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The Internet is not the problem. The Internet is the solution

2012-01-19T13:49:00.001-05:00

My partner Brad Burnham appears in the wonderful video below which is called Innovation Blackout. Ostensibly it's about the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation.

And the video is about that, but it's about something more fundamental. A few minutes in Brad says "The Internet is not the problem. The Internet is the solution."

This is the generational divide that I think is playing out right now. At dinner the other night I told my family I was thinking about going on a business trip to Stockholm, Sweden. My daughter's immediate reaction? "Are you going to get to meet Notch?" - referring of course to @notch of Minecraft fame. This was in between weekly questions regarding why their school discourages the use Wikipedia. Which happens in between my son's regular exhortations to "search twitter" when we want to know about a tv show. Which is separate but related to when he - all of 9 years old - used an ipad to go onto Google and find that Fender yes in fact does make an electric guitar for a kid with small hands like him, even though I told him they don't. He has multiple and life threatening food allergies. He spends a fair amount of time watching recipe videos - to find foods he can eat and make. Which of course is related to the time my daughter tried to explain something complicated to me by saying "it's really hard, it's like one million lines of code."

The generational view of technology is right in front of us. Brad is right. The solution is right in front of us.

Cash Mobs

2012-01-11T10:27:00.000-05:00

I first read about "Cash Mobs" a few months ago. The idea is simple - a group of people organize themselves through social channels and get together at a certain time and go shop at a local business. Cash mobs:

encourage people to go into small, local businesses and spend their money, en masse, to give the business owner a little bit of economic stimulus. We’d help businesses grow, we’d make people happy, we’d get stuff for ourselves, have a great time, and maybe we’d get a drink to celebrate afterward.

One can follow the Cash Mobs twitter account and see these things in cities such as Cleveland, Houston, Ann Arbor, Kansas City - and that's just this week. Carrotmob is another organization: "instead of organizing boycotts, we offer to spend money as a group if a business agrees to make a socially responsible change."

It feels like an emerging movement, if it can even be called that, and in fact some of these organizers resist it even being considered something more.

Cash Mobs” isn’t a political or social organization, a corporation, a movement, or meant to be an answer to economic crisis. By and large, those that organize Cash Mobs are simply people trying to make a positive impact on the businesses in their communities (and have fun while doing it)!

The book What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption posits that there is something hugely transformational in peer to peer commerce, sharing and consumption ("Peer-to-peer is going to become the default way people exchange things, whether it is space, stuff, skills, or services"). It uses examples of business that allow people to share excess capacity - Airbnb, Zipcar, Bag Borrow or Steal are the iconic ones.

But instead of sharing excess capacity around our stuff - our cars, apartments, clothes - what if the most powerful thing about collaborative consumption is organizational. For many decades we've been trained as consumers to receive offers - discounts, coupons, groupons, daily deals - from entities who want to sell us things. Many of these offers are valuable. But we receive them as they are marketed to us.

Instead, what if we defined the offers ourselves, around the local communities and merchants who make up the fabric of our daily lives? What if people became their own self-organizing local marketers? Maybe then the idea of Cash Mobs is so interesting because it is a reverse-daily-deal, a reverse-Groupon, type of business relationship. One that, by shifting the production, marketing and distribution of the product to the users themselves, is entirely consistent with the peer-to-peer power of Internet and social connectivity.

It will be interesting to see where this goes.

Small Things

2012-01-02T13:00:00.001-05:00

Normally, I'm against big things. I think the world's going to be solved by millions of small things - Pete Seeger

One of my favorite quotes, said with typical humility by Pete Seeger on the celebration concert in honor of his 90th birthday.

I was reminded of it the other day while watching Terrence Malick's brilliant movie, The Tree of Life. That film is about many things, and almost impossible to summarize. But ultimately I think it's about how the small things in life define the essence of our existence. Those moments of humor, compassion or cruelty; the odd funny events; the fleeting images and sounds; the comments spoken or not; the memories that fade. These small moments comprise the whole of our lives moreso than the "big things."

I remembered that last year I read how the writer Austin Kleon keeps an annual logbook - a simple daily planner in which he keeps track "of the little details of my day":

And then I realized why I think people adore (and use) social media services, the ones that connect us. Because they too are comprised of small things, millions of them, and provide platforms for the sharing and recording of small things. Thoughts, music, images, sounds, essays, randomness. It's why the service Findings has such potential - it allows us to track the marginalia of the things we read. Why Twitter is so addictive - the thoughts in our heads. Why Wordnik is so weird - the words we love. And so on. Maybe in 2012 I will focus more on paying attention to the small things.

All the while remembering, of course, that Bruce Springsteen wrote: "From small things, mama, big things one day come."

Talking About A Generation

2011-12-13T09:40:00.013-05:00

Generations is the title of a a fascinating (and dense) book by William Strauss and Neil Howe that theorizes that history advances cyclically based on repeating types of generational characteristics. Generally, history creates generations, and generations create history.

More specifically, under this theory, each generation passes through four cultural phases. Strauss and Howe believe we currently may be in the part of the generational cycle known as a Crisis: "an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival."

Hard to tell whether this theory is correct or not, but just in the past week I've noticed certain similar descriptions of unrelated events that has me thinking more about it.

First, on December 9th, Andy Baio, in writing about movie remixes on Youtube, wondered aloud:

Here's a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote. What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office?

Second, while reporting in the New York Times about the unprecedented protests in Russian on December 10, Ellen Barry describes the

"Younger protesters — so digitally connected that they broadcast the event live by holding iPads over their heads."

Finally, in explaining why he thinks the Stop Online Piracy Act would seriously inhibit the growth and innovation of the Internet, Yancey Strickler, the founder of Kickstarter, just yesterday (December 12) says:

"This is not a small issue. This is a generational issue"

Of course, this could just all be an unrelated set of events and people trying to cause a big sensation. It could also be something more, something related to individuals and groups of people who are figuring out how connectivity, unrestricted connectivity, has not only given them more meaning, but also more potential for learning and creation and possibilities for self expression and empowerment. All happening during a week when not only did the comedian Louis C.K. decided to distribute his own content, directly from his to his fans (and he took to Reddit to talk about it), but my kid took to Khan Academy to get more help with Linear Equations.

Perhaps all unrelated but I think its more, something about how attempts to restrict this empowerment or preserve prior regimes or hierarchies will bump up, often messily, against a generational shift.

The Golden Age of Internet Marketing?

2011-11-27T11:39:00.013-05:00

"Let the products sell themselves... fuck advertising, commercial psychology ... psychological methods to sell should be destroyed." - The Minutemen, Shit From An Old Notebook

We have enough data now to realize that display advertising on the Internet doesn't work. Some suggest click through rates are as low .09%, a shockingly low number. It seems like click through rates are trending towards zero. Users don't notice the ads, they don't click on them. Ultimately, will we eventually see Google giving impressions away for free?

No amount of targeting, behavioral or otherwise, will solve this problem.
There are a number of reasons why, but the main one is that display ads online are the wrong metaphor. They come from a construct where web services were viewed as "pages" - magazine pages. They were invented by applying an old model (magazines) onto a new medium (web services) and assuming that the user is a "reader" and will accept being interrupted. Over time, the web has proven both these paradigms to be untrue in a truly profound way.

In short, web display ads are not web native; therefore they do not and will not work.

However, it also feels like we are about to enter a new, maybe a golden, age of Internet advertising and monetization. Even the word “advertising” in this new golden age is not accurate. Josh Stylman said to me that “advertising as we've known it is dead. Marketing on the other hand, may be entering a golden age with the ability to spread ideas in a way that pundits only dreamed about 10 years ago.”

Web services now exist at a scale that dwarfs the old “web page” model, and the value that many of these services deliver derives from users as contributors, not simply viewers. They then lend themselves to native business, or advertising models (again, the word advertising hardly applies here because this is not like advertising as any of us currently imagine it).

These new emerging revenues streams will be native monetization models that are consistent with the fabric of the product, that run with the grain of how users interact with and use the service. Google ads are the perfect, and prototypical, example, because they deliver a unit in a manner consistent with the way the user is using the product to search for information. These units generally work because they align the interest of the three interested parties in a search: users, marketers and publishers. Users get what they are looking for; marketers' get performance on their spend because they buy against the search action itself; and finally publishers generate traffic from the content.

Other examples - new marketing products - now emerging that are beginning to solve the user behavior/marketing experience include StumbleUpon Paid Discovery, Twitter Promoted Tweets, Buzzfeed Social Content, Facebook Sponsored Stories, Percolate Brand Curators, foursquare for business. Those are just six examples where the “ad” unit is consistent with, and integrated into, the very fabric of those social services themselves. Six examples developed only in the past few years.

I imagine Tumblr, Instagram, Soundcloud and other services will introduce similar initiatives, again that are consistent with the way their services natively work. These platforms, as James Gross of Percolate likes to say, are brokering interest across vast information networks, so in order for a brand to succeed they must broker interest in a native way that makes people enjoy them.

These are all new, and as a result will cause some confusion amongst the “buyers” of the products (as Fred says, The Fragmentation of Online Marketing), in the same way that Google ads originally did. They will take a while to be adopted, maybe even years. But I believe they will work and scale. Because when they do, hardly anyone will even notice them. “You want to not look like an ad at the first glance, but to look like an ad on the second glance.”

The products will sell themselves.

American Censorship Day

2011-11-16T10:00:00.006-05:00

Today is American Censorship Day, so named because there is legislation working its way through Congress that would materially harm innovation and impede speech.

You can read about why so many of us feel so strongly that this legislation is particularly harmful in these places - I picked out just some of what I have read this morning that articulates how harmful this would be:

USV - Help Protect Internet Innovation

Bijan Sabet

Embedly

Albert Wenger

It's worth being informed here, these potential laws would affect how we all interact with web services. It's why the censorship logo will remain on this page for now.

5 Minutes of Happiness Each Day

2011-11-03T11:24:00.009-04:00

My friend Mike White told me the other day that he uses the photo sharing service Instagram because it makes him happy. That stuck in my head.

So I remembered that the mission statement for the Cheezburger Network is "5 minutes of happiness each day" and I was thinking about that statement and how powerful it is.

It says nothing about the product or service, but says everything about the way they want you to feel after using the service. If you didn't know what the Cheezburgers were all about, you can imagine any number of things they might deliver to give you those 5 minutes of happiness.

I use Wordnik all the time. Not because I am looking for word definitions (though it delivers that), but instead simply to look at words. Their mission: "Wordnik is all the words, and everything about them." Again, nothing really about the specific product functionality. I have a list over there called "Good mouth feel words" - words that sound nice when saying them.

Turntable.fm is also a daily stop for me, particularly the Folk/Americana/Blues/Soul-It's All Connected room. That service's theme: "we believe music is better with friends." Music. Better. Friends.

Defining services around a grand theme or even emotion allows them more flexibility to deliver interestingness (noun: "the power of attracting or holding one's attention because it is unusual or exciting etc.) and over time iterate on that delivery - how it might evolve. Flexibility should be a hallmark of an evolving business.

But defining a service thematically should also provide more opportunities for new, native business models to emerge from their usage. You can't slap magazine style advertisements on these services and expect them to work - for the user or the advertiser. I bet however that business models centered around "themes" - whatever they may be - will work.

Self Expression through Social Media

2011-10-20T09:12:00.002-04:00

Chris Poole, founder of Canvas, "a place to share and play with images" gave an amazing talk the other day, Self-Expression through Social Media, you can see it below:

Chris speaks about how identity intersects with the forms and methods of self-expression. He says that, for services that enhance self-expression, it's not the audience that matters, it's a users' context within that audience:

"Its not who you share with, it's who you share as . . . Identity is prismatic . . . We are all multifaceted people, we are more like diamonds, you can look at people from any angle and see something different and yet they are still the same."

