Web Development, startups, entrepreneurship, books, art, and other stuff
Dan Pink is the author of A Whole New Mind, which I still have not read (I should probably remedy that), but which is high up on the “Titles I Wish I Had Thought Of” list.
He also has a new book; “America’s first business book in manga”. Does this imply there are whole series of magna business guides in Japan? I don’t know. Maybe.
Also, Dan really knows how to promote a book:
Johnny Bunko trailer from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.
Heck. I want to read it.
So, I haven’t asked for donations on the internet since my wife went to Peru a few years back. But, I’ve been accepted to Startup School and if possible, I’m hoping to make it. Unfortunately, it’s not in the budget.
All I need is about $600, so I figured, well, why not give it a shot. I created a campaign on ThePoint, which can be found here: https://www.thepoint.com/campaigns/send-phil-crissman-to-stanford-for-startup-school/headquarters
I’m extremely passionate about the web and startups, and I can absolutely say that I don’t believe the trip will be wasted. If a few dozen people can spare $10-20, I’m there. If it sounds worthwhile to you, please consider helping out. If not; no problem. Thanks!
I’m not sure I’m very good at predicting the Next Big Thing. I mean, when I first heard about Microsoft Windows in 1990, I figured that would be a complete flop*. Yeah. So, there you go.
(* But really, who could blame me?)
Still, I think we can be assured that there will be, at some point, another Next Big Thing. It’s just the actual shape and smell of it that eludes us.
I don’t know if the Metaweb will be the Next Big Thing. But if it isn’t, I think it may be the Next Next Big Thing, or possibly the 3.times(”Next”) Big Thing, or maybe somewhere beyond that. I don’t even know if we’ll call it “the Metaweb”, but at the moment, I don’t know what else to call it.
When I say “Metaweb”, then, what am I talking about? Mainly, I mean a layer of activity and content over the web, interdependent with existing web content. Some possible examples:
Continue reading ‘The Metaweb’
Stephen K. Wolfram spoke at a YCombinator Startup School instance in 2005; I’m not sure how long the content has been online (possibly for the last 2 years) but I just saw it earlier. The whole talk is very interesting; here is a bite-sized chunk:
People have different motivations, of course. A lot of people think the big thing with companies is money.
Yes, if you luck out, you can make a lot of money. But it’s really rare that money carries people as a motivation.
You have to actually care about what you’re doing.
For some people, like me, it’s the actual creative content that they care most about. For other people, it’s the act of building the company. For others, it’s making deals. Or winning against competition.
But there has to be something you really care about.
And I think it’s important that if you’re the one who cares, you should be the one pushing things forward. If you’re smart, there’s a good chance you can learn the detailed skills to run a company. But to make the company really work, you need someone leading it who really cares about it.
You can’t delegate the core motivation.
From the Gmail Greasemonkey 1.0 API page, emphasis added:
Greasemonkey is an integral part of the web experience for many experienced users. Google acknowledges that some people are going to change their own experience of our web applications regardless of what we do. Resistance, as they say, is futile. It would also be somewhat hypocritical. After all, a Google employee wrote Greasemonkey in the first place, another wrote these scripts to add functionality to Gmail, and a third wrote two books on the subject (and these docs).
The news about Gmail and Greasemonkey is cool and interesting, but what I found most interesting was the emphasized statement above.
When I wrote a week or two ago that I didn’t think an Ad-driven business model could last forever, I think a lot of people probably thought that was crazy. After all, don’t we read articles about blogs, sites, and businesses making hundreds of thousands of dollars, per month, with online advertising?
Absolutely; and I think those sites and business models will continue to work. Probably they’ll even do so for the next few years, even the next decade (maybe). But Google’s acknowledgment above is at the heart of what I was trying to say:
We, the web publisher, have NO CONTROL over how the browser views our site.
It’s conceivable that anyone, via their browser, plugins like Greasemonkey, other addons, or yet other technologies and methods unforeseen, can ignore or over-ride our CSS, our carefully tested layouts, any and all widgets on the page, anything.
Yes, right now it’s a very small percentage of rather geeky folks who are using Firefox extensions, Greasemonkey, etc, to do this, but we have no reason to suppose that it will remain this esoteric in the future. It could become easy as one-click, in many more browsers, to remove ads from web pages. What then?
