Business

Last weekend, I spent my entire Saturday in geek-land: a Barcamp followed by a
Geekdinner. Lovely!

I met some really interesting people again this time, and got to see
live-blogging from nearby for the first time. Raphaël and I gave a presentation about
MyOwnDB, and even before it was finished, you
could read
about it already. Apparently, it’s still not that easy to explain what MyOwnDB is all about. De Standaarddidn’t really get it completely either. We’ll have to work on that!

Anyway, I really love hanging around with Barcamp people, even though I
couldn’t find anyone to help me fix my laptop. :-)

Later that day, we all shifted to the net|lash offices for a mixed GirlGeekDinner and ITPro Geek Dinner. I had a great
time again meeting very interesting, almost famous people and hurting myself
(and other people) playing tennis on a Wii.

I hereby officially announce that I will be organising the
next ITPro GeekDinner. It will be the first one in the province of Limburg.
Let me present you with a little fact: starting from Antwerp or Brussels,
Hasselt is as nearby as Ghent is!

Wow… what a day!

Plugg really blew my socks off last Wednesday.
It was a wonderful event: over 300 people either with a start-up or with loads
of money, trying to find each other.
I had a great time.

Unfortunately, MyOwnDB didn’t make it until
the last three contestants, but then again, I don’t think we were up for it
yet. Just look at the companies that won!

Bragster

My personal favourite. They exist for some time now though, have
made business deals with celebrities as 50 cent and Eminem and are
represented in various European offices.

Viewdle

At first, I didn’t really understand what they were doing, but it
is a great concept. Again though, this is not a start-up like we are.
People in 3 countries, 7 PhDs hired full time, building on ex-KGB
technology, working for 3 years, … A nice interview with the COO
can be found at zoomz.

Zilok

Dubbed the eBay for online rental. Operational in 4 countries in 2
continents. Also won the peoples award.

Compare this to MyOwnDB: Unofficially founded
in November 2007 only, core product has one year of development behind it,
nothing spent on marketing yet, …

Anyway, it was a huge boost for us being selected to the last 20 already.
We’re very proud of that! Thank you Robin, for organising this great event.
This was the first public event on which MyOwnDB was presented.

For people who missed my 2 minute pitch, this is (more or less) what I said:

Thank you all for being here. And thanks to the jury for letting me in.

MyOwnDB is a joint venture between Zeropoint.IT, a managed software development
outsourcing company and Raphael
Bauduin, famous as the FOSDEM founder.

Together, we bring the concept of databases up to the next level. Some 10
years ago, we all made the switch to managed programming languages easily, but
in the world of databases, everything still happens old school. The *main*
focus is still on data storage, whereas *we* focus on data management. I’m
talking about custom data types, fine grained access level control,
localisation, online collaboration on your data, REST APIs, …

Up to today, MyOwnDB has been fully funded by owner investments. Our core
product has one year of full time development behind it and one year more is
planned within the current budget. (This all happens in Pakistan by the way).

With MyOwnDB, we are aiming for three revenue streams:

• paid user subscriptions on myowndb.com
• recurring license fees for large(r) local enterprise installations
• a worldwide MyOwnDB partner certification programme

Our business model is pretty “modern”: it’s based on abundance.
We want to reach out to the people (users and developers) as soon as
possible, converting a small percentage of them into paying customers.
The best way of reaching this goal is releasing the product under an Open
Source license.
This is planned for this summer, together with some kind of media campaign.
Without any marketing budget, we get 250 website visits per day and
convinced more than 1700 users to register for an account.
Of course, we want to increase this pace.
Extremely.

I see the opportunity. Do you?

You can always reach me on bart@myowndb.com.

Thank you.

Earlier this week, I was present at a HOT or NOT session, organised
by Sioux. This session included a talk by
Alan Cox on The Future of Linux.

Philippe,
it was definitely worth it! :-)

It was the first time I attended a talk by Alan, and I must say I was greatly
surprised. He had a very nice presentation, a clear voice and overall a pretty
entertaining way of presenting his material. The content of the presentation
was fairly technical and dry, which made it extra hard to present it in the
way he did.

One nice thing I’ll remember form his talk is about the discrepancy in
computer hardware evolution. Intel and AMD keep on putting more and more cores
into their processors. Each time you buy a new computer, your amount of
pre-installed RAM has at least doubled. But when speaking about hard disks, we
only see the size increase — 40MB to 1GB tot 500GB to even more
today — but their speed is still the same! Sure, we went from plain
ATA to SATA and PATA (never mind SCSI), but that’s only a performance increase
of roughly 20%. This introduces many challenges to software land, as people
expect to be able to download stuff at more MB per second as their hard disk
can handle. Or data centres are more often than not waiting longer for a 1TB
backup to complete than their mean time between backups. Alan says: “Hard
disks today are more and more like tapes. Great for linear access, awful for
random access”.

Another interesting thought was about the evolution of the GPU back onto the
CPU. This puts Intel ahead, and ATI is “safe” too, under the hood of AMD.
But what will nVidia do?

I was also happy to hear that he believes Europe is doing a good job in the
battle against American Software Patents lobbyists.

Overall, an interesting night. Thank you Sioux.

What can
say
more than these guys? :-)

FOSDEM 2008 has been a great edition,
for me too. I spent most of my time at the BSD+PostgreSQL
Developer Room. One nice thing I found out is that EnterpriseDB has a development centre
in Islamabad at only a few kilometres from our
office and, apparently, we’re both member of the industry advisory board
of NUST. Nice meeting you,
guys!

