We seem to be technology contrarians here at the office of curiosity. I’m very familiar with the notion that somehow Ruby (on Rails) may well be the framework of choice for so-called “web 2.0″ apps. However, we decided to develop our forth-coming project (called ImageKind) using .NET 2.0. Ruby certainly is powerful, object oriented and rational (simple) yet C# is all of those things AND there is so much support for it in terms of documented samples, user interface elements etc. .NET 2.0 seems to have a rich class framework with something in the neighborhood of 400 classes that encapsulate data access, file upload, regular expressions, image generation, performance monitoring and logging, transactions, message queuing, SMTP mail, blah, blah and blah. Along the way, we’ll insure our site works in a cross-platform environment and degrades nicely when necessary. So, maybe Web 2.0 isn’t about Rails at all. Maybe it’s just about getting the job done the right way with whatever tools our developers like to work with.
Archive for February, 2006
My browser “home page” consists of a whole bunch of Firefox tabs that are configured to launch every time I fire up Firefox. Today I’m deciding to try one of the many Ajax desktop apps to see if it makes sense to consolidate some of those services into one page. This will include my Yahoo Finance quotes page, my Yahoo email, Google and others. I’m going to start with NetVibes…what appears to be one of the better developed apps. I can tell you right off the bat that when I tried to set up my Yahoo mail account, it did not recognize my username and password even though I logged in and out of Yahoo mail from Yahoo several times just to be sure that I wasn’t mistyping something. Loading new modules seems easy enough. Account setup wasn’t too bad. Now let’s see if I can develop a habit to use it vs. going back to my old way of launching multiple tabs. After all, who has just one “homepage” anymore anyway?
Last night I was chatting with Ian Blaine over at thePlatform. We were reflecting on the last 5 years and how far the company has come in spite of some very turbulent times. Nobody expected the company would be where it is today. Internet crash. Nearly running out of funds. Lean revenues. Other similar stories also close to home include AtomFilms. My good friend Mika Salmi fought hard to keep the company alive and relied on his own good instincts and a small, loyal team to keep the company on a trajectory that got it to where it is today. I know how close it was but I also know how both guys made up for tough circumstances by working SUPER hard and (eventually) managing each dollar like it was their last. They both also prioritized the businesses they wanted to be in spite of the temptation to do five other things. I could (but I won’t) rattle off dozens of companies just in the digital media sector that hit every industry trade show over the last 5 years but who are no longer in business (remember IVT?)
Maybe one lesson is to be skeptical of your own press. Another lesson is to simply stay alive. There are many more Web2.0 companies popping up than will be acquired. There can only be so many Flickr’s and Del.icio.us type buyouts. By no means am I suggesting to have all the answers but I have seen that endurance plays a critical role in tough times. Maybe that goes without saying. Then again, maybe it’s important to really, really hate failing.
I mentioned over on my personal blog that I attended a PaidContent.org party tonight. One thing I noticed was that at least a few people were making jokes about checking the value of their house on their mobile phones using Zillow. I had written about Zillow in a previous post as I know Rich and was curious what exactly he was cooking up. While at the party, Jeff Schrock and I were talking about life up on Queen Anne (we both live on Queen Anne, a suburb in the Seattle area) and how easily the word “zestimate” flows off the end of your tongue. I agreed and mentioned that my wife spent a good part of last weekend putting a “Z” in front of everything…”I zink I need a zestimate!”. Jeff goes on to tell me, “well, you know, it WAS developed using Zajax and ZML so it had to be good!” One of us goes further saying, “sure, and ZML is surely the next best thing to XML - Zillow Markup Language!” To our amusement, the banter went on and on. “Zis is ZO funny!” No doubt, the crew in the Zillow offices has already had all kinds of fun with this type of Zebonics.
Reflecting on this during the drive home, I thought a bit about my old employer RealNetworks and how they could have gone even further with the “real” branding and the talking bubble which has become such a great tech logo over the years. Something about this “Z” thing really works for me. I hope the guys over at Zillow get maximum mileage out of this thing. Because, a lot of big corporations pay a lot of marketing companies a lot of money for zis kind of hook. I zay keep it rolling!!
Michael Copeland at Business 2.0 wrote a great story this month about “How to find your angel”. It’s the March issue so if you are a subscriber it probably comes to your house this week. It should hit newstands soon. The article talks about our venture over at Curious Office and our interest in Peter Cooper’s fabulous FeedDigest product. Michael discusses everything from how to best attract early stage funding to how VC’s can work with or against angels to take companies to the next level. One thing the article didn’t talk about is what angels should expect from certain types of deals and how they may need to have a different behavior than an investor (like a VC) who may play a higher stakes game. One thing I learned early on was that you cannot expect to invest a small amount of money and then further expect your company to have all the infrastructure for reporting that a VC backed company might. Updates may come in the form of brief emails or quick phone calls vs. nice quarterly powerpoint presentations in a boardroom. Decisions are made fast and informally. Developers aren’t accountants or lawyers and sometimes things like balance sheets, income statements, non-disclosure agreements and other contracts lack the same sheen or structure that a larger company might provide you for your investment. This doesn’t mean things are broken. It just means you’re early and resources are limited. If the company is truly viable, it will grow and you’ll have to sit through PowerPoint briefings soon enough.
This article sums up quite nicely what my business partner and I have been thinking for a few years. And, in large part its what guides us here. However, really good (exciting) deals still come along infrequently so we remain on the lookout…
We’re working on a new web app called ImageKind and as part of that project I’m responsible for developing workflow, user interface and development progress. While designing the shopping cart, I was curious (hey, we are called Curious Office) as to whether or not I should incorporate breadcrumbs into the site to aid people as they moved through the check out process.
