Ksso.net

Holidays ! That time of the year where I can finally stop fantasizing about scuba diving and can actually log a few dives. This time we chose a weird scuba destination: the volcanic island of Lanzarote, in the Canary islands. The island was featured in the movie “Broken embraces” by Pedro Almodovar and has been thoroughly staged by the local artist Cesar Manrique creating a one-of-a-kind experience in that otherwise dry piece of land.

The diving there is amazing, although the heavy wind and tides may make it a bit tough for beginners, the coastline felt pretty pristine and house to many huge groupers (more than 1m long). Lots of moray eels, nudibranchs, parrotfish, snappers, pulps… all friendly to divers and playful. I also managed my 3*/N4 scuba certification – thanks Uli for the fun dives.

We avoided the mass German tourism by staying in the small fisherman village of Arietta,and had the most quiet time (and enjoyed amazing tapas ! ). We’ll definitely go back there.

I’ve had those endless discussions with corporate guys, who basically would not understand life outside a big corporation (along with career plans and such).

The most amazing revolution over those 10 last years, is that you know can build anything you want with limited to no budget.

Want to build a device? Hack an Arduino
Want to build a website? Get a text editor
Want to do business globally? Load linkedin
Want to build a game? Download Unity

Wether you’re an engineer or not, building stuff and hacking your way to create your idea has never been so easy… and cheap. The only thing required is passion for the product you’re building and that passion is what will make it possible for a couple of guys in a garage to actually overrun huge corporations with endless budgets and cohortes of subcontractors.

I loved watching the documentary Indie Game : the movie which perfectly shows my point : how a bunch of passionate people can build amazing products that sell. And Kickstarter has taken full advantage of that paradigm shift betting that more and more passionate people will be able to create amazing stuff.

This also changed a lot entrepreneurship as a “job”. 10 years ago it was about raising money, growing your company, hiring, doing business… Now I feel the ways have changed and a team will spend much longer self-financed (or lightly bootstrapped) building an awesome product and building a community around it before even starting to consider funding – if they even need it.

You now have a choice, you don’t need to raise money or be in a corporation to get to build your ideas – just roll up your sleeves and start hacking.

Looks like things are starting to shake up for Twitter. After growing to 500M users (half of Facebook.. so it must be worth 50B right ?).
Anyway today, the long-announced twitter ads program opened up – and I managed to get my way in! Although promoted tweets have supposedly been around for a while for big corporations, I personally never encountered any – maybe I should consider using more the website than clients crawling the Twitter API.
The Titter ads for small business are really simple to setup : If you’re in the US or Canada, head to https://ads.twitter.com, setup a billing mechanism, and you basically have two choices from that point :

• Promoted tweets : Those will select the latest tweets you did and put them in the timeline of non-subscribers.
• Promoted account : This will list you account in the list of accounts that you should consider following.

With the promoted tweets, you must be cautious to remove tweets that may not direct users to a conversion funnel – otherwise you’ll be just losing money by sending them… anywhere else. Used accurately it will direct users to a conversion funnel on your website and serve as user acquisition mechanism.

The promoted account will bring you followers, thus increasing your reach but not necessarily the number of your followers. To be efficient you should ensure that your profile is explicit enough and a welcome message to new followers will come in handy… and make sure you feed the followers with tweets they’re prone to share.

While the whole mechanics feel a lot like Facebook Ads to me, I find it way more expensive than the latter:

The like is here price 5/8=0.625USD and the click 0.35USD… while on Facebook, and with very little to no optimization (we’re not really using ads for marketing, just as a way to play with the mechanics and gain experience) we have a cost of acquisition of a follower at 0.06USD … 1/10th to twitter !!!!! Moreover the Facebook followers are highly targeted (they all are scuba divers) whilst I’m not sure of the quality of Twitter’s … maybe it’s just some random twittos that loved the Diveboard logo.

But bottom line, Twitter is getting into the ad game… ages after google or even Facebook, but still seems like they’re finally trying to grab some money from (small) businesses trying to reach out to new customers. Which means big changes for twitter, as they are now obviously going to have to expand internationally with local offices and local sales and support force, which will undoubtedly bring a new side to the techie company

Just what I needed to get Diveboard fixed on iPad!

After 2 weeks down (the server got hacked and closed without any notice by online.net ) and after looking at low-cost yet feature-full hosting options, ksso.net is finally back online ! I took the opportunity to also clean up the image links in the database (some very old links were bogus) but for some reason the recovery of the database from the hacked server induced some encoding issues :/ – which I’m not sure how to solve (and may not be worth the time).

