Almost half of all employees say they would accept less pay, if they could work for a socially responsible company, according to a survey by Care2. Even more workers – 73 per cent – say that it’s “very important” to work for a company that’s “socially responsible.”

Companies mentioned by survey-takers as socially responsible included:

• Ben & Jerry’s
• The Body Shop
• Patagonia
• Seventh Generation
• Starbucks
• Whole Foods Market
• Working Assets

I know that Exbiblio would dearly love to be mentioned on that list one day.

Damon joined Exbiblio in June, one of a clutch of recruits who came over from RealNetworks. A friend at Real who was job hunting pointed out the Exbiblio website. Damon was immediately attracted by Exbiblio’s culture, vision, and the direction it wanted to go in with its technology.

“It’s a big vision. It’s a vision that isn’t limited to ‘We are going to make blog writing easier’, or ‘We are going to let you buy coffee’ or ‘find cheapest tickets’, but it is, “We are going to do something epic for humanity.'”

He also liked the idea that it involved real technical challenges that needed to be overcome, and which would establish Exbiblio as a leader in its field.

Damon’s particular role is to work on the search and indexing side of Exbiblio’s project. Without going into detail – Exbiblio’s index will work in a way that is substantially different for others currently in use. He has been given a deadline of the end of August for the first working model that can be put on desktops internally. When you consider that Damon only arrived in June, that deadline is rather tight.

He describes the current work as “drastically trying to pull something together that demonstrates the vision in a short space of time.” The early results will involve some trade-offs, but the aim is have a proof-of-concept that can attract funding if necessary.

He compares the current state of Exbiblio to the early days of personal computing, where the vision of a computer on every desk was in the province of geeks, and not really understood by the business community.

“Before you cross an ocean, you have to build a boat,” he says.

While Damon has been at Exbiblio, there’s been a lot of lively discussion that could have pulled the project off in a variety of directions. Even now there there are developments afoot that could change or add substantially to the vision.

He likes the fact that the destination of this particular journey is not always clearly in view.

“If you are walking towards a peak, the journey is not so interesting because your focus is always drawn to that end point. If we wander on the way, we will have some adventures. We might find that that peak we’re headed towards is not what we want. Perhaps we will find a lovely waterfall on the way up to this peak, and decide that in fact, that’s what we want after all.”

Ed played violin and piano while growing up, and later trained as an audio engineer working in television on soap operas and cartoons. In 2000, while visiting London’s Millenium Dome, he was inspired by a Japanese music installation to try his hand in interactive art. One of his projects involved hooking sensors to his body, and making computer music from the galvanic skin response from his fingertips. At the same time he was working towards a PHD in digital art, but be became “burned out” by academia and decided to look for a job.

It might be that Ed is at Exbiblo by a quirk of fate. He had worked as a teaching assistant on a course at the University of Washington called “Digital Sound Synthesis.” By chance, Exbiblio’s Adam Behringer had attended that same class several years before. He had considered it to be “simultaneously the most useless and useful course he had ever taken”. When he saw Ed’s application, he decided that he probably wasn’t qualifed for the job in question, but was intrigued enough to meet him. During the job interview, they spent about 90 minutes trying to find a role for Ed and settled on “assistant blog master”. But the blogs initative fizzled out for a while, and Ed ended up helping with the code on the software project named “Kibble”.

Previously Ed had programmed computers “in the service of art”, and so writing code is not quite as far as it might seem from his background in the Arts. The work is very immediate. Usually he responds to requests when somebody says, “Hey can you do this? Or fix that?”.

As for Exbiblio’s office culture, he says he can’t really judge it – as he’s never worked in an office before – “but people tell me it’s unconventional.”

Longer term, Ed sees his role growing into the social media side of Exbiblio. Initially he was attracted to the idea of using Exbiblio technolgy to explore literature and the arts, perhaps working closely with academia, and “revitalising literature for the new age.” Now even wider vistas appear to be opening up, but that’s a story for another time.

