I was a need of a new sheath for my cards & papers as the old one was a bit worn out after a few years with daily use:

Green canvas is from Kenya, btw.

So I bought this leather wallet today for EUR 25,-

…which doesn’t work for me. One of the reasons I’d come up with my own sheath/wallet is that I only put my cards & papers in there and keep the money somewhere else. So it has to be as slim as possible – which isn’t the case with the new sheath.

After trying the new leather sheath for a minute, I quickly decided to make a new one, similar to the old one. Never change a running system.

Costs: 0,- EUR

old, new & soon-to-be-returned, new + the pile of cards that have to fit in there.

One of the reasons for using this special material is that it actually looks so strange that no one will really want to steal it.

Open Source

Supportive Documents:

The open-source model has a lot to offer the business world. It’s a way to build open standards as actual software, rather than paper documents. It’s a way that many companies and individuals can collaborate on a product that none of them could achieve alone. It’s the rapid bug-fixes and the changes that the user asks for, done to the user’s own schedule.

The open-source model also means increased security; because code is in the public view it will be exposed to extreme scrutiny, with problems being found and fixed instead of being kept secret until the wrong person discovers them. And last but not least, it’s a way that the little guys can get together and have a good chance at beating a monopoly.

Of all these benefits, the most fundamental is increased reliability. And if that’s too abstract for you, you should think about how closed sources made the Year 2000 problem worse and why they might have very well killed your business.

Gerald P. Weinberg once famously observed that, “If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.” He was right. Up to now, the reliability of most software has been atrociously bad.

The foundation of the business case for open-source is high reliability. Open-source software is peer-reviewed software; it is more reliable than closed, proprietary software. Mature open-source code is as bulletproof as software ever gets.

Until recently this was a radical idea to many businesspeople; many had a belief that open-source software is necessarily not “professional,” that it is shoddily made and more prone to fail than closed software.

But the Internet’s infrastructure makes the best possible refutation, and since OSI was founded in 1998 many people have been paying attention. Consider DNS, sendmail, the various open-source TCP/IP stacks and utility suites, and the open-source scripting languages such as Perl that are behind most “live” content on the Web. These are the running gears of the Internet. (Read this for a look at what would happen if they disappeared).

These open-source programs have demonstrated a level of reliability and robustness under fast-changing conditions (including a huge and rapid increase in the Internet’s size) that, considered against the performance record of even the best closed commercial software, is nothing short of astonishing.

You can read an extended technical argument for the superior reliability of general open-source software in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. This paper was behind Netscape’s pioneering decision to take its client software open-source. It describes a bazaar style of managing software development that depends on open source and leads to high reliability and quality.

The real-world evidence backs this up. In an independent head-to-head reliability test, open-source Unix systems and utilities were less fragile – crashed or hung less often – than their proprietary counterparts. <!– Postscript or –> <!– here –>.

The business implication of this technical case is clear. Eventually, bazaar-mode peer review will come to be considered a necessary condition for highest quality. In many market niches, software that has not been peer-reviewed simply won’t be perceived as good enough to compete.

Bazaar-mode development seems to reverse our normal expectations about software development; more programmers are better (at least, as long as the capacity of the project leader or project core group to handle integration isn’t exceeded). Even a small open-source project can muster more brains to improve a piece of software than most development shops can possibly afford.

You’ll see the following gains under the open-source model whether you’re producing software for internal use or for resale.

It follows that commercial developers leveraging the bazaar mode should be able to grab, and keep, a substantial initiative advantage over those that don’t. But there’s more; the first commercial developer in a given market niche to switch to this mode may gain substantial advantages over later ones.

Why? Because the pool of talent available for bazaar recruitment is limited. The first bazaar project in a given niche is more likely to attract the best co-developers to invest time in it. Once they’ve invested the time, they’re more likely to stick with it.

Switching to the open-source model should also be good for a significant overhead reduction in per-project software production costs.

The open-source model allows software shops to (in effect) outsource some of their work, paying for it in values less tangible than money. (But perhaps not less economically significant; the increased speed with which an outside co-developer can have a needed bug fix will often translate into a substantial opportunity gain for that customer.)

This means smaller shops will be able to handle bigger projects.

If you produce software for sale, you’ll see two more advantages:

One of the most often-repeated pieces of management advice is “Stay close to the customer.” In today’s fast-moving, short-product-cycle business climate it’s more important than ever to do that – to understand almost as soon as they do what the customers want and be able to rapidly respond to those needs.

If you sell software, what better way to do this than by co-opting your customers’ engineers to help your development?

It’s worth pointing out that the open-source, bazaar method resembles the way many successful Japanese companies have done consumer product development; get a product to market that works but is not perfect, and iterate quickly based upon customer feedback to reach the combination of features that the customers need and want. This has turned out to be especially valuable for high technology products (laptops, personal assistants, cellphones, etc) that people don’t know they need, or what features they need.

An important side-effect of the open-source model will be a much wider platform range for your product. Open-source authors frequently find themselves receving, for free, port changes for operating systems and environments they barely know exist and can’t afford developers to support. Each such port, of course, widens the market appeal of the product.