This brings back to a big question: this blog started in 2005 – Feb 19th to be precise – and god it has changed a lot along those 7 years. Yet blogging has changed a lot too – becoming more professional, more organized. Some massive players have conquered a large audience on very vertical subjects and the place for personal blogging has gotten smaller and smaller. Commenting the news is futile, providing in-depth analysis is über time-consuming, talking about personal life is boring, bragging or complaining is useless… What’s left to the occasional blogger ? sharing passion and thoughts in a “lighter” form than what the verbose blog used to be.

Thus the evolution of this blog into something lighter – closer to a tumblr form factor – and closer to the daily concerns rather than a pompous why’s why analysis. At least that how I feel today !

iPad was revolutionnary … 2 years ago. We all marvelled about that piece of technology letting us consume digital media in a whole new different way.

2 generations later, I’m still in love with my iPad, love to read RSS on it or play chess… but I believe the iPad will never go beyond the media consumption paradigm. iOS which was one of its strength thanks to its ease-of-use is proving way too limiting to enable any actual work to be done on that device – which is a shame since this device is – at least in its latest revision – a computing monster.

In the meantime, Windows 8 is bridging the gap between tablets and computers at fast pace.

As you may know I can’t work with windows as it lacks a decent shell and I still don’t see why you need to use a mouse to do actions that require the precision of a command-line.

And yet – Windows 8 and the new generation of tablets it’s helping build are truly a leap forward from the standard set by Apple. One example is the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga, rocking a i7 processor and 13″ 1600×900 IPS display, it’s both an ultrabook and a (big) tablet.

lenovo ideapad yoga

Featuring both a touch interface, with an elegant design (I kinda like the Metro UI/UX as I grew kinda tired of Apple’s skeuomorph thing) as well as en environment where productivity apps can work decently – I love being able to use Visual Studio 11 on a “tablet”, coming with or without a keyboard, it opens up this platform to the full class of usages that people may imagine for them – lifting away the media consumption-only limitation. 

windows 8 on samsung slate review 13

Moreover, it comes with an unusual openness (coming from Microsoft) to web standards as HTML5 apps are natively supported by the platform on an equal level as native c++/c# apps.

To me this evolution means only one thing : the time of Apple is coming to an end unless they manage to give a decent openness to their system and stop putting walls everywhere (Moutain Lion is a major step backward from that prospective).

Customer Service has evolved a lot on the Internet over the last 5 years. The likes of Zappos have set a new standard over how users/customers (let’s call them users for more simplicity) expect to be interacting with an online service.At Diveboard we implemented 3 strategies over how we want to be interacting with our users :

• Open various communication channels for users to give feedback : mostly through our Facebook page or Uservoice ideabox and make sure to mark our presence there and interact actively with the users
• Process help tickets in less than 24hrs. Most of the time we answer them in less than an hour ensuring speedy issue solving
• Engage proactively with a customer upon signs that he may be experiencing troubles. This is currently done manually

Although Pascal had doubts over the last point, after a year of proactively engaging our users one thing is sure : they all LOVE it ! This has helped to solve number of issues before having to get the user through the additional hassle of opening a support ticket.

This kind of behavior has become somewhat the new standard for online services, and anything below that standard now feels unprofessional. That was my feeling for instance this week with hobbyking’s customer service. A poor zendesk interface, an average time of response of 3 days, the guy responding did not have access to my account !?!? thus requiring from me extra work to get support…. which made them basically loose me as a customer.

As with the building of your web service, the customer service is one of the most crucial side and must never be overlooked. It’s a big part of the soul of the entire system, and just as you focus on the customer when building your service you should keep him at the center throughout the whole flow… which does include customer service and keep on trying to make his life easier especially when he’s in trouble.

I gave a talk at Telecom ParisTech earlier this week about business creation. One of the key points I tried to stuff into the wannabe entrepreneur’s heads was “IT TAKES TIME”. I wish I hadn’t missed Paul Graham’s startup curve as it beautifully illustrates the point. Stephanie usually says that creating a business takes 3 years:
Year 1: shape the idea, Year 2: develop it, Year 3: learn to sell it.

TheBlu is a curious company. They like the underwater world, have a team of all-stars on-board (Joi Ito, Andy Jones…) and have been crowdsourcing for the past few months 3D models of fish.

Initially I though it was about demonstrating that 3D design could be crowdsourced (instead of using farms of chinese people) but maybe it’s not about that after all..

This week at SXSW they’re announcing the beta release of an interactive screensaver based on the models they crowdsourced… and it’s beautiful. As a scuba diver I could probably spend the whole day switching from one view to another and following each and every fish as they smoothly swim in the Blu.

I still don’t get what they’re up to – but I totally love what I’m seeing! Grab your copy here