A VC

Donors Choose Blogger's Challenge

I am involved in a competition with a bunch of leading bloggers to see who can raise the most money for public school teachers who want to do cool stuff in their classrooms. I need your help because I don't want to be embarrassed and more importantly, this is a really good cause.

Donors Choose was founded by Charles Best who was one of the people who attended our Hacking Philanthropy event last week. It is a classic Hacking Philanthropy company. They use the web to connect people with public school classrooms that need funding. It's a marketplace for philanthropy and I think it's a great idea.

So here's my Donor's Choose page. Check it out and please give some money to a good project. You'll be helping out a public school teacher and his/her class. And you'll be helping me keep up with some stiff competition.

This competition will last throughout the month of October so I plan to mention this a few more times and will be running a widget on my sidebar too.

Well That Sucked

I agree with Charlie.

Being a Jet and Met fan today was brutal.

Good thing I don't do that for a living.

Let's Go Mets

It's a Sunday in late September and the Mets are tied with the Phillies with one game left. I wish I was going to be at Shea but I'll watch on TV. It's been a really tough couple weeks watching the Mets collapse and it's a bit harder for me to watch them lately.

But one thing about this pennant race that's been different is the way I've been able to share the misery via social media. Here are some (not all) of the Mets fans who I've been blogging and twittering about the Mets with this year.

Charlie
Dave
Tom
Chartreuse
Jeff
Ben

I'll be on Twitter while I watch the game today. So let's share the joy or misery (Twitter Groups would be killer for this).

As Dave Winer told Jeff Pulver:

a true Mets fan savors every moment, win or lose. the klutzier they are, the more mets-like they are. those are our boys. if you want to be a mets fan you're going to do a lot of crying, it's an emotional game, don't try to over-analyze it. and it ain't over till it's over.

Indeed

Gizmodo Goes Bearish On The iPhone

Here's the link, but this picture says it all.

Multiple Interfaces

Most technologies I use have a single interface to them. That's largely the way things are developed. But one of the things that is happening on the web is that services are developing multiple interfaces.

And I like having multiple interfaces to a service. I like being able to use Outlook, and Entourage, and webmail, and blackberry to manage my mail. Each interface allows me to do certain things better.

This is also true with Twitter. I access Twitter via sms, mobile web, and Tinytwitter on my phone, via the web, Twitterific, Snaz, and Snitter on my desktop. Each interface is better for certain things. None would get the entire job done by itself.

I use a voicemail transcription service called Simulscribe. It takes all the voice mails I get on my cellphone, office phone, and home phone, transcribes them, and sends them to me via email. Recently they offered a mobile app that I use on my Blackberry. And they are working on a desktop app and an outlook plugin. I think they should open the api and let a thousand clients bloom.

Because having multiple interfaces into a single service is a great thing.

Filtering Twitter

One of the complaints I hear about Twitter is there is no way to "filter" messages, specifically the ones that come via text to your phone (other than following and unfollowing people).

But what if you want to filter by the subject of the message instead of the person who is sending it?

Twitter quietly launched the first step in that process earlier this week. They call it tracking and it allows you to track the entire Twitter universe of users on your phone by keyword.

Over time I can see expanding this to include many other interesting ways to filter Twitter and I think that's a really good thing.

Who Owns Your iPhone?

I have not yet used the iPhone my family gave me almost six weeks ago. I've been trying to unlock it and have been wary of most schemes that have been offered to me. I want to be able to run MY phone on whatever network I want to run it on. I will unlock it soon and then give it to my daughter to run on her T-Mobile account.

That said, the reports that Apple is "bricking" phones with their 1.1 update are outrageous to me. I realize that Apple has a business deal with AT&T and they make it very hard to unlock the phone as a result. But honestly they shouldn't be destroying phones that have been "hacked". That's obnoxious. Very few iPhone users are going to go to the expense and hassle of unlocking their phones. Apple should know enough to look the other way on that kind of activity and let it exist as a "gray market".

Saul Hansell has it right in his blog post. He says:

Since the iPhone is a very sleek, capable handheld computer, people are going to want to run programs on it. They are going to want to hack and see what they can build. It’s a law of nature. And Apple might as well be fighting gravity.

More than that, Apple is destroying goodwill that they enjoy in the geek community. They've gone from being the cool company to being the evil company.

The "Obama Republican"

  Obama - NYC 147 
  Originally uploaded by ~gio~.

Barack Obama came to NYC yesterday and had a large rally in front of the Washington Square Arch. I wasn't there but heard he was quite good.

Later in the evening the Gotham Gal and I attended a small gathering of supporters and potential supporters (with us in the latter camp). It's the kind of event I've been looking to attend for the past nine months. I want to look the person in the eye before supporting them and asking others to do the same.

To be honest, I'd be fine with either Barack or Hillary as the next President. My dream is Mike Bloomberg but unless he gets in the race, my support is going to Barack or Hillary. I've tried to like the Republicans, but I've had the opportunity to watch Rudy in action for 8 years and its ugly. McCain is compelling but seems to have shot himself in the foot with his position on the war. Romney has moved so far right on social issues that there is no way I could support him.

But back to Barack. He made a number of comments to the group that he talked to last night that I liked a lot. But one thing he said really turned me on.

He talked about the need to govern our country with a real majority, to move beyond Presidencies that govern with "50+1" majorities. He talked about how Reagan enjoyed "Reagan Democrats" and claimed that he could assemble a large group of "Obama Republicans".

Is that true? I'd like to hear from all the Republicans who read this blog. Can you see yourself getting behind Obama?

Because if he's right about being a leader who can speak to people with different beliefs, who can bring our country together, then his candidacy is compelling. Frankly that's what I want in 2008 and that's why I've been so eager to see Mike Bloomberg run.

Hacking Philanthropy

  _DSC4583 
  Originally uploaded by andrewparker915.

We did our third annual Union Square Sessions event on Tuesday up at Columbia University. We brought together about 45 people who are working in the fields of web technology, philanthropy, and the convergence of the two fields to talk about how web technology offers the potential to "hack" philanthropy.

My partner Brad started off the day explaining that a hack in our minds is a wonderfully creative way to solve a difficult problem with a simple and efficient approach.

We believe that the web offers a tremendous platform to hack philanthropy and we came away from the event even more convinced of that.

We've posted our initial thoughts on the event on the Union Square Ventures blog. Photos of the event are on Flickr. And as we always do with Sessions events, we had a stenographer transcribe the discussion and we will post it in its entirety when its available in the next week or two.

I am no expert in this topic and many in the audience were. So it was mostly listening which is hard for me to do without engaging in the discussion.

Towards the end of the day though, I proposed that some of the standards we use on the web, like RSS for example, be adopted by the non-profit world. Shouldn't every cause, every need, every grant be a post somewhere that can be distributed via RSS, crawled, filtered, rated, tracked, and measured so we can discover more of the wonderful things people are working on to create social action and change? I think so.

