Erik Sundelöf

entrepreneur, thinker and Swede

The summer is here and Erik is alive…
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It has been a long time since I have written anything here. It has been an intense period and a lot of things has happened. I have met incredible people, and learnt so much about myself. The time and environment here is amazing. I have had some friends over from Sweden and it was great to show them around and give them a taste of the daily life here.

Next week I will speak at a conference NetSquared on the use of cellphones in developing countries and emerging markets. I will present my work here at Stanford and discuss the design of the new generation of cellphone applications. By that I mean the architecture and not a discussion on the network generation. I have written a blog entry on this here.

June 3rd I will be at Teddy’s great place up in the mountains and party with the fellows. It will probably be as great as last time, when it ended up as an all-nighter. It can’t go wrong. Great people, great diversity of food and a great place…

It is now decided that I will stay in the Bay area for some time so I will most probably miss the Swedish summer, but hopefully I will be able to fly home during early autumn for a short while. I will try to be more frequent in my blogging here, not to mention the photo upload.

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Wikipedia is dead or not?
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I read The death of Wikipedia by Nicholas Carr telling the story of the death of Wikipedia. I have as many know been critical about the Wikipedia, which is a great construct, yet surprisingly very few realise that any review systems will need hierachies within the community.

I guess I will settle with once again citing Clay Shirky from one of his speeches The Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, which by the way should be read by anyone that calls themselves experts or developers of social software.

Now, this story has been written many times. It’s actually frustrating to see how many times it’s been written. You’d hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn’t happen is other people don’t read it.

The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is “learning from experience.” But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That’s not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: “Don’t go in that swamp. There are alligators in there.”

I guess very few people do their homework… My answer on whether the wikipedia is dead or not is yes, but might get another life when people start doing their homework on how to create cpommunity driven software.

The only “social software packages” I have seen so far that has created a community feeling yet does not fall into the pitfalls are developed by the organization Barnraiser. Why? Because it is built for real people by people, who have done their homework.

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The proper cellphone application in the emerging markets
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Cellphone applications today are often focused on, in some sense simplified, displaying the web page on the cellphone. The web pages are more or less exclusively designed only considering the restrains of a regular work station. This is perhaps one most important challenge in future cellphone solutions and in many ways this is a philosophical challenge rather than a technological challenge. Nevertheless, I will not try to fully address the challenge in this blog post, but indicate what I believe are the key elements of it and sketch the solution.

In the post I will focus on the restrictions on a cellphone application in an emerging market and/or developing country even though it might be applied to the developed markets. We start by looking at some of the differences between the two platforms.

Most cellphones have small screens. (Oh yes, they have.) That means that you have very limited space to present the content. Very few solutions so far have been able to present content in an adequate and appealing way on these screens. The difference in the (graphical) presentation the content between a cellphone and a normal workstation is therefore huge for most content.

For instance, considering the mouse/touchpad of a normal laptop makes the user interaction much simpler than on the cellphone, as the “keyboard” is small. Naturally the user interaction with a cellphone, i.e. texting, is very much linked to how used you are to it. Clearly, in Asia, Africa and Europe people are much more used to it than they are in for instance the US. Thus a clear distinction between possible cellphone applications in these regions has to be made.

Finally the cellular networks are still lagging in bandwidth and the data plans in cellular networks are continuing to be fairly expensive. Both these factors are limiting the amount of data that being sent to and from a cellphone.

What is the proper solution?
For me the obvious solution is to display an extract of information on the cellular platform, but combine that with the proper platform on the web where the full version can be seen. Think of either trailer or an article abstract. If you like the trailer, you want to see more. However in many cases an abstract of an article is enough.

What are the techniques to use?
For emerging countries the right choices are SMS and MMS. In some cases WAP might be an alternative, but in most cases the two first choices are enough. Those techniques fulfill the criteria as presented above. They are simple to use. They are already known to the user. They have a low entry barrier and exist in almost all cellphone out there. Even better, they are normally very cheap.

The available applications in this field usually lack the corresponding web application that completes the content delivered to the cellphone. You have to provide the user with the full version of the content, and this makes even better sense as it will boost the PC-market and need of bandwidth for workstations in those regions.

I think that in many cases these techniques, even though well-known, are underrated. Especially since the emphasis primarily have been to either deliver or submit content via these, but also lacking the proper backbone on the web to support them. Using these techniques to both send and retrieve data and combine them with a web application would be very powerful. Especially when combined with the proper business model and strategic partnerships.

The future cellphone applications in emerging markets and the developing world will need to or to be more direct should address this challenge.

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Is a for-profit social venture impossible?
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I am collaborating with the Graduate School of Business here at Stanford, and usual working with students is always an intriguing and fruitful experience, which I usually cherish a lot. We did touch a quite interesting matter of what a social venture really is during a discussion on the project. Do all social ventures include a non-profit approach or can you have social ventures based on a ‘purely’ for-profit model? Can a commercialised approach ever do any good?

I am fully confident that you can and in some sense we really should pursue it, especially to obtain financial sustainability and decrease the dependence of external funding. Funnily that would mean that you have a wider manoeuvre space, and thus you have better control over your social venture.

What is really a social venture? Much simplified and according to me, a social venture is any venture in which you also value a (good) social outcome of the same. The very abstract word ‘social outcome’ could be discussed in length (which I will not), but refer to literature on measuring success in social venture. It is very much an interesting matter in itself. Personally and of course much simplified, I think we could consider a good social outcome as anything that makes the life or the earth itself to become a better place to live. Let’s keep this simple and leave it as that.

What amazes me is that so many people think that a (good) social outcome never can be married to the thought of a commercial activity. This puzzles me. Why? I see no reason why a good social outcome is inconsistent with a for-profit approach. I especially remember speaking to one of the last year fellows on this matter. He told me that an outcome of a project might even be better when people have to pay for the project. This is a very interesting thought, which has stayed with me since that date.

What is it in us that make us feel that it is better to pay something, even though extremely small? I think it is quite simple. The sense of ownership is still quite strong in us, but also the need to give back to someone that helps us. When someone offers you a hand you normally want to give back something. Probably it is as simple as keeping your self-respect. The more you feel like you are dependent on another person, the less self-esteem you usually have. I think you get it.

However, I think it is important to remember that there is a narrow path to walk on here. Having an approach that is for-profit can quite easily be turned in to an exploiting approach, where any good social outcome will be shadowed. Here the management of and leadership in these projects become increasingly important. The need for good managers and leaders become ever so high in those ventures, but we have all those people out there.

Hybrid business models, corporate social responsibility and industrial anthropology are some examples why I believe the trend is really towards such business models instead of the traditional highly fund-dependent ones. There will of course exist ventures where this approach is impossible, but for all other cases I think it is really a good idea to look at such business models.

Thus, I think it is important to keep an open mind about this and realise that for-profit is not by definition evil or bad.

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