Things to Do

Kortina implored me to do resolutions, like him, instead I will just write down what I want to do more of next year:

1. Help spread the joy of Tipjoy. Of course I am hopelessly biased and financially motivated, but I think that what Abby and Ivan have created has the potential to be the right solution to alot of problems, in an open, distributed way, at the right time. Don't be evil indeed.

2. What with betaworks motoring and a couple of growing kids, our travels will likely involve the beach and then the beach. But I will be thinking about my three favorite places in the world - Dublin, Juan-les-Pins, and Ko Samui - and at least planning on visits to each in the next years.

3. Less multi-tasking, more focus and concentration. Got way too much going on in 2008 - need to organize and focus, pay more detailed attention. It's all about the details. Omnifocus to the rescue.

4. Eat at more small local NYC (and other cities') places, such as Dil-E-Punjab , and especially finally take advantage of Alex Lines' outerborough eating club. Small (and local) is the new big (and international).

5. Similarly, I created a list of 10 people I want to spend more time with in 2009. I'm gonna try to see all of these at least quarterly. Some of these peeps I've never met, but know through various social channels, so need to move those relationships into meals at small local NYC (or other cities) places.

6. Hope hope hope (and help help help it become a reality) that at the end of the year Topspin Media and Hypemachine are the two leading companies in the music world, because what they are doing is right, and more importantly their respective proprietors are righteous.

7. Continue posting a song a day over at tumblr.

Wwoof (ebay for farming) and others

Latest things I am tracking:

WWOOF - world wide opportunities on organic farms - ebay for farming - "WWOOF is an exchange - In return for volunteer help, WWOOF hosts offer food, accommodation and opportunities to learn about organic lifestyles."

Devo - keyboard command launcher (thanks Kortina)

Twitter Influencer - twinfluence

World names profiler - just try it

Random

CDARS - "When you place a large deposit with a network member, that institution uses CDARS to place your funds into certificates of deposit issued by banks in the network. This occurs in increments of less than $100,000 to ensure that both principal and interest are eligible for full FDIC insurance."

Where is your username registered? See Usernamecheck

Pastie - “it's the only pasting app that doesn't suck”

Wordia (love this one) - redefining the dictionary -" a democratic ‘visual dictionary’. A place where anyone with a video, webcam or mobile phone can define the words that matter to them in their life"

Songbike

More

Lazyweb links:

http://www.fuspy.com/ (via kortina)

Dave Cancel's invisible web

Twitter Counter

Daytum - what is it? I like anything that greets one with a "Hello"

Recomm.me "a simple Twitter bot with memory"

Stevienickshasnever

the prison burpee

Latest batch

What is the song of the summer? (via mediaeater)

songmeanings.net and lyricwiki - total repeat usage on these

Very Loud - b/c it needs to be louder, sometimes

Backtype - comment search, see, google can't find everything

github "social code hosting"

gutbots

A few more things

Whuffie

drop.io - "simple private sharing"

twistori "wish" (I want this as a screen saver)

WTF is Twitter

Play Crafter "a place where you can easily play, make and share games"

slydial

More Things I Like Lately

14 tracks - great design and concept - online music sales grouped around concepts of 14

TiltViewer

Twitter search for "WTF is up with" (via mediaeater)

Twitter acquiring Summize

Poketo

Zemanta

Trendrr

conversational search

Things I Like Lately

Tipjoy

AdNectar

Seedcamp

Bit.ly

Tinydb (and Quickerly built on top of it)

Structuring unstructured data

Placetweeting

Screw all manner of betaworks' objectivity, this is pretty cool - John Geraci:

Don’t have time to start a placeblog? Neither do I. But now, thanks to outside.in Radar, Twitter and Summize, we can placetweet. Placetweeting? I’ve got time for that.

How does it work?

You just twitter like you normally do, but include the neighborhood you’re twittering about, and if you want to take it a step further, the name of the venue you’re twittering about.

Then, via the magic of the summize api and outside.in’s place detection algorithms, your tweet will be detected, matched to those locations, and will show up in people’s Radar in those areas.

So for example, this recent tweet:

ericgardenfork tweets: even people in the Tea Lounge Park Slope Brooklyn are talking about Tiger woods

just popped onto the Radar of everyone in Park Slope, and it got attached to the cafe Tea Lounge in that neighborhood. It’s being read right now by everyone in that part of Brooklyn, informing them about their local area.

That’s a pretty low bar for getting involved in the hyperlocal scene. I may not ever really be a placeblogger, but I’ve already become a placetweeter.

