What's next?

The most beautiful MVP ever done

First I would like to apologize for 3 things:

• the swanky title of this blogpost but I had trouble finding a better one :-)
• I haven't posted any article for a month :-(
• I didn't keep you posted about my progress ^^

Last time I blogged, I was evoking my self-taught but quick paced iphone training. I even promised you, dear readers, the roll out of a first prototype in the next few weeks. Actually since then I've gone even faster and am proud to announce that I released a finished product already 2 weeks ago! How did I manage this? Let me explain it to you.

A pivot I didn't expect

As mentioned a few months ago, I'm eager to build what I called "the ultimate mobile application that finally bridges your social activity in the physical world with your social activity in the digital space". Basically, imagine you scan somebody's t-shirt (for instance) with your smartphone and it instantly displays the digital identity of this person (his phone number, mail, skype, facebook, twitter... etc). You can then add this person on your favorite web services and the tedious chore of looking up for people on Google is over.

That's my goal.

However, based on the great feedback from the people behind the image recognition technology I use, I didn't start to build it. I met them a few days after I published my last blogpost. I had just finished my iPhone programming book and was ready to start developing my product. Yet, after a few minute discussion, they convinced me I should stop. You mean, throw away everything that I learned since then? Forget the few achievements I made? Exactly!

Instead of building a heavy client interface, they told me I should only develop the server side. Instead of linking social networks, I should only associate vcards. Instead of a mobile native app, I should use emails. Instead of scanning with their smartphones, my users should only send pictures by email and get the response by email.

That became my MVP.

The Minimum Viable Product, a concept I've loved, then hated and finally valued

The Minimum Viable Product is a buzzword/ a concept extensively used by the lean startup gurus. It's a product restricted to one or two core features, targeted for a very small audience of early adopters and mainly designed to learn from customers/ users.

When I heard of it about a year ago, I first fell in love with this concept. It made so much sense to me to implement a test/ measure/ learn process with incremental steps. Yet six months later, I started to be wary of lean startup ideas. I saw awful products rolling out and people thinking they were on the right path because they were "lean" (disclosure: I was among these people with a first project). So I wasn't that enthusiastic when they presented me this MVP idea. Yet I quickly adopted it and, today, I think I made a very good decision.

Why? It took me only 12 days to make it work. YES YES, you read it: 12 DAYS, less than 2 weeks. I installed the Google App Engine SDK on Sunday June 5th (I knew nothing about it before) and I first made a victory shout on Friday June 17th. It was working. I had built an app that could turn anything into a business card! I had associated my student ID with my vcard and when I was sending a picture of my student ID, I received my vcard! Of course, there were bugs and I'm still today polishing Capturio (my product). So feel free to test it out! Instructions for Capturio are here: http://captur.io.

How to deal with MVP?

First of all, your MVP must have the V of Viable. It has be a Minimum and Viable at the same time. In my case, why is it viable or better: valuable? Basically, with Capturio, you don't need business cards anymore PLUS it's fun. So if you are an environmentally-friendly person willing to waste as few paper as possible, if you're a kid (kids don't have business cards) or if you basically hate business cards, you finally have something that fits your need! Go test Capturio and transform your t-shirt or any of your objects into a business card.

Then, I must say I had to completly changed my wording, my storytelling, what I thought about my product. I should not only talk about Capturio in 6 months but as it is right now! Capturio will tomorrow connect your physical and digital social life but right now, it "only" turns anything into a business card! Now, since I've changed how to market it, people better understand it. As the matter of fact, they like testing it and showing it to the people around them so that's pretty cool.

In the next episode, I try to describe how it is to be a solo founder teaching himself code. In between, could you also tell your own MVP experience? What radical changes/ decisions did you make in the first place to better focus on the important things?

Lastly: Be ready. Capturio will have a new website and great new features in 2 weeks. Big roll out coming!

First steps in iOS, one week later

Last week, I disclosed my strategic choice to start building an iphone app myself as I couldn't find (yet) anyone with a heavier and better technical background to develop the project together. I'm still looking for this kind of person but also diving for a week into things such as XCode, Objective-C, Cocoa, iOS, Delegate, Pointers and all these obscure (but fascinating) concepts.

Whereas I thought at first it would be the worst error to do, I switched my opinion after numerous people told me it wouldn't take that much time. With my existing academic background and experience, they gave me up to 3 months. That looked like a reasonable period and as I didn't have many options, this argument convinced me to take the plunge.

Now that I'm becoming my "own technical founder", I would like to use this blog to track my progress, give a few tips about mobile development and especially help other people assess how fast they can learn coding and achieve building products for the iPhone. I hope it will be useful.

No matter your existing experience but how complex is your product?

I think this is the only right question to ask. In this regard, Vinicius Vacanti has made a really detailed typology to help you decide if you should become your own technical (co)founder or not. 

Vinicius is an entrepreneur with a business background and a banking experience that decided to quit his job, learn python (a programming language) for 6 months and enter the web industry. Since then, he has raised funds for a really successful startup named Yipit, delivering tailored local deals to their users in the US. He made 6 months ago some excellent blogposts where he distinguishes 3 categories of web B2C products with regards to where they provide added value:

• Sales, editorial, marketing (Groupon)
• User experience, user interface (Facebook)
• Technology innovation (Google)

Basically, if you're in category 2, that's where you should start teaching yourself code. In my case, I use image recognition technology to help 2 people meeting each other transfer their contact information and social profile right away. I'm building a social mobile application on top of a third party technology. I'm therefore in category 2 and that's another reason why I told myself I had no excuse not getting started.

Now that I'm in category 2, how fast can I hope to go?

Before building anything, you need to learn technologies you'll be using. How fast can you release your product depends on your product's complexity (the main question as we mentioned earlier) but also where you start. Do you have an existing experience or nothing at all? In case of a mobile application, these are the things I have to master:

• A programming language: Objective-C
• Object-oriented programming
• A development framework: Cocoa

Luckily, I have an existing experience in object-oriented programming and already know some programming languages (Java and Python). In this regard, I am better equiped than Vinicius who didn't know anything at all in the first place. That's another reason why I told myself I should get started. 

If you're starting from scratch, I would say you'll need about a month, full time, to manage a language and object-oriented programming. Now, I can be more accurate with iphone development: I started a week ago. I basically worked something like 60 hours and yesterday, I achieved building an application displaying weather forecasts. After a hardworking week session, I inform you guys you're totally able to achieve the native weather app in the iphone! That's pretty motivating, isn't it? (PS: I'm aware my app would need some design refinments)

Top down or bottom up approach to learn iphone programming?

I'm currently using several materials to learn iphone programming.

If I was able to achieve building a weather application yesterday, that's because I use a book with a top down approach (iPhone Programming - OReilly edition). It means it takes examples of quite big applications and teaches you coding by describing every component of it. On one hand it's really rewarding and you have the impression to progress really fast. On the other hand, you're exposed to a lot of complex code upfront. There are many things and subtitlies necessary to understand that aren't detailed. Besides, it's not exhaustive, which means there are things not covered in the book you'll have no idea of. 

On the contrary, I'm also refering sometimes to a more bottom up approach: the Stanford iPhone courses. They have absolutely great materials online. You can download all the slides and assignments. You can have the course videos on Youtube. That's something really nice from them. In these courses, you'll get a highly detailed, highly pedagogic approach. After that, you'll understand everything and be really comfortable with your development. On the other hand, going through all the courses and assignments will take much more time.

In the end, just pick your favorite one! As one option is free and the other not (really), I will highly advise you to start with the Stanford courses. If I hadn't started by the OReilly book, that's what I would have done. 

Eventually let me give you one final tip for iPhone programming: there is one friend you should not forget/ ignore. That's the XCode Documentation. If you're don't understand something or looking for something, that's where you should start looking. 

Ok, we're done with learning on the iPhone. Next week, I hope I will describe to you my first prototype!

