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.

One day, when i was first meeting with the internet it was so difficult for me to remember where should i click and what to do then. I was a little child and no english knowledge. I was always asking to my dad; “dad, where should i click now, where to write my name and password?” It was a huge problem for my dad, to show me again and again and again where to click, what to do and so on.

Imagine that you can put notes on the pages you visited before and write there small notes, about where to click, what to do and some clues about the that specific web page. After 13-14 years later now I am a computer engineer and i decided to help people who faced this kind of problems before. We developed a new technology which enable you to put sticky notes to the web pages like you put notes to your wall or post its.

Referring to the pictures in this post, you can see how easy ad fast to use it. Imagine that you are teaching using internet to to your children or a friend who is really not familiar to use internet. You can write notes about where they should click, where to write their user-names, passwords and then where should they click on.

This was only a simple scenario. We can create more and more scenarios. Imagine that you are away from home and you found something interesting on a web page and wanna show it to your wife, husband, girlf-friend, boy-friend. Basically, you can write post to the wall of the web page by using our product and then he/she can visit the same page and see what you think about any specific product, video, picture and so on.

We believe that this is a discontinuous innovation which will enable to use internet effectively. By using our product you can post notes, videos, musics and read and listen others’ notes. We will add so may other features soon but this is the best until we do the better.

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Last week, in Global Entrepreneurial Leadership course we made a small virtual team work assignment. We divided in to 4 teams and each team had 10-12 individual participants. The goal of the exercise was, building a bridge by the materials that we had been provided, on the second life and improving leadership and communicational skills through virtual teams. Here you can find my opinions about the session, exercise and Second Life.

Virtual Teaming & Real Life

Working in virtual life was almost the same with real life. Trust, communication, efficient teamwork and coordination are some of the basics while working with a team.
To begin with, face-to-face communication is crucial in real life experiences. On the other hand, communication was quite difficult in the second life while working with other 4-5 people. Every body was talking during the experiment but none of them was listening. Because of the fact that, there was no boss or coordinator; every individual participant was acting like a boss.

Even if all the participants were from the same class, sometimes trusting each other is not easy. Working together in a team and being friends are very different things. In real life, it would be easy to trust or not to trust. Nevertheless, in second life you have to trust your teammates.

Next, efficient teamwork was not satisfying in the Second Life. Because of the communication problems and lack of commission plan it was really time wasting while working in the Second Life. In order to increase the quality and productivity on teamwork in Second Life, communication problems must be solved in advance and then working in a virtual team can be easier and faster.

Lastly, coordination was a big problem. In real life examples, there is always a boss, coordinator and there is level of responsibility. However, as we were all in the same level and we all had equal responsibility; sometimes coordinating the people was so difficult. Two people were trying to do the same job even if only one person was enough.

With all these in mind, virtual teaming still has some problems to solve. In order to improve the quality and efficiency in virtual teams; building trust is very important. However, we believe that virtual teaming can be beneficial while creating distributed teams spread around the different locations. Meeting face-to-face can add value to the virtual teams, and let them know each other better.

We can apply virtual teaming in business development branches or to new employees to make them understand the basics of job and organisational chart in real life.

Most important factors in building team

It is important for all the team members to understand why the team is created and have the same understanding of the objective and goal of the project and they should commit to the purpose of the project and shape it if necessary. Team need to develop a common approach or method on how they are going to accomplish to their purpose.

Team members should feel the team mission is important and in order to stay motivated and committed they need to know what they will get by participating in the tem work. What is in it for them?

We think the problems in our exercise were:

• People did not take the exercise seriously because nobody knew who was who and team members were not supposed to get any credit for the project!

• Communication problem, not using same communication tool

• Not familiar to the communication medium

• Not have a clear vision for the exercise

• Tasks were not divided among the team members (communication problem)

• They cannot use body language such as shaking head to show understanding and approving each other or raising hand to have attention etc.

