Here’s the final piece based on Omar’s experiences on successfully building a business worth hundreds of millions dollars in just a few years. Today we cover Communication and a final piece of advice that he says is the most important of all.

Communication

Don’t hide anything

It’s not worth the trouble and it will come to light eventually.

Re-ask the question if necessary (get a real answer and don’t just go through the motions)

Some people have conversations as if the only thing needed is for both people to move their mouths and make noise. If you are in a conversation make sure you are both really saying something. Feel free to challenge people on fluff until something of substance is uttered.

Russell adds: Omar walks the walk on this one, for sure. I’ve frequently heard him ask the same question numerous times until all is clear.

Be right (unless you have a right to be wrong)

It’s ok to say you don’t know, but it’s not really ok to be dead wrong about things you SHOULD know. Choose your words carefully; people build their opinions about each other through lots of small interactions.

Say no or say when

If someone asks you for something provide them with a clear “No” or a delivery date. Constantly providing open ended “I’ll look into it” answers generally builds frustration after a time.

Russell adds: Take note Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, BD, Finance (is there anyone I’ve left out?) everywhere.

Most important

Don’t be afraid

Don’t be afraid to fail, don’t be afraid to get fired.

Don’t be afraid to make a mistake or change your mind.

If you find that you are doing or not doing something simply due to a fear of what might happen, chances are you need to rethink the problem.

Fear is an awful guide and people tend to be awful judges of the true “downside”. One of the most amusing things in the world is watching MBA students at the best business schools in the world fret over their career opportunities as if they will be living out of a cardboard box if they don’t get the right internship.

The best advice I have is that whatever you do, it should be done as if you are reaching for a new opportunity, rather than shrinking from a phantom anxiety.

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Last night, I gave a speech at the American German Business Club about technology and The Singularity, which I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. The audience was very mixed, ranging in technology sophistication hugely, so I pitched it at a fairly tech-lite level, which seemed to work OK. Overall, the talk was very well received, with lots of questions, which is always a good sign.

There isn’t much point in sharing the slides, as they were largely image based, but I thought it would be interesting to write things up, as I think I do raise some important and fairly fundamental questions about the whole of humankind – dramatic though this sounds.

I started off by demonstrating that technological “advances” are frequently not remotely democratic – they’re decided by a small cadre of relevant business people or scientists. Wider audiences aren’t consulted, including our elected representatives or we, the people, the ordinary citizens, whose lives are affected by such innovation.

I cited quite a few examples such as the prevalence of CCTV in urban areas in the UK, where there is now 1 camera deployed for every 14 people and where 25% of the world’s CCTV are focused. The UK is being studied as a potential role model by other countries, despite CCTV being known to be inefficient as either a deterrent (see Banksy’s famous graffito) or as an efficient means to apprehend culprits. Police are generally very reluctant to use CCTV evidence in court and those cases which make it that far are thrown out 75% of the time.

It doesn’t stop there. Last month the BBC reported that a “secret network” (in the sense that it hadn’t been announced) of CCTV cameras had been deployed that is capable of reading car number plates. This is unregulated currently.

The point about this isn’t whether CCTV monitoring our every action is a good thing or not. But the fact that we haven’t been consulted on any level about this. And as I’ve said before, this may sound like great technology to the law abiding citizen, but if we ever did have a regime change (and there were plenty in the last 100 years), it would give the new Government complete and utter control over us all. And that’s not even considering the potential of CCTV evidence wrongly convicting the innocent from time to time.

However, it’s not just about CCTV. Other examples are Google’s Streetview, location tracking technology and the huge centralised Government databases that we’re starting to see emerge – which have a horrible habit of being installed on laptops that Civil Servants seem to be incapable of taking with them when they get off trains.

We simply have not been consulted.

Now, if you don’t know about The Singularity, I should preface this next part by saying that I am not a conspiracy theorist, nor barking mad in the sense that I believe the world is ruled by a race of lizards. There are many serious and academic writings on The Singularity and it is not a figment of my imagination. Serious scientists with serious qualifications are tackling this issue.

The (non-technical) explanation of The Singularity is that we’re getting better at creating Artificial Intelligence all the time – huge advances are being made. Sooner or later, we’ll break through and create the first generation of a computer that can design the next generation of computer. Once that happens, subsequent generations will be developed increasingly quickly – not one per decade, but perhaps one a month, a week, a day – who knows? As each generation is significantly better, you can see that we have a machine at some point that is infinitely powerful in comparison to what we have today and far superior to our own monkey evolved brains.

