MyC4 is aiming to help eradicate poverty by 2015, in other words, supports the United Nations 2015 Millennium Development Goals and Global Compact. It’s doing so, by offering market place for micro credits, specifically in Africa. People having a business in for example Uganda can apply for a loan (say €1500). The loan will be given by a group of people that all invest somewhere between €10 and €500. The interest rate is determined by using a bidding process (as an investor you have to determine the interest rate you want). Payback is monthly, usually over a period of 12 to 24 months. So far, MyC4.com has a rate of on time payments of approximately 95% and none of the loans have defaulted yet.

I’ve just put €1000,= in various opportunities, none of which have been provisioned yet. This will happen though in the next few weeks I hope.

Previously I looked at KIVA, another marketplace for micro credits. The problem with KIVA is (last time I looked at it) that you do not receive interest from your loan. (as a European you can invest your money, but won’t get anything in return for it. Due to fiscal limitations, having interest flow back to Europe is impossible or so)

I’m a strong believe in the concept of micro financing if it’s beneficial for both sides. Philantropy is nice and all, but only goes so far. Making it economically viable will attract a much bigger group of people that will invest, increasing the chances of us achieving the Millennium Goals.

Go and have a look at MyC4.com. You do not have to start with thousands of €, a simple €50,= or €100,= will do. I’ll keep you up-to-date via this blog on my experiences.

An interesting blog on the subject seems to be P2P-Banking.com.

Two things that made up for the way too commercial leaflets. First, the humor in one of the articles, combined with a little arrogance was great–especially because I started laughing in such a way that it caused a good conversation to start between the guy in the aisle seat and me. The second (which I had never noticed until now) was the fact that you don’t have to pay in advance for a subscription. I always buy the magazine in the store (as opposed to the Economist, which used to be in my mailbox every Friday–until I forgot to send in my renewal which I still haven’t done . I’m still doubting whether or not I should subscribe…

“Nobody knows if we’ll ever receive a message from extraterrestrial life, but if we do, one-third of the world’s population would probably worship the remote intelligences, one-third would probably want to conquer them, and the final third (the readers of this magazine), would want to do some extraterrestrial market research and sell them something.”

^{Paul Saffo, Six Rules for Effective Forecasting, HBR July/August 2007}

p.s. by the way, there was a great article on IT strategy and SOA in the July/August issue. Often nothing too technical, but nonetheless a pretty interesting read.

I think Europe is still far beyond here. What I get from people is that here in Holland for instance, people (and specifically people between 15 and 24) are certainly watching TV for more than 1 to 2 hours a week. Of course people here are much more in doors than in the Bay Area (the panelists for from the Bay Area). We’re certainly not seeing that many people using PVRs here, but it’s probably inevitable, as well as the drop in time people are watching TVs.

Interesting stuff!

Your subscription to The Economist expired several weeks ago and we don’t want to lose you.

Such a good start of this letter! They had already won me back. It sounds really honest, they’re not trying to sell me anything here they can’t give me. They know they provide value, so they don’t go and shout it out aloud in the first part of the letter. The letter then continues…

For a small outlay, and a substantial saving on the cover price price – you can continue to benefit from analysis and opinion on the latest international issues.

Again, spot on (except for the error in the sentence–unless my English is totally screwed up, there’s one mention of the word price too much). They do not exaggerate the value of their offering, in fact they do not even include any such thing as ‘great’, ‘good’ or ‘fantastic’. This is how I like it. Next sentence…

Whether you read the whole newspaper every week, or just those articles of specific interest to you, The Economist gives you invaluable insight across a wide array of topics, from business and politics to the ARts and science.

Okay, they’re getting more confident and are gradually building things up. Now their offering is characterized as being invaluable. The one who wrote this letter clearly knows he’s got enough credit to get away with this. On we go…

A one-year subscription will save you 63% on the cover price. Renewing for longer will save you even more. The enclosed renewal form shows just how much.

What struck me here was that they’re mentioning the smallest saving you can get. Are you renewing for two or even three years, you’re saving a lot more, yet they do not mention how much specifically, they just mention the smallest saving. Interesting…

And you’ll continue to get every Economist article back to March 1997 on www.economist.com. Plus our in-depth country and industry special reports, to help make the world’s workings that bit clearer.

Making the world’s working that bit clearer. Not crystal clear or entirely clear, but just that bit clearer.

The letter ends with the following:

If you change your mind at any time, you can simply cancel your subscription and get a full refund on the remaining issues.