Feedback on teaming exercise

We believe that, one of the most enjoyable aspects of this exercise was the ability to be someone else. In Second Life, you can be anyone regardless of your real physical appearance. In addition, when you mix “being anyone” with “being anonym”, just like in this exercise, it is more fun.
Because you know that, the person who is next to you and in pink t-shirt and long hair, can be anyone in the class. This also breaks the barriers between people. For instance, you can talk and work with someone in this exercise, that you are actually offended in real life. That way, you can see how cool that person is and then you can build relationship with him / her. There may be some people who you do not talk just because of your prejudgments about his gender, race or anything, but in this game, everybody is a combination of bytes and bits so everybody is same.

This ‘edutainment’ activity which mixes education and entertainment teaches people how to work in a team to achieve a specific goal which was building the bridge in this particular exercise. Yet there was no clear definition of how a bridge looks like, teams were able to have a common sense about this. Therefore, we also learned that, definitions change from person to person. That is why, we have to make things clear before we expect the others to do it.

Another thing that we learned from this exercise was the different approaches those can be developed against different situations. We saw that every team had the same goal but they had different approaches. This shows that there is not only one truth in the world. Besides, keeping an eye on what the others in your business are doing is an essential part of managing your team better.

We learned that, leadership skills are so important to control the distributed teams. In addition, not only being a leader but also being a team member is crucial to succeed in the team. While there is no level of responsibility, still acting like a team and try to listen the other’s opinion are basic of being a successful team. It is somehow very similar to the real world teams. Always listen the others opinions and suggestions and make a goal and do it all together.

Content of the exercise was good, but the process was a little confusing for us. Before starting the virtual team, we could meet in face-to-face and see who the others in our team are. Talking and defining a work process or an action plan could be better.

All the members in the virtual team should use the same communication tool as the real life communication, in our exercise some people were chatting while the others were talking and I think it was a big problem in communication. Talking over one another should be minimized to be able to follow the conversation. As a suggestion, you should buy 20 cheap headsets and loan them to the participants.
This would greatly enhance communication, which was the primary issue in our group. Also; you could specify preparation tasks more in detail so people really do them and are more familiar with the system when starting

In a nutshell, we know that this was the first time for the experiment. Here are our humble advices to make it better.

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.

For a start-up lack of resources is the biggest problem. Sometimes it can be money, network, customer or can be consultancy.The obvious reason for looking for a Business Angel is that, due to the high risk and uncertainty the early company phase conveys, usually no other than business angels are willing to invest. Further, the angel’s network of contacts is an important advantage. Also, the experienced board of directors can refine the company. They can help to companies in these aspects :

Capital in order to hire staff, purchase machines and equipment, and cover upfront costs.

Competence in order to obtain knowledge and skills in how to carry out a specific task.

Contacts in order to obtain a network of people who can help your business in different situations.

Consultation in order to obtain experienced advices.

I believe that when B.A. are dealing with an entrepreneur, they are mainly looking for these; personal relationship, entrepreneur’s enthusiasm and trustworthines, reasonable business plan, potential for the product or service and finally of course for the income.

Business angels can be divided into two different types: active angels and potential angels (Krá ovi &Hyránek, 2005). Refer to the graph above active angels divided into four different groups. For an entrepreneur it is important to know his/her aims and business plans and goals before negotiating with an B.A. For me entrepreneurial B.A. are the best because generally they are coming from an entrepreneurial back ground and they had great network for the specific businesses.

The entrepreneurial angel differs from the other types of angels by having entrepreneurial experience from earlier business, being richer and more active. In addition to the main purpose with their investment which is to get better financial gain on the returns compared to other investments, they also sees informal investing as fun and satisfying.

Last but not least; i strongly advice to entrepreneurs in Sweden to have a look at to these web pages:

EVCA

Swedish Private Equity & Venture Capital Association

CONNECT

REFERENCES :

http://www.connectsverige.se/cldoc/inenglish/96.htm

www.diva-portal.org/diva/getDocument?urn_nbn_se_hj_diva-588-1__fulltext.pdf

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