Herve Cuviliez: Entrepreneur - business angel in the Middle East

I watched on techcrunch a couple of weeks ago the future of search by Google. It impressives me, not only because they will team up human rating with pagerank but also because it will create new sources of traffic creation for all of us (your name is visible on each comment & rating made). Google was already taken something around 75% of our attention, it will become with this 99%.

It made me realize that Microsoft will never catchup on web search. They are too far behind, even buying Yahoo won’t solve the problem.

Having said that, Mr Balmer should look at emerging countries and learn from their “jump to the next generation” attitude.

When you start traveling there, you realize they’ve chosen not to catch up but to invest into the next generation infrastructure and it’s a winning strategy: Estonia (called  E-stonia), Macedonia (wimax covered), Africa (mobile applications stronger than web ones), UAE (150% mobile penetration rate)…

That’s why should focus on the next big thing: Mobile.

Mobile is the big thread for Google (my previous post on this here).

Why? because with mobile will come new usage patterns. Today, everything start with google but tomorrow nobody knows what will be the entry point on mobile internet.  Google already working on it with Android and their strong presence in the iphone.

Of course, it’s easy to say not easy to do, but with Microsoft cash-flow, it should be doable.
My humble opinion

Some people have asked me if they need a domain name strategy, the answer is yes for this 4 reasons:

• Word of mouth is a strong source of traffic for websites but it’s also a source of
misspelling
• Every business becomes international, with this come the need to protect your
products names and brands in yours and future local markets
• Misstyping is a source of lost traffic
• To prevent cybersquatting (people that registers yours potential domain
names)

Domain names should be consider as an asset in a company but it’s to often undervalued by the management

Now, you know that the answer is yes, Where to start?

It’s quite simple

First thing, keep in mind that registering a domain cost only a dozen of dollars; so
don’t hesitate to cover all your needs.

Then, start to answer to each of the first 3 bullets point above. Remember that
generally, cybersquatters are more creative than us.

• What king of misspelling can be done with my brands and products? Commons are with or without “-“ for composed words, with or without silent vowel (try amazone.com) or an H in your name, etc…
• Try to forecast your international expansion and start to register all local domains you will need in the coming years (don’t forget to apply the misspelling check for each local market)
• With out being paranoiac, try to anticipate possible mistyping around your brands and register them (try amzzon.com or hervecuvilliez.com / hervecuvilier.com /hervecuvillier.com)

Once the list is done, select you registar and get your credit card ready.

Don’t forget to manage DNS on each domain.

Review it every year.

and one last tip, turn on the autorenew function, it will ease your life next year.

Yesterday, It was my birthday. I don’t tell that for those who forgot but to thank Facebook. I never received so many happy birthday greetings.

Some were honests and recognized that they remembered because of facebook, others called proudly because this year, they remembered.

Special thanks to Remi, he left me a message to not wish me an happy birthday because it’s too easy now with facebook.

So thank you, facebook, for this little moment of social networking

A couple of months ago, I have created an account on Kiva.org. Kiva enables you to loan to small businesses in developing countries.

You can see my lender page here.

I’ve helped among others 2 projects, one Internet cafe (Loan Requested: $975.00) in Ayacucho, Peru and one bookstore (Loan Requested: $975.00) in Agoe, Togo.

Small Amount of money to be honest ($100 + $10 donation to Kiva). It was a trial to verify by myself if the social business concept is really effective.

The answer seems to be yes because i just received the first repayment from both projects.

It’s a great feeling to see these projects becoming a reality and more important repaying their debt to give others the opportunity to been also helped.

1) Our culture: Coming from an engineer culture, France has always been strong at building infrastructures, don’t we have one best automotive highway or high speed train networks even airlines. It’s a no surprise that’s we have a fair good broadband network. As a consumer, you pay only 30 euros for a 20mb connection plus free calls plus 60 TV channels. Everything perfect but only 53% households have access to it.

But this time it’s not about infrastructure but about services and content
Didier Lombard (France telecom CEO) said

Contents are the oxygen for our networks

That’s my point because our culture, we don’t give enough value to intangible assets. We have very few online champions, really to few to catch the growth which goes to the US (around 80% of online media spending in france)

2) Our lake of investments: if you take a look at the The Global Information Technology Report 2008 ranking just released by the World Economic Forum, you won’t see big evolutions in the past 3 years, France (2006: #22, 2007: #23, 2008: #21), UK (2006: #10, 2007: #9, 2008: #12), US (2006: #1, 2007: #7, 2008: #4), Germany(2006: #17, 2007: #16, 2008: #16), India (2006: #40, 2007: #44, 2008: #50), China (2006: #50, 2007: #59, 2008: #57).

