One eye on Tech

I am Ben Bergeret (also going by 'Benoit') and this is my tech blog. A random gathering of observations, commentary, opinions on things tech that inspire me. Updated when updated. More about me at about.me/benbergeret. (All comments, opinions or errors appearing in these posts are mine and mine only and do not represent those of my clients, employers, friends or anybody else. Blame them on me, nobody else, and get in touch with corrections, precisions or even flames if that's what you feel like)

[oneeyeontech]

Rule of thumb: if you got hired on a handshake, you may get fired the same way. If it took seven interviews and as many weeks, your termination will be a softer landing when / if it comes. That's because the more time and attention is put into hiring, the more vested the hiring people are into your success, and therefore the more likely to think twice and work out adaptations. #foodforthought

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Gates, Grove and Jobs shared these traits, according to HBS' David Yoffie at Intel Capital Global Summit – View on Path.

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Spree: the first sports body monitoring device that tracks your body temperature. Using a headband, what else? Not sure how useful this is... Available next month to those interested. at Intel Capital Global Summit – View on Path.

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Wearable devices for athletes: Adidas jumps in the fray. #GigaOM #mobilize at UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center – View on Path.

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Withings raises $30 million for international expansion

Health gadget company Withings will announce in a few minutes a new funding round from Bpifrance, Idinvest Partners, 360 Capital Partners and existing investor Ventech. Out of the $30 million, $15 million comes from Bpifrance, the newly created public entity -- BPI means Public Investment Bank in..

Excellent news for my friends at Withings! And a bold move from a traditionnally conservative institutional investor. The dawn of a new era for startup investment in France?

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David Marcus and his team at Paypal having fun. Love it. Sequel: "Who killed cash?" (in a few years ;)

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You know it's time to get your fingers to the keyboard and blog again when... someone you are interviewing for a job complains that you haven't blogged in too long! 

[oneeyeontech]

In Case You Were Wondering... What's Up For Me In 2013?

Time to take a few minutes in this second day of 2013 to wish you a Happy New Year!

... and share with you a few details about the job I took a few months ago. It's been a very busy ramp-up since October 15, with a lot of ground covered, and I hope this synthesis will answer the questions you may have.

How do you improve the mobile experience when all you have is a visibility over a carrier's network?

That is the question that started carrier IQ (CiQ) in 2005. They set out to open up a window on the devices. To show what was happening inside what was until then a closed 'black box' after it left the factory.

Seven years later, the company now has a tremendous technology foundation, from a unique agent software which gathers system data on smartphones (180 million rolled out so far), to an incredible analytics big data platform that's able to deliver real-time drill-down information on technical parameters of a phone as well as trends and statistics. Last ime I checked CiQ was processing over 7 terabytes of smartphone system data each month...

They have a great business team, too, and managed to develop solid relationships with major mobile carriers in the US and abroad. And weathered an incredible storm in late 2011 -- more on this at the bottom of this post.

"Mobile Intelligence": a window on what's going on inside your phone

Using information gathered in four technical domains: voice communications, data communications, system and battery, and applications, the CiQ platform helps mobile operators improve customer care, optimize network coverage and operations, and better understand their users base. All for the benefit of us, subscribers.

The information that is gathered (with customer consent, through the carrier's interfaces and policies) is about things such as calls start time and and end time; dropped calls contexts; battery life and discharge rate; text messages sent / received stamps; applications launch and close, the memory they use; and so on.

CiQ lives on ROI, not user content or user behavior monetization

Nothing CiQ gathers for their clients is about user content. There is no monetization of user content. Instead, CiQ is making money helping carriers provide a better experience.

For instance, if you complain to your carrier about too many dropped calls, using CiQ they can better diagnose the problem and often help you fix it without you having to go through the pain of exchanging your phone -- which more often than not resolves the problem only for a few days. This in turn represents cost savings for them, as they can avoid shipping a new handset for instance, or worse, seeing you churn over to their competitor. That same information is also used by carriers in their dealings with device vendors, whose bugs can now be better exposed -- and therefore corrected. The whole chain, from manufacturers to the subscribers, benefits from the visibility CiQ provides over the devices' internal issues.

In their intent and purpose, the solutions enabled by CiQ are very similar to the remote diagnostics and assistance services found in cars such as BMW's or Tesla's. 

A word on that 2011 bad rap...

Some of you might have heard about CiQ "spying" on mobile users last year -- and a Google search will still bring up a lot of that noise.

