26. February 2008 by Aidan.

I am in San Jose this week attending a conference. Although San Jose is at the centre of Silicon Valley, the downtown area itself is pretty small and very quiet. It’s the smaller, less well known cities around here where you find all of the hi-tech household names. Apple are based in Cupertino, Intel in Santa Clara and you drive by many others: Oracle, Adobe and Google. The catalyst for much of the innovation in this part of the world has been Stanford University. Stanford is based in Palo Alto, just to the north of San Jose. It’s a combination of factors that has lead to this area being the hi-tech capital of the world. In particular, the research work being done in Stanford combined with a ready supply of cash from Venture Capitalists that have their offices nearby. There is a history here of young people trying out their ideas in Stanford and when they hit on an idea that they think has potential they are able to access a local supply of money that gives them time to convert their idea into a business.

These factors result in the start-up companies staying in the area. That and, of course, the ready supply of local talent.

After the supply of money being tight here for a few years, the signs are that it is more readily available now. The VC’s are again willing to put money into potential businesses that don’t have a clear revenue model. They are willing to gamble on some of these in the hope that they will turn into the next Google or E-Bay.  

 San Jose skyline

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22. February 2008 by Aidan.

It is interesting to see that the recently formed Irish Technology Leadership Group are holding an award ceremony at Stanford University (Ca.) on March 27th.

The ITLG is a group of Irish and Irish American business people, based in Silicon Valley, who are active in the global technology business and who are interesting in helping promote the growth and development of Irish Technology companies.

Irish Technology leaders based in Silicon Valley include John Gilmore, Chief Operations Officer of Sling Media, Brian Fitzgerald, former VP of Operations at Intuit Inc, Niall O’Connor, Chief Information Officer at Apple, Rory McInerney, Dir of Engineering at Intel and Tony Redmond, Chief Technology Officer at HP Services.

 Intel Chairman, Craig Barrett, will be among those honoured at the groups first award ceremony on March 27th.  

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19. February 2008 by Aidan.

In an article written by Prof. Frances X. Frei of Harvard Business School in the November 2006 edition of the Harvard Business Review, she talks about “Breaking the Trade-off between Efficiency and Service” for service companies.

 A number of key points made in the article are of some relevance to service providers in many industries.   

Service companies struggle with a reality that does not exist for manufacturing companies, that is, customers interfering directly with their operations. In order for a service company to deliver consistent quality at sustainable cost, companies must learn to manage the customers’ involvement.  In fact, at the same time as customers introduce tremendous variability, they complain about lack of consistency in the responses and support that they receive. Dealing with that variability is a central challenge in making the service offering profitable.  Service managers have to make decisions about how and how much to reduce or accommodate the variability that customers introduce.   Read the rest of this entry »

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18. February 2008 by Aidan.

On Nov. 7th and 8th last the 3rd International Conference on Services and Innovation was held at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin. Most of the presentations from that conference are available to download on the website now:

http://www.innovationconference.net/asp/

 There was a number of very interesting presentations on innovation, particularly in the service sector. Two that stood out were one by Aviv Katz of Engine about The Fundamentals of Service Design and a case study by Christine Kurjan of Innovation Delivery. Take a look at these…

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14. February 2008 by Aidan.

 Model of Dalian Development Area

In November I visited Dalian in China. Although you don’t hear much about Dalian it actually has a population of around 7 million people. It is on the coast in the North East corner of China, quite near North Korea. It was my first time in China and I wasn’t sure what to expect, particularly when I wasn’t going to one of the big cities that I had heard about.

I was very impressed with the area. I was there on business and spent a lot of time in meetings, including many with the local authorities. They have created a huge development zone around the city, called the Dalian Development Area. This area is 390km2 is size and contains many technology parks. They are pushing strongly for overseas investment in the area, particularly hi-tech and it is incredible to see the steps that they are going to to attract this investment. They have universities, hospitals, international schools and many hotels in this area. If you want to set up a business there and need something built, they will build it for you. They even have a huge Disneyland style themepark and many golf courses in the area.