Diary of an entrepreneur

I started my entrepreneur’s journey about a year ago, coming back from the US with my brain full of products ideas and business concepts. Since then, I’ve completed my computer sciences master at Ecole Centrale Paris, developed and killed a startup project (already!), organized a study trip to the Silicon Valley. I’m now back for a month, developing my new project – by myself so far. Probably because of all this activity, I haven’t been blogging recently, which I think it’s a mistake. As an entrepreneur and inspired by many of my peers (French or not), I believe I must share my daily experience with others, discuss, advise, help and getting helped from others.

Today, I begin the first chapter of what I could call “my entrepreneur diary”. Even I am not used to be a regular blogger, I will try to post constantly: what I learn, what I notice… Addressed topics will be about business, social networks, image-recognition (my startup’s fields) but also coding (as I’m getting my hands really dirty ;-). You may have one day some tutorials! Anyway, I hope it will interest you. So for now, let’s go straight to the point: what do I do? What have I done so far? What do I want?

Capturio: the missing link in social networking

Imagine you meet a great person. Awesome conversation. Definitely someone to keep in your network. Sometimes you get a business card. Sometimes not (in a party people don’t exchange business cards). You got a name and look up for it the next morning on Google. Bad luck there is plenty people that have the same name. A few minutes later, you find the right person and request it on Facebook or LinkedIn and then Twitter and then another social network you like. Phew! You’re finally connected.

For me, there is today a missing link between the physical and the digital social life. People have to look for other people on Google. Sometimes, they try to do it live on their mobile but typing on a phone is such a hassle… I see this as a serious lack of productivity people don’t necessarily notice but which will soon disappear. My intentions in the end: build something to make people life easier, help them connect quicker their physical and digital social life.

To enable this vision, Capturio uses image recognition. Capturio is a mobile application that lets you link your information (mail, phone number, social networks) with any of your IDs (a business card, a driving license, a student badge) and capture other people’s information by scanning their own ID.

Basically, someone hands his ID to you. You scan it with your mobile phone. Image recognition tech does the magic and the application transfers to you the information input by the ID’s owner: mail, phone number, facebook profile, …etc. No more Google. No more typing. Just take your phone out. Scan. 1 or 2 taps on the screen. Put it back in your pocket. You’re done and connected!

My progress to date:

Product name found. Photoshop sketches done. iOS started last week. I’m developing a Minimum Viable Product. I’ve met tons of technical people but they’re pretty overwhelmed right now (a guy at a famous French engineering school told me he received up to 2 mails every week coming from entrepreneurs and headhunters, it’s crazy). Therefore, I came to the conclusion I should start by myself and try to gather other people down the road. If, by any chance, you like the idea and want to know a little bit more, do not hesitate to send me an email: damien DOT detcherry AT gmail DOT com. I’m highly looking for partners (technical or non technical)!

To break any possible isolation, I’m also happy to work in the offices of a nascent but great startup: Bipsly. They’re getting loyalty programs of small merchants digital! I met their founders recently and since then spent a great time with them and all the people at Bipsly. (If you’re a lone founder, I highly advise you to find entrepreneurs to work with them in the same office: it’s so much worth in terms of motivation/ learning…etc). Besides, we’re also working close to guys at Jimmy Fairly, an online optical company, which is also awesome (you should check out their beautiful (but cheap) glasses).

Ok. I think I’m pretty much done with the first chapter. You’re up to date. In the next blogpost, I might probably discuss about iOS as it’s gonna keep me busy in the next couple weeks.

Bouygues Telecom = Worst French Telephony Provider EVER

Many people wonder how startups with less than 10 people in the team and no capital at all can shake worldwide empires, big corporations with 50 000+ employees and a few billions dollars valuation.

In fact, that's pretty simple: they don't care anymore about you. They're big and they think you're small. They push products and don't care about the services. Money is the TOP priority. Customer satisfaction becomes more a PR thing and a marketing concept than a field reality.

And today, I realized at my own expenses that the French telephony provider Bouygues Telecom fits perfectly this description. I wanted to switch my regular plan and old cell phone to a big, expensive 3G plan and a brand new iPhone4. As a long time customer, I wanted to get, if possible, a special discount. I am not a selfish and capricious consumer but given the awful user experience I had, I thought it was necessary to share it.

Here's the incredible process I had to go through this morning ^^

A 1h30 process to buy... NOTHING

10:00 am: I call the client services number 1064. The day before, a representative at the Bouygues Telecom retail store told me to deal with them to make my order and get a discount. I type my cell phone number to log into my session but get rejected. I have a special plan named "Universal Mobile" and should call another client services number: 1022.

10:10: Ok fine. I type 1022 on my phone (and I'm pretty sure that's what I did). I don't understand why but get redirected to the 1064 standard. I got rejected a second time.

10:15: I type 1022 again. It seems to work. The standard voice has changed. I choose to speak to a representative. No waiting time estimation is given. I will wait for 15 minutes.

10:30: I finally start talking to a Bouygues Telecom operator (after 30 minutes). I present my situation. Yet, he tells me I can't order my new plan with him and should call instead the main 1064 standard. UUUHHH... I explain I got rejected a bunch of times. He answers he will try something out. Another boring mainstream music track is up on my speakers again. 3 minutes later, he's back and informed me I'll be redirected directly to the main standard.

10:40: I am honored to talk for the first time to a representative of the famous, selective and inaccessible 1064 standard (man, I was quite impressed). She says I can't order my new plan with her and can't get any discount either. UUUHHH... I insist a little and she finally talks about a special discount plan I never heard of or seen on their website. It's called "UP" and includes 4 months free. But I must order online.

10:50: Ok I hang up and go to their website. As expected, I don't see such information. Fortunately, a chat windows pop us and a helpdesk assistant asks me if I need anything. She confirms all the information mentioned by the previous representative. I just should go deeper in the order process. She insists to stay with me until the transaction is completed. I start feeling more comfortable and stop thinking I'll get screwed.

11:00: Phase 2 of the online purchase (one hour later): I must type my name and phone number to confirm my identity. ERROR. Service unavailable. I try again. It seems to work. I should receive a SMS with my secret password.

11:05: Nothing received. I go on Facebook

11:10: Nothing received. I go on Twitter

11:20: Still nothing... WHAT IS GOING ON? I ask the helpdesk assistant. She advises me to look for my secret password in the invoice I received when I bought my current plan 4 years ago. Not useful... I trashed it or lost it. I try to reset my secret password. ERROR. 3 attemps failed. I should try again... TOMORROW. WAIT, WHAT???? The assistant confirms and recommends me to reach the 1064 standard to get directly my secret password.

11:25: I start feeling a little desperate and call the 1022 (my only option). Exactly like the first time, I get redirected to the 1064. HEY GUYS, DO YOU WANT TO DRIVE ME NUTS??

11:30: I type 1022 again. It works. Waiting time: only 2 minutes (impressive...). I speak to the 4th Bouygues Telecom representative of the day (give me a week and I'll talk to all of their employees). Unfortunately, he's not allowed to give me my secret password. OK SO WHAT DO I DO NOW? "Obviously, there must be some network issues. You should reboot your phone and hope for the best..." I don't like that much this answer and insist. No, it's definitive. He really can't.

15:00: At this time still no SMS received. HOW CAN YOU SUCK THAT MUCH????

(Most) Startups ROCK. (Most) Big companies SUCK

How is it possible? Really, how on earth is it possible that such a powerful corporation cannot be able to complete a regular phone plan switch?

I think it's a terrible disease organizations encounter when they start exceeding a critical mass. Bring value to customers isn't something trivial. And it's sad but when old companies under shareholders pressure start focusing on costs reduction, financial performance..., they hardly achieve it. It must be a day-to-day duty and deeply rooted in the company's culture to succeed.

As for me, I don't think they still deserve me as a customer... I usually don't write things to complain. I prefer building than destroying but this time, really, it was TOO MUCH to just let it go.

