Yesterday I got a phone call from one of my fellow student from KTH (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) regarding their project final presentation date. They are working on a project aiming on providing open source high definition video conference system. The presentation and exhibition date of their project are this 16th of October 2009 and next 19th of October 2009, and they sincerely welcome you to their presentation and exhibition.
 
Press Release.

I have presented my master thesis last week and started to work for HP as a junior product chef. I have spent more than 4 months to complete my master thesis and the most single difficult part for me was the writing part. I think it is crucial to have good communication with your academic supervisor, since he/she decides how you should write and how much you should write. After this master thesis I began to abhor the communication problems. Giving an example, I wrote 100 pages at the beginning and spent almost 3 weeks to write it, then my supervisor wanted me to cut it down to 30 pages (max.). It was a very big hassle. Moreover, my supervisor did not want me to do those changes with alacrity. Because of that I had to wait two more months before I present my master thesis. Any way it is still good that I have the rights to decry my supervisor and my own work. By the way, my academic supervisor was Gustaf Juell-Skielse from KTH and he is a very experienced Accenture consultant. I have learned a lot from him and he has incisive comments which make me work harder and harder. But my recommendation for those of you, who will write master thesis, is that; talk to your supervisor very very clearly at the beginning. What he/she wants you to do, how much and how does he/she want you to write and so on. Because time management is difficult and you might waste your time if your supervisor changes his/her mind.

However, it was a priceless experience to work in one of the biggest energy companies at Europe and has an experienced academic supervisor back at school. Even if I had some difficult times to finish my thesis, I liked it and enjoyed a lot. In case you need, I am sharing my final master thesis (believe me, this is the real final version:) ) and my final presentation down here:

SAP Systems Integration Master Thesis Real Final Version

I am still a master student at KTH, Stockholm and will be graduated with in 3 or 4 months. Some people wanted me to share my intention letter, which I used while appliying for a master’s program at The Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. I believe intention letter is the most important thing when you apply for a master or PDH program. Because it basically shows your interest and willingness to study on that particular topic.

 Here you can find my intention letter.

In the 1990s the computing industry shifted from expensive proprietary systems to open systems based on standard, low-cost hardware. This move changed a 20-year pattern of IT buying and deployment models. Some of the biggest IT buyers, like universities and research centers, also started to look for better, flexible and cheaper IT solutions.

National Research & Education Centers are generally start point of knowledge and innovation. These institutions must create value for the benefit of their people. To be able to do that, they need to be connected with the other source of information, like universities and research centers in the world. For example health, education, security and economy are the top priority topics for most of the countries and Africa is not an exception. To be able to increase the development level of society and create economic value for people, research institutions must be connected to internet and share knowledge and experiences.

To be able to have an cheap and flexible internet connection, PC-Based open source networking can be an alternative solution for African NRENs. Currently, a group of student at KTH, we are working on this project and try to make it 100% working solution. We are thinking end-to-end solution, which means starting from technology it self till the customer support and so on.

We hope, we will be able to create a real business based on this idea. If you want to read more about the idea itself, please download the document from here

Last week was “China Week” at KTH and in order to celebrate it, students organized lots of different activities. There were many different kinds of public lectures, career days, parties, dinners and business case competition about the Ericsson’s business strategy in China. Ericsson has two biggest competitors in China, which are Huawei and ZTE

The case competition was mainly about the strategy of Ericsson against ZTE and Huawei. They are both growing very rapidly and Ericsson needs some clever solutions to gain more market share in Asia and Africa. To do that, they need to examine the competitors and see the big picture. The term “rapidly developing economies” is now being used to denote emerging markets such as China, Taiwan, Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and Malaysia that are undergoing rapid growth. In next 5-6 years most of the increase in mobile sector will come from the emerging markets. So it is really important for such a huge company to understand these countries and gain market share.

All in all, it was a great experience and i enjoyed a lot. I would like to thanks to my team mates again. It was a great case competition with full of fun and education.

I won the idea generation competition at Hej Världen event by my “Virtual Sales Representatives” project. The topic of the event was “Virtual Reality” and its effects to our daily life and future. I think the virtual reality is something that we try to understand all together and make some assumptions. When ever i talk about Second Life or any other virtual worlds, i can not create very innovative ideas. I guess, it is because we don not know a lot about the topic yet. You can find the project proposal here and i hope, i will have a chance to work in a project about virtual worlds

Virtual Sales Representatives
I like traveling and shopping. Every time when I go to a shopping centre, I have to face with a sales representative who is trying to sell as much as possible to me. If you are in another country and trying to buy something, from an eager sales person, without knowing the language then everything is even harder.

