Who invented the dot (“.”) that precedes the file type extension, as in document.doc or metal.mp3? As we near the end of what has emerged as a most interesting year, we all could use the diversion of examining the history of something so simple and pervasive, that we all take for granted.
A note from my friend Brad Templeton reminded me that being in the right place at the right time can be profound. In fact, as strange as it sounds, Brad Templeton may well have invented the dot in “.com“, as he discusses here. As he says:
Brad Templeton
“Indeed if it was me, it was simply by virtue of the fact that having been around at the beginning of these things, and taking an interest in these issues. Being in the right place at the right time. But it’s simultaneously mind-boggling, conceit-building and humbling to think that what I said might have sparked something that became so universal.”
This led me to ask myself, who orginated the ubiquitous dot that separates the extension, denoting file type, from the base file name. A much older concept, clearly the use of dot as an internet name separator was influenced, perhaps subconciously, from the longstanding filenaming convention.
The Windows filenames of today are direct descendents of MS-DOS which lacked tree-structured directories and restricted filenames to an 8.3 format, consisting of a maximum of 8 characters of base filename followed by up to 3 characters of an extension connoting the type of data stored in the file. MS-DOS, in turn, directly inherited this convention from CP/M, and indirectly from the UNIXfamily of operating systems.
I have directly worked with all of the above systems since their early days, but to go back further, I must rely on the oral history I was hearing at the time. CP/M was directly inspired by the Digital Equipment Corporation family of operating systems such as DOS-11 and RSX-11. The dot convention may well have been inherited via TOPS-10 for the DEC PDP-10 line of computers. Can anyone please confirm or deny this? At the very least, the 3 letter limitation of extension length, still common today, came from those systems which stored the extension in a 16-bit word in a format known as RAD50.
However, filename extensions separated by a dot were also a feature of Multics, which dates back to 1964.
Thus it is unclear to me whether Multics or DEC operating systems were the true originator of this concept, or whether there is an even older, perhaps common, ancestor. Can an alert reader, possibly a computing pioneer, help enlighten us on this important question.
Happy New Year to all. Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2009.
I wanted to share a great presentation by Ray Simonson who spoke on December 3rd, giving a “Lived It” talk as part of the Mars Entrepreneurship 101 lecture series at MaRS Discovery District in Toronto.
I’ve known Ray for a long time and, not only is he a great guy, but he’s an amazing storyteller. Certainly Ray’s stories can serve to inspire and educate any budding entrepreneur. Ray is forthright, having seen his share of challenges along the way, ones that might make a less determined person pack it in.
Ray Simonson
Since 2004, Ray and I partnered through Verdexus to acquire then build the company now known as Coreworx (formerly Software Innovation). Since its August 2008 acquisition by Acorn Energy, Ray continues as CEO of a growing business.
This recent lecture, focusing on Ray’s first exit at BlueGill Technologies, was taped and the video located here:
is well worth the time to view. The site requires you to provide your name and email to access the video.
It’s part of a great, non-credit course to encourage and educate new entrepreneurs with real life experience. You can find out more about it at the MaRS CIBC Entrepreneurship 101 Lecture Series site. You might want to sign up for this series, but they don’t come much better than Ray’s recent talk.
The Founder of ARISE, Ian is now Vice Chairman and Chief Technology Officer and I met him just after a great quarterly release to the public markets.
Having worked tirelessly for close to 12 years, Ian is a living example of the qualities we recently outlined in a set of blog posts entitled “Entrepreneurial Toolkit”:
First of all, rarely have I seen someone more passionate about a business vision than Ian. His company vision, almost a mantra, is to “take solar mainstream” and that hasn’t changed since Ian first explained ARISE to me many years ago. In fact, I believe it was the founding vision way back in 1996. Indeed, even the company name itself, shortened from “Appropriate Renewable Intelligent Sustainable Energy” is a passionate embrace of Ian’s vision.
Having pioneered in the solar industry long before Green Technology was fashionable as it is today, particularly in Canada’s challenging technology funding ecosystem, meant that the company was forced to run on fumes for many of those formative years. By watching cash burn like a hawk and by being able to sell and articulate the vision clearly, Ian was led the charge to fund those early days. Indeed, Ian spent significant time in fund raising mode for many of those years. In our investment climate, this is something almost all early stage technology companies will easily relate to. I would credit Ian with more persistence in riding through a challenging funding environment than almost any other entrepreneur I can think of.