Bouygues Telecom you suck. And I really wonder HOW COULD YOU BOAST HAVING THE BEST CLIENT SERVICES in France for telephony??? I just can't get it.

Now should I go for Orange or SFR? Is it the same? What do you think?

Extreme Lean Startup Case Study: Peernuts

When the lean concept hits an innocent student and leads to significant lessons

4 months ago, I started an exciting web project with two of my friends. On paper it sounded like a great idea. So we wanted to give it a try!

A few months before, I had attended to the online - and astounding - conference organized by lean startup guru Eric Ries (actually I wrote a post about it here and even experienced my first “social broadcast” with Twitter). At the end of the keynotes, I had learned so many things from disruptive product development methodology to metrics-based marketing to cheap go-to-market that I kept thinking again and again:

“I just need to get started, apply the lean style and here we are I.P.O. (ie Internet Paranoid Obsession)! But first I have to get started!!!”

As a matter of fact, this web project was our pretext to start applying the “lean style”. In parallel in September, we all started a computer sciences/ entrepreneurship master program in French engineering school Centrale Paris and we wanted to get our hands on a dirty web project before starting our “big thing”.

It turned out this web project has become our “big project” to me and another cofounder. Our other friend gave us more than a hand to launch the application but he has now left to another direction.

4 months since the beginning and I wanted to share the multiple lessons learned on our journey to the lean path. In this blogpost, I’ll try to be wide open. The first part describes our project and all decisions we’ve made with regard to the lean startup principles. I turned it into a small knowledge test to make things a little funnier. In the second step, I dwell upon lessons we've learned. Lastly I evoke our next steps as well as the usual traps we won’t fall in. I’ll try to be more than transparent so dear readers feel free to comment and give feedback. I’m every day learning and willing to learn more from you.

Now let’s start your lean check-up!

 

The Extreme Lean Startup Test applied to Peernuts

Preliminary: what is Peernuts?

Peernuts is a sharing platform for cultural goods. You just have to log in, list your library, connect with your friends and get access to the hundreds of films, books, video games, comics they want to share with you.

Right now, Peernuts is in beta mode, available in French and just for DVDs. We use Facebook social plugins to help you reach your friends. Check it out: www.peernuts.com if you’re interested.

Test #1: Blogging before coding

Have you started blogging before coding? If yes, congratulations! Go to Test #2. If not go wordpress, tumblr, posterous or any other blogging platform and start sharing your project!

A blog is a way to present your product to future customers (especially if it’s a B2C product), gather feedback, learn and improve the original draft. It’s quick and cheap. It has only advantages.

At Peernuts, we started with a short blogpost and a 10-question poll we massively advertised on Facebook. In a week, we had about seventy answers. We were in the middle of August so it wasn’t so bad! And with all the positive feedback we got, we were definitely on track to accomplish more!

Test #2: Market shrinking

Is your market really big and totally bullish? If yes, you’re missing the point. If it’s big that’s too big. Start shrinking your market!

In other terms, segment your market, find a niche and focus on it. There is extensive material on this concept so I won’t talk too much about it.

At Peernuts, we wanted to manage all cultural goods. There was no point using an app for books, one for movies, another for video games…etc. But that was indeed too big for us. So we decided to take a shot with movies. A lot of people disagree with us and say it’s not optimal but we pretty think we’re right. We’ll see!

Test #3: Feature Burner

The Feature Burner is for startups what for females the Fat Burner is. Ask yourself if you have more than 3 features. If yes, you’re too fat. Go back to the Feature Burner! If no, congratulations! Go to Test #4!

At Peernuts, we had put all our ideas on a whiteboard. I remember there were about 10 to 20 ideas each one accounting for a different feature in the product. First we asked: “What is our core value proposition? Why will our users go to our website”. Answer: “to see what movies they gonna lend or borrow”. Then we asked: “What is absolutely necessary for that?” We came up with 3 features: a movie listing powered by an external movie database, a loan dashboard, a friend system coupled with Facebook connect and a basic mail invitation. That was it!

No rating system, no wish list, no recommendation, no notification, no privacy setting…etc. All of that is useless. If people do not use the basic features, do you really think they will with additional features? That’s pretty hypothetical.

Test #4: We don’t have a designer Syndrom

Are you trying to get a designer on board? If it’s a friend already interested in the project, ok fine. If not, you can absolutely do without!

First product ship objective is to learn, learn, and learn. If you don’t have a designer who consistently asks you to delay the product ship to refine the last design details, you will never complete product ship. As long as the platform design is not critical (in the case of a luxury fashion ecommerce website, it’s critical), you can start without.

At Peernuts, that’s what we did. With no designer in the team, I was the most adapted person to do the job. I bought a book about web design, bookmarked a few articles across smashing magazine, webdesigner depot and it got me started. With a few references, you don’t become the most gifted guy in user experience but you get notions about “web-friendliness”, how to play with colors, shapes, and how to respect basic rules. Then if you’re not a master at Photoshop or Gimp (I hate Gimp I hate Gimp I hate Gimp), you can play with Keynote or Powerpoint and screenshot your compositions. That’s how I did the landing page picture ^^. Lastly, don’t depress if you don’t have a wonderful logo. It looks weird but if you don’t care, it will just be fine! Remember: you don’t need the perfect product but a working prototype.

Test #5: Danger, Procrastination

Did you postpone product ship for the 3rd time? If yes, stop messing around. Release it! If not, you've a little time to get it right but don’t procrastinate either!

When you’re building something, you always tend to think your product isn’t perfect, you should still refine it, there are a few bugs to correct, users won’t accept mistakes, … and you’re right. All of that is partially correct. Now, you need to get over it. If you keep your product in-development, you’ll lose time-to-market, miss necessary feedback. You’ll spend your time refining useless aspects of your product instead of learning with your customers. That’s one of the most important lesson I learned from the “lean movement”. Indeed, lean startups reduce their development time to the extreme.

Today, I must say it’s pretty hard to go from theory to practice. Bad habits usually come up and prevent you from doing the right thing. For example, with Peernuts, the first 3 weeks of December were a period of bad hesitation and total procrastination “Should we release it? Yes/ No? Maybe that’s not reasonable… Maybe we should correct this and this”. Eventually we decided to launch it just before going to vacation, around the 20th December. We put the site online. We knew there were bugs. We knew some were really important. But we did it anyway. I posted a blog article on the day after to inform our fans/ friends and the people that had signed up for the beta version.

To know more about the bugs we made our users experience, I can give you a few examples:

• Our Facebook connect was really unstable. The week before going live, it simply didn’t work. The error page was the fourth page the most viewed on the site. Now, it looks to work correctly because it has fallen to the ninth position…
• Our Mail system that sent invitation mails and notifications was also unstable. Sometimes I received a mail. Sometimes not. We definitely need to work on it.
• Activation mails are usually sent to the spam box of our users. That’s because we didn’t white list our server. This one pretty killed our conversion rates to zero.

Nevertheless, the past two weeks have been really interesting. We couldn’t code anything as my cofounder was in Mexico but we learned a lot of things. Way more than if we hadn’t opened the application. Now as a friend of mine told me: what’s next? So let’s talk about our alternatives and the future of Peernuts.

 

Lessons learned in 2010

A few figures more than a long speech

Basically, our growth is totally flat. I won’t give any precise figure but I can say something like: our viral rate is zero, our conversion rates are zero, and our number of users is almost zero. Bad results, aren’t they? Actually, we didn’t expect many people to rush to our application. We have about one hundred of fans on Facebook and we converted a significant portion of them to sign up. After that, if our mails are directly sent to people’s spam, it’s pretty hard to attract more people.

Lesson learned #1: We have a lot of technical problems to address. Being an extreme lean startup is not a goal in itself. If you have technical flaws, you must correct them.

User behavior: everything happened as expected, which means bad!

