Nabru is a company that makes modular sofas meaning you can completely customise your sofa, from the size of the cushions down to the number of arms and the colour of the covers. My girlfriend and I were looking to acquire a corner-sofa-bed, which doesn’t sound very complex, but turned out to be as we had tight specifications:

• no leather or any fabric of the sort,
• around £1,000 (most sofas in DFS, John Lewis were about £2,000),
• durable (i.e. hard cushions that stay hard for a long time),
• has to fit through our flat – we have a corridor making quite a tight angle into the room.

After much shopping and testing, we came across Nabru by searching for corner-sofa-bed on the Internet. In a nutshell, Nabru offers a few ‘standard’ configurations, which you can customize or you can design your own sofa. We went with the latter and visited their showroom to give us an idea of what the fabric looks like and what some of the options are (N.B. you can order fabric swatches to get a proper feel). The sofa arrived a mere 3 days (!!!) after ordering it (we ordered it on a Sunday). I didn’t take a picture of what you receive but you can imagine a pallet full of bits and bops about 6 feet high… quite daunting.

The following videos are to show what the bits look like and give you an idea of assembly. It was very easy but a bit time consuming to put together, but great fun overall. I love the fact that everything is modular and everything can be ordered-reordered afterwards. If you ever have a party and break an arm, you can order it! if you ever stain in in a way that is not washable (all covers come off), you can order new ones!! It is truly amazing.

Click to continue »

I came across the Wuiper whilst at La Cantine in Paris. The product was presented by a team of young entrepreneurs to a very attentive crowd. There are many ways to define what wuiper is:

• a round plastic disc with a sticky side
• a new way of communicating amongst people
• a shy guy’s way to a lady’s heart

However, since all good marketers know that a “product is what a product does”, let me describe to you a plausible situation. Imagine yourself walking down the street minding your own business, when you suddenly pass this wonderfully beautiful girl/man. You have the choice of either approaching him/her with the high and present risk of failure and looking ridiculous. Or, you can quickly text a message to the number on the wuiper and then launch it onto the girl/man (hence the sticky side). Later on, the object of your desire will find the wuiper inviting him/her to texting the wuiper’s number to retrieve your message. The beginning of a love story….

Click to continue »

I have read a recent article from the Harvard Business Review (April 2008) about the economics of open source. In the article, a company CEO was confronted with opening the code of her beloved software. The main arguments for doing so were (if I recall accurately):

1. the “community” is doing it anyway
2. the “community” will get the features it wants
3. the “community” will alleviate pressure on the developers
4. The first argument poses an interesting dilemma for most companies as it is/can be seen as pure “theft” of intellectual property – after all, people are reverse-engineering their software and releasing unofficial versions…
5. This argument is at the core of going open source… after all a company’s product is meant to give the customer what he wants. But what if it doesn’t know what a customer wants? then let the customer satisfy its own needs.
6. The 3rd argument is the easiest to see from a company’s perspective: programmers reuse code = they spend more time on value-adding bits = reduction in costs.

Where the value lies…

A company has developed a product that is currently selling very well. This product has some sort of software that allows it to do all the cool tidbits, which give the product its value (that’s why customers pay for it after all). There is however a gap from the customer’s point of view: the difference between gross value (what the customer thinks the product will do) and net value (what the product actually does). The difference being a perception cost, which importance can go from disappointment (”oh, it doesn’t do that”) to frustration (”I’m never buying from this company again”).

… in reducing perception cost

So far so good, all companies know they need to reduce this perception cost if they want to improve their turnover. The problem is however twofold:

• the perception cost is hard to qualify (what does the customer want?)
• in our fast moving world, the perception cost changes quickly (what does the customer want now?)

The first point should be addressed by a good marketing department. The second point can only be addressed through the constant release of new products (or new patches, updates, upgrades…). Firefox is a typical example is this domain. The customer wants Ajax support, here’s a release, the customer wants tabbed browsing, here’s another release1. I didn’t choose Firefox innocently because here is where the power of open source truly lies:

open source allows customers to be involved in the product fabrication

… in customer’s eyes

With this argument in mind, one could wonder: so where is the value of my product? and why would a customer pay for something he can get for free?

The answers to these questions are industry and sector specific, you cannot compare the way Nokia makes money to the way Talend makes money despite the fact that both companies use open source. Open source is a new dimension to the business world that will be explored in another post.

Firefox actually got a lot cleverer with the release cycle through the use of addons allowing it to provide and test new functions before official releases [↩]