As an early ARISE advisor and investor, it was instructive for me to watch Ian lead a charge which necessitated navigating through a number of key stepping stones to attain their current status as an advanced solar manufacturer. Now they produce both proprietary PV solar cells in Germany and refine specialized solar-grade polysilicon feedstock in Waterloo. As part of the means to an end, ARISE acted as a distributor/reseller of solar components. As well, they honed their brand and expertise by integrating solar systems into a number of, primarily residential, projects. Although this potentially diverted much energy and focus, it was necessary to generate awareness, cashflow and to be ready when the market was ready for ARISE to ramp up production of their proprietary products.
Today, having raised over $100 million in financing, which is in itself a rare feat in the cash-starved Canadian technology ecosystem, ARISE is growing at breakneck speed. They will transition from effectively a pre-revenue state to a projected over $40 million revenue from commercial solar production during 2008. Such rapid market expansion requires scaling of all aspects of the business, including significant increases to their management footprint. Unlike many founders, Ian was ahead of the curve, both in recruiting A-team talent into CEO and CFO positions, but also refining his role into a long term role where he can have the highest value to this growing Canadian success story. Other entrepreneurial founders could do well to learn from people like Ian. Although it’s sometimes hard to “check your ego at the door”, building great companies is all about great teams as imposed to superstar individuals.
Kudos to Ian and the great team at ARISE. We’ll be watching this Canadian-headquartered global success story closely.
As an investor, the most important lesson I’ve learned over the years is that great companies are built by great teams. Furthermore, great teams rarely are one superhuman “A” player surrounded by a supporting cast of “B” players. And unlike the Borg Collective which seeks to “… add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own”, great management teams need to have a set of complementary, yet overlapping, skill sets.
Most of us know the example of how Steve Wozniak the brilliant hardware designer teamed up with the uber-persuasive Steve Jobs to create Apple, an iconic Silicon Valley startup success story. While that partnership didn’t last forever, it’s pretty clear that the fusing of the talents of these two brilliant individuals directly led to Apple’s early success. I encourage you to read more in a “must read” book I’ve recommended earlier, Founders at Work.
Jim BalsillieMike Lazaridis
Here in Waterloo, Research in Motion (RIM) would not be today’s superstar company unless Jim Balsillie joined engineer, founder, Mike Lazaridis. Until Jim joined Mike in the early 1990’s, RIM had long remained a typical engineering oriented company doing about $500 000 annual revenues from 20-odd products. Although Jim could never have built the products, his introduction to the management brought the marketing and financial drive and focus that ultimately led to the Blackberry led success story we know today. Rather than the cult of the individual, once again it is the power of this amazing duo that built RIM.
What is unusual about this case is that both Mike and Jim share the title CEO, billing themselves as co-CEOs. Perhaps more companies should consider this approach?
Reed Hastings
Back in 1995, as MKS was starting to look to the capital markets, one of my personal inspirations, Reed Hastings CEO of Pure Software (and now Netflix), observed that “Pure Software has built a team where any of the senior management team could be CEO”. I certainly took that approach to heart when building MKS’s great team and it has been an important insight ever since.
For example, Chuck Bay, who was Pure’s CFO at the time has subsequently gone on to be CEO Broadbase Software (acquired by KANA) and President and CFO of Spatial Technology. Rob Dickerson, who was VP & GM of Developer Tools for Pure, a key operationally focused executive, subsequently became CEO of Faves and President, CEO of Pacific Edge Software (acuired by Serena Software) and EIR at Ignition Partners. These are just two data points illustrating the calibre of the team Reed built at Pure Software.
At MKS, we managed to build an amazing team, especially in the mid-late 1990’s with superstars like Ruth Songhurst, Eric Palmer, Tobi Moriarty, Michael Day, Frank Pfeiffer and Paul Laufert. It was a great mix, with stars from Canada, US and Germany. As well, almost uniquely, we had a balance of the genders. It is a big disappointment to me that I continue to see how rare that is.