Peernuts is a peer-to-peer lending website for cultural goods. One of the barriers we identified for the service is: will users list their library? A few movies? Just one? As expected, users don’t list their full catalogue: most of them add one film during step 2 in the signup process.

Now the question is: does our current product give enough incentives or is the service in itself too tedious? Do we have a chance to correct it or no matter what we do, it won’t improve.

I pretty think all startups with disruptive (or at least new) concepts are facing this challenge. A classic example: Foursquare. It gives users the ability to share their location with friends. On one hand, it’s a pretty cool service. On the other hand, it’s clearly a waste of time. Developers probably asked the same questions as mine: What should I do to lower the barriers and raise the value? What should I do turn it into something cool you wanna share with friends, use everyday? If our users base doesn’t grow, should I persist or switch to something else? Iterate or do something different?

Lesson learned #2: It won’t be easy. First try isn’t the good try.

Our energy: people feedback

Fortunately, we have something very powerful that helps us move forward and be motivated: people feedback!

In fact, people love the concept. They find it really cool. They clearly see the value. They always ask about any business model (and we usually answer it’s not a priority). And I come to think that they really envision something that is cool, something they’ll be using, something that will bring a lot to them. We felt it when we did our poll and we feel it almost each time we talk about the project.

Lesson learned #3: There are too many people out there willing to use the service. We need to work hard but there’s definitely a chance for Peernuts to work.

 

What to do now? What not to do?

Right now: Peernuts doesn’t work.
But: we have a great feedback on the service we are building

Will we add features? NO

Steve Blank, the father of the customer development methodology, writes it numerous times in his book, the 4 Steps To The Epiphany:

“Don’t add features until you have exhausted the customer segments in this market.”

It’s so deeply printed in my head, adding features will really be the last thing we will do.

However, there is feature and feature: we won’t add anything new but we will definitely work on the service performance.

Will we work on the product? YES

I just told you there were bugs. That’s simply not questionable: we have to correct them. Without being a priority, design should also be enhanced.

Besides, there is a lot to do to improve the performance. I am not talking about product performance (response time, availability…) even if it’s important, but customer performance. In the next few months, we will highly focus on our metrics: conversion rate, virality rate, number of invitations, number of added movies, absolute value and per user…etc. We will regularly tweak the product and take a look at the consequences. We hope it will improve over time.

Practically, there will be a lot of work to understand user psychology: Why does he add movies to his collection? Why does he invite friends? What is the biggest interest of Peernuts? Our challenge is to design Peernuts to increase user interaction.

Will we start massive communication? NO

As long as the virality rate of a social Web product is not above 1 (which means for every user that signs up, you have more than one of his friend that signs up), it’s typically useless to do so.

If we spend time on communicating instead of letting our users do so, it’s not sustainable. If the virality rate is under 1, it means our product is not enough good to get user recommendations or user conversion following these recommendations. When we communicate to let’s say 1000 people with a virality rate of 0,5, we know we’ll only attract a finite number of people, which is:

Sum (i=1…n, 1000 x 0,5^(i)) where 1000 x 0,5^(n)>1 and 1000 x 0,5^(n+1) < 1

That’s a total of about 2000 people. And that’s it. Yet, I don’t want my user base to converge. What I desire is exponential growth! For that, we have to work on our product to add the perceived value of users and increase our virality rate. Of course, if we trigger a buzz, we attract a few recommenders/ trendsetters, it starts getting cool to use our service, it leads to raise the perceived value of users and increase our virality rate. But, as a necessary condition to create a buzz is to have a good product, we will rather focus on the latter.

Will we work on our market? YES

Right now, there are a few recurring questions that get users confused according to me. That means we don’t have the correct positioning yet. For instance, they usually ask: how to transfer my DVDs/ books/ videogames to my friends? People don’t understand they just have to hand it out once they see the person they have to lend it to. We really focus on lending within your close community or at least the people you see really often: your classmates, your colleagues, your rugby teammates, the members of your painting club…etc.

As a result, we know we have to segment more precisely our users. Right now, our landing page is really general and we suppose that maybe a tweak or two can get it right in users head.

Besides, we currently say we are a “sharing platform for cultural goods” or a “peer-to-peer lending website for cultural goods” (even if we only managed movies right now). But this one could maybe attract more users: “legal peer-to-peer sharing” or “vintage peer-to-peer sharing”. We just don’t really know what our positioning is and we certainly have to figure it out.

 

Conclusion

You heard our resolutions for 2011. Listen to users, focus on metrics, refine our segmentation and positioning, build something cool and we hope it will be enough. Do you think we miss something? Would you give us an additional recommendation? Is it ok to not consider any business model for the moment? Thanks for giving us your opinion on these issues and happy new year everyone!

E-Learning Bling Bling

This article is inspired from a TED Talk I never gave. Indeed, I was supposed to take the stage at TEDx Paris Universities Active, the interactive session of the TEDx Paris Universities on October 16th. Unfortunately, organizers could not handle both events and cancelled my venue. Anyway, I thought I should still share my work and ideas with you, my little exclusive audience. And that’s the purpose of this article.

This blogpost is entitled “e-learning bling bling”, it talks about upcoming disruptions in the higher education system and I will first dwell upon two topics that created a little buzz a few months ago in the middle of the August.

Machines will replace humans. You can still buzz with that.

First, an article published on Fast Company website - a famous American magazine that deals with business, management, culture and technology issues – opened the ball and sparked off a lot of debate in the blogosphere to determine whether TED was becoming the new Harvard or not?

Giving that TED already gathers world-class speakers and features presentations at the cutting edge of science, technology, art and design, the question made total sense. It was all the more relevant that TED has reached with its online videos a massive audience that no university could compete with. As a matter of fact, TED is nurturing an unprecedented number of brains and educating an unprecedented number of souls. Basically, TED is for education what Wikipedia was for Dictionaries: a technology-based revolution in the world of knowledge.

Then, a few days later, a pretty famous, successful and well respected character know as Bill Gates, reiterated the same kind of thesis when he declared during a conference: “In 5 years, the best education will come from the Web”.

Well, according to both of these visionaries, it looks like the future of education, teaching and learning will happen… in front of a computer. Err… Bullshit?

E-learning = not exciting

In this regard, I notably had an insightful discussion a few months ago with one of the TEDx Paris Universities founders, @AlexandreKoenig, who told me that, now, in his school @sciencespo - the Paris Institute for Political Sciences, their English courses were done via e-learning, which means in front of a computer using some software, a microphone and a screen for interactions.

Wooo, it sounds really innovative, you could say. Unfortunately, after feedback collection, it looks more like a failure in terms of global learning and a pain in the ass for students that are anything but motivated. Who would be excited to replace basic but lively human communication with sophisticated but empty technology-based learning?

As a matter of fact, e-learning has always been and still remains not exciting. We refuse technologies because we all want to keep our friendly and attractive English assistant (especially Alexandre). Nobody would argue that the latter approach is outperforming e-learning in terms of student motivation and learning.

So, don’t worry, you the people scared by technologies! According to its president, Chris Anderson, TED has absolutely no intention to become the next Harvard.

Now, about Gates’ opinion, I would rather advise you to make up your mind a little bit. You must have observed the dramatic change in knowledge openness that we have experienced during the last few years, do you?

Incomprehensible and successful initiatives

In particular, you must know this wonderful initiative called Wikipedia, a huge encyclopedia built by everyone and designed for everyone. Yet, you probably don’t know another revolution that occured a few years ago when prestigious American universities such as the MIT, Stanford, Berkeley…etc started to broadcast their courses online and… for free!

As you can see, with the OpenCourseWare initiative, you have now access to almost every MIT course via online videos posted on their Youtube channel. Thank god, it’s not only video: you can read their digital books, download exercises, corrections, check their exams and almost every course material they have. It’s free and totally available online.