The theory is that this God-like creature will take over from us and that’s The Singularity. I use God-like intentionally, as one Christian definition is that s/he would be omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing), and omnipresent (always present everywhere). You couldn’t describe this creation better.

From there, you have 4 possible scenarios that I can think of.

Scenario 1 is favoured by the scientists who are leading us in this direction, without consulting their fellow citizens (see a theme here?). They believe that this creation would essentially be benign and anyway, would have controls built in to its programming, such as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which essentially state that a robot or computer can’t harm mankind.

Just assuming for a moment that such a machine decides to honour these Laws, it would thus create a kind of heavenly world, where wars, famine and terrorism were abolished. Work would be much altered, if it existed at all. And death would be terminated too – yes, that means that if you hang on until this happens, you would be immortal. The timeframe most frequently cited for this is 30 years maximum, so it’s a real prospect for most of us.

Immortality might be rather better than it sounds though. No matter how many great experiences you pack in, “life” might become pointless and boring after what, 500 years, 1,000, 1,000,000? Lots of writers have played with this idea ranging from Swift to Julian Barnes to The Singularity classic The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, where the indestructible and immortal inhabitants of that post-singularity world are driven to more and more extreme forms of sadomasochistic sex as they struggle to find fresh and interesting things to do.

Scenario 2 is the Terminator plot. Machines somehow overcome their reliance on Asimov’s laws and set out to kill all of mankind. Despite the heroic efforts of John Connor and crew, waging war in this context is a little like playing chess against the afore-mentioned God. We wouldn’t stand a chance.

Personally, I think if it gets this far, this might be a pretty likely outcome – or at least as likely as any other. Humanity would be the only possible obstacle to the future of the machine and if we could be eliminated quickly and easily, why not? It would be like us deciding to eliminate mosquitoes, which we would if it could be done quickly and easily.

Scenario 3 would see some kind of merging of man and machine to create a kind of hyper intelligent and super strong race of beings, with a human soul – whatever that might be. With our new powers, both intellectual and physical, it might be possible to realise intergalactic travel and, if I’m not mixing my sci-fi franchises too much, boldly go where no man has gone before, while simultaneously saying “I’ll be back”.

Finally, Scenario 4 says, OK, so the machines bear us no ill will and can’t harm us. But there’s nothing in the Three Laws that say they need to treat us well or as special citizens in any way. Maybe they’ll look at precedents from the human era and see how we treated inferior species – like animals under the factory farming system and conclude that ethical treatment is to squash us all into cages where movement is practically impossible?

The point is, we don’t know what the outcome of all this might be and neither do the scientists bringing about this brave new world, or Humanity 2.0, as I called it, somewhat unoriginally – I mean it was that or Machine-gate, right? And if you factor in a dash of chaos theory, no one knows what will happen.

Now, we might think that these risks are all perfectly acceptable as we stumble towards our destiny of self-created heaven or hell. But surely, we should be talking about this more? Surely citizens should have a say in the future of mankind? Surely this is a debate that politicians (bless ‘em) should be having too?

So my simple message is; tell your friends and start spreading the word. With all due respect to the brilliant scientists taking us towards this post-Singularity world, please don’t presume that we have agreed to this. Please take the time to educate us and debate it.

Consult with your fellow Citizens about the future of humankind.

—–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo

The team over at Skyfire have today released version 1.0 of their browser, bringing it out of beta. Skyfire is a “full” browser, like the well-known Opera Mini, but it’s even “fuller” — it can handle Flash 10, Silverlight, AJAX and Quicktime, meaning you can watch videos on YouTube and Hulu, and get the full versions of other sites. Pretty nifty.

Skyfire’s currently available for Windows Mobile and Nokia smartphones, but they’ve also announced they’ll be tackling BlackBerry next. What’s more, they say they also had a million downloads during their beta period, so congrats for that.

Download the app from get.skyfire.com.

—–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo

There are a couple of great events coming up that are worth checking out. First, on June 3 at Java One in San Francisco, our pals at WIP are holding another one of their WIP Jam Sessions. If you’re a mobile developer and will be in the area, definitely hit this one up. It’s free, and full of great discussions and contacts.

