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site admin | May 29th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for May 29th from 05:17 to 12:45:
- Some stats from Twitter conference compared to… – Robert Scoble – FriendFeed – Anecdotal data from 140tc this week. 200 tweets/second at peak. Didn't see an estimate of current user account population though, I keep seeing site unique visitor estimates, which aren't useful.
- Microsoft Silverlight vs Google Wave: Why Karma Matters | Zoho Blogs – "The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology. Google Wave, as yet, is not much more than a concept and an announcement. It is easy to dismiss all this with "Oh, the press just loves to hype everything Google, and loves to hate Microsoft," but that cannot explain why even competitors like us are willing to embrace Google's innovations, but stay away from perfectly good innovations from Microsoft, such as Silverlight? It comes down to one word: karma."
- makerfaire.com: Maker Faire – This weekend at San Mateo Expo Center
- Google Wave Federation Protocol –
- Google Wave API Overview – Google Wave API – Google Code – APIs for Google Wave email / bbs / wiki / chat / collaboration / communications mashup platform introduced yesterday.
- What Emacs Commands Do You Use Most and Find Most Useful? : programming – Reddit thread discussing favorite emacs commands
site admin | May 4th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for May 3rd through May 4th:
- Dilbert comic strip for 05/04/2009 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. – Secretary to Pointy Haired Boss: "I live in a rented trailer and all of my money is in my checking account. Your investments are worthless and your mortgage is underwater. My net worth is higher than yours now. I guess promiscuity and a G.E.D. was a pretty good strategy after all." Reminded me of a thought I had earlier this year, that much of Western Civilization is built on valuing delayed gratification, which hasn't worked out so well recently as opposed to immediate consumption in many cases.
- Without Warning, Twitter Kills StatTweets (Businesses Beware) – StatSheet.com ChangeLog – Owner of StatTweets post regarding his network of sports-related Twitter handles being banned. They had several hundred accounts, one for stats for each team. This makes sense for users, given the way Twitter works, but they don't like mass account creation. Interested to see how this sorts out, there seem to be at least a few similar Twitter networks with team/region/topic-specific handles.
- Dooley Online: What URL Shortener Should I Use? – Comparison of features and some usage data for URL shorteners such as tinyurl and bit.ly used on twitter and other services.
- Obesity and Overweight: Trends: U.S. Obesity Trends 1985-2007 | DNPAO | CDC – During the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in the United States. This slide set illustrates this trend by mapping the increased prevalence of obesity across each of the states. In 2007, only one state (Colorado) had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Thirty states had a prevalence equal to or greater than 25%; three of these states (Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee) had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 30%. The animated map below shows the United States obesity prevalence from 1985 through 2007.
- Why text messages are limited to 160 characters | Technology | Los Angeles Times – A look back to the beginnings of SMS in 1985 – Would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, they based their initial assumptions on two "convincing arguments," Hillebrand said. For one, they found that postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters. Second, they analyzed a set of messages sent through Telex, a then-prevalent telegraphy network for business professionals. Despite not having a technical limitation, Hillebrand said, Telex transmissions were usually about the same length as postcards.
site admin | April 30th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for April 30th from 05:57 to 07:10:
- SIGUSR2 > The Power That is GNU Emacs – "If you've never been convinced before that Emacs is the text editor in which dreams are made from, or that inside Emacs there are unicorns manipulating your text, don't expect me to convince you."
- How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord – 100 remedies for the fatal flaws exhibited by famous evil overlords of the past. Also some business executives, I think.
- Google Could Have Caught Swine Flu Early | Wired Science – Google’s search data may have been able to provide an early warning of the swine flu outbreak — if the company had been looking in the right place. Last week, at the request of the Centers for Disease Control, Google took a retroactive look at its search data from Mexico. And there the team found a pre-media bump in telltale flu-related search terms (you know, “influenza + phlegm + coughing”) that was inconsistent with standard, seasonal flu trends.