Wooo, that’s crazy, isn’t it? Now as a reader, you can fall into 2 categories: you can say “that’s brilliant!” or more probably “they’re nuts!”. And I agree with you. Do you imagine how much they lose by doing this: their intellectual property, their scientific advance, their attractiveness…etc. If they give their content for free, they’re going to go bankrupt. It’s simple as that.

Well, I would like you to think twice about it. Do you imagine the backlash that MIT decision makers had to face when they suggested the OpenCourseWare? - Maybe, I’m changing the history and OpenCourseWare was pushed from the bottom to the top: yet, with my French culture, it’s pretty hard to imagine.

Anyway, people didn’t strike as in France but I assume teachers and students got both super angry.

• First, teachers: For God’s sake, do you realize how damaging your online free courses will be? Students will never attend to our courses anymore. Chinese and in general every foreign university will suck all our intellectual property. We will lose our advance in research. That may be generous but that’s freaking dangerous!
• Then, students: WTF????!!!!! I pay 50000 bucks a year for these 4 courses and you want to put it all online? For free? Are you just out of your mind???!!!

And yet, MIT decision-makers stood firm. Now, behind the generous dimension that no one will ever question, I would like to stress the real purpose of this initiative. Don’t be fooled. This is a pure – and very smart – strategic move.

MIT gets the education world into a totally new and different era: a world of unprecedented competition between universities not only on a national basis but also on an international basis. This is the beginning of a phenomena I call “the internationalization of the higher education market”. Barriers featured in the higher education market, that had largely remained local, national throughout the world will soon collapse. As a market shrinks, new one will grow and “alternative” business models have already emerged.

The freemium approach

You may probably know the traditional business model in higher education. I go to university as a freshman. I live a memorable experience with schoolmates on the campus. I also pay shitty money (this is not that right in France compared to the US because education is largely subsidized here). Then, if I do well, I get a degree, some kind of pass card to enter the business world.

On the other hand, MIT has proven you can come up with a totally different approach for higher education: one that is free, provided via e-learning on the Internet even if it doesn’t confer you any credit. OpenCourseWare success as well as all of those kids learning everyday a massive amount of information from the Web shows that this model is perfectly working. Internet and web-based technologies are great ways to learn and improve individuals’ knowledge.

Yet, today, between the free and the “premium” approach, there is a complete no man’s land.

Be sure that many innovative institutions will explore this promising terra incognita, a land of opportunities, future growth and domination. With the recent maturity of both technologies and users for web-based learning, you will see, in a couple of years, new models flourishing. As a mix between the free and the premium experience, I named them “the freemium models of education” even though they’re not that similar with what entrepreneurs usually think when it comes to freemium.

Basically, these models will combine the advantages of the physical experience (on a campus) with the online experience (unlimited). They will leverage their respective strengths which means: on one hand, the same life quality and learning excellence you can find on a campus; and, on the other hand, huge cost reductions and new possibilities based on new technologies. Now, in the next paragraph, I’ll invite you to take a big plunge into the future so that we can imagine together the models that will tomorrow emerge.

A big jump into the future of universities

For instance, in 2015, just five years from now, HARVARD as well as other prestigious American universities such as the MIT will open a totally new and original program based on a mix between e-learning and a “real” campus experience at HARVARD. Let’s say, it will be composed of 2 years of e-learning provided by the HARVARD ONLINE SCHOOL, and 1 year at HARVARD (the physical campus).

It sounds innocent but these online programs will have significant impact for our national universities. For instance, from then on, a French student interested in business or management studies will have the following choice: either I can follow the well considered path of daddy-mummy that graduated 30 years ago at HEC or, maybe I can set my own track and take a more original, more international and more connected program with the HARVARD ONLINE SCHOOL. It’s about the same total cost of education as HEC, thanks to new technologies. Besides, it gives me the EXACT SAME degree as students from regular HARVARD University, one of the most hunted references in a curriculum vita. I mean: what do I wait to do it? Let’s get started!!

If tomorrow, American and in general some international universities are able to compete in terms of cost and attractiveness with our own programs in our own country, I’m pretty sure it will have some really unpleasant consequences for our education, research and economic activity. Nowadays, some universities are acquiring the technologic capabilities and massively digitalizing content to scale up and take up tomorrow’s challenges of global education.

Anyway, if you don’t believe in the maturity of e-learning and especially if you doubt about the success of programs composed by 2 years of web-based learning, don’t worry! Universities such as HARVARD (HARVARD is just an example for me by the way, I could have come up with Stanford, MIT or Boulder University), they will have figured this out. That’s why in 2018, you will have the opportunity to enjoy the first agreements between the HARVARD INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL and partner universities throughout the world.

Basically, in these partner universities, if you choose the HARVARD certified program, you will have the chance to attend lectures provided by the HARVARD ONLINE SCHOOL, use HARVARD content, and pass HARVARD exams. As a bonus, teaching assistants from your own university will help you during the whole program. Eventually, after a pretty selective exam, the best students will be invited to end their program in the United States on HARVARD campus. The rest of the students will continue their master’s degree in the partner university based on equivalent ratings of qualification.

Do you think that foreign universities will refuse those imperialistic propositions? Well, in fact they will love it! Thanks to such agreements, they will develop their college system at a much higher pace, get a huge amount of content they would not have accessed to, and reduce dramatically their costs. Who will refuse that? Ok, it may be a little aggressive and those who will produce and provide education materials will have a dominant position. Yet, it’s still collaborative, isn’t it? In this system, prestigious universities still relies on partner institutions.... a situation doomed to end very soon

From 2020 in fact, as HARVARD and other universities will start building their first education centers abroad. These campuses will be almost totally similar to ours. They will feature dorms, library, university canteens, lecture halls…etc. Still, they will have a unique specificity: no teacher or almost no teacher. Most of the courses will be provided via e-learning. They will offer the same quality students experience today with their “regular” campus. They will simply cost much cheaper and provide new possibilities. Welcome – finally – to the XXIth century!

Want to struggle? Fight with the same arms as your competitors

As I stressed it above, there will be in the coming years an intense competition between universities worldwide for power, attractiveness and recognition. In my opinion, French Universities and Grandes Ecoles have absolutely a role to play. Yet, if they want to fight, they’ll have to fight with the same arms as their competitors. And these arms are e-learning and new technologies. They’ll also have to pass their cultural reluctances. Don’t forget it, we are the country whose representatives voted an archaic law called HADOPI. It’s still very controversial to question intellectual property issues and some people might reject the open distribution advocated by e-learning.

Damien

PS: Feel free to comment this article and express your opinion! I’ve only recently (a few months ago) started to gather information on this topic and I might not be taking into account every variable. Let’s contribute and discuss this problem together!

PS2: Special thanks to TEDx Paris Universities for giving me the opportunity to dig a fascinating topic even though I hadn’t the chance to present it in front of an audience!

20% rule for startups: how much Google are you?

If you’ve already read my previous posts, you know that I’m a big fan of Daniel Pink's theories about organizations, love CEO Tony Hsieh’s “ social experiments” with Zappos (among many others), promote the idea of a democratic workplace and particularly worship Google founders’ boldness when they decided to allow their engineers to dedicate 20% of their time to their own projects. This type of initiatives brings a culture of innovation and engagement that is positive for everyone: the company, the customers, employees and shareholders.

However, as some of my fellow Parisian entrepreneurs are wondering if such a rule can apply for a startup, I wanted to share my opinion on the topic. Actually, I got the same questions as Romain (because I will certainly kick off a few projects this year) and even started a blog post to talk about it. So far, it had remained largely uncomplete and thus, his article gave me a great incentive to publish it.

In the next paragraphs, I'll try to highlight some key issues - in particular identify the specificity of Google -, checklist the differences with entrepreneurs and conclude with skepticism: other flexibility rules look way more relevant for a startup to achieve employee satisfaction and continuous innovation.

Is Google experience specific or generic?