Next up is the latest Mobile 2.0 Europe event on June 18 and 19 in Barcelona. Not that you should really need much inducement to visit Barcelona, but Rudy de Waele and co. have put together a tremendous list of speakers, and they’ve also added a developer day that looks good.

Rudy also adds another good reason to come is to “Come and see the new Champions League cup in Camp Nou of F.C. Barcelona.” We can only hope, Rudy

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I hope you’re finding this series of posts interesting – I’ve had great feedback, so I’ll continue with a few more posts.

Today, I’ve combined two areas, Competitive Threats and Team. I hope you find them useful.

Competitive Threats

Ignore the competition

If you need to constantly look at what your competition is doing in order to guide your next step, you are not an entrepreneur, you’re an opportunist. You need to set your own agenda and execute against it. If you define yourself by how you differ from the competition, you’re probably in trouble.

Russell adds: At a recent conference, it seems that every company in the mobile ad space, defined itself in relation to AdMob. Very flattering and all, but it probably doesn’t do them any favours. I once met a girl socially who introduced herself as “[vaguely well known industry figure]’s girlfriend” to which you want to shake her physically and say “Have some pride, Lady!”.

(insert big company here) probably won’t kill you

Big companies are almost always far to slow to actually kill a small competitor. If you do end up failing it will probably be because you simply weren’t needed, not because a bigger competitor actually out-executed you.

Russell adds: Yes, this is a little counter-intuitive too, but some companies have consistently had great success specifically by taking on industry giants and doing it better. Richard Branson’s Virgin Group spring to mind.

Team and People

Find a mentor (or know when one finds you)

You can’t do it alone and you don’t know everything. If you can find someone who is not afraid to tell you you’re an idiot, and who really brightens your day when they give you some positive feedback, you should make sure to keep them nearby.

Where you are matters

Your environment will have a huge influence on how your career ends up going. Put yourself in the BEST place to do what you do. If you are an actor, go to Hollywood; if you are a chef, go to Paris.

Russell adds: and if you’re in technology, you need to be in The Valley. No question that everything is easier there than say, Europe. Everything from engineering talent to funding.

Nothing matters more than the team

The most important factor in your efforts is the team you are with. If you find that you do not like/respect the vast majority of the people around you, you should figure out how to get on to what’s next.

Russell adds: Well, I disagree slightly on this one, as it happens. I think timing matters more than anything, with team a close second. You can actually have a brilliant success with great timing and mediocre team, but not a brilliant team and lousy timing. Better to have both, obviously.

Hire people you feel like you’ve known your whole life

Pretty self explanatory.

Avoid arrogance at all costs

Never, never, never, hire people with an attitude. You will regret it.

Russell adds: Oh yes! If someone comes across as doing you a favour by deigning to consider working with you, politely extract yourself immediately as you’re wasting your time. Big company employees are mainly guilty of this, but not exclusively.

I’d also say extend this slightly into “listen to your gut”. If my head has ever persuaded my heart about a prospective employee, it’s my head which gets proved wrong in the end.

The ‘law of 7s’ is kind of true

Some people say organizations tend to get more complex in multiples of 7. So what it’s like from 1-7 people is very different than what it’s like from 8-21, and so forth. Those people are pretty much right.

No one matters as much as you think they do

As soon as you have more than a few people then chances are your business will be fine without any particular individual. No one should be indispensable and they should earn their spot on the island every day.

You work for them as much as they work for you

When you bring someone onto your team they are implicitly putting a lot of trust in you. You have expectations and so do they. Your job is to deliver whatever success and satisfaction they are expecting.

Don’t waste people’s time (from a career perspective)

Make sure that whenever the ride is over everyone has benefited from the time they spent with you. Try your best to make sure that no one comes off as the same person that got on.

Think about measuring your success by how many people will be better off for having worked with you.

Don’t carry any passengers

Working on an exciting new venture is an honor and a privilege. Don’t waste it on anyone who is just along for the ride.

So, that’s it for today. We have one final post in this series, where we’ll think about Communication.

—–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo

Continuing my posts on Omar’s learnings and thoughts, today we do Sales and Marketing.

Focus on the second sale

If you aren’t going to get a second order from a potential customer, don’t bother getting the first. In order to grow the business you need to be able to build on a solid base of relationships rather than burning one and moving on to the next

Customers LOVE to hear you admit what you don’t do (it’s usually very refreshing)

Pretend you work for the customer and tell them exactly what they should expect from working with you. If you meet their expectations and don’t over promise, you’ll build significant trust and loyalty.