- What Twitter Looks Like For Twitter Employees (SCREENSHOTS) – Some screen shots of current admin tools at Twitter for managing user accounts, blocks, whitelisting, suspensions, and user stats such as # follow attempts, # updates, #directs, etc
- Twitter Aggregator Sawhorse Media Raises Seed Round, Launches Pets, Celeb Sites | paidContent.org – "Channelized" feeds from curated lists of twitter sources.
site admin | April 23rd, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for April 20th through April 23rd:
- What I’ve Learned from Hacker News – Paul Graham on social dynamics and managing Hacker News, user submitted comments and ranking (voting up/down) , editorial intervention and moderators, project goals.
- SEOmoz | Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and Hacker News Algorithms Exposed! – Looking at variations on algorithms for ranking items on social news aggregators
- NGINX + PHP-FPM + APC = Awesome – Walkthrough on setting up cached PHP web server on nginx with apc.
- Particletree » PHP Quick Profiler – Lightweight tool for profiling PHP code.
- MySQL’s Full-Text Formulas – Database Journal –
- http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html – Online text-to-speech demo, with various male and female speakers, plus a few translations.
- Dealing with Duplicate Person Data – Proud to Use Perl – Classifying likely duplicate entries in name/address contact data using Levenshtein distance and tables of nickname synonym and assigned distance weights.
- Web Security Horror Stories: The Director’s Cut at <head> – Presentation slides from a talk by Simon Willison on cross site scripting, SQL injection, referer forgery, and clickjacking attacks on web applications.
site admin | April 19th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for April 18th through April 19th:
- Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design – Stefano’s Linotype – A practical approach to CSS for non-designers (programmers).
- The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions – Presentation slides on improving application user experience by making them more game like (points, levels, scarcity), social interaction, and other ideas.
- Stephen Marsland – Python code from "Machine Learning: An Algorithmic Perspective", assorted clustering and estimation algorithms.
- Firediff – In Case of Stairs – Firediff implements a change monitor that records all of the changes made by firebug and the application itself to CSS and the DOM. This
provides insight into the functionality of the application as well as provide a record of the changes that were required to debug and tweak the page’s display.
- Crowdsourcing the semantic web | lexanderA – "Currently, all attempts at providing semantic metadata require server-side changes which means that we need to rely on page authors to implement them. This, of course, is a major obstacle. But what if we could change that? What if we could bypass page authors and have the crowd add semantic metadata to existing pages?"
- Just How Important is the Valley? Let’s Look at some Data. – Tony Wright dot com – Is the silicon valley entrepreneurship model specific to SV? List of acquisitions in 2007 and 2008.
site admin | April 17th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for April 15th through April 17th:
- Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step – Compress text files with gzip to reduce file size/bandwidth, the incremental cpu cost is usually low relative to the performance gain from lower network cost. Friendfeed uses nginx in front of main web servers for this.
- Jabbify – Free Comet web service and browser client for simple chat and streaming status applications.
- TinEye Image Search Engine – Idée Inc. – The Visual Search Company – Finds references to images online, starting with an original image. Attempts to use image analysis to be independent of scaling, cropping, and other common manipulations.
- All That Twitters Isn’t Gold: A Popular Web Application in Search of a Business Plan – Knowledge@Wharton – Business school take on Twitter and high growth, non-revenue consumer web startups.
- Almost Viral: A Hybrid Acquisition Strategy – "By being almost viral you can grow very cheaply, control your rate of growth and demographics, and get enough traffic to conduct meaningful experiments. Need to grow more slowly? Just decrease your daily ad spend. Need statistically significant results more quickly? Increase your daily ad spend. With a viral coefficient of 0.9 you’ve dealt with your acquisition risk. Rather than going fully viral and dealing with the operational difficulties, it might be worth your time to deal with other market risks: retention, engagement, and monetization. "
site admin | March 3rd, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for March 3rd from 05:48 to 12:10:
site admin | March 1st, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for February 28th through March 1st:
- Community Data – Swivel – User contributed datasets, for visualization and graphs with Swivel
- Obamameter – Map visualization of economic stimulus outlays. "Keep tabs on the the US economy, the global economy and the stimulus through our dashboard for the economy."
