The other day I decided to do a ’status check’ with peers who are doing interesting things with technology and culture. Hopefully this will be the first in a series of part interview / part tech-talk, and part street-business that orients people to things happening now and in the future. It’s light spirited and casual, but covers a lot of concepts and ground..

The first is with Jon Phillips. Jon Phillips is a community and business developer contributing to society and building meaningful relationships. In 2002 he helped launch the open source drawing tool, Inkscape and founded the Open Clip Art Library. From 2005 until 2008 he built Creative Commons’ community and business development projects and is currently a Creative Commons Fellow. Currently, he is growing the media company Fabricatorz with Cantocore Art Exhibitions, Laoban Open Soundsystems, and is recently assisting with an upcoming re-launch of Status.Net (Identi.ca). He is known for growing successful open communities globally, leading international business development in Asia (particularly China), and developing Open Marketing.

Jon Phillips

We both attended grad school at UC San Diego.

This conversation was recorded via Skype on December 16, 2009.

Open Marketing

Tim: I want to do some interviews with my peers and you are doing some interesting stuff…it’s good to touch base and get some notes for our readers and people who are working with technology and do a status check kinda thing.

Jon: Status check…totally.

Tim: So some questions I had actually had for you..Obviously I know who you are, I’m sure other people do too..We can skip that and go through the bio stuff later. What’s open marketing?

J: Yeah I added in those tag lines there..It’s just an easy kinda way to say that you give a s**t about what you’re doing. A lot of marketing and stuff is not heart driven, not passionate..That’s why you see whole teams just getting dismissed from companies because the people..maybe they can kind of buy into some some idea, but..it’s different I dunno..a lot of big, large companies don’t really..they hire a marketing guy who went to an MBA or something like that and they actually don’t know what they’re doing..So I just call it ‘open marketing’ that’s really just somebody caring about what they’re working on, but also trying to expose the inner parts of it. Like I’m working on this startup now called Sharism / Sharism at work.

Tim: Sharism?

Jon It’s the rebrand of this Qi Hardware, and the idea is really to expose all the parts of making open hardware devices…like gadgets. The devices are $99 and you can say it costs $61 dollars to make and we can be completely open about that. That’s the other thing about this open marketing thing is trying to be as transparent and open as possible.

The Qi Hardware Ben NanoNote with battery.

Tim: So..but aren’t companies…I mean they’re not necessarily trying to be transparent but now everyone’s on Twitter..companies and people, and everyone’s a social marketing guru, right? Or expert. Because they can setup a Facebook page now they are a social marketing guru, so…

Jon And the second they put that on their profiles means that they’re not.

Tim: ..Means that they’re not, yeah! So who are the successful open marketers? What people or companies are the most transparent or are the most successful at doing it?

Jon: I don’t know, there’s not a lot of people who are known for their marketing skills in this kind of space. It’s more like founders, co-founders..A lot of times in the web space the CEO does everything, or the founder does everything and there’s just a bunch of people who work there and tag along at the parties and stuff. Or there’s high level engineers. Like at Status.net, Evan the CEO…he’s cool..he can do all these things very well, and he’s hired off me to do this marketing and biz dev-y stuff. He can trust me that I know what I’m doing because we’ve worked together in the past. He’s hired Brion Vibber who’s the CTO at Wiki Media Foundation the architect of Media Wiki, the engine that powers Wikipedia. So, he can trust in this guy because he’s the ‘open guy’, he cares about what he’s doing, you can go and look at his change logs.

Tim: Sure.

Jon: You can see that he’s not bullshitting. You don’t have to go and look at his resume, you already know.

Tim: That’s another questions too, one thing I’m thinking of..we were hiring some business developers and people who claim they know Twitter and claim they know this stuff. What value does a resume have any more? Do people even need to use it in some industries?

Jon: Well you know the funny thing is that..Creative Commons is always funny like this, people used to give me crap because I used to ask people when they were being interviewed if they ever edited Wikipedia. They were like ‘Oh that’s not important’ and I’m like, No! It is important, especially for some organizations like Creative Commons. The whole thing about being able to Google people is so important, so important, it’s not just like LinkedIn, it’s like: what has this person been doing, what are they doing, and what is their digital trail like? So like, ok..I can go and find out this guy, he actually did something really horrible in this country, he got kicked out of this other one, he got fired.

