Web 2.0 startups in Europe.

StartUp2.0 is a competition of European web 2.0 startups. Tomorrow, May 10th, they will be voting on a list of the top 15 web 2.0 startups. You can see the list at Read/WriteWeb (which is in itself a very interesting blog).

The list of startups is not much different than those here in the U.S. (there’s lots of social networking and video in what they do) except for one difference. There seems to be more focus on geolocated services. This is partly because mobile providers in Europe have been providing excellent location-based services for a while whereas here in the US it’s still trying to get off the ground. And that’s despite the fact that GPS is a system created and owned by the US Department of Defense.

Radical transparency and the death of spin.

I often talk to my students about the power of today’s networked information environment in shaping reputation. Keeping secrets has become extremely difficult, for businesses, politicians, and even 15-year-olds. All you need is one person (often yourself) to put the information in digital format and post it somewhere where others can read it. The network effect can be frightening. In a matter of minutes, it can become world-wide news. And even if you take the information down, it will always exist, cached on servers everywhere just waiting to be found. The result can be tremendous pressure on companies and politicians to clean up their act and be accountable. And I’ve always told my students, some of whom are budding CEOs and CIOs themselves, that the way to control your reputation is not by controlling information that is made public, but by making more information public yourself.

Well, enter Wiredmagazine, which has done a fantastic job in reporting on this idea and giving it a cool name: radical transparency. It has several articles on the subject but this one in particular tells the story beautifully. In fact, the whole article was written in the author’s blog inviting reader feedback, some of which is featured in the printed article. As the article’s author, Clive Thompson, says:

The Internet has inverted the social physics of information. Companies used to assume that details about their internal workings were valuable precisely because they were secret. If you were cagey about your plans, you had the upper hand; if you kept your next big idea to yourself, people couldn’t steal it. Now, billion- dollar ideas come to CEOs who give them away; corporations that publicize their failings grow stronger. Power comes not from your Rolodex but from how many bloggers link to you – and everyone trembles before search engine rankings.

Some of you may be thinking: What about industrial secrets? The secret recipe of Coke? As Clive points out:

[Some of my blog readers] enjoyed ripping apart my new theories. Several pointed out that secrecy can be necessary – CEOs are often required by law to keep mum, and many creative endeavors benefit from being closed: Steve Jobs came up with a terrific iPhone precisely because he acts like an artist and doesn’t consult everyone. In fact, secrecy is sometimes part of the fun. Who wants to know how this season of 24 is going to end? It’s not secrets that are dying, as one reader named gjudd noted, but lies.

Secrets can be useful tools for competitive advantage. Even though there are many cases when even those secrets are better left in the open. Just look at the success of all the open-source software out there.

So it’s not secrets that are dying. It’s spin control that’s dying. This spells trouble for PR firms.

What’s making me even more excited is the impact this is already starting to have on politics, where transparency is a dirty word and spin control is god. Remember George Allen’s “macaca” comment that got posted on YouTube and cost him a Senate seat?

Politics is going to be fun again.

The loss of separation between work and life.

In the e-business class I teach, we talk about how technology in the last 10-15 years has reversed many of the effects of the Industrial Revolution. This was an idea that was proposed by Jacob Nielsen in his article “Undoing the Industrial Revolution.”

One of those effects that has been reversed is the separation of work and life. Before the Industrial Revolution, work and life were mostly together. People worked where they lived and vice versa. The farmers, blacksmiths, bakers, and so on didn’t leave home in the morning to go to the office or factory and work a fixed schedule before they returned home. Instead, they lived in the same place they worked and had no fixed work schedule that was separate from the rest of their lives.

The Industrial Revolution brought the factories and then later the office buildings with their fixed time schedules. People lived in a space and time that was separate from that of their work.

Today, for many, that effect of the Industrial Revolution is being reversed. As a Yahoo! HotJobs survey confirmed, devices like Blackberries, laptop, and smart cellphones have eliminated the separation of work and life. People work without a fixed schedule and without having to be in a specific place, like an office.

The upside is of course more flexibility and availability. The downside is that people can literally work all day and everywhere. 67% of the respondents to the survey said they connected to work using a wireless device of some kind while on a vacation. That’s a huge percentage but not a surprising one.

This radical change in the idea of what a work schedule should be has gone beyond the service and professional sectors, where wireless devices can enable work at any time. Best Buy for example, an electronics retailer, has shifted to what they call ROWE (results-only work environment). In other words, they judge performance of employees only by output and not by hours put into it. Why is that possible? Well, because of technology which allows the monitoring and attribution of output more accurately. Since this was not possible before, companies relied on what they could monitor accurately, and that was time.

Best Buy is actually so confident about this change, that they have formed a consulting organization called CultureRx to help other companies with making similar changes. If you want to read more about Best Buy and other companies that have eliminated the traditional time-based schedule, check out this excellent article on Business Week.

No cell phones on planes? Thank god!

The FCC today announced that it’s scrapping a proceeding that was looking into the use of cell phones on airplanes. According to the FCC “there was insufficient technical information on whether cell phones would cause harmful interference.”

Actually, I’ve read that the FCC was bombarded with messages from people begging them not to allow cell phones to be used on the plane because:

1. Everyone is dreading that planes will become cramped tubes filled with loud never-ending people who discuss everything on their cell phones as if nobody can hear them

2. Business travelers love the fact that during their flight trips they are not reachable by anyone and can actually relax or get work done without interruptions.

I, for one, am relieved. Cell phones on planes would just be incredibly annoying. Even more annoying than the person who always seems to be seated next to me and wants to share their life story with me during a 7-hour flight, even forcing me to take off my headphones (which I put on purposefully) in order to be able to hear them.

Though I must say, when I was in Tokyo last spring, cell phones are functional in the subway cars but people were incredibly respectful. They mostly texted (as the signs everywhere encouraged people to do, instead of talking on their cells) and if they had to talk, they spoke very softly and cupped the phone’s mouthpiece with their hands so nobody could hear them.

But then again, this was Japan. Things would be very different on a plane from, say, New York to Rome or Athens, don’t you think?