- recovery.gov.pdf – Slide presentation on data sources and construction of initial Recover.gov site in Jan 2009, from talk at Transparency Camp.
- Virtual Hoff : DoxPara Research – Slides from Dan Kaminsky's talk at CloudCamp Seattle on network and application security issues in cloud and virtualized computing environments.
- Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. – from Paul Graham – "If you could get startups to stick to your town for a million apiece, then for a billion dollars you could bring in a thousand startups. That probably wouldn't push you past Silicon Valley itself, but it might get you second place. For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the world."
- Berkshire Hathaway 2008 shareholders letter (PDF) – Warren Buffet reviews the state of the financial markets, his worst year ever, and the outlook for 2009.
- White House 2: Where YOU set the nation’s priorities – Not the actual White House, but an interesting experiment in collaborative input for setting government agenda.
- Python for Lisp Programmers – Peter Norvig examines Python. "(Although it wasn't my intent, Python programers have told me this page has helped them learn Lisp.) Basically, Python can be seen as a dialect of Lisp with "traditional" syntax (what Lisp people call "infix" or "m-lisp" syntax). One message on comp.lang.python said "I never understood why LISP was a good idea until I started playing with python." Python supports all of Lisp's essential features except macros, and you don't miss macros all that much because it does have eval, and operator overloading, and regular expression parsing, so you can create custom languages that way. "
site admin | February 27th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for February 26th through February 27th:
site admin | February 24th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for February 23rd through February 24th:
Silicon Valley is built on optimism and entrepreneurship, but lately, most tech companies can do no good in the eyes of public market investors, who are presently in a mood to sell on no news, bad news, or even good news.
At the same time, private market sentiment toward investing in Web 2.0, online services, and consumer media and publishing appears to be positive.
Barry Ritholtz posted this investor sentiment graph, on which I’ve marked roughly where I think we are for “new web” startups versus public tech companies.
A lot of the problem with public tech company share prices is due to uncertainty about future prospects – a slowing economy, growing competition, increasing costs, and a general cloud of unknowable liability from options accounting issues. The actual businesses are often doing OK or even great, but investor sentiment has shifted, bringing down the share price. See BRCM, RACK, or NVDA for a few examples of what happens when you report a decent quarter without boosting forward guidance. Fewer people are willing to pay a 30 multiple for growth that may never come, or that may never have existed in the first place.
In contrast, there is still a lot of investor love for Web 2.0 startups and other “new” online services. Part of this reflects supply and demand — there are a lot of investable funds around, and it’s hard for a fund to invest a lot of money in small chunks.
There’s still a lot of excitement about the future of Web 2.0 et al, but it’s been feeling overdone for the past few months (“Digg is worth $60M“), without necessarily being over. On the other hand, I still get the impression that people here in Silicon Valley are still somewhere between denial (“It will go back up”) and fear (“What if it doesn’t”) with respect to the medium term prospects for tech stock share prices.
This investor sentiment graph and other graphs of economic cycles can also be found on the forecast page at Now and Futures.
Anyone think we’ve already hit a peak for Web 2.0 investments or a bottom for tech stocks? (I don’t.)
Would you rather be “right” or be successful?
Changing your mind about an investment – intellectual, emotional, or financial – is difficult.
Munjal Shah, founder and CEO of photo search company Riya, has been writing a series of posts narrating his experience over the past few months getting his startup off the ground. Highly recommended reading for entrepreneurs and others with an interest in startups, online web services and software applications.
In startups and other forms of investing, it’s common to have a vision or thesis guiding your decisions. Technology companies, and especially technology startups, tend to be big on vision, which can be helpful in achieving internal alignment and for building external awareness among potential customers and partners. It can give everyone a common sense of purpose or mission, and can sometimes take on a religious or political tone (i.e. Apple fanatics, the first Internet Boom, George Gilder’s Telecosm, or lately “Web 2.0″).