Again, the sky is not falling, no one is going to stop making money, and this business model isn’t going to fall apart overnight. I’m just not sure it’s The One True Business Model that will continue to work in perpetuity…
—
Back to Gmail & Greasemonkey. Again, this is cool. Anyone found or created greasemonkey scripts for this yet?
What we call “Web 2.0″ products have, so far, been web applications targeting the average user. Every new app and startup seems to follow this same pattern. I think there’s a few reasons for this:
That’s an incomplete but (I think) not completely inaccurate list. So yes; there are advantages to what has become the typical model for modern web applications.
At the same time, the enterprise is becoming more and more interested in “web 2.0″. In truth, this is partly just because it’s cool. Not that the enterprise is too concerned with being “cool” (though it would be great if corporations tried to be a little “cooler”, a la Tom Peters’ style re-imagination) — but if something is generating a lot of buzz, the enterprise will assume that it is providing value for someone. In this case, for many someones. The enterprise is very interested in “adding value.” They want to add value for their customers (so that they can keep and grow their customer list) and they want to add value internally (to lower costs/raise productivity, ergo affecting the bottom line and ergo pleasing the shareholders).
So the enterprise will be looking very carefully at anything they think will add value. They might do it a little later and a little slower than the early-adopter alpha geeks, but if persuaded that there is value to be added, I think we can rest assured that the enterprise will check it out.
As they do this, the enterprise has the same two choices it has whenever it contemplates a new product: develop it internally, or acquire a smaller company that is doing what they want to do. The choice that they make will probably based on cold, hard, budgetary numbers and projections. Will acquiring the small company add enough value, in a short enough time, that the cost of acquisition and integration is less than the cost of developing the tool internally? If the existing tool is mature enough, I’d say that acquiring the small company is going to win a fair number of times.
Not only that, but part of your monetization strategy is solved quicker. For typical “web 2.0″ applications, the idea is to release some very cool, free service into the world, and then figure out a way to make money from it. Usually this is with advertising (which is still currently working very well) or with a subscription for a version with enhanced features.
The enterprise, on the other hand, expects to pay money for software. Not only that, but they’re used to paying quite a bit for good software. That’s not a bad paradigm to walk into as a new startup, versus giving something away, and earnestly trying to convince your investors that you can, somehow, generate revenue.
Normal web 2.0 apps don’t really spend a lot of time trying to “sell” the user on their service. They generally rely on their uniqueness (hopefully) or their buzz/momentum/word of mouth. Selling to the enterprise isn’t going to work that way.
There are pros and cons to having to sell someone on your application. One of the first is that you’ll realize very quickly whether or not it meets a need. Someone said once, if you can’t state your position in eight words or less, you don’t have a position. Similarly, if you can’t tell me the need that your product meets, or the problem that it solves, you don’t have a product. You have a software toy. The enterprise wants to buy solutions, not toys. “Solutions” may be a bit of a buzzword, but regardless, that’s what we need.
(Now, technically, all you have to do is convince someone that your are solving a problem — but it helps if you actually are.)
Once you get used to the idea of needing to sell the product, though, there are some potential pluses. With a consumer product, if you want 500,000 users, you need 500,000 people to be convinced that your product is worth using. With an enterprise product, you may just need to convince 500 IT directors, CIOs, or other management. Is it easier to make 500 sales than 500,000? Well, I suppose the real answer is “that depends”, but the bottom line is, if you sell one person, you may wind up having just gained a thousand users (or more). Not bad.
However, you don’t want to create Yet Another Enterprise Application. There are a lot of those; if you’re reading this and thinking about it, you do want to keep your application “2.0″ — which probably means social, network-y, highly communicative, simple, etc.
Now, here’s where I interject with my opinion. It seems to me that what has made “Web 2.0″ explode can be in a large part attributed to open APIs — in some cases, completely open source applications. If you want to make your widget work with systems X, Y, and Z, you can; because they all told you how.
Conversely, in the enterprise, the tradition seems to be mammoth “solve-all-your-problems” application leviathans. They might have an API, sure; but plan to call in several $500/hr consultants for 6 months to integrate anything.
If Enterprise 2.0 is going to add value in the same way that web 2.0 has, a huge component will be simple, open APIs. By simple, I mean, you don’t need to be a J2EE/Oracle DBA/UNIX Guru to understand the documentation. That doesn’t mean you can’t use those technologies, but make the API something that a junior programmer can use. If the IT department then wants to add a little modules, they can do so with some quick PHP, Ruby, or Java.