Here’s a good one..Some of my friends know this guy who’s well-known for SEO and Social Media. If you dig back about six pages into Wikipedia you start getting into the things of what was really being hidden.

Tim: (Laughs) Ok..

Jon: It’s like..why did this guy get really into SEO, you know, its like, Oh! He wanted to know how to bury his own past.

Tim: Well that’s the thing..one thing I see happening is you get people even younger than us, let’s say they go to college and, you know, they’re more net natives and they grew up with Facebook and they’re concerned with leaving a digital trail in the form of, let’s say, cool links. They don’t think about it, they just think these things are there for messaging their friends and they may or not know whether it’s open source…And you’re working with Creative Commons, and it’s a very special organization.

Jon: Yeah. For special people.

Tim: (Laughs) Yeah, you are special!

Jon: Yeah think about kids now, they’re not going to be able to be kids, they’re going to say some stupid thing on Facebook and you saw that Facebook this week starting indexing content. We’re seeing this thing with Facebook where it’s indexable now where users have to opt-out..it’s not even opting in. It’s like, if anyone didn’t opt out some part of their profile is going to be searchable on Google. So you think about this..Some kid growing up, they’re going to say some stupid thing, say something rude to a girlfriend or say something and now it’s indexable forever! It’s pretty crazy! We are at the beginning of a lot of things but we haven’t grown up with the Internet, and this is different.

Tim: It is different..and you’re between San Francisco and China, so obviously people in the Bay are thinking more about this stuff than others because Facebook is in the Bay area but now everyone is building on top of Facebook and the whole point of everything now, if it’s digital or mobile is the promise that you can connect, right, like Facebook Connect. We talk to a lot of people and everyone wants Facebook Connect, right? But that implies that everyone is on Facebook and that it has value.

Jon: What about the people who aren’t on Facebook?

Tim: But there aren’t anymore according to..the world!

Jon: It’s kinda like, Google only indexes only part of the Internet, but what about the part that Google can’t find? It’s like dark matter or something.

Status.net

T: So now you’re working with Status.net, and that’s similar to Twitter, right? So what are the differences between Status.net and Twitter and why should people know about Status.net?

J: So, the big differences are really that Twitter is a locked box, it’s a centralized service, it’s a huge service which is it’s big advantage, they have a lot of famous people on there, like Paris Hilton, Shaq, Kenny G, Weird Al, these kinda people like that..probably Tiger Woods, or his nickname ‘Cheatah’.

T: Did he break the affairs on Twitter?

J: Now he’s ‘Cheatah’…I’m really amazed at this Tiger thing because he should have been like Lil’ Wayne and been like, ‘Yeah I did it’..

T: He should have posted the pictures, that would be the best thing to do is if he broke the ground on Twitter.

J: Yes! Yes! It might have just taken pop culture over the top, it might have made American culture go so sour. But, man..he’s gonna pay the costs.

T: But what about from a branding perspective..So he gets dropped from these goody-goody sponsors, but now he can pick up these vice sponsors like..Trojan Condoms.

J: yeah, Condoms….Hustler….

T: He just needs a new P.R. campaign!

J: He could probably move to Dubai and buy a castle..he probably already owns one..a couple towers..This Tiger thing is really interesting because how quickly the media can move on things and people are piecing it together. But Status.net, the difference between that and Twitter is that the software is open, so you can install it on your own service internally like Motorola’s done, there are some really big companies that are rolling it out that are going to be announced soon. All these services use it because they know that even if there’s a bomb that gets dropped on this building and all these developers here, they can still use the software. It’s like, you’re not going to get a fail whale. You’re not going to get a shutdown. If the service is not good on our end you can do your own. You get your data and run with it. So that’s a key piece.

The other piece is that it’s federated so you can have different servers that talk to each other.

T: So what does that mean, ‘federated’ in this context for less specialized people..It sounds like Star Wars or something.

J: The Federation comprised of people from Earth..

T: Ok, I like it already..The Earthlings…

J: No, so the federation just means that you can have multiple servers that talk to each other. It’s a federated service meaning multiple servers talking to each other.