An important skill is recognizing when the facts on the ground are diverging from the vision and it’s time to reconsider. Some relevant investing adages:
- It’s cheaper to lose your opinion than to lose your money
- It can be very expensive to convince the market that you’re right
- The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent
In today’s installment of his startup journal, Munjal recounts their discovery that their users weren’t behaving the way they had expected. Riya was conceived as a platform for users to upload their own images for tagging and search, but more and more people come to the site to search for images without uploading anything. The Riya team has been puzzling over what’s going on with their beta users for weeks when they see:
The answer to the question we had been seeking. It didn’t come from our brains but from the silent majority of people who were using our site each and every day. For most people Riya was not a replacement to their Flickr accounts. Riya was not a replacement to Y! Photos. Riya was becoming a replacement for… you guessed it: public web image search!!
Munjal’s comment on entrepreneurs’ drive to change the world with the power of their vision, and the corresponding difficulty in assessing incongruent facts, is right on:
Entrepreneurs are an odd bunch. As an entrepreneur you create a vision of what can be and then work really hard to make that happen. It is your imprint on the world. It is your legacy. Maybe 2000 years ago if you wanted to leave a mark you would be Julius Cesear or Genghis Khan. Today you start a technology or Internet company. I believe almost all entrepreneurs seek immortality through their products. This is one of the reasons we all seek to build products that are used by and benefit the lives of as many people as possible. We want to do good, but we also want to be remembered. Some admit this and some don’t, but it is true. The greatest crusades in the world are always for the intangible. There is no other explanation for why founder’s of companies work so hard and sacrifice so much. Money can only account for so much of this. You have to believe that you are on this planet to somehow change it.
However, this is the achilles heel of the entrepreneur when changing strategies.
The desire to imprint can leave you deaf to the input from your customers. Like Alexander your men can want to go home and you want to press further into India. So you ignore the facts and continue trying to imprint your first vision on the world. When the data doesn’t support you, you say words like:
“We were ahead of our time.” – Full Denial
“I just have to hold out longer and people will see the value.” – Almost full denial
“If we only had this feature people will use it” – Medium denial
As a startup, Riya is in the midst of defining (and redefining) itself, and is taking rapid steps to revise their vision, rather than ignoring the mismatch between their original vision and the behavior of their growing user base.
Some would argue that they should stick with their original vision, the one that’s gotten them this far. But when a startup business is faced with flat to slow growth in it’s initial proposition versus strong demand growth in an unheralded aspect of their offering, it’s a good time to consider whether a new vision is order.
Long ago, I once had a company that spent a lot of time and effort building an advanced signal processing system, only to discover that most people wanted to do very simple things with it. It took us a while to realize that our “vision” helped customers find us, but most of them actually wanted something different than what we had in mind. (It didn’t help that were really proud of our product.) We eventually came out with a product that actually did what customers were asking for, which was predictably, far more successful than the original.
One of the things I’ve learned (and am still learning) over time is the value of recognizing and reevaluating a broken thesis (or vision), the sooner the better. One of the biggest inhibitors to changing one’s mind is the fear of looking silly, that other people will think badly of your decision. This can be an expensive fear, when it causes you to stubbornly follow an investment thesis or startup vision which is showing clear signs of being flawed.
It looks like Munjal and the Riya team have elected to change the vision rather than trying to convince the market that they were “right”. I’m looking forward to seeing how the new vision shapes up.
There’s an interesting new report out today from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (the US Military Academy), titled “Harmony and Disharmony: Exploting Al-Qa’ida’s Organizational Vunerabilities“, which has some useful insights for entrepreneurs and corporate managers as well as for those dealing with global jihadist movements or with a general interest in global security issues.
