3. Be transparent, in particular about your data collection and processing. If you are trying to be sneaky about this, someone will discover and publisize it and your company will suffer.

4. Keep copyright to all your code. You want to make your code available to the world under an open source license, but you want to control the code. You are not putting the code in the public domain. If you control the code by having the copyrights you might use dual licensing.

To me these points really charecterize a modern, pragmagtic open source business. A lot of companies can learn af lot from listening to Jonathan Schwarz.

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supernova, supernova2008, jonathanschwarz, sunmicrosystems

In the opening panel at Supernova2008 Esther Dyson got into a discussion with Bob Iannucci, who is the CTO of Nokia, about markets for online exchange of infomation between individuals and businesses. Bob Iannucci seemed to make the point that markets for the exchange of personal information could mitigate individuals’ fear of giving up adresses, preferences and so on to companies. In other word he advocated that the price mechanism would enable efficient exchange of personal information based on its value to the individual as opposed to its value to company.

Esther objected to this quantification of the personal utility of private online users. She said that “Businesses has to acknowledge that not all users are online either to buy something or to sell something, in this case their personal information”. People has much more nuanced motivations for exchanging information with others. Just like in the offline world the by far largest number of exchanges that involves real humans are completely non-market based.

Bob Ianucci described markets as languages enabling exchanges. I agree that this is often the case but its important to understand that the price mechanism more than often is extremely insufficient to express complex and emotional relations between human beings.

Markets may be languages but with vocabularies and grammar far to poor to understand much of the interaction between human beings!

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supernova, supernova2008, estherdyson, bobianucci

I am in San Francisco the coming week attending the Supernova 2008 conference as part of a tour arranged by the Danish eBusiness Association (FDIH).

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fdih, supernova, supernova2008