Scorpions

Last night Jackson and I went up to the Beacon Theater to see Scorpions. I brought a friend, he brought two. It was fun although I couldn't hear after the show and my ears are still ringing this morning.

Back in 1979, Scorpions released Lovedrive, one of my favorite heavy metal records of all time. I saw them live back then with Jackson and Rod and probably dozens of friends (I honestly don't recall). Soon after, I moved on from heavy metal and Scorpions faded into the back of my brain.

Last night was fun. I knew most of the songs and the band was into it and so was the crowd. As Jackson said, the band came to "rock you like a hurricane" and so they did. For a couple of guys who will be 60 next year, Klaus and Rudy can still rock. And they look great too.

My favorite moment was the instrumental off of Lovedrive called Coast to Coast. Klaus comes out with a guitar and you get four guys standing side by side jamming hard. It was great moment.

Pretty much just like this.

I Love Amazon

In our home, Amazon is the equivalent of the shopping mall. I was playing golf with Josh last weekend and he said he wanted to buy some golf balls. I told him he should pick out his favorite brand and buy a case of them. His reply was "I'll go on Amazon when we get home". That's the way it is in our home.

And today, we got to add digital downloads of mp3s to the list of things we can buy on Amazon. It works just like eMusic. You install a small "downloader" on your machine and after that the experience is just like buying anything else on Amazon. You can check out via One Click and within minutes all the files are on your laptop, in mp3 format so you can play them wherever you want, including a Sonos system.

I bought my first record via download on Amazon today. Challengers by The New Pornographers. We've been listening to it on Rhapsody and the kids want it on their iPods and I want it on Sonos. It's not on eMusic and it's not on iTunes in non-DRM format yet. But Amazon has it the way I want it. Awesome.

I love Amazon just a little more today.

Down 1% Already

I said I was going to join Covestor and build a public stock portfolio. I did that over the weekend. And I am down 1% already. Public market investing has never been my thing, but I am in this now and I'll stay at it for a while.

I've added the Covestor widget to the right sidebar of this blog (appropriately right next to the Gaping Void cartoon of the day). So you'll be able to see how I am doing every time you come visit this blog.

And you can follow me on Covestor and even track my trades if you want to get notified every time I trade. These are real trades. Covestor is linked to my E*Trade account. So this isn't fantasy stock picking, it's the real deal.

I got an email yesterday alerting me to the fact that my friend Mark sold Google. I don't own Google so that didn't impact me that much. But it's interesting nonetheless.

If you like to buy and sell stocks and are interested in doing that in a social way, join Covestor and let me know your account and I'll follow you.

How To Get Attention From Your VC

I had a funny exchange with Steven Johnson, founder and CEO of our portfolio company outside.in last week. He saw my post about the email address book rankings in Xobni and wanted to know where he ranked. It turned out he was #29 which is pretty high considering that outside.in is the smallest investment we have (by amount invested) in our entire portfolio.

That led me to a simple analysis. I took all of our active portfolio companies (both Flatiron and Union Square Ventures) and I looked at the CEO's Xobni rating and built a simple spreadsheet table comparing that ranking to the amount of capital we had invested in the company. There was no correlation.

Now you can say that is stupid. We should be consciously giving more attention to the companies where we have more financial upside and more capital at risk. I suppose that is true, but in my experience over 20 years doing this business, that's not how it works.

VCs pay attention to companies for several reasons:

1) The company is in trouble. I've heard many investors say "if you don't hear from me, it means you are doing just fine on your own". I understand that approach but I try not to take it myself. But one thing is for sure, when a company is struggling, we certainly do our best to help them get through it.
2) The company is killing it. If I was an investor in Facebook for example, I'd be spending as much time on that company as I could. I am sure that the VCs from Accel, Greylock, and Peter Thiel are doing exactly that.
3) The company is just getting going and needs help figuring out its strategy, building its team, etc. The funny thing is that the ratio between attention and stage/capital invested could actually be reverse correlated, meaning that the VC pays more attention when there is less capital invested.
4) The company is interesting to the VC. You can read this blog and know where my mind is. And as much as I hate to admit it, when my mind is focused on something, that's where my attention goes as well.

There's another factor which I'll call the entrepreneur's ability to engage the VC. There's a reason that Steven is number 29. He has a great way of including me in company conversations via email and face to face. He doesn't look to me to sign off on his decisions, but he does look to get my input. He is roping me into the company. Dick Costolo, who is still in my top 20 email relationships even though FeedBurner is now owned by Google, was also a master at that technique.

Not all entrepreneurs want or need to engage the VC in that way. And that's fine. We have one company in our portfolio that has made most of its decisions without our input and has the best financial profile in our portfolio right now. So there is no rule that says you must engage your VC to be successful.

But if you want to get more attention from your VC than you are currently getting, and you don't want to get that way by struggling, then you should find ways to rope them into your internal discussions. I personally think email is the best way to do that even though it's a terrible medium for a thousand reasons.

I was in a board meeting several weeks ago and we were discussing the company's top priorities. The CEO pointed out that the top priorities were on the company wiki, which is fantastic. But unfortunately, not one of the board members had read the company wiki before attending the meeting. Another truth about VCs is that they are attention constrained for the most part. And they will most likely read information that is pushed out to them, and they are less likely to go find it on their own. That's why email is best.

Getting attention from your VC means giving them attention. It's like any relationship. There are no one way streets. And it takes work. But if your VC can help you and you want the help, you have to rope them in.

Facebook Really Is Copying AOL's Playbook

Back in late June, Jason Kottke wrote a oft quoted post called Facebook is the new AOL. In that post Jason argued that building apps for Facebook's platform isn't much different than building apps on AOL's Rainman platform back in the mid 90s.

I am not sure I totally buy Jason's argument, but he certainly put out a point of view that was important in the ongoing debate about the value of building Facebook apps.

But today we saw that Facebook is certainly copying parts of AOL's playbook. Back in 2005 (seems like so long ago now), AOL ran an auction between Google and Microsoft to be AOL's new search partner. Microsoft had the inside track early on in the negotiations according to friends of mine who were involved. But Microsoft got hung up on parts of the deal, and Google caught wind of the transaction and used their money and incumbent position to steal it away from Microsoft and placed a $20bn valuation on AOL by investing $1bn for 5% of AOL.

So the news that Facebook is talking to Microsoft about buying 5% of Facebook for $500mm seems like deja vu all over again (to take a great line from Yogi Berra). The 5% number is the same. The billions of dollars of valuation is the same. The fact that Microsoft is the incumbent this time may mean this plays out differently. I'll bet that Microsoft wins the deal and that Google's in it to play the spoiler more than to win this deal.

The news last week that Google is readying a Facebook competitor could prove to be an interesting factor in this  process. Would Facebook take an investment from a company that is planning to compete with them? That's certainly not the definition of an ideal partner but stranger things  have happened.