To round out our discussions, anyone wanting a deeper grounding in this important topic should read the book Co-Leaders: The Power of Great Partnerships by David A. Heenan and Warren Bennis, John Wiley & Sons, 1999. With the thesis that great organizations need “more than a visionary CEO”, the bookoutlines the rare, but critical, role building a strong management team takes in building exceptional companies.
To summarize this book, in the authors’ words, “Co-leadership . . . is a tough-minded strategy that will unleash the hidden talent in any enterprise. Above all, co-leadership is inclusive, not exclusive. It celebrates those who do the real work, not just a few charismatic, often isolated, leaders who are regally compensated for articulating the oranizations’ vision”. Although, like many it has taken me years to learn this valuable lesson, I couldn’t say it better myself.
There are lots of detailed case studies, from companies in many industries, with a few key lessons for co-leaders, including:
Know thyself
Know thy leader (check your ego at the door)
Avoid titanic clashes (!)
Find out what the enterprise needs and deliver it superbly
Lead as well as follow
Know when to stay put (control the temptation to star)
Know when to walk away (learn when to say no)
Define success on your own terms
To reiterate, great companies are almost always built by great teams. As organizations and markets get more complex, I believe co-leadership will become increasingly the norm. For smart and successful people to control their egos takes a lot of maturity. Furthermore, the ideal team depends, in large part, on the stage and growth of the company. As I’ve learned, great teams take a lot of work to build, but can also dissipate over time. Indeed, they are a rare and fragile flower, to be cultivated constantly.
Nonetheless, it is definitely worth any entrepreneur’s full time and attention to unleash the power of the team – whether a gestalt of two, three or even more remarkable individuals.
New York Times on Sunday contained an article which immediately caught my attention, as it appears to provide the missing piece pulling together all of my recent postings outlining an “Entrepreneurial Toolkit”, so far consisting of these five core skill sets:
The article, “If You’re Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow”, New York Times, 6 July, 2008, in extolling an individual’s openness to change and personal growth, really provides a common thread, weaving together the above skills.
To quote Carol Dweck of Stanford University,
“People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.”
The notion that nurture trumps talent, is an interesting one. It underscores why defining some great attributes for an entrepreneur in my Entrepreneurial Toolkit is such a good idea. For the right people, if they strive for personal growth, each and every one of these attributes is in reach.
I’ve always held an innate belief that hiring is about way more than the credentials from the best schools and relevant job experience. By finding people who value “stretching themselves”, companies are adding those who can navigate today’s complex and every-changing environment to their team mix.
It’s also a very positive and empowering message.
Good mentoring and management, like good parenting, works.
Remember 1200 baud ModemsLatte from A Matter of Taste Cafe
The Office Goes Home
Over a short span of years, I’ve witnessed work migrate from a highly structured office setting, to home offices via telecommuting and now into the “Third Place”, a term coined by Ray Oldenberg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place.
Back in the early 1980’s, I was a pioneer of telecommuting, between Waterloo and Chicago via a state of the art 1200 baud modem, pictured above, no less. There was intense interest in this at the time, because as an extremely early adopter (too early some might say) of the telecommuting paradigm, I felt a bit like a guinea pig. In retrospect this workstyle enabled extreme concentration and productivity. At the same time, the primitiveness of the communications technologies, from network speed to the software then available, necessitated a lot of travel for in-person meetings. And, tellingly, the home office can ultimately be a lonely workplace, leading to a decrease in social interaction and overall motivation.
In that early revolution over the last 25 years, telecommuting saw work slowly migrate, or more typically intermingle, between the second place (the office) and the first place (your home). Telecommuting has changed traffic patterns, social life and, on the whole, provided an improved work experience by increasing knowledge worker flexibility.
Enter the “Third Place”
As an early adopter, not to mention beta tester, of many cutting edge mobile technologies and as a long time road warrior working on a number of geographically dispersed projects, I’ve often explored a work style that the Economist has labelled “mobile nomadism”, in their richly insightful 12 April 2008 special section on “The New Nomadism”. Always a great read, the particular Economist feature stands out, especially for those interested in mobility for social, technological, political, artistic or economics reasons. Last week, Alec Saunders ran a great SquawkBox conference call on iotum, with the podcast available on his blog here.