The report is based on a collection of captured documents which have been recently declassified, and examines some of the strengths and weaknesses of the Al-Qa’ida organizational structure. The merits of a 21st-century, networked, mobile, internet-enabled insurgency have been observed elsewhere at length, as summarized by James Na at Korea Liberator:
Martin van Creveld of Hebrew University, the author of the highly influential Transformation of War who has been lauded (including by me) as a leading prophet of military transformation, even went on to suggest that the small/weak would always beat the big/strong in a long war. (The stronger side is more constrained in methods; it also loses morale more rapidly from inability to defeat the weak completely over a long period of time; on the other hand, the weaker side often enjoys a more flexible, networked organization, and has a faster decision making cycle, i.e. the OODA loop).
The captured documents (available online in both original Arabic and translated English) have a remarkably familiar feel to them. Take out the parts about politics, religion, and carrying out jihad, and it looks kind of like an odd startup, with position descriptions (“must have work experience of no less than 5 years and have complete military operational experience in the battlefront and bases”), employment contracts (“vacation requests must be submitted two and a half months before the travel date”), and bylaws (“Goals – To spread the feeling of Jihad throughout the Muslim nation”).
Part of what makes the report interesting is that it’s based on Al-Qa’ida’s own self-assessment of what’s working and what isn’t working. Here are some sample items from a post-mortem summary of Al-Qa’ida’s experience in Syria:
- Absence of an advanced comprehensive plan and strategy
- The faithful mujahideen were spread among numerous organizations
- Failure to explain the mujahid revolutionary theory and clarify it’s objectives on an ideological level
- Low level of religious instruction and scarcity of revolutionary and political awareness
- Dependence on quantity after the 1st blow did away with the quality
- Weak public relations campaign both inside and out
- Dependence of the mujahideen on outside sources for support instead of being self-sufficient
- Getting bogged down in long term gang warfare unsuitable for the country
- Moving out of the country for an extended period of time, losing touch with the masses, and the decline of the religious and revolutionary level among the members
- Not benefiting from the Islamic and international gang warfare experiences
- Dealing with the neighboring regimes as if they were permanent supporters of jihad
- Operating publicly was a grave error
- Deficiency of military operations on the outside and failure to deter the enemy and their friends
- No planning for the aftermath of the regime
- Not rallying around the religious scholars and benefiting from them
A lot of this looks like the “before” part of a management consulting project.
Some items here remind me of Noel Tichy’s views on management, on the need for aligning ideas and values to achieve effective action within the organization. At the same time, many of their operational problems are linked to “agency” problems. This is when individuals or affliates have an incentive to do something in their own interest rather than those of the organization, and which get worse in the presence of personal risk and operational secrecy. This tends not to happen as much in companies, but there are still spectacular failures from time to time (think Enron’s SPEs).
If you’re interested in thinking about startup organizations and competition from a very different perspective, check it out.
Update 02-14-2006 23:37 PST: You may also be interested in “Unrestricted Warfare“, on asymmetric warfare, a 1999 paper by senior Chinese PLA officers, and Scott Maxwell’s recent series of posts, “How David can beat Goliath“.
Update 03-08-2006 10:58 PST: You may be interested in “Stealing Al-Qaida’s Playbook” which reviews other writings from active jihadists, also from the Combating Terrorism Center, although it’s probably less useful in a business context than the ideas on asymmetric warfare.
I had been trying to arrange my schedule to get to the Future of Web Apps workshop this week in London, but sadly things didn’t work out. Actually, I didn’t even manage to get to last night’s SearchSIG to see edgeio’s first public demo here in the Bay Area, so perhaps it’s not surprising I couldn’t get a trip to the UK sorted out.
The good news is, there’s a conference wiki with lots of presentation notes, including comments on del.icio.us, discussions on how Flickr evolved, some thoughts on approaches to building discoverable URLs for data, the merits of Ruby on Rails. and a detailed discussion on the implementation approach and specific costs for the DropSend service.
The other day Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch wrote a rave review of Bluepulse, a new mobile application platform. In a quick read through their website, it looks like they’re trying to offer a carrier-independent path for 3rd party mobile application developers to reach mobile users.
