Posted by Antonio
3 years, 1 month ago (Jan. 6, 2007)
Last year I was obsessed with 2006 being the year of the "casual publisher" which I guess it might have been if you buy the load of hoopla Time magazine heaped on us with the Person of the Year but I'm not sure we got as far as I would have liked. Sure YouTube is the absolute bee's knees and they really do deserve almost $2b of Google's money they got, but it's not because of the explosion in casual publishing they've enabled (it's because they did something really amazing in giving the bits of television that serve to hold our culture together permalinks that we could all email, IM, and post to our blogs).
And no, wikipedia— though even more awesome than YouTube— does not make for a universe of casual publishers (for instance, it's been 18 months since I last contributed to an entry). What Wikipedia did prove in 2006 is that the dynamic from the Professor and the Madman can be amplified 1000-fold with the Internet and broadened way beyond the scope of the OED.
We spent the year at Tabblo focused on the casual publisher. Our particular twist was that the distance between "photo sharer" and "casual publisher" was short and easy to cross if you could pre-select the type of person coming to you by giving them an app with the right attributes. Our angle was (and still is) collaborative story-telling with pictures and words, helped by a personal art director in software and the ability to go from online to print with a few clicks of the mouse.
The good news was that more than a million people seemed interested enough to at least drive by and take a look with a good number of them staying around to make some really outstanding stuff. The more interesting news however, is that we've still got a bit of work to do to truly make it casual and that this looks like a great year for that to happen.
By casual we don't just mean easy (which is where we'll be focused for the next few months) but also compelling, relevant, and right-sized. This last bit is the big lesson from all of personal publishing in 2006— and the hardest one to get right. For instance, blogs are really interesting and compelling but for most people they are the hammer of personal publishing; that is, sitting down to compose an entry like this one takes forethought, time, and sweat. I am afraid that is is still the same for tabbloing— giving people that much creative freedom amidst a community of artistes who live to look at each other's work necessarily implies that authors have to really make an effort to tabblo. We attempted to mitigate some of this by building a publishing platform where distribution could be varied with access controls (from 1 person to the world), and as the folks at Six Apart have learned, this does help a bit— but it doesn't solve the whole problem.
We also attacked it with different formats— defining some as quick and others as more involved and elaborate. We did this specifically with the introduction of books and other printable products that could also be shared virtually. This gives you two axes— intended audience size and type of output which does provide some freedom to do all sorts of different kinds of things depending on your mood and intent.
But there is still one big problem in getting the experience to the right size: the ease of publishing when the moment motivates you to do so. The mobloggers got this from the very beginning— blogging from your cellphone wasn't just about "hey cool I can blog from my cellphone!" but also about being able to casually publish during the holes in your day (waiting in line at the supermarket, riding the subway, driving). Unfortunately the experience is just too cumbersome for most device/platform combinations. That said, the product that did the best job of bringing the potential of mobile-based publishing this year was the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Odeo, Twitter. Sure, they're only aiming to help you answer the question: "What are you doing?" but everyone of those SMSes has just picked up a thread, an audience, and most importantly, a permalink (no surprise that this product is from Ev and some of the other ex-Blogger folks).
Even if Twitter solves it for the words that come out of SMSes though, I want to see it solved for photos, audio, video, even the data that comes out of my Nike+/iPod running partner. We'll be giving it our own unique twist for photos at Tabblo this year, but as 2007 bring all sorts of new device/data combinations, the opportunities are almost limitless.
To close: why the hell should we care? I would argue that we should care because it turns out that casual publishing is a lot more like voicemail and a lot less like commercial radio— it's an opportunity to make connections with the fellow tribesfolk you most care about in new and interesting ways. And as Barry Schwartz argues in his book, it is these relationships (and the constraints they bring with them) that truly make us happy and fulfilled.
And even if you don't buy that, Chris Anderson (of Long Tail fame) had another possible reason in the best answer in this year's Edge question with his "Metcalfe's law of minds." Essentially, it this type of activity that can make us smarter as a species more quickly than anything that came before it. This too should be plenty of reason why you too should continue rooting for the casual publisher in 2007.
Well it seems like after the suspension of disbelief that was 2006 as far as making money from social sites, web 2.0 mashups, etc., we may see 2007 as the year when people start asking themselves that question in earnest. All of those eyeballs have got to turn into dollars after all, and thus far Rupert Murdoch seems to be the only guy who's been able to do it right.
At the end of the day though where all of these social sites are concerned, you either have an audience that advertisers want to pay for, or a base of potential customers that can be incented to spend money. Google, Yahoo, and all of the rest of Web 2.0 fall into the former camp, and innovative new companies like Smugmug, Cafe Press, and Tabblo fit into the latter.
