Showing posts with label vic keegan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vic keegan. Show all posts

11 October 2007

Best4C: Best4U?

I was interested to read Vic Keegan's column in the Guardian today:

This week I bumped into a number of people who had no office to go back to. But there is no need to feel sorry for them. It was not that they were too poor or unemployed, they just did not need an office to work from.

the reason being, of course, that they mostly use web-based apps.

I'm not quite office-less, since I do tend to work in the same room, but I'm certainly big into web apps, and I'm always on the look-out for new additions to my collection.

Here's one, the wonderfully literalistic Best4C:

Best4c(Best for chart) is a Web-based, online diagram tool that allows you to create, edit and share charts anytime, anywhere.

The interface is rather clunky, and the icons almost indecipherable, but, do you know what? It works, and has a lot of nice computer-related artwork. Not that I have much need for any of this, but if I ever do, at least I won't need to go to an office.

Of course, it's not open source in the traditional, client-side, sense, although the underlying server-side code probably is (LAMP etc.). Which raises the whole issue of what's to be done about such web services that take so much from the free software commons without always giving back. But that's a post for another day.... (Via China Web 2.0 Review.)

20 September 2007

eForum Follow-up

While I was at the Westminster eForum last week I had the pleasure of meeting Vic Keegan finally. Vic used to edit the Technology pages on the Guardian, and commissioned a number of features from me for it, but I'd never met up with him until now.

I was pleased to see that he drew on some of the stats mentioned at the forum for his column in today's Guardian, bemoaning the scandalous indifference of the present UK Government towards open source. This, in its turn, has provoked Alan Lord into a fine rant that draws together a number of related threads.

27 February 2006

(B)looking Back

I wondered earlier whether blogified books were bloks or blooks, and the emerging view seems to be the latter, not least because there is now a Blooker Prize, analogous to the (Man)Booker Prize for dead-tree stuff.

I was delighted to find that the Blooker is run by Lulu.com, discussed recently by Vic Keegan in the Guardian. Lulu is essentially micro-publishing, or publishing on demand: you send your digital file, they send the physical book - as many or as few copies as you like. You can also create music CDs, video DVDs and music downloads in the same way; Lulu.com handles the business end of things, and takes a cut for its troubles.

Nonetheless, the prices are extremely reasonable - if you live in the US: as Vic points out, the postage costs for books, for example, tend to nullify the attractiveness of this approach for anyone elsewhere in the world, at least from a financial point of view. But I don't think that this will be a problem for long. For Lulu.com is the brainchild of Bob Young, the marketing brains behind Red Hat, still probably the best-known GNU/Linux distribution for corporates.

I emphasise the marketing side, since the technical brains behind the company was Marc Ewing, who also named the company. As he explained to me when I was writing Rebel Code:

In college I used to wear my grandfather's lacrosse hat, which was red and white striped. It was my favourite hat, and I lost it somewhere in Philadelphia in my last year. I named the company to memorialise the hat. Of course, Red and White Hat Software wasn't very catchy, so I took a little liberty.

Young, a Canadian by birth, was the perfect complement to the hacker Ewing. He is the consummate salesmen, constantly on the lookout for opportunities. His method is to get close to his customers, to let them tell him what he should be selling them. The end-result of this hands-on approach was that he found himself in the business of selling a free software product: GNU/Linux. It took him a while to understand this strange, topsy-turvy world he tumbled into, but being a shrewd chap, and a marketeer of genius, he managed it when he finally realised:

that the one unique benefit that was creating this enthusiasm [for GNU/Linux] was not that this stuff was better or faster or cheaper, although many would argue that it is all three of those things. The one unique benefit that the customer gets for the first time is control over the technology he's being asked to invest in.

Arguably it was this early understanding of what exactly he was selling - freedom - that helped him make Red Hat the first big commercial success story of the open source world: on 11 August 1999, the day of its IPO, Red Hat's share went from $14 to $52, valuing the company that sold something free at $3.5 billion.

It also made Young a billionaire or thereabouts. He later left Red Hat, but has not lost the knack for pursuing interesting ideas. Even if Lulu.com isn't much good for those of us on the wrong side of the Atlantic, it can only be a matter of time before Bob listens to us Brit users (to say nothing of everyone else in the world outside the US) and puts some infrastructure in place to handle international business too.