Brown Bag by Jeffrey Beall, on Flickr

Working at a small company (Found Line), there aren’t as many opportunities to talk with and learn from a diverse set of co-workers as there might be at a larger organization. This is part of the reason why I organize our local PHP Users Group and am involved with other community events (VAGUE, Vermont Code Camp, Burlington Web Application Group, etc.). These are all technically-focused groups—I’d like to try something new.

Found Line would like to start hosting brown bag lunches. Each lunch will feature one speaker from the local community and will be about an hour long. The talk itself can be up to 30 minutes long, but can be as short as 10 minutes (we want to reserve at least half of the time for discussion). We will provide the monitor or projector, if needed. As the name suggests, BYOL. If you’ve been to our studio, then you’ll know that it isn’t very big. This means that space will be limited, but I think a smaller group has its benefits.

We’d really like the first speaker to be someone from outside of Found Line. If you’re here in the Burlington, Vermont area and have a topic you’d like to talk about for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes with a small group of colleagues, then please let me know. The only requirements are that your talk isn’t a sales pitch and that it’s on a topic that you’re passionate about.

Update (4/4/2011): Please fill out this form if you’d like to speak at an upcoming brown bag lunch.

Building business success on technology is not easy—myths abound based on common sense, tales told by those who have won, analogies to things like evolution, and appeals to inventiveness and innovation. When we look closely at how technology is accepted and how success is built on it, the picture is quite different, and the process of acceptance is both lengthy and unpredictable. In this talk we’ll look at the myths and the realities, we’ll look at many specific examples, and we’ll conjecture a set of principles that might work.

Those of us who use and build technology every day often don’t give much thought to technology acceptance. We’re always trying out the newest and latest technology and are frustrated that others aren’t keeping up with our efforts to bring technology forward. We’re often surprised by what technology does and does not get accepted by the mainstream. We wait impatiently for the rest of the world to catch up with us. A common meme on the popular technology news website Slashdot is, “Where’s my flying car?” Most people don’t want a flying car, at least not yet.

Many of the interesting innovation opportunities are in technology acceptance. Sure, Google has some of the most advanced technology around but how have they lost out to Facebook over Orkut and to Twitter over Jaiku? Both Orkut and Jaiku are owned by Google but Google’s likely superior technology platform does not necessarily equate to superior user acceptance.

The information in Gabriel’s talk is great news for startups and entrepreneurs. Focus on technology that is several years old, keep your design simple, and find a niche opportunity where a larger competitor can’t beat you at gambler’s ruin. Read the full talk [PDF] for all the details.

We made this decision for several reasons. We are strong believers in the free/open source software movement. To us, this means not just using free/open source software but also contributing to free/open source software. While this software is currently only licensed to individual clients, we plan on licensing specific components publicly in the future (and, of course, individual clients currently have the right to do this as well). For now, this decision makes it really easy for us to publicly release specific components to the community as it makes sense.

Many of our web applications are built using existing libraries, Zend Framework being the most common. Zend Framework is also licensed under the New BSD License so this provides consistent licensing for our clients. Also, I would like our business to contribute back to Zend Framework and this license parity helps make this simpler.

This licensing allows us to give our clients the most freedom while still protecting our right to reuse individual components (which helps keep costs down). We are in the business of creating value for our clients and are not interested in locking them into proprietary software contracts. This licensing gives our clients many options such as switching to another vendor in the future or even bringing web development work in-house. If clients are going to pay us to develop, maintain, or extend their web applications we want this to be because we’re the best team for the job — not because they don’t have a choice due to vendor lock-in.

Skype is a proprietary Voice-over-IP program that uses a proprietary protocol. Skype is seducing free software users into using proprietary software, often two users at a time. We do not want to encourage the creation of a Skype compatible client, but instead, we want to encourage you to create, contribute to, or promote the use of free software alternatives to Skype, such as Ekiga, and to encourage to adoption and use of free VoIP, video, and chat protocols such as SIP and XMPP/Jingle.

I have long been annoyed by Skype’s closed platform and have refused to use it despite its popularity. Skype users can only communicate with other Skype users (or PSTN users through SkypeOut) because they do not use an open standard and do not federate with other VoIP providers. This destroys much of the value proposition of using VoIP and ultimately reduces VoIP (in people’s minds) to simply “free/cheap phone calls.” In other words, Skype is helping to hold back an entire industry from innovating.

At Found Line, we use two open VoIP standards: XMPP and SIP. Google Talk provides our XMPP service (through Google Apps) and is used mainly for internal communications. However, Google Talk is connected to the public XMPP network so, just like with email, we can communicate with anyone else using the same standards. Junction Networks provides us with very reliable SIP hosting and allows us to communicate (at no cost) with anyone on any public SIP network. They also provide us with a PSTN gateway (so that we can make “normal” phone calls) and a hosted PBX (auto attendant, unlimited extensions, etc.) all at a very reasonable price.