I found this interesting study which did the most thorough analysis I’ve ever seen on this subject. You are welcome to read for yourself but the basic summary is this:
“Breadcrumb users were found to use the Back button less often than users who did not use the breadcrumb; however, no differences were found in the efficiency measures of total pages visited, navigation bar clicks, embedded link clicks, or time to complete the search tasks. It is not known if all participants understood the function of the breadcrumb as a navigational tool.”
I think I’ll be leaving breadcrumbs out…
Steve Brotman has a nice little summary of Bo Peabody’s book, Lucky or Smart. The bullet list summary is worth the read if you don’t get the book. For example:
1/ Entrepreneurs are made, not born.
2/ Lose the ego, be gracious at all times, the world is a very small place
3/ Know what you don’t know
4/ Don’t believe your own press
I’ll be at the ContentNext Mixer…these are the PaidContent.org guys. Should be kind of fun and expect to see lots of old friends. Hope to see you there, Feb 22nd, 6 PM sharp @ The Palace Ballroom, 2100 - 5th Avenue, Seattle.
Today’s purchase of Measure Map by Google will be blogged by hundreds (if not thousands) of others. But, the thing that struck me about this purchase was that a) the company never even launched to a public audience and b) it splintered Jeff Veen from the rest of the founders of Adaptive Path. This was Adaptive Path’s first initiative to develop products in-house and it was originally concieved by Jeff inside the company. Measure Map provides bloggers with a powerful, simple way to understand participation on their blogs and its a great ego tool. Jeff was an Adaptive Path founder and Product Director for Measure Map, and he’s heading over to Google along with several other members of the development team. I personally doubt this purchase involved millions of dollars in cash (more likely an aggressive stock vesting plan) but I’m sure it will spur the other bright founders at Adaptive to further develop more of their own standalone products. Perhaps Adaptive will morph into a product company as 37Signals did with the success of their Basecamp product. Needless to say, these are smart folks who are helping define what the future of the web is all about. When I interview people, I often want to get a sense of their “Internet culture”. If I mention companies like Adaptive Path and ‘interviewees’ look back at me with a blank stare I seriously question the depth of their “web culture”…at least on the inside 
Alex Bosworth has a great post about ways in which a user community helps grow the size of the community itself. For those planning or building a web platform that is supposed to try and support this kind of activity, this post is a bit of a deeper analysis into what things you can do to besides talk a lot about how important viral behavior is. Some things are kind of obvious like, have the ability to host users pages. Other things might not have been so obvious such as, supporting the ability to integrate with blogging publishing engines and supporting incentive mechanisms for thousands of bloggers to promote every post.
I’m going to add a new one to this list. In development of our own upcoming platform at ImageKind, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at other systems and thinking about ways we could have improved them or ways in which they could be extended. I’m calling this new thinking “re-creation”. Here’s a simple example; Cafe Press is a very popular e-commerce engine that facilitates printing of your artwork onto coffee mugs, tee-shirts, mouse-pads etc. It’s successful for a few reasons. First, is that it married the evolution of the direct printing industry with the web. Anyone who has worked in marketing for the last 10 years knows that it wasn’t easy to order 10 custom tee-shirts for a corporate promotion. You had to order a box of 300. Secondly, Cafe Press lets user open and create their own “galleries”. What they didn’t do, however, is architect the system to support re-creation. For example, I often see pieces of art from a designer that I really love but really don’t want that piece of art on the white tee-shirt that the designer selected and put in his Cafe Press store. I want that digital file placed on another product. I can’t do it. That’s just crazy. I want to open a store where others dictate the products my digital files are on. In essence, they help me create inventory.
Letting users reconstruct the evolution of a store or website in deeper ways will be the next big part of viral vectors. There are lots of potential examples. Consider that there are dozens of Ajax desktops out there. I want the ability for some of my chosen, registered friends to influence my desktop. I’d like the ability to publish to their desktop. In this example, re-creation could be simply achieved with RSS but it all depends on how deep you want re-creation to occur. If I want to give my friends the ability to re-theme my Ajax desktop, then RSS alone might not do the trick. Another simple example? I have trusted friends who should be able to post to my del.icio.us list.
Supporting re-creation on deeper levels create additional development headaches on the server side and create “exponential success” headaches but should make for some very interesting online addictions if done correctly. And I’m just scratching the surface here in terms of the possibilities…
My friend Rich Barton launched Zillow today. Interest in Zillow which has been in stealth mode for months, is so high that the site crashed its first day I guess that’s a good thing. They raised $30 million with which to torment their other under-funded competitors.
This is great.
1. Staying the wrong course: Rejection of board input
2. Offsite and out of touch: Disengaging from daily operations
3. Indignation: Emotional and combative behavior
4. Silent treatment: Cutting off information flow to the board
5. Buck-passing: ignorance of key details and blaming other executives for unexpected shortfalls
6. Pulling up the drawbridge: Directing his or her management team to deflect board inquiries
Andrew Wright used to work at RealNetworks and I remember him being a very laid-back, very smart guy. He had since left to start a company which was operating by the name Muskoka Media for a long time but the new, official name of the consumer service is called SmileBox.com. The Seattle PI has a decent overview of the mission which, in a nutshell, is a new system for allowing people to use their own digital photos to create clever new digital greeting cards. I haven’t used the system but to do some really innovative stuff here (e.g. custom flash greetings created on the fly) can actually be much harder than a lot of people realize. I wish them luck. My bet is that the company will do reasonably well. It’s all about execution and Andrew has a great track record.
John Huntsman is my hero. He’s worth $5 billion and he’s giving all away to cancer research over the next few years. I love his book and its subtitle “Everyday lessons we learned as children and may have forgotten”. This guy is about as classy as any one individual can be and I admire him greatly.
