March 2008 Archives

GroupPress is coming along, yet still has a ways to go.  There are still some essential ingredients that are missing as well as many spices to finish it off.

The following is list of what we currently have and what we are currently missing:

What we have:

-         The basic "group page" of aggregated shared content

-         The "on-page" discussion overlay with partial functionality.

-         The ability to share items using the Marklet and on-page discussion back to the group page.

-         Feasibly, we have the URL that can be shared with others (although not the mechanism to easily share) that loads the page with the on-page overlay.

What's missing:

-         On-page tools and functionality: highlighting, annotating, drawing, etc.  The discussion is primitive at this point.

-         Limited group page "dimensions".  The goal is to create an efficient dashboard for the group's shared items and activity as portrayed in the mock-ups.  What's there now is much like a Facebook Newsfeed.

-         User accounts

-         Multiple group management

-         Smoothness and speed

-         Customization

-         XML

-         The major sharing mechanisms.  The goal is to have this thing spread virally--be able to share the on-page discussion with anyone.

-         A proper name and domain

I'm continuing my journey through academia, this time, though, applying it to our very own business ventures.  What I am interesting in is how organizations, groups of people, businesses, etc. share information.  What are the best ways that this can happen?  How does it benefit the group?  How can this be motivated and encouraged (assuming the outcome is desirable)?

I'll be attempting to answer these questions using the intellectual brute of academic literature.

I'll be sharing my findings--what I find interesting and relevant to our venture--and documenting my progress and learning process through a series of posts. 

I just wrote a post on failure as the rite of passage to becoming an entrepreneur.

Then I started thinking more about failure and how failure is a skill.  People can learn to fail.

This last weekend Russ and I were snowboarding in Mammoth.  He and I both fell a few times, but they weren't bad falls.  Mostly because we had learned to fall.

Compare this to when we were learning how to snowboard.  Each fall was painful.  After a day of snowboarding we could barely walk.

But now, when we fall, we don't even come to a stop.  We can pick ourselves up mid-fall and keep going.

In other words, we've learned to fail. 

The same can be said for many of our affiliate marketing campaigns.

When I was running with Brad Feld the other day he told me that he sees 25 year old entrepreneurs all the time that have never failed before.  This shocked me.

How can you consider yourself, or call someone else, an entrepreneur, having never failed before?

This got me thinking.  Then it got me thinking about Star Wars.  Then I changed my personal definition of what an entrepreneur is.

Remember when Luke Skywalker is training to become a Jedi with Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back?  When Luke decides to leave to go save his friends in Cloud City, Yoda tells him that if he leaves now he will lose all that he has worked for in his training.  Luke responds with something like, "but I'm a Jedi".  Yoda then says, "No, you must first face Vader".

Maybe this isn't the best example, but in order for entrepreneurs to become entrepreneurs, they must FIRST fail!  Failure is a rite of passage.  Just as Luke must confront Vader to become a Jedi.

So, to formally amend my personal definition of what/who an entrepreneur is: they must first FAIL.

A Professor, myself, and a few of my classmates had coffee with Craig Newmark on Monday.  He is probably one of the most down-to-earth people I've ever met.

In fact, so down-to-earth it was almost surreal.  Strange.

Anyway, it was interesting to hear him talk about the success of craiglist.  He summed it up something like this: "We have no idea what we are doing, why we are successful, or how we are doing it...we just kind of go with the flow".

It's interesting because every entrepreneur wants to know "How'd you do it?!", "How are you so successful?", "What's your secret?".  Craig's response is usually something like this: "We don't know how it happened, but it happened".

Anyway, toward the end of the coffee session he pulled out a tiny little computer and said, "I've got to do some customer service now", and that is how it ended...

Russ has a nice post on Amazon's new Facebook apps Giver and Grapevine. 

Here are my thoughts on the apps:

They suck.

I doubt they will do very well as far as building a user base.  Unlike Visual Bookshelf, which Russell cited as a good example of a useful Facebook App, Amazon's apps are not useful.  At least not to me and my intuition tells me not to very many others.

First, who cares what you are doing on Amazon? And probably, in a lot of cases, you don't want others to know what you're doing on Amazon.

Second, Facebook is not the place to display your wish list.  In fact, you shouldn't display it anywhere.  I think it's tacky, cheesy, snobbish.

There must be some unhappy Amazon affiliates this week with the announcement of Amazon Giver and Grapevine. TechCrunch has the scoop. These two new facebook apps allow you to get an Amazon wishlist right on your Facebook profile page. They also allow you to get product recommendations and actually buy products without leaving Facebook.

   
My initial thought was that this is a big bummer for the half a dozen or so other apps that already link to amazon product pages (with a nice little affiliate link). Competition from the big fish has gotta hurt the conversion rate. It also makes you wonder how successful are these Facebook apps that try to monetize by driving affiliate conversions? There are apps like visual bookshelf that are actually useful. They provide a useful service that users actually want. In Visual Bookshelf's case they let you see what your friends are reading. They also provide a link to Amazon were you can buy your copy. Visual Bookshelf has over 29,000 active users today. Apparently someone likes the app, but are people buying books from it?

Amazon must think there is some potential here, but as of today Grapevine and Giver have 124 and 221 active users respectively.  Granted the apps have been live for less than a week, but thats still not much of an adoption. Time will tell. Bill care to weigh in?

A few days ago Brad Feld was in town speaking on a panel at the IP & Entrepreneurship Symposium here at the Boalt School of Law at Berkeley.  Being a fan of his blog I signed up to attend.

