Help us create the first museum of new technologies in Slovenia

May 20th, 2013 § 0 comments § permalink

Children playing Paperboy on an Amstrad CPC 46...

Children playing Paperboy on an Amstrad CPC 464 in the 1980s (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

I am proud to be part of a group of enthusiasts, who have 10 years ago started systematically collecting and exhibiting computer history in Slovenia. the pinnacle of this first decade was the recent exhibition Goto1982, prepared in collaboration with MNZS, that covered the cambrian explosion of home computers extensively.

 

Today, we are hosting a closing event for this exhibition, which is moving on to be hosted by Technical Museum of Slovenia for the next 12 months. We are extremely proud to be recognized and trusted by both institutions, and by thousands of visitors who left very optimistic comments, like “omg, this was my first one!“, and “this is confusing, i feel young and old at the same time“. thank you all!

 

We are more sure than ever, that technology is not just part of everyone’s lives today, but essential ingredient in everyone’s personal story. Each and every one I talk to these days doesn’t feel intimidated or bored by the idea of this Museum, quite the contrary – with glitter in the eyes, everyone starts listing objects from their past that they have been safely storing until now.

 

Screen Shot 2013-05-20 at 1.04.42 PM

We are opening a new chapter today – we will be announcing the founding of Computer Museum Society, and inviting new members and supporters to join. Our plan is to build a different museum – one that will not only educate about the past, but also think ahead, educating the youth and bringing together professional communities.

 

To do this next step, we first need your help. We need you to raise your hand in support and basically say: “yes, computers and other contemporary technologies have made me what I am today, I don’t want this to pass by unexplored.”

 

You can support our efforts by:

 

  • showing up tonight, at 6pm in MNZS
  • becoming ‘supportive member’ with a donation, which gets you the right to wear exclusive t-shirt, learn about our next steps in real time and your place on our wall of fame
  • thinking of 10 friends who might support our cause and telling them about it

 

Thanks!

 

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How many people work in slovenia (and on what)

April 30th, 2013 § 10 comments § permalink

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bakery

bakery (Photo credit: Sachiho)

Slovenia is a small country. it’s a fact, but unfortunately this realization is too often used as an excuse to not do something right. In my opinion, this means two other things:

  1. because it’s a small country, we can have much better overview of activities, if only we choose so. our national statistics centre is able to produce monthly insights into many aspects of the society without much effort, so we actually have data available that could be used to empower better decisions easily.
  2. because we don’t have infinite pool of human resources, we have to be more careful on where we employ them.

I don’t see enough efforts on either part, and I’m pretty sure very few people in slovenia are actually aware of the actual distribution of human potential of the country, which results in lots of ungrounded frustrations and much ranting about “too big government sector” or “too little economic growth“, without data to back it up.

So i wanted to get better sense of what our high level structure is. here is first draft of a breakdown of slovenian population:

… every slovenian resident can find herself in exactly one of the squares. now we can observe some interesting facts, some that we have known before, and some that might be a surprise:

  •  government is not so big. 40.000 people work across the administration. the same for public sector – all our education and health is run by only 5% of the population
  • i ventured into separating private sector into two halves – the pseudo-private sector are people employed in companies that are funded mainly from public sources. i’ll get more accurate data, but i believe this distinction is important, because those companies are not actually creating value on the market, but rather live off national budget.
  • so my theory is, that until we get more people from all other buckets into the real private sector, there is little hope of solving the economic crisis. if all our growth is dependent on government projects, and only 16% of people daily work on and think about adding value to the

complete data table is:

sector group headcount percent
slovenija 2,050,000 100.00%
pre-active slovenija 430,000 20.98%
active slovenija 940,000 45.85%
inactive slovenija 680,000 33.17%
kids under 15 pre-active 250,000 12.20%
young students pre-active 90,000 4.39%
student pre-active 90,000 4.39%
government active 40,000 1.95%
public sector active 110,000 5.37%
pseudo-private active 330,000 16.10%
real private active 340,000 16.59%
unemployed active 120,000 5.85%
other inactive 110,000 5.37%
retired inactive 570,000 27.80%

i’m imagining next steps for this visualization will be:

  1. make it update itself from monthly data
  2. add more complexity, adding ability to drill into individual sectors
  3. create a comparable breakdown of added-value, or contribution to GDP, or something similar, to back my thesis that we need more people in the real private sector.

thoughts? what else do you see in the chart?

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my comments on “Slovenia cuts growth forecast as bail-out fears grow”

April 1st, 2013 § 0 comments § permalink

300px-Zemljovid_Slovenske_dezele_in_pokrajin

 

A map of the Slovene Land and Provinces, autho...