Imagine that you are in China, Zimbabwe, Turkey or in Singapore and go in to a shop, then there is a three dimensional sales representatives, in fact a hologram, who can speak your own language. Then everything would be so easy and fun. You just select the language, gender, physical appearance of a sales representatives and he/she will help you during your shopping experience.

Unlike usual photo, the holographic image can reproduce exactly three-dimensional copy of the original object. Such image has amazing realness and often looks like the real object. A hologram can create everything your eyes see – size, shape, texture and relative position. However, if you try to touch a holographic image, all you will find is focused light.

All in all, holographic sales representatives, can be next generation of sales and marketing. I am sure it will be a win/win/win situation and will add so much value to the shopping experience wherever you go.

For Photos of the event: http://flickr.com/groups/hejvarlden08/pool/

For videos of the event: http://alpha.bambuser.com/channel/socialclub

In ICT Entrepreneurship department we are reading lots of books. From my point of view; Crossing the Chasm is one of the best among them. As a small list i can give you the names of the books and i strongly suggest entrepreneurs to read all of them

1- Crossing the chasm (Geoffrey Moore)
2- Blue Ocean Strategy(W.Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne)
3- Made to Stick (Dan Heath & Chip Heath)
4- Inside the Tornado (Geoffrey A. Moore)
5- Good to Great (Jim Collins)
6- Art of the Start (Guy Kawasaki)
7- Rules for Revolutionaries (Guy Kawasaki)

Let’s talk about the Crossing The Chasm as summary. According to Geoffrey A. Moore, who defined the Technology Adoption Life Cycle Landscape, in his books “Crossing the Chasm” and “Inside the Tornado”, attitudes toward the adoption of new technology become significant, any time users are introduced to high tech products that require them to change behavior or modify other products and services they rely upon. Products causing this pattern are referred to as discontinuous innovations. A high definition monitor, with format incompatible with current equipment, is an example of a discontinuous innovation. Continuous innovations, on the other hand, refer to the normal upgrading of products (i.e. a regular monitor with a sharper image) that do not require any changes. A basic marketing model was created based on discontinuous innovations, relating to psychographic buying habits, forming a bell curve with divisions roughly equivalent to where standard deviations would fall. The divisions included:

• innovators – had larger farms, were more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented
• early adopters – younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders
• early majority – more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbours
• late majority – older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active
• laggards – very conservative, smalls farms and capital, oldest and least educated

The above model depicts marketing success by winning one segment after another, with each captured segment acting as a reference base for the segment following. Moore’s model shows gaps between all of the segments, with the largest and most difficult gap to overcome being ‘The Chasm’ between the early adopters and the pragmatists.

The fundamental problem lies in the transition from the early adopters to the pragmatists. Careful analysis of the psychological profile of these two groups shows that they do not have much in common. The early adopters like making decisions by themselves that do not depict the norm. The pragmatists, on the other hand, want to communicate with others and put together a good decision. The key to crossing the chasm was derived by studying the fundamental differences between the last early adopter and the first pragmatist. While the early adopter would purchase a product that could deliver an 80% solution (seeing it as only 20% more to go), the pragmatist takes the position of buying when it is 100% complete (a ‘whole product’ as Moore puts it) and can be referenced as working within their industry. There are many pragmatists out there–all in different industries.

Moore’s solution for making the transition is to focus on a ‘beachhead’ and deliver a total solution to one of those niche markets as quickly as possible. Identification of target customers and their compelling reason to buy are keys to fulfilling the ‘whole product’ concept, which will allow you to win over the pragmatists in a particular market segment.

As a summary i can say these but there a lot to talk about. After crossing the chasm, we will be in the Early Majority segment and inside the tornado is mainly concerning about this segment. In my opinion, in every stage of the TALC there are small TALCs. After i finish searching the documents and reading the Inside The Tornado, i will write a summary about it here in my blog.

Wish you all the best and merry Xmas, for muslims i wish you enjoyed during the feast.

At 6th of december, we had a presentation about the Sun Startup Essentials in KTH /Kista campus. Mostly students group from ICT Entrepreneurship were there and Alex Breton who is one of the best entrepreneur in Sweden.

It was a nice presentation and young Swedish entrepreneurs are eager to learn more about this program.

If you want to read the presentation you can download it from here: Sun Start-Up Essentials