People who build great companies start with a very different motivation. They want to make “meaning”, not just money. They want to improve the quality of life, right a wrong, or prevent the end of something good.

Hire “infected” people. Look for love of product or idea more than educational credentials. Hire people better than yourself.

From The Ten Commandments of Successful Entrepreneurs by Guy Kawasaki

In mid-March, Adam sent the following email out to the local Mac development list XCoders:

Howdy XCoders,

We are looking for a few great coders to join our team in Pioneer Square. We need your help creating two important things:

1. A company where we can’t wait for Monday to roll around each week because we love the work we are doing and enjoy working with one another.

2. A set of technologies that will change the way that people relate to paper documents.

The skills we are look for include:
– The ability to create killer-apps that change peoples lives
– Experienced with Mac, web and / or open source technologies
– Collaborative and engaging team players

Check out our web site (www.exbiblio.com) for more specific job descriptions and send me an e-mail if you’d be interested in joining our team.

Thanks!

Adam Behringer
Exbiblio

I had just joined another great company, so I wasn’t looking for yet another job, but the “Monday” bit sounded sincere, and the technology that the Exbiblio site talks about is fascinating and personally interesting to me (I had “invented” content-based addressing on the Web myself, but I hadn’t made the connection to paper), so I decided to meet these people, and it was love at first sight (sorry Good).

I especially like the bit in the statement of corporate values from the Web (posted on the front office door as well) that talks about technology:

It reminds me of a big difference I see in companies today in their approach to product design.

Some companies claim to have no personal stake in the products that they build, and strive to be perfect mirrors of their customers’ needs. They focus on their customers first, and the products follow. Other companies, often led by strong visionaries, portray a love of products, quality and excellence. They focus on the products first, and the customers follow, and usually end up loving them.

There is a big difference between creating good enough products for money, and creating products because you want to see them come to life. There’s nothing wrong with solving real problems in as economically feasible a fashion as possible. In fact, it’s difficult and worthy of admiration. But, I do believe that it is often possible to do a lot better. Quentin Stafford-Fraser has an interesting quote on the subject.

One way to look at the difference is to observe the long-term cycles in business. Clayton Christensen, for example, in Innovator’s Solution, talks about how new ideas disrupt existing products and business models, often using highly proprietary, custom solutions, and then gradually become commodities, and become built from commodity pieces, and then are disrupted by a new idea.

People who love products (be they gadgets, services or outcomes) are the ones who will innovate in the large, but innovation is riskier than optimizing existing products and processes, and is not a consistently winning strategy if one’s focus is money as a means to other, unspecified goals. But it is a winning strategy if the products are the end, and the money the means.

By Claes-Fredrik Mannby

I just completed my first day at the Apple WWDC conference in San Francisco.

What strikes me, is the attention to detail that is evident in everything Apple does. Not just the industrial design of the new Mac Pro, but the presentation graphics, the stage, the signs, even the juice refrigerators.

To give a few examples, the sound system in the main presentation room is one of the best that I have ever heard (and this isn’t a music event). Also, the sound and video engineers are hidden behind black cloth booths at the back of the room instead of being in the middle of the room (and elevated instead of eye level) which makes them almost invisible. Little things like the transition from demo machines to slides is always on cue and have a nice cross fade effect instead of just switching. Everything from the badges to the “session changed” posters to the slides has perfectly matching graphic design.

Details, details, details. It is what I love about Apple. It is inspiring.

There’s a new twist to the story about tantalum, a surprisingly controversial mineral used in capacitors (for background see my previous post, Cruelty-Free Tantalum).

The Sunday Times reports that coltan (columbite-tantalite ore) is being used as a cover to smuggle Uranium from the Congo to Iran via Tanzania. The newspaper quotes a senior Tanzanian source:

There were several containers due to be shipped and they were all routinely scanned with a Geiger counter,” the official said.

“This one was very radioactive. When we opened the container it was full of drums of coltan. Each drum contains about 50kg of ore. When the first and second rows were removed, the ones after that were found to be drums of uranium.”