Bluepulse is planning to develop applications for customers, as well as rev share with 3rd party developers, and offers a free SDK. Getting applications onto wireless carriers network is a pain, and getting paid for them is also painful, so there are some good opportunities here, and I thought I would give it a try on my Nokia 6820.
The application downloaded and installed, but nothing happened, so after a few tries I sent off a message on the Bluepulse web site, and got a quick response from Stuart Hely, their general manager.
Unfortunately, it turns out that while the Nokia 6820 is capable of downloading and installing the Bluepulse application (which is needed to use other Bluepulse-hosted applications), it can’t actually run the Bluepulse application. No Bluepulse for you!
Our technical support guys have looked into the issue you raised and the bad news is that we can’t squeeze bluepulse onto the Nokia 6610 as the memory size required JUST exceeds the phones capacity even though the bluepulse file is very small.
Thanks for your query and sorry about the fact that you can’t have bluepulse on your current phone. We hope that with your next phone, you will be able to enjoy bluepulse.
Sounds like an interesting idea, but there might be some handset deployment issues for a while. I haven’t been keeping close track of handset capabilities, mine’s about a year old, so anything since then is probably OK.
I’ve been having good results with my new Bluetooth headset, so I may consider switching to a phone with a bigger screen that is better at running applications sometime. I’ve been moving steadily toward carrying less and smaller equipment for the past few years, though, and have been resisting switching to a Treo, Blackberry, or any other PDA-like device, partly because of the bulk.
David Hornik asks: Where’s the Money in the Long Tail?
It is certainly the case that in the aggregate, Long Tail content is extraordinarily valuable. The question for VCs and entrepreneurs is “for whom?”
…
The real money is in aggregation and filtering and those will continue to be interesting businesses for the foreseeable future.
He points out that aggregators are building convenient one-stop shopping for people looking for topically-focused content, and derive economic value even when the content publishers do not.
David Beisel follows the money a little further:
…in the long run, the value of the network is not only determined by the number of nodes in it, but in the ability for the network to monetize those nodes.
…in calculating the value of a network, any equation describing it should contain a variable with the monetization rate (or proxied by the value to the user which can be monetized in the future). So while the number of nodes in a network surely is a fundamental (if not the majority, in many cases) driver of value, the value of the network itself to the user is also a very important component to the overall total.
Being the provider of a filtered view of online content is somewhat analogous to being an editor at a magazine or newspaper, a program director at a radio station, or an A&R rep at a record label. It usually doesn’t make sense to pursue some topics or styles as there’s either no audience, or a very low value audience, or an audience that’s too hard to reach.
Conversely, some publications do well on a very small base (financial newsletters and independent musicians come to mind). When the individual publisher (writer, musician, artist) develops their own audience, they are able to capture more of the value placed on their content by the consumers of content (readers, listeners, viewers) than when they are simply one of many aggregated content producers. People seek out their favorite writers in newspapers and magazines, talk show hosts on television, or musicians in local concerts. The content producers gain relative power over the distributors and a few can become their own branded media empire. (Think “Oprah”.)
From an investment point of view, it’s difficult to justify betting on any particular content producer becoming an online media star, for the same reasons aspiring writers/musicians/actors don’t get VC investment. (How are you going to know when you’ve got the next J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown on your doorstep looking for seed funding to write their book? )
In contrast, search, filtering and aggregation services can be built for specific audiences. The trick though is not just to find an audience, but to provide a service that is valuable over time to the audience, service provider, and content publishers. The Alexa Web Search Platform announcement this week is interesting not because it’s the best general purpose search engine, but because it may drop the effective cost of building some targeted filtering and aggregation services low enough to uncover some new interesting niches, in addition to the areas that are already being addressed by vertical search startups. Many of these niches may be profitable short term projects for a small team (or single person) but not durable enough to be investable, though.
Greg Linden adds:
Massive selection isn’t enough. To make the long tail accessible, irrelevant items should be hidden. Interesting items should be emphasized. Millions of poor choices should be reduced to tens of good ones. The value is in surfacing the gems from the sea of noise.