Well, believe me, after my extensive due diligence, I can confirm to you that this was untrue. A mistake made in good faith by a junior 'hacker' who since then has recognized his error.

The witch hunt that followed, complete with lawsuits, the EFF jumping in, and more bad PR that any company could which for in an  entire lifespan, was homeric. But the team and the business survived. More on this (and lots of details about what the company does -- and has always been doing) can be found here. 

(on a side note... I still can't get my head around the process that has got some people to write misleading things such as

"...Have you heard that every text message, every e-mail, every phone number, every keystroke made on a Google Android phone may be secretly recorded, logged and sent to your cellular provider by a tracking service called Carrier IQ?"

Duh. Does the author (Philip Elmer-DeWitt, article here) understands that "every text message, every e-mail, every phone number" is TRANSPORTED by every carrier and therefore is entirely recorded and logged on their servers? Without CiQ needed? Again, CiQ is about system data, not user content, which is readily available on the carriers' networks from the moment you hit send or call...)

2013 and beyond: a killer opportunity for Carrier IQ

Tier-1 clients, hundreds of millions of devices installed... the sky is the limit. We are entering an age where mobile phones are an integral part of our daily lives and we, subscribers, are expecting the best level of service from the wireless industry. Mobile carriers worldwide are competing for best customer service, best coverage, and best customer experience management -- the new mobile industry buzzword. They are for most of us the main contact point, our lifeline to a great service. They need the best technology to continue to satisfy our ever-increasing demands for quality experiences on our smartphones.

At the same time, some device manufacturers are building a stronger connection with us, the mobile users. Starting with Apple, who pioneered it with the iPhone, other brands are starting to market themselves more aggressively as frontal brands. If confirmed, the trend to drop carrier subsidies and recently embraced by T-Mobile a few weeks ago should only push devices manufacturers to manage customer experience even more directly.

Apple has been doing this since 2009, integrating CiQ software in all iOS versions for the benefit of the iPhone user experience (update: technically, until 2011; they are now said to be using a derivative technology).

The mobile ecosystem is going to become more complex, but the need for managing to the best possible customer experience will remain stronger than ever. This is the opportunity I see with CiQ. Enabling the best mobile customer experience across the whole industry. 

The challenges are many but the foundation is solid. What more to ask for?

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"... the way forward is to learn to see any startup in any industry as a grand experiment. The question is not "Can this product be built?" In the modern economy, almost any product that can be imagines can be built. The more pertinent questions are "Should this product be built?" and "Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?"

-- Re-reading "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries, always a fresh inspiration.

[oneeyeontech]

This presentation is aimed at technology leaders from Europe (with a focus on France)

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"There is a significant shift going on this year, much more significant than we saw last year, from web to mobile. It is most noticeable in games, social networking, music, and news, but it is happening across the board and it presents both great opportunity and great challenges."

It would have been interesting to read what Fred has to say about what's missing from this short piece: what are the consequences of this growth on infrastructure (networks, cloud), device form factors, and education / employment/ All three good areas of growth, imho.

Think about what this means for the Enterprise, too. What do you think? Is mobile going to remain a consumer only revolution?

[oneeyeontech]

Instagram gets Facebook to bite a $50 million bait

  Reading reactions about the Instagram purchase by Facebook this morning (read the WSJ announcement here, Instagram's CEO Kevin Systrom comment here), I can't help but quickly comment. You might read this analysis elsewhere as I guess I am not the only one seeing through the logic of the price paid: $1bn. For a 2 years old, 12 people team, with no technology innovation whatsoever. Wow. Market forces at play.

Eyeballs rule

Most comments I have read so far focus on the product aspects of the acquisition: "With Instagram, Facebook is going to have a much better photo sharing app than what it has developped on its own", or anything along the same lines.

However I believe that the real reason for such a deal is not technology or product, but eyeballs and TSO. Both on laptops and on mobile phones. At 16% (US), Facebook is a clear leader. TSO, the amount of time a user spends online within the boundaries of a given service, is one of the most strategic variables for Facebook, as it is what drives their advertising revenues. Like with old-days television. (Facebook doesn't monetize yet their mobile app through advertising, as they say they have not figured out yet a good way to do it -- most mobile advertising is too intrusive to the user experience, and drives the user away from the app in most cases. But Instagram -- a fully mobile app so far -- should easily transfer their experience onto the larger screens, where Facebook knows how to push ads).