Pseudonymity provides opportunities for rich expressiveness. Further, pseudonymity not only accurately reflects "prismatic identity" but it can also enhance creativity by allowing for creation and sharing from different sides of the diamond. One only needs to look at Canvas, or Tumblr, or Reddit for many examples of this.

"Its not who you share with, it's who you share as" is an amazingly insightful description because it recognizes that the power of social applications comes from the people, and even moreso its comes from what they call themselves when sharing.

Everybody wants to be special here (In praise of pseudonymity)

2011-08-01T10:16:00.004-04:00

In real life I am who I am. As Boon and Watt once wrote: "Real names be proof."

But does a name, a real name, an identity, capture the full richness of personal self-expression? I'm not sure it does - indeed I believe that one of the promises of the Internet is that online social networks can allow for different personas - ones for different times or different subjects or different modes of expression. And this is an amazing thing, for one identity does not fit all. It's also amazing because it allows for the full spectrum of human expression.

Identity, like most things, is not monolithic. It's rich, varied and textured. And our online modes of expression should allow for that texture, particularly in what we name ourselves while expressing.

I use tumblr to express myself through music - songs, photos, quotes, randomalia. I go by the pseudonym newspeedwayboogie - not using my real name - because, well because I don't want to be Andy Weissman over there. I want to be someone else, the part of me that is obsessive compulsive and ridiculous about another subject matter.

So over there I chose to use that pseudonym, and not be anonymous, but instead to have a persona that reflects that subject and my expression of it - and nothing more. Sure, that expression may have resulted from late night dorm room shenanigans, but so what? And as a service tumblr makes it easy - and in fact I think encourages - the use of pseudonyms as personas. I've met some fantastic friends who use pseudonyms - Miles Smiles, Vast and Grand,Further From Age. Most of the time I have no idea of the real identity of these people, and I don't really care, because I can tell you so much about them and who they are as people. Their identity is secondary - their expressive persona is primary.

Certain services in fact thrive in creativity in proportion to their embrace of pseudonymity. Examples include tumblr, but also many more - Live Journal, Twitter, Canvas.

Chris Poole - Moot - says that anonymity enables users to express uninhibited creativity in a completely unvarnished, unfiltered way. "Anonymity is authenticity" is how he puts it. I think he is really talking about pseudonymity here - as Jyri Engstrom recently wrote: "A service that aims to become the default arena for online social exchange globally should allow pseudonymity (which is really what we're talking about when we talk about anonymity) and, in some cases, even encourage it."

Or, as Jyri also puts it: "Were you ever the nail that sticks out, at some point in your life?" To which I would add, that nail reemerges in life, often and always. People need places to express how they stick out while being able to assume other personas, for whatever reason they think is appropriate.

Paul Westerberg (in perhaps his greatest song) wrote that "Everybody wants to be special here" - which has always struck me as the most astute observation about human nature. The best online services are the ones that allow us to be special there, and name ourselves whatever we want in the process of expressing how special we are.

How I Get Excited About New Ideas

2011-06-25T16:39:00.017-04:00

My friend Anthony recently wrote about a six step process he uses to determine whether a new idea he finds out about, or a new company someone is starting, or a new product being released, is interesting to him.

He emailed and asked me how new ideas catch my attention. For me, it's not a methodical list, but there are certain aspects of ideas, or companies, that always seem to grab me:

1. Can I relate to the problem being solved: does it solve some rather large problem that I, or someone close to me, has experienced and that I (or we) have explicitly acknowledged how the solution would make our lives (and the lives of many others) easier or better. In other words, does it matter to me? Similarly, if it doesn't matter to me specifically, does it look like it may matter to alot of other people. Did the inventor of this new idea create it to solve a problem of their own.

2. Can I relate to the pleasure being induced: does it make me happy, smile, laugh or cry? Do I feel an urgent need to call my wife asap and tell her about it? Is this something I'll mention at the dinner table that night ("guess what I saw today"). Did the inventor of this new idea create it to produce a pleasure they wanted to experience themselves.

3. Does it do something in a new and unusual way? Does it make me think (or say, upon initial glance) "Oh shit that is really cool." Does it let me experience something in a completely novel way.

4. Does it look pretty? If it is a web service do I remark to myself how amazing the things that can be done in the browser these days are? Am I sure that there is no way that I - who can barely draw stick figures - could ever conceive of something that looked and worked like that.

5. If I am thinking about something as a business, does it seem like it could be a company and business that captures and exchanges value in a new way; is there some business model whereby it can generate revenues and profits in novel and unusual ways - in ways that are consistent with the grain or fabric of the use cases it engenders, and not simply as bolt-ons.

6. Is it something that I could not imagine being done five years ago? Does it feel like something that can remain unusual or unique five years hence.

7. Did I encounter this idea, service, business, in a completely random, unexpected and serendipitous way.

8. If its about music I will sine qua non be interested ;-)

How do new ideas catch your attention?

The Fitness Function of a Venture Capitalist

2011-06-05T10:10:00.006-04:00

"The fitness function of a venture capitalist — meaning the metrics of performance, the report card — is pretty pure. You show up with money, and one way or another more money has to come back than goes in." Bing Gordon

Oftentimes it's best to reduce things to the base elements, in order to really understand things. I am fascinated by the transformation that has occurred over the last five years in the funding of early stage technology companies, and the resulting transparency around this process. Angel investors, seed investors, micro-VCs, angel lists, secondary markets, no-cap convertible notes, liquidation preferences, etc - these terms and concepts, once arcane, are now discussed and debated openly and with vigor. And this transparency leads to efficiency.

But it can also lead to a form of confusion. For the job of a professional investor is simple - to gain a return on money. To deliver outsized returns relative to the risk - some level of returns greater than can be achieved by, say, investing in public liquid markets.

A venture investor can achieve this with numerous tactics: stage focus, sector focus, geographical focus. Expertise in financial matters, marketing, relationships. Friendly, fair terms. Incubation. Doubling down. All these matter, but they are merely tactics.

The strategy, in turn, always remains the same - "more money has to come back than goes in." I like to say it as "own large pieces of very big companies." Either way, the spread between the money that has gone out and that which has come back is the measure of success, and it is the only measure of success for a venture investor.

What's Old is New

2011-04-29T10:17:00.002-04:00

The folks at the Tribeca Film festival were kind (or silly) enough to ask me to write something for their Future of Film blog.

Which I did - entitled "The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get."

I'd been thinking alot about how users are getting content, how they are experiencing it. It seems that in an on-demand video world (which if we are not there yet, we will be soon), the problem that is being solved is "what can people watch." But the real challenge, however, is not what can people watch, but what should they watch. I think that social media will solve this, to me much more interesting, problem. My thesis that I wrote about over there is that:

Social media changes everything – at least it should. So how can it change the way catalog content is distributed and experienced?

And the solution may just be that social media can make events out of the back library of content that comprises our experiences, our passions and our lives.

Between Thought and Expression Lies A Lifetime

2011-01-05T08:55:00.008-05:00

Lou Reed wrote this line (my favorite lyric ever) in the context of relationships (I think). But it's much more applicable than that.

Ideas for new businesses are amazing, wonderful, creative things. What makes ideas so interesting is that they are unbounded by limits - they operate solely in the realm and palette of a person's mind. As far and wide as one can imagine, one can develop an idea for a new business that solves a huge problem, that scales infinitely, that is wildly profitable. The possibilities are limitless.

And therein lies the problem with new application ideas and expressions - they have no limits. They are too broad, too creative. Ideas are too good.

It's what comes next that is so much more interesting - the point (the "lifetime") between taking that idea for a new application or service and actually expressing it in a real form. Building it. Prototyping it. That's when your ideas are subject to limits (technical, execution, market, financial) and those limits actually test your theses and tenets. Prototyping shows you where your assumptions were wrong, maybe, and how your idea may be even better than you thought. Most importantly, it subjects your idea to numerous unanticipated constraints.

I was with a friend the other day who is planning to build an awesome new service that I would use and pay for - it solves a real problem, it scales, the market is right for it. I desperately want him to prototype that service - I want him to see where his thinking is off, how some user/testers will actually use it, how web technology can't scale to this problem. I want him to know where he is right and wrong in his thinking.

This step - the expression step - is just that, a step. It's interim, it's likely to never see the light of day. But it is the most important, and the hardest one.

Because it takes something limitless and subjects it to real life constraints, the point between idea and execution can last a lifetime. But without moving onto the expression, there is nothing.

Get Up, Shower

2010-12-14T14:04:00.002-05:00

Tim Devane - who we luckily hired last year - wrote an essay about how he, a kid right out of college with little work experience, landed a job. Tim is a wonderful writer, but his top line tips are so insightful. I am summarizing below, but please read the whole thing:

1) Get Up, Shower

2) E-mail Constantly

3) Move Where You Want To Work

4) Don’t Stop Believing

5) Can’t Knock The Hustle

Maximizing Serendipity

2010-09-23T08:56:00.008-04:00

The title of this online space is "Maximizing the serendipity around you" which comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, and is as much of a universal business rule I've ever heard and followed.

To me it means that you have to increase the chances of something random happening to you, you have to increase your chances of being lucky. It fits in with another theory I have, which is that it takes alot of skill to be lucky. It takes alot of effort to get yourself into the right place so that when luck, or randomness, or serendipity strikes, you capitalize on it.

I suppose that means there is no such thing as luck, and we should all start instead adding "Good serendipity" to our salutations.

Adherence to this principle means you have to not only embrace randomness, but you have to increase your chances of randomness happening to you. But this is hard to do because it implies a lack of structure and form, and formlessness can be lethal. In another context Peter Coyote once wrote: “When you live without the limits of law or convention, you must supply your own. If you don’t, or can’t, formlessness becomes terminal.”

So how do you maximize serendipity?

I believe there are two main qualities that define a successful entrepreneur or investor. The first is pattern recognition. The ability to use experience or insight from past patterns to have a viewpoint on future markets. "I know how this movie ends."

The second quality is conviction. The gut, visceral belief that what you are doing is right regardless of what anyone else thinks (and indeed opposition often increases levels of conviction). "I don't care what anyone else thinks."

These two qualities are in tension and inconsistent with each other. But that's what makes the combination so powerful. Indeed that very tension can be the boundary line between success or failure, and it's a tightrope.

But if you get that balance right, you are in the best position to maximize serendipity. Which means you are in the best position to be successful.

Escapin' through the lily fields I came across an empty space

2010-04-14T09:47:00.007-04:00

There has been much debate in the last week over platforms, holes, products and ecosystems.

All of it made me think back to my youth, the days of AOL, around 1995-1997. Back then, one of AOL's innovations was a publishing platform (Rainman - Remote Automated Information Manager) which allowed thousands of content producers - of all sizes and skills - to publish into AOL. As a result, back then the breadth of content on AOL was remarkable and filled every possible niche. It was a wonderful, rich, vibrant community of content. I joined AOL back then because Geoff Gould published his Grateful Dead forum on AOL (keyword: Grateful Dead, I recall) - one of the first online communities. Indeed you can still see today he uses the same modified AOL logo he used back then:

As a platform, this worked precisely because AOL provided the two key components every platform must deliver to create value: distribution, and monetization. AOL offered distribution through its thousands and then millions of users. It delivered monetization through its pricing scheme: users paid AOL for Internet access by the hour ($6.95 or $9.95, I can't recall) and content providers got paid a percentage of the hourly rate related to the time users spent on their AOL pages. It worked, it worked well, and literally thousands of flowers bloomed (think about the analogies to the Facebook platform, or iTunes store, or Windows OS - offering distribution and monetization always works). The platform succeeded . . . .

Until it didn't.