OpenSocial could be a big one; if developing for the “Enterprise 2.0″ space, I’d think twice before ignoring OpenSocial. If companies and applications start adopting this (and it looks like they will), then having compatibility with it could be a very large selling point. Not having it could be an automatic loss.
I think that Web 2.0 applications targeting the enterprise have a bright future. If it sounds good to you; go make something! ;-)
I think part of what we (anyone with an idea or an entrepreneurial urge) miss is: if an idea is marketable, there’s room for competition. There very fact that competition exists is a good thing - it proves that a market exists.
In some cases, competition can even simplify your plan; find out what your competition is doing wrong (or could be doing better), and do it right.
A local example might illustrate what Aiken’s quote means to me: Here in Minneapolis there is a fast growing local coffee chain called Dunn Bros. Coffee. How could they — or anyone — even try to compete against giants like Starbucks? Automatic “bad idea”?
As it turns out, no. Dunn Bros sells only coffee roasted fresh in the last few days, and most locations feature local artists’ work on the walls. To a coffee lover or a person with a soft spot for local artists, it’s automatically better and hipper than any Starbucks could be or probably ever will be.
(Okay, it’s pretty easy to see which place I prefer. Actually, some of the independent coffee shops here are very good as well, but they don’t make as good of an example.)
That said, if someone came up to you and said, “I’m going to start a chain of coffee shops and compete with Starbucks/etc” — sounds like a pretty bad idea. You would literally have to ram it down peoples throats to get them to see that it could be done, and they still might not see it.
Is there any competition too big? Microsoft? Google? IBM? Maybe, in some time periods, and for awhile. But Microsoft pulled the rug from under IBM, and Google seems to be doing the same to Microsoft. Eventually someone will do it to Google, and who’s to say that it won’t be you? That sounds a bit crazy — and certainly I don’t think that any of my ideas from the previous post are in the “Google-killer” category. But the point is, if you decide before you start that you can’t compete with company x, you’ll never start. And the company who does become the New Leader in their field will do so despite everyone who told them it couldn’t be done.
Another of my favorite quotes, when applied to business or competition:
“If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.”
- Michael Corleone, The Godfather: Part II (mp3)
EDIT: And yes, that is my sorry attempt at a Kathy Sierra style funky illustrative graph. I try.
Recently stumbled over a great post: Don’t Keep Your Idea A Secret.
I seem to remember reading some other similar things:
It reminds me of a moderately famous quote (also seen in one of the above links):
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you will have to ram them down people’s throats.” -Howard Aiken
It sounds like good advice, to me. In the spirit of this, here’s what I’ve been percolating, incubating, and trying to throw some spare time at:
It could incorporate a sort of popularity based ranking - add the times that a site’s ad is clicked, as well as the times that the links on their site are clicked; The better the score, the more likely it would be that your link would appear on other pages. Lest it become a tyranny of the popular, some forced rotation of all members could be put into place. Because the system would be reciprocal (someone who wanted their “free ad/link” displayed on another site would need to also include the ad script on their own site), there should always be enough sites to display all members ads multiple times throughout each day.
I’d like to have one, or two levels above “free” that would allow more text, and/or a small image, and/or an additional number of guaranteed impressions per day.
Has online advertising been done to death? Maybe. Despite my rant about advertising being a shaky business model for the future, I do think it’s a very solid model right now.
I’m already looking at the above description and seeing challenges. Also, there’s no particular reason this would be monetizable (unless you just started with subscriptions, like SixApart/Typepad) or any better than any other blog system. I want to build it anyways, because it just appeals to me.
At the moment, I’m thinking it would be a micro-blog type format, but at the same time, I don’t see any reason to prohibit longer posts. I started a prototype of this in PHP, but I’d really like to develop it in Rails using acts_as_tree. Again, just because.
In my mind, an app like this would literally make it possible to build blogs, databases, social networks, or whatever, all using this tool. There’s no reason you couldn’t allow people to map their own domain name to their app when it’s finished, much like SixApart and Blogger let users have their own domain names point to their hosted blogs.
I’m really intrigued by this idea, and I really want to build it. I’d need help for this one. I know sites like DabbleDB already exist; that’s fine. To me, the fact that something similar exists only confirms that it’s a good idea.
This is just a thought — I haven’t worked out whether this sort of site would even be possible, profitable, or legal. (Really; investing in risky ventures has some fussy rules, IIRC; I’d rather not have the SEC bothering me.) I still think it could be good idea; it just needs some research and some fine tuning.