I think the valuation, which many are focusing on, is not the issue to pay attention to here. The $20bn valuation that Google paid for AOL wasn't a real price and the $10bn valuation (or more or less) that is being discussed isn't real either. By "unreal" I mean that it's unlikely that financial investors would pay that price or that anyone would pay that much to buy the entire company right now.

But the strategic partner that Facebook takes money from will be important as it continues to develop its business. That's the part of this process that bears watching.

Social Net Interops

Dave Winer has some good thoughts on why Twitter and Netflix should get connected. I agree completely.

Last week Hugh twittered that he had joined Dopplr. I had to surf over to Dopplr, find Hugh, and ask to follow his trips.

That should have been possible right from Twitter.

The web is going social but the interops aren't there. We have to build them.

Should VCs Blog?

I ask this question because the Boston Globe asked it in a piece in yesterday's paper. The answer depends first and foremost if you are comfortable blogging and are willing to make the commitment to do it often and do it well. If you are uncomfortable with blogging or are unwilling to commit to it, then the answer is no, you should not blog.

My views on the the subject are pretty well outlined in the piece. The journalist who wrote it, Scott Kirsner, had an email conversation with me. I told Scott the following:

[Blogging is] a huge benefit to our business. Of course it brings incremental deal flow, but it also filters the deal flow and makes it more targeted and more relevant

Its also a great way to bring needed attention to the companies we invest in

And its a way to do research on new sectors and learn about other companies that compete with our companies

And its a great way to learn about emerging technologies. Check out the comments to my andreessen post yesterday or my post on AIR last week. You can't buy that kind of education and I get it every day for free

I could go on and on. Its the best tool for vc investing that I've ever seen and I've been in this business for more than 20 yrs

My favorite quotes in the Globe article come from my friends Woody Bensen and Charley Lax. Woody says:

Woody Benson of Prism VentureWorks says the Needham firm has spent years gaining venture capital experience, "something that we call our intellectual property."

"Our goal is to share that in the confines of the meetings that we have with our portfolio companies and potential portfolio companies," he says.

That, to me, is the defining argument for and against blogging. There are those who think the best way to manage your "intellectual property" is to hoard it for yourself. There are others who think that intellectual property should be shared, developed out in the open, and that it will grow exponentially. I am in the latter camp. In fact, that is my worldview on almost everything, as readers of this blog well know.

Charley Lax' quote is classic Charley:

Charley Lax, managing general partner of Grand Banks Capital in Newton Centre, says the limited partners who put their money into venture capital funds think blogging is "stupid. They want you to be working on your portfolio companies and looking for the next great deal."

You can spend you time in the venture business worrying about what your limited partners think or you can focus on your true clients, the entrepreneurs and the companies they create. I prefer to do the latter and I think blogging helps enormously in that effort.

I don't think there's a right and a wrong in the "should VCs blog" debate. It works for me and it works for our firm. And I couldn't imagine doing this business anymore without a blog.

Across The Universe

We went to see Across the Universe last night. For those who don't know, it's a movie about the 60s using the Beatles' music as the soundtrack/backdrop.

I liked it but didn't love it. There were many in the theater who did love it. We couldn't leave until all the credits had rolled because our entire row was sitting mesmerized as Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds played to a psychedelic background. Most of the audience was 10-15 years older than me. And it seemed that everyone of that generation absolutely loved it from the chatter in the theater on the way out.

There were some great cameos, the best of which was Bono as Dr. Robert singing I Am The Walrus.

My favorite scene/song was Happiness Is A Warm Gun. But it's always been the "john songs" that got my juices flowing.

Happiness Is A Warm Gun - The Beatles

Covestor

A big theme at TechCrunch 40 was social/web financial services. Mint and Cake launched there and Mint came away with the top prize.

To many, it seemed that these two companies were the first movers in their respective market spaces. But that is far from the case. In the case of Mint, there are at least three services already in the market, Wesabe (which Union Square Ventures is an investor in), Geezeo, and Buxfer. The social investing market is even more crowded with dozens of companies trying to become "a social Bloomberg".

The twist that Cake brings to the social investing field is that they use real transactions to build your profile by accessing your online trading accounts. Again, they are not the first to do this. A company out of the UK, called Covestor, has been doing the same thing for the past six months and has built a large network of traders who are sharing real trades with each other. My friend Rikki started Covestor and my friends Mark and Howard (both great public market investors) are angel investors in the Company. At this point I do not have any involvement with them.

I've joined Covestor and set up an E*Trade account to invest a little money in the market (not something I do very well so I am keeping it small). I'll probably put a widget on this blog to showcase how I am doing and you can follow my trades. I hope I don't embarrass myself.

Comments Are Back Up

An update to disqus prevented new posts from having comments. It is now working again.

The Best Cross Platform Folder Share Service?

There are so many "hard drive in the sky" services these days that I honestly can't bring myself to wade through all of them and find one I like.

Here's my application. I've now moved back to Windows in the office (xobni/outlook being the driver) and still using MacBook Pro for home/on the road.

I want a folder share service to share one folder (my documents of course) between both machines and also into the cloud.

I'll take any and all the advice I can get but I'd love to hear from people who are doing exactly this.

Where Is Your Social Graph?

I know that I wrote not too long ago that I didn't like the term "social graph" but the comments I got to that post educated me to the reasons why it's a good term. So I am using it now.

But where is your social graph? In Facebook or myspace or LinkedIn? Maybe. But mine is in a bunch of other places;

1) email - Xobni proves what I've always thought. My primary social network is my email address book. But it took a tool like Xobni to present it in that way. It is shocking to me that AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and even Google have not done anything with this opportunity. It's enormous.

2) this blog - MyBlogLog turned me on because it started to build a social network around this blog. But since the acquisition by Yahoo! its been pretty stagnant. Six Apart says they are going to give me the tools to build this blog's social network and open it up via OpenID. That's a cool idea. Bring it on.

3) twitter - last night i was joined by Charlie and Ben in collective agony as we watched the tenth inning unfold in the Mets/Marlins game. It sure helped to have some company to take that hit.

These are the three places where my social network exists most strongly. For many it is Facebook or myspace or Beebo or LinkedIn or something else. The truth is that no one platform holds our entire social graph.

So when Marc calls out to Mark to open up the social graph, he should in fact be calling out to every application that is social (isn't that every app Marc). Because technology has allowed us to capture our worlds, database them, and map them. And now it's time to build on that. The social web is upon us.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Yesterday morning I posted about Xobni, a new outlook plugin that brings the concepts of social networks to email to improve productivity. It's a cool product and so far I am loving it.

The founders were kind enough to give me 25 invites which I offered first come first serve in my blog post. I quickly got 25 requests (in less than 2 hours). So I asked for more and got another 10. Xobni really wants to keep their beta small until they work the kinks out.

