New Year, new work...
A year or so has past since my full daytime job.
My last day at ACS, a Xerox company was April 4, 2012, when we were downsized. I was enraged and could only think malaise to my former boss. Xerox was a wonderful company but not in Monterrey. The ACS side were single minded people who could only think of the bottom line.
When I tried a joint project between us and the Xerox Research Centre Europe, things get awry once top management hit their upper wall.
After a while, I realized, I was a big duck in a small pond. Minding the difference, I felt like Alan Kay and Bob Metcalf at Xerox PARC on the 70's (see my previous blogpost for thoughts on that).
And that's when my journey begins...
The Silicon Valle project
If you don't already know, Silicon Valle, started as a personal quest to make it on the big leagues.
It started as a personal journey from my current town (Monterrey, Mexico) to the center of IT all: the Bay Area, San Francisco, the Silicon Valley.
The actual name Silicon Valle started as a pun. The place I grew on is most commonly and affectionately called the "Colonia del Valle" or Neighborhood on the Valley or simply Valle (without the 'y' at the end), as Spanish for Valley.
About Valle...
Since the late 80's, due to an increase of under-graduates and graduates from higher educations centers, it has started to focus on IT. Several important venture capital funds are located there, like Alta Ventures and Naranya.
I say there, mainly because I live just two blocks north, just past a bridge atop the dry Santa Catarina lake.
It's a nondescript bridge spanning a few feet away from the posh neighborhood on the other side. On most of the Monterrey's Met area, space is tight and municipal services lack, on San Pedro Garza García (which is the official county name) traffic lanes are divided by wide parks called Calzadas which expand north-south and east-west this affluent area. It hints first-world, but the illusion quickly fades once you get to know other areas of my town. Kinda, it indicates that we are half way on the middle.
From Point A to C, but going through H and B.
And that's precisely where my journey began. Half way down that middle road, between the knowledge economy and the real economy of my current ecosystem.
Here you don't sell ideas, you sell hands and do other's people work.
So being a freelancer is not a good place to start. There have been hardships and low downs. At several moments in time I had given up on my dreams when something new came up.
So, after much work, finally a windows opened. A friend of mine, gave me an opportunity on his company to do some intraprenual work and tomorrow we start with the first customer. To avoid giving the name away, I'll just say it's a Depot but ain't for the Office.
They are quite big, with a 1000+ team on location everywhere from Austin to Santiago, Chile, stopping at my home town of Monterrey.
My goal is help them create synergies for the likes of: mobile, consumer apps and all sorts of uses for the social and localization trend (a la Foursquare and Path) but with an Enterprise slant. They also will be assigning me to key account to help on business development, software development and architecture.
Other musings...
Alas, I don't want to forget my current visions outside that realm, so as to make them grow in current year, including.
Some of them are (I will describe briefly, as as to keep them on my personal radar).
Loreto
We plan to change social networking for the better. Today people exchange the nuances of life, including large amount of photos of food, jokes, babes and stuff.
We want to push forward, into the realm of ideas and lores, that is, the real fabric of thought. Using semantic analysis we want to help propel the semantic web forward. That'll take time and we will move slowly but surely.
Blogfacturing
Wouldn't it be nice if companies that handle your social networking needs focus on the good stuff and not just sending social messages without a purpose or meaning.
That's BlogFacturing, creating ideas, dialogues and helping companies make the right choices with regards to their social interactions.
My partner (in crime) is a Fellow from Mexico City living here in Monterrey. He's helping me sort things out and find customers willing to change their current social media providers.
Thanks to him, we currently have a graphic designer at Mexico City working with several design studies. We want to expand the team and focus on continuous clients which have a clear idea of their social interaction needs and premises.
In the end, this could become an app similar to HootSuite but far more focused and outsourced (even crowdsourced)
Featured
We believe the customer is always right, but can't find north or south. So that's what Featured's gonna do.
Give the end customer an app to find promos and packs and have him sort them out as they like. Automagically, the sorting gets published and others can search for stuff the same way.
On the back end, we're thinking of doing things the BI (Business Intelligence) way. Denormalize as much as you can, create a common engine and tell your back end customers (Wal Mart, H.E.B., Oxxo, etc.) to just drop stuff on your central server in a common way. No fuss, no mess.
P.S.:I want this idea to be a joint venture between the Santiago people here, and another guy down there in the Lean Startup LatAm stuff. I've plenty of people to convince before this goes forward, but I'm patient and I know I will get what I want once everybody 'gets the idea'. Wish me luck.
Global Internet Guru, GIG and OpenGIG.
This project has been a late bloomer. Our idea is to create a spot where freelancers can find jobs that best match their interests. We want to be kinda like Agents who find gigs for talented people and only charge the commission, kinda like 10x Management, but Silicon Valle.style.
Unfortunately, my partner down at Mexico City has given other projects the spotlight. Alas, I was banned from one of his customers, so it might well be a no go, but I will try my best to find a compromise, between business and technology.
Well those are the breath of my effort. I hope G-d gives me the knowledge, the savvy and the experience to push them forward without breaking me apart.
Alas, as always, plans change and things change, so I'm open to compromises here and there, as long as the general vision stays.
As an old saying says:
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
Wilhelm Stekel -- As quoted in The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger.
So wish me luck and hope for the best, but expect the worst, although I think that has--hopefully--past by.