The Internet business changed, completely, in 1996 when the AT&T WorldNet Service began offering"all-you-eat" (unlimited access) pricing for Internet access. AOL (as an ISP) soon followed suit, as it had to do.

This destroyed AOL's original platform, as it could no longer share variable usage revenues with its content partners. We spent much of 1997 renegotiating thousands of these deals. The revenue stream for these guys ended. I can only imagine the outrage and headlines and hating if this happened today. But AOL too had to change its business.

A funny thing happened, however. Smart content providers realized they could - indeed had to - move to the nascent web. Over there - using HTML - much more rich content experiences and applications and commerce services could be launched. And over time more users would migrate to an open web entry point. The good ones created good businesses, even some iconic ones (early on we negotiated hard with the NY Times - an early AOL partner - as they considered moving their content off AOL - and onto the web!). Others failed. AOL had to flip its business model outside of access fees into advertising, commerce other services. Web browsers became the primary presentation layers, not the ISPs.

Innovation didn't die - instead it flourished into new, related and unrelated, spaces.

History tells us that markets get flushed, always and often. It doesn't matter what we call them - holes, ecosystems or whatever - but things change, business landscapes alter their foundations, and companies themselves are often the catalyst for those changes. But each time good execution survives, and more opportunities are created than those that are filled. It always happens this way.

Comin', comin' around, comin' around, in a circle, indeed.

Users Experiences

2010-03-18T08:19:00.003-04:00

I was thinking this morning that one way to create a service of real value is to ensure that the way a user experiences that service is commensurate with the value you are trying to deliver to the user. Feels like a simple idea but harder in practice.

For example, Foursquare. Stated mission: find your friends. With the mobile app, iphone version at least, for a user to get that benefit - finding their friends - requires only two taps of the thumb. Nothing more. Which makes sense - simple user experience here not only works perfectly but is in fact consistent with the initial effort required for a user to have a successful interaction with the service. Of course, there is much more richness to the application - but the initial, baseline experience is in line with the benefit of the services' goal.

Which doesn't mean that simplicity in itself is the answer to the design of users experience. Contrast Hunch. Stated goal: customized recommendations that get smarter the more you use it. To get those recommendations requires some effort by the user - there are a number of user touch points - questions, search, likes/dislikes. As I see it, Hunch does not shy away from presenting to the user a bunch of inputs and experiences. Indeed, the services' value proposition (better recommendations) is of such high, personal value that it implicitly and explicitly requires a deep experience for the user to get that value. Again, an experience consistent with the stated mission.

Finally - Dailybooth. Really only two things to do over there - take a picture, or comment on a picture. But that's precisely the value proposition: document and share your life with others. The experience and functionality are consistent with the value a user gets.

So while I am able to check in to Foursquare while at breakfast and see who else is there, all in 5 seconds with only my thumb, I am going to spend 10 minutes back at my desk figuring out what pair of headphones to buy. And later on spend a few minutes catching up with Jon's life, in pictures and words.

To me, the key innovations of these three services, to use just a few examples, are simply in how they present user experiences (and the design that comes along with that) that are completely consistent with the value their users receive from experiencing the services that way.

Venture Innovation, or why the First Round Capital Entrepreneur's Exchange fund is good

2010-01-30T11:08:00.011-05:00

There is an amazing wealth of innovation around early stage venture financing, most of which developed in just the past few years.

There are new models of creating companies out of innovation: Seed Camp, Y Combinator, Tech Stars are just three, all with different foci and core strengths.

Then there are new sources of financing - groups or people that literally didn't exist as early stage financiers just a few years ago: O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, True Ventures, Jeff Clavier, First Round, Ron Conway & Co., Roger Ehrenberg, Chris Sacca, Dave McClure, TAG/Saul and Robin Klein etc. I call these "quasi institutions" because while in some cases they are or have traditional ventures partnerships, they act very entrepreneurially - they move fast, they move often, they are heavily collaborative, they focus on the seed, they are very active, they have alot of fun. In many cases they are run by operational entrepreneurs themselves. Their existence alone is innovative.

Then there are new economic models - Founders Collective being the most prominent now, ("None of us have ever been bankers. We like products and building stuff. We show up on time and don't email during meetings").

On top of this framework First Round announced last week that they have set up an "exchange fund" for founders of companies they have invested in. Josh Kopelman writes that the fund will:

"allow First Round Capital entrepreneurs to contribute a small piece of the stock they own in their company -- and share in the upside of all the other companies."

I don't know any details of this "exchange fund" and absent those it's hard to know how it will work, but in any event I think this has the potential to be truly disruptive and innovative for at least five reasons:

(1) Removes some entrepreneurial stress. Again, Kopelman: "When I was an entrepreneur, I remember the feeling of having all my eggs in one basket -- and it is our hope that this fund will remove some of that stress." The idea being that removing some of this stress can lead to the companies these entrepreneurs run executing better and more efficiently.

(2) Promotes more effective sharing and collaboration amongst the First Round companies. I think FR is better than most at providing opportunities for their companies to collaborate, yet this now creates a framework for these activities. Of course you are going to work harder and help your neighborly First Round company - there are shared economic benefits. Every entrepreneur in the portfolio now acts as a part time EIR.

(3) Strengthens the First Round brand and reputation. Yes, they are a solid team. With a great set of companies. And track record. Now when they invest in your company you have an opportunity to share in the greater network. Competitive differentiation.

(4) Incentivizes (sic) the First Round team to continue to be great investors. For now not only their reputations and money are on the line, but they themselves need to work harder to ensure their portfolio is filled with great companies. If not, the value of the exchange fund is diluted. This it the most interesting to me - part of their business is now tied directly to their entrepreneurs' collective success. Josh writes that the fund is for the benefit of their companies - it is, of course - but FR just put into place a structure that I think will make the FR team work harder, and better. Brand equity is hard to build, and even easier to lose. They've now got a pool of founders' equity that they can enhance, or devalue. Talk about putting yourself on the line.

(5) Venture funds by structure are money managers. They get paid to manage a pool of money and then get a piece of the upside on the returns of that money. Very simple, well known. As a result, there is no inherent value in a fund qua fund - it's a collection of assets the value of which is driven by the partner's track records and reputation. But with the exchange fund, First Round as an institution above and beyond the asset management has value. The decision a founder makes to take money from First Round may be driven in part by this exchange fund, and how well it may do.

There are undoubtedly issues with this exchange fund. But, it's a great example of a virtuous circle - each component of the program strengthens and enhances each other. Founders may want to take money from First Round because of the program; the companies in the portfolio have incentives to collaborate more efficiently; the First Round team has to work harder to ensure the collection of companies is quality; the whole brand is enhanced.

In short, innovative.

You Can't Make Word of Mouth Viral

2009-12-02T18:22:00.012-05:00

"Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning…and it’s harder to create virality than it is to create a good product. That's why we often see good products with poor virality, and poor products with good virality. The reason that over $150 Billion is spent on US advertising each year is because virality is so hard. If virality was easy, there would be no advertising industry."

Josh Kopelman

This is self-evident, of course. But raises another issue, a common misconception, that bugs me.

Positive "word of mouth" - the passing of information person to person - is an important (maybe the most important) component to growing a service. However its not the same thing as service being viral. Virality at its purest and most scalable form means a service that through it's very usage advertises and spreads itself.

Word of mouth is casual, yet the active sharing of brand - positive or negative experience with a good or service. Virality is causal, yet the passive compound effect of interconnections being maxed out.

They are totally different things.

The Pay Pal service is viral. So is Venmo. As is bitly. A user's usage of those products - without anything more - markets the products themselves. This has nothing to do with word of mouth, which is not viral, and is also not directly trackable from the usage itself.

Viral is interesting because of the compounding network effects that result from the usage. With the right use case usage can explode, literally, and it can be measured.

In the past few years a newer, and potentially more interesting, type of virality is emerging - virality via API. Because the idea of virality is about interconnecting nodes, where a product or service is built using the API of another - the API providers service spreads, automatically. TweetDeck utilizes the Twitter API; TweetDeck's growth and usage thus increases Twitter's usage, without any explicit action by the user. The nodes interconnect. API sprawl enables virality (as Greg Battle once told me)

But this ain't word of mouth. Word of mouth doesn't scale. Virality does.

The Golden Road (to Online Distribution)

2009-10-23T16:52:00.019-04:00

The technology industry has a seeming lack of institutional memory - the constant cycle of invention and reinvention while barely looking to the past. It's so optimistic in nature.

But we sometimes need to look to the past to sharpen our pattern recognition. We started betaworks by specifically looking at the past, and using that look back to come up not only with a specific and focused view of online media but also a corporate structure to enable us to optimize our participation in future innovation.

Don't yet know how fully right or wrong we are, but we believe we are in the very beginnings of the fourth major road (or phase) of online media distribution and innovation (where the words "online" "media" and "distribution" are each broadly defined). Each of these roads bleed into one another, to the point where its hard to tell when one is transforming into another, but generally each phase seems to last 10 years before the next emerges at scale:

1. The first phase was the ISP phase - where content and distribution were optimized (monopolized?) thru the ISP onramps. ISPs provided access and attempted to provide services and content.

2. The second phase was characterized by portals (AOL and the like) - the idea and philosophy that all your services and content are located under one roof ("come here for everything").

3. The third road IS search (characterized by the idea “you don't need to remember anything, you just need to know where to find it”). This is why the Google UI is so much more radical than given credit for, it represents a media philosophy that was materially different from everything that came before it.

4. And the fourth road - which is barely just beginning now - is real time social distribution. The idea that “if something is important it will find me” - a constant flow of content and ideas with applications and services supporting the distribution of content ("content" again broadly defined) from person to person initially and then with intelligence, filters and who knows what else. This represents the final breakdown of the traditional media content producer/distributor/consumer buckets, which now blend into one another. Indeed, there are no more consumers, there are only “users”. As a result, this transformation is utterly disruptive to the whole media value chain. Think Twitter and Facebook obviously, but also think Boxee, pubsubhubbub, Etsy, Kickstarter, 20x200, PostSecret, Dogster, and many more.

This is where distribution - the linchpin of content - gets flattened, pushed to the edges.

I don't think information (content) wants to be free. I think it just wants to be distributed friction-free. Which is why this fourth road - social distribution - has so much potential. It opens up distribution in ways that never existed before.

I Want To Be A Platform

2009-10-19T09:08:00.012-04:00

We all want to create or invest in platform businesses - those that enable other businesses or participants to add features, content, build other things into/onto the platform, extract associated but not directly related content therefrom, thereby creating infinite scale and value. And valuation.

But it doesn't work so easily. I submit that the best platform businesses evolve, they are not created sui generis. Further, they evolve from applications - applications as representative of specific pain points and use cases.

Applications can and do become platforms. It's extremely hard for platforms to begin as platforms and at the same time find the specific problem they are solving, in a way that encourages usage and enhances the users' experiences and leads to growth.

So another core betaworks philosophy: it is infinitely harder for a platform to spawn value added applications than it is for an application to evolve into being a platform.

We've seen this many many times before, for example:

AOL - began as chat/email application, then evolved into "portal" platform.

Yahoo - initial pain being solved was navigation - application was a directory, also later evolved into portal platform.

Twitter - application= messaging, now becoming a communications and media (news, links, more) platform.

Google - search application into media platform.

More specifics: we built switchabit as a content routing platform, a way to move any piece of content from its base format (mp3. jpg, blog post) and location to another service. Nice, decent usage, but too many and varied use cases (flickr to twitter, tumblr to blogger etc etc) which I believe got in the way of mass adoption. It did, however utilize a URL shortening service (bitly), which solved a very focused pain. Thus that application was born separate from the platform. Similarly, Twitterfeed does one thing - as a content routing application - moving one piece of content to one or two other places. Result: 350k publishers and about 600k feeds running through the service. Maybe it will now move to platform like attributes. Maybe not but it has proven it can solve a specific pain and scale.