So yesterday evening, I sorted through all the emails and found the first 35 requests. I sent each person an email giving them the code and asking them not to share because I only had 35.

Sure enough, several of the people I gave invite codes to were not able to use them because by the time they tried it, the limit had been reached. I know I only gave out 35.

So one ore more of the people I gave the invite code to didn't play by the rules. I guess I should have expected that but it still frosts me.

Looking For A Killer Sys Admin

Outside.in, a Union Square Ventures portfolio company, is growing rapidly and needs someone to focus on the scaling issues. Here's the job description.

Outside.in is looking for a system administrator to help us manage our growing collection of web and database servers. We are looking for someone with experience in load balancing and clustering web servers running Ruby on Rails and PHP. You'll be expected to identify possible bottlenecks and scalability issues before they happen, and work closely with developers to address the problems you find.

Outside.in is located in Brooklyn, NY. If you are interested send an email with your resume to jobs.outside.in.

Platform On The Brain

Not a day goes by on AVC these days without some sort of post on platforms. That's because I am thinking a lot about them and so are my colleagues at Union Square Ventures. As I said in my most recent post, the people who have the most to say about platforms are the developers themselves.

Albert Wenger, our venture partner at Union Square Ventures, has spent the past nine months building a web service and dealing with its growing user base (ie scaling it). He's lost nights of sleep and some of his hairline, and has come out of that experience with a hunger for a new platform for building, hosting, and scaling web apps. He's posted his thoughts on that new platform on the Union Square Ventures weblog.

Close, But No Cigar

NBC announced they are going with free downloads for seven days after the show airs. I gotta give these big media companies credit, they are slowly but surely getting there. But why not make it free and ad supported forever? Put the 30 second spots right into the downloadable file and let it go.

Until big media companies understand that they cannot and will not control their content once its left their servers, we won't have a vibrant digital media ecosystem. Blowing up files after seven days is lunacy when you could have an ad in there and be getting paid for impressions for a long long time.

Kings of Leon At Radio City

  Kings of Leon 
  Originally uploaded by Enricco Benetti.

I went up to Radio City last night to join my two brothers at the Kings Of Leon show. Seeing that KOL is a family act, it seemed like the appropriate thing to do.

I must say that I much prefered the energy of the Roseland show we went to in the spring. Radio City just seemed so tame for these guy.

But they put on a very solid show. Highlights were The Bucket, closing the main set with a great version of Trani, and finishing the show as always with a killer version of Slow Night, So Long.

These guys are the real deal, a rock band that is not afraid to rock.

The Bucket - Kings Of Leon - Aha Shake Heartbreak

I Am Andrew's #1 Email Relationship

I suggested in my Xobni post that Andrew would have his own thoughts on the cool Outlook plug-in that's in semi-private (invite only) beta.

He posted them yesterday afternoon and disclosed that I am his #1 email relationship.

The shocking thing is that I still haven't figured out my #1. Gotham Gal is #4, Andrew is #3, and my partner Brad is #2. I'll figure out #1 shortly.

Bottom line is that like all good technology, Xobni has a fun element to it.

Xobni

There were several really great companies to come out of last year's Y Combinator summer class. One of them is Xobni which launched yesterday at TechCrunch 40. I've had the pleasure of getting to know Adam and Matt, the two founders of Xobni, and they were kind enough to give Andrew and I a preview of Xobni's outlook plug-in.

I am going to let Andrew tell you what he thinks himself. But it's safe to say that we are both blown away. I realize that many of you don't use Outlook anymore and have moved on to Gmail or some other better way to do mail.

But for those of us stuck in email hell in Outlook, Xobni is showing a way out. They start with the notion that your email usage is a social network, possibly the most accurate social network you have. Xobni looks at the way you use your email (who you message with, who you reply to, who you cc, etc) and it creates a social graph with that data.

Then it uses that social graph to make Outlook smarter.

Here's a few ways it can instantly help you be more productive.

1 - it pulls phone numbers out of sig files and displays them when you are looking at a person's email

2 - it knows who you haven't been in touch with in a while and might want to shoot an email to

3 - it shows the email and document history for the person's email you are looking at.

I've just started using Xobni and I love it. The service is now in private beta. Matt gave me 25 invites. So if you are in Outlook hell and need some help, send me an email (my email address is located on the left sidebar) and I'll get you one. But first come, first serve. I only have 25.

UPDATE: I've run out of invites. In fact, I got 40 requests before I got to the office today. I am hoping to get more, but at this point I am out of invites.

Who Owns Your Financial Data?

That's the question we should all be asking. Now that Mint has finally launched and joined Wesabe, Geezeo, Buxfer and a few others in the personal financial web service space, it's time to discuss what it means to take your personal financial data out of the hands of your bank and credit card company (who thinks they own it but do not), and put it on the web.

Wesabe, a Union Square Ventures portfolio company, has a Data Bill Of Rights.

It says:

• You can export and/or delete your data from Wesabe whenever you want.
• Your data is your data, not ours. Our job is to help you understand and act on your data.
• We’ll keep all of your data online and accessible for as long as you have an account. No “archive access” charges.
• Any data you want us to keep private, we will.
• If a question comes up not covered by these rights, we will answer it remembering that your data belongs to you.

That's a good start. But I think its time to discuss this at length. And there's no better place to do that than in the blogs. Here's some questions to ponder.

- who owns the metadata you and others create about the transactions that come into the system?
- is it better to let the service do the tagging or is it better to let the community to do the tagging of the transactions?
- should the tags be shared and if so, when and with whom?
- where should your login and passwords be stored?
- can these services be hacked?
- is personal identifiable information (PII) being stored with the data?

I am sure there are more questions. So now that we have a full fledged category here with at least four high quality companies in it, let's figure out the rules of the road.

Research Recap

Investment research is a business I know a bit about. Back in 1993, I was involved in seed funding a company called Multex that basically invented the idea of online distribution of investment research. Multex was a big success, went public, and was sold to Reuters earlier this decade. The team behind Multex is now doing another startup called Instant Information which I am an investor and board member of. They aren't focused exclusively on Investment Research but they do some interesting things with it.

I also provided the initial venture capital money to TheStreet.com which I credit (Jim Cramer actually) with inventing the idea of blogging stocks and creating instant research.

The two are coming together. Is The Insider's post about the iPhone price cut a blog post or investment research? It's both actually.

So it makes sense that people are trying to merge blogs and investment research. Seeking Alpha's been doing that for a while. So has Blogging Stocks. So has Wallstrip. And many more stock bloggers who I've become friends with because of their blogs and mine.

The logical next step is to aggregate all that content and present it in a single place. Instant Information's InfoNgen service can do that for you and if you are a serious investor, you should check it out.

Another of my portfolio companies (this one a Flatiron portfolio company), Alacra, has built a service called Research Recap which launched today. Here's why Research Recap is worth trying.

