As Google reminds us nicely, today is the birth date of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

What is in a name? We always thought that was not so important for us, but over time we got tired of people misreading what we are. So end of last year we decided to look for a new name for our company. As anyone who has been in this process knows quite well, it is not an easy task. Especially if it is your own company. We found some good names, but the web domain names were of course taken, and not having the .com, .net and other domains did not make sense for us we thought. So finally Adrian found one that we liked since it describes what we do, had all domain names still available and, last but not least, found approval from others we asked as well. After letting it sit there for about 4 weeks we still thought it is OK, so decided to do it.

From today on we are Extendance, and Nice Ventures, which was started back in 2001, ceases to exist. The name has served us well, but the time has come to move on.

I once (about 17 years ago or so) attended a speech by German stock market guru Andre Kostolany (1909-1999). So many years later, the only thing I still remember (apart from his self-confident appearance) was his analogy on how the stock markets and the real markets correlate. He said that one can compare both with a dog and his master going for a walk. The dog runs forward and backwards but the net forward or backward movement is the same as the master’s. The dog, he said, is the stock market and the master the real business market environment. I thought it was a nice comparison, although it has not made me a guru myself in stocks. Now, looking at last week’s tech stock market development, Kostolany’s comparison seems to be more true than ever. With one addition, I would say.
Changes in businesses are now reflected on the stock market instantly and literally in real-time, to use a technology phrase. If you look at how practically all tech stocks this week got either a boost or a knock down depending on their quarterly performance, this becomes evident. I guess the explanation is also more technical than anything else. The IT systems, internet information spread and also online trading for private people makes these super-fast movements possible. If a tech company announces great quarterly results, the info is spread instantly and institutional and private investors alike go online to sell or buy.
So what do we learn from that, other than that life and markets move fast? Let’s close with two quotes from Mr. Kostolany: “Wer viel Geld hat, kann spekulieren; wer wenig Geld hat, darf nicht spekulieren; wer kein Geld hat, muss spekulieren.” (Who has lots of money CAN speculate, who has little money CANNOT, who has no money MUST speculate”). And the other quote: “Aktien kaufen, Schlaftabletten schlucken und sich nach ein paar Jahren über einen hübschen Gewinn freuen.” (Buy shares, swallow sleeping pills and be happy about a nice gain in few years). The latter is probably still true as well, as long as we have a growing world market, which is the case thanks to China and others.

Gizmodo has spotted an interesting advert in New York. It has to be said that in this case I certainly agree with Nokia. Apple’s desire to keep the iPhone free of third party apps seems bizarre given the fact that Apple Macs were successful mostly because of third party apps, but there do seem to be some reasons why this is the case

Reason one is that Apple seems to want to retain an excessive amount of control over the iPhone - this may be related to the network exclusive deals it has inked with AT&T, O2 etc.

Reason two is more serious. Basically Apple’s iPhone runs (almost?) all applications as the root user, as has been noted at metasploit amongst other places. Running applications as root (Administrator for Windows users) is a big security no no because it means that if the application that runs is a malicious one then it has complete control over the phone. This is generally considered “A BAD THING”.

I suspect 3rd party apps will only become available once the iPhone code creates a number of lower authority users. This is likely to be a tricky task and so we may have to wait until v2.0 of the code.

Nokia, in this case, would seem to be a far more secure smartphone, because although it is open it doesn’t have this really nasty security feature (as far as I can tell anyway).

Update: Another potential PR spin for Nokia. The “Bricking” of unlocked iPhones. Nokia’s brick is a nice reliable (if expensive) piece of hardware not a software “upgrade” that kills your nice expensive hardware.

I was encouraged by some colleagues today to briefly blog about this experience. We needed to chat with someone in the Middle East on a project. Since that country is blocking Skype it was suggested we use Google Talk for chatting. So we did. We had only three people in the chat but were quite annoyed by the fact that Google Talk does not support multiple chatters. Only two people can chat with each other at a time. If you have three people only you can still manage of course - even if it is annoying - but more people would be impossible to do without unreasonable effort. In addition, the user interface was otherwise very poor and at times irritating. As one of my colleagues said: “yes that tool is really crap.” Only excuse they have is that it is in “beta” still…

If you need to hop from Zurich to London at short notice you don’t have to wait for Easyjet to come back (I think in October) but can simply use Air France, which operates at extremely low costs and offers a much better service than the low-frills, low customer service Easjet. Now on my last trip I found a nice gadget in the airline magazine. An electrical bicycle that seems the ideal vehicle if you live in a small to medium-sized city/town, don’t want to add to the pollution, but want to be fast. It seems like a great idea. You simply recharge from a normal electrical outlet and then obtain up to 25km/h speed and 30-45 km of traveling distance. Recharge time is 6-7hours, so overnight basically. Price is 790 EUR which seems reasonable as well. So in short I can see some good reasons for people to use it, particularly in central European cities and especially in the summer. In the US, distances are usually too big so I would think not an appropriate fit unless you live 5-15km or so away from your work place.

