My morning news consumption…
Like most people, I have my morning information digestion routine. I’ll browse some stuff to see if I get any ideas to put on my personal blog. I’ll fire up my customized Netvibes home page which I’ve gone to great lengths to populate with all my favorite sites over the last few years. I’ll check the stock market and my email. But the one place where I’ll often find some of the most interesting web pages is actually the “popular” list on the del.icio.us bookmark service. Since the service launched, I’ve stopped bookmarking websites directly in
my browser simply because I’ve found it more convenient to have everything accessible on the web, regardless which computer I’m logging into. But the popular list on del.icio.us is like an uncanny treasure trove of digital tidbits that is something like finding a neighborhood garage sale with under priced collectibles, tools and record collections that your friends would otherwise die for. You never know what you’ll find there but you’ll always find something interesting. You don’t go there looking for anything in particular. But you’ll always find something peculiar. Take today for instance. 100 ways to organize your life. Who doesn’t love lists? Especially when someone else makes them…
Leopard is here!
Wow, yet another reason to spend money on tech toys. I guess this is probably a fine occassion to finally break down and get that new 8-core Mac Pro.
A few of the new features you won’t find in Vista that I love:
Quick Look:
Look inside the contents of every file in the Finder without having to actually launch the application. Even Photoshop and Illustrator files?
Time Machine:
What a way to use that extra storage! Roll your computer back in time as easily as browsing any file folder. Lost a file? Deleted a file? Just do any regular search but go ahead and go backwards in time. So cool!
Spaces:
This is easily my favorite new feature.
I have one 30″ Mac monitor and another 21″ inch monitor next to it. But you know what? I STILL don’t always feel like I have enough real-estate. With Spaces, you can toggle back and forth between custom “environments” without having to move applications all over the places. Email stays in its own Space. Photoshop stays in its own Space. You can even drag from one Space environment to another.
Stacks:
Yet another demonstration that Apple understand UX/UI concepts better than just about anyone out there. Create your own file “stacks” behind single icons on the dock. So simple. Most good things are.
Time to go to the Apple store!!
What a week for Seattle companies…
I suppose the most notable announcement was Microsoft’s $240 million dollar purchase of 1.6% of Facebook. It was only a month ago that Steve Ballmer was trying to figure out if this was all a fad or not.
What he said:
There can’t be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years. That’s for sure,” Mr Ballmer also noted that sites such as Geocities, an online community that was bought for $3 billion by Yahoo! in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, “had most of what Facebook has.”
Hmm. Well, make of this what you will.
The other notable announcement was the closing of Judy’s Book. I understand start-ups not working out sometimes. What I don’t understand is why it took $10.5 million to get here. I don’t necessarily know that Judy’s Book was a bad idea…I just think that it should have only taken about $2-$2.5 million to get to this conclusion.
Today I read with great interest that Nick Hanauer over at Second Avenue has joined the Board of Marchex. I’ve long believed that a huge frontier is that of small businesses slowly moving their ad dollars online. ReachLocal’s recent $55 million dollar round certainly underscores that point. But, Marchex’s recent acquisition of VoiceStar suggests very clearly that they intend to sell phone leads to small businesses. How do you track a phone lead from a website? Why, using an IVR system like Voicestar of course!
Last but not least is the ongoing saga of Isilon’s public life on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock currently trades at $5.65 (down from its 52 week high of nearly $29 per share) after the company failed to missed sales targets that analysts were expecting. Fellow RealNetworks alumn and Sujal Patel, who founded the digital storage company seven years ago and served as its chief technology officer, has assumed the CEO role. The appointed CEO and CFO were let go this week after several disappointing quarters. Actually, three disappointing quarters in a row. Knowing Sujal, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this stock rebound nicely over the coming year. He doesn’t have experience running a public company but he does have a very big brain and that’s half the battle. He won’t make promises he can’t keep.
I might just buy both Isilon and Marchex stock this week.
Where are we on the bubble-meter?