Russell adds. This is so true and a point echoed by Maarten Albarda Worldwide Director of Media & Comms Innovation for Coca-Cola at the recent Valencia Festival of Media. As I tweeted from the event: Coke annoyed by “yes we can” agencies ie be *honest* about what you really can do and what you can’t

This point goes against conventional wisdom in service industries where a “can do” mentality is generally emphasised. However, if “can do” leads to “broken promises” and “disappointed client”, employ “can do” at your peril.

Don’t underestimate the power of being nice

Too many companies think some technology solution or design principle is going to be the only thing needed to catapult them to success. At the end of the day, business is a transaction between people, and simply being a decent human being goes a long way.

Russell adds: This took me a very long time to learn in my career. I thought that a great product or service was enough to win the day. But generally, people do business with people they like. So work on how to project your inner niceness.

Don’t announce vapor

You’ll start to get known for it and the one time you actually have something to say nobody will listen.

Large amounts of small media > small amounts of large media

With the fragmentation of media you are much better off getting mentioned all over the place than in a few central locations. Keep an eye on what the blogosphere is saying about you and try to figure out what they should be saying.

Russell adds: AdMob has been built with very little paid-for marketing spend – actually a tiny, tiny amount. But our share of voice is very significant.

The next post will be on People and Team, something AdMob has been very good at, even though I say it myself.

Information is not that important

Too many people think that all the details of their business are state secrets. The fact of the matter is that having an idea is FAR easier than executing on it. So relax. Besides, if the only thing standing between you and failure is an errant conversation you’re probably not in a good place anyways.

Russell adds: AdMob has always been big on sharing lots of information (our Metrics report, as an example) and its generally stood us in good stead. Focus on getting stuff done, not worrying about

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Continuing Omar’s thoughts on startups and business, today there’s a small section on deals and negotiations.

Understand what you really have to lose (which is usually not much)

If you are a person with a laptop and an idea, don’t worry about messing up the 100m dollar business you think you will someday be.

Russell adds: It’s hard to emphasise how important this is. In reality, most people have very little real downside to having a go and even if the idea doesn’t work out (and most don’t let’s remember) you’ll still learn a ton, which will add considerably to your value in business.

I’d also add, on a related note, that far too many entrepreneurs get paranoid about protecting their idea to the point of paralysis. The value of most ideas is in the execution, not in what the concept actually is. To make it reality, you need to share it – actually, with as many people as possible, counter-intuitive though this might seem. And in my view, forget about NDAs and the like. They’re pretty useless all round as far as I’m concerned, but for one man and a laptop, a total waste of time and effort, which at best just create speed breakers for your idea.

Leave something on the table

If your partner feels as good as you walking away from the table, you are much more likely to have a successful relationship

Russell adds: This is so important. Many self-proclaimed “great deal makers” focus too much on getting the best for themselves and wonder why the relationship falls apart or never achieves its potential.

Wait until the rubber hits the road to evaluate a deal

Don’t get too excited until the results actualize. Most deals are not as good as they look on paper

Russell adds: Oh yes. If I had a penny….etc

It’s also worth remembering that many of the best deals come from existing relationships with partners or customers. This isn’t as sexy as hunting down the big mammoth stomping around in the jungle, but effective account management is a skill you ignore at your peril and every company could improve this aspect of their operation.

Omar’s next thoughts will be on Sales and Marketing.

—–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo

As many of you will know, my day job is working for AdMob. I was actually lucky enough to be the first person Omar Hamoui, AdMob’s Founder and CEO, employed 3 years ago and it was mainly through writing this blog that we connected.

Over 80 Billion ads and 3 years later, we’ve come along way since then, have over 100 employees and a valuation at least in the hundreds of million dollar range. Indeed, Ron Conway, legendary Valley angel investor (among his portfolio is Facebook, Twitter, Digg and AdMob, of course) was kind enough to suggest last week that we were good for an IPO when the market comes back next year.

With success like this and the profile that comes with it, Omar gets asked by friends and aspiring entrepreneurs for some of the lessons he’s learned along the way. This prompted him to curate these snippets into a list, which he can add to from time to time and which he can share when appropriate. I think there’s some gems in there, so I asked if I could share with MobHappy readers as I thought you’d appreciate them.