1) its looks and feels like a blog.
2) you can subscribe to it via RSS
3) it aggregates a ton of blog content that is essentially investment research (search on apple and you'll get The Insider's post on the iPhone price cut)
4) the content's not limited to stocks. it covers credit, investment, economic, market, academic and industry research, with tabs for each
5) you can subscribe via RSS to various categories of investment research

So if you care about the intersection of wall street and blogs, check out Research Recap. It's in my blogroll now.

Tough Times Ahead For The Web?

I was meeting with a web entrepreneur yesterday. It's something I do at least five to ten times a week.

This entrepeneur said 'but I worry that the coming downturn might have a negative impact on my business plan.'

Not 'a possible coming downturn', it was 'the coming downturn.'

And I found myself nodding my head, not challenging that assumption.

Why is it that I feel a downturn coming? It's not one single factor, it's a combination of factors, some based on real factors, others based on fears and other emotions.

First, the economy seems rockier than it has in a while. The housing market is no longer a driving force, its weighing on the economy. The fed's lowering rates in response but that makes the dollar and our markets less attractive to international capital. I have no idea if we are headed for a recession or not, but it sure seems more likely than it did a year ago.

Second, we are ccming into a presidential election cycle. The democrats are looking stronger than they have in a while. The Iraq war and Bush are unpopular. There will be a lot of uncertainty over where our country is headed until the end of next year. That uncertainty has traditionally been bad for financial markets

Third, there's a looming crisis in the buyout business because banks have gotten more tight with credit. Less private equity buyouts will take one more positive aspect out of the financial markets

But none of those factors directly affects web/tech and the venture markets. But it does directly affect the psychology of the investors who fund the market and to a lesser extent the entrepreneurs who drive it

Then there's the parallels with web 1.0. This is where emotion enters the equation. I started Flatiron Partners in 1996. We had the wind at our back for four and a half years and then we got headwinds in the summer of 2001. We started Union Square Ventures to focus on renewed opportunities on the web at the end of 2003. We've had the wind at our back the whole way. My mind is trained to expect headwinds soon. I don't know that we will, but I can't help but expect them

And then there's the supply problem. The venture market in any industry (biotech, nanotech, green tech, comm equipment, web, etc) does best when the supply of new companies is relatively modest and the demand to invest in them is equally modest. Right now in web tech, we've got a huge supply of new companies and a huge demand to invest in them. That's not sustainable forever

And we are getting to the point that some web 2.0 companies are going to start failing. VCs will keep bad investments alive for a while, but they won't pour good money after bad forever. We've seen some web 2.0 companies close their doors and we are going to see more.

Finally there's the question of what's next? Is it semantic web? Programmable web? Social web? Yes, yes, and yes. But we are still seeing a lot of me too companies, slight twists on ideas that are now five years old. We are not yet seeing boldly new ideas, at least not enough of them to say we are now in web 3.0

Do we have to go through a shakeout to get to the next big move? I don't know. I only know that's what it took last time

So if you see the downturn coming as the entrepreneur I met with clearly does, what do you do? If you are a VC, I think you keep investing, but carefully. Its not a time to step on the gas. And focus on your existing portfolio, take gains where you can take them, and make sure you've got plenty of 'dry powder' for your portfolio

If you are an entrepreneur? Well that depends on where you are in your development cycle and what your goal is. If you want to spend the next five to ten years building your company, then raise a good amount of money and then put your head down and execute. If you are in it for the quick flip, get busy. That opportunity may not last forever

I know this post sounds gloomy. I am not certain we are headed for a rough patch. I am not sure of anything. But I think the probability of tough times ahead has gone up in the past year. And it seems to be creeping into our collective consciousness (or at least mine).

So let's talk about it and if it comes to pass, let's make sure we handle it better than we did last time.

Andreessen on Platforms

More discussion of platforms. This post comes from Marc Andreessen, who is currently working on a platform for building and deploying social web apps called Ning. One of the apps that has been built in Ning is We Love Etsy, a social network for people who love Etsy. Very nice.

Marc describes three kinds of internet-based platforms

Level 1 - API access - Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, etc, etc
Level 2 - API plug-in - Facebook
Level 3 - Runtime environment - Ning, Salesforce.com, etc, etc

Marc asserts that Level 3 platforms are the best for the developer. And I am not going to argue with Marc on technical grounds. That would be like me trying to beat my son at his Xbox.

Marc's argument is that Level 3 platforms provide all of the infrastructure to build, deploy, and scale a web application and therefore are more attractive to developers. He says:

What are some of those issues?  To list a few: You have to provide a runtime environment that can execute arbitrary third-party application code.  You have to build a system for accepting and managing that code.  You have to build integrated development tools into your interface to let people develop that code.  You have to provide an integrated database environment suitable for applications to store and process their data.  You have to deal with security in many different ways to prevent applications from stepping on one another or on your system -- for example, sandboxing. You have to anticipate the consequences an application succeeding and needing to be automatically scaled.  And you have to build an automated system underneath all that to provide the servers, storage, and networking capabilities required to actually run all of the third-party applications.

So here's my question. With providers like Amazon increasingly providing the infrastructure to host, deploy, and scale a web app, and with rapid development tools like Ruby, and with the web as your runtime environment, isn't it possible to do much of what a Level 3 platform provides directly on the web?

And isn't it also true that building apps on the web itself, instead of plugged into Facebook, or resident in Ning, is more attractive to developers because the app is less reliant on the owner of the environment to continue to act in good faith toward the developer and their app?

Marc notes that the idea of app running "off platform" is relatively new concept:

I say this is ironic because I'm not entirely sure where the idea came from that an application built to run on an Internet platform would logically run off the platform, as with Level 1 (Flickr-style) or Level 2 (Facebook-style) Internet platforms. That is, I'm not sure why people haven't been building Level 3 Internet platforms all along -- apart from the technological complexity involved.

I think that apps running "off platform" are one of the great things about the Internet. A truly distributed computing environment. With all the benefits and challenges.

But I am not a developer. And as Marc says, "lots of people have opinions about platforms, but the people whose opinions matter are programmers, and people who can make decisions about what programmers program"

I would like to hear what the developers think. I know there are a bunch that read this blog and comment actively. So bring it on.

Should You Friend Your Spouse?

One of my favorite moments in the history of social nets is the scene in The Myspace Movie when the girlfriend looks at her boyfriend's myspace page and realizes she's not in his top friends and goes beserk.

Social nets are great for meeting people, connecting, etc. but they pose some specific problems for those in a relationship. What exactly is the role of the boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse in your social network?

The Gotham Gal reads this blog every day but has never commented on it. Is she a member of this community? Maybe, but not a particularly active one. I comment on her blog from time to time, but it always feels a bit strange when I do that.

I started thinking about this the other day when I saw a twitter post from Kylie that said:

          Has convinced the husband to sign up for Twitter and give it a spin!