As you are probably aware, there is widespread concern about Iran’s use of nuclear technology. This latest story will do more to taint the use of Congolese tantalum as being unethical, despite the official end to the civil war in Congo and the recent widely-praised elections. As it happens, I’m told that Exbiblio is avoiding the use of tantalum altogether, which neatly sidesteps the problem.

Publishing giant HarperCollins has announced a deal with iAmplify to offer audio and video content along side books. It will provide free audio interviews as well as paid-for content that adds a new dimension to the words on the printed page. I quote from the press release:

“We are moving towards a new distribution model where content is available to consumers on demand,” Hidary added. “iAmplify provides digital content in any format and on any device – not only to iPods, but also to laptops and cell phones – that consumers can access digitally anytime, anywhere.”

Now imagine just how much more powerful this development would be if readers could swipe a hyperlink in the paper book and be whisked to a multi-media digital experience – for that is exactly the Exbiblio vision.

At the same time, HarperCollins is launching a “browse inside” feature for a range of titles on its website. It’s already including audio extracts (example from Isabel Allende’s Zorro). The browse feature, which aims to give online book-buyers a similar experience to thumbing volumes in an bookshop, was pioneered by Amazon, and emulated more recently by Google Books. It does not quite fulfill the Exbiblio vision of a digital text that a reader can place in a “Life Library”, but it is a significant move by a book publisher in that direction.

Meanwhile the New York Times reports that publishers are using video services such as YouTube to promote books. Companies like Expanded Books will make video promotions for around $4000. Top blog Gawker calls a video trailer for your book, “The hottest new marketing trend.”

Jeff Jarvis, one of the most widely read bloggers, talks of “exploding books” and says “authors are breaking free of paper.” Jarvis is perhaps a little bit too hasty to write the old-fashioned book off just yet (see Penguin’s best selling performance). Another way of looking at this is to say that paper is not “dead wood”, but is finding a new lease of life by becoming integrated with the digital world.

Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has returned from his trip around California. When he wasn’t hobnobbing with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, he found time to lunch with a group of Silicon Valley leaders, including Steve Jobs of Apple and Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems. The latter gives and account of the lunch on his blog.

Naturally Mr. Blair was interested in what makes Silicon Valley so successful. One of the answers he received was “education”. He was also told that wage costs do not matter so much, so long as the talent can turn projects around fast.

Coincidently, The Economist Magazine has a different version of why America’s high tech firms succeed (Venturesome Consumption quoting a paper by Amar Bhide). According to this theory, investing in scientific education can be over-done. The “Venturesome Consumption” theory praises consumers, rather than inventors, of technology.

“The most important part of innovation may be the willingness of consumers, whether individuals or firms, to try new products and services.”

I have to say that on my first visit to Exbiblio, I was very struck how the office had adopted all the technological help it could get its hands on, from a wireless network, to AIM instant messaging, a wiki, and internal blogs. Using tools like these seems like second nature, at least in this American company. The same tools are freely available in the UK, but few companies are quite so quick to adopt them.

So Mr. Blair take heed: it might be better to leave great inventions to others, and to let consumers get on with enjoying their gizmos.

One of England’s oldest and most important public records is now available in digital format. The Doomsday Book dates from a census of 1086 by the Norman invader, William the Conqueror. Its gloomy name probably relates to the fact that it was used as a basis for taxation. It listed just about every village, field and pig in the land, as well as the owners, though the big cities such as London were excluded. Many families can trace their names back to the survey, and the book is an important starting point for genealogists.

The Anglo Saxon Chronicle relates how William commissioned the survey:

Then sent he his men over all England into each shire; commissioning them to find out “How many hundreds of hides were in the shire, what land the king himself had, and what stock upon the land; or, what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire.”

You can now search the Doomsday book online at the site of the UK’s National Archives. Unfortunately, there is a charge to see a facsimile of an individual page. This is a model that could prove problematic for Exbiblio, which aims to interlink paper copies with their online versions. Even so, it would seem likely that researchers will be among the earliest adopters of Exbiblio’s technology.