Welcome to the future! MIT SENSEable Lab Assoc. Director Assaf Biderman on future cities

[Assaf Biderman is one of the speakers at the upcoming SIME Vienna summit to be held on April 28th]

Assaf  teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is the Associate Director of theSENSEable City Laboratory, a research group that explores the “real- time city” by studying the increasing deployment of sensors and networked hand-held electronics, as well as their relationship to the built environment. Biderman’s work focuses on engaging city administrations and industry members worldwide to explore how pressing issues in urbanization are being impacted by a wave of new distributed technologies, and how these can be harnessed to create a more sustainable future living in urban environments.

In the talk below, Assaf explains how future cities will be driven by drivers such as technology becoming smaller but powerful and information increasingly becoming an infrastructure that can communicate in building our future cities.

Assaf is part of developing a futuristic 3-dimensional display that can be projected around anywhere in space, controlled by “little helicopters” that are like 2-D pixels with a LED, a location sensor and wireless communication that can be controlled in real time from any computer.

What’s the application? If all these technology platforms become more open, and gets available to the public, these kind of applications can be used to fuel innovation ranging from giving you timely personal information on “blank screens” , showing you the most relevant ads and applications that we haven’t thought through yet.

Well we say, lets make the future happen!

What do we Learn? Entrepreneurial lessons from Match.com

This is a guest post by Johan Siwers, former MD of Match.com. Johan is a seasoned online media executive with a passion for entrepreneurial game changing companies. Johan has over the past 15 years been involved in breaking ground for a wide range of media and online mediaventures within companies like Kinnevik, Spray, Schibsted and InterActive Corp (IAC). Johan tweets @siwers

Do we ever learn from history when it comes to business, a friend asked me recently.

I wanted to say yes, but then I thought a second time and realized that I very rarely neither look back nor make any attempt to summarize or analyze my own life and lessons learned in business.

Feeling slightly disappointed with myself, I decided to try to improve by taking on to look at the past 7,5 years when I have been running Match.com, and see what would come out of it. Realizing that time and stamina would be the main hurdle for a lazy 40+ executive, I decided to start my #recap of the past few years by twittering – that would make it doable wouldn’t it?

To my surprise, after pushing out a few tweets I started to group and structure my thoughts somewhat more, turning it into this blog post that I wanted to share with you: a blog testament of lessons learned after launching, growing and exiting a business.

- In 2003 I started looking at a small business that wanted to roll out in Europe. There was this US based company that wanted to make the transatlantic journey, after its initial success in the US.

In Europe the category we talk about had just established itself, there was quite a large number of players, but there was no one investing/executing with a clear ambition to become the market leader, there were shaky and unpredictable business models as well as a significant stigma tied to the category.

Having done my research, I prepared a business case assessment for the owners, concluding that this was a great business that was bound to explode.

When I was asked to take on and also execute the plan, I got ridiculously excited and I was not overly hard to convince to run the roll out of match.com on behalf of InterActive Corp and Mr Barry Diller.

The starting point was:

- a category with dozens of local players, lacking scale, ambition and execution
- a highly stigmatized type of service, that needed to reshape one of the most basic aspects of human life: how to meet your partner
- a US company with a working economic engine, but lacking bandwidth to make a successful international roll out

What did we do?

- we built a bridge head in the 25 million populated Nordic region, being an internet savvy and e-commerce intense area, with among the highest ratios of single households in Europe
- we developed a network of partnerships with dominating players, local (Tv2 DK, SOL, Aftonbladet/Schibsted, Telia, Startsiden/Telenor, etc) as well as international (MSN, Yahoo, AOL)
- we configured a machinery for efficient customer acquisition within search, affiliation, display and every other available channel
- in parallel we grew a strong, passionate team on the ground, being able to handle e.g. product localization (in multiple geographies, languages, currencies, etc), PR, brand marketing, social media and customer care

What was the result?

- we built the dominating player, in terms of revenue, users and brand recognition – becoming the largest non English speaking region globally for the company in terms of revenue
- we were awarded Best E-commerce company (SIME), Campaign of the year (Media Week) and were proud to be celebrated for building one of the more successful online businesses in the region
- we changed one of the most basic human aspects of life, where official data show that today 23% of relationships starts online (SIFO)
- we exited when merging match.com in Europe with French Meetic [MEET, listed at the Paris Stock Exchange], creating a dominant European player with a market capitalization of approx €400m.

So what where my lessons learnt?