The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg
In The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg characterizes the Third Place as:
“the place which is neither home nor work, where you spend comfortable time in easy association with friends and a few strangers.”
He celebrates the magic of the English Coffeehouse tradition and the seductive and widespread Viennese Cafe Culture as social gathering places that have often been scenes of political intrigue and even major business enterprise. Likely few are aware that in 1698, Jonathan’s Coffee-house in London started trading stocks and commodities, and eventually evolved into today’s London Stock Exchange. Ironically, Oldenburg was lamenting the decline of such third places.
Today’s revolution of being always connected, spawned by wiresless technologies, has dramatically reversed that decline. Version one of “on-demand” spaces is, of course, the humble WiFi enabled cafe. Locally in the Waterloo area, many establishments, beyond the ubiquitous Starbucks, have innovated in this genre, including:
A Matter of Taste which is an amazing fusion of art, coffee and WiFi hotspot,
Williams Coffee Pubs, a local chain with food and long hours, popular with students doing late night assignments, hackers and even those working on offering memoranda, and
C’est Bon Cafe, with its international flair and sinfully good Chocolate Fiesta Fire, and Refuge for village cocooning are great examples in bucolic Elora.
Initially, these cafes served as venues for meetings that were more informal, more conducive to creativity, and powered by wonderful Latte macchiato creations (pictured above). Eventually, I started to do small amounts of work there to increase productivity in the dead time between offsite meetings, including planning and brainstorming, reading briefing documents and eventually emails and, truth be told, writing this blog post. The environment is pleasant, a vibrant mix of people from a wide array of social backgrounds. It is worth noting that I always have the choice how much I wish to tune in or tune out those around me, just as I choose to go there to relax, work or both.
All new technology breakthroughs require adjustment. In this case, the major downside of nomadism is that the mix of real and virtual channels can lead to socially awkward situations. One is the issue of alienation, where people are more attuned to those they are in their virtual universe than those in the real world around them. While I may return to this topic at a later time, I would expect that society will eventually evolve a hybrid, multi-tasking communications style, learning to strike a reasonable balance between isolation and the global reach afforded by such virtual, always-on communications.
Instead I will focus on the opportunities. Beyond the obvious environmental benefits of reduced commuting, I strongly believe that the next generation of third places could serve to enrich our life as we build communities of the future. In Waterloo Region, there are signs that many are thinking about this challenge and building better third places that encompass peoples’ needs from business to the arts to entertainment and fun. In short, the building of vibrant, social spaces will create healthy cities of the future.
One aspect that is immediately apparent in the best of these first generation, third places listed above is the role of the arts in their mix. The simple coffee house is just the beginning. The impact of the arts is much more than art on the walls — it is a certain style and ambience you feel when you enter. Arts is an enormously creative endeavour, and I firmly believe, has a great affinity for the natural creativity inherent in the most innovative, knowledge-based companies of the 21st century. People like Alf Bogusky, Director General of KW Art Gallery have been developing a vision to reshape our urban spaces on a collaborative model based around the notion of third place. Historically, the arts institutions like art galleries, public libraries, theatres and concerts halls have been enclaves, walled off from the rest of the city. Alf and a group of leading thinkers have been mapping out a very different future, which exploits the natural synergies between all these stakeholders. Stay tuned …
In summary, we’ve witnessed a huge transaction through several generations of societal change from fixed offices to telecommuting and now rampant nomadism which is creating new spaces called the third place. I challenge all those who are beta testing the new mobile nomadism and who interact in these new third places, to please comment and share your experiences – we truly are building the city of the future in the context of the global village.
Today, I am excitedly watching Ottawa-based iotum‘s Free Conference Calls application on Facebook rocket through the 200 000 net installed user mark. As many of you know, iotum is a Verdexusportfolio investment of late last year when I also engaged with the company as Chairman. Note that I plan to discuss the investment cycle for global and Canadian startups in later blogs. Meanwhile, for those of you near Toronto, on Wednesday March 19th, my colleague Grover Righter of iMobileInternet will present a great keynote on the topic “The New Playbook for Venture 2.0: how to get from $0 to exit with less capital” at the Mars ExperienceTech 2008 conference.