Who needs technology? Virality + Stickyness + Growth

In reality, the deal today is all about the virality and stickiness of the Instagram experience which helped them secure significant mobile TSO: they have managed to built a community of users who return multiple times daily, regardless of whether they are on FB or not. They engage quickly with the service virally, and remain engaged throughout the day for months. Add rocket growth in the past few months, a sure sign that a service has gained acceptance: the Instagram user based grew 30 times in the past year, to 30 million last month. A winning formula.

Kudos for a brilliant setup

The smart move was Instagram's when they chose to not integrate their app with Facebook last year. It must have taken balls to resist the temptation, but they made it. Because the service was growing independently of Facebook, capturing TSO and growing their user base very fast, they became a threat.

With the $50mm round they were raising at $500mm value a few days ago, they were on the path to becoming an unaffordable threat, in both senses. Facebook had one bullet, and they fired it quickly. Investors at $500mm valuation would not have agreed to selling at a small premium. Hence the offer that made the deal, at a x2 valuation: $1bn.

Instagram clearly outsmarted Facebook: their $50mm round announcement was a smartly designed, well executed bait.

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4/09 3:33pm update: On 2/29 Facebook announced their mobile advertising strategy. It has not been rolled out to everybody as I write this. Venture Beat has a good analysis here: "Facebook’s mobile ad strategy is a risk for Facebook and its advertisers (analysis)" (http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/29/facebooks-mobile-ads/)

[oneeyeontech]

In one simple fake video, Google has created a level of over-hype and over-expectation that their hardware cannot possibly live up to. — Blair MacIntyre, Georgia Tech

Thank you Blair, I feel less lonely in my assessment of Google Glass.

Found here: Google Glasses Face Serious Hurdles, Augmented-Reality Experts Say (Wired.com)

[oneeyeontech]

Of Big Data, Elephants, and Serendip(ity)

  Big Data fascinates me

Ever since my technology adolescence days, when I was studying data structures, machine learning and knowledge-based systems at UTC (Compiegne, France), data has been core to all the hardware and software businesses I was involved in. Whether it was UNIX servers (and the new data structures, file systems and databases they brought with them), business activity monitoring, telecommunications billing systems, speech recognition, or mobile image processing, data was central.

Startups founders I advise these days will tell you how much of a b*** I am about the data model when developing a new service. With all due respect, those who start development with the UI and think they will just plug in some database to support their service are in for serious surprises -- not to mention costs.

The latest example that comes to my mind is Vitogo, a self-tracking workout app for iPhone. Great interface, great design, but... it doesn't work. According to the company, the app is now undergoing a "major rewriting" that has been taking months so far. I suspect the data model (or lack of a well though-out model, from inception) is central to the issue.  Anyone familiar with what is going on at Vitogo, please comment or correct my assumption.

So when the industry started to talk about Big Data a few years ago, I got Big Interest. I won't spiel here a tutorial about what Big Data is, for fear of boring most of you. Enough to quote Noreen Burlingame in her well-written, concise "Little Book of Big Data" (2012; available here in a kindle reader version):

"Every day of the week, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. This data comes from everywhere: from sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos posted online, transactions records of online purchases, and from cell phone GPS signals -- to name a few. In the 11 years between 2009 and 2020, the size of the "Digital Universe" will increase 44 fold. That's a 41% increase in capacity every year. In addition, only 5% of this data being created is structured and the remaining 95% is largely unstructured, or at best semi-structured. This is Big Data."

Now for the elephants

One of the core emerging technologies for dealing with Big Data is Hadoop. Apache Hadoop is an open source platform build around Map/Reduce, a "seed" technology developed by Google (and inspired by LISP -- no wonder I like it... there's no denying one's childhood love) to address their needs for indexing and analyzing web data, and dealing with the flow of searches hitting their data.

Several companies have sprouted up, that enhance / simplify / complement Hadoop with specialized layers and applications. A good overview of the current Hadoop landscape (suppliers and major users) can be found on Wikipedia here. And then there's the analytics world, with the likes of ClearStory Data and Palantir Technologies.

Among these players, Hortonworks is particularly notable. Hortonworks was created by Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital in 2011 to take on the Yahoo! contributions to Hadoop. It is an independent company and one of the rising stars of Big Data, together with Cloudera and a few others.

The legend says that the Hadoop name comes from that of one of the original authors' son's toy elephant. Hence the elephant in the Apache Hadoop logo. How inventive of Yahoo! and Benchmark to have called Hortonworks after Horton, Dr Seuss' elephant... I guess 'Babar' was protected by a strong copyright.