The Gotham Gal doesn't Twitter and she doesn't follow my Twitters (other than those she sees on my blog). But the fact that I was riding to the GWB this morning would have been interesting to her since I left the house before she got up. I can see how it might be useful.

She doesn't have a Facebook profile, a myspace profile, or any social networking presence other than her blog (which is the best profile on can have in my book). So all my social networking activity is  basically  invisible to her. I don't think that's a big deal one way or another.

Unless, of course, there are problems in a marriage. Brad Stone had a story in yesterday's NY Times on the amount of electronic surveillance that spouses in troubled marriages do on each other. There was no mention of social networking in that article, but I have to believe social nets will find their way into divorce court soon enough if they haven't already.

If social nets are going to map our social relationships correctly, they'll have to include our closest relationships. I am sure that for many who are ten or twenty years younger than me, they do. But as my generation goes social networking, do we take our closest relationships with us? Of that, I am not sure.

The "North" River

  The "North" River 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

The Hudson River is also known as the North River (as opposed to the East River and the Delaware which was the South River). It runs 315 miles from Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks and into the ocean at New York Harbor.

I've moved a lot in my 46 years, but one constant has been the Hudson River. I was born in a hospital that overlooked the Hudson in West Point NY. My bedroom in my teenage years (after we moved back to West Point) looked out over the Hudson and in the winter when the trees were bare, I could stare out the window and watch the boats go up and down the river.

Maybe that's why I love riding up the Hudson River Park. I guess I just have a thing for the North River. And it shows no signs of abating.

SquidWho - When A Product Becomes A Platform

I wrote a post a week ago talking about products that become platforms.

I started it off with a discussion about the Mahalo/Gnomedex thing. That was a mistake. It clouded the point I was trying to make. And that point is that the best products become platforms at some point. And things that start out as platforms have a hard time becoming products.

The other day I stumbled upon SquidWho. SquidWho is one of a number people search engines that are cropping up. Other notable "people search engines" include WikiYou, WInk, and of course LinkedIn and Wikipedia can be used for searching people.

What's more interesting to me about SquidWho is what it represents. It's an application built on top of Squidoo, the service that let's people make webpages about things they are passionate about. Squidoo is kind of like a truly peer produced About.com. And despite some recent controversy about Squidoo being spammed up, it's a fairly popular service.

Squidoo is one of the 500 most popular websites according to Alexa. comScore says Squidoo has over 4mm unique visitors per month worldwide. Squidoo has excellent search engine optimization so the pages you create in it get indexed highly in Google.

That's a good place to start when you want to build a web app. Like a mini version of Facebook, Squidoo is a platform because it has eyeballs and unlike Facebook, it has great google juice.

According to Seth Godin, the founder of Squidoo, SquidWho was built in five weeks from initial idea to launch. And they have a bunch more of these "apps" coming. What's next? I sure hope they open up the Squidoo platform to web developers so thousands of apps can be built on top of Squidoo. That's how a product becomes a platform.

Irene

One of my favorite twitterers is Raj Bala who posts under the name of 140orless.

Raj posts music reviews in 140 characters or less. That's the perfect amount of information for me. Last week, this note popped up on my desktop:

Irene - Long Gone Before Summer: If you love Jonathan Richman and The Magnetic Fields, welcome to your new obsession. You're welcome.

Well the mention of Jonathan and Magnetic Fields in the same sentance led me to a manic web search for this band called Irene. It wasn't easy. Irene doesn't have a lot of fans here in the US. It was even harder to get an advance copy of this new record called Long Gone Before Summer.

But Raj was right. It has become the new obsession in our home. Everyone loves it.

The entire record needs to be listened start to finish. There isn't one standout track. It's the flow of the music that makes it so great. That said, here's the opening track.

By Your Side - Irene - Long Gone Before Summer

NFYB

I like to think that this isn't needed because we all know what's confidential (the pitches I get every day) and what is not (a twitter or a blog post), but Seth is right. There are gray areas. So just put NFYB in the message and then it's clear. Thanks Seth.

Tattoo You

Some people have accused me of wearing my investments on my sleeve. But that doesn't hold a candle to Dave Morgan and Rich Levandov who are getting the TACODA logo tattoo'd on their bodies somewhere.

Robert Buderi has the whole story on the Xconomy blog.

Bob On Steve

From Lefsetz:

Mr. Jobs is on the brink of a Q rating meltdown.

Oh, he hasn’t changed. Not much. But suddenly, all his wisdom and all his talent have resulted in Apple being top dog. And EVERYBODY shoots for the top dog.

Stunningly, Jobs isn’t even aware of the coming backlash. As evidenced by his failure to foresee the early adopter reaction to the iPhone price drop.

There have to be fewer special events. Steve’s got to do some press where he laughs at himself. The record labels and movie studios and TV networks have done SUCH a good job of depicting him as a tyrant that some of it is now sticking. Steve’s RIGHT! But right isn’t everything.

Steve has always walked a fine line between the industry and the fan. But now, it’s getting him in trouble. He’s isolated, he’s alone, out in the desert.

In order to win in the twenty first century, first and foremost you have to be aligned with the public. The Tommy Mottola decade is over. It’s not about your flashy life and power, if you believe that, you’ve watched too much "Cribs". It’s about being honest and delivering for the public at large, with your cash and power being mere BYPRODUCTS!

Buying tunes from Starbucks via Wi-Fi on your iPod Touch? That doesn’t get my hormones going. How about a subscription that can verify via Wi-Fi, i.e. when you enter Starbucks? How about more music for less money? How about further illustrating you’re in OUR world, not THEIRS!

Searching Outside.in

In a case of better late than never, outside.in has added search. It's on the upper right on the home page.

It really opens up the service. So much of the value of outside.in is buried beneath the start page. My favorite part of outside.in are the place pages that host all the blog discussions about a specific place. This morning I searched for Pier 40 and got this Pier 40 place page. Which is a great summary of the current debate about the development plans for the "central park" of lower Manhattan.

Check out your favorite place in outside.in by searching for it. You might learn something.

Places I Like In My 'Hood

OnTheInside.info is a web service that asks this question of people - "what are your favorite places in New York City".

A month or so ago, they contacted me and asked if I'd sit down with them for thirty minutes and answer that question. It seemed like a neat idea so I said yes. I sat down with them right before I took off for vacation the last week of the summer.

This week, they've been running my answers to that question, in text, audio, and photos.

I can't remember exactly how many places we talked about, but these are the ones they ran with.

If you are interested in hearing more or seeing more about any of those picks, click through and check it out.

AT&T Is Discriminating Against People With Good Credit

I don't know if this is against the law, but if it is, I would be happy to join a class action suit against AT&T.

Last night I tried to activate the iPhone that I recieved as a gift with a pre-paid plan. A plan that I am sure tens of thousands of people have on their iPhones. The iTunes system would not allow me to activate. I got a message that said:

Additional information required to activate your iPhone

Please call AT&T at 877-800-3701 to complete your activation.