Of course, many companies moving here are attracted by the low cost of labour; and it is very low. According to the local authorities, the standard salary for workers in low tech industries is about 650-1000RNB per month. This is about 65 to 100 Euro’s per month (yes, one hundred!). For skilled workers in technology companies they say that the monthly salary could rise to about 150 euro’s per month. My own information is that this too low and the actual salary for an engineer is about 500 Euro per month - still low!

Overall, I was impressed with Dalian and the efforts that the local government is making to attract business there. I can see why China is such a huge challenge to manufacturing in the West.

Let me know if you want any more information, Aidan. 

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13. February 2008 by Aidan.

Check out the CreativeCamp “unconference” in Kilkenny, Ireland on Mar. 8th. This “unconference” is a free gathering for people working in the technology and creative sectors and gives attendees the opportunity to network and learn from one another. Register at http://creativecamp.barcamp.ie/

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13. February 2008 by Aidan.

There are many reasons why companies engage consultants to work with them. The primary reason being that the consultants bring some expertise or experience to the company that is not available in-house. This is most successful when there is a specific technical need for the consultant to support a project, e.g. an IT consultant to support the introduction of a new CRM or business intelligence system. With the right preparation in place and clearly defined objectives this can be a very successful relationship.

However, many companies engage consultants to develop some initiative that does not exist, or is not working, in the company today. For example, getting a consultant to come in to design a new Performance Management system or to drive an improvement initiative. These are often areas to which the management has not assigned any priority in the past and is now trying to fix quickly with the help of the external consultant. In that environment it is also common for these initiatives to become lower priority again after the consultant has left. The result is a failed implementation of a worthwhile initiative and a general feeling of scepticism among employees about what the management priorities are. In fact the situation is often worse after the project has failed than if it were never started in the first place.  

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12. February 2008 by Aidan.

Got $200,000 to spare?  If so, then why not book a ticket on Richard Branson’s space flight with Virgin Galactic, it takes a lot of vision and deep pockets to come up with something like this. Now where can I get $200k from……

http://www.virgingalactic.com/

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12. February 2008 by Aidan.

In the course of starting this blog I looked at a lot of others. A few things struck me, particularly there are so many blogs out there (which is the point I guess) but also that there is so much content. How long do people really spend reading all of this stuff? Personally I don’t spend very long. Are there lots of people out there with so much time on their hands that they can read all of these blogs? I don’t think so. My preference is to keep the content short and clear (i.e. a blog V’s a weblog). Get the message/thought across quickly and then send me somewhere else if I want to read the details. Also, to avoid over/mis-communication, keep the language simply. It’s pretty tiring to read about a company that has “an intense passion for diving into the consumer behaviour pool”. 

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11. February 2008 by Aidan.

I was reminded the other day of a past life. In ‘99 and 2000 myself and a colleague started a business creating online audio for companies. It was back when all of the talk was of exploding bandwidth but in reality everyone was still on dial up (some still are!). My colleague was a musician and composer, I knew how to use Flash and how to sell stuff. As a result we combined these two and created audio and video content for corporate websites that was still in a reasonably small file size. We did a lot of work for telecomms companies and made some good money at it. It was pretty easy at the time. We met with consultants who told us that we were looking at “phone book numbers” for the value of the company, some of our customers talked about investing. Then everything stopped. Audio content became a nice to have and no-one had any budget for it. Myself and my colleague diverted our attention back to our day jobs and got on with it.

It was great fun being part of that boom and it was easy to blame the downturn on our misfortune, however I still think that a major factor in the failure of a lot of companies at that time was that it was all too easy, too fast. You didn’t have to work too hard at it, you didn’t have to think it through too much, people wanted to throw money at you. When that dried up then the cracks started to show and the new easy way was the way out.  

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