In fact, it’s totally unique. Google is the result of a set of variables (almost infinite) that makes its experience totally unique. Fortunately, we can distinguish a finite set of variables that could help us determine how transposable this rule is for another company that shares the same similarities.

Let’s have a little recap about this 20% rule: What are the conditions? What was it made for? What was the context at Google?

The Rule:

• Staff engineers are allowed to dedicate 20% of their work hours to their own project. Consequence: Marketing, Sales…etc are not involved.
• These projects have a link with existing Google activities. Consequence: Engineers are not supposed to build a pizza restaurant during the 20% time and project proposals require managers’ approval. Projects’ scope is large though (especially for open source code).

The Goals:

• Employee satisfaction: they are free to choose what they’re gonna spend their time on. Consequence: it nurtures employees’ intrinsic motivations (different than money)
• Continuous innovation: busy or authoritarian managers, bureaucracy, corporate procedures do not strangle people ideas anymore. Consequence: Google recruits the best and has a really low turnover.

The Context:

• Google was becoming at the time a LARGE corporation. The founders didn’t start giving free time to their employees in Stanford in 1998.
• When the decision was taken, it was for Google a period of amazing growth and success. I heard recently that, given the current economic downturn, this 20% policy had been withdrawn or, at least, “adjusted” (like the 35 hours workweek in France?).
• Google had since its inception a deep culture of innovation. And in almost every product released by Google, you can feel this ambition of bringing something revolutionary: AdSense, Analytics, Wave even Gmail was disrupting other web-based mail clients at the time.
• Top background and highly skilled individuals recruiting is Google’s bottom line. New recruits at Google are usually the best individuals from the best universities in the world. Hiring processes can last for months for one employee.

Now, I think we all approve and agree with Google's goals and values in this experience. Employee satisfaction and continuous innovation are obvious and valuable ambitions. But, as I said, Google had several properties that made its case unique and enabled the success of this now famous 20% percent rule. Let’s review if startups share the same conditions.

Checklist for the 20% rule: hey startup, how much Google are you?

Top background recruiting

How smart are your employees? How self-working could they be? Do they have initiatives? Do they need orders? Well, usually in a startup, people are smart. And if they weren’t smart, their product wouldn’t have any chance (don’t make me say people who fail are not smart, I did not say that ;).

So let’s say startups fulfilled this first condition.

On the opposite, you would probably agree that if your employees cannot work on their own, it would be a total non-sense to give them freedom and budget. They wouldn’t know what to do with it. Similarly, you give a promotion to individuals that can take responsibilities, not anybody.

Culture of innovation

Every startup wants to change the world and the first employees usually share the vision of the founders. That’s one of the main reasons they’re in the team and living the trip!

Culture of innovation within startups: checked.

On the opposite, be careful if you’re a manager within an administration or a big company. If you wanna bring this new management style, there will be a huge cultural gap for you to overcome. Enterprise 2.0 features many challenges.

Low-constrained environment

Startups brilliantly fulfilled the two first points of my “Should you have the 20%?” test but it’s gonna get harder now. Remember: Google founders didn’t start thinking about how they’re gonna manage and foster innovation in their company during the early stages of their venture. They did it when life was getting simpler: profitability had been attained, no cash flow problem, a growing market, a sustainable revenue model and existing customers.

Unfortunately, startups do not fulfill this condition during their early stages. At the beginning, startups experience a highly constrained, highly unknown and highly hostile environment. They don’t have any customers; they don’t even who they are; they have to educate the market; they cannot assess the product/market fit; they have to make a few different attempts; try out different strategies; iterate; move forward; move backward…etc. It’s totally freaking out!

-> Startups are market commandos.

They are 5 visionaries, dropped out inside an unknown territory where mutual aid, total trust and relentless efforts are the only ways to survive. Do you really think that giving 20% of free time to your soldiers will be something valuable? Indeed, the hypothesis of a remote individual who finds on his own a solution to come across the wild jungle, build a DIY helicopter and escape seems highly improbable.

Conversely, the group should work closely together and leverage his complimentary with leaders giving clear directions. Okay, that seems kinda old fashioned but I’m pretty sure army strategists have been used to this kind of highly constrained environment for a long time and I doubt to see any 20% rule in the Pentagon agenda… (CEOs and CXOs of startups, don't take my comparison too seriously, you don't have to become unbearable generals to manage your business -> nobody signs up for that ;)

Be a large corporation

Err, startups, you have nothing to do here… You're too small for that. You’re totally mistaken. Okay, Google implemented a 20% rule for its engineers. Right, that was successful. However, the main and most powerful aspect of Google corporate culture consists in its organizational structure: flat management based on very small teams working independently. As a matter of fact:

-> Google tries to imitate startups!

So startups, don’t try to imitate Google. It’s the other way around! Otherwise, let’s guess there is no threshold of people, under which the 20% rule is not adapted. That would mean that Google engineers, within their 20% side project, could choose to dedicate (again) 20% of their time to something else. And we can run this again and again. I may be exaggerating but that’s something like that.

Don’t miss the point. The 20% rule was decided to protect brilliant Google engineers ideas from getting strangled by the bureaucracy, procedures and management required in a large corporation. If the idea is good, the engineer usually finds some colleagues to dig it a little bit. Then, they start building the application/ feature. The project can flourish and may even be released in case of managers’ approval: Gmail is one of the Google products that passed the whole process.

Now, in a startup, there is not the bureaucracy of large corporations. So don’t ever try to give the impression you become a big guy by hiring only part time employees! It would be so illogical: with more people, less flexibility and less reactivity. Totally incompatible with startups...
Then, more important: one of the biggest threats for a startup is to keep on building new features in order to achieve market fit. That’s a complete avoidance strategy that @romain_david also mentioned with Vinicius Vicanti’s article. Product change should only be considered if you’ve exhausted every market option (which means there is absolutely no customer for you out there). According to me, that case apart, you should always say NO to new features.

Startups VS Google: Same goal, different rules

In my opinion, Google 20% rule is totally irrelevant for startups. For the Mountain View based corporation, this policy decision was driven to nurture the 3 elements of intrinsic motivations, as exposed in Daniel Pink’s latest book, Drive: autonomy (the desire to get our own lives), mastery (the urge to get better and better at something that matters) and purpose (the yearning to do what we do for something larger than ourselves) because they were getting big.

In large corporations fossilized by bureaucracy and narrow-minded managers, these three key elements of a company’s wealth are traditionally threatened (even for innovative IT businesses such as Google). Large corporations crushed individuals. Fortunately, the situation is totally different for startups. Actually, I would say they don’t have to worry about 2 of the 3 elements mentioned above:

• Purpose: startups are changing the world. Founders and employees are together building products and services to solve big issues, current problems and exciting challenges. That’s quite a bit! Given the small size of the team, everybody feels its impact on the project, its contribution to the company’s progress and success. As a result, there is not the lost of interest and sense you can encounter in big companies.
• Mastery: everyone is involved in a startup. Everyone gives its best to make the company succeed. This is true for engineers but also designers, managers, sales, marketing, business developers…etc. Basically everyone learns everyday and becomes better at what they do.

On the contrary, founders’ attention should focus on “Autonomy”.

First, because there is a traditional difference between founders that are usually workaholics, able to work day and night with 8 cups of coffee and 2 lines of coke (just kidding) and their first employees. The latter are also passionate by what they do in the startup but founders have to understand they’ll never be able to devote the same amount of time.

Secondly, given the short deadlines of startups, founders tend to measure as much as they can the units of progress the company achieves. Unfortunately, there is a really bad metric in this field: employee presence at their desk. Some employees prefer working early in the morning. Other simply can’t. In order to take this diversity into account, managers are invited to discuss with their employees about their work hours. Sometimes, flexible hours can be implemented with work time split between the office and the employee’s house. When I was in the US, the staff engineers at my company had this kind of autonomy and they really enjoyed it. They could check and send their mails early in the morning, then come to the office, leave earlier, catch up at their house during the evening… At the end, only their performance mattered (which is the only thing important).

