We had a noticeable earthquake a few minutes ago this evening. Nothing too severe, but the hanging lamps were swinging back and forth a few inches, and the house was shaking for 15-20 seconds. Apparently it was magnitude 5.6, somewhere near Alum Rock.
BarCamp returns to Palo Alto next weekend, this time as BarCampBlock.
Almost two years ago, a group of 6 San Francisco geeks in 7 days, using blogs, wikis and IRC slapped together a weekend conference with wifi, food and amazing presentations in Palo Alto, California. This was a different kind of conference, though. There were no superstar keynote speakers. There were no pre-programmed agendas. There was a brilliant agenda filled with content by and for the attendees. Everyone, including the sponsors, the organizers, the speakers and the audience were involved in making the event happen equally and were often one and the same. Over the weekend, more than 200 people showed up and people watched remotely from all over the world. This event was BarCamp.
This popped up on YouTube this afternoon - filmmaker Ahree Lee shot an image of her face every day for three years starting in November 2001, then concatenated them into a fascinating short movie called “Me”. The project is set to music by Nathan Melsted, which give it a hypnotic, X-file-ish feeling.
A slightly longer and sharper version is posted at AtomFilms. There’s also a short related project built on lots of different faces, called “Everyone”.
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.
“Knights, I bid you welcome to your new home…Camelot!”
An amazing mashup of Monty Python’s “Knights of the Round Table” song, with singing and dancing by the cast of the original Star Trek.
If this doesn’t leave you rolling around on the floor, it probably means you’re completely baffled and/or younger than 30 or so.
Try naming the episodes for extra credit…
via The Big Picture
Here’s part of a visualization of this site. There are many more site visualizations on Flickr, tagged websitesasgraphs. The applet is written by an artist named Salas, who also has a project to sell one thousand paintings of numbers from 1 to 1000.
Markup tags are mapped to colors.
What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags
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″).
Here is a visualization of my del.icio.us tags, by Kunal Anand, who’s been collecting del.icio.us tags and turning them into interesting pictures. Here’s the short explanation he sent along:
1. Each dot represents a tag (aka a node)
2. Each line represents an intersection between tags
3. The center of the visualization (denoted by a colored gradient), represents the heavy set of intersections
It appears that I have a fairly consistent set of regularly used tags, and a fairly even distribution of less used tags that intersect with the most common ones.
For comparison, see visualizations of tags from Brad Feld, Tom Coates, Pete Freitag
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:
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.
Tagnautica is a fun and interesting Flash user interface for exploring and navigating among tags, in this case on Flickr. After keying in an initial tag, related tags are displayed in a circle, with a sample image from each tag category displayed in a representative size.
When you move the cursor over a tag bubble, it temporarily becomes larger so you can get a look at it. The other bubbles keep resizing as well, giving the interface a very fluid appearance. When you find something you like, you can click on the Tagnautica bubble to view the tag page over at Flickr.
I always enjoy these sorts of user interfaces for semi-random exploration. I’ve noticed that I don’t really use any of the cool visualization tools when I actually want to find something, though. Not sure if that’s because they don’t represent a useful set of questions as implemented yet, or simply because my brain doesn’t work that way.
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.
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.
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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…
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.
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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 :
Some thoughts following the Microsoft splash this week:
The big PR launch for Windows Live last Tuesday announced a set of web services initiatives. It probably drives a lot of Microsoft people crazy to have the technology and business resources that they do, and to have so little mindshare in the “web 2.0″ conversations that are going on. I haven’t read through or digested all the traffic in my feed reader, but it looks like a lot of people are unimpressed by the Microsoft pitch. Been there, done that. Which is true, as far as I can see. The more interesting question is whether this starts to change the flow of money and opportunities around developing for and with Microsoft products and technologies.
If I do a quick round of free association, I get something like this:
Microsoft:
Andrew Wooldridge has built a web application which will instantly generate a web2.0 buzzword-compliant startup name and concept.
Web Two Point Oh!
Create your own Web 2.0 CompanyBelow you will find a pre-created VC friendly Web 2.0 company just for you!
Hit reload to create another potential million dollar idea
Some of the candidates I got were:
Just to be safe, he adds an editorial footnote:
Note: this is just a little programmatic satire. Any semblance to an actual company is purely accidental and not intentional! It’s supposed to be funny
Before too long, someone may start to automatically generate examples of these on Ning or something along those lines…
Haven’t been keeping up on feedreading due to this cold for the past few days. I’m still kind of out of it, but I finally went to see the doctor and the prescription meds seem to be knocking it back a couple of notches.
I see that Riya (née Ojos) is about to start their public alpha trials. Mike Arrington got an early look today. Looking forward to trying it out.
During the past few days of semi-coherent downtime, I was having something like the following thought, which Russell Beatty articulated in a post this evening:
© 2004-2008 Ho John Lee
