Headworx

I closed my Facebook account two months ago. The reason was the “ value for time ” of Facebook had been declining for me continuously and the interest graph offered by Twitter fits my much better than the social graph offered by Facebook. The other reason was I felt Facebook has peaked. As a company and as a service. It has peaked because I am not alone in my decision. There are many like me. Including some well-known members of FB’s board . May be they have not closed their accounts but will soon. And for me it was time to move on. The nature of mine is to abort declining trends and to embrace rising ones. The reason number three was to learn if life without a Facebook account would be possible. It certainly is and I miss nothing. Apple has peaked too. Yes I know I called Apple peak back when the stock was $300 (I posted this on Facebook at that time, so cannot give you the link, sorry). Way too early, two years ago. Or maybe just in time? It was two years ago when Apple...

Last week I named passion, courage and perseverance the three personal traits one should have to create a successful startup. But I have not precisely defined what makes a startup successful. I think Rafal Han did this in our upriser.pl video: when a startup becomes a business. It is very important to note it does not have to be a leading, global, world - changing business. A small grocery store can be a successful startup. And a good business too. I have always admired people delivering good value, especially when it is being delivered continuously. Today, in the digital age of networked intelligence, value is scrutinized as never before. So continuous delivery of a good value is a bar set very high. You have to cross this bar. The world is still full of lackluster enthusiasm, shortcuts and crap. When somebody gets rich by riding a wave of impulse selling of million copies of an iPhone application, which is deleted by most users the day after they download it, this is not a busin...

In recent days and weeks I have had a number of discussions on startups, entrepreneurship, seed funding and everything related to creating a successful company. The discussions have helped me sharpen my own, partly rough thoughts on the subject and I have decided to share them here for others to benefit. Or at least to give some food for thoughts. I feel I do have some credibility talking about successful startups, as there are two already behind me (one - CDN - started from scratch in 1991 and the other - Wind Mobile - started from ashes in 2006). Both are now grown up and doing very well on their own, which gives me this great feeling of satisfaction of "job well done" and "mission completed". Today I am deeply involved as a founder and CEO of the third one - HomerSoft , which is shaping up to be an order of magnitude bigger (of course time will tell...). A few weeks ago when we were filming the teaser for the Upriser initiative, I was asked about three ...

It has been several years now since I was actively working with mobile network operators (MNOs). And almost six years since I called Presence the mobile killer application . Yet is is amazing how little the MNOs have been doing to improve the call setup process. We still dial numbers, not people or places and we still dial blind. Not knowing whether the other party is able to pick up the call. With everybody carrying a smart computer (a teleputer) in their pockets and almost everybody connected over ultra high speed 4G networks and everybody doing almost everything in the cloud, for voice calls we still dial blind. A number, the green call button and wait... for the other party to send us a busy tone, or pick the call up just to tell she will call back after the meeting ends. The smart ones use "reject the call with a text message" option present on some devices. Amazing! Or is it? Sad indeed. MNOs did so little to improve the call setup. For me the best time for pe...

Automapa was the leader in car navigation 10 years ago. Microsoft ruled the mobile world with Compaq iPaqs and we were using standalone Bluetooth GPS receivers coupled with the palmtops. And Automapa was the top navigation app in Poland at that time. Most kids today think the mobile world started with the iPhone. Apple thinks so too. Almost nobody remembers Compaq (the Apple of the year 2000) or HP Jornada series of "iPhones". They were pretty cool, with apps, touch screens and connectivity. Hey, we even had "iPads", with the groundbreaking and lovely Compaq TC-1000 leading the pack. But back to the Automapa. It died, being replaced by Garmin and Google/Android and Navigon as much superior. Automapa did not manage the platform switch from Windows Mobile to iOS / Android well. But they have risen from the ashes. In a big way. A month ago I downloaded a beta version of Automapa to my Android car computer . And I have fallen in love with it. It leaves all Garm...