Business

Yesterday at 17:50 I decided to go to the 4^th Manic Monday, organised by Creative Class, which started at 18:00. Boy, am I glad I made that decision.

For those who don’t know, Manic Monday is a simple concept of inviting a number of people for round table discussions with up to four different moderators or speakers, one at each table. Every 25 minutes, the participants move to the next table and take their discussion with them towards the following speaker/moderator.

The moderators yesterday were all very interesting people. First, there was Lorin Parys, co-founder of FlandersDC with a special interest in creative entrepreneurship. This lead our discussion topic almost immediately towards our Flemish education system where entrepreneurship is systematically under-valued.

Our group then moved towards Bart De Waele, co-founder of the webdesign company netlash and an all-round entrepreneur. This moved the topic from the general low sense of entrepreneurship in Flanders towards the differences we find in various cities, with Bart, obviously, promoting Gent here. :-)

After that, our group got a nice presentation from Luc Buntinx about his last 20 years in ICT entrepreneurship. Very inspiring! His latest venture, Story Nations seems pretty interesting.

Finally, we moved on to Giovani Oosters from the great Vous Lé Vous restaurant and found out we kept the best for last. His passionate story about cooking and his quest towards a Michelin star was truly inspiring and was really interesting listening to.

Overall, Manic Monday was a very successful evening, very well spent among inspiring people with great entrepreneurial spirit. What was very nice is that there were so many new faces. I was very happy to meet all of them.

Last week we had another Profoss-event in Brussels. As always, it was a high-quality event, with very interesting speakers and a nice group discussion at the end. It’s really a pity there’s never more than 20 people showing up. A topic such as the legal matters concerning Open Source software definitely should interest more people. Profoss has a lot more potential!

The first speaker, Ywein Van den Brande showed his expertise again by explaining the most important elements of GPLv3 compliancy. Isn’t it great there are lawyers out there knowing the difference between static and dynamic linking? :-)

I also very much enjoyed the talk of Philippe Laurent about the EUPL. The most important thing to remember here is the political value of this license: Europe is really going for Open Source here! Never forget the GPL was crafted for the American jurisdiction. It’s translations are always unofficial, which forms an additional problem for countries as France, where companies have to, by law, have all their legal documents interrelating them with other French companies in the French language. Also, terms as “distribution” have different meanings in the US and Europe, not to mention the various interpretations of the individual European member states.

I’m very happy I finally could attend a talk by Bruno Lowagie. I found him a very gifted speaker; he knew how to entertain and greatly inform the audience at the same time. Since he once called me “probably the youngest one on my list of favourite Flemish entrepreneurs”, I’m a big fan of his. ;-) In the context of this Profoss-event, the sharing of his experiences with the iText IP review were invaluable!

The other speakers, unfortunately, weren’t all that interesting to me. I was especially bothered by their lack of fluency in English (I blogged about this before). I really appreciate speakers coming over from as far as France and Luxembourg, but everyone should feel free to present in their native tongue. I’m sure they had a very nice message for the audience, and feel sorry that so much got lost in translation.

Anyway, it was a great afternoon spent in Brussels again. Congratulations to Raphaël Bauduin for the organisation. I’m looking forward to the next edition again, and feel proud Zeropoint.IT is an official partner of the Profoss-event!

Last year, I was present at the first edition Plugg as a start-up finalist speaker for MyOwnDB. It was a truly wonderful event then. But this year, it was even better. Congratulations to Robin Wauters and Veronique Pochet for bringing us such a high-quality event.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Plugg is a one-day conference with a clear focus on celebrating entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe and raising global awareness for those European start-ups in the Web / Mobile 2.0 field that stand out in the crop.

Mike Butcher is a great host and knows how to retain the audience’s attention throughout a full-day event. I’m less enthusiastic about Sien Luyten as a presenter for the core of the event, the start-up rally. But that’s just me, I suppose, as I heard other people congratulating her for her efforts.