Having invested in the company because of a great team and a deep intellectual property portfolio driving an application aimed at the emerging market for business-oriented applications on Facebook, it is indeed gratifying to witness this robust level of end user adoption. Not just a typical “light-weight” Facebook application, iotum‘s Free Conference Calls is a professional grade, full featured new take on the conference call. It fuses iotum‘s expertise in presence with social networks to create a new level of user experience, and mashes up many non-voice features like a live wall, full SMS/mobile enabled invitation system, recordings to allow instant podcast creation, and much more.
How good is this? Well, for the all important race to a million for Web 2.0 type of businesses, iotum is definitely a top performer. On February 27th having previously focused on the North American market with US dial-in numbers, iotum released global call-in features, like flash-based dial from computers, callback and their first European dial-in numbers (in France). This was done in partnership with some key international players like Truphone, Abbeynet and Moi Telecom. The response? In a mere two weeks, with huge interest in the media and blogosphere, the installed base of users more than doubled to 200 000 users as of today. That level of user endorsement is a direct response to the iotum team managing to deliver and refine an application that resonates with a rich user experience and which is in fact very useful. Essentially a new form of media experience, already it is being used for teleseminars, political campaigns, talk radio, podcasts, nonprofits, business meetings, and much more. In typical Web 2.0 fashion, the user community is seizing this application, and not only building content (conferences), but shaping it in ways that were not perhaps anticipated initially at the time of launch.
The screen shot at the top of this blog shows one recent conference call, an installment of the daily Squawk Box conference and podcast. But, to be truly appreciated, this needs to be experienced personally. Stay tuned for more developments from this exciting company.
And, don’t worry, with modern hand luggage restrictions, I didn’t have my sword to open the oyster to extract a pearl! In fact, Oyster is a Transport For London brand for their payment system. Many here in North America feel we are at the epicentre of the technology universe and have a monopoly on great technologies empowering the connectivity behind our increasinly always on lifestyle. With a different work-life cultural balance, Europe has much to teach us about deploying state of the art technologies, especially those we might encounter in daily life. But, too, not all are absolutely without flaws. I will share a few experiences from a recent pan-European sojourn.
OYSTER CARD:
Although deployed for a few years, this convenient contact-less payment card, containing an RFID chip, has in the last year or so taken off to the point that it is now used by around 90% of all trips on London Underground, buses and even some National Rail services. While, in North America, we think of RFID’s use in logistics and as a more active version of all those UPC barcodes, these embedded applications may be the more fundamental ones. How does it work? You simply pay £3 for the card, which is yours for life, and you then top it up as a pre-paid card. Oyster users pay less per trip, and, by monitoring your usage and appropriately capping charging, it also replaces a single day travelcard. Further, Oyster can also be used as a multi-day pass. You can register online so you can keep your money should your card be lost or stolen. In use, it is important to swipe both in AND out at the turnstiles, like in the photo above.
Compared with:
Toronto Transit Commission, which replaced its 50 year old tokens, with ones that are harder to counterfeit, or with
San Francisco’s BART, which uses 1980’s technology magstripe cards,
Transport For London (TFL) has taken a much bolder step in payments with their Oyster Card. It was convenient, fast, well documented, but …
What’s the Catch? Several times, I found that I got the message “See Supervisor” and would have to swipe again to make it exit. And, remember, that unless you swipe both in and out from your journey, you may find a £4 charge for a short trip, instead of the correct charge of £1.50. How this happened to me was that I swiped on exit, got the “Supervisor” message, and swiped again. The gates opened, but I found it had ended my first trip then begun a second trip, which it viewed as uncompleted, hence the £4 charge!
Like most great technologies, it comes down to intelligent software design and execution. Clearly smarter pattern recognition in the software could have removed this artefact either because of the short time between trip end and trip start or because this was an outbound turnstile, from which trips should end not commence.
WiFi ON BUSES:
Normally, I don’t travel on buses. Here in Canada, they are typically unpleasant, crowded and I’m old enough to remember when they were smoky as well. Because of a missed flight by my partner, I made one unscheduled 1 hour inter-city connection on a bus. Imagine my surprise when the price was great, there was free coffee served by a human, TVs with headphones and comfortable seats. But, most surprising of all, and I haven’t seen this anywhere else, was FREE WiFi connectivity on the buses. I was actually able to crack open my notebook and connect to the web and synchronize my email. While it did fade in and out a few times, I was totally amazed that this would even work at all. I’m still trying to figure out what technology connected the bus to the rest of the world (is it 3G wireless?), but clearly this was impressive. So, a combination of great technology, great service and comfortable buses was instructive in creating a “business class” experience in a European inter-city bus.