It must be said though: the ULB is not the
best location for FOSDEM. At least not any
more. For several talks, I had to sit on the floor or stand up against the
wall at the back of the auditorium. The Mozilla dev room was a named
sauna.fosdem.org. The hallway with the project booths was so crowded, it was
nearly impossible to take your time to visit the individual projects. I know
Brussels has a nice international aura hanging around it, but if you would
just turn Leuven into “Brussels East” or something, I’m sure you won’t see
the difference in the amount of people showing up. But, dear FOSDEM
organisers, at Campus Arenberg
III of the K.U.Leuven, I’m sure you
can provide all of us a nicer geek experience.

And, oh yes, FOSDEM is not free. I spent over € 100 this
weekend on donations only! ;-)

Whoa! Got some really good news yesterday: MyOWnDB made it
into the second round of the first edition Plugg! Out of 66
submissions from start-ups out of no less than 18 European countries, we made it into the top 20.

This means that now we will get a 2 minute speaker slot to present our wares
to a public of internet specialists, investors and general geeks. 20 times two
minutes plus some delay, means one full hour of presentations. Having only two
minutes to stand out from the crowd will be no easy task. I guess I’ll have to
sing, or wear a pink suit or something… :-)

Anyway, I hope to meet a lot of interesting people at Plugg. We’re very excited about this opportunity,
and would like to thank the organisers for providing us, European Web 2.0
start-ups, a chance like this to expand our business opportunities.

See you in Brussels on the 19th of March!

Yup, me too:

I wont be there on Saturday though, but you can expect me at the
pre-FOSDEM-social-event and on Sunday!

And you know what’s so cool? I can categorise this post in “Business”,
“Open Source Adventures” ánd “Life, the Universe, and Everything”.
Man, do I love my job! :-)

Today, I filed an application at Plugg for our
new baby: MyOwnDB. For those who don’t know
yet, Raphaël Bauduin and Zeropoint.IT decided October 2007 to partner in
the development and promotion of the best Web
based DBMS in the world. Raphaël started with MyOwnDB in the beginning of 2006, but ceased
development early 2007. Our partnership will form a company behind MyOwnDB and has gotten the development back up
to speed already. Expect a release of the core engine (called
δεδομένων) under a Free Software
License soon!

And because they asked for it:


:-)

Just got back from another nice Geekdinner, in Leuven this time. It was
especially pleased to see two of my fellow students again (hello Jan and
Koen!). I also got the chance to try one of these things much beloved in the
geek community these days: a “plooifiets”. Not sure if it’s something for me
though.

Anyway, Wouter convinced me to subscribe
to Planet Grep with my still freshly
smelling weblog. I guess that’s an honour, so… here we go!

One of the things he said was that “having an audience” might help keeping
up the blogging. I don’t really believe this. Although “having an audience”
might spur some short-term enthusiasm, I really believe that blogging is
something you need to do for yourself. Because you want to do it yourself.
Has something to do with internal and external motivators.

Anyway, maybe I should tell “my audience” something now: I don’t allow
comments or messages on my blog. It’s my blog after all,
isn’t it. If you really feel like reacting, please do! But use your own blog
for that and link back to my post’s permalink when doing so. I feel that if
it’s too easy to react to my writings on my own space, I will (1) loose too much
time keeping up with the comments and probably cleaning up spam and other
unwanted things, and (2) more importantly, I guess I’d feel restricted from
writing exactly what I want to write. Now, there’s absolutely no reason for me
to stay (politically or otherwise) correct!

One last thing. I’ll probably always blog in English, but the odd Dutch or
French word might pop up once in a while.

Aah, la douce France…

Yesterday I spent one day in Paris at The Linux Solutions, Open Source &
Free Software Exhibition for Business, Administrations and Communities. It
was an interesting fair, but not as much as the ones I’ve gotten used to in
Germany (and the Netherlands). It was like half a FOSDEM and half a LinuxWorld.

Funny thing happened though. I met Frank-Thomas Drews from Xandros, Inc. again. The first time we met
was by accident on the bus in Nürnberg.
Apparently, we both know Thomas Uhl, and both like
him as a business partner. Who knows, maybe we get to do some business with Xandros in the future. That’d be great!

After the fair, I went for a drink with an old friend of mine, Céline
Jérusalem. I was really wonderful to meet her again after more than
three years. Céline and I followed the same Athens
course in Trondheim, back in 2003.

And it cannot be said enough: France has a won-der-ful food culture. Even in
some small, random food stand in the underground, they serve freshly baked
croissants with chocolate. Hmmm….

Last week I came back from a three weeks stay at our office in Islamabad. I landed
6:40am in Frankfurt, and instead of going home, I took the train to the Open Source
meets Business conference in the wonderful city of Nürnberg. Pretty
tiring…

Anyway, I had a great conference. First of all, I met Bertrand
Maugain again. Bertrand is a good friend of mine and was a fellow student
when we were both studying at the NTNU in
Trondheim, Norway. Then, of course, I discussed a collaboration framework
for expanding our customer base in Germany
with Thomas Uhl. Then, I
finally met Dr. Karl-Heinz Strassemeyer and Nico Gulden from LiSoG (Linux Solutions Group) in real
life with whom I discussed our possibly
upcoming membership of the group. And of course I bumped into Klaus Behrla
(director of communication at LPI) and Reiner
Brandt (President of LPI-Central Europe and OSC),
as I always do on conferences lately. :-)

Of course, I should also mention that rapid-i
won the Open Source Business award and that Bryan
Cheung, CEO of Liferay, is a very
nice guy. :-)

After these two days, I finally got home (after a train delay in Belgium of course). No time to rest
now though, because next week I’ll be in Paris for The Linux Solutions, Open
Source & Free Software Exhibition for Business, Administrations and
Communities. Let’s hope it will be as much fun!

END