Refer to your Activation ID when calling

It was late when I got to that point, so I called AT&T this morning. I talked to a very nice customer service rep who told me that I could not get an iPhone without giving them my social security number. I told her that I was a tech blogger and just wanted to test the iPhone, review it, and then give it as a gift and I had no need or desire to sign a 2 year contract. She told me there was nothing she could do. So I asked for a manager.

After about five minutes, the manager got on the line. I repeated my case, asked him to authorize a prepaid plan for my phone. He said he could not do so. That it was AT&T policy to only issue pre-paid plans to people with valid social security numbers who fail a credit check.

So there it is. You cannot get a prepaid plan from AT&T unless you are a deadbeat. That's discrimination in my book. And I suspect its illegal at some level.

I will never, ever, use an AT&T service again.

Al Warms Sells Buzztracker to Yahoo!, Becomes GM Of News

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post about my friend Al Warms' new web service called Buzztracker.

In that post I said:

For all of you who like to use buzztrackers like Techmeme and Tailrank comes a new service that may blow out the category to a much wider audience.

I was also critical of the service:

But there are some shortcomings to the buzztracker service. First, I think it lacks the feed density it needs. if you compare the techmeme front page and the buzztracker tech front page, you'll see that techmeme does a better job with that category. Of course, you'd expect that to be the case since techmeme has been around for a while and buzztracker is just launching. But it's even true on the music page where buzztracker music is missing almost all of the top hypemachine music blogs. I spent some time trying to find a place to suggest a new feed and categorize it for them and it wasn't anywhere I could see it.

Al and his team addressed most of my issues pretty quickly and the service has gotten much better. So much better that Yahoo! has acquired it and made Al its GM of News. Kara Swisher has the scoop on her blog.

Truth be told, I still get my tech news from Techmeme and I care less about the other categories in Buzztracker so I don't visit it that often. But now that Yahoo! has bought it, and will likely promote it heavily on its news pages (I would assume they'll integrate the buzztracker technology into their news pages), I am sure that this category is going mainstream. And that's a good thing because there's a sea of information out there and we need new tools to manage it.

Most of all, I'd like to congratulate Al and his team on a nice deal (they bootstrapped the whole thing) and I look forward to working with Al in his new role as GM of News. They could not have found a better person for that job. Here's Al's take on the transation and his new role.

Doubt

At services today, the rabbi invited a member of the congregation to read the opening monologue from Doubt. I've spent about 30 mins googling for it and can't find it online, so I cannot reprint it here. If you know where to find it, leave a link in the comments.

The play starts out with Father Flynn giving a sermon about Doubt, he begins "What do you do when you're not sure?" And then goes on to tell about a sailor who survives a sinking ship, hacks together a raft, and using the stars as his guide, sets a course to land. But then the skies cloud over for the next three weeks and he has no idea if he's heading in the right direction. He's racked with doubt and try as he might, he can't be sure he's still heading in the correct course. It's powerful drama and its a powerful parable. The rabbi, Niles Goldstein, used the story to talk about the role of doubt in faith and how important it is to be honest about your doubts.

But all I could think of was our president, George W Bush. The thing that kills me about him is he never expresses a shred of doubt about his path. In Iraq or elsewhere. The only thing I've ever felt about Iraq is doubt. Doubt it was a good idea. Doubt we could win. Doubt that we should leave. Doubt that we are doing better. Doubt that we aren't. I am confused about Iraq. Who isn't to be honest? I hope George W Bush has doubts. I hope his absolute confidence in his path is a show. But I fear it isn't.

What I look for most in people is an open mind. I dislike zealots, righteous people, certainty. Because there is no truth. Just opinion and doubt.

I put my opinions out there every day. And I believe they are right. But one of the reasons I put them out there is that there is always the doubt. What if I am wrong? And by expressing my thoughts and getting feedback from you on them, I can learn, change my thinking. Adapt.

Doubt is key. It has to exist. Otherwise we'll drive off a cliff at 70 mph. And that's a bad idea.

AIR

I just installed my first adobe air-based application. It's called Snitter and its a new Twitter client. At first blush, it does a few things that Twitterific doesn't do and I think I like it better.

But this isn't a post about snitter or twitter. It's a post about Adobe's AIR, which is an "integrated runtime".

The neat thing about building an app on top of AIR is that it instantly runs on windows and mac. True cross platform development

That in and of itself isn't new but building an app on AIR is like building an app in Flash and/or HTML/Ajax. In theory, if you have a web app that you've built in Flash or HTML/Ajax, it should be a snap to write it on AIR and launch it as a desktop app.

There are a couple other efforts to do this, including Google Gears, the Parakey effort that Facebook acquired recently, and something from Microsoft (i think). Google Gears is potentially the most interesting because it includes persistent storage which is nice. Imagine being able to do gmail as a desktop app when you are not connected to the web (airplanes, etc). That's a dream of mine for years and it's going to come true soon.

So here's the issues as I see them. If you want to install an AIR based app, you first need to download and install the AIR runtime. I did that yesterday and it was simple, but that's a problem because most computers don't have AIR on them and many people won't want to take that extra step. It would be great if AIR came with Flash because most computers have Flash on them at this point.

So if you are a developer, you have to think twice about developing to AIR. And then there are going to be two or three more of these "web runtimes" out there. Do you need to support all of them in the short run? Probably yes, if you want to get the most adoption that you can.

Ultimately one platform, maybe two, will win out. Flash has won that place for rich media on the web. That doesn't mean that AIR will win too. My guess is that Google has the best position at this time because if they launch versions of their web apps as gears-based desktop apps, they'll get a lot of adoption that others can ride on top of.

Nevertheless, this is an interesting area to watch develop.

That Was Quick

Yesterday, I suggested that The Insider make some changes to their community water cooler. When I went there this morning, the changes had been made.

Thanks everyone at The Insider. If you work in the NY tech/startup scene and if you Twitter, you should join this page.

Unlocking My iPhone

So I am unlocking my iPhone. I've ordered the $99 iPhoneSimFree software from Wireless Imports and now I have to activate and jailbreak before I can run the unlock software.

I want to activate with a prepaid plan. I've read that the best way to do that is activate via iTunes and then type in 999-99-9999 when asked for a SS#, and that will fail the credit check and lead to a prepaid option.

I've got two questions.

1 - should I activate on the machine I ultimately want to sync music and photos and other stuff with (which is my daughter's computer since she is going to get the iPhone when I am done unlocking it) or can I use any version of iTunes to unlock?

2 - does the above method for getting a prepaid activation still work and is is the best way to do that?

Thanks everyone. I'll let you know how it goes. I hope to have an unlicked iPhone in the next couple days.