This week I’ve heard multiple viewpoints on the outlook for 2008. Some are bearish – I suppose primarily fueled by the incessant launches of new “web 2.0″ start-ups with no apparent revenue models. Others still see a strong market for new ideas and a slew of big companies with deep pockets and high-minded motivations to spend money on tech teams seen to be innovating for the “next generation of the web.” Who is right? I think that nobody would dispute Adobe’s view that the network is ultimately the computer. Ok, actually the folks over at Sun get credit for that exact phrase but in any case, Microsoft surely isn’t happy that Google docs is being used by millions and there still isn’t a good web-based alternative to the mighty Word. In spite of this macro-movement I think that things could get a bit rough in the second half of 2008 for many web 2.0 companies that are hoping that advertising alone can sustain them. And building to flip was never a good idea anyway. No doubt Microsoft will buy a lot of companies over the next few years and those are the ones we’ll read about but there will be legions more that quietly go under. I always think there is an opportunity for good business ideas but I wouldn’t bank on pure market momentum to sustain an otherwise inadequate business plan. That worked out for a lot of companies over the last year (read: Sony’s buyout of Grouper) but I personally wouldn’t put “Google AdSense” in any new business plan. 
Samwer Brothers making more moves
Imagekind investors, Marc, Oliver and Alexander have announced their latest move – Jimdo.com.
The boys in Munich have a reputation for successfully cloning US websites that appear to do well. Their roster of investments is formidable and they seem to have a deep understanding of Internet culture that serves them very well. StudiVZ (essentially a clone of Facebook) was their latest success as it was gobbled up by another Imagekind investor – Holzbrinck. Linkedin and ReachLocal are two other sure-fire hits. All in all, these guys seem to make great choices when it comes to online investments.
jQuery – yet another example of killer open source
Ok, so by now a lot of people are already familiar with jQuery. We used it at Imagekind and I’ve used it messing around with various other projects too. jQuery is a JavaScript toolkit designed to simplify various tasks such as element selection, DOM manipulation, event handling, AJAX and animations.
If you’re doing a project that isn’t primarily based on Flash and requires certain effects such as Drag-and-Drop or you need to add DOM elements on the fly – there is almost certainly a plugin that is available to you within the jQuery plugin library. There is a complete themed interaction and widget library that sits on top of jQuery that have you making sortable lists within minutes – not hours. Very cool. Try it if you haven’t.
TechCrunch is like Foxnews
I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw this post tonight. I love TechCrunch but this post shows that Arrington certainly isn’t above getting very personal with his public platform. BBC this is not…
Chris Matthews new book looks good
Got some good quotes from this new book by Chris Matthews.
Return of the startup factory?
This story was recently sent to me by a friend, and, operating Curious Office, I read it very closely. For the last few hours since reading it I’ve had mixed feelings about it. For my own sake I thought I’d try to obtain some clarity by forcing myself to write about it. So, what’s wrong with this article and this approach?
Some things I agree with. Others I don’t. I think the process of starting a company should be treated with more respect. Starting a side project that becomes successful is called ‘luck’. Doing as many side projects as you can find time for is a perfectly good thing to do. Sometimes this is called a ‘hobby’. Saying that you’re going to churn out 20 companies per year almost feels cheap to me. I DO agree with the suggestion by Evan Williams that you don’t necessarily know what is going to be successful. Very true! I promise you that the founders of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook never had an idea that these companies would be worth their current valuation. Sergey Brin once said that he always knew Google was going to be huge. You know what? I don’t really buy it on some levels! I don’t believe that he ‘knew’ that Google was going to be a $47 billion dollar company any more than I believe that Mark Zuckerberg knew Facebook would be worth billions when he co-founded it. But the theory presented in this article is that “if you can’t predict what’s going to be successful you should do as many projects as you can.”
I suggest things aren’t nearly that simple. This article says “engineers have 90 days to ship a product.” It further says “the product has to grow organically, without any marketing.” To me, this is not even fine if you’re working on a consumer project. It has ZERO bearing on development of an enterprise product. First, the amount of time and money to be spent on a project should hinge on the market your chasing, the size of the market, the competition in the space and the complexity of your unique offering. In other words, some thinking still applies. Secondly, NO company is successful without marketing. The issue is about the true definition of marketing. If Yelp enters an already crowded market defined as “a place to share the experiences they’ve had with local businesses and services” and suddenly has an Alexa ranking of 1,850 do you think it was done without marketing? Sure, there are no fancy Superbowl commercials. No sock puppet. But there IS a marketing strategy. A strategy about building affinity with your users. A strategy about optimizing for search engines. A strategy around unparalleled customer service. These things have development and human resource expense that are marketing related.