A map of the Slovene Land and Provinces, author Peter Kozler Hrvatski: Zemljovid slovenskih zemalja i pokrajina, autor Peter Kozler (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

every western media seems to be talking about slovenia these days…

Slovenia cuts growth forecast as bail-out fears grow

Fears that Slovenia will become the next eurozone nation to need a bail-out have been fuelled by a sharp cut to the country’s growth forecasts by the government’s economic institute. Slovenia has become the first victim of contagion from Cyprus as its borrowing costs rocketed last week in the wake of a punishing bail-out deal.

via: www.telegraph.co.uk

as an ‘insider’ I feel obliged to comment:

  1. to all westerns: slovenia is going to be just fine. the current state of public finance is a residue of a couple of years of poor governments, that resulted in couple of months of public uprisings and a new government that feels promising. so stop panicking and pay attention to details. every crisis in EU zone in the last three years was handled completely differently, there are no patterns.
  2. to slovenian politicians: this is actually awesome public PR opportunity – the world is looking at us closely now, let’s keep the limelight on us as long as possible and make sure the ‘crisis’ resolves while they are paying attention. now is the time to invest in all kinds of projects :)
  3. to slovenian public: go vote next time around. and pay more attention next time. the rest of the world cares more about slovenia than you do.
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Best Book about Zemanta in NYC

March 18th, 2013 § 0 comments § permalink

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I gave several book interviews since starting Zemanta and moving to NYC, most of them in the last 18 months. Lots of authors are exploring the technology revolution that we were fortunate to participate in.

Books are coming this year, discussing it from various angles – comparatively with .com boom, the rise of entrepreneurship Europe, new entrepreneurship as a lifestyle, … It is no surprise to me, that the first book to actually publish is the one specifically celebrating NY tech community and agility and resilience.

Tech and the City became available on Kindle two days ago, and hardcopies are coming in April. I received the notification from the authors this morning, and already I’m half way trough it. It’s that good.

It starts with an amazingly inspiring foreword by Fred Wilson, which alone is worth the $2.99, as it perfectly outlines the mental model of the greatest city on the planet. After that, the book only gets better, weaving the story trough fragments of conversations with participants in the ecosystem, rather than lazily throwing together yet another series of interviews. This enables the book to read like a travel diary, rather than a self-hype-help business manual.

For the finish, the authors have collected a very comprehensive list of the NY tech ecosystem institutions – vc’s, events, co-working spaces and competitions. They have also published them on the official blog of the book.

It’s cheap and it’s short, and it’s awesome. Go read it and learn how you should be thinking about helping entrepreneurs in your cities / countries.

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Beware SXSW Networking Syndrome

March 11th, 2013 § 1 comment § permalink

blog

I’ve been meaning to write a piece about networking events for a while now, and this article prompted me to finally do it today.

Beware SXSW Networking Syndrome | TechCrunch

“Wow! I’m wanted!” I thought to myself upon receipt. But after basking in narcissistic glory for a few seconds, my pride gave way to bemusement. For one, I’ve never met the sender. We’ve exchanged a couple of LinkedIn messages, but I don’t think that qualifies me as a close friend. And on balance the @Garyvee namedrop as a hook to entice the invitee felt more sad than enticing. But most striking, to me, was that this sender is not a PR person or event planner who trades in building social connections, but rather an entrepreneur whose startup I respect.We need this to understand how you use our service - you can take it out if you like. Cheers, your Blogspire team.

via: techcrunch.com

I have a problem. I totally grew tired of networking events recently. I just want to be in the office and talk to my team and occasionally help them close a challenging deal. but then i sometimes feel guilty for not spending every evening ‘networking’ and mingling on VIP events and such. how can that be?

whole industry flocking to SXSW for spring break is the greatest symptom of this mentality. forced fun i call it.

So i asked myself, why do entrepreneurs really go to these events? there must be a finite list of possible motivations, and i’d bet each of you, if being really honest with yourself can pick one that is the main driver. I could identify 5 phases in my own history:

  1. I wanted to tell everyone about this great new thing – we are makers, and we get excited about stuff we build, and want to talk about it. the more the merrier. until the novelty wears out, or you are successful and have to start working on other types of challenges related to growth.
  2. I enjoyed being part of the in-crowd – startup ecosystem does resemble entertainment industry, and today’s entrepreneurs are treated as rock stars in some respects. and attention is addictive and you do enjoy it. here, a lot of people are famous for 5 minutes, or sometimes 5 weeks or 5 months. nobody is famous for 5 years. though.
  3. I enjoyed meeting new interesting people – on every event you go, you will meet at least one very interesting person that will make the event worthwhile. and by interesting, i mean really interesting – doing something very compelling, thinking in special ways that inspire you etc.. but after a while, you realize you can only manage several hundred relationships anyway. unfortunately.
  4. I got business done there – strictly professionally speaking, you don’t have to have fun. you can just prey on prospects and partners and clients. works fine, but makes you pick the events very carefully. 
  5. ultimately, sometimes I felt it’s my job to go there. this was the worst, but actually made me notice the other four angles.

so these days, I don’t go to events if I can help it and I don’t go to SXSW, even though I know it would feel special, I would meet awesome people there and that I would do business. I still prefer working with my team on day-to-day challenges above all that.