My personal highlights of the day, however, were not the presenting start-ups (even though I found their pitches of a much better quality as last year’s contestants), but the very inspiring talks of Dries Buytaert and Bart Decrem. First of all, I am personally quite a fan of both these guys. Big Belgian names in the world wide Open Source community (that’s reason enough) ánd able to work on what they love most in their own businesses (need more reasons?).

I was very inspired by them, explaining the European entrepreneur that being in the United States is not a bad idea for your business and that we should not be afraid to think BIG.

I’m not a big fan of the States myself, but I can see their point. Thinking BIG however, is something I have in me. Let’s see where it gets me. :-)

One last thing I want to share is that it really struck me how nearly every startup was highlighting the fact that their product was platform-independent. Nothing we saw was tied to the Microsoft platform at all. I think the big shift towards the mobile platform, where no monopoly has settled yet, makes businesses rethink their platform compatibility strategy. Moreover, most key-note speakers clearly mentioned Open Source as being a really important factor in today’s digital world (Inmaculada Martinez, Dries Buytaert, Bart Decrem, Paul De Decker, …). I can’t help but think that the current crisis the world is finding itself in only accelerates this trend of Open thinking. This is good news for all us Open Source oriented businesses!

Anyway, it was nice meeting new and great people yesterday. I’m already looking forward to the third edition in 2010!

Yesterday was probably the best Profoss session up to now. Too bad, only 30-ish people showed up, but the quality of the discussions was pretty high. It was also one of the first Profoss’es where business models and market promises of Open Source software vendors stood central. Too bad, however, that all four speakers (OpenBravo, OpenERP, Compiere and Adampiere) were not very proficient in English. You could tell after 5 words where they came from (The Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany). :-)

One thing which got stuck in my head was a remark form the Microsoft representative in the audience. He mentioned that all the industries in Europe where we’ve been doing very well and are successful with worldwide, are in sectors where Intellectual Property rights are very well protected and laws are in place to do so. He gave the pharmaceutical industry and the GSM communication standard as examples.

Now, he might be right for certain definitions of “success”. They are the industries where venture capitalists like to live. They are the sectors with the so called money-printing companies. But, as someone in the audience gave as a remark, haven’t they stretched the limits of profitability too far? Isn’t the financial crisis we are in right now a symptom of that?

The Microsoft guy went on to express his fear that by adopting the Open Source idea so quickly, Europe is putting itself in a more vulnerable position as compared to the rest of the world where huge companies are still being formed around (software) patents. And that’s where I strongly disagree.

I believe, and not only for the software industry, that the Open Source philosophy forms the best sustainable business models, as a whole and in the long-term. Janssen Pharmaceutica might never have been so huge without it’s patents on the medicines they “invented”, but now it appears that for the last 25 years the whole company just survived on those few patents. Now that they have expired, all of a sudden Janssen is in trouble and recently had to lay down some thousands of people. However… now that alternatives for those medicines are allowed, they all of a sudden become far cheaper as the factor of choice appears. So which Europe (or Belgium, for that matter) is the most “successful”: the one where huge companies can get monopolies and allow some to get astonishly rich, or the one where medicines are affordable by anyone (without the need of too much medical insurance intervention)?

Isn’t the reason that Europe became what it is right now because of the rapid and free expansion of science and exact knowledge? ( As a matter of fact, I agree with Michael H. Hart that Isaac Newton has had a greater influence on our every day life than Jesus Christ. But that’s a different discussion. )

But… doesn’t Janssen deserve to be paid back and generate revenue to support further research and development of other, great medicines? Well, of course they do. But why didn’t they do it then? Why are they now, after 25 years of artificially stretching the time constraints of their patents, getting in so much trouble? Haven’t they had the time to invent something else profitable? ( One could also argue that for matters as health and hygiene, research should be left to public entities as universities. Again, that’s another discussion. )

The other example I want to tackle is the GSM one. GSM is, in my eyes, one of the great failures of humanity. Compare it to, say, TCP/IP. Both are communication protocols. One is proprietary and heavily regulated. The other is open and free. A couple of years after it’s existence, TCP/IP shaped the Internet, changed our entire world and allowed millions of business and even completely new business models to flourish on top of it. On the other hand, with these stupid mobile phones, after 10 years we still can’t do anything but calling and sending crappy text messages. MMS was supposed to be a big innovation. Ironically, we had to wait for TCP/IP to arrive on our mobile devices, before we could start doing useful stuff with them. Before we could do fun stuff that we didn’t have to ask permission for. Before we could be free.