In practice, then, for us when we build a service, or invest, we look closely at the use case to determine what kind of application it might become. We don't expect any evolution, though as dreamers we hope that there will be one. Show us an application, not a platform.

Don't Get High On Your Own Supply

2009-10-03T11:34:00.005-04:00

"Lesson number two: don't get high on your own supply" -- Elvira Hancock

At betaworks we try to (over) simplify some key principles (no business development, for example) to operate our businesses, and look for inspiration for those ideas in disparate pockets.

One of our key learnings is that while it's really fun to live inside the startup bubble whereby your application is filling a huge problem and therefore is going to change the world, it's even more important to remember what happened to Tony Montana in Scarface when he didn't listen to the sage advice of his mentor Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia) and wife Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer) - don't get high on your supply, i.e., don't believe your own bullshit; don't live in your own bubble; if you are going to use your own product do it as a user not as a supplier.

Innovation is happening at such a fast pace that if you can't step outside your own world you will not see it clearly. Stepping outside your own world can mean don't believe what other people say or write about your service - good or bad - it is the use case that matters, not the chatter. Experience your product as a user would - not as an insider. Don't believe that if you disappeared tomorrow anyone would care. Question the key assumptions you think are vital to your perceived success.

Most importantly, also don't forget Lopez's first rule, the corollary to the first:

Never underestimate... the other guy's greed

Your competition might be hungrier than you are, particularly if you are high on your own supply.

No Business Developement (or, Hackable Business Development)

2009-09-21T11:17:00.007-04:00

We have a saying at betaworks - "no business development allowed."

Of course, it's tongue in check and we don't really mean it (well, maybe we do), but it represents the application of one of our core business scaling principles. Namely, find a way to scale usage of a service or application that doesn't rely on formal business deals. Those deals - "business development" as it were - take too many cycles relative to unknown value to be truly effective at the early stages. Too long to find the partner, get to know them, structure and paper a relationship, and then implement.

Instead, we focus on ways to work with other services, companies or applications at the data level. Where complementary data sets - utilized via API - can enhance or supplement or supercharge your service, and can be implemented quickly and without any company-company intervention or interaction (no human contact allowed). Jon Steinberg has an awesome piece called Hackable Business Development which is in some ways profound in its simplicity but represents something vitally important:

If you’re interested in a platform or service from an intellectual, career, or partnership prospective, you simply must build on it.

"You simply must build upon it." Just fucking do it.

Things to Do

2008-12-31T17:29:00.005-05:00

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

2008-10-12T08:46:00.003-04:00

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

2008-09-30T07:10:00.002-04:00

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

2008-09-06T10:53:00.003-04:00

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

2008-08-18T16:56:00.003-04:00

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

2008-08-05T14:44:00.003-04:00

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

2008-07-20T17:47:00.003-04:00

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

2008-07-08T11:38:00.002-04:00

Tipjoy

AdNectar

Seedcamp

Bit.ly

Tinydb (and Quickerly built on top of it)

Structuring unstructured data

Placetweeting

2008-06-17T16:27:00.002-04:00

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

2008-06-11T18:37:00.006-04:00

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

2008-05-04T18:11:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-16T11:11:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-11T14:19:00.001-04:00

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

Killer Apps

2008-04-06T07:20:00.006-04:00

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

2008-03-16T06:46:00.003-04:00

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.

Email, Microsoft, Yahoo

2008-02-23T08:50:00.005-05:00

There is one way that a Microsoft - Yahoo merger makes very important sense, and that area has as its base email. Yahoo mail, according to Wikipedia, has 260 million users. Microsoft Hotmail looks to have 280 million users.

Putting aside all the chatter about search, display ads and content (total distraction that falls right into Google's hands), these are hugely important assets.

Email is a base level consumer activity, and more importantly can be a jumping off point for related personal utility and organizational applications.

I'm thinking Microsoft and Yahoo should be totally focused on utilizing this combined base as a web based email start page -- 500mm plus users -- then layer on great end user applications. Add in delicious for web links (e.g., email links right from delicious). Integrate Flickr for photos (e.g., download .jpg attachments right into Flickr). Build in a publishing service, acquire Six Apart or Wordpress or even better Tumblr! And integrate them all in a way that make sense from the perspective of consumer web-based utilities and publishing, ensuring that the design enhances the functionality and keeping things simple. Then add document storage and sharing, and online word processing and spreadsheet apps. The list over time can grow, lots of fun whiteboarding this out can be done here. Numerous ways to monetize also.

What you just might end up with is a great personal self publishing platform, all tied together. Something unique, that no one else has. You don't necessarily need to be the best at what you do, but you do need to be the only one who does what you do.

MySpace scaling revenues

2008-02-07T09:19:00.000-05:00

MySpace is a service that has tremendous benefit and utility to its users, and in terms of an efficient, scalable business, is wildly underrated in the tech industry. Facebook et al seem to get more attention and have more sex appeal, which I think works to MySpace's advantage.

Plus the most interesting ad tech news of the year was what seemed like a little heralded acquisition from those folks. In creating an interesting business, with the potential for valuable advanced ad targeting, I watch what MySpace is doing. Particularly because Peter Kafka just wrote that:

Everyone knows that advertising on social networks and video sites is challenging, but the WSJ rehashes the story anyway (using three reporters!): CPMs remain low, most inventory goes unsold, marketers are connecting their brand with any anything-goes site, etc.

What the Journal doesn't play up, most likely because the news popped late Monday afternoon: News Corp.'s MySpace is finally making some headway selling ads. Its Fox Interactive Media unit, which is basically MySpace, generated $233 million in sales last quarter, up 86% y/y and up 24% from the previous quarter. Most encouraging is that Google's guaranteed search dollars made up just $62 million of that total, meaning that FIM's non-search dollars increased 43% y/y and 32% from last quarter.

Simplicity = utility

2008-01-30T09:40:00.001-05:00

Marco built (well, released) something called Instapaper the other day which allows one to save web articles to read later.

Its goal is simple (save to read later), its functionality is simple (click the read later button/bookmarket) and its design is simple (only 61 words -- including credits - on the front page!). Nothing that couldn't be accomplished, I suppose, with delicious or a million other services. Yet I am now getting addicted to Instapaper, I think because design (front end or functionality-wise) really does matter in achieving a stated goal for web products.

Simplicity of design + simplicity of purpose = enormous utility and value to users.

Media Physics

2008-01-07T13:17:00.000-05:00

Ian Rogers of Yahoo and elsewhere writes that that scale of the web creates media opportunity through the creation of:

" . . . a loosely-coupled value chain including users as value creators. The value chain is not owned by a single entity (LimeWire, Apple, or Universal). There are many participants in a healthy ecosystem. Furthermore, users are no longer just consumers, they’re active participants adding value and any successful solution will leverage this user-contributed value."

Totally right (and we're betting a whole investment thesis - so-called outside in services - against this proposition). Moreover, its why the music business in particular reminds me of the online ad business years ago. Value - and creativity - come from different places now -- from the outside of where they traditionally have in media. Makes for interesting opportunities and challenges (and investments and things being built).

Design

2007-12-21T16:17:00.000-05:00

Seth Godin writes today about Charles and EJ's latest designs at I'm in like with you:

"Given the choice, that teenager you're trying to market to is ignoring you and she's on this site instead. Take it or leave it."

Design, functionality, sensibility, and new ways of creating engagement matter.

Smart venture investing quote

2007-12-06T18:00:00.000-05:00

Jeff Nolan writes something very insightful about the potential changed nature of venture investing (which is near and dear to my betaworks heart):

"[I]n many ways I recoil at the notion that true invention and innovation matters less today, but it does appear to be the case. The fact remains that most acquisitions are in the $30-60 million range so if you want to generate a return across an entire portfolio of deals you simply have to adjust the economics of the deals and the process by which you engage them. Jeff Clavier is the epitome of this new model."

Facebook is My Space's Best Friend

2007-12-05T11:53:00.000-05:00

In the context of design and aesthetics, Andrew Chen reminds me that:

My Space is alot larger than Facebook in terms of users, pages per visitor, and ads per page viewed; and
My Space has more visits, visitors, page views, and average stay than Facebook (as of September at least).

Of course, some measure of "buzz" suggests that many see Facebook, at least lately, as the more important or newsworthy (and oftentimes alot) player here:

When I looked at those stats and generated this chart, it occurred to me that all the buzz, or chatter, focused on Facebook has been the best thing to happen to MySpace in the past six months. The volume of the chatter, which has been remarkably high in the past few weeks in particular, has taken enormous attention off the market leader. Indeed, it has created the perception that the bigger site (from any number of metrics), now plays an underdog role. Moreover, I'd bet it has enabled them as a company to be focused on execution, and not fending off press and attention related to valuation, or beacon, or whether the CEO wears shoes.

In fact, in my mind, the most important social networking ad news of the year was the launch of the MySpace targeted ad platform. Much more important than apps or beacons.

In this case, maybe Goliath has in fact become David.

betaworks

2007-11-28T22:05:00.000-05:00

Peter wrote about betaworks today.

Music is like the online ad business 10 years ago

2007-11-20T16:26:00.000-05:00

I've written about my love affair with Amie St., so its obvious that I am intrigued by different ways to deliver audio content.

My friend David, who has been at the epicenter of the online ad business for the past 10 years, and I were talking last night while checking out Songkick.

We discussed how the changes undergoing the music business today are amazingly similar to the changes that occurred to the (online) ad business 7 or 8 years ago, to wit:

* it's moving from a seller-driven to a buyer-driven industry;

* it's moving from a volume model (CPM) to a transactional (CPC) one;

* we are witnessing the commoditization of the middle man;

* there is now a real lack of analytics, showing for example how to value different forms of consumption; and

* delivery is moving from a fixed/set flight to an always on (platform agnostic) structure for distribution.

If these are in fact the case (and I think they are), there could be real value to be had by looking at the successes of the ad model, and then porting them over.

The most interesting online ad news of the year

2007-11-05T12:57:00.000-05:00

. . . could be the new My Space targeted ad platform reported on by CNET and Tech Crunch.

Looks like this is the fruit of the earlier Fox Interactive Media acquisition of Strategic Data Corp. earlier this year.

This has the potential to be much more interesting than the much heralded deals involving aQuantive, Doubleclick, Right Media, etc., because this could represent the most advanced instance of behavioral targeting into social media networks.

If this advancement allows real action-based (i.e., not just interest based) targeting (what Lotame and Andy Monfried call "verb targeting"), maybe real value can finally be brought to the consumer and advertiser. That's the potential, at least, and if it works I think represents the biggest breakthrough for online advertising since AdSense.

And while I had heard that there was still much too much manual categorization going on inside MySpace as part of this - if the end result is an easy, efficient product for advertisers, it will do well.

Fichey - better presentation layer?

2007-11-01T08:54:00.000-04:00

Design and presentation matter.

Billy Chasen is a friend and a highly creative developer we've (betaworks) been working with the past few months. Billy's created a number of great apps, and perhaps I'm biased but I find myself using each of them heavily. One is downfly, another is fichey. I like them because they all seem to solve specific problems, at least ones that are particular to me.

I'm using fichey now on a daily basis. The problem Billy set out to solve is that the web is awash in wonderful, interesting, but unstructured content (data). As a result, applications and algorithms have been developed to structure this content, machine based, human based, or often combinations of the two.

These apps/algorithms do an amazing job of providing context and delivering the content. Digg, delicious, reddit -- perfect examples of high value content structuring applications. But while the content sorting has advanced, consuming the results is still stuck in the same old point - click - hit-browser-back button - repeat method of discovery. It's clunky and slow. It's boring.