That’s all I have, for now at least. Tell me what you like, what you hate. Leave your own ideas in the comments, or just link to them. Thanks!
Thursday night was Minnedemo; it was my first time attending the event. The room (O’Gara’s Garage) was packed, which was nice to see. I’ve been wondering how the tech/start up “scene” was in the Twin Cities, so it was nice to see the turnout.
The common wisdom, for tech startups, is to move to Silicon Valley (1 2 3). I can understand the reasoning behind that, but I guess I’d have to put myself in the camp that wants to believe that’s not always necessary — mostly because I’m interested in startups, and I’m not looking to move right away. From that perspective alone, it was cool to see the local tech startups, and especially cool to see the dozens of others who signed up to demo, but were cut off (only 6 demos due to time restrictions… 6 was plenty for one evening, though).
One of the demos, Pokeware, looked like a winner. It’s not the sort of thing I probably would have tried to build, but I have a hard time seeing how they couldn’t do well. What they do is insert advertising hotspots into online video, but to keep the ads from being obtrusive, they only appear when the video is paused. A pretty neat solution, I thought — the numbers from their tests were impressive. That said… I did get one a business card from the Pokeware presenter, and the address was in California. Is that where Pokeware is based? That’s fine, but it confuses me that they would demo out here, in that case… regardless, it was cool to see.
Of the other presenters, FanChatter was cool, but I’m not their demographic — I enjoy sports, but not so much that I would want to chat about them 24-7, on the go, everywhere. Crashplan and Wonderfile both had very good looking apps, and I’m one of those people who think that GUIs matter, so that was also impressive.
All in all, all the presentations were good. The venue was good — it was packed, but not too packed, and parking was a little hard to find; but then again, I was a bit late.
I’m already looking forward to the next. Here’s to local startups. And no, I’ll have nothing to present… ask me this time next year. Maybe.
Damn. It’s hard to believe that the Scobleizer once worked for Microsoft: viz, this post: Steve Ballmer Still Doesn’t Understand Social Networking. Ouch.
If I thought any reader would listen, I’d say to open the above link in a new tab and read it right now without delay. No, it’s not earth-shattering, but it demonstrates very clearly the problem with Microsoft and Microsoft-like companies: they don’t understand what’s going on right now. This has nothing to do with being anti-Microsoft or pro Web 2.0/social networking/etc/etc — even if Microsoft were the worlds most wonderful software company (stop snickering, now), they still just don’t understand this.
Disclaimer: I realize I’m doing exactly what I used to accuse Web 2.0 zealots of doing, that is, saying that anyone who disagrees with a particular vision of the future just doesn’t “get it.” However, if you read Scoble’s post, I think what stands out is that Ballmer really, truly, genuinely, has no idea why social networking/Web 2.0 or whatever you like to call it, is succeeding. He doesn’t see its value; I don’t want to sound elitist or clique-y, but the CEO of Microsoft really doesn’t get it.
The CEO. Sorry, if the CEO doesn’t get it, the company doesn’t get it, regardless of how smart the other people within the company may be.
To be fair, I’m not sure that Oracle gets it, either. That’s not to slam Oracle, either: I don’t know if any enterprise-level corporation really does (Workday? Maybe — it’s one to watch). I think it’s difficult at huge corporations. We do have the valiant folks over at Oracle AppsLab, but while I think what they’re working on is awesome, I have a hard time really believing Ruby On Rails will power anything more than a few internal corporate applications. I would love to see a new CRM or ERP stack built on Rails. I would give my left arm (though I’d want it back, for typing) to work on such a project. But I don’t think it will happen; everything is Java, Java, Java, Java *. Now, what I could see happening is that some smaller company, powered by insane people, develops such an application in Ruby on Rails, or Python, or whatever, starts growing rapidly, and then Oracle would buy them. And then rewrite it in Java. Oh well.
* I have nothing against Java; programming in Java is interesting and challenging. It’s just not as much fun as Rails… but, that’s beside the point.
Yes, I did suddenly switch gears, there, from talking about social networking to talking about Rails. I know they are not analogous in any way, they just happen to both be associated with the “latest and greatest” on the web. You could easily build a social networking app in Java, and you could also get a Rails-type stack in Java using something like Grails and Groovy.
My only point, if there is one, is that while Scoble’s post is great, interesting, and correct, I don’t think it’s just Microsoft or just Ballmer, it’s the whole Fortune 500 set.