Why is the iPhone such a success? Surely not because it supports GSM.

Just like Janssen, the great mobile operators might get in trouble when everybody starts using VoIP on their mobile phones. Sitting on top of their governmentally protected industries, they have done nothing to protect themselves.

Yes, GSM regulation has made it possible for huge companies to form where, in Belgium, Mobistar, Proximus and Base are offsprings off. But it has killed all innovation around it.

So again, what’s the most successful Europe?

Those Open Source ERP vendors might not get the big venture capitalists backing them. And none of their CEO’s will be the next Bill Gates. But they are forming the shape of the software business of tomorrow.

Yesterday, I attended the first CloudCamp in Belgium, which was held in Brussels. It was at a very nice venue, and the attending and presenting crowd was of very high quality.

There was much to be seen and more to be learnt. However… it wasn’t an unconference at all. Yes, at the end of the schedule there was a piece left “unscheduled”, but that time was wholly consumed at the bar.

Oh, wait… so maybe it was an unconference after all then… :-)

I especially enjoyed the talk of Raphaël in which he stressed the need for openness in the cloud, as that is exactly what made the Internet such a success. If the “cloud” is willing to turn into this next layer on top of the Internet, it indeed will have to make sure that it’s as open as can be. Otherwise, all we’ll get is another useless network like we have today with the mobile phone network and it’s few übermasters.

By the way… MyOwnDB is as open as can be! ;-)

Live from the Gardemoen airport in Oslo. I’m getting better and better in getting free internet access at airports lately. :-)

The last two days, the small town of Skien held three conferences at once: Open Nordic, the eZ conference (including the amazing eZ awards event) and the very first Mobile Open Nordic.

I learnt one interesting fact. Most of the current Web 2.0 revolution we see now, happens on top of the LAMP stack.

Let’s have a look where these technologies come from:

Linux:

started in Finland (Linus Torvalds)

Apache:

mainly American, but apparently has many Nordic contributors

MySQL:

Swedish/Finnish company

PHP:

started in Denmark/Greenland (Rasmus Lerdorf)

Basically, the Nordic countries can be held responsible for 75% of the LAMP stack! (ok, Norway isn’t in the picture here, but they have Opera, for what it’s worth ;-))

I was very happy to see that Nokia (+ Trolltech), Sun, IBM and other big players were represented by technical people, not by marketing people. In fact, the most interesting talks I attended, were presented by people of those larger companies. They really are trying to keep up with current trends.

Most interesting was also the main keynote speaker and opener of the conference on the first day: Bart Hanssens from the Belgian federal government (Fedict). He held a talk about the recent ODF guideline implementation at our federal government.

Personally, I had a wonderful time. Met many new people, mostly of the eZ crew and realised the sheer joy of such an internationally orientated SME (especially at the midsommernatten BBQ the last day). It felt great speaking 4 languages through each other once more, especially increasing the level of my Norwegian again. :-)

Yes, Norway… I completely fell in love with the country just once more…

The first Open Source Expo in Karlsruhe is coming to an end. Yesterday and today, the Kongresszentrum in Karlsruhe hosted Webinale ‘08 and Open Src Expo ‘08. I understood it was the first Open Src Expo. Webinale is an established conference. You could tell the latter was (treated as) the bigger brother of the former.