For an entrepreneur or start-up software producer, going open-source is a way to grab mind-share. The best new concept in the world won’t make money unless people know it’s interesting.

Whether this makes sense as a strategy depends on whether you think your main value proposition is in the software itself or in service and the expertise associated with the software. More often than one might think, the value is actually in service and integration.

This, to give one recent example, the startup Digital Creations open-sourced its flagship project Zope on the advice of its venture capitalists. The VCs projected that going open-source would actually increase the value of the company.

For full discussion see Paul Everitt’s business decision essay. It makes an eloquent case.

You can also read Wired magazine’s tour of open-source startups..

Now for a higher-level, investor’s point of view. There are at least four known business models for making money with open source:

1. Support Sellers (otherwise known as “Give Away the Recipe, Open A Restaurant”): In this model, you (effectively) give away the software product, but sell distribution, branding, and after-sale service. This is what (for example) Red Hat does.
2. Loss Leader: In this model, you give away open-source as a loss-leader and market positioner for closed software. This is what Netscape is doing.
3. : In this model, a hardware company (for which software is a necessary adjunct but strictly a cost rather than profit center) goes open-source in order to get better drivers and interface tools cheaper. Silicon Graphics, for example, supports and ships Samba.
4. Accessorizing: Selling accessories – books, compatible hardware, complete systems with open-source software pre-installed. It’s easy to trivialize this (open-source T-shirts, coffee mugs, Linux penguin dolls) but at least the books and hardware underly some clear successes: O’Reilly Associates, and SSC are among them.

T

Branding Sells

Well what is perceived by the word brand? Probably you are wondering where I am going with this. Well some months or years ago we had Tusker Supermarket a local self help store. The perception and reception by the public it was viewed as one of the underground local stores and unconfirmed sources said it was going down at some point. With a string of stores around capital city and towns, the resulted to rebranding and sure enough it catapulted its revenue and image of the store rose high to the standard of the main stores like Nakumatt and the then Uchumi. The store just renamed its name to Tuskys and put some more definitive colours for outright identification.

Back to our case Brand Kenya, well would argue Kenya has always been a brand on its own rather we needed rebranding. The whole strategy is amazing and yes under normal circumstances it would pass to be the best ideal way of selling Kenya to the Diaspora and attract tourist and investors. It’s viewed as an extension of progressing the main agenda of Vision 2030. Quoting the Information PS Mr. Ndemo he claimed politicians give guidelines they follow and if something fails its due to lack implementation by the likes of them the PS and so on. Is this really true to have such a claim when we do know that they are employed by the same politicians? May be sounding dumb but who is the boss and what if the boss grounds your plan? He was addressing attendees during the Brand Kenya launch claiming we should not blame politicians and that it was them to implement. Really tend to think he was wrong because for a fact it’s the politicians who have assumed the role of what goes and what does not. Look at the situation of the constitution review we haven’t begun and the already at it. Soon am guessing us going to be back to Orange and Bananas politics.

Anyway I think if the issue of Brand Kenya would lack the political goodwill we would be like playing musical beats without lyrics or having tuneless music but is still music. Look at it this way; yes we have Brand Kenya initiative but what about the underlining Kenyan issues that keep propping up? What are the strategies put forward to addressing them? Through this initiative we have TV programs and Lobbyist send out to sell Kenya in the positive light and uplift its image plus to ensure deviate from the bad publicity Kenya had received since last year. Looking at the programs well would look at them and agree that yes it would pull up some public information inspire others and so on but are the political class in together with us or are they to stick back and be the spoiled potatoes to spoil the rest. Think about it, w busy painting this beautiful picture of oneness, safety and beauty of the country few days later some politicians comes out accusing the other of political assassination. With these grounds lobbies a community against the other going all tribal. Another scenario is when public scandals and mismanagement is the order of the day of government what are the investors to think?

In my view Brand Kenya is supposed to have from inside outside rather than just trying to do patch up work on the extremely spoiling image of the great nation. This should be an initiative for a cross section of the whole country. Every persons to be involved I expected to see the president in the foreground of Brand Kenya the PM was supposed to be on the foreground too but what did we see at the launch PS and people from the department and yeah our very own image portrayer the media. The previous initiatives looked so empty and almost disappointing struggle for damage control. The likes of Vision 2030 and The Kenya We Want.

We should be Branding Kenya from within we put policies to run and sustain the country regardless of the situations. We should have good and practical food policies that guide the importations, exportation, supply, distribution and production of food. This would ensure we have food security. We should ensure safety and security of Kenyans and their properties is paramount to the governance of the country. We should ensure we have policies to ensure basic wants like water and housing have been addressed appropriately. Empty promises made by politicians make the issue of Brand Kenya as another attempt of PR waiting to fall since we see nothing to sustain its accomplishment.

Being optimistic as they say its our duty as the Kenyan citizen to speak well of the beautiful country. The initiative should be done on a serious note such that the given TV programs identified should address the issues rather than cover them and better yet bring the solutions but surely we need politicians to be answerable so am thinking there involvement in the discussion and forums would just help us identify which of these leaders are for real. We love this beautiful country Kenya God bless it as we try every way to stay above!!!

By Neville D. Nelson