The evening before the conference I emailed Brad and asked if he wanted to go on a run Friday morning before the conference.  I won't lie, I felt a bit creepy/stalker-ish, but he emailed back and said yes.

Nothing like a 6 AM run through the streets of Berkeley and campus.  After a refreshing, pitch-black walk over to his hotel at 5:30am or so, we met up and set off.

"Thanks for reaching out", he said in response to my asking him to go on a run.

"Thanks for not calling the cops", I should have replied.

Anyway, the run lasted 48 minutes or so, as I gave him the grand tour of Berkeley and campus and back to his hotel.

We had one of the most interesting and entertaining conversations I have had in a long time.  We talked on so many different topics, ranging from the Web and entrepreneurship to foreign policy and American sentiment now and during the Vietnam War era.

There was never a dull moment and I was a bit sad when it had to end.  Brad is an incredibly interesting and fun person; certainly atypical of other VCs I've met.  

Thanks for reaching back, Brad.

Tiddlywinks, apparently.

Internet startups are starting and running cheaper than ever.  Frugality is a point of pride.

"Money in the bank is cash for your wages", says Gianforte in Bootstrapping Your Business.

I am glad that innovation is cheaper and entrepreneurship is cheaper than ever before, mostly because the timing is right for our start-up.

I even pride myself on my cost conscious attitude.  

But when does cutting costs become cutting corners?  When is frugality dangerous in a start-up?  When should you spend the extra buck and do it right?

I imagine these are questions with "fine line" answers.

Should you ever cut corners on legal fees? Which ones?

Is having an accountant a luxury or a best practice?

Innovation is getting cheaper for those on the web. 

Server costs are falling; better yet, cloud computing is making it cheaper and easier for startups to scale quickly and effectively.

Storage costs are continuing to fall as well.  As it gets cheaper and cheaper, more and more are giving it away for free. 

Microsoft's recently increased storage space on Windows Live Skydrive from 1GB to 5GB.  Google came out of nowhere and gave away 1GB of email storage with each Gmail account.  YouTube did it for video. 

I even remember the days when I was doing HTML work, hosting on GeoCities, AngelFire and others.  They were all competing with each other on how much space they could give away for free.  When I started 5 or 10mb was huge! Today that's paltry.

The Web 2.0 boom has been making it easier and cheaper to innovate.  More so, companies are quicker to get off the ground due to so many cheap, or free, ways of doing things.

Google Docs means free document collaboration.

Skype means free calls, even if its VOIP.

Skydrive means free 5GB of online storage and backup.  Share among colleagues.

Legal forms are standardized, cheap, and easily accessible.

And of course, the most important thing: Information!  Information on every topic is more abundant than ever, so much so that we are having problems sorting through it.

I was gone this weekend, busy yesterday, and impatient today. 

I noticed something on Jason Calacanis' blog today that struck the entrepreneurial nerve in me.  I'm not a regular reader of his blog so I don't often have a chance to notice this.

Jason, being very popular and active in the Tech/Web world, has a list of social networks, microblogging, social bookmarking, and other popular Web 2.0 tools that he wants you to be his friend on.  He wants you to add him as a friend on Facebook, follow him on Twitter, see his activity on del.icio.us, etc...

Behold, exhibit A.
This got me thinking.  Isn't there some way to simplify this?  Why not create a single button that expands into an entire menu that does this. 

Just like the AddThis and ShareThis services.  The situation is the same.



Has something like this already been done?

As more and more people join more and more social networks, social bookmarking sites, microblogging, and other fine products of Web 2.0 something like this may be in greater demand.

That is, don't let others tell you what you just saw/heard/felt/experienced.  You know yourself and your reality better than anyone else.

That's what Tom Kelley said tonight at the Dean's Speaker Series here at Haas.  I'll tie this quote back in, in just a bit.

His talk, based on what he calls the "Red Queen Effect" (derived from Alice Through the Looking Glass), can be summed up into this: businesses must constantly innovate.  Not only that, but businesses must innovate faster and better than their competitors.

In his book The Ten Faces of Innovation, he outlines the various roles required for successful innovation within an organization.  One of which he calls "The Anthropologist"--the people who go out and observe, looking for problems. 

Many times these problems exist in plain site and most go on with their lives without noticing.  Not the Anthropologists.  They say, "What was that? What was that that I just saw?".

Kelley gives the example of a turn-style in an airport that enters into a train station.  The problem is that these turn-styles are small, narrow and difficult to navigate with baggage.  Being that it is a large international airport with a major rail line leading into a city, people have a lot of baggage. 

With both hands full of baggage how do they insert their token to get through?  They must drop the baggage, throw it over, pass it to their spouse, etc....Not exactly hassle-free.

The anthropologist saw the problem.  The architects who built it didn't.  From the administrators to the janitors who walk by this problem everyday, they all missed it.

So, the next time you see something with your anthropologist eyes and say "Hey what was that?", don't let anyone tell you it's nothing.  You are the expert of your own experience.

By the way, this guy was an excellent speaker.  See him if you have a chance.

"Recommended reading for every niche"

The premise: Share reading recommendations, whether it's blog posts, news articles, books, or whatever.

Create a flexible (wiki-like?) directory where users can create their own niche groups and share their reading with each other.

Within each category is a discussion board-like engine.  The most recommended are at the top but new ones have a chance of being seen.

Shelfari already does something like this for books.  They allow for creating groups, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of structure to it.

I am always looking for good reading on esoteric topics.  If something like this were popular, I could go and find relevant blogs, books, and articles.