To renew now, please visit www.economist.com/renew/emea, call our hotline on +44 (0)114 220 2404 or complete and return your form in the envelope provided.

Renewing now will bring you the big picture for as little as EUR 1.67 a week.

I think this is an excellent letter. I’m wondering if this letter is specifically designed for Europe, or the Netherlands, or if they’re using this letter all over the world. I can’t help but think there are people at the Economist thinking about the culture in a specific region and designing different letters for different regions.

In any case, if you’d like to sell me something, please do it in a respectful manner and read the above letter to increase your chances of success!

p.s. do I need to tell you that I filled out the renewal form? I do still have to post it though and that’s where it went wrong last time, so we’ll see if The Economist will continue to have me as a customer after all.

Interessante panel discussie onder leiding van Guy Kawasaki. De main trend van de discussie is het feit dat VCs het niet waard zijn. Okay, dat is de boel wel een beetje over een kam scheren, maar het komt er wel een beetje op neer. Belangrijkste wordt gezegd door Karen Northrup (Corefino) en James Hong (HotorNot). 1) VC-geld regelen betekent all-all-nothing en 2) VC moeten iets bieden wat je zonder hun niet kan krijgen.

Interessant voor elke ondernemer, hoewel veel een beetje eenzijdig is: panel discussie

Near the end I said the next book I was about to read was Good to Great, by Jim Collins and I promised you that I’d update you once I finished the book. Well, I have to apoligize for breaking that promise, because I did finish the book, but didn’t blog about it.

I’m not going to do an entire review here, because there are plenty of raving reviews out there. One thing I can say is that it really helped me shaping my business and although it’s not a really easy read (it’s kind of boring actually), the conclusions Jim and his team draw are really inspiring.

I have also just finished Barbarians at the Gate about the (in)famous take-over of RJR Nabisco by KKR in the late-eighties. It’s a fantastic book that covers the take-over really well and feels like a fiction thriller, but is in fact based on a real story. Especially with all the discussions around hedge funds lately, it’s an interesting read, especially if you (like me) are not really into these kinds of things but still want to keep up-to-date.

So where do you go, when you need a new bed right away?? Well, here, there’s only one place to go really, and that’s the IKEA. I don’t like the IKEA that much, because if you put too many IKEA stuff in your house, it’s going to look IKEA’ish for sure, and I’m not sure if that’s what I want . Anyway, I had to get a new bed fast, so IKEA it was. After arriving at the store in Utrecht, I quickly found a good bed in the showroom, had a guy explain a bit about the matrasses and chose one that seemed comfortable. Off we went to the counter to order the bed and the matrass. The guy at the counter quickly came to the conclusion, he had to dissappoint us, because the bed was out of stock.

I remember a new IKEA had just opened in Amersfoort, which is quite close to Utrecht, so I ask the guy if the bed was in stock there. Well, as a matter of fact it was! They had 3 left. I still had to do some other stuff first, so I also asked him: ‘Can you reserver one of those for me?’. He said he couldn’t, simply because they didn’t want a whole bunch of dangling reservation for stuff that people might not pick up. ‘But don’t worry’, he said, ‘the bed is not going to go out of stock, they only sell about 1.2 of those a week in Amersfoort‘.

No way, I thought! This guy, an IKEA salesman (with all due respect), not knowing anything of IT or inventory management at all, is able to tell me (without being amazed about it), how many beds of a certain type they’re selling on a average weekly basis in a certain store?? And he just takes it for granted???

I asked the guy if I could have a look at his screen and there it was, somewhere in between other details about the Vinstra (link in Dutch) bed; an entry saying the average sales per week for this bed was 1.2.

‘But that’s not a miracle, is it’, I hear you saying. Well, it’s not, but if you think about it carefully, how many times does it happen you go to a store and you find its IT infrastructure to be everything you hoped for, having no questions left when you leave the store? I think this is amazing and an example of IT done well. A quick search didn’t get me references to what ERP system IKEA uses or who implemented this, but it sure is a good implementation, because no matter what system it is, it sure gave me a good experience while visiting IKEA in Utrecht.

p.s. This by the way only partially made my day, because the other stuff you have to go through when visiting an IKEA on a Saturday afternoon is just horrifying! When I entered the IKEA in Amersfoort, I immediately realized I would have to do things real quick here, otherwise I would definitely end up with an IKEA overdose. So I quickly rushed through the store, ordered my bed, did a little waiting for the bed to be picked up from their internal warehous and drove home. The bedroom now has a closet and a bed from IKEA. That’s the limit as far as I’m concerned. There’s some Japanese antique stuff in there as well, which nicely balances with the IKEA pieces . If I would have had time, I would have bought the Pallucco bed in the picture above.

