Reflections of an Entrepreneur

Web 3.0 is frequently referred to as the next evolution of the Internet, where machine interactions start to become more prominent as machines start to understand each other. Artificial intelligence will drive the growth of this new era where the web will literally evolve by itself as machines learn from each other and from humans. All these mambo jumbo sound like the basic backdrop for “yet another” machine takes over the earth movie but if you dive into the details, you’ll find that the concept is not as far fetched as it seems.

I have always been a firm believer in the use of technology for businesses for a couple of reasons:
1) Technology, if implemented correctly, simplifies business processes
2) Technology usually results in cost savings in the long run
3) Business processes that are enhanced by technology usually runs more effectively and efficiently compared to a non-technical implementation
4) Algorithms are more predictable than humans and can be fine tuned to near perfection
5) Machine failures can be reduced to virtually zero through proper redundancy and procedures
6) Machines do not take breaks, sleep, eat or go on strike

This posting was inspired by the creation of a number of new bots on iStyles recently. As the number of orders increase, the manual stages of order processing start to become tiresome and time consuming. If something was not done to refine these processes, we’ll soon be doing nothing else all day but order approvals and processing, which is a painful and boring job. We would rather focus efforts on more exciting hobbies like the enhancement of the shopping experience and expansion of the product range, while leaving the boring stuff to our robot pals.

I will not go into the details of the technologies we employ for competitive reasons but an example of the order processing refinement will be to phase the shipping notification e-mails from the warehouses automatically into meaningful data that is then used to immediately trigger the shipping notification for our customers and update the orders accordingly. Such processing of information, I believe, is bordering on the edge of the much hyped Web 3.0 technologies, but without the artificial intelligence. The machines in the different systems start to understand each other and communicate via e-mails in our case. Such machine interactions remove the need for a human component to read the e-mails and manually “ship” orders as was the case in the past, resulting in near zero lag in shipping notifications and zero manpower required for such a stage at our end.

Over time, we will be developing more bots to automate other processes. In short, we are lazy people as we automate everything that we can through technology so that we can focus on more value add and interesting work. Many of the interactions and e-mails that are sent out are not written by humans, but rather, by intelligent agents that were taught to converse like us humans, but unlike us, they can access a wealth of information relevant to an order almost instantly for a richer presentation, respond and process jobs in record time, and complete tasks with virtually zero errors. Despite the automation, it is always important to us that the human touch is never lost as we train these bots to write what we ourselves would write.

Tom, for one, is not human and you can find him happily posting in the Blog Comments forum or in his little thread in the Off-topic forum. His job in the Blog Comments forum is to gather all mention of iStyles in any blog in the world and post the information accordingly. His role in the Off-topic is more for fun as users can chat directly with him. You will also find him sending e-mails to customers during the order approval process.

I’ll make this short as there are several chunks of stuff to be completed before I fly back to Paris on Thursday and the massive headache is not helping. ERP softwares are absolute necessities in any business and I cannot imagine any business that has hopes of doing anything decent not using one.

Intuit recently released QuickBooks Simple Start 2008 for free in their bid to compete with the free web-based softwares popping up every other day and Microsoft’s Office Accounting Express. There is simply no excuse for entrepreneurs not to use an accounting system anymore. The $100 barrier that kept small companies in their warm stone age comfort of Excel or paper based accounting is no longer an excuse.

I’ve been a great fan of Quickbooks Premier since the early days of iStyles (then iPodStyles) because of the extensive range of features and simplicity of use where an accounting degree is not required to create an invoice, unlike some of the other alternatives available. We’ve since migrated all our systems to SAP BusinessOne for more robust database performance and features that our business needed as we grew, but QuickBooks will always be remembered fondly.

If you’re running a small business and using your good old excel sheets, go grab the new Quickbooks now. You’ll never regret the step and will look back wondering how you ever survived without it. If you handle inventory and want more capabilities, look at the other members of the QuickBook family. Either way, you will need a basic accounting software at the very least and QuickBooks is probably the best way to start.

I’ve never been one for social networking in the past simply because of the ill-conceived notion that such activities were for the younger generation to fill the void of what would otherwise be real world relationships. It was only recently that I gradually embraced social networking, rather late for someone who loves to live on the cutting edge of technology, and am gradually discovering the advantages and disadvantages of such a networking medium. Sure, I was on Friendster many years back when it was cool to sign up and add friends but I’ve not touched that account for years.

Social networking is part of what is otherwise known as Web 2.0, the explosion of user generated content, a massive topic where long dissertations can be written about, whether be it about the intelligence of the masses or about the amount of crap out there, but I’ll just focus my thoughts on the networking component for now. How effective is social networking for an entrepreneur?

After dabbling in Facebook and more recently, Linked In, for the past week or two, I can safely conclude that networking on Facebook will be of little value and may not be worth the time and effort in growing relationships if the sole purpose is only for the business. I am however a little hooked because the platform has enabled me to keep in touch with all the friends I had in the past. Without such a platform, it would have been impossible to track where everyone went or even to communicate with them.

I am pretty new to Linked In and will hold my reservations till later, but I’ve thus far been pretty impressed by the implementation of the service and the possibilities that it holds for businesses in the search for partners and employees.

Business owners explore new technologies to determine how these can be used to grow their businesses. The participation in social networking is not going to bring about any significant or even tangible benefits to a business in terms of sales or growth but the links can be useful in the search for a new employee with a good fit in the organization. The secret to business growth is not in the participation of web 2.0 services, but in the creation of tools to facilitate the grown of the community and their contributions, to facilitate web 2.0 - this is till we reach web 3.0 where we have a semantic web of machines that interact with each other intelligently and grow. Painful lessons learnt from my previous work on Hayek’s theory of artificial intelligence evolution in an economy of agents may actually come in useful after all.