FOCUS
* The effect of doing a few important things right is so much greater than doing many things in chaos
* Saying yes is easy, saying no requires character – dare to be brutally honest
* Don’t do ‘one offs’, impact comes from coordinated efforts, thinking 360 degrees in everything you do

DATA & CELEBRATION DRIVEN
* If you can’t measure it, it does not exist
* Structure, control and understand your data
* Make your points of celebration holy – and measurable

PROVIDING VALUE
* Irrespective of short-term monetary considerations, you only win the end game by providing the end customer with most success
* In a transparent world, you can’t fool people. In a fully transparent world you need
to be true. True to what the purpose is in what you try to achieve

STORYTELLING
* Stories matter
* Stories give life. Stories turn random into to order
* Stories give meaning. Meaning create passion

NON-MONETARY GOALS
* Making money is not a business idea
* Few people are passionate about making someone else rich. Therefore egocentric
goals cannot drive any business
* Earning money therefore becomes an irrelevant goal, for any business that wants to make a difference, and for any business that wants to be truly successful

TAKING ON CHANGE
* Very few people like change. Still change is the only thing that will be constant
* As a leader you are paid well to be agnostic to direction, as long it is the right thing
for the business
* Be clear beforehand what metrics you want to impact initiating a change, so you
can validate your change of direction over time

PEOPLE
* Passion beats seniority
* Ability to adapt to change beats analytical skills
* In an Internet company, traditional skills are only valuable if accompanied by
an “Internet DNA”

FUN FACTOR
* It’s important, but it is a job. It’s important, but it is a game. It’s important but it’s fun, so laugh at it. It’s fun so enjoy.

And surely, I have enjoyed the past 7,5 years with Match.com immensely.

But now it’s time for a new chapter, even if I am sticking around as a grand old dad and advisor to the company and new owners.

This time I will make sure to recap more often and if you are curious of what I am up to, you find me on Twitter as @siwers.

SIME Vienna – First batch of 10 speakers released and a heartwarming comment to share

SIME Vienna is coming up on April 28th, and we are extremely excited to present the first batch of 10 speakers yesterday. They are:

1. Isabella Löwengrip or better known as Blondinbella, inspiring fashion cults and movements online in Sweden
2. Andries Oudshoorn, Program Director Schibsted, one of the most inspiring, innovative and transformative media companies there is
3. David Rowan, editor in chief of Wired Magazine
4. Mattias Miksche, founder of Stardoll – the virtual world for young girls
5. Matt Stinchcomb, from Etsy, fashion marketplace for handmade goods, valued north of 300M$ and growing at a healthy rate
6. Fabian Heileman from Dailydeal.de – a daily deal and coupon site
7. Stefan Glanzer, a SIME Veteran, involved in companies like Last.FM, Mendeley.com, RJDJ and also running White Bear Yard, an innovative incubator spurring the European digital scene.
8. Pablos Holman, futurist, hacker and a genius, again a SIME Veteran
9. Daniel Mattes, founder Jajah, serial entrepreneur and author of books in SQL and Databases
10. Robert Lang, CEO of Criteo, one of Europe’s hottest companies in the retargeting space.

You can find their details profiles here

Stay tuned as we keep updating our speaker roster and agenda in the next couple of weeks.

And what definitely made our day, was a very nice heartwarming email from Michael Borras, co-founder of Tupalo.com. He said:

SIME welcomes ZIT as one of the partners for SIME Vienna

SIME Vienna is brewing quite nicely, we are in the midst of getting some great speakers, cooking up the agenda to be in tune with the times as our landscape keeps continuously evolving. That said, ZIT, the technology promotion agency of the City of Vienna joins SIME as one of the partners for SIME Vienna.

You can find more information at http://www.zit.co.at/

When we spoke to ZIT about the city of Vienna, Dr. Claus Hofer, the CEO of ZIT wanted to be part of SIME to promote Vienna as a hot bed for new ideas, innovations and entrepreneurs. The short of the story is, ZIT offers support for innovative companies in the media space through funding and other strategic services to promote Austrian digital economy and the long of the story is below.

“For the last decade, media business has been under constant transformation – and it still is today. Those survive who are flexible enough to profit from these changes, who invent new business models, who innovate. As the City of Vienna’s Technology Agency ZIT offers support for these innovative media companies: through the development of the Vienna’s Media Quarter Marx, through monetary funding and through valuable services.

To me, SIME VIENNA seems like the ideal platform: both for successful Viennese companies, as well as international firms. I’m positive that meeting each other will be of additional value to all media players.” – Dr. Claus Hofer, CEO ZIT – The Technology Agency of the City of Vienna

We are very happy to have ZIT with us in this journey for our quest for knowledge and digital opportunities. In the past, we have worked with Barcelona Active and Stockholm City Council to promote the respective cities, and with SIME having a major share of audience being international (who isn’t these days huh?), there is a good win-win scenario as we see it.

Brewing the digital economy coming up April 28th. Are you part of the new world order?

Come join us at SIME Vienna