Archive for February, 2007

Creating a Fund for Israeli Open Source Entrepreneurs

February 21, 2007 at 11:42 am · Filed under Consultancy, Database, FOSS, Fund, Growth, Israel, Open Source, Product, VC, start-up

This is something that i’ve been thinking of since the Database project and especially after speaking with some of the CEO’s of Israeli Open Source companies about a year and a half ago.

There are very few Israeli open source companies that have a product. Most provide consulting services in various areas. The numbers i’ve got are dated and are only a random sample of companies i’ve come across. However, the number of a random sample of Open Source companies worldwide, that have a product, compared to Israeli companies with their own product (by percentage) is alarming.

Out of 16 Israeli Open Source companies only 2 have a product, while, out of 65 Open Source companies worldwide (list of companies taken from the database project) , only 8 don’t have a product. 12% of the Open Source companies worldwide, that this small, dated, quasi-research checked, do not have a product compared with 87.5% Israeli Open Source companies that do not have a product (or only 12.5% Israeli Open Source companies have a product).

Most Israeli Open Source companies provide consultancy services, the problem is that without their own product they have a problem to scale up and become competitive world-wide. They are usually a one to five, max ten men/women show. They need a lot of funding to able to train new talented employees. And, while training takes time, once their employees are fully trained and experienced, they can easily open their own consultancy or join a different consultancy in the same area of expertise.

While large and famous consultancies have historically, developed their own processes of doing things, which differentiates them from their competitors (Bain for example, has a reputation for being result driven) Israeli Open Source companies are usually depended on the exceptional skills and reputation of their founder, and therefore are hardly able to scale up* (there is a limit to the amount of work one person is able to do).

One possible reason for this situation is funding. Israeli VC’s have only recently began considering investment’s in Open Source companies, and there aren’t that many, Israeli Open Source companies to be investing in.

There may also be a culture problem between VC’s and Open Source entrepreneurs. Each operates with a different set of values and priorities which are in many instances conflicting.

Open Source is about “reuse” of technology already out there and its also about organic growth. Open Source companies usually involve many stakeholders, such as community of users, customers and employees (which are in some instances prominent figures within the community) this involves a more democratized process then the one usually required from a start-up company. However seems that at-least this last attribute of open source companies will/is becoming part of many non-open-source companies attributes.

On the other hand, government funding programmes involve a licensing policy that conflicts with Open Source companies licensing programmes.

Seems that government funding at Israel has not yet discovered Open Source and the considerable economic benefits associated with FOSS.

For more figures about the economic benefits associated with FOSS refer to the EU Study “Economic impact of Open Source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication technologies ICT sector in the EU”, published on Nov 20, 2006 were Open Source is considered a power of growth for the EU countries.

Possible growing venues include, merging three to four, Israeli Open Source companies and creating one or two, medium size companies that provide a full solution to their customers.

And as for the future, it may be the right time to start considering the option of creating a fund that would not only provide seed money but also operate as an incubator environment for Open Source entrepreneurs that’s sensitive to their unique needs. This may allow Israel, in the future, to enjoy the many economic and social benefits of growth associated with FOSS activity.

*The exception being IT, were you provide a 24/7 service which requires a small group of experts and a large group of employees who are semi-experts. However such Israeli companies would only be able to provide services to their local market, and with Israel being a small market, thier ability to scale would be restricted.

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GNU/Linux @ Schools

February 14, 2007 at 10:08 pm · Filed under CMS, Education

Current efforts to offer Israeli school’s an Open Source CMS have the potential of solving, altogether, many of the problems that we face today at schools.

Our on-going attempts to implement a GNU/Linux at schools have involved a considerable overhead, and unless its backed by substantial funding and especially the approval and commitment of the Ministry of Education or other powerful organizations like Match (CET – Center for Educational Technology), its bound to involve considerable and draining efforts. It takes time before the system is smoothly integrated with the schools system, and training must take place (we’ve been putting much efforts on building such a training program for school system administrators, teachers and off-course children, you can see these efforts here).

One of the major reasons Ort Hatzor High School was interested in a Linux Terminal Server (LTSP) system was the promise they’d be able to add additional computer stations for teachers loading exam results, especially during the crowded exam period. The only problem was, The Ort portal is only compatible with Explorer. We could not find a way to overcome the issue of loading exam results to the mutual Ort respiratory.