T: It’s different than the cloud though…

J: It’s kind of related to the Cloud, the Cloud has more to do with…you just have this solution that scales up. But this is more like..I have the Identi.ca, the biggest site that Status.net actually runs that can talk to another site and let’s say it is status.rejon.org…Let’s say I’m running it on my own server. I can have those two servers talk to each other.

T: Ok.

The Federation...

J: So it’s not even reliant on other people it’s all about the service..having control over.

T: Well you’re on Twitter to, so should companies move over to Status.net or should they just have it additional to Twitter.

J: Now it’s turning into pitch mode..

T: I didn’t intend that!

J: No no it’s not you it’s me! Status.net also has a bi-directional plugin from Twitter so you can get both ways, also to Facebook.

Status.net

T: So it’s not going to replace anything.

J: Yeah it could but the key thing there is that it can work with it. Ok, if you have one solution that can send everywhere that’s great. But the other key thing about Status.net is that it’s becoming clear is that it’s good for companies inside, especially big companies, because there’s a lot of trauma troubles inside of companies with cubicles and stuff, so how do you get people to talk to each other inside own company, because they can’t even talk about what they’re working on outside of it. So, they can install this software internally and hopefully there’s some amazing connections and hookups that are made.

T: Both literally and figuratively? Maybe on The Office Jim should use that rather than phoning Pam? So moving things along, what is your role with Status.net and where are you taking it?

J: So my role is, what Evan told me, is I actually really like to do all the biz-devy stuff these days, I really like to go and make deals and enjoy meeting people up in weird places…Funny story: I had a meeting in India and I was actually in the wrong city…

T: Did it matter though? You could just Skype in..

J: Well the next day I was in the other city and I had that meeting. It was just a miscommunication on both ends.

T: That’s definitely a miscommunication, rather than just the time, it’s like..the city, the time, the time zone, the person.

J: No, it’s just a different pace there. But my role here is really the Ambassador of Kwan.

T: What’s Kwan?

J: That’s that cheesy term from that Jerry Maguire film..It’s like Ubuntu or some misuse of an African word. So basically I’m just speaking at events and trying to get more people into it, brainstorming and coming up with ideas.

Working in Asia

T: Cool. So then the other questions..What do you see as the advantages from your experience as an expat working over in China with the Internet scene, startups…?

J: I just got back from Singapore, I’m working on some stuff with Joi Ito and other groups there to do an incubator, a technology incubator, and the great thing about Asia, more so than Europe or the U.S. is they’re like ‘Please come here. We want you here.’ And it’s such a refreshing feeling that people want you to work there and they give you tax breaks and your money goes further. I like it because I gained a lot. My brain works pretty quick most of the time but people are circling me sometimes.

T: Really?

J: Yeah, in Hong Kong I was hanging out with @coffeemeow, that I met at a conference, and she was four steps again, she made me look bad?

T: How was she four steps ahead of you?

J: She helped me get into my hotel. So Asia’s brilliant, it’s awesome, they want you to come there, it’s different than Europe, it’s different than the Middle East..actually the Middle East is pretty cool too, in places like Syria they’re like, ‘We want to do business with you but we can’t’

T: (Laughs) That’s crazy…

J: It’s literally like that. Syria is totally like that..I was only there in a tourist capacity but people are like, ‘Dude we want to do work, we just can’t’..And there are all these laws in Syria that disallows companies to sell software there. So Microsoft cannot legally sell their software to Syria. The only way they can get software is to pirate it. There’s weird stuff like that because there are terror restrictions..

T: That is weird…So Microsoft is on the side of..who?

Skype Conversations #1 - Jon Philips from SignalFive on Vimeo.

J: Yeah it’s very weird. So back to Asia, Asia’s really interesting, I think the best investment for people’s money..You hear these things like ‘You should be investing in your IRA’ and stuff like that..yeah, right! Every person in the U.S. should be maxing out how much money that can make outside of the U.S. untaxed every year.

T: So what about..what are some things going on now in China with Internet or Mobile that people don’t know in the States?