For our part, after having spent six months building an initial member base that was attracted to the Tabblo service (either because of the editor, the online/offline combination, or the quality of the products we make), we're now starting to experiment in earnest with products that will begin to motivate members to buy at greater frequency than most other output vendors.
Tabblo Valentines, which we are launching today, is an interesting first experiment in this regard for a few reasons. First, at $1 including shipping, it's a relatively low commitment to try. Second, Tabblo Valentines are an offering that builds on all of the core parts of the free service that we've built over the last year. The same editor, the same mix of photos and words, and most importantly the same focus on collaborative/social content creation. So it will be really interesting to see whether these elements when combined get us to something more interesting than "yet another site offering some Valentine card gimmick." Finally, the inclusion of a relatively small feature, auto-addressing makes the Valentine product something that is really interesting in the context of an online community.
Most people who meet online don't know each other's physical addresses— usually not a problem (and sometimes an advantage). However there are times when it really is nice to interact in meatspace which is why people still read real books and like to get real cards. This is what auto-addressing is meant to fix. By letting Tabblo be a blind intermediary in handling the addressing and shipping of the package, it becomes possible for members to strengthen their online ties offline without doing too much work or feeling awkward about it. And in doing so, we're also lowering the friction usually involved in sending real mail (a nice thing to do despite living online).
This is the first step in what is going to be one long experiment with our business model— focusing on the types of physical products that make sense for our online community— however this seems like a very timely experiment now that 2007 is here to stay.
All of this hoopla over the new releases of PC operating systems has been bothering me lately, mostly because it's made me think back 10 years to when Windows 95 was released, or even 5 to when Mac OS X first shipped, and think about why today the releases feel like such non-events. Just the other day I was struck by an eager teenager who excitedly tabbloed his Vista unboxing, and at the office they have been relentless about some Vista-related quote I gave an AP writer (mostly because I just really don't care about Vista or its impact on our "lab").
Even this year's MacWorld— usually replete with pronouncements about how OSX is going to change the face of personal computing by introducing features which are long overdue on most client operating systems— was bereft of even a single OSX-related announcement. Craig Syverson over at Venture Cast had an interesting thought on this that got me thinking along a different line: he basically argued that the future of the Mac OS ("Mac OS XI" as he called it) was really iTunes in that more and more of what is relevant to users (media, iPods, mobile phones) was going to start to flow through iTunes, whether on the Mac or on Windows. In this case then, for media hungry consumers, iTunes is the new runtime and everything underneath it really is just a bunch of buggy device drivers.
The geek in me bristles at that, first and foremost because of how closed the whole iTunes ecosystem (including the forthcoming iPhone) is relative to POSIX, Win32, and even OSX. Even the relatively closed cellphone runtimes appear open as a commune by comparison. That said, plenty of valiant startups are finding ways to hack into iTunes to extract metadata and insert themselves into the flow of media— so if the desire is there and the resulting user experience doesn't end up being too encumbered, I'm sure that enterprising and curious geeks will find a way to make Apple's media-based OS XI a more open system.
A more relevant reason as to why OS releases are no irrelevant (hello Marc Andreesen?) is that all of the interesting things you can do with computers now (outside of specialized content creation like programs, video, music, etc.) has little to do with the OS itself unless you count the bits required to run a fast (and standards-compliant) web browser. I first heard Tim O'Reilly articulate this 4 years ago in a talk on the web as platform, but it has become dramatically more true with the development of Web 2.0.
Just this morning, I ran across a YouTube video that really captures the underlying sense of wonder in the possibility of it all when we start thinking of the network as the relevant runtime for innovation. After watching it, I'm sure you will come away thinking that the real innovation these days is as far from a shrink-wrapped box of device drivers as internal combustion is from a barrel of feed.
I highly recommend this video to any of the new web naysayers who think that the biggest things in the web over the last 5 years have been the return of pastels, rounded rects., and XmlHttpRequest replacing hidden iframes. Though it is gimmicky at points, it does a wonderful job of communicating why the folks on the leading edge get so excited about what's been happening in Silicon Valley over the last couple of years.
Update: A sadder but potentially more impactful of example of why the web-as-platform is so much more compelling than 3-D shading on windows and buttons is the search for Jim Gray via the use of a lot of the work/collaboration patterns that have really caught on in the last couple of of years.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (Feb. 23, 2007)
Though I am really happy to see Google experimenting with revenue models outside of advertising, yesterday's launch of their premium business applications left me thinking that they are either a) gleeful about the possibility of putting a stick in Microsoft's eye or b) not yet clued in to what makes things work on the web if they don't have a search box in them.
Software as a service (SaaS) delivered in the form of dynamic and rich web applications is a really great thing— in fact probably the most significant thing to happen on the Internet since the coming of the web itself. However this does not mean that every possