startups

Judge.me – Internet arbitration

For years now I’ve heard (and said) that the legal system is lagging behind, that it needs to catch up and provide answers to some of those questions raised by the recent technological advances. Given how complex and large our current legal system is, that’s not an easy task. But the need is there. And, as always, where there is a need, there is a business.

I’ve actually been wondering when we’ll see more and more lawyer start-ups, figuring out problems and providing solutions. Today I’ve learned about one such start-up via this Slashdot post. It’s called Judge.me and it provides arbitration services over the Internet:

It’s not unusual for a freelance Web designer or developer to be burnt when a client refuses to pay up, citing one excuse or another. And what can you do about it? If a contract only amounts to a few thousand dollars, litigation to recover your fee can be far too expensive, and an increasingly vituperative exchange of emails is often not enough for client and contractor to come to agreement over who owes whom what. Into this gap steps judge.me: A start-up founded by Peter-Jan Celis that aims to provide internet-based, legally binding arbitration services — a ‘small claims court’ for the internet — with a particular eye on settling the conflicts that arise over freelance development and Web design.

The start-up is utilizing the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards that is recognized by 146 countries (yes, including US, most of European Union, Cyprus, and Russian Federation). Read more on how it works.

There are still questions and doubts on whether Judge.me is the solution or a milestone on the road to one. Some people are skeptical, yet others seemed to have tried it and got the results. But regardless of how good this particular service is, I’m glad to see some activity in this area.

Open Source or not?

Slashdot has an interesting discussion on whether or not a small start-up company has to Open Source their code or not. From one of the comments I followed a link to an excellent blog post by Tom Preston-Werner, one of the co-founders of GitHub.

Lastly, it’s the right thing to do. It’s almost impossible to do anything these days without directly or indirectly executing huge amounts of open source code. If you use the internet, you’re using open source. That code represents millions of man-hours of time that has been spent and then given away so that everyone may benefit. We all enjoy the benefits of open source software, and I believe we are all morally obligated to give back to that community. If software is an ocean, then open source is the rising tide that raises all ships.

In a nutshell he basically says that you should Open Source everything, except things that are at the core of your business value. His arguments are insightful and I suggest you read the whole thing.

Interestingly, this reminds me of a few discussions I had on outsourcing. And I was saying is that a company should outsource as much as possible, except for things which are at their core business value. As in, IT company should outsource accounting and legal, not IT, while accounting companies should outsource IT and legal, not accounting. And so forth.

That leads me to think that Open Source community is a huge outsourcing resource. Something that I’ve known for a long time, but now arrived to through a totally different route.

China is coming

These days, when discussing globalization with my friends, the discussion often touches upon China. And more often than not I hear skepticism when suggesting that China’s role is becoming more important and more influential. While I am of the opinion that China is in its early stages of being a global superpower, many people seem to believe that China has some sort of limitation that it won’t ever overcome. The mass production of cheap, low quality goods seems to be the sky’s limit. I strongly disagree with that. I’ve read and heard plenty about the quality of Chinese production going up. And I don’t believe that China is limited by cheap labor alone.

Today, I read an article in GigaOm about Chinese geeks, who have studied and worked in US. Many of them, it seems, are going home to start business in China. Here is a quote form the article:

In China, the red-hot tech scene seems dominated by a small group of entrepreneurs who paid their dues in Silicon Valley before returning home to create successful Internet and software startups. Aside from finding fame and fortune, these “returnees” are also laying the foundation for a startup culture that will allow grassroots entrepreneurs to flourish as well.

Returnees — Chinese nationals who studied or worked the U.S. — head up just 3 percent of all tech companies in China, yet they represent nearly 70 percent of all startups that go public in the U.S. market (still the largest measure of success in the industry), according to an internal study by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capital firm GSR Ventures, which deals exclusively in China. The firm also found startups created by returnees were much likelier to become financially successful and hire more employees than startups founded by Chinese entrepreneurs who never worked in the U.S.

On the same note, I’ve heard similar things about India too. You don’t have to know too much about Indians in technology – look at some conference presentations from Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Half of the people speaking will be of Indian decent. And one day some of them will go back to India to start their own business too. Still think that China and India will serve the world with cheap labor and call centers for the eternity?

Foundation – new podcast by Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose, who you probably know as the founder of Digg and co-host of the popular podcast Diggnation, has started a new podcast – Foundation. In this one, he interviews famous and not so much founders of web services, entrepreneurs, and other creative people. The show is free. It’s also ad-free, but there is some sort of subscription for those who want to get it one week earlier. The first episode is out and it’s a half an hour interview with Jack Dorsey – inventor of Twitter and co-founder of Square. Watch it at Revision3 and subscribe.

Cities and ambitions

Paul Graham continues writing down his thoughts and observations – “Cities and ambitions“:

No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

There’s an imbalance between encouragement and discouragement like that between gaining and losing money. Most people overvalue negative amounts of money: they’ll work much harder to avoid losing a dollar than to gain one. Similarly, though there are plenty of people strong enough to resist doing something just because that’s what one is supposed to do where they happen to be, there are few strong enough to keep working on something no one around them cares about.