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Archive for the 'Others' Category
Small Drops, Big Waves.
I’m busy preparing an article for Design In Flight, interviewing (I hope) a bunch of interesting people around the globe, and preparing for an extraordinarily busy New Year. In the mean time, here’s a short post of something I found interesting today. I’ve often wondered, both in my head and with fellow colleague Mr Zahnd, how much location has to do with an individual’s chance of success in their field. Large and successful design firms typically seem to be located in principle cities like, London, New York, Paris and even San Francisco. So it seems to suggest that if the bigest and the best are in these cities, is there any chance for more provincial and isolated entrepreneurs to succeed? (I’m obviously discounting many other fields like Biotech, the Movie industry, Farming Research, Defense work or being a London Underground Train driver- for the sake of my thought here.) Today, with the announcement that Joyent has acquired TextDrive I was reminded of this unanswered thread in my head and happy to see that business really doesn’t care where you might be, if business needs to get done. Joyent, a firm that I can’t quite figure out what it does, is based near me in San Anselmo, buys a San Diego based European-run business, TextDrive which is a hosting company. The inimitable John Gruber works for Joyent, though lives in Philidelphia, and the very tall Dean Allen moved from Vancouver to France and started TextDrive. Phili is, granted, a very large and well-known place on the map, but I’m not sure many people outside France (Quebec and Northern Africa) can pronounce where Allen lives today. [update: I accidently came across what appears to be TextDrive’s designer who is based in Melborne, Australia - which just adds more dimension to the ‘all-over-the-map’ thing I’m going on about here.] So living slightly outside of San Francisco, not far enough so as anyone would really notice; like I can look out of a number of windows and see what the weather is like in the city - most days; I consider it both brave and interesting that small companies like Joyent exist, even further outside of San Francisco than I am, and buy companies many miles away from them. I think if you’re an individual, working from home, you can live pretty much anywhere you like. Whether you’re a writer like Robert R. Cringley who writes about Silicon Valley, while living in South Carolina, or a futurist, entrepreneur, philosopher and all-round mad-project-person, like Stewart Brand living here in Sausalito. Both people seem to tap into fairly well-oiled marketing engines for themselves, or if not, invent them. But then, in doing my research for my article, I decided to uncover where in the world a weblog, of which I am a great fan of, comes from. As it turns out InfluxInsights is published several times a day, from right here in the usually-sunny Sausalito. I don’t know how many hits Influx gets, I imagine a lot, the quality of their posts are incredibly high even though brief - and frequent, including often on the weekend. It doesn’t come as a suprise that places on the web like Coudal.com or Speak Up start from a large city like Chicago, even though they’re small, even tiny teams of people making them happen. It often seems like a large metropolis is a major ingredient in making small ideas into very large ones, so I always enjoy hearing or learning about companies like Joyent, or people like Mr Allen, because it reminds me that it shouldn’t and doesn’t really matter where you are, particularly if your work involves the internet and being wirelessly connected to the internet - you should really live where you would most like to. This of course doesn’t really relate to the geological scientists who specialize in underwater volcanoism - where you pretty much have to go to where the action is in that case. But hey, I don’t think they read this weblog. Mentionables: 1. Design In Flight 2005-11-28 + plink |