CMS’s Iv’e seen gathering pace and fund, in the last year or so, like Drupal, Joomla — which rumor says you’ll be in pains trying to get support for, and Lahak which unlike the other two is a native Hebrew CMS overcoming bidi problems, all have the potential to be comparably, low resource intensive, overcome schools sticky layer, while solving Web Site Standartization issues that are unfortuantly so common in Israeli Web Sites.

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The changing ladnscape of work

February 12, 2007 at 9:02 pm · Filed under Future work

INTUIT published a report (PDF) about the Future of Small Business, this is a quote from page ten:

“Personal businesses are a surprisingly large part of the American economy. According to the US Census Bureau, at the end of 2004 almost 20 million Americans operated businesses with no employees…Businesses without a payroll make up over 70% of the nation’s businesses, and almost one million new businesses without payrolls were added in 2004 (the latest available data).” It would be interesting to know how many of them earned their living from Internet related activity, and what kind of Internet related activity were they involved in (ebay?)

At the same time with Web 2.0 technologies offering enterprises to feel small but stay big (a promise waiting to be fulfilled), it seems that the bigger you are the more advantages you’ll be able to rip from your Web 2.0/social networking tools.

For the bigger picture (implications of falling communication costs) there is a podcast from (2005) of Thomas Malone who also wrote The Future of Work at IT Conversations

Here is part, of a three minute summary Mr. Malone gave of his book (subscribed from the podcast): “I think we are in the early stages of an increase in human freedom in business that may in the long run be as important a change for business as the change to democracy was for governments…”

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Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

February 12, 2007 at 8:52 pm · Filed under Video, Web 2.0

Digital Ethnography @ KSU

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Demo 2007 aftermath

February 6, 2007 at 11:19 am · Filed under Conference, Demo, start-up

There may be an interesting conference coming up, its an aftermath of Demo 2007, instead of the selected group of start-up companies presenting but having to pay for the opportunity, something similar without the need to pay. Its organized by the people from Techcrunch and Jason Calacanis. More details can be found at Calacanis’s blog.

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Enterprise mashup tool

February 6, 2007 at 9:41 am · Filed under Demo, Enterprise web 2.0, Mashup

There is a very interesting article by Dion Hinchcliffe from ZDNet, that introduces an IBM mashup platform for enterprises called QEDWiki
its also possible to see a short demo of the platform in action by Mr. Hinchcliffe at this address.

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About

February 5, 2007 at 12:05 pm · Filed under About, Database, Education, Enterprise web 2.0, FOSS, Open Source Companies, Wiki, start-up


Yael Talmor

Picture originally uploaded by pdcawley.
If I’d been asked to tag my interests they would probably include:
disruptive technologies, processes, change, innovation, organizations, and the idea of future scenarios.

I’ve been working with companies on building an on-line community of users around their product, and have recently began lecturing to organizations about the use of enterprise web 2.0 tools (always interested to know more about new tools, and also about methods of measuring these tools). You can find some of my thoughts on democratizing enterprises and more recent writing on social networking tools in the enterprise.

The Free and Open Source world has been and still is a great knowledge base of many of the current processes i’m interested in. For instance, the dynamics of social networking tools in enterprises, a culture of innovation, future organizations, democratization of certain enterprises, marketing techniques in a communication intensive world, and more are not new in the open source space, while many of these have been practiced by open source companies and communities for a while now.

At late 2004 I’ve started a database of Open Source companies. The database project, includes information about Open Source companies, their community relationship, ecosystem’s and many more, and was a semi-research project. It hasn’t been maintained for quite a while but can be found here. The database also includes a list of Israeli open source companies their area of expertise and their contact information.

I’m Founder/Director at Vaya Research Center for FOSS where we’ve been building a system that will provide support services for Israeli schools teaching and implementing FOSS. The project is a joint venture with ISOC IL and a major Israeli FOSS news and forum site called Whatsup.
The system is being written by Meir Kriheli and is based on Django, it promises to be a great Wiki style system. You can check it out at http://schools.whatsup.co.il (still in Beta stage and currently only for Hebrew speakers).

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