MTL Salon BI quick summary

I went to MTL salon BI on November 8th.

Here is the my headlines:

• Elie Elia: 45% of people are overloaded with data; need actionable information
• Freddy Midi: BI = old decision support systems; reports shouldn't be the end of the process; it is a flow; The future of BI looks like www.netvibes.com;
• Before graphic was the end but now it is the begining (drill down).
• Philippe Nieuwbourg: Since big players have done acquisitions their is no more innovations and price have simply increases; it is a good timing for startups. Visualization is weak...we want minority report interface and it is coming
• Online Analytic Maturity Model: 6 levels by Stephane Hamel : http://immeria.net/oamm/; BI and Webanalytics are merging; diff, web analytics is real-time and accept higher error margin; future is agile & predictive
• For now BI mostly look at the past but the future of BI is finally moving slowly to predictive analysis
• BI clients priorities: Simplicity, cost, quality
• Best BI solutions: QLikView; PowerPivot, SPSS (IBM), Tableau Soft
• People want to bypass IT for BI answers
• Michelle Blanc: disruptive truth about internet marketing
• Wayne Knaggs (Adastra): cloud BI: we are moving from SaaS to IaaS and PaaS (Soft->Infrastructure-> plateform)
• Semantic web: linkedata.org; triple store (RDF) are becoming standards

IP strategy for tech startups

Most VC & angels want IP in order to consider investing in your startups.

Why: seems a security illusion. If they were really thinking about it, they will ask for industrial secret most of the time. Let me explain:

First, look at some facts:

• 95% of patents are useless (lawyer expensive fees & precious time)
• Patents are most of the time weapons of litigation which result in licences exchanges agreements (why google bought Motorola mobility)
• 50% of patents are invalidated in litigation (thanks David)...so you need a portfolio of patents if you really want to play in that yard
• It takes on average 6 years after patent deposit before it is validated....which means your competitors can copy you easily for many years because your invention will be public ;)..
• You need deep pockets to enforce your patent rights, only big player can play that game

So, if you aren't thinking of been acquired by a very big player or founded by a very deep pocket VC, you are wasting your money, time and are helping your competitors by giving them all your secret recipes and even better, you are paying for it. Isn't that the most inefficient thing you can do?

Btw, you should know that filing is making a deal with government so don't expect efficiency. Last, lawyers are relevant in ambiguity which might explain the patent process.

Speaking at confoo 2012: Empowering IT with Real Users Analytics

I have been selected to speak at the next confoo web conference about "Empowering IT with Real Users Analytic"




Webapps monitoring landscape is changing. As pointed out by Garnter, IT needs simplified monitoring and Google Analytics can now measure page load times.
As more and more businesses rely on them, techniques such as real time user monitoring, incident detection and root cause analysis have become critical. While been the Holy Grail to users, webapps are a nightmare for engineers as ensuring quality of service becomes more difficult.
More and more companies are starting to realize that they are losing significant revenue, growth and productivity due to down time, high latency and scaling issues with their web applications. Quality of Service guarantees with built-in penalties are becoming the norm, bringing a downside into the equation.
We will present these new problems in detail, followed by a short history of techniques used to measure and estimate the quality of web-based applications. We will review the most popular monitoring technologies, pointing out their pros and cons.

Startupfest best presentations July 2011

Here are the 5 best presentations that I saw at startupfestival:

1. Jeff Clavier - Founder and Managing Partner - SoftTech VC Starting by the numbers: (The 3 asses rules slides 14: Team/Product/Market)
2. Your first startup: slide 5 & 21: most startups fail because the founders give up
3. SUPER ANGELS, SUPER STARS, AND THE SUPER-SIZED STARTUP MYTH Chris Shipley Cofounder & CEO GuideWired Group
4. Succeeding-with-freemium (how to succeed in converting free subscribers to paying customers) Sean Ellis - Founder & CEO - CatchFree
5. Why not do a startup (basically, do you have the profile): Dave McClure - Investor - 500startups.com

http://www.startupfestival.com/en/speakers/

appengine unittesting trick

I was looking for the ideal way to run all my unittests on my appengine projects.