Three services being interconnected in ways that I don't believe any of them initially thought about could create value. Now once they start using switchabit . . . .

The Velocity of Data

While eating Chicken Adobo at Cendrillion every other day for the past 6 months, we talk constantly about the value of data - how can an application or a technology create value to an existing or new group of users through the creative aggregation, manipulation or structuring of data.

One of the favorite theoretical examples we use is the ability of an application to add structure to unstructured data. And, in particular, in ways that add value to end-users, publishers or advertisers, three specific groups we seem to care about at betaworks. We seem to be attracted to those examples, but in any event this can get pretty heady and theoretical and wonky.

And then sometimes the theoretical turns specific in a way that validates all the lunchtime chattering. A few months ago Summize turned their search application toward Twitter - in a way Twitter is the very definition of a mass of data -- conversational, casual, and totally unstructured. By adding search to that mass of data - and including including things such as trending analysis and other ways to search - by user, geography, sentiment, places and dates, for example, the unwashed mass of Twitter info becomes . . . structured data. Today I found out about Plurk and that Firefox RC3 was released, to name just two minor and immaterial examples from the trending topics.

So maybe this is an example of where adding structure creates new ways of even thinking about a data set. Or, much more broadly, where adding structure can take an application and make it into a platform.

Post-Americanism

This week, I traded alot of emails with a great hacker in Barcelona, had a skype call with a CEO in London, and had lunch on Friday with a South African and a half British/half French guy (at a Filipino restaurant, natch).

I personally feel provincial, what with a simple NY pedigree. At betaworks we're trying to create a different seed stage business model (John wrote about this a little more here), at least a bit, and though we might be "obscure even among Web insiders," by nature of being located here in New York we tend (and are right now designed) to have more activities here. And though as part of our network we do cover San Francisco to New York to London, I can't help but wonder about the implications right now of having too much of a geographical focus.

For example, Fareed Zakaria writes that "the world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism," to wit:

Look around. The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.

Or, as Adam Gopnik put it last September:

Now, for the first time, it’s possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from.

Then again, good business models are flexible, and are made to be molded and shaped and even broken and reassembled. We'll see how much of that is needed in a post-American era.

betaworks, vc

Paul Graham:

The exciting thing about market economies is that stupidity equals opportunity. And so it is in this case. There is a huge, unexploited opportunity in startup investing. Y Combinator funds startups at the very beginning. VCs will fund them once they're already starting to succeed. But between the two there is a substantial gap.

John Borthwick, re betaworks:

Mid 2007 we flipped our approach — and went bottoms up. We stayed small, under the radar, focussed on our theme, seeking not to be distracted by opportunism. We started identifying standards and methodologies to scale our work and stopped trying to over think the design. By the fall of 2007 we had assembled our learning and formally started to build out the platform. Six months later we have four things that we have built and we have fourteen seed investments. . . .

Someone said to me last week that we are a reverse incubator. Incubators share the peripheral services things that I believe entrepreneurs can and should get from the market (legal, hr, accounting, office space) — betaworks is designed to share core capabilities - software / IP, knowledge, data, standards, analytics, leadership, tools etc… Someone a year ago called it a funcubator — maybe outcubator? — a little less George Clintoneque.

Scott Rafer:

VCs are money managers rather that bold desperados? must be a very slow news day.

Someecards.com

Why did betaworks get involved with someecards? See below - Brook Lundy, co-founder.

Killer Apps

My list of most important apps/products of the last 30 years:

*Remote control
*MTV circa 1980-84
*Curb-side check in
*Caller ID
*Email
*Instant messaging
*iPod 80 gig
*EZPass
*EpiPen
*Metrocards on NYC subways
*Suzuki method of teaching guitar
*Senduit/Rapidshare/yousendit/megaupload etc etc

Y Combinator Demo Day

Y Combinator's investor demo day was last week, out in Mountain View, showcasing the latest batch of companies that Paul & Co. have funded and worked with . Kind of blew my mind. Not because I saw 19 very interesting and innovative ideas (yes, every single one of them), not because they will all be huge businesses some day (they won't, that's not the point), and not because I came away from there wanting to invest and get involved with a few - or more - of these (I did).

Blew my mind because 19 presentations, with two breaks, were made and the program ended, to the minute, at the time listed on the agenda. 3:57 pm, precisely. When does that happen? It stayed exactly on schedule.

Moreover, when do you see presentations from 19 technology companies in one afternoon, and then not want it to end?

Thanks Paul, Jessica, all.