There's something appealing about leafing through the pages of a magazine. It's casual, fast, fun and allows one to quickly scan a high volume of content to get to something that is even more relevant.

That's fichey, in a nutshell -- it's a presentation tool. A visually appealing, more efficient way to view (leaf through) large groups of content. It saves a user time -- you can page through a given days top Digg stories in seconds, stopping where you want, paging on as you please.

Brady Forrest at O'Reilly recently described a note he got that said "wouldn't it be cool to see Google search results displayed Cover Flow-style in the Safari web browser."

Fichey is a small step towards getting at this idea. It's early and Billy is already working on building more into it. But for now, at a minimum, it works.

New Feedburner address for this site

2007-10-31T07:36:00.000-04:00

http://feeds.feedburner.com/aweissman

Radiohead, freedom, artistry

2007-10-22T09:07:00.000-04:00

Over at Alley Insider, Peter Kafka waxes poetic about the Radiohead's "In Rainbows" experiment, correctly recognizing that the import of this event is not how much money Radiohead made from releasing their album with a pay-what-you-want model, but instead:

"Radiohead is likely to make a nice sum from "In Rainbows," but the real advantage that its giveaway stunt has conferred is freedom: Radiohead, not a music label, will own the songs it recorded (EMI owns all of Radiohead's earlier work, for instance). Radiohead, not a music label, can decide how to market, promote and distribute the songs -- if it wants to do any of the above. And Radiohead, not a music label, can decide when, where and how it wants to release its next album. Etc."

I think Peter is partially right, clearly this freedom is a big part of what happened. But I think something more significant is going on, related to pricing mechanisms. Radiohead shifted the decision of what to pay to its audience. Allowing, in essence, its listeners to have more control in determining what the content is worth. Recognizing that each consumer has a different value they put on the content (and maybe that value changes over time too).

Radiohead clearly is in a unique situation and has much more flexibility than, say, Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, or a million other bands. But methinks this is the more important trend to watch . . . .

Secular Advertising Shift

2007-10-14T16:36:00.000-04:00

New York Times:

"Last year, Nike spent just 33 percent of its $678 million United States advertising budget on ads with television networks and other traditional media companies. That’s down from 55 percent 10 years ago, according to the trade publication Advertising Age."

Facebook and Wikipedia's Lovechild

2007-10-12T17:28:00.000-04:00

I'm biased but Jack did make a nice video for us:

Amie St is the future

2007-10-03T15:47:00.000-04:00

I've been aware of Amie St for a while now -- heard the buzz, checked out the service a few times. Looked interesting, but I never spent too much time really thinking hard about what they were creating.

The way it works is that all songs start out as free downloads and rise in price the more they are purchased (with a max of $0.98). Variable pricing, with tons of social and community elements worked in.

Yesterday, Thaddeus Clark twittered that the new Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings album, 100 Days, 100 Nights, was available on Amie St for download for $1.80. I read Thaddeus' tweet a few hours after he posted it, and being a big fan of the first two Jones/Dap-Kings albums, I popped over to Amie to buy it. When I got there, the album was listed at $6.22. Demand had been increasing for this great record, and prices started rising. So I bought it -- still a great deal at that price.

As of now (Wednesday 4 pm EST), the album is listed at $7.22. Still rising.

Thaddeus then wrote that Amie St. "appeals to the trend setters, early adopters, and majority all in one model." I read that at least twice.

Then it hit me. Hard. Media consumption with variable pricing based on the profile (and time of that profile) of the buyer. Simple model but one that covers the whole spectrum of possible listeners in an effective, and efficient, and social, and fun, way. Brilliant. Utterly.

For the past year I've been constructing an investment thesis (and trying to put together a portfolio of investments) that suggests that enormous value could be created by services that look at models of distribution, production and consumption from a different way. That look at them almost from the opposite, or outside-in, direction, viewing the consumer as the most important player, and not the distributor or manufacturer or producer. Outside-in services. Starting from the consumer, these services can then build value in much different, more efficient, better ways.

Amie St. hits this squarely on the head. It is the future of music distribution.

Google

2007-09-26T16:08:00.000-04:00

Patrick McAndrew:

"Google Knowledge is when you don’t know something but you know Google does."

Adam Gopnik, France and the start up world

2007-09-20T16:35:00.001-04:00

As I look at seed stage start ups, the international environment is much more relevant now compared to 10 years ago, at least in terms of competitive standing, markets to go after, and centers or pockets of innovation. Saul Klein and I were discussing this at the betaworks event in August, and the stuff coming out of the Seed Camp event shows that interesting things are really sprouting everywhere, maybe even more so looking eastward (from NY) than westward.

With that in mind, Adam Gopnik's recent article in the New Yorker about French President Nicolas Sarkozy contains maybe the most relevant analysis this web investor has read in a long time:

"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.
What Brown, Merkel, and Sarkozy all have in common is that they do not want to be defined by their response to America—either unduly faithful, as with Blair, or unduly hostile, as Chirac became. Instead, as Levitte says, they all want to normalize relations with a great power that is no longer the only power. Its military weakness has been exposed in Iraq, its economic weakness by the rise of the euro, and its once great cultural magnetism has been diminished by post-9/11 paranoia and insularity. America has recovered from worse before, and may do so again. But it is also possible that the election of Nicolas Sarkozy may be seen not as the start of a new pro-American moment in Europe but as a marker of the beginning of the post-American era."

It's like a library, except everyone is talking

2007-09-11T15:10:00.001-04:00

Carmun (of which I am a founder, etc.) is getting set to launch v2.0 of its student connective wisdom, yin to the Facebook yang, product. I believe that the web presents an opportunity for businesses to take fresh looks at processes, and then create value for users from outside the traditional parameters of those processes. Education, advertising, social media are just a few of the areas where many of these opportunities exist.

I met Jon Bischke of Edu Rev last week and we were discussing how technology and connectivity (between people and ideas) are just now beginning to be applied in creative ways to learning and knowledge sharing. His company and Carmun are just two of a number that are trying to use the web to change that. We'll see what happens soon.

CenterNetworks NYC Event 9/27

2007-09-11T11:19:00.000-04:00

Allen Stern of CenterNetworks is hosting an event, a "mixer" on September 27th.

CenterNetworks, like AlleyInsider, seem to be a new breed of content related sites and communities that, aside from a particular focus on the New York area (excellent!), really are producing insightful, thoughtful commentary about web and related businesses, asking tough questions and getting way beyond standard-issue hype. And also having a sense of humour about it all. The sign up for Allen's event is at the link above.

Yahoo and Blue Lithium

2007-09-05T10:17:00.000-04:00

Yahoo acquires Blue Lithium, as widely reported.

Personally, I think this is a much more interesting deal than Yahoo's acquisition of Right Media, Microsoft's purchase of aQuantive, and Google's buy of Doubleclick, because I believe advanced targeting, particularly as it relates to social media, is the biggest growth opportunity in online advertising.

Andy Monfried and I exchanged notes about this last night. We are seeing a secular shift in consumption patterns towards more interactive ways of communication. To date, the ability to present relevant marketing and advertising to new forms of social media has been lacking, for a number of reasons including the difficult of targeting inside a publishing model where he consumers are a (or "the") major source of content. Better targeting -- whether from analytics, ad networks, or exchanges -- can solve this problem (and ultimately allow social media sites to be free to use!).

Henry Blodget frets about the behavioral targeting perception risk that this deal may usher in:

"We continue to expect that "behavioral targeting"--in which publishers and ad networks place cookies on users' PCs and gather data on what they do--will eventually experience a bout of intense press and government scrutiny."

While I think this risk is overblown (behavioral targeting does not represent more targeting of users, just better targeting), the perception does remain, and ad tech companies must get ahead of the perception game.

UPDATE: Andrew Parker, in a comment below, thinks the issue here is not that great, but for a different reason:

"There's a larger question as to whether behavioral targeting should be default opt-in or default opt-out, but I think this is a much smaller issue consider how easy it is to opt out of every behavioral targeted network all at once."

He points out that Tacoda, a Union Square Ventures company, puts a link to opt-out of targeting right on their home page.

Twitter?

2007-09-04T09:05:00.000-04:00

Thaddeus Clark, of the amazing Melatone Music blog and record label, writes "The 3 Most Compelling Reasons to Twitter," which to me is the best compilation and description of why Twitter has the potential to be an interesting communications medium.

Number two for Thaddeus: "You can use Twitter for making the liner notes of your life."

He includes this example:

"[H]earing that "polyphonic spree just covered smells like teen spirit. everyone went insane" or "Enjoying my last barbecue of the summer and dreaming of all autumn has to offer" isn't so bad, is it?"

Kind of says it all, in a way.

End to end online ad provider?

2007-08-29T16:25:00.000-04:00

Brian Norgard wonders if its possible:

"The mythical, “End-to-end,” solution is much discussed yet far from being realized. My best guess is that it will emerge from companies that have built tools themselves (or most of them for that matter). There is so much information coordination when it comes to the ad space. Patching together company after company feels difficult, labor intensive and non-optimal from a technical standpoint. The ad spectrum being wide as it is: text, display, CPA, video, etc. and the customers coming from violently different economic stratas–from multi-national conglomerates to mom & pops–I feel a fully integrated, one stop solution is still a ways out."

I tend to agree, yet I know a bunch of folks currently trying this macro level roll up strategy themselves. As Brian writes, the online ad world is so broad, and I have always tended to think about things in buckets anyway. For example lead generation in my mind is a world apart from behavioral targeting.

The more interesting strategy, in any event, could be to find areas where there is consistency of purpose, customers and revenues, and therefore easier operating leverage to be gained from putting the pieces together. For example, an ad network, or exchange, combined with a provider of behavioral analytics. Then, start from that position and see if building out makes sense, or not.

Advertising on social media

2007-08-27T13:52:00.000-04:00

John Borthwick says:

"Ads are often blunt instruments that fail to offer value to a membership engaged in a dynamic conversation – targeting and metadata only get you so far."

Greg Yardley, on the other hand, wonders:

"But what if individual ad targeting gets really good? What if the proportion of ads that don’t work plummet, and start getting replaced with more and more ads that actually make me want new stuff?

What happens to society in general, if due to the increased effectiveness of targeted advertising, we all experience a sudden uptick in the things we want?"

So what about targeted ads that are designed, through their attributes, to reinforce the dynamism of social media? Ads that are delivered based on activities (and conversations, as John says) that are occurring within specific social media. There is alot of value to be created there if someone gets that right.

Moved domains

2007-08-27T12:13:00.001-04:00

From blogspot to www.aweissman.com

Thanks

New York and early stage ventures

2007-08-27T11:10:00.000-04:00

Roger Ehrenberg:

"As both an active angel investor and entrepreneur, I can say one thing for sure: macroeconomic woes aside, the New York early-stage investment scene is vibrant, exciting, and full of possibilities. I have seen more interesting deals with strong business models than any time over the past three years: deal quality is just getting better."

Could not agree more (and I've written about it at Alley Insider). The next few years, even with the macro uncertainty, should be a very interesting time for starting, and investing in, ventures in this area.

Truism

2007-08-16T15:20:00.000-04:00

Henry Blodget, at Silicon Alley Insider, speaks the truth about some online videos:

"Everyone is jumping aboard the executive-video-interview bandwagon, which is too bad, because most executive video interviews suck. Why? Because who has 20-30 minutes to sit around watching glib, telegenic folks dodge questions? The joy of a text-based interview is that you can scan quickly for any news, consume it, and get on with your day."

Venture Capital

2007-07-31T14:22:00.000-04:00

Rarely have I read a more interesting essay about the psychology of venture investing than this piece written by Todd Jaquez-Fissori. I don't know Todd, but his post is a most welcome take written with a rare honesty and rich in both substance and fact:

"Point of this rambling was that there are a 1000 reasons to say no to a deal, and only one reason to say yes. Problem is you get tired of saying no. You get tired of fishing without results and you feel like you are hunting with endless ammunition but with nothing to catch. At last, the compromise.