But wait a minute

Why did Dr Seuss name his character Horton?

I will offer that when "Horton Hears a Who!", the book featuring the nicest elephant on Earth, was published in 1954, Dr Seuss might have been influenced by the elephants of the Horton Plains in Sri Lanka. A paradisiac high plateau at 2,100 meters of altitude in the center of Sri Lanka, the Horton Plains were home to a large population of elephants until their extinction in the late 1940's due to over-hunting by the British who then occupied the region.

From Big Data to Serendip (Sri Lanka), the connection is now established. Serendipitously, thanks to Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital.

"--- you don't reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings ... serendipitously." (John Barth, The Last Voyage of  Somebody the Sailor)

[oneeyeontech]

I will attend the Quantified Self conference to be held September 15 - 16, 2012 at Stanford University. Will you join me? From health and activity monitoring (fitbit, withings, runkeeper to name a few) to collecting and using data about our own activity, the sky is the limit. I see tremendous value coming from, beyond the collection, the analysis of this data. 'Big Data' meets the individual. We will detect patterns, correlate data to develop better habits, increase performance, predict outcomes, or diagnose (and hopefully cure) pathologies or to alter damaging habits. We will analyze behavior, usage, and reactions based on actual data, taking the guesswork out of marketing, planning, or choosing a resource / tool. Once the data set is large enough and we have found a metastructure that allows for it, we will be able to extend these to multi-individual / group / population level analysis. The sky is the limit, this is a true revolution in the making. www.fitbit.com www.withings.com www.runkeeper.com Also www.palantir.com and many, many more.

[oneeyeontech]

I couldn't resist this one... The geekiest game announcement video ever. (Note the tablet that's used at the end? Not a 'new iPad' -- well done, Rovio.

[oneeyeontech]

On Mentoring Startups.

  My friend Cecile Thirion (@cecilesf) sent me tonight an interesting piece of advice from Henrick Wederlin, startup mentor, to 'mentorees'.

A mentor to early stage startups myself, I have recently helped out SeedCamp last week in both San Francisco and Mountain View with mentoring eleven startups over two days. I have assisted, behind the scenes, Matthieu Dejardins' ambitious NextUser project come all the way through the hurdles of Adeo Ressi's Founder Institute program to graduation. I have mentored many other founders in the past year, trying to give back to the tech entrepreneur community after having benefited from incredible mentors as a mentoree as I was starting, growing, and later exiting Realeyes3D and Qipit.

  Googleplex, 1900 Building. Where SeedCamp Mountain View took place last week.

  Henrick gives a series of advices to startup founders engaged in a mentorship relationship for them to 'extract the most amount of value" from their mentors (italics are my comments):

Get introductions: this is one immediate value your mentor can give you.

Ask for specifics: in order to avoid 'mentor bias'. 

Stay at the top of their minds: yes, mentors are usually busy too!

Get emotional support: one of the key values a mentor can bring.

Pick the right mentor for the right things: know your weak points and get help there.

I couldn't agree more with Hendrick's list. Some of his points are especially relevant for 'spot' mentoring opportunities, such as a SeedCamp or Founder Institute session, where mentors are usually assigned to you.

Luckily, in many situations, the mentor relationship has more time to develop. Whether as part of an organized program such as the French American Chamber of Commerce's Business Booster program, or as an initiative you, the founder, have taken on your own. Weeks, or years. In that case, I would add what I see are four additional essential pieces of advice if you want to maximize the value of mentoring:

Avoid cookie cutter mentoring: make sure your mentor understands your ambition and the specifics of the company you are building. What you want isn't a mentor who will 'dump' his past experiences on you, but rather someone who will participate in your thought process, bringing new light to the problems or situations you face.

Pay attention to the personal fit. Good mentors won't agree to help you if they don't feel the fit is good. But this is best if it is reciprocal. Sounds obvious, however I have seen situations where it wasn't. Not a happy ending.

Commit to the relationship beyond the short term. The greatest value will be obtained after a genuine, personal connection with the mentor has been established, and the mentor feels that her contribution makes a difference. This doesn't happen overnight.

Incentivate your mentor. The longer the relationship, the more efficient this will prove. Whether you chose to grant your mentor discretionary stock options, or you introduce you to your Board or associate him to your success through company celebrations, you will benefit from making the mentor feels she is part of the team-at-large, not just a hidden secret you keep up your sleeve!

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Full article: "Five Ways To Get The Most Out Of Your Mentor" -- Fast Company.