The Community Water Cooler

I don't like the term silicon alley and never have. It's a wannabe term. And the internet/tech scene in NYC doesn't need to be like silicon valley. We've got a pretty interesting community developing here. Just this year, we've seen Doubleclick, Right Media, and TACODA become the objects of affection from the big guys. Twelve of Union Square Ventures' fifteen portfolio companies are headquartered in the NY metro area. There's a lot of good stuff happening right here in the Big Apple.

So that's a long way of saying that I don't like the name of the NYC's version of Valleywag, called Silicon Alley Insider. The comparisons to Valleywag only go so far. To date, The Insider (that's what I am going to call it) has not delved into the private lives of the people in the NY venture/startup scene. It leans toward the kind of analysis that its editor Henry Blodget did when he was in the investment research business. Just this week, we've gotten an analysis of the economics of the iPhone price cut and another analysis of the video streaming business.

Just like I read @NY and SAR back in the 90s, I read The Insider religiously. They've got the blog format down. The posts are short and get to the point quickly. It's largely news and linking out to other stories, many of which I've already read elsewhere, but every once in a while they'll post on something I don't know about.

And they are building an audience quickly. The Insider already gets more traffic than this blog.

It's good to have a "paper of record" for a community and The Insider is likely to be it for the NY venture/startup community. I particularly like what they are doing with Twitter. They've build something they call Community Twitter, but I think of as the Community Water Cooler. If you are in the NY venture/startup scene and use Twitter, you can add your Twitter posts to this page. It's a nice way to keep track of what's going on around town at any given time. It looks like this:

I have two suggestions for Henry and his colleagues. First, I'd like to see the posts by reverse chronological order, not grouped by the person making the post. Second, I'd like to subscribe to the whole page via a RSS feed.

Let's make this our community water cooler. If you work in the NY venture/startup world and use Twitter, join this page and let's start talking to each other.

Bruce Is Livin' In The Future

That's the title of my post over at newcritics about the new record from The Boss called Magic.

Wallstrip Blackberry Shootout II

  The Finals Of The Wallstrip Blackberry Shootout II 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

Today was the return of the blackberry shootout. I was gunning for a finals rematch with Bijan. Blackberry vs. iPhone. I would have killed him.

It didn't happen because I lost in a semi-finals tiebreak. You'll have to wait for the Wallstrip video to see the whole thing. All I can say is I would have won the finals in about a nanosecond.

More coverage and photos are at Alley Insider.

The Veils At Bowery Ballroom

  finnanderson-veils.jpg 
  Originally uploaded by mediaeater.

At the end of a late night The Gotham Gal and I stopped by The Bowery Ballroom to catch a piece of The Veils' set. As we were getting ready to head upstairs to the show we bumped into our friend Mark (aka Mediaeater) who had his Canon EOS in hand. We went up the back stairs, got right at the foot of the stage, and Mark disappeared into the crowd. This photo, among others, is the result.

We left early to help Jess with her NYU homework (she's taking an NYU course this semester) and only caught the first part of the show. But I really like Finn Anderson's voice and stage presence. Here's a live version of the song "Advice For Young Mothers To Be" from the "Black Sessions".

Advice For Young Mothers To Be - The Veils - The Black Sessions

The Cell Phone Empowerment Act of 2007

Consumerist has the news about a bill being co-sponsored by Jay Rockefeller and Amy Klobuchar that will require the FCC to "report to Congress on the harmful and anti-competitive practice of locking handsets".

Hell they should just make it illegal. The FCC doesn't need to study anything to know that locking handsets is screwing over the customers.

Read It In A Blog Post

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin

Read this at Bob Lefsetz' blog.

Magic

I got an advance copy of the new Springsteen record, Magic.

I've just listened once so far. After a few more listens, I'll let you know what I think.

Here's the title track.

Magic - Bruce Springsteen - Magic

Every Product Is A Platform

At Gnomedex, there was a well publicized spat between Jason Calacanis and Dave Winer. I followed the whole thing and felt badly for both of them as neither was being understood by the other very well. But there was one point in the middle of the mess that was very important and got kind of glossed over.

Winer said in his original post:

Bottom-line, he needs to figure out a way to build the company so that many others can profit from it. Otherwise I don't think it has a prayer against Google, which we like less and less as a company, but who basically offers an equitable proposition to the users of the Internet, who the Gnomedex crowd represent in a loose kind of way.

Jason responded in his retort:

I've never looked at Mahalo as a platform, but rather a product. I understand Dave's interest is in things he can manipulate and play with it. He does fun things with Flickr and Twitter all the time, and I feel him on that. However, who said Mahalo was closed? So far we've had people create Facebook applications, widgets, and Firefox extensions for Mahalo, and Dave is certainly welcome to do that. We publish a bunch of RSS feeds already, and more are on the way. ....

However, I'll take the blame. We have not published an official API yet, although it's in the works, and also we haven't released a friendly copyright policy--although we're figuring it out.

I do not believe you can build a product in this day and age without focusing on the platform requirements. All the best products are platforms in their own right; Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc, etc

I wrote a couple days ago:

The [twitter] API has >10x the traffic of twitter.com. That's a great stat and I'd like to find other companies that have that metric working for them.

I don't think you can build a very good business just trying to build a platform. Look at YouTube vs Bright Cove. Bright Cove has built an amazing video publishing system for the web. But if you use them to publish your video, you don't get an instant audience. YouTube has a so-so video publishing system, nothing near as robust as Bright Cove. But you get millions of potential viewers instantly when you publish via YouTube.

And I don't think you can build a great product without being a platform. Facebook wouldn't have Scrabulous, Texas Holdem, iLike, Top Friends, and many other good apps without being a platform. You cannot build everything even if you want to. And when you let others build cool stuff on top of your product/platform, you give back to the Internet.

Which is the point that Dave was trying to make. Google is such an amazing business because as much as it takes from the Internet (close to $15bn/year at current run rate), it gives more back. Every single business that operates on the Internet gets value out of Google. Now I think Google could be a lot more generous with its API and if anyone is going to "beat" Google, they are going to do it with a more open platform, one that gives even more back than Google.

When we look at web businesses to invest in, we think hard about the API. What could it be used for? What new services could it open up? When the API is even more exciting than the .com, that's a big deal to me.

Rolling Your Own Mini Feed

My Facebook profile isn't a bad start if you want to know what's going on in my world. My twitter updates are in my mini feed. My blog posts are in the mini feed as notes. I've got a last.fm widget on there so you can see what I've been listening to lately. I've got my delicious links on there too.

It's a good start, but it's not exactly what I'd choose if I could create my own mini feed which I am working on and plan to launch shortly.

Yesterday I saw Eric Marcoullier's version of a "roll your own mini feed". He used feed widgets from Grazr and put a mybloglog faceroll at the bottom (Eric is one of the founders of mybloglog). Here's what it looks like:

Scene From My Morning Bike Ride

I was riding up the Hudson River Park bikepath today and came upon this scene.

Not one, but two cruise ships were docking at Pier 92 to let off their passengers.