One could argue what really causes the compromise. It is not the time sink of the deal and diligence process, but maybe the lack of quality deal flow, too much LP money in the system, everyone wanting in on the Internet boom (again!), all the VCs hoping to sell there’ technology-less’ web startup to Google, or maybe even weak partnerships that don’t properly challenge deals because of partnership dynamics."

If venture investing interests you, please read the whole thing.

Revenues kill the dream

2007-07-27T06:10:00.000-04:00

Paul Kedrosky:

Whatever your feelings about Twitter, business plans are overrated, and profits perhaps even more so.

Why? Two reasons. First, because VCs are professional nit-pickers. Give them something to find fault with, and they'll do it with abandon. I generally tell people to come to pitch meetings with less information rather than more. Sure, you'll get pressed for more, but finesse it. Presenting a full and detailed plan is, nine times out of ten, a path to a "No" -- or at least more time-consuming than having said less.

More here.

Seed Investing

2007-07-24T20:38:00.000-04:00

I wrote a piece for the new Silicon Alley Insider site about seed investing in New York.

It is about the fact that while venture funding statistics show larger funds and more later stage investing, there are still a wealth of early ventures being formed, and getting funded.

The article can be found here.

Web Site Measurement

2007-07-24T10:37:00.000-04:00

Page views? Visits per week? Time spent per visit? What's the answer?

Social Degree posits another approach:

A user is much more valuable to a community, to the publisher, and to the advertiser if they are interacting and contributing. 1,000 highly engaged page views is far more valuable than 10,000 non engaged page views to all the stakeholders involved. The best public measurement to date, time spent per page, still falls extremely short of measuring true engagement. In my opinion, the best way to measure engagement is to measure the contribution levels of comments posted, photos posted, blogs posted, (or whatever interaction points are in the community) compared to the number of active users.

As users are now actors, and not just viewers, it makes sense to look at them in terms of what and how they are doing and to what magnitude. And to find new patterns among these behaviors that tells us something more about them in the aggregate.

This is much more interesting than other data sets. And, on the same day that AOL acquires Tacoda, maybe more relevant too.

Quote of the week

2007-07-17T15:15:00.000-04:00

Seth Goldstein:

Netscape browsed the Web. Yahoo! organized it. Google searched it. And now Facebook has made it social.

Right or wrong, it's an interesting characterization.

Plus, it implies myriad opportunities around each point -- browsing, organization, search and social community. Users can benefit through a richness of applications that solve problems in each of those areas. Clearly, the social area is the hot one right now.

Deadliest Catch Media Distribution

2007-07-13T10:47:00.000-04:00

The traditional approach to content distribution has been "if you build it they will come." Distribute quality content in one place, buying the shelf space for that place, then market it to drive users/viewers to that place. TV, cable, movies, etc.

But in chatting about this with Robert, and in recounting the Discovery tv series, Deadliest Catch, we realized that, as with all thoughtful forms of media, that show proposes a much better method of distribution that is consistent with the decentralized nature of media platforms today.

The old media world: you KNOW there are crabs (audiences) in a specific place and you camp out in that place alone, and go in with GREAT bait (marketing).

The Deadliest Catch approach: you lay baskets all over the ocean, and gather the crabs. You ensure their are crabs by going EVERYWHERE.

The crabs are in many places in the ocean. The strategy that places content all over the place will gather the most.

Ads on "social nets"

2007-07-09T18:27:00.000-04:00

Great analysis from Umair at Bubblegen on advertising on social nets:

"The point is - ads on social nets are seriously underperforming at the moment. It's unlikely that naive ads will be the b-model that lets them capture a share of the massive value they have created. Rather, it's when they revolutionize today's stale, inert adscape is when real (top-line) growth will occur."

The way that "social nets" (broadly defined) have radically altered the content production, distribution market needs to be replicated to the way ads are placed, sold and delivered. I'm biased, but I do think that such replication can occur in an obvious way: by viewing the recipient of the ad, and that person's actions, as the focal point of the whole ad system.

Who Participates in Social Media

2007-06-28T20:56:00.000-04:00

Fascinating chart from Business Week showing what people are doing online:

They don't describe the chart as "social media" - but looking at the online actions listed (creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, inactives) seem to be a decent representation of activities associated with new Internet media/content, and of course all media is becoming social media.

The most interesting aspect of this data is not that it confirms conventional wisdom (that kids/youth are driving the user generated content trend), but that the distribution of participants in social media also contains a fairly large percentage of "older " (22-26, 27-50) also participate actively in contributing to online media.

For example. almost 30% of the 27-40 age group have joined social networking sites; similarly, almost 20% of 41-50 year olds have commented on blogs and posted ratings/reviews. Suggesting, quite naturally, that maybe the user-content shift is deeper, and wider, than had previously been thought.

Restructuring Education

2007-06-22T12:05:00.000-04:00

I found some great thoughts at elearnspace:

Restructuring Education

Love this quote by Clay Shirky: "The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the society they live in. As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are transmogrified, replaced, or simply destroyed. We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the music and newspaper businesses, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences — employees and the world. The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organizational structures, is epochal. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without radical alteration." (via Mark Oehlert).

In my mind, there is little doubt that we are at the initial stages of tremendous change to our educational structures. The way in which we interact with knowledge - co-creation, commenting, amateur peer-evaluation, openness, etc. - is strongly at odds with traditional education. Classrooms have been conceived as comprising a single prominent node (the teacher). Our daily interactions are multi-nodal. Our experience with information in multi-perspective. The question that remains for me is whether education can evolve on it's own...or whether it will be transformed/revolutionized by outside forces.

(emphasis mine).

The "evolution" of education, like the evolution of most markets (and I do consider education a market), will be driven by outside forces. I don't think, however, that those outside forces will come from companies, service providers, thinkers, etc. instead, the evolution will be derive from the students themselves. In this way, education actually won't be transformed by outside forces per se. But in the same way the students today, in their individual and social lives, co-create, comment, peer-socialize, etc. -- in the ways people are already multi-modal -- those shifts will alter education irrevocably because students will implicitly require that it happens. That transformation promises to not only create many new opportunities, but also to be extremely interesting as well.

Ad serving is officially a commodity

2007-06-21T08:59:00.001-04:00

Well, this has probably already been the case for years, but in the past two weeks:

*Openads, the "free, open source ad server," announced a $5mm funding, in part to become an open advertising platform. Their core products, Openads 2.o (formerly phpAdsNew) and Openads 2.3, are licensed open source under the GPL.

*Exponential, parent company of ad network Tribal Fusion, released a free commercial ad server.

In many ways these two events are not surprising as ad technology providers rip apart the online advertising stack and attempt to provide real differentiated services (and business models) at points where those services are truly valuable. Ad serving is valuable, obviously, but most publishers consider it an expense, and not an investment. Targeting, analytics, networks and exchanges more clearly result in revenues.

Amit Shah, one of the founders of Openads, writes that one of their goals, is "to allow as many participants in the advertising ecosystem to work together on one platform for mutual benefit."

Whether it's one platform or many, with the price of ad serving trending towards zero (what moves will the non-free serving companies make in the next few weeks?), the company that can, with transparency to the publishers provide demonstrated value in those upper regions of the stack will have an interesting, and I think lucrative, run of the market in the next few years.

Half of the ad network story

2007-06-11T10:26:00.000-04:00

My friends at Lotame processed their one billionth ad transaction this weekend and will quickly double that.

At the same time, Jeremy Liew writes about content specific ad networks that in effect are creating synthetic ad channels:

"Synthetic channels, like the channels on the big portals, have an advantage in this respect. By guaranteeing that all sites in their network are about a single topic, they can aggregate a critical mass in traffic while still enjoying endemic site RPMs. This is, in a sense, a “hack” to true contextual targeting, but it has the advantage of being simple to understand and hence simple to sell to advertisers."

Examples of content specific ad networks that Jeremy points to include Jump Start and Glam.

Ad networks fill an important gap in the online publishing equation -- the efficient and orderly monetization of content assets. That being said, clearly ad networks are great for advertisers and the networks, but are they great for publishers? Some, like Mike On Ads, believe ad exchanges can/will step in to balance that equation.

I think the ad network businesses are becoming commodities and as such the drive for differentiation and higher prices leads, on one path, to content specific channels. It's one reason I like the vertical ad business of Adify so much - it attempts to place itself out of the domain specificity business and just provide the relevant platform and tools.

And, exchanges are also a way to provide differentiated unbiased value, but they too could become commodities as their numbers rise.

But I still think networks, synthetic ad channels, vertical ad businesses, etc., are only half the equation, because they all still focus primarily on the content side of the equation, the publisher's perspective. They provide great value in determining what a consumer's interests are, based on the sites being visited (that's precisely the value proposition of a synthetic channel). But in using the content as the starting point, they run the risk of merely re-creating the ad business online. Same old inside-out model.

They don't yet provide enough value on what the consumer of content is doing, with and to that content. They don't flip the ad perspective to concentrate on the actions consumers take and then create value from there. Media companies, as Roger Ehrenberg points out, are and have to move to this focal point. I think the next wave of real online ad innovation will be parallel to this trend and move away from content toward the consumer. It's an important step that can help the new models -- including synthetic channels -- add much more value than being associated with a vertical domain.

Why I love Mahalo

2007-05-31T08:51:00.000-04:00

Jason Calacanis has a new venture, Mahalo, and I love it.

It's not because I think the idea of the "first human-powered search engine" is a necessarily novel or a good one -- I have no idea if this is new or even interesting.

(that being said, one of the first human-powered pages they put up is a nice set of content and links about the Grateful Dead, so something right is going on over there).

It's that, if the press reports such as this by Paid Content are accurate, this venture launches out of the box with at least $16 million in funding with backing by some brand name partners and people, and there is at least one report that Calacanis says this venture has enough capital to run for four years without revenue.

In a venture world where the leading mantra of the past few years has been the ability (and desirability) to start a company with $250,000 (or less), where venture funding comes in smaller and milestone based chunks (get a product up and running, hit 100,000 users, see that it scales, see how viral it spreads, etc.), it's refreshing to see someone going after a big idea (finding relevant content) in a big way (lots of hype) with lots of resources at the outset (partners and funding).

After all, new venture creation is supposed to be about going big, which means you often fail in a big way, but you sometimes succeed in a massive way. Mahalo, and Calacanis and its partners, seem to implicitly understand this equation. So I love this new venture.

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized." Daniel Burnham.

POTS -- Plain Old Text (sites, services)

2007-05-21T15:51:00.000-04:00

Atif Rafiq, in an essay called "In Defense of the Text Web, writes that:

"[I]t’s simplistic to believe that anything produced in text today can be better consumed in video. The written word is and will remain the optimal form for a lot of content. Yes, the same news story can be transformed into news video. But the relevance of one over the other is a function of user needs."

Atif is right. Lost in the shuffle of innovation (and hype) related to video, photos, and music are the myriad of services arising to take on the challenge of plain old text in an online world. Such as digitizing it. Organizing it (here too). Contextualizing it.

Faster, cheaper bandwidth has allowed the promise of streaming media to be finally realized, which has provided numerous wonderful services to proliferate. It has also allowed new, just as impressive, products and ways of thinking about text data to be developed.

Online video advertising -- halfway there

2007-05-14T09:38:00.000-04:00

This weekend I read about two interesting companies developing advertising platforms for online video providers and publishers.

ScanScout's technology scans video content, creates intelligence about the clip and then dynamically matches ads to the content and intelligence it has just created.

Adap.tv also appears to scan video content and then shows targeted ads, with a particular focus right now on targeted direct response offers.