There’s another thing about this article I don’t like. It makes it sound like building a successful business is something that is a process of chance. The comparison is of a movie studio churning out one hit after another. My dispute? Great movies involve one or more of the following: great director, great story line, great cinematography, great producer, great big budget, great actor(s). Most successful movies involve big budgets with highly proven directors, actors or writers. Occasionally, but far less frequently, do you get a short film that makes big money. Napoleon Dynamite was inspiring because it was a rare example. But it doesn’t usually happen that way.
So, I guess my feeling is that finding good company opportunities is hard. This is why limited partners give venture capitalists money. It’s hard work. It takes evaluation and strategy. It takes smart people, good plans and some timing. It can’t always be forced. You can’t always know what will be successful anymore than a professional poker player knows what the river card will be. But, he’s still more likely to beat me at poker in the no-so-long run.
Michael Copeland at Business 2.0 gave me a nice mention once and I like him but in this case I’m going to give Ravikant a lot more credit here. I’d like to think there is some deeper strategy going on here than most readers will take away.
Nokia deal sign of GPS to come?
I like this story over at the Alarm Clock. It makes on think a bit more about GPS doesn’t it. I don’t feel like I’m almost 40 years old. As such, it doesn’t seem that long ago that I was standing at a RealNetworks tradeshow booth at Mipcom in Cannes France back in 1997 demonstrating to a packed crowd that we could actually tune into a live radio station over the Internet that was based in Sweden. Everyone was sure it was some canned demo. People thought we were playing the music from our local hard drive. I did that demo a hundred times during the tradeshow. Today, video on the web is just an assumed part of the experience.
GPS will be like that. For our kids, they won’t know a world without it. Advertisers in 5 years won’t deliver a lot of ads that aren’t targeted in a three dimensional context of time, location and relevance. And when I say “location” I don’t mean the LBS (location based services) the mobile providers talk about today. I mean that a unique ad could be delivered to those people sitting in the highest seats during the world series whereas those on the ground level are getting a different offer from the same advertiser based on the implicit value of the seats they’re paying for. Pretty cool. Lot’s of opportunity here.
When does marketing become important?
Did you know that the average tenure for a Chief Marketing Officer in a technology company is about 23 months? That’s about half the time for a CEO or COO. In my mind, the reason is two-fold. First, most CMO’s do not accept responsibility for revenue generation in a way that is truly accountable. Secondly and more importantly, the others in the organization put unrealistic demands on the marketing organization and don’t really understand what the marketing organization is supposed to produce. For most CEO’s, the VP of Sales role is much easier to grasp.
Here in Seattle we’ve got a bunch of Microsoft refugees who go on to start companies. At Microsoft, the engineering and program management teams sat on top of the pyramid. As such, most of these start-ups are “engineering led”. Nothing wrong with that. Except that markets buy products. Markets don’t buy code. Markets don’t buy business plans. People sell themselves when marketing is working right. Business plans are for bankers. Marketing is for making money.
So when does marketing become important? Well, I can only speak from a little bit of experience. Recently, I met with a first time entrepreneur who is a software engineer for whom I have a great deal of respect. Over the last year or so, we debated the issue of features development versus marketing. He was always a big fan of adding more features. I was a big proponent of understanding differentiation and developing a solid marketing strategy. Today, the product has a ton of features but not enough users yet to drive significant revenue. And quite some time has passed. Marketing cannot save a product that isn’t packaged and presented extremely well if the business plan already posits that you’re operating in a crowded market. In a crowded market, marketing must be better understood and executed well. In a less crowded market, product engineering and features could possibly suffice in absence of decent marketing.