J: The thing here is..I’m not naive, I see everything here is made in China. But I know where it’s made, I see the factories, I know where it’s at. It’s different, it’s like the magic’s gone or something..But there is innovation, there is a lot of knock-off culture in China which is totally interesting, a lot of stuff called Shanzhai technology, but it’s actually become innovative. I can get a cellphone for $50 that has two SIM cards. So if I’m traveling a lot between different provinces it’s cheaper to get 2 SIM cards. You can get an iPhone knock-offs with 2 SIM cards and a keyboard, and a lighter on the side or something.

T: And there are companies doing this, or hackers or what?

J: Yes, yes. That’s the thing that’s really interesting there are a few thousand of these companies battling it out, and they build stuff in their houses, and they build factories into their house and have to move around a lot. But they completely fill a market and to met that’s Chinese innovation. But beyond that, if somebody wants to make something, an artist wants to make artwork, a computer, a gadget, a web company, they should definitely be starting it in China.

Laoban Speakers - Made in China

T: Wow, this is news..this is definitely good stuff because everyone debates where the best place to start your company or startup is, and everyone has an opinion on it, so it’s good to hear.

J: China has a lot of people who can speak English, they’re smart, and it’s cheap to live..

T: What about the labor? Let’s say you want to get a team of four programmers or four developers..

J: You are talking like $500 - $1,000 a month per person.

T: That’s a huge difference.

J: So I mean, get an assistant that’s $300 - $500 a month..someone that shows up 6 days a week and works all day.

T: That’s..I wish I had that…

J: It’s just money logic and I don’t feel bad saying these things at all.

T: And they’re looking for it, right? They’re looking to get paid to do these things anyways, so it’s not like you’re exploiting them in a way, it’s an ‘at will’ relationship.

J: I mean, you’re not exploiting them at all, this is the pay there. That’s like saying, ‘Oh I have to buy a cheeseburger in China vs U.S. and shouldn’t I be paying the same price?’

T: It’s a bogus argument.

J: Everytime I hear that in the U.S. I get sick on some level. I have some friends in band (in China) and their name means ‘Dead White Devil’ or something..It’s a white guy and a Cantonese America guy in San Francisco and they have a song called $50 Dollar T-Shirt, and I met them up in Beijing, actually Matt and I did, and we were having some beers and stuff and we were walking buy American Apparel in Beijing and I was like, ‘Oh that’s really funny, they actually sell $50 T-shirts here’.

T: Really!

J: It’s hilarious, they were making fun of someone that would pay $50 for a t-shirt, but in the global economy…Ok, I got at t-shirt for $1 - $3 in Vietnam. A pretty good t-shirt. What am I paying for if I pay for an American Apparel t-shirt?

T: You’re paying for Dov Charney’s lifestyle..

J: I’m paying for some kids in L.A. to make something. And then I ask you this: where do the raw materials come from? Where do the machines come from? These things of ‘Made in America / Made in China’ are false, man. Even in China the stuff that’s made in China is made from stuff from all over the world. Basically, you do business where it’s best to do business. From what I’ve seen the factories I’ve seen people are having fun, they put dorm rooms for people.

Shareism

T: So people are getting frustrated with the iPhone and people are getting frustrated developing for the iPhone because of wait times, so..what do you see in 2010 with Android, maybe, or with other platforms?

J: I’m putting a lot of eggs in the Android basket, Android’s pretty cool..But in the long-term I hope we have an open-source solution. Hopefully we’ll get to more open products. With Sharism the goal is to have 0% closed, 100% open, the entire stack, the chips, the case, and the content on them. Because there’s no such thing as an open device now because even the chips have software inside them that’s locked.

T: What about the hardware? There’s a case that has to contain it?

J: But it’s like a black box, it’s like ‘Ok, I put in this, I get this other thing out’…But it’s not true, you don’t always get out what you expect.

T:: So you are proposing a build-your-own-device.

J: Kinda, but building off of these fake Chinese products and what they are doing and making them legal with Creative Commons, GPL…So that’s another big thing I’m working on in 2010.

T: Are there any links?

J: We’re keeping this low-key until next year.

T: Not anymore man!

J: You can look at it now, it’s qi-hardware.com. So lots of stuff happening.

Links

Rejon

Status.net

Qi Hardware

Shanzhai

Tags: creative commons, rejon, skype, Social Networking, status.net

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Big Picture, Social Networking, Web Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.