Both of these services do seem to advance the state of advertising around online video content, but they also appear to be missing an important focal point -- that of the viewer or user of the content. They take a very traditional approach -- looking at the content, and delivering services outward from the publisher or content perspective. This is an important approach, but one that I think misses an even more important perspective and movement occurring, whereby value is being created by looking at the viewer, the consumer, the actor participating in the content. After all, isn't that what community and connectivity are all about. Such an outside-in approach to creating value is where real radical businesses will be built. Maybe these two new companies are just a start.

Carmun Links

2007-04-30T14:37:00.000-04:00

Some comments on Carmun from around the world today:

Networking aims beyond facebooks: Boston Globe

New Resource Rating and Sharing site: Out of the Jungle

Carmun: Helpful Student Tool or Evil Conspiracy -- Connecting the Dots

Educational tides

2007-04-26T13:11:00.000-04:00

"Surely this is exactly what an education institution should want – collaborative learning. They’re always banging on about the collaborative environment of a school, college or university, so why not accelerate this using the very technology that the students use anyway. The tide of web 2.0 use has flooded over the campus walls an it’s too late to stop it, so embrace it. There comes a point where bottom up becomes so compelling that it becomes the new top-down." Donald Clark

(via Edson)

What does open mean?

2007-04-24T14:52:00.000-04:00

Great definition:

"Open data is to media what open source is to technology. Open data is an approach to content creation that explicitly recognizes the value of implicit user data. The internet is the first medium to give a voice to the attention that people pay to it. Successful open data companies listen for and amplify the rich data that their audiences produce."

Seth Goldstein

The search war is over, Google has won, and I couldn't be happier

2007-04-13T10:23:00.000-04:00

It's being widely reported that Google's share of the U.S. search market has climbed yet again.

This data is consistent with two points I've recently found. On the quantitative side, 6 weeks into the initial launch of Carmun, we' see that about 60% of the initial traffic has come from search engines, and of that search traffic close to 95% was delivered from Google search. On the qualitative side, prior to March we conducted numerous formal and informal focus groups at NYU, Tufts and Columbia. Overwhelmingly the students told us that Google was their starting point for Internet discovery. And by overwhelmingly I mean over 95% of these kids used Google exclusively for discovery.

I therefore declare the U.S. search war to be over. Google has won and it is becoming the sole starting point for the delivery of web content and services. It won because it works really well for users and and incremental advances will not matter to users -- those doing to searching.

I'm totally thrilled with this development. This makes it that much easier to develop and deliver interesting web services. Google does an amazing job of searching through the raw data that is the web (the web as the database). However it is they do it, they are the best ever at providing relevance to search.

But Google does not provide context to search. And that is a vast, huge opportunity, because I believe the next stage of search innovation is about providing context on top of and utilizing Google's dominance relevance. Kind of like adding an application layer called Context on top of Google.

For example, in searching for a hotel in Puerto Rico, one of the top results is from tripadvisor, which delivers ratings, reviews, deals and related information to that search. In other words, it provides a layer of context on top of the original Google search.

Similarly, searching for Mud Coffee in New York (the best coffee there is), brings me results from yelp, 23 reviews, maps and a community. Again, context.

Finally, someone interested in Arthurian legends who searches for a summary of Lancelot and Guinevere might find their way to this project list on Carmun, where a user has put together their own compendium of 38 works related to this subject, with ratings, reviews, groups and a way to locate a work at a university library.

These three examples of context on top of Google results are powerful because they demonstrate the richness and variety that web applications can add to raw indexed data. Having one provider who excels at indexing that data and making it searchable, and having that provider deliver the vast majority of searches, actually makes it easier and more efficient for us service providers to add innovation -- context -- on top of the search.

For that reason I am thrilled that Google has won the search war.

Iggy Pop

2007-04-11T12:49:00.000-04:00

"Iggy Pop, now 59, is the captain of these inside-outside actions. Try to take your eyes off him. How he re-enacts fear, rage, sex, abject boredom, universal love and lethal cynicism, while dancing with originality, remembering lyrics and maintaining the delicate middle-state between having pants on and not having pants on, is why he is he, and you are merely you."

-- New York Times, April 11, 2007

Open Data 2007

2007-03-14T11:03:00.000-04:00

The Open Data 2007 session yesterday at Reuters, organized in part by Seth Goldstein, was interesting, as others have reported.

And while much of the debate centered around what exactly were the implications of open data in the web world, I was surprised that there was indeed alot of surprise about the extent to which our behaviors and actions are being tracked and the data therefrom being manipulated and analyzed, for example to provide targeted advertising or to track "buzz data" (people from Tacoda, Right Media, AggregateKnowledge and BuzzMetrics all participated in this event).

In my naivety perhaps I believed it was common knowledge that most people building or involved in web applications knew the magnitude to which these actions are being analyzed. Indeed, with the rise of web services, I would have thought the availability of such services to ingest the stream of data individuals are producing and then output that stream in new ways was not in question. And, that the extent of the use of cookies in online advertising was surely not new news.

My assumptions were proven wrong at the Open Data sessions. Which raises a more fundamental question about our data that was not answered. At a certain level I subscribe to the Jerry Garcia theorem of open data - when Garcia was asked many times how the Grateful Dead could allow the open taping and trading of tapes of their shows, he replied:

"Once we're done with it, you can have it"

Once he produced the music, it could freely be had. The corollary here being that once information is produced in this digital medium it can be utilized by others. The original value to the producer comes with that initial act of producing. Then our interconnected mashed up world takes over. (Of course, Garcia was not referring to others profiting from his downstream music, so maybe this theory falls apart here).

Nevertheless, I think I am in the minority in subscribing to this view. But maybe it's important to consider nonetheless. For example, Roger Ehrenberg's Monitor110 is doing fascinating things monitoring a breadth of content across the web, and then applying analysis and a presentation layer to create actionable value from this information to the investment community. If, for example, I am writing alot about advertising and education, and somehow Roger's engine picks that up and correlates it with other info he then sells to hedge funds interested in private innovation in those segments, what's his obligation to me? To let me know? To compensate me? To allow me to opt out from his collecting activities? And if there is some obligation he has, will that then stifle innovation? Do we even care about that as an outcome? The issues not only relate to rights ($$), but perhaps more important ones such as notice and consent. And, of course, privacy.

And this same type of example applies with respect to the services BuzzMetrics provides, or the data AggregateKnowledge collects.

Ultimately I think in this example he (or any other similar provider) has no obligation to me based on the Garcia Theorem listed above. The social compact, if you will, is that my interest in the content is in the act of producing it, and not down stream from there. It's a cost, if you will, of living and producing digitally. And if someone can utilize that data for new services, maybe the greater good is served.

Or maybe not.

Coffee cart, Astor Place

2007-03-14T09:57:00.000-04:00

Outside In Services

2007-03-04T10:08:00.000-05:00

In reading the recent Piper Jaffray Internet Advertising report, I was struck by what the report lists as trend number three in the "Media World Order:"

Indeed, I think the implications of this concept are greater than as relates to a strict definition of the media world.

Maybe we should start to call these things "Outside In Services" -- those services that begin their conception of value creation from outside the confines of what is traditionally considered areas where value, control and distribution lie. Services which create new ways of looking at data and people and content, using the actors (or customers, or users) involved with the data and content as the focal point, and not necessarily the distributor or publisher or even service provider. Such actors have generally been considered, at least by publishers, as passive recipients. Audiences, if you will. Similarly, value has traditionally been considered to lie with the content or services delivered to those actors.

By viewing actors as being the locus of activity enables radically new ways of creating businesses to serve those actors/customers/users. These services are Outside In because, while they serve a user base, their functionality and utility derive from the actors, not from the content. Thus, they create value from outside the system (starting with the users), pointing in (towards the content or publisher or service provider). The actors to these services do not necessarily have to be generating the content themselves (and so this applies to a much broader base than "user generated content"), although that is an easy starting point and a radical evolution in and of itself. Outside In Services start with a premise (philosophical, almost, and different, definitely) of where and how services can/should be delivered. Then they use that thinking to create new ways of doing business.

Outside.in is a good example and not just because their name applies specifically to this concept. This business starts with the proposition that, when it comes to information about neighborhoods, or localities, there is indeed no good center or publisher to work with. Thus, value here can best come from (and amplified and be promoted) the outside, from distributed postings, content, comments and listings. In a way, Outside.in is remaking itself as a new kind of center. This has lots of implications, take politics as an example. It's also been noted that maybe the inside-out, opposite approach to this market is too hard to scale and grow. More interesting commentary from some investors in this service.

Aggregate Knowledge is another good case study -- helping drive ecommerce, for example, not using products as the center, but again by considering users' interactions with products to drive data, sales and relevancy. The actors at the center of retail is how I think about this one.

Interestingly, Dapper looks at the issue by considering the content, or the data associated with a website, to be the actor itself, and then they provide services to push that data, those actions, form the inside to the outside, where they can then be utilized for even more services.

I'm also lucky to be involved in two other companies that are taking outside in approaches to business. Lotame is spinning the advertising and analytics business on its head by looking at that industry from the perspective of content users, viewers and audiences. Lotame looks at these actors and their actions and interests in digesting web content as the basis for providing value-added marketing services to publishers. Thus, for Lotame what's less relevant is web content qua content, and what matters MUCH more is what people are doing to that content and what they exhibit as interests.

Finally, Carmun is attempting to redefine educational or learning value by allowing learners and students to create connections and insights themselves outside of a school or other institution, and then use those connections or insights in old or new ways.

There are many more examples of Outside In Services and thinking. For example, take a look at Jay Gould's framework for creating an online business and see how many of his criteria are focused on criteria outside the content or service (all of them).

Outside in learning

2007-02-28T11:32:00.000-05:00

In looking at what I wrote are the top 10 interesting learning technology applications currently available, one common theme is that they are all "outside in" services. In other words, they don't start with the proposition that learning, or education, begins with an institution. Indeed, they all explicitly or implicitly reject that proposition and instead posit that the student, the learner, can also be at the core of education and learning.

Thus, while I do find some learning, or course, management systems to to be useful (and even necessary) applications, they are less interesting examples of leveraging technology to fundamentally shift the learning and educational paradigms.

As edugator writes:

Curration and editorial control are the two key ingredients in the secret sauce that turn information into knowledge. This is the much-overlooked other side of the Web 2.0 coin: who filters the signal from the noise? Traditional publishers who accept the paradigm shift and make their materials accessible online in new ways will continue to wield strong advantages based on well-earned reputation and competency. Meanwhile, an enormous opportunity has opened for others to step and provide context to the clutter.

Indeed, real innovation will come from doing alot more than making materials accessible online -- it will come from making connections, in a data-accessible way -- by and among information and people. It will come from giving those tools (and the control that comes from it) directly to consumers themselves in, as some have suggested, a DIY fashion. That is a paradigm shift that my top-10 list attempts to get at.

Finally, my partner Jonathan Edson recently wrote about a macro level view of this and what we are trying to do with Carmun in the context of what he calls "Intellectual Enfranchisement:"

At Carmun, we hope to build a virtual community that provides access for any and all people to that same kind of intellectual foment. If we are successfully, perhaps one day, people will feel that the education you receive has to do with what you put into it and not what institution you are lucky to attend.

Top 10 innovative educational technology services

2007-02-21T09:17:00.000-05:00

While developing own our app, we've come across dozens of other services that sit at the intersection of education and advanced Internet technologies.

Here is a list of the most interesting ones out there, based on those that I think are advancing, or attempting to advance, the use of technology and the Internet in particular in the evolution of next-generation learning models. And, while my partner Jonathan Edson and I clearly think that Carmun is among the most interesting of these, in that it provides a suite of tools and applications for conducting research, as well as community layered on top of it for collaboration, kind of an application layer for other services, I did not list it here.