Conclusion

In the end, I hope this article will help you assess how the 20% rule at Google could be useful for your company. I tried to gather and summed up all the information I had and experiences I got on this topic (a few for-profit and not-for-profit one). I highly invite you to comment this post. My opinion can be uncomplete (I just identified four important variables but there might be others that ruin my arguments) and your contributions are welcome! In particular, I would be very interested to know why @laurentk, founder of the great app Submate, wants to adopt the 20% rule.

Insightful readings on this topic:

• The Google Way - Bernard Girard
• Drive – Daniel Pink
• Enterprise 2.0 thoughts by @cecildijoux : Hypertextual

Drive

“A book that will change how you think and transform how you live” claims the cover of Daniel Pink’s latest book: Drive. And it’s true.

If you have ever thought about the non-sense of our organizational systems based on rewards and punishments, if you have ever been appalled by the non-effectiveness of senior management methods, if you have ever been amazed about the gap between you generation and the previous one, Drive presents “the surprising truth about what motivates us”, exposes “the mismatch between what science knows and what business does” and reveals “the three elements of true motivation: autonomy, mastery and purpose” which will probably consolidate your opinion.

Now, in addition to these “copied and pasted” sentences, if you want my personal opinion, the main interest of this book consists in its right, simple and clear formalization of human motivations and its numerous consequences on organizations: 20th century management has started demonstrating its limits, as workers productivity has never been that low in western countries for a few decades. Conversely, more and more initiatives, scattered all around the world, are implementing new approaches based on what behavioral sciences have known for a long time about us.

When you have read “Drive”, things are never like they were before. You’ll start questioning everything and try to apply your latest knowledge to every aspect of your environment: your work or your school, your household, your friends… You’ll spread the word like the latest apostle. This comparison makes a lot of sense to me because this book was definitely “enlightening”.

I am still a student (grad school next year if you’re a faithful follower of this blog) and have had a lot of mixed feelings in the past few years about how things were managed in my environment. Sometimes I had the impression we were really going in the right direction. Sometimes I really disagreed with my school administration. And this book gave me explanations and confirmations about what I felt in the first place. More over, I started to go deeper into my questions and develop analogies between cutting edge companies that are implementing new approaches and my engineering school. In the next blogposts, you will find the results of my intellectual journey, which is definitely not over and has already gone through a strange experiment with Twitter (see older posts) as well as a TEDx event keynote addressing the cultural challenges in the French equivalent of the “Ivy League”: “les grandes écoles”.

That’s my story but you can write your own. And the starting point will be “Drive” by Daniel Pink.

As a bonus, you'll find thereafter a compelling introduction of "Drive" by Daniel Pink himself at TED GLOBAL 2010. I am pretty sure you'll enjoy it.

 

Twitter in the Classroom - The Must See Tutorial

What if the existence of another communication channel that brings students to share more questions, content and thoughts in real time during lectures could enhance the learning experience?

This article is a compilation of existing materials as well as personal thoughts about why using a social network such as Twitter in the classroom. In this blogpost, I intend to give you an overview as complete as possible of the different issues that are encountered, benefits and limits of the system, how to use it, how to introduce it…etc. I don’t pretend to be an expert. With the help of a professor in my engineering school in France, Ecole Centrale Paris, we organized a short introduction but that’s nothing compared to the experience of some teachers who have been using Twitter and other cutting edge technologies for years. As a result, this is more a theoretical exercise but I highly encourage you to feed the comments thread with your own practical experiences!

What Twitter is:

Twitter is a social network where users post 140 characters message. It’s a pretty basic service. It’s made up of text and hyperlinks. That’s all. But it’s a pretty efficient system to communicate, get informed and shared content. The service is generally public. By default, your posts are public. People can follow your stream of posts. You can follow streams of other people.

Why I believe technologies such as Twitter are valuable:

After a 7 months immersion in the US culture of innovations and collaboration-based education, I personally believe in 2 things:

• Technologies can enhance the learning experience
• Students must have a fully fledged role in educational processes

When you see how the Internet and Wikipedia among other things have revolutionized the way people learn, people teach, knowledge is spread, you might be pretty convinced of the importance of the first bullet.

Unfortunately, the second bullet is less obvious for many people especially in my native country. Nevertheless, I believe the traditional model where knowledge is only confined in teachers, professors, pundits brains will come soon to an end. A growing number of initiatives are abandoning the authority-based approach and already releasing the energy among their students by giving more control to them. It looks pretty scary but for many reasons, I believe this is the right approach for our modern societies.

This claim is a little remote from our first concerns and would require a really big blogpost (even a book like the enlightening Daniel Pink’s “Drive”). But I really wanted to evoke these high-level ideas before going further. These are the reasons why you would use or despise Twitter for your students.

The specific potential of Twitter:

Twitter is a social network. In other words, it means it is a collaboration and communication tool a student could use to post through a device such as a computer or a cell phone in real time comments and questions related to the lecture, answers to the questions of his comrades, additional information (via hyperlinks) he thinks valuable for the rest of the group (including professors)… Indeed, Twitter has established itself as a powerful tool for live sharing (or rather live tweeting). Eventually, the goal is to enhance the lecture compared to its traditional version without any technology.

And maybe, with more contents and more exchanges during the lecture, this tool can enhance the students’ experience: get them more involved, make them learn more things and better understand the lesson. That’s basically the deal (and what happened during the experiment we made)

If we try a quick comparison: in a traditional classroom, there is usually one producer (the teacher) and 40 consumers (the students). Now, with twitter, there is a potential of 41 producers and 41 consumers! I won’t conclude the lecture is 40 times better with Twitter but if it’s only 3, 2 or 1.2 times better, it’s still better and that’s…. well that’s good!

What to post to Twitter practically:

It’s pretty obvious. If you’re a student, remember the last time you talked with your neighbor. What you told him, you could basically post it to Twitter (except if it’s some kind of gossip not really related to the lecture). For instance: you have a question.

Unfortunately, most of the times, you won’t submit your question:

• You think it’s not worth it
• You think it’s really valuable but the class has no time. Too many questions have been asked before
• You’re shy and don’t dare to take the floor among other people

Now, if you share it directly to Twitter, you will have instantly 39 other people able to respond to you (not only your neighbors). If your question is too tricky for them, the teacher has a way to keep track of questions, see unanswered one and respond to the students after the end of the class. What is remarkable: in this system, you don’t disturb the lecture process. Everything continues as if there was no Twitter.

More over, there is wide range of other things you can post to Twitter:

• Additional information, interesting content
  • Websites, Blogs
  • Videos, Articles
  • Books….etc
• General comments, remarks, suggestions
  • What you appreciate/ don’t appreciate in the lecture/ Suggestions
  • When you agree/ disagree with the professor
  • General opinion about the topics evoked in class
  • What you had expected/ What you regret/ What you’re satisfied with…etc

And I pretty think possibilities are infinite. You’ll experience it by yourself.

In the end, a significant amount of content is added on top of the traditional lecture. More questions, more information, more comments… In fact, Twitter is a way to overcome the scarcity situation of the class: in a traditional lecture, you have time (only one hour) and physical (a 40 people discussion is just impossible) constraints. Now, with Twitter, you are in an abundance situation, with its advantages but also its flaws that we’re gonna mention now.

The limits of Twitter

Here are the common threats and limits people evoke about Twitter

• Too much information to manage
• Lose of student attention
• Twitter will produce uncommunicative students that will never try to overcome their timidity
• 140 characters message are just not enough. It only allows superficial conversations.

I totally agree with them. Twitter is not the perfect tool ever. Be aware of its limits to correctly manage its use in your classroom.

What are the most optimized courses (academic disciplines, format) for Twitter use?

2 settings seem important: the discipline and the number of people in the room.