Francis Turner, one of my colleagues, pointed me to this website here: The Funded. It is a place where people can rank and comment on their experience with VCs. VCs themselves are typically extremely well connected and send each other business plans and other info on a daily basis. But what should young entrepreneurs do when they need to find out which VCs might be a good fit for them, and which ones they had better be careful with? That is one aspect of The Funded site, where a VC ranking and personal comments give some insights. I have not checked out the site in detail so I am not sure how good the info is, but I would think it is at least a place worth looking at when you are checking out VCs.

This morning was interesting because when I started work I discovered my phone and internet connections were dead. This was a France Telecom problem. But there was no information about it and no advance warning or anything.

Unfortunately there is only one way to report a France Telecom technical problem, dial 10 13 from a France Telecom phone line.

I’m sure readers can see the Catch 22 situation that follows when you want to tell France Telecom that your phone line is dead…

This has happened before and it usually fixes itself, which was exactly what happened in this case. Of course I’d wasted about half an hour trying and failing to find any neighbours who were not on holiday to see if I could use their phone before I came back and discovered that things had started working again.

So then I get on the internet and discover that Skype is dead:

Due to Peer-to-Peer network issues there are problems with Skype login. This issue is being investigated. We will give new updates when the issue has been resolved.

Fortunately Skype, unlike France Telecom, can be worked around. There are rather a lot of other IM/Chat/VoIP clients to choose from. The only requirement is that you are able to agree with your Skype buddies which fallback service to use.

I’m not going to recommend Microsoft for the purpose though, I found the login and sign up via .NET Passport or whatever to be annoyingly confusing and the search for other users to be practically impossible. And then there was the fact that once you’d found someone to chat to you appear to get logged out after half an hour.

But back to Skype. Currently Skype has about €10 of mine in various deposits and I have a large community of Skype contacts. Neither of these is a great barrier to change IM/VoIP provider if Skype’s service remains down and other service providers ones are OK. Switching from Skype to one of the others is not going to cost much or take long.

Switching from France Telecom is a rather more complex procedure, which no doubt explains why I anticipate Skype to explain what went wrong and I have no expectation whatsoever that FT will do anyhting other than charge me.

I also have to agree with the “Watch Out for the iPhone” message of Adrian Slywotzky’s Business Week article. For a long time I thought that the iPhone would prove a crucial test of Jack Trout’s mantra that line extension eventually kills brands. By extending Apple’s lines beyond the Mac to the iPod, Jobs already tested the limit of brand extension. I felt that the iPhone would be a product too far. I have changed my mind.

Steve Job’s genius is to redefine markets in line with his vision. Colleagues who try to argue with him famously end up being totally overcome in the “reality distortion field” he generates. That field seems to extend to markets, too. What marks Jobs out is his instinct for what customers want. The original iMac offers a perfect example. Uniquely for a personal computer at the time, and against all expert opinion, it had no floppy drive. Jobs insisted the customer wanted an intuitive product that read CDs and could dial the Internet. Floppies were complicated. He was right.

The iPod fitted in perfectly - both Mac and iPod were cool, intuitive, Internet-connected, entertainment-providing, mutually communicating devices. But how does any of this apply to a cell phone?
The killer app of the cellphone has always been the phone call, something way outside Apple’s existing functionality. What Jobs is betting the company on – and make no mistake, if the iPhone flops, regardless of Jobs’ low market share forecast, that will badly affect the brand – is not so much a phone-plus-everything else as a phone that is not primarily a phone. One of the iPhone’s main selling points is that it is “the best iPod ever”. That is quite a strong consumer argument – the price starts to look much more reasonable as a video iPod replacement-plus-phone. The old “Your Life – To Go” slogan is also supported by the ease at which the phone syncs with the PC via the iTunes app. Loading music, video, contacts, email, calendar etc, looks completely intuitive – especially to existing iTunes users.

The iPhone needs to be taken seriously as a business phone, too. Here the Blackberry and Treo have already established that phoning can be the secondary function. The iPhone promises serious competition to these devices based on its slick integration of web, e-mail, organizer and even map functions. The video presentation of these functions on Apple’s site is genuinely impressive.

The challenge for other cell phone manufacturers now is that, almost regardless of functionality, their product will be seen as primarily a telephone with Internet, multimedia and organizer added on, a complex proposition compared with Apple’s “complete mobile life accessory you can also call your friends on”. Once again, Jobs looks to have defined a new market. By leveraging both its iTunes app and the Mac OSX operating system, Apple has also put up high market entry barriers. That will probably buy Apple enough time to create the vision that Slywotzky outlines.