Let's define what is ideal:

• http://project.appspot.com/test to run all unittests
• create unittest directly in file it is testing/no need to create unittest file for each file

Solution:

• install gaeunit
• create or move unittest classes directly in file that it is testing
• create /test/project_unittest.py
• import all file containing unittest class in project_unittest.py

What's great with python is that unittest.main() run all unittests that are in the scope which means you simply have to import them and no need to create multiple test files if unittests classes are directly integrated in each files.

Governments programs are destructive for new entrepreneurs

I reached my limits of bureaucracy. Enough is enough. My conclusion is that governments programs are destructive to new entrepreneurs. Let's face it, it is simply incompatible, entrepreneurs are looking for efficiency and government can only produce bureaucracy and inefficient process that are killing wealth creation.

Many entrepreneurs are trapped by government programs where they expect help and finally end up losing precious time, getting ridiculous support for massive paperwork if not excluded by incoherent rules. Entrepreneurs are here to create wealth not justifying bureaucracy existence.

I am tire of hearing bullshit like:

• we are here to help entrepreneurs

Stop saying it and do it.

• but you have to be profitable, have clients, make more then 200K, been incorporated since, have a product, have N employees, have to been able to pay your new employee to get the support, not this, not that, this, but only in 3 months, sorry in 6 months, it needs to go through the committee of the committee of the board and can't tell you when they might decide but it will required another meeting to decide, you have to come to our office, we need this form and this proof and letter of this and details of this....like if entrepreneur time is free.

If we were respecting your criteria, we wouldn't need your support. Again we aren't looking for advices but only financial supports and efficient process, we know what we have to do. The current system seems to subsidising establish corporations, corporation without financial constraints and most important, for a second time, justifying bureaucracy existence.

Here is in a nutshell what entrepreneurs need:

• Real founding support, light and fast decision process...not advices nor endless decisions and paperwork process of months and please stop pretending you can help if you know you can't.

Worst thing is that it is sending a so bad signal to the new entrepreneurs, you should be an bureaucrat official, you will make more money, you will have a pension plan, less stress, no performance evaluation from people you are suppose to help...

Don't worry entrepreneurs can't go that way but can kill this system slowly. Without entrepreneurs, this system cannot sustain. I hope the new majority Conservative Party of Canada will make drastic cuts in this bureaucracy (their 10 billions cuts hasn't been unveiled). Officials aren't untouchable, don't shit in your plate rules applies to everyone. The effect might take longer but it will come and new entrepreneurs will help the momentum but what is bad is that founds might been cuts but no untouchable government jobs. Stop wasting time on their salaries and invest in entrepreneurs directly.

Government programs are making more damaged then good for new entrepreneurs by making them loose too much time and energy and encourage indirectly outsourcing which overall is extremely bad for the economy. Hopefully Canada has natural resources....but it isn't an excuse to tolerate destructive economy programs.

http://www.mdeie.gouv.qc.ca/fileadmin/contenu/documents_soutien/apropos/strategies/entrepreneuriat/renouvellement_entrepreneuriat.pdf (see page 24)

http://www.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/Economie/2011/05/04/006-indice-entrepreneurial-quebec2011.shtml

Letters order isn't important for our mind: a simple appengine service to play with this idea

I got several time an email about cool visual illusions and enjoyed a lot the one on the fact that our mind doesn't care about letter order, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be in the right place (refer as a Cambridge study). You might have already seen this:

Olny srmat poelpe can raed tihs. I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs psas it on!!

I decided to create a service to play with the idea on google appengine.

You can try it now with your own text:

http://nonhumanreadable.appspot.com/

How to create standalone python apps?

You might have to run your applications in your customer infrastructure but you might not want to give your recipes (python source code) so here are the alternatives depending on your OS:

• windows = py2exe
• mac = py2app
• linux = pyinstaller (freeze doesn't work->compile errors*)

On linux, pyinstaller works quite well but you have to generate it on the same distribution.

Here are the steps:

1. download latest version
2. python Configure.py
3. python Makespec.py /path/to/yourscript.py
4. python Build.py /path/to/yourscript.spec
5. start app: yourscript/dist/yourscript/yourscript(binary executable)

(*) Freeze instructions:

1. svn checkout http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Tools/freeze/
2. python freeze/freeze.py yourscript.py
3. make