Adrian Colyer – AOP in the Enterprise: If you have never seen Adrian present, please make sure to drop by at his session. Not only is Adrian a great speaker, he also has some interesting material to cover. I’m sure he’ll touch on the new features Spring 2.0 has in the area of Aspect-Oriented Programming and how Aspect-Oriented Programming will bring us closer to doing domain driven design and development.

Rod Johnson – Testing with Spring: Rod will present on testing with Spring. Of course he’ll touch on the excellent integration testing support Spring features. Everytime I host a training session, I explain about the support for tests that automatically roll back. The approach is so natural for me, that I never think about the time anymore I had to generate unique IDs for all objects I insert in a database while testing or setting up a new database schema for every test. This sure is interesting stuff.

Juergen Hoeller – JMS in a Spring Environment: Juergen will present on JMS and I’m certainly going to join this session, since I haven’t had a good look at the latest additions on the JMS front yet. Spring 2.0 features asynchronous message listeners, based on POJOs.

Gregor Hohpe – Patterns in Service-oriented Architectures. Aside from the fact that Gregor has good humor (’If this was buzzword bingo I probably would be an instant winner with this session title’) and that he knows that SOA in Dutch translates to STD, he also is very knowledgeable. I’ll definitely join his talk because I’m certain he has some interesting stuff to cover in the area of Service-oriented architectures and asynchronous stuff.

The conference is going to be held in the same location as JavaPolis which is the Metropolis movie theatre in Antwerp. So besides some good technical content, you’ll also be able to enjoy Belgian beer and I can tell you, Belgian beer is pretty good!

The conference is a joint effort of Interface21 and the Belgium Java User Group (BeJUG). More information can be found on the SpringOne website, at www.springone.com

While discussing the conference internally, more and more we came to the conclusion that it shouldn’t be focused entirely on Spring. That is why we didn’t not only approach the Spring experts in the field, but also on software development with Java in the enterprise in general. So we ended up with an impressive list of people to come and speak at SpringOne, ranging from the father of AOP Gregor Kiczales to SOA expert Gregor Hohpe.

A short introduction to some of the sessions we’ll be having:

Adrian Colyer – AOP in the Enterprise: Spring AOP has been greatly improved in Spring 2.0 and is now both simpler and more powerful than the AOP support offered by Spring 1.x. In this session Adrian will cover the new AOP support in Spring 2.0, integration with AspectJ, and where these technologies fit in enterprise application development. The talk includes a number of demonstrations and examples.

Eberhard Wolff – Spring Patterns: Patterns are widely accepted as a means to describe common ways of architecture and design. In the book “Server Component Patterns” (Wiley, 2002) we described component-oriented systems like EJBs as a set of Patterns. This talk presents how Spring implements these patterns and illustrates the new approach Spring takes towards components. Also new Patterns in Spring like Exception Translator or Template are presented. This shows the principles Spring uses for the integration of different APIs and makes the design of Spring easier to understand.

Ramnivas Ladded – Domain Driven Design with AOP and DI
Domain Driven Design (DDD) suggests dealing with complex software system using a domain model and preserving the model in implementation. Since domain model entities have rich behavior, so should their software implementation artifacts. A direct mapping between domain model and software artifacts create simple-to- understand, inexpensive-to-implement, and easy-to-evolve systems.

While the idea behind DDD isn’t new and the value is easily understood, many implementations do not adhere to its principles. This disconnection may be due to many obstacles in implementing it. Combining Dependency Injection (DI) with a full-fledged aspect-oriented programming (AOP) system such as AspectJ help overcome many obstacles.

The traditional DI mechanism allows injecting dependencies into coarse-grained objects such as services exposed to the application level. However, it cannot do the same for fine-grained domain objects, which are not exposed in the same manner. The DI and AOP combination overcomes this limitation allowing creation a web of domain objects mirroring the model. Now domain classes can implement rich behavior by collaborating with dependent objects, instead of acting as mere data carriers. Further, domain concepts such as security, change tracking, and business rules are crosscutting in nature. AOP allows expressing these concepts directly using aspects.

In this session, we will examine the need for domain driven design, obstacles in achieving it, the basics of enabling behavior-richness for domain objects, and patterns of usages. This session will also present several examples that show the power behind the techniques. The knowledge gained through this session will enable you to readily apply domain driven design in your systems.