Microsoft new recruiting techniques. Seen in the headers of a Microsoft Skydrive API response :-)

What a journalist truly want is an article to publish. They don’t care about your company. They don’t care about how great your product is. You must tell them a story.

Sometimes I hear people saying how difficult it is to get press coverage in stealth mode. They say the press always talk about the same, that they have their favorites. Of course it helps to know the journalist, but I think that’s really not the main point.

The fact is, most of the people are interested in knowing details about startups funded by the big names. But It’s just like you don’t care about Nespresso but you do care that George Clooney likes Nespresso. The product is not special, but the story is interesting.

So if I could give an advice: think as a journalist. A great journalist is not the one that copy / paste a Press Release. What a journalist needs is an unconventional angle about the market or something.

What you need to provide are details that will call the reader (like a fresh analysis on your market, or any topic related to sex, money, fame, etc.). If you don’t call the reader, you won’t call the journalist neither.

"I think the tech business is just fundamentally characterized by— Darwin had a term for it in evolution, “punctuated equilibrium”—where the world is evolving a certain way and then bam, it changes completely and fundamentally. You can even see this in the fossil records. Where the fossils progress at a certain rate, and then bam, there is a whole new layer of sediments that looks fundamentally different. The theory is, maybe there was a flood that wiped everything out or some new organism adapted and survived and crowded the old organisms out. I think to make money as an investor in the tech business, you have to find those. If you cannot find any of those ever, I think it is hard to argue that you have a business."

- Mike Maples, Floodgate Fund — Venture Capitalists at Work

There’s a lot of talking about mobile payment these days. Clearly, great companies like Square show how much can still be done with payments. And with many rumors about an imminent NFC-enabled iPhone, mobile payment looks like the next big thing. But watch out! Companies that will success on this market might not be the one we think of.

As any strong innovation, mobile payment is technically challenging. You need to create a secured electronic transaction which is a complex problem to solve, involving financial institutions, mobile careers, manufacturers, operating systems, point of sale IS and retailers.

But most of the big players tend to forget a disruptive technology is first a marketing challenge before being a tech one. You have to identify a market where this technology will be a must have for the consumer.

Why would the general consumer requires mobile payment today? Isn’t he happy with his credit card? Frankly when you check the Google Wallet pitch, it’s amazing how poor the benefits are:

• You can pay by tapping your phone (vs paying by swiping a card)
• You can pay on the web with your wallet (wow!)
• Google wallet shows you deals nearby (You don’t need mobile payment for that, do you? See Plyce :)
• You can lock your card with a PIN (definitely the most amazing feature here).

So we say the main benefit is to get rid off your wallet. Problem is, before a big 100% switch, you’ll have to deal with both a Credit Card AND your Mobile for several years. How simple is that? If there’s a market for mobile payment, and don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure there will be one, it’s not — yet — for the general use.

And I wouldn’t be surprised to see companies around mobile transaction technologies growing on a very different market. Then, when strong enough, they would eventually move towards mobile payment and disrupt the big players solutions.

Animated with Loopcam for iPhone.

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The firms that were most successful in commercializing a disruptive technology were those framing their primary development challenge as a *marketing* one: to build or find a market where product competition occured along dimensions that favored the disruptive attributes of the product.

It is critical that managers confronting disruptive technology observe this principle. If history is any guide, companies that keep disruptive technologies bottled up in their labs, working to improve them until they suit mainstream markets, will not be nearly as successful as firms that find markets that embrace the attributes of disruptive technologies as they initially stand. These latter firms, by creating a commercial base and then moving upmarket, will ultimately address the mainstream market much more effectively than will firms that have framed disruptive technology as a laboratory, rather than a marketing, challenge.

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- The Innovator’s Dilemna - Clayton M. Christensen

Bolivia - September 2011

Hong Kong - Summer 2010

Philipines - Summer 2010