• Discipline

If you’re doing mathematics, maybe you should rather listen to the teacher than monitor Twitter. Usually, hard sciences courses are dense and require a lot of attention. If you’re using Twitter to ask questions, the odds are higher that nobody will respond to you.

Conversely, Twitter is really valuable for soft sciences where conversations with students are already fostered. Students and teachers knowledge is complementary. Twitter gets students more involved and brings additional material and information to the group.

Thus, Twitter seems more adapted to “strategy” than “quantum physics” lectures. However, I would like to stress it doesn't mean use of web 2.0 tools and collaboration is forbidden outside the classroom (forums…etc) for “hard sciences”.

• Group size

Everybody acknowledges that Twitter in a classroom of 10 people has no sense. But what is the lower limit where Twitter becomes useful? I would say something like 30 students. I personally made an experiment with 40 people and it worked out.

Indeed, in a community, there is always a minority of “producers” and a majority of “consumers”. It’s called the 10% percent rule. Only 10% of users tend to actively participate to the internal life of a community (for Wikipedia, it’s even less for instance). So in a class of 40 people, it gives us only 4 people. Practically, it’s more than that but don’t expect to get everybody into it.

Now, in a big auditorium of 400 students, it makes a lot of sense. It might be a little messy but I really think it would really powerpul. I would really love to experiment something like that.

Conclusion

Hey, it’s getting really long so I’ll stop here with 3 links for people for want to go further:

• The ReadWriteWeb article about the UT Dallas Experiment (Fascinating)
• The Blog of a web 2.0 tools and education specialist (Really valuable)
• The Blog of a French teacher who’s been testing Twitter for a year in her class. The day-to-day description of the class progress.

A wonderful story including Twitter breakdowns in a strange educational experiment

What Twitter threatened, almost…

3 days ago, around 4:30pm (Paris time or 7:30am PDT), I was right in a middle of a crisis. Twitter was down and the famous whale was displayed (as below) in every computer screen of the classroom where I was giving some kind of speech.

I was actually standing in a classroom of my current engineering school in France (Ecole Centrale Paris) during a workshop for junior students about leadership (I am a little older, start grad school in September). During my speech, I was promoting the use of Twitter for educational purposes. It was a premiere in my school. Unfortunately the dawned social network was out of capacity and students were about to start tweeting for the upcoming lecture!!

I had heard before of its low uptime. Every time Twitter was down, I could enjoy a blogpost of Techcrunch wondering why, making fun of the troops of CEO Evan Williams and scrupulously stressing when the breakdown started, how long did it last… (here for instance). I also found other interesting websites like this one: http://whentwitterisdown.com/ giving improbable explanations of Twitter failures or this one http://www.istwitterdown.net/, you can figure out by yourself what this website does.

Anyway, students were getting impatient - no I joke they were really nice guys - but my reputation was in danger, you could conclude I was screwed. Big mistake! Actually, there had already been a “home made” Twitter-like forum in my school for years when Twitter released a few years ago. I mean it’s NOT twitter but you could enjoy the same real-time collaboration/communication (hey, everybody knows Twitter did not revolutionize so many things or, in fact yes they did…). Our technology consists simply in newsgroups hosted on NNTP servers you can manage by a mail client like Thunderbird (for the one that would have been interested…). Basically, we switched to that bootstrapped alternative with low user-friendly interface but the experiment could continue: my “twitter consulting” job was done, I got as many people as possible set up, and the professor, Dimitri Dagot, who had remained calm despite the technical problems (I would like to sincerely thank him for that) could start his lecture, about leadership.

Twitter in the classroom: bullshit, fashion or really valuable?

One year ago, I would have said thousand times PURE CRAP 100% GUARANTEED. But that was before, before I spend 7 months of my life in San Francisco. And now after the transformation, I would describe the challenge as below:

Despite the complexity you introduce (new tool, second flow of information, potentially disturbing), maybe you get your students more involved, maybe you get more things shared, maybe people learn more stuff (I say people for students AND teachers). In the end, maybe the course becomes just better? Sometimes value of innovations is obvious. Sometimes it’s totally a bet. I had to personally figure it out.

The lecture was a 30 minutes slide supported presentation about leadership. Without Twitter, the teacher told me he would not have thought one second of doing that. Usually, students get bored really quickly. Not that leadership or the teacher is boring (I attended one of his course two years ago and I could say he’s pretty charismatic) but still, it’s hard to get students concentrated for 30 minutes with slides. And with French students, there is another difficulty. It’s hard to get feedback. We’re just not as expressive as Anglo-Saxon or German folks and we can keep the mouth shut even if something is going wrong. So maybe could Twitter be this canal where students express their held back feelings? It would be so valuable for French teachers…

The results after experiment

So how did it go? Let’s first give some figures:

• About 40 students
• But only half with a laptop
• Only a proportion of this group that had the NNTP webchat system set up
• A dozen people able to post we would say
• 9 different posters (I am excluded)
• In total: 38 posts
• 6 of mine (as a community manager)
• 12 including jokes or … quite useless comments
• 20 posts as part of a valuable discussion

I don’t know if you can conclude any general result from these figures. I only wanted to give them for transparency considerations.

Now I would like to go beyond and describe what happened practically. There were a few remarkable things, moments, and reactions during the 30 minutes session and after. In most of the posts, students were reacting on what the teacher said and trying to start brief discussions about leadership related issues. “Should we be more competent than individuals we manage, we wouldn’t have general engineering courses” or “Does a leader lead or simply orient? Is there too much hype about egos when talking about leaders?”.

In particular, I had observed a student that had never said a word so far (my twitter experiment was only at the end of the workshop) and he posted a very profound remark: “Do we show leadership with the mouth shut when we let wafflers talking?” (I could not personally disagree I just can’t think and discuss at the same time. I usually shut up for a moment before taking the stage). Teachers noticed this post, suspended the presentation, and started discussing about it with the entire class. It was really rewarding to see that this canal could communicate everybody’s thoughts, no matter how shy/ extraverted you are.

There was also something I clearly didn’t expect but a little prankster hacked the teacher’s identity to post some nice comments about his colleague: “She’s pretty hot”. Nothing serious but still a little bewildering: beware of students’ pranks if you reproduce this experiment!

Conclusion

At the end of the session, before getting students feedback, I was quite at loss. 30 minutes were definitely too short. A few things had been shared, was that so valuable? Well, in fact, students in the class pretty enjoyed this new tool. A minority found it too complicated but an - almost overwhelming - majority said Twitter got them more involved in the course. Even people who hadn’t a laptop and couldn’t tweet said they wished they had been able to!

Hey, that was not the perfect introduction of social networks advantages beyond their traditional uses but that feedback was relieving. When I had exposed this idea to a bunch of friends asking for advice a few weeks ago, I had experienced a really violent backlash: “it will never work” “it’s useless” “it’s dangerous”. I didn’t abandon this presentation but I really got prepared for an entire classroom protest. And fortunately, it didn’t happen.

Now, I really encourage every teacher a little curious about interactions between technologies and education to take these kinds of experience to their audience and bring these so far niche practices to mainstream behaviors. We have a lot to gain. After my 7 months trip in the US, I definitely believe technologies can enhance the learning experience, bring teachers and students closer to each other and get our youth (and myself) more curious, involved, hungry for knowledge!

In a next post, I will put together my work and research on “Twitter and the classroom”. I browsed a lot the Internet to find relevant materials and people thoughts about such experiments. Nevertheless, except a few articles and the teacher notes of the well press covered Twitter experiment of UT Dallas, I didn’t find things that interesting. So I hope I will help you to introduce easily this new tool in your institution.

Lastly, I would like to thank my amazing professor Dimitri Dagot for giving me the opportunity to test new things and contribute to a better education in my school and the students who had also been really nice and open-minded in this really strange adventure.

Otherwise, you can still follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/detcherry