Headworx

It is official: I've adopted Feedly as my primary Google Reader RSS reader. The Google Reader shutdown was a shock for me and initially I panicked. But then I immediately realized I was not alone. After all GR was one of the most popular Google service. So somebody must have tapped such opportunity to grab the audience.  Initially I tried the Google Currents app but it was far from giving me the Reader experience I was used to. So I decided to wait and follow the wisdom of the crowd. At the time of writing it seems the crowd has elected Feedly to be the next RSS reader of choice. It took me a while to adjust but after using it for a week I have to say it is very similar to the original Reader. Feedly also proves my earlier point on the Apps versus the Web: it exists as an app for the mobile operating systems and as a Web app for desktops. There are many theories on why Google decided to shut down the Reader. I heard they did not have a lawyer responsible for the product. I ...

ARM versus Intel has probably been one of the most important technology battles in the recent years. Well, may be not that recent in fact. Intel has been around since 1968 (45 years) and ARM officially since 1990, with Acorn dating back to 1978 (35 years). For years both companies have been serving different markets. ARM wan inside small devices like cellphones and Intel was powering computers. Now when a phone is a computer, ARM and Intel are direct competitors. Industry analysts argue the pros and cons of each company and the underlying architectures. ARM has historically been less power hungry and Intel more powerful. With the advance of smartphones in the post-PC era, and especially with the rise of tablets, ARM and Intel fight for the same spots. ARM has been on a continuous rise and Intel has been steady at best. There is a bet that the Haswell, the latest CPU from Intel is about to change that. And not waiting for the Haswell, Samsung is reportedly already in with the latest...

I'm fresh from a long meeting with a VC. It was a good meeting. Potentially very good. But one thing was on my mind during the several hours' long discussion, which was looking extremely far ahead and from a very far perspective. I felt like we were playing a game of chess. Moving the pieces on the chess board. Discussing what the opponent will do. Planning our subsequent counter moves. It is easy on the chessboard. Because you can execute every move you want. Which is not the case in real life. In real life the challenge is to actually execute the planned move. This is this extra level of complication the strategists often forget about. You have the pawn sitting on the D2 square. And you plan the D2-D4 move. And the pawn does not move. It behaves like glued to the D2. Surprised? What about your strategy then? Real life of an entrepreneur is not a chessboard. It is not only about the strategy. First and foremost it is about being able to execute the planned move. Many str...

A startup is like a child. I a sense that there comes the time it grows up. The early days are like childhood. Full of joy, creativity and unconcern. Childhood is very important. Like Bernoulli, you've discovered an increase in the speed of the air occurs simultaneously with a decrease in pressure. Like the Wright brothers you've built the airplane with wings. And you have the vision how your invention will change the transoceanic travel. This is when the childhood ends. Now you have to build airports, introduce safety regulations, debug your prototype, start serial production, setting up the supply chain, employ lots of people, take care of the unions, and do a thousand or more other things before the first airliner with passengers lands safely on the other side of the Planet. Inventing the wings was just the beginning. It was all you - the inventor. The creator. The visionary. But building airports, dealing with laws, setting up serial assembly lines, hiring people ...

Startups (and not only startups) very often lament about fierce competition and how they are being forced out of the market or how difficult it is to enter or play because of the competition. Here is my take: look in the mirror. You will see your biggest competitor. I mean, instead of looking around look at yourself. Look at your business. Instead of focusing how to outmaneuver the others, focus on your own speed, execution, efficiency, error rate, quality, customers. In most cases it is enough to just deliver what you've envisioned, to be the winner. Be flexible, be agile and focus instead of spreading wide and thin. Confession: spreading wide is one of the errors I make most often. It is this greed, this thinking in the lines of "we can do that too... and that too...". STOP! Just because you can eat, do not try to eat everything that is on the table. Taste what you like the most and eat what you can digest. No more. Otherwise you will get sick. Or feel bad. Or you...

The Internet Of Things seems to be very immature in terms of security. Similar to what the Internet Of Humans was back in 1995. This week I have been following an interesting discussion on the Philips Hue connected light bulbs. It appears a small home made device, capable of sending the Hues into the Oblivion, can be built. All that is needed is a simple micro-controller (like the Arduino ) and a ZigBee radio (like the XBee ). Reading the discussions at the http://www.everyhue.com community site, here is what happened: A Hue lightbulb can be remotely reset (a standard Philips remote can do this trick). After the reset, the bulb starts looking for a ZigBee network coordinator. A rouge coordinator may give the bulb a random network key and send it over to a randomly selected ZigBee channel. Once this happens, there is no way to recover the bulb. It sticks to the random network key obtained from the evil coordinator. Since nobody knows the key anymore, there is no way to reset the ...

I see the explosion of startup activity in Krakow, my home town. There are many groups, communities, events. Young, energetic people meet, exchange ideas, talk. Having a startup has become a lifestyle. But the Dragon Valley (the nickname for the Krakow entrepreneurship community) is not the Silicon Valley. At least not yet. There seems to be a cult of entrepreneurship lifestyle and bright ideas. There are plenty of very good ideas. But what seems to be missing is the focus of turning the ideas into successful businesses and products. We need more high profile successful businesses and products. Here is my call: stop gadoing and start doing ("gadoing" is a phonetic construct, in Polish it means talking). So yes, stop talking and start doing the job. Creating an idea is fun. Turning the idea into a successful product is still fun, but requires a lot, and I do mean a lot of hard work. Work, which not always is fun. But without actually doing the hard part, there won't be ...