David Beisel has some suggestions:
Where’s my “social portal” for me as a skier enthusiast? Better yet, where’s the “About.com of social portals?” Or why isn’t About.com more social?
I suspect that someone will have that social portal for skiing enthusiasts in limited beta somewhere real soon now…
See also: The Home Pages of this New Era
At last month’s Mobile Monday, Jack Denenberg from Cingular Wireless commented that 411 calls accounted for a huge chunk of revenue to the US cellular carriers, with Cingular servicing around 1 million 411 calls per day at an average billing cost of between $1.25 to $1.40. All US carriers combined do around 3 million 411 calls per day, which works out to more than $1 billion per year in 411 fees!
They’re going to be really unhappy if these guys get some traction:
A few weeks ago I met Andre Vanier, CEO of 1-800-411-SAVE (my friend Ajay, the guy with the cool geek car, introduced us). I was intrigued by his new business and he’s on the phone with me announcing his new service that turns on tonight at midnight.
…
We are considerably cheaper, he says. 1-800-411-SAVE is a free call.
His service is using the same database that the carriers use to provide 411 information. This service is using the latest data the big phone companies use (they are forced to share that data with other phone carriers), while many of the Internet-based services are using much older and less complete databases.
What’s the business model? 1-800-411-SAVE pays for the cost of the 411 call. The model is to recover the cost from advertisers. Not just any advertisers but specifically advertisers that fit into the overall concept of “save.”
(via Scoble)
Update 11-16-2005 00:41 PST – The corollary to saving $1.50 for listening to an ad from a sponsor before getting the phone number from 411 is that the customer service lines for banks and credit cards should pay me for listening to their upsell message that gets played before getting to the automated response or being put on hold. At least with the free 411 I get to make a choice…
Quick notes from SearchSIG last night:
This month’s SearchSIG featured John Batelle along with Dan Farber and a panel discussion on vertical search by Gautam Godhwani (SimplyHired), Pete Flint, (Trulia), Adam Beguelin (Truveo), and Tony Gentile, (Healthline). If you look carefully at the photo above, it’s nearly self-documenting, as the web page with the speakers and agenda is projected behind the stage. If only they had sat in order…
Best quote of the evening, from Gautam Godhwani: “I have yet to see Google do applications well”. This in response to a question to all panelists about why Google / Yahoo / Microsoft wouldn’t end up squashing them like bugs at some point. In the background, John Batelle ran a search for “search company ceo” on SimplyHired, which came back with 1020 matches…
Tony Gentile from Healthline had a more defensible reason for existence, in that they’ve built a domain specific taxonomy and onotology for mapping consumer names for health-related topics into the professional medical namespace, and has a quote from Eric Schmidt to the effect that “health and law are two areas that they wouldn’t approach now as they require too much domain knowledge” or something like that. Truveo has a lot of branded content, and claims to do an excellent job of digging out metadata, thus letting you quickly filter for recent gossip, sports highlights and adult content. Trulia works with real estate agents to map their listings onto a Google map, with filters by price, zip code, etc. I have a hard time keeping Truveo and Trulia straight.
A quick show of hands turned up something like 1/3 of the attendees were involved in building a new search engine, most of them not Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft employees. Hmm. This might be correlated with the large number of search company CEOs.
Update 11-12-2005 16:10 PST – more from John Batelle, Dan Farber, Om Malik, plus a pointer to an Information Week article with the quote from Eric Schmidt regarding domain knowledge requirements for law and health search (via Tony Gentile)
I spent a lot of time digging up new music a couple of months ago during the pre-launch period beta tests of the Pandora music service. I put together a list of interesting music that I found, and ended up purchasing a number of new albums, and put off signing up for their paid subscription service until I finished working through the new music. I thought the fee was OK ($12/quarter or $36/year) but I simply had too much other stuff to listen to, so it would have been wasted money until the backlog cleared a bit (all the CDs I found from listening to Pandora in the first place).