I must say I found it only a mediocre success. Somehow, it reminded me of FOSDEM, but far smaller ans less professional. A handful of Open Source projects were represented at their stand and a smaller handful of people were walking around, talking and watching demo’s. I had a nice introduction to OFBiz, The Apache Open for Business Project and was very impressed by it’s functionality. In the main hall which could host over 800 people, some talks were held, generally attended by 30-like people, more interested in their laptop than the speaker (a sad trend I see coming up unfortunately, although I must plead guilty as well). I do believe Open Src Expo ‘08 has some potential though. Keep it up!

It was also nice to see some Belgians around. Machtelt and Wim from OpenBSD were there to talk about ODF and BSD Certification. The Belgian TinyOpenERP had a stand as well.

I was also contacted by Edward Wijnen of SpringSource to talk about a partnership or other collaboration with Zeropoint.IT. Sounds good. I’d love to get the world to know about our Java team which loves working with Spring 2.5!

Just came back from the first BarCamp in Lille and I had a great time. You could tell it was a French organisation, as there were abundant amounts of food… and what kind of! It started off with a buffet with different kind of cookies, fresh strawberries and cherries. Several types of drinks were made available and later on they started coming around with warm pancakes with a dressing of your choice. At the end of the day threre was a free ice cream for all attendees. And I was told I missed the cake… Who doesn’t love the French? ;-)

As far as the talks are concerned, I was a bit disappointed to find a large focus being put on Enterprise, Management, Marketing and other things you can prepend to 2.0. For the tech-savvy, there wasn’t all that much to be learnt. I guess this had to do with the organisation team (and the location) being from the ESC Lille. It was interesting nevertheless.

Again, Raphaël and I gave a presentation about MyOwnDB and again, we got some nice reactions. Getting pretty nervous by the way for our GPL release in a couple of weeks!

It was nice to see how many Belgians made their way to Lille (which is so close to Belgium that the train station has more Dutch signs than the train station in Leuven has French sings). I arrived together with Patrick and met new, interesting people like Michaël Uyttersprot and Vincent Battaglia.

Tomorrow, I’ll be present at Open Source Expo 08 in Karlsruhe. Looking forward to it!

Earlier this week, I attended the Pulse event organised by USG Innotiv. It was a very nice evening, and I liked it very much. If your not familiar with Pulse, the evening consists out of a nice dinner and 4 parallel talks (of which you get to choose one to attend) about Java, .Net, mainframe and SAP.

I always go for Java, as, out of these four, it is the only relevant topic for Zeropoint.IT. This time, an impressive personality was invited as a speaker: Alef Arendsen, a prominent Spring developer and principal consultant at SpringSource.

The session focused on the Spring 2.5 integration for working in a Java EE 5 environment. Support for components of the Java EE 5 specification were discussed, as well as things like the common annotations from JSR-250 and using JNDI. In addition to the various possibilities for integration, the 90 minute session also included an overview of the similarities and differences between the Spring component model and the EJB 3.0 specification, as well as the options available for combining them.

Very interesting, both for me personally, as for our largest development team, which is currently in the middle of a multiple man-year enterprise project in Spring 2.5.

Generally, the whole Pulse event was very well organised and very interesting. Definitely going again next time!

Yesterday was a day well spent. I was at Mobile Web Camp Hasselt and did a presentation about My Mobile DB, a MyOwnDB presentation in which I focussed on our vision/roadmap for the mobile future (in short: through a very lightweight (in terms of bandwidth) REST API, MyOwnDB can become a *very* good choice to db-enable your mobile app).

I want to say special thanks to Dorien from citylive for putting such a great effort behind the event!

After a whole day of presentations, scripts and a Wii, a couple of late stayers had a drink/dinner together after which Loes and I went to Kinepolis Hasselt for a late-night film. Did you know that Kinepolis Hasselt inserts a 10-minute break in the middle of the film? This is so annoying, I’m really considering never to return there. It’s truly awful. A couple of weeks ago, I was there to watch Rambo 4. Exactly at the moment where Stallone says “It’s time to decide: live for nothing or die for something”, suddenly lights went on and music started to play immediately: “De meeste droooomen zijn bedrog…”. Argh! I didn’t get into the mood of the film again.