FON WiFI HOTSPOTS:
I was excited a few years about when FON was launched to make an open, universal WiFi Cloud. Part of the idea was for each person to “open up” their home or business routers, but in a secure way, to create a cloud in an almost open source way. And, because part of the founding energy for Spanish company FON, came from the Skype principals, it looked very promising indeed. So, I signed up in 2005 and then nothing happened.
Imagine my pleasant surprise to be in a cafe in Munich, called News Bar, and to see the familiar FON logo. Furthermore, after having paid €3 per hour at a previous cafe hotspot (not to mention £4 per hour in London!), it was great that this cost only €3 per day. What is more, I logged in at 2 other cafes that day, all using FON and all for that same €3 charge in the first hotspot. Although the FON business model includes a revenue share with the hotspot owners, they will not get rich from the proceeds. It was great to see the high level of FON penetration in Munich, and London appears to be following along. I can only hope that Waterloo and Toronto will wake up to this movement to create an open source cloud, as well.
3G:
Perhaps WiFi will become less important as 3G technology, in particular HSDPA with around 3.6 Mbps download speeds, becomes pervasive. Having started rollouts in 2003 in UK and Italy, Europe has about a 5 year head start on North America. Few will realize that Rogers has been staging a rollout of HSDPA into major Canadian cities over the last year and, similarly for AT&T across the US.
Enroute back to Toronto, I was in the Air Canada Maple Leaf lounge, struggling, like everyone else, to connect to their WiFi network, when I noticed one Swedish laptop user was productively downloading, surfing and emailing. His secret? His 3G PC card. Now, of course Europe insn’t a total 3G data utopia. I suspect it will be a year or more before international roaming in 3G data becomes more reasonably priced (read not extortionate) and, for those of use who aren’t residents and rely on prepaid cards, unlimited prepaid data tariffs become available. However, hope is on the horizon – my colleague, Alec Saunders, at World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, used Yoigo for an amazing €1.50 per day, on a prepaid basis. How long can it be that such a great concept will propagate from Spain to the rest of Europe, and perhaps the rest of the world?
As part of a European trip through Vienna, Munich, London and Berlin to meet with some tech startups and key tech investors, yesterday I stopped in at CeBIT in Hannover Germany.
For those who don’t know CeBIT, this massive Information & Communications Technologies (ICT) show remains the largest computer show in the world. I’ve attended CeBIT off and on over the last 25 years, with my first one being in 1984 to launch Coherent on a prototype Commodore C900 machine. At that time, CeBIT was a “show within a show” of about 5 buildings in the 25 buildings that comprised Hanover Fair (HannoverMesse, in German). The rest of the show was chock full of large industrial equipment, construction technology, mining equipment and the like, so incredibly diverse. Today, CeBIT consumes 27 buildings (plus a number of smaller pavilions), each building the size of a large convention centre/trade show facility in itself.
Today, before heading out to Berlin, I wanted to share a few impressions:
The show is still going strong – while the web is disintermediating large US shows and even reduced to 6 days, down from 8, the halls of CeBIT were packed.
In all the chaos, there is still some room for focus. e.g. I estimate that last month’s World Mobile Congress in Barcelona to be about 5% the size of CeBIT, and CeBIT’s 5+ buildings of mobile and wireless are likely double WMC’s exhibitor footprint.
Other key focuses are security (whose hall was mobbed yesterday), navigation and tracking, big server and other hardware, and of course the many smaller companies from around the world.
Notwithstanding the amount of German signage, the show continues to be quite international. Although US presence may have dropped a bit, the Asian presence continues to grow dramatically, and those companies are moving up the food chain – not just contract manufacturers, but producers of innovative products and technologies.
Top people were there – CEOs, senior executives and the like – clearly, it’s an environment where global tech business gets done, alliances are built, etc.
I can’t remember when I’ve seen so much big iron – servers, telephony switches, etc. While Verdexus doesn’t invest in this area, it was interesting to see the trends here nonetheless – companies like Thomson with their media strategies are notable in this regard.
