ServOSS Seminar

Last Tuesday there was a seminar at Helsinki hosted by COSS and organized within the context of the ServOSS project. ServOSS is a research project lead by Nina Helander (Tampere University of Technology) and Mikko Puhakka (Helsinki University of Technology) aiming at analysing young companies with open source business models in order to extract some conclusions that can help to better understand how to launch sustainable open source based companies.

As a founding member of Warp and eBox I was invited to participate in the seminar and talk about some lessons on open source we learned in the four years since we started, both from a systems integrator’s point of view such as Warp as well as from a product based business’ such as eBox. It seems people liked very much about my presentation and they found it interesting. Seeing Finns asking so many questions in a conference was a new experience to me

Jing Jing Helles made a very interesting presentation, giving some hints about how the Chinese software market works and what should be the right approach to enter that market. I particularly liked a Chinese proverb she mentioned, which summarizes one of the main ideas pretty well:

Government policy is like the moon. It is different in the middle of the month than it is on the first day of the month. Government policy is also like the sun. When it shines on you, you flourish.

There were also presentations from other Finnish companies explaining their views and experiences with their open source based businesses, such as IBM (Finnish office), Mediamaisteri, Nemein and Cubical Solutions. Unfortunatelly, with my poor Finnish I could not understand all of them, but I still managed to catch a few ideas, about the customers perception on open source and how to overcome their fears, about the way they organized their companies internally, about their challenges of partnering with an open source vendor, … I was quite surprised by the level of internationalisation that all these companies seem to have, at least regarding their customers, so different to the regional focus in most Spanish startups.
This has been a very interesting trip to Finland, and also pretty nice, as the weather seems to be much better than in Spain

Warp, Junior Company

Tomorrow Warp Networks will receive the “Empresa Junior Award” during the Night of Telecoms at the Boston Hotel, Zaragoza. It is a prize awarded yearly by the Official College of Telecom Engineers in Aragon and the Engineering College of Zaragoza to an outstanding IT startup in the region. This year they chose us
I think this is a great step for us for three reasons:

1. So far we have received some important innovation awards, such as NEOTEC, Global Innovators and Premio Vivero, but this is the first one highlighting our business evolution as a company. I guess it means that we are beginning to move from the sartup phase to a more steady stage in our development.
2. We are the first open source based company to ever receive this award
3. The prize will be awarded in the midst of an exquisite supper among all the IT fellows in the region. I am sure it will be a really enjoyable evening

eBox: Open Source Network Admin From The Desert

Last week I got interviewed by alarm:clock euro, a blog covering the business of technology startups that got interested in learning more about us and eBox. The interview is long but interesting, as it summarizes our genesis and evolution. Even I learned some things from us! I particularly liked the catch phrase at the end of their introduction:

“[...] Those points and the fact that it’s the only startup we know that is based in Europe’s largest desert sealed it for us.”

Being coded in Perl and developed in the middle of the desert maybe we should consider adopting a camel as eBox pet

Warp on TV

Warp, Libellium and others at SIMO. Thanks Fer.

Happy 3rd birthday, Warp!

Nobody would have believed it back in September 2004, but the tiny venture started by a bunch of geeks in the middle of the largest desert in Europe has survived three winters and is determined to make it to its fourth. There has been lots of progression during the last year: eBox has continued its development and gathered lots of community traction and Warp has grown to a 20-people company with new and exciting projects arriving at a fast pace. I can only be sorry for not being home to celebrate it with my working mates. But I can drink a pint on our health. Cheers!

Forming eBox board of directors

eBox has been so far a community project with no public plans of developing any business around it. So far. Today we released the first press note (also translated into Spanish) announcing plans to make eBox a commercial venture, forming the board of directors. Mikko Puhakka, Stephen Walli and Timo Teimonen have been so kind as to accept our invitation to join us in the adventure of developing a sustainable business around our open source project.

The press note explains everything so I just copy-pasted it below:

Zaragoza, Spain. Stephen R. Walli

Blog-interviewed

This is some ego-boosting post but this is the first time I have been interviewed by a blogger and I can’t resist. Mikko Puhakka, the open source business guru has posted the interview in his blog, summarizing who we are, what we do and how get got here.

Update: Stephen Walli has posted about the interview on his blog. I am really overwhelmed :’-)

Mr Puhakka in Zaragoza

Last week Zaragoza had the privilege to host one of the best experts in Open Source Business in the world, Mikko Puhakka, investor in MySQL form its start, researcher at Helsinki University of Technology, founder of Open Tuesday, member of the steering committee at the research project “Management of High Growth and Continuous Change” (Canada/Finland) and advisor for the Finnish Centre for Open Source Software and for the Fujian University (China).

I had the pleasure of spending with him most of the four days he stayed in our city and I got a really good impression. He has a very insightful mind on the open source market and how to develop a business model on an open source product. He is also very keen on sharing his ideas and gave me really interesting advices about how to develop eBox.

Mikko participated on Friday at Open Innovation conference, organized by the Fundacion Zaragoza Ciudad del Conocimiento, Zaragoza City Council, Gaceta Tecnologica and Warp Networks, and gave a lecture together with people from Yaco, Libelium and myself (pdf). His lecture (ppt), the best of the conference, was really inspiring and I advice anyone in OSS industry to have a thorough reading.

We’re hiring

So far, the recruitment of our new staff has been based on contacts we knew previously. But it seems contacts cannot bring us new candidates at the pace we are growing currently. So, we have decided to open an account in infojobs and post our first public offer, looking for people with a geek profile and good knowledge in Linux who want to become developers at Warp. I am not sure whether this is the best way to find the people we need, but you will never know unless you try.

Warp Networks is now a NEOTEC company

CDTI designates Warp Networks as a NEOTEC company and contributes with the needed financing to complete the development of the open source project eBox Platform. More on this at Warp’s web site. Also available (in Spanish) at Europapress (the main private press agency in Spain) and Gistain’s blog (one of the main blogs in Aragon).

1st KDE Conference at Zaragoza

The conference, sponsored by Warp, has a technical orientation and is aimed at people with a good level in computers and in GNU system who want to get started in development and maintenance of applications for KDE graphic environment. There is also room for amateurs who want to know what is the present and future of graphic environments.

During the programme there will be talks by Antonio Larrosa, Isaac Clerencia, Albert Astals, Pablo Pisa, Jorge Fuertes, Julen Urdangarín and myself. During the presentations there will be explained the revolutionary advances of KDE 4, how to contribute to the project, develop KDE with Ruby, etc. There will be also workshops to start programming in KDE and correcting bugs.

The conference has free admittance and is being held today and tomorrow at the Hispalinux center.

Partnership with MySQL

We have recently signed an agreement with MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database, and we will be soon delivering certified training. This partnership is an important side on our business, as a growing proportion of our projects are centered on MySQL database, and we can be proud of being one of the few and far between partners that MySQL has in Spain.