Given my experience (liked the service, liked the music, put off signing up temporarily when the fees started), and the opportunity for affiliate referral fees from Amazon and others, this move to a ad- and affiliate-supported service could end up generating more revenue in the end.
In addition to many new features (bookmarking, station editing, playlist improvements, etc.), Pandora v2.0 includes a free, ad-supported version. Listeners have the choice to subscribe and stay clear of ads, or use the free service, which will gradually incorporate advertising. What does this mean for you? You can now come back and listen to Pandora as much as you’d like for free–and all the stations you’ve created remain intact.
At a referral fee of 6% of sales, it would take around $50 of CD sales to directly replace the old subscription fee. However, many more users who would turn away if even a small payment were required might try using a free service. And Pandora is the sort of service that creates demand for new music that those “free” users might be happy to purchase from Amazon (or iTunes). I don’t know what their conversion rates look like, but if they look anything like my behavior, Pandora is far better off working on bringing in more music-loving users than trying to collect subscription fees.
See also:
Ho John Lee | November 7th, 2005 | 2 comments
This topic for this month’s Mobile Monday was “Funding and Investment”, held at the AOL offices in Mountain View.
Speakers included:
Quick scribbled notes:
Keiritsu Forum is an angel investing group, making investments of $250K to $1MM in early stage companies, at premoney valuations of $1.5MM to $10MM. They gather 50-80 applications per month via their website, which invite some teams in for screening by member committees to select which ones will make presentations at their monthly meetings.
They are not strictly focused on mobile or technology, and their disclosed investments are eclectic. One company they mentioned makes a self-cleaning kitty litter box.
Vineet from BlueRun Ventures outlined some mobile and communications topics they’re following :
- Convergence of wireline/wireless (Cellular + VOIP / VoWLAN)
- Innovative Mobile Services
- User interface and usability innovations
- Emerging wide area technology (WiMax, not 802.20)
- 3G rollout creating new opportunities
BlueRun is focused on relatively early investments of $2MM to $8MM, while a related fund, Nokia Growth Partners is focused on later stage investments. BlueRun started out as Nokia Venture Partners (but has since taken on additional LPs), giving it a strong global flavor before it became more fashionable. They are early on in their latest fund which just closed a few months ago, and could be a good fit for startup teams working the mobile space.
Martin Frid-Nielsen (CEO of SoonR) spoke from the entrepreneur’s perspective. Their product is a remote access solution for using your PC desktop from the mobile phone, and they have apparently been featured as a plugin for Google Desktop. Aside from the actual product, I found his talk entertaining for his comments on selecting a country for outsourcing their software development.
Their company is based in Denmark and the Bay Area, both high cost areas. They decided to outsource to a Eastern European country, and ultimately selected Albania. Martin also commented that Ukraine was actually cheaper, but there were other issues, “like, you have to pay the mafia”.
David Fradin (President and CEO of MauiGames) gave an overview of their phone-based games. They offer advertisers the ability to place sponsored banners and product placement within their (mostly Hawaii-themed) games, such as golfing, frisbee, and some sort of cycling sport. He seemed to be over-reaching a little when he claimed that their system provided the only method so far that could actually count ad impressions on a mobile phone, perhaps I misunderstood what he was saying.
They have a proprietary API for their ad service, which allows dynamic insertion of background banners into the game scenery and other displays. Someone in the audience asked why they didn’t drop the game development activity and just become something like “DoubleClick for mobile games” and his response was that the existing mobile game developers were mostly from gaming backgrounds, didn’t really understand the potential revenue value of selling advertising in the games, versus selling the game itself, and that MauiGames needed to continue forward with their model to demonstrate to the other companies how it could work (and thus convince them to sign on to use their advertising platform).
MauiGames is in Hawaii, although it looks like they’re actually on Kihei, not Maui. Still, a nice place to work. (Updated – AndyF points out that Kihei is on Maui…)
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