Out of this plethora of technology riches, here are just a few themes that I’d comment on:
MOBILE: Given that Symbian (Nokia, Sony Ericsson) has a installed base over 10 times the size of RIM’s Blackberry, I was really surprised to see that Vodafone’s entire enterprise and data-driven applications displays were pretty well 100% Blackberry-oriented. While someone in Waterloo wouldn’t be surprised at this, for Europe this was surprising in a region where Blackberry sitings (except among Americans and Canadians) are still relatively rare. And, as a corollary for obvious reasons, there really weren’t a lot of Apple iPhones around. SECURITY A whole new generation of security players, relative to Symantec and Macafee, are rapidly gaining market momentum. Companies like Kaspersky Labs, AVG, GData, Trend Micro, etc. now have a huge footprint. There’s lots of talk of IPO activity in this sector (which will certainly be a welcome change), and it’s interesting that the new security business model is less to build the all-singing, all dancing suite (a la Symantec), but to stick more closely to a pure play strategy. These trends should be of strong interest to all those building startups in the security space – new partnering and liquidity strategies may be needed.
And, with my interest in new startups and the business models they enable, I’ll mention one university spin-out from Regensburg called Psylock Years of research seem to have finally provided a commercial grade, hardware-free authentication, accurately identifying people based on their typing behaviour. I’m convinced that Psylock will enable some very interesting new applications.
RFID Another promising technology, coming from some brilliant minds in Zagreb, was an OEM RFID implementation sized at 50% of existing products and consuming much less power. This, when combined into barcode scanners or other technologies, will help RFID move into entirely new applications. This is another technology to watch.
OFFSHORING The days of cheap offshoring (nearshoring) for European companies in countries like Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland are probably over. The very talented companies in this area are now focused on quality and human capital and no longer on price. You have to look further east to Ukraine or Russia or Asia to lower software development costs.
So, there you have it – CeBIT, there’s nothing else quite like it, and amazingly strong after all these years …
Ray Simonson
Jim Balsillie
Mike Lazaridis
Reed Hastings
Remember 1200 baud Modems
Latte from A Matter of Taste Cafe
The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg
As part of a European trip through Vienna, Munich, London and Berlin to meet with some tech startups and key tech investors, yesterday I stopped in at 
31 Dec 2008
0 CommentsWho Invented the Dot in Filenames?
Who invented the dot (“.”) that precedes the file type extension, as in document.doc or metal.mp3? As we near the end of what has emerged as a most interesting year, we all could use the diversion of examining the history of something so simple and pervasive, that we all take for granted.
A note from my friend Brad Templeton reminded me that being in the right place at the right time can be profound. In fact, as strange as it sounds, Brad Templeton may well have invented the dot in “.com“, as he discusses here. As he says:
This led me to ask myself, who orginated the ubiquitous dot that separates the extension, denoting file type, from the base file name. A much older concept, clearly the use of dot as an internet name separator was influenced, perhaps subconciously, from the longstanding filenaming convention.
The Windows filenames of today are direct descendents of MS-DOS which lacked tree-structured directories and restricted filenames to an 8.3 format, consisting of a maximum of 8 characters of base filename followed by up to 3 characters of an extension connoting the type of data stored in the file. MS-DOS, in turn, directly inherited this convention from CP/M, and indirectly from the UNIX family of operating systems.
I have directly worked with all of the above systems since their early days, but to go back further, I must rely on the oral history I was hearing at the time. CP/M was directly inspired by the Digital Equipment Corporation family of operating systems such as DOS-11 and RSX-11. The dot convention may well have been inherited via TOPS-10 for the DEC PDP-10 line of computers. Can anyone please confirm or deny this? At the very least, the 3 letter limitation of extension length, still common today, came from those systems which stored the extension in a 16-bit word in a format known as RAD50.
However, filename extensions separated by a dot were also a feature of Multics, which dates back to 1964.
Thus it is unclear to me whether Multics or DEC operating systems were the true originator of this concept, or whether there is an even older, perhaps common, ancestor. Can an alert reader, possibly a computing pioneer, help enlighten us on this important question.
Happy New Year to all. Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2009.