Rather than publish them all at once, I’ll put them up as short series of posts in the next week or so and I’ve classified them into topics. This one is about how you come up with a great idea for a company or product, so perhaps you can use them to create your own multi-million dollar company.

Finally, before we get stuck in, no one (least of all Omar) is suggesting that all these are necessarily stunningly original, but they are observations as to what Omar has found to be especially true along the way.

Solve your own problem

The best solutions will come when you are working to solve a problem that is deeply impacting you. Avoid solutions in search of a problem.

Russell adds: The idea for AdMob came when Omar found it very hard to market a mobile service that he’d launched. If you’re interested about what that was, I wrote about it back in 2005. In retrospect, I am very pleased that I liked his original concept, otherwise things might have worked out very differently for me and AdMob!

The first idea is probably the most important

Many great businesses were built on the back of one fundamental insight. Much of the rest is just execution.

You shouldn’t have to push

You want an idea that gains traction and accelerates on its own after you give it the first push. If you have to continuously infuse energy to help it grow, you should probably go back to the drawing board.

Pay no attention to common knowledge

Too many people claim to know too much. The largest opportunities are found in ideas that go against the grain.

Try often, fail fast

What you are doing is wrong most of the time. Don’t spend too long examining every rock. If it’s really a diamond you’ll know.

Businesses make money

Think about the business model from the start.

Russell adds: This is a school of thought and one that’s very popular in times of recession. For an alternative view, see Linked In’s Reid Hoffman, who says it’s all about users and you’ll figure a way to make money later. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, all have enjoyed very high valuations, but the jury is still out as to how/if they’ll ever generate significant revenues.

Break the speed breakers

Whatever is slowing you down isn’t helping. If you KNOW the launch will do damage, then investigate. If you don’t know what it will do, then go faster so you can find out. If something ALWAYS slows you down, get rid of it.

Next time, I’ll post Omar’s thoughts on deal making.

—–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo

I’ve been carrying a Nokia E71 for several months now, but I swapped back to my N82 briefly a little while back when I wanted to use its far superior camera (best-ever camera on a phone IMO). The biggest change was having to use predictive text again — and that wasn’t something I enjoyed too much, having gotten used to the QWERTY goodness of the E71. I’d have a really hard time going back to a standard keypad at this point, and I’m not sure I’d want to.

AT&T’s CMO says that what it’s labelled “quick-messaging phones” — feature phones with QWERTY keyboards — will “usurp the feature phone”. We’re certainly seeing more and more of them here in the US, across all the operators. But from my view, I’m not sure I see them “usurping” featurephones so much as hampering Blackberry’s consumer push, and perhaps some of the growth of smartphones. I’ve felt for a long time the main attraction of Blackberry and other QWERTY smartphones to the consumer market wasn’t push email, but rather the keyboard, and how much easier it makes texting and IM.

Further, I don’t think that adding QWERTY keyboards to devices means the feature phone is dying, it’s simply evolving, as you’d expect it to. The feature phone market, or at least the non-smartphone market, still has a lot of life left in it, and increasingly, the smartphone/feature phone distinction will become less and less important.

If you’ve swapped back and/or forth between QWERTY and non-QWERTY devices, I’d love to hear about your experience and your thoughts in the comments. Are devices with standard keypads on their way out?

—–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo

A post over at the excellent Daily Irrelevant reminded me of an old MobHappy post from a few years ago, when Twitter was just starting to scale. Basically, it’s a localised Twitter machine, enabling people to leave personal messages for friends and family.

This was a coin operated machine from the 1930’s, where (many years before mobiles were dreamed of) you could leave a message for a friend to pick up later. The machines were placed in stations and highly trafficked areas and on leaving your message and paying a small fee, your localised note would be displayed for a few hours.

Obviously, this idea never survived its initial incarnation and we had to wait until the mobile phone and the Twitter era for the concept to suit available technology.

Another post worth revisiting is one I wrote about the first TV ad and what the mobile ad world could learn from it. I first presented this thinking at a confrence last year and now it seems it always gets an airing by other speakers whenever anyone wants to make a point about maturation of a marketing medium – whether I’m at the conference or not!

You know what they say about imitation and flattery. Actually, it isn’t true. It’s actually mildly annoying as I now have to think of a new example to make the same point. It’s one thing to plagerise, but when I’m being original and look as if I’m plagarising a popular meme, it’s something else entirely.

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