Plus this is not necessarily in order if importance, it's just a simple list. So here goes:

10. Librivox: free public domain audio books, innovative not just for distribution of non-textual material but because the volunteer nature of the service is the definition of doing something for the good of the community.

9. Curriki: while I am generally skeptical about grandiose business/idea claims without seeing the tactical implementation of those schemes, the idea of open and shared curricula is consistent with the most innovative online ventures, so this one is too big to ignore, at least for now.

8. Zotero: relatively new, but great integration with Firefox and some of the cleanest automatic citation capture available. As a project living out of George Mason University, it will be interesting to see how this grows and evolves.

7. Anystream: their "Apreso" product line allows for the capture of university-specific rich media content, and then making that content digital. A complicated task, but their vision of taking what's analog and providing for its delivery and manipulation in digital form is an interesting and large one.

6. Connotea: reference management and bookmarking tools, sets the standard for meta-data on top on research with a heavy scientific bent.

5. WorldCat: the library of libraries, the most comprehensive source catalog in the world, maybe? While I do wish for an open API that I could use for things like search and their tool set (such as ISBNdb), there is interesting stuff sneaking out of their labs such as FictionFinder, Identities, and Lorcan Dempsey's blog, suggesting that there is way more to this than a large database and, indeed, the fruits of real data analysis, manipulation and collaboration may not be far behind.

4. Google Scholar: amazingly rich database of scholarly materials, with a unique ranking/relevancy system. Returns in-books results from Google Book Search, very interesting on that front, but in any event deep, great UI and easy to use. We're seeing alot of citations being bookmarked from this over the past few weeks.

3. Stanford Wiki: while I believe that most educational and academic collaboration change has to come from the outside in ("To educate such students, we don't so much need a faculty as we need an intellectual network," Henry Jenkins), this is a great example of how to do it the other way, form inside the ivory towers but using students as the change agents. Very exciting. See also PennTags.

2. Facebook, for demonstrating how to create a rich community by, for and among students.

1. Internet Archive: a digital library of web sites and other "cultural artifacts," a wonderful amazing ongoing project, is there any doubt that the importance of this increases exponentially over time?

Why Carmun?

2007-02-16T13:49:00.001-05:00

Over the past five years, I've seen an abundance of web-based innovation centered around structuring data and different data-types.

Many interesting applications have been developed to address a similar problem: how to manage data-types in an always-connected, Internet-centric environment. Some of these data types are new and digital (digital music and photography, for example), and some are old and analog but are now being delivered and consumed in a digital world (news and information and search).

Thus, we've seen applications such as Flickr to manipulate the data type digital images. iTunes and Last.fm to manipulate digital sound data. YouTube for more streaming moving images media. Wikipedia for "objective" information. Google for search. Facebook and MySpace for social community. Huffington Post for the news. Delicious for web pages. Etc.

What I find common is that these categories of applications all solve the same problem: how to structure, categorize and manipulate different types of data in a digital presentation and application environment.

Additionally, they all use common techniques to achieve their result and bring utility to users. Namely, collaborative filtering, user generated content for creation and sharing, interoperability.

Carmun is an attempt to bring these phenomena to education. Whereas applications called social networks seem to exist to help improve one's social life, Carmun's mission is to help improve academic experience and outputs. Thus, the "data-type" Carmun attempts to help organize, share and manipulate is research: books, articles and more generally sources. It's goal is to transform the way people share, use and generate knowledge, thereby making academic tasks easier and enabling powerful new communities of learning. It will contain tools and community to achieve that.

It's a large, complicated task that solves a few problems: existing tools are expensive and not connected; the nature of education can inhibit collaboration; existing communities don't improve the academic experience. In essence, we're attempting to build a tools and collaboration "application layer" on top of education. Clarence Fischer explained it as: "Share what you know. Tear down the walls." C. Elizabeth Thomas has mixed feelings but kindly wrote that "I’m wondering why I have mixed feelings and am beginning to think it’s my paradigm shifting…." Other comments are here and here.

Education and technology

2007-02-06T21:06:00.000-05:00

I am working on a longer post about Carmun (http://www.carmun.com/) for sometime in the next week. Needless to say, my post, and this business I founded in general, are about utilizing technology in new ways to enhance learning, connections, and learning connections.

Thus, I regularly read the work of Clarence Fisher, a teacher who writes wonderfully interesting materials on his site called Remote Access, about technology and learning. His thoughts are particularly insightful because he is a practitioner, an educator, and can therefore speak from firsthand experience.

On his site today he wrote about the familiar concept of signal vs noise, but applied to learning:

"When students are aggregating streams of content in many forms, from many sources each day, the ability to lift out certain pieces from that stream to examine them further, or to simply tag them as important to their understanding of an issue is a skill to consider. It is essential information management that has yet to make it into classrooms in any wide spread form. Understanding that a picture from flickr goes with that blog post, which built on a podcast from last week and a comment before that is a difficult, mature understanding of how content is created, distributed, and built upon."

While my longer exposition here is being written, I would also like to suggest that the tools and applications to manage this type of "information management" (the ability to take disparate, and multiplied sources of info, and make connections among them efficiently and appropriately) , in the context of education and learning, have only begun to emerge. I believe that those tools, in turn, will help spread information management into many areas, classroom included.

No comment needed

2007-01-29T12:37:00.000-05:00

For Anglicans who still haven't found what they're looking for, the Church of England is staging its first "U2-charist" communion service -- replacing hymns with hit songs by the Irish supergroup.
Yahoo News

The iPod Bubble

2007-01-26T10:19:00.000-05:00

Anthony Volodkin of Hypemachine, on the Podblop Blog:

iPod or Zune?

iPod, but I don't even listen to my iPod anymore. I soak in the surroundings. When I take the train, I look at people. It's interesting. I think it's the next stage after you live with the iPod in the iPod bubble. After you are tired of this, you want to see what's in your surroundings.

Superchunk, The First Part:

One good minute could last me a whole year.

Perspective

2007-01-23T11:10:00.000-05:00

"What we’re about to tell you is so shocking . . .

. . . we ask that you please be seated before reading on.

There once was a time when “home entertainment system” meant “jigsaw puzzle” and "interactive experience” meant “wedgie.”

Honest to Pete.

Not yet chained to their high-tech toys, bored kids actually left the house and did things with other kids, instead of plopping down in a dark room strewn with empty Red Bull cans and dirty socks to IM their friend around the corner and update their daily blog documenting exactly what they had for lunch that day and exactly how they felt about it.

Unbelievable, but true."

Sundazed Tymes, No. 14

Mashup Camp 3

2007-01-17T22:35:00.000-05:00

Attending Mashup Camp this week, really stimulating bunch of people and conversations. Much to digest, but two things standout:

-- Jon Aizen and Eran Shir of Dapper, smart guys with a wild technology to extract content, or create an API in essence, from any web site. Nice guys too. I think this could help as we grow Carmun towards integrating more third party relevant content and helping students find that information. Could also potentially help our library lookups.

-- Seeing Anthony Volodkin show off and talk about The Hype Machine. While I have read and used The Hype Machine for a while now, actually meeting Anthony and hearing his thoughts behind the service, one is reminded that behind digital services are real people with real ideas and thoughts building them with passion and innovation. It makes the usage of the services that much more interesting, for me at least. Great stuff.

Carmun, Education

2007-01-15T13:52:00.000-05:00

[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og:

So far we've predominantly been discovering better ways of representing standard course materials on webpages. This corresponds to the first phase of a new form of media: that of a new way to do old things. "Cell phones are like landlines without cords." At some point a paradigm shift occurs, and the new form of media isn't "Old Media With Feature X" but a separate thing in its own right, and gets used in apps that weren't even on the radar before; smartphones, SMS, and location-based messaging, for example. The two phenomena snowball into each other, and soon enough the world is chang'd, at least in some small way.
We're seeing the beginnings of a transformation for education as seen through the internet corresponding to just this kind of shift, where we move beyond the "put the old class material on html" and into... what? I don't know, but here are three trends I've got my eyes on; ambient information, communities of apprenticeship, and public reflection. I'll cover each of these in a separate post later on, with the disclaimer (courtesy of my friend David) that it's tough to predict a horizon that's shrinking towards you; a few years from now we'll probably look at these posts and laugh.
In the meantime, take a peek at Carmun. It's a web 2.0 startup designed to help students track and share reference lists - for instance, if I'm taking a course in educational theory, I can put articles and books from class in Carmun and they'll be there for seamless referencing and bibliography creation later on when I'm writing my final paper. Better yet, if you take the same course next semester and ask me about good books to read on the subject, I can send you my reference list via Carmun (with links to the original papers and everything) instead of copy-pasting my pdf's endnotes into an email (where you'd have to laboriously re-search for each article in JSTOR anyway). You can write notes on papers and books, rate and tag them, and generally use it as an all-purpose reading list for whatever you're interested in learning.

Segments and Data

2007-01-12T15:03:00.000-05:00

Sramana Mitra:

I would submit, that Yahoo hardly needs to do anything drastic, except, that it needs to reorganize its entire portfolio into Segments and Lifestyles, and align the 4Cs of each segment, so that the people interested in advertising to a particular segment can reach the community in a focused way, in Context. If they want to sell Groceries to people reading recipes, they should be able to reach them right there. Or, if they have Gadget Geeks researching a cell phone, they should be able to access that eye-ball, in Context.

Amazingly insightful. Audience and user segmentation, I believe, is the key to unlocking value from community driven publishing and media models and businesses. The ability to segment, in turn, requires a discrete level of correlated user, usage, media and context data. It needs to be collected (efficiently, which the right detail to drive its organization, which I submit is not trivial), stored, analyzed and delivered in actionable pieces, to publisher and advertiser.

While this level of analytics is only now beginning to be available, it is, as I have written before, remarkably powerful.

Advertising, Data, once more

2007-01-12T10:11:00.000-05:00

Dave Morgan (via Andy Monfried):

We have unique consumer insights and can tell advertisers and their agencies valuable things about their audiences and their campaigns and their products and services--things that they didn't know, and need to know. This can help them reach consumers in places that are not apparent to them right now, thus opening up underdeveloped inventory. Over time, I think that we will find that online ad-based consumer insights will be more valuable than the media that we use to deliver the ad and capture the insights.

Advertising = data.

Pain

2007-01-10T08:54:00.000-05:00

Andy Monfried writes that that best businesses are those that solve a customer's pain. Without that pain, it's hard to build a solid and long lasting business that makes money.

Sometimes things that are really cool, technically innovative indeed, do not have a focused and clear way of making something easier, cheaper, faster for a customer, taking their problem and offering a solution that is significantly better that what currently exists.

In my opinion much of the current talk about mobile advertising and marketing lacks a clear focus on precisely what customer pain is being solved in a material way. Getting pinged with a starbucks coupon as I walk past the store not only seems marginal, it may even be intrusive.

I'm still waiting for a huge, important business to come from all this.

Online advertising, again, equals data

2007-01-02T21:53:00.000-05:00

"Someone will successfully fuse social networking and online advertising. If I am interested in some topic, like programming in Ruby, or Vespa scooters (along with thousands of like-minded others), then sponsoring an online watering hole for aficionados should make sense. But no one has cracked the code yet, except for the mega-sites like MySpace and Yahoo. This should be the area that traditional media companies would move into, if they had any sense."
- Stowe Boyd, Jan, 2, 2007

Right on. Once the goals of online advertising are seen as being primarily data-driven (and less about brand or even direct response), as many have written, than this vision will become a reality.

I don't think its an easy code to crack necessarily(because of the data repository and analysis needs -- think of the cycles to be spent finding Vespa interest data points and correlating them with advertiser messages), but it will happen in 2007.