By David Grajal on March 24, 2011
It was a lot of fun to visit China’s Electronics and Photonics trade show this week. I tested 3D screens for the first time. It is promising, but they need to get much better. Even the screens with a 240Hz refresh rate have noticeable flickering.
More interesting was the Mirasol screen. I had in my hands a Mirasol screen for the first time. Mirasol is one of the most promising color e-tint technologies. They told me a big player will release a 5 inches Mirasol screen device later this year. I hope it is true because the screen has a very fast refresh rate and the size looks perfect for a full featured e-reader device running android.
The coolest thing I saw in the trade show were the laser cut and Laser welding machines. They are big, powerful and very precise. They look very scary.
Posted in technology | Tagged electronics |
By David Grajal on March 17, 2011
I attended Shanghai BarCamp 2011 event last weekend. The BarCamp meetings are un-organized, the content is provided by the participants. Anybody can start a talk or a workshop about open source, internet, media or any other topic. In this event I got inspired, I learned some technical stuff, I discovered cool projects (Try Google Square, it’s pure magic) and I got to know the best way to set up a company in China.
Barcamp Shanghai Logo
But the most important thing is that I finally met the community in Shanghai. It takes time to do anything here when you don’t speak the local language and you don’t live at the right side of the river. The community in Shanghai is a very international mix of Hackers, Open Software fanatics, Apple zealots, masters of the electron and Social media gurus. All of them got together to share ideas and pizza.
All of them using my language.
Barcamp seating area.
Thanks to msittig for the picture.
Posted in linux, technology, web | Tagged barcamp, internet, shanghai, technology |
By David Grajal on March 3, 2011
This week CEIBS Hispanic club and Carlos Zapata brought Carlos Moncayo to give a speech at CEIBS about his personal experiences as an entrepreneur in China. He shared 7 tips with us for those that want to start their own business. Carlos is very humble which makes him a great communicator. He speaks with simple words, from the heart about his experiences and about what he learnt from his failures. Below, check out the 7 recommendations he spoke about.
Carlos Moncayo
- The hair dresser lesson
Carlos spoke about the problem he faced at the beginning, when he had a turnover rate of over 70%. One day he went to the hairdresser and noticed that the shop had many workers and they all seemed to be motivated. He asked the owner about his secret and he told him that all of them were working on a commision system. In China people have a strong entrepreneurial spirit, you can see how easy it is for them to open shops. Once Carlos introduced this system, the turnover ratio improved dramatically. His business now opertates with a 5% turnover rate.
- Every Saint has two candles
At the head of the organization there must be a figure, a leader, but under him/her there must be two figures. This is not only to assign them different functions, but also to provide mutual support to each other. Furthermore, in case one of them leaves the company, there will be somebody who can immediately take over the tasks of the other person.
- Find your zebras. Identify your shark
Carlos spoke about the Zebra customer. He did the exercice of modelling the perfect kind of customer they wanted to have in his company. After modelling and identifying it, they only pursued those kinds of model customers. Focusing on one type of costumer allows you to know exactly what your customer wants and needs. He also spoke about the Japanese fish boats that had problems with the freshness of the fish because the fish felt unmotivated in the big tanks inside the boat. The Japanese introduced a shark to keep the fish constantly in movement so they were still fresh by the time they reach the market. The sharks in the entrepeneur world are the competitors that force you to stay in alert.
- The water guy lesson
Carlos’s wife ordered water bottles from different companies depending on the ads they got in the mail every week, but one day one of the water guys brought a bottle and put a sticker on it with his phone number. They never called any other company. The idea is to get closer to the customer with the aim of offering him a better service. Carlos’s company hired people to be fulltime in the offices of each one of their customers. Even if only a few customers accepted this model, his sales increased 30%.
- Cash is oxygen
When you start with your business you have limited cash. And it runs out very fast. You need to start as light as possible and once you create movement, make sure you have reserves enough to invest and make your company flourish.
- Management reports are vital signs
An startup is like a hospital. It is very critical to know the real economic status of your business, as close to real time as possible. Carlos and his team developed a technique to have a periodic “ideal budget” vs “real budget” report and use it to have a close control of the financial status of the company.
- 40000 vs 49
They tried to develop software to manage the relationship with their customers. Carlos invested a big amount of money in it, however the customers never liked the product. At the end they dropped it and started using Highrise. A simpler, better product that their customers loved, for just 49$ per month.
Carlos Moncayo
Posted in CEIBS, management, technology | Tagged ceibs, speech |
By David Grajal on February 25, 2011
Do you want to be more relevant in your organization?
Do you want to boost your personal and proffesional career?
Have lunch with two people you think they should get to know each other.
Jeremiah Lee, reyagroup
I attended a speech today by Jeremiah Lee from reyagroup about corporate culture and social networks. He changed my mind about social network graphs and now I consider them a very valuable tool to measure the health of your organization and identify the people that connect people together. As Jeremiah said “Social Network analysis is a powerful tool for diagnosing and changing organizational culture”.
When you think about the relationships in a company you probably have this structure in mind:
Hierarchy structure
That’s exactly the picture that comes to my mind. It is a functional structure that tells us to whom you report. But in reality that’s only half of the picture, the hierarchy graph ignores hidden informal relationships. That information is graphically represented on a Social Network graph.
This is a Social Network Graph. Every time I saw a social network diagram in the past I thought: Bullshit! That thing is not useful for anything.
Why are relationships important? Because they are the most direct way to spread information. If you want to have a organization in learning mood, where people educate themselves and take the initiative to research new ways of doing things you need to facilitate the flow of information. One of the ways to do this is create a central repository of internal information (Please do not use ‘Data Warehouse’, it’s a term I consider serious bullshit). What about the rest of information? You need to make the people of your organization the knowledge repository and facilitate people to become as interconnected and interdisciplinary as possible.
How does the graph look like?
The social network graph represents the person as nodes of the network. The lines between the nodes show the relation between persons and the size of the node increases with the number of connections. The concentration of relations is shown in the graph as clusters of nodes.
The graph looks beautiful for a presentation, but what information does it really convey?
The graph is an alternative view of the functional relationships described on the hierarchy graph. You can see the intensity of personal interactions and the degree of knowledge exchange between clusters . You may discover that people interact with the head office but different branches with different functions or different locations have no interaction at all. You may also discover critical people that have relationships between clusters without that role actually being an explicit function of their job.
How to get data to build the graph?
The psychologists at this company conducted a survey which they distributed all over the organization to measure the relationships at staff and management level. Jeremiah showed us a short survey with six basic questions that I consider enough for basic purposes:
- Choose people you feel energized by when you interact with them.
- Choose people you typically get information from.
- Choose people who provide you with the most valuable connections.
- Choose people you like to work with.
- Choose people you feel personally comfortable sharing opinions with.
I think the result of this survey is important to measure the hidden relations that
exist but nobody knows about. If I had to do this in my organization I would also do a
statistical analysis of the email flow within the domain (Using the From: To: and CC:
headers) and the conversations on the corporate microblogging and chat system. I would
later weight every source of data and combine them accordingly.
How to build the actual graph?
I don’t know if its the best software, but I’ve been playing with Gephi. It is GPL and runs in multiple platforms.
Posted in management | Tagged management, social networks |
By David Grajal on January 5, 2011
Posted in CEIBS, pictures | Tagged pictures |