Let me start at the beginning (since that’s usually a good place to start). We decided to use Google Checkout and Google Checkout Shopping cart for one of our client’s projects. The reason was that they needed it done quickly, they were only selling a handful of products, and a full shopping cart seemed like overkill. One of the products they were offering was a donation on behalf of a non-profit.

Three days ago our client got an email from Google Checkout support indicating that soliciting donations is against their policies unless you are a non-profit. Google indicated that they had removed the Checkout badges from our client’s AdWords ads but did not say anything about suspending their account. We immediately removed the donation item so as to reinstate the Checkout badges and not risk having the client’s account suspended. At this time we verified that the the Google Checkout account was still working and had not been suspended.

Yesterday I sent an email to Google Checkout support asking if there was any way our client could collect these donations on behalf of a non-profit. I clearly indicated that we had already removed the offending item from the website. This morning I received a response that did not answer my questions, but instead said “We were unable to verify your organization’s tax exempt status. As a result, your Google Checkout account has been suspended.”

Our client never claimed to be a non-profit. We immediately removed the donation item in order to comply with Google Checkout policies once this issue was brought to our attention. Only after we had removed the donation item was our client’s account suspended.

I immediately emailed back to support explaining everything above and asking them to reinstate the account. This is a micro-site for a nationally known brand and is part of a larger campaign. Not being able to accept orders is a big problem. In the last eight hours I have sent seventeen emails to support and have yet to receive a response. I have also posted a message to the Google Group with no official response yet. If the lack of response is because the support department is closed, then why did they suspend the account of a nationally known brand while support was closed without first double-checking that that policy violation was still in place?

We went so far as to try and call the corporate number. The absurdity of that phone call was beyond imaginable. We explained the problem and the Google representative said we needed to know the first and last name of the person we wanted to talk to. Of course, the email we had received from support about the account suspension only had a first name. They would not forward us to a department either. When we asked for the Google representative’s name we were told, “I’m not authorized to give you that information.” When we asked to speak to their supervisor we were told, “I’m not authorized to transfer you to a supervisor. You need to have their first name and last name.” This was after we had said, “Don’t you know your supervisor’s name?” We were told to wait for an email reply. I’m still waiting.

Google Checkout is a service that Google offers to businesses. This is not a consumer-oriented service. It is completely ridiculous to expect businesses to use your service if this is the type of support that is offered. Google, fix your customer service – it is completely broken!

One last message for Google: I didn’t take “no” for an answer from Verizon Wireless, in my opinion one of the most evil companies around. I called them again and again until they bent the rules on their asinine policy. Do you think I’m going to stop hounding the company that claims, “Don’t be evil?” Wake up call: your lack of customer service for business customers is downright evil. I have been a Google evangelist for many years and this experience has been a huge slap in the face from a company that I thought was different.

“If your colleague (is a) little bit lazy, or something like that, you try to be more competitive. So that is the positive side,” he said. “Negative side — to be causing one trouble.”

I find this interesting because what he is saying parallels the theory of capitalism in which competition is healthy as it creates better products and services. But, he is also addressing the reality of capitalism where individual businesses may see competition as something to be crushed. If you take the world view that we are all interconnected (whether this is through religious or secular belief) then harm caused to another causes suffering for all:

“If you do good, you get positive result. Something that creates harm is bad because we do not want to create suffering.”

Apparently there is quantitative research that shows that compassionate companies tend to outperform the market. I’m not sure, exactly, how compassion is measured or how statistically accurate this research is. However, I’m inclined to believe in the concept.

Sure, there doesn’t need to be a “business model” for companies like ours to contribute back to open source. I certainly see the value in contributing back to open source and would like to do so even without any clear picture of how it’s good for our bottom-line. But, in order for it to be part of a small companies business plan there needs to at least some basic understanding of how it contributes to the business’ overall success. Here are few arguments I can make for why a small business should contribute back to open source software:

• It helps to ensure that the open source software your business relies on survives and thrives.
• It can help attract talent. With proprietary software there is a bigger risk that everything an employee learns and creates is left behind if they switch jobs. A job may look more attractive to a potential employee if they know that their efforts will not stay within a “walled garden.” In other words, open source software and open standards are transferable skills.
• Your business can have more of a “vote” when it comes to the direction and features of the open source software that you use. Those who contribute the most to open source projects get the most say in what direction the project goes in and what features are added. Features that are important to your business can be added to the software that you use.
• You can claim that you are an open source contributor, not just a consumer. This can also communicate legitimacy and experience to potential clients.

These are just a few that I came up with. I would love to hear if anyone has additional benefits to add to this list.