Real marketing started AFTER the product was built. Bad idea. Marketing starts before any line of code should be written. What usually happens is that stuff gets built and then companies want to promote it to drive new customers. That’s part of a promotions budget. The issue is that a promotions budget only reflects what you already built. A marketing budget is supposed to help you understand what it is you’re going to build. People tend to promote what they built. They don’t tend to build against a marketing vision. Marketing isn’t another word for promotion. Promotions IS part of marketing. But in reality, marketing is part of a product definition strategy. It captures key questions right at the beginning of a business concept such as “who will be part of our team and why?” Or, “what investors can help us insure the product is well received upon our launch.” Or, “what will we build that shall set the product apart from other options in the marketplace?”
In simple terms, marketing is about your users needs. Not just what you’ll tell your users about what you built. Certainly promotions is important. But it’s a lot more about what you’re going to build for your users that makes it a compelling product offering with real revenue potential. It’s a discussion that happens before the business is started and before each new product feature is prioritized and implemented. If you don’t give your users a better product, with a better value proposition and a better usage experience then a promotions campaign is going to be hard, expensive and possibly ineffective.
Start-ups. Who cares what was tried before?
Ok, I admit to being a bit enamored with Pownce. Kevin Rose of Digg fame seems to really understand how the InterWeb works. I can think of at least a dozen failed attempts at file sharing apps over the last few years. A whole raft of P2P file sharing utilities. I mean, even imeem started out that way before changing their entire business strategy and keeping only the name. But Pownce already had an Alexa ranking of about 2,500. And the general public STILL can’t even get the app.
There are two reasons for this. First, they focused on a problem and didn’t give a damn how many people had worked the problem before. Sending files amongst friends and family was never “solved right”.
Second, they got packaging right. If you develop apps for the web you need to understand your user. For HP/Snapfish, the user is “Emily“. Emily is HP’s target persona. For Pownce, the target is clearly the more cutting edge technocrati that live in a world between fashion, tech and rock bands the rest of the world haven’t heard of yet. And the Pownce team knows that this user base has an eye for detail, design and execution that “Emily” (Good Housekeeping) wouldn’t ever notice. It’s about tapping into a culture. And Pownce understands which community will initially get the company off the ground. There are other examples of this in action that were also working well in already crowded fields. YouTube WAS the “cool” video sharing place but those in the know still think Vimeo is cooler.
Social networks may be playing themselves out but the boys at Virb just keep cruising along.
Nailing that packaging and understanding your target persona means you can thrive in supposedly crowded markets. I’d go a step further and say that you’ve got to be driven by passion accompanied by an acute infatuation with “better execution”. In such cases, you’ll always find a market. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always about “cool”. Emily may not be cool but she is Snapfish as much as this guy is a driver of the Pownce/Vimeo culture.
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Curious Office Companies
Inkd
Inkd is our latest internally developed concept. We raised our $1.7 million seed round on September 22 and are backed by Second Avenue Partners and a variety of tremendous angel investors. We are developing the World's First Market for Original Print Design.
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CafePress
Cafepress acquired Imagekind in July 2008. CafePress.com is an online marketplace that offers sellers complete e-commerce services to independently create and sell a wide variety of products, and offers buyers unique merchandise across virtually every topic. -
Imagekind
Curious Office started Imagekind in 2006 and it is the world's fastest-growing art site offering over 750,000 high-quality fine art images for sale. Imagekind gives consumers limitless options to purchase museum-quality framed and poster art from over 50,000 domestic and international emerging and established artists. -
SEOmoz.org
Curious Office invested in SEOmoz along with Ignition Partners in 2007. SEOmoz serves as one of the largest online hubs for search marketers worldwide by providing education, tools, resources and paid services to help make every SEO the best they can be. -
Shelfari
Amazon.com acquired Shelfari in September 2008. Based in Seattle, Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers -
Fanzter
Fanzter is headquartered in Collinsville, Connecticut and are the creators of the wildly popular celebrity style and entertainment platform Coolspotters.com, which launched in May 2008. Fanzter secured $2 Million In Series B Funding Led By Steamboat Ventures in March 2009. -
Wishpot
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netConcepts
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Rouxbe
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RocketVox
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FeedDigest