Knowing that a networked economy is directly linked to innovation and competitiveness, we will have to invest heavily to catch up with the 10 or even just for not been catch up.

Regarding point 1) and our 2,000 billions euros debt, It will need political courage and vision to make the necessary investments.

3) Talents migration: Due to point 1&2 and/or to our tax system, we face a huge talents migration and where we are still questioning ourself about it , others developed countries are already working on it (see Bill gates congress intervention here). In the past 6 months, every entrepreneur, I have met was considering incorporate outside of france. Fortunately, we have local initiatives (see my post on digiport) but it won’t be sufficient.

Conclusion: This is in this context that was appointed Mr Besson as Digital Economy Secretary of State. He will present his catch up plan for the french digital economy in a couple of months after a series of meetings with french digital economy leaders.
It will have to be ambitious, heavily founded and engaging if he wants to have the market makers behind him.
I wish him good luck, If this time nothing happens, I will also move east.

I just finished the latest book of Prof. Muhammad Yunus (founder of the Grameen bank and 2006 Peace Nobel Prize) called “Creating a world without poverty“.

I’d liked his analysis of capitalism and more precisely his vision on the far too simple way we are dividing the economic world: On one side companies with only on objective, maximizing profit and on the other side none profit organizations in charge of taking care of poor people & environment.

You, like I first done, will object that now big firms have sustainable development and CSR programs. that’s true but at the end of the day what is the one and only indicator the market will use to rate a company : PROFIT.
So if a CEO has to choose between profit and doing a good action, he will choose profit in 99% of the time because it’s what the market expects.

You know what it’s normal and Prof. Muhammad Yunus find that normal also.

That’s precisely what is liked in his approach, he is not an anti-everything kind of guy but a very practical and realistic one.

He proposes to create a new business concept: The social Business. A social business will be have the same mechanisms as a standard business but with two major differences it’s first goal is poverty reduction instead of making profits and propose products and services that’s enhance poor people life.
They will not distribute dividends, the investors will only get back their investment that’s all. So it will help to low products and services prices.

Social businesses and standard businesses will compete on the same market and at the end, consumers will decide.

I think it’s a brilliant idea it will give talented people another option than “profit companies” without sacrifing their revenues (remember a social business will be pay the same salary as a standard business) plus it will leverage the money given to non profit organizations by giving them the ability to get back their investment instead of just spending it.

My only concern about social business is how do we ensure social businesses keep their structural costs sharp without the profit pressure from the shareholders (really important to be able to keep the lowest prices). The board members will have to play hard on this otherwise it will turn into an inefficient administration and then back to beginning.

I strongly recommend this book and to think about this social business concept, if you have any input or comment, feel free.
On my side, I have a idea for a social business, I work on it and I keep you updated.

While the vaste majority of us just getting tired of facebook, the Web 2.0 is entering into phase 2. I will say a more mature phase.
With phase 1, we learnt how to connect to each other, sharing basic information, etc… I’m talking about facebook, dopplr, linkedin, Xing and hundred of others.

With phase 2, we will learn to share informations with others forms of intelligence. I’m talking about artificial intelligence, I’m talking about robots, sensors, any kind of devices. Scared ?
To make it simple, everyday there is millions of information gathered by sensors that could be valuable for us: temperature sensors, mobile for localization, wifi hotspots, RFID chips, etc…
In fact, we are already surrendered by sensors collecting information and “socializing” between them.
This phase 2 will be the connection of this 2 kinds of social networks: us and them.
Don’t Believe me ? Need some signs ? Here is some

Tim O’Reilly at the ETech08:

the future of Web 2.0 will be applications driven by sensors

But in fact, the first person, i ever heard talking about this, is Bernard Benhamou that’s was a year ago and he made a interview (in french) about this in may 06.

and then start to google this there tons of pages on this: A good article on the economist

So what’s new ?
It’s getting real. In 2008, we will move from prospective to concreate applications.

Need another sign ?

Yahoo just released Fire Eagle (a way to share your location with sites and services online) that collect localization informations and centralize them in an unique application then you can feed this into your applications. Sources could be wifi hotspots, mobile, gps, etc…

I will continued to investigate that and invest myself and my money into this type of application.

To be continued…

I just attended a keynote from Tim O’Reilly. It was amazing

He talked about hackers philosophy and why Emerging Tech conference is the place to be for them. Does that make me an hacker ? I hope so.

Hackers are people who try things that have never been done before
Hackers don’t know where is the business opportunity but do things because they love it, because it matters

they don’t know if it will be the next big thing, they just loved it.

to make his point he showed this picture : “Microsoft, 1978: Would you have invested?”

Don’t follow the ease path then you will be an hacker…