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Launching RankWP.com

February 19th, 2013 § 9 comments § permalink

Screen Shot 2013-02-18 at 9.57.07 AM
I have a very special announcement to make, at least very special to me. i’m happy to be announcing the launch of a community project, that’s building on top of the WordPress Plugins directory, augmenting it’s default information about the plugin, with some never-seen-before data, that should make your decisions when evaluating plugins even easier. It’s called RankWP.com

I have been a blogger since 2004, ever since i installed my first WordPress, version 1.0 if i recall correctly. it was the hottest thing online back then, and one could argue, it still is. Also, the first product we ever released at zemanta was a WordPress plugin. of course we uploaded it to the directory, and rejoiced when we saw bloggers discover it, starting to use it, leave reviews and ratings.

one of the best features wordpress had, and still has, is it’s extensibility trough plugins. there is a plugin for just about anything you could think of, more possibly, there are several. for every wordpress-based site owner, testing various plugins is a regular, and fun activity. wordpress.org directory is like an app store for website owners, built in a true open-source fashion as an ever-growing and ever-improving repository of blogging goodness, where developers across the globe are building on top of previous efforts of likeminds.

with thousands of plugins available, it’s not always easy to find the best one for your needs. it’s easier if you know just how popular it really is, so we have built an algorithm that estimates the actual number of active users of each plugin. plugins also become more or less popular over time, so we started tracking their popularity rank and show you how it’s changing. both of these informations are available now for all the plugins for the first time.

Screen Shot 2013-02-18 at 9.56.49 AM

all these great plugins are built by people, and most developers publish more than one. we are happy to expose most successful developers based on the aggregate number of users of all their plugins. of course automattic’s own developers have a clear lead, but of the independent developers, Yoast is a clear winner. I’ve shown him an early version of this project and he was kind enough to say a few words for this announcement:

“For users to find new plugins, or better alternatives to plugins they’re already using, is really rather hard. RankWP seems to be a very good step in the right direction of allowing people to see what other people use, which plugins get installed and uninstalled more often and which developers tend to have good plugins. I hope they keep developing this as the community could really use this.” – Joost de Valk

you’re all cordially invited to take a look, send me feedback, suggestions, corrections. if anyone feels like helping, either coding or editing the content, you will be very welcome.

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we’re all made of math

January 25th, 2013 § 0 comments § permalink

English: Math is prerequisite to Ontology. Mat...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

reading a great summary of 17 equations that changed the world. great stuff, go check it out.

I love how each of these formulas captures en entirety of a part of our world into a simple 2-d graphic :)

however, there is one formula missing here, a rather important one. it’s an equation, that sums it all, well, almost everything. everything that we could have summed up so far in the history of science. the grand, unified theory of everything.

GUT is a theory that connects three of the four forces that shape our world. Only gravity is missing in this connection, before we can claim we really can model the world. and my mind was blown when i first realized that we can write it up into a single page-long formula. here it is, in all it’s glory.

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the economy of wordpress plugins

January 23rd, 2013 § 0 comments § permalink

there is a very interesting discussion going on about the emerging business landscape of wordpress plugins, between Evan Solomon and Pippin Williamson, and even Matt chimed in.

English: Matt Mullenweg during the conference ...

English: Matt Mullenweg during the conference WordCamp in San Francisco CA 5 August 2006 Français : Matt Mullenweg lors de la conférence WordCamp, à San Francisco, le 5 août 2006. Deutsch: Matt Mullenweg während der Konferenz WordCamp in San Francisco, USA am 5. August 2006. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

they observe correctly, that plugins are becoming real businesses, however they feel that it’s not as serious as the themes business, nor that it ever will be.

while this is probably true if you consider only ‘custom plugin development’ and ‘premium plugin’ models, however there is another significant business model that emerged in the last years, that they are ignoring here.

for us at Zemanta, wordpress plugin has always been a core driver of adoption, and we’ve built a real business around it. but our business is actually software-as-a-service offering built on top of the plugin, rather than the plugin itself. the plugin is essentially a delivery mechanism, that is very efficient because most publishers are using a modular CMS, predominantly WordPress.org. but the real business value lies behind the scenes, in the cloud, where we can afford to process large amount of data.

I see business like ours grow tremendously over the past few years, and I see a lot of WordPress.org plugins being leveraged in this way – to deliver real value for the publishers, and enable diverse business models from utility, advertising and agency work, scale.

