business

Doing business in Cyprus

The Doing Business project provides a rating across 183 countries on how easy it is to do business in each one of them. Cyprus occupies a respectable position #40 in that list. Here are the metrics used in ranking calculations, as well as some of the neighbors for Cyprus:

Easy of Doing Business Rank: 40 (after Columbia, Azerbaijan, Qatar and before Kyrgyz Republic, Slovac Republic, Armenia)
Starting a Business: 25
Dealing with Construction Permits: 77
Employing Workers: 93
Registering Property: 64
Getting Credit: 71
Protecting Investors: 93
Paying Taxes: 37
Trading Across Borders: 15
Enforcing Contracts: 107
Closing a Business: 21

And while there are obviously plenty of pros and cons to each country in the list, it’s nice to see a summarizing effort.

Yaroslavl Roadmap 10-15-20

There were plenty of news recently about Russia in general and its president Dmitry Medvedev in particular taking steps towards building up some technology innovation in the country. Medvedev visited a number of technology companies in the Silicon Valley. And there were a few announcements about some sort of technology center being built in Skolkovo, next to Moscow. Most Russians that I’ve talked to about this are very skeptical (me included).

In fact, I’m not even interested on how this project goes now and who is involved with it. At least, not in Russia. But there are some interesting developments internationally. One example in particular that I want to mention is Yaroslavl Roadmap 10-15-20.

As part of the Skolkovo project, Russian government requested some expert help on figuring out the best approach and course of action. One source of such expert advise came from the New York Academy of Science. In fact, I think they have done some spectacular research and managed to summarize it in a very concise report. They titled it “Yaroslavl Roadmap 10-15-20: 10 Years to Implement, 15 Steps to Take, 20 Pitfalls to Avoid—International Experience and the Path Forward for Russian Innovation Policy” (PDF, 3.7 MB, 128 pages).

In essence, it is a very compact review of how technological innovation was formed and grown in Israel, Finland, Taiwan, India, and USA. It summarizes they key points, successes and failure. It also briefly describes the specifics of each country and how those specifics affected the chosen path. It then describes the key specifics of Russia. Once all that is done, a roadmap is presented, with both generic bullet points and a time table of steps that have to be taken.

And even if my feeling is that this whole work will be completely ignored in Russia, I still think that the report has plenty of interesting information for a lot of other people. If you work in, with, or near technology, you should download the PDF and at least scroll through it. If you ever were interested in Silicon Valley, how it came to be, and if or how it can be created somewhere else, then you should definitely download the report.

I downloaded it a few days ago and barely looked through it, but even that alone gave me plenty to think about. But there is way more than that. It needs careful reading and studying, which I will do the soonest. Brilliant stuff!

WordPress trademark moves to WordPress Foundation

These are some serious news! Matt Mullenweg announced that his company Attomatic is giving away its core brand name – WordPress – to WordPress Foundation.

Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the non-profit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress’s identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company.

This is huge!

This reminds me of those times when open source software started its way into the enterprise. Most people weren’t taking it seriously. A lot of people were laughing at it. Yet, one by one, company by company, open source made progress. These days, there are no doubts about the benefits of the open source software, both inside and outside of the enterprise. It brings plenty of benefits to the table. But yet there are companies that are built around closed source software which are doing fine.

Similarly to the above trademark news. We had a few examples of a company giving the source and trademark to open source community and some sort of foundation. But that was usually a desperate move, a panic attack. Often, such a move would bring in new blood and save the application or the company.

This time, with WordPress, it’s not a desperate move. It is a well thought through and calculated decision. It is the right thing to do.

WordPress is what it is mostly due to the huge and dynamic community of its users and developers. It’s them who make the most of it, and it’s them who push WordPress forward. It makes the most sense that they, as a community, via the non-profit WordPress Foundation, own the WordPress trademark.

On pseudovariety

Kottke has a link to an interesting article, with much more interesting visualization of soft drinks industry. The article discusses pseudovariety. That’s when you think you have a lot of something, when indeed you really don’t. Like with all those soft drinks on the shelves of every supermarket. You think there is a whole lot of them, when in fact most of them are brands of either one of the three major companies.

One other example of pseudovariety that came to my mind was from the field of politics. Think about it. There are usually a number of political parties and presidential candidates at every election. All of them spend hours and millions of dollars to promote themselves, demote their competition, and explain to you how different they are from everything you’ve seen to this day. But in reality, most of them are pretty much the same. You can see it from the way they talk, the way they work, the way they lie, the way they approach difficult problems, and the way they talk about simple things.

It often seems like you have so much to choose from, when in fact, you really don’t.

Best vacation policy is a no policy

Read this:

At Netflix, the vacation policy is audaciously simple and simply audacious. Salaried employees can take as much time off as they’d like, whenever they want to take it. Nobody – not employees themselves, not managers – tracks vacation days.

That’s an example to follow. After all, it’s the work that matters. If you work is taken care of, what difference does it make how many hours you spent doing it, or how many hours you spent not doing it? More companies should adopt this approach.