WordPress.org has built an impressive ecosystem, it’s tight integration of the CMS with the plugins directory enables SAAS models with almost frictionless infrastructure to customers (auto-updates, integrated discovery, security guidelines), but at the same time it’s sometimes limiting. it’d be great if WordPress.org was more aware of the needs of all constituents.

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slovenia’s national budget and open data

January 21st, 2013 § 2 comments § permalink

first, a disclaimer. in light of recent political events and unrests in slovenia, i’d like to stress that this post is not meant to take any sides. i’ll merely try to point out to a project that might otherwise go unnoticed.

English: Detail from Government. Mural by Elih...

English: Detail from Government. Mural by Elihu Vedder. Lobby to Main Reading Room, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

last year, i’ve spend a couple of days reading our national budget. the purpose of the exercise was to find ways to create something not unlike the famous ‘death and taxes’ infographic. i was pleasantly surprised with the fact, that our budget is actually very well designed, with fascinating inherent structure of programs and spenders, but unpleasantly not-surprised, that it was published as PDF.

to create an infographic with such complex data, that should be rebuilt every year, one needs programmatic ways to process it. so i ended up parsing the pdf, with many silly problems on the way. but it worked, and i’ve published the broken-down version for the years 2010-2012.

that was in spring, and ever since i’ve been waiting for the new government to finally publish the budget that was supposed to govern us this year, so i could compare it with the old ones. i really resent the fact that the budget was kept unpublished all throughout the legislative process. i really feel it’s an insult to the citizens.

but, they finally published it last week, and to my great surprise, they’ve really made an effort – they published detailed explanations of each section, and, ta-da-da-da, we have machine-parsable CSV files as well!

i realize it’s not perfect, but it’s light years ahead of what we used to have to deal with. so, who’s up for some info-charting now? ;)

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first three things every new startup founder/ceo should know

December 17th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

This post was inspired by an entrepreneur who I barely know from one of my previous lives, who sought a meeting because he was put in a position of running a startup. While thinking about what to say to him in the first 30 mins, I realized that it really can be boiled down to a handful of core truths. everything else is a footnote, or tactics. 

startup-curve

So, you’re starting a startup with a couple of your good friends? there are only two ways you could have ended up in this situation:

  • you are so smart, that you never had to really think hard about what you are doing with your life. you go where it takes you and make it work in your favor, and have fun while doing it;
  • or, you’re so dumb, you think doing startups is fun because it’s fashionable and you want to be just like mark

I sure hope you’re of the first kind, or that you are at least smart enough, to recognize yourself in the second description and give up while you still can.

Odyssey

Odyssey (Photo credit: tonynetone)

If you’re still reading, I guess you really want to know what it takes to run a startup. For explaining startup management issues, I really like the Platonic metaphor of a Sailboat. I might explain this some other time in more detail, because for today, we just need to be aware of the Guiding Star – when you are in the middle of the sea, without GPS, and with a couple dozen crew member who’s fates depend on your judgement, it clearly is important that you know which direction to sail to reach the destination.

It is no different in a Startup. you start a startup, because there is something tangible in your mind, that you need to make tangible for everyone else – a vision / an idea, that you see clearly, and can imagine how to do it. that’s your Guiding Star. thinking of that idea gives you strength to move forward, and to think creatively about shortcuts. discussing that idea makes other people join you on the journey, because of your ability to paint it so clearly for them, that they can see their role in getting to the end.

so here’s the heart of the advice for any first-time founder of a startup: never ever loose your Guiding Star. if you stop being obsessed with it, just stop.

Robin Klein taught me a version of this statement: “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” the flip side of this statement is, that it is better to kill the startup, than to keep working on it without the inspiration of the Guiding Star. Here’s why: as Fred says, a startup CEO has only three jobs to perform:

  • communicate the vision, internally and externally
  • assemble the best possible team to execute on that vision
  • secure the resources the team needs

I would argue that if you have your Guiding Star – if you can really feel your vision, if thinking of it is making you do things rather than sit still – only then will you be able to communicate the vision. and if you can do that, you will assemble the team, and convince the investors needed to succeed.

inevitably you will choose the wrong direction sometimes. and you will be running short on cash. you will have to do hard practical decisions. but if you have the Guiding Star in front of you, the decisions will make sense, so they will be infinitely easier to make. even if you run out of cash completely, and you are forced to kill your company, if you do that while knowing what you believe in, it’s not a failure, it’s just a learning experience.

and lastly, one thing that has nothing to do with you or your idea. Odyssey needed 10 years to return home, and that’s exactly what you are signing up for – assume your startup will consume you as a whole for 10 years. keep that in mind while you are deciding to start it, and while you are doing your everyday decisions. only if the idea is such, that it would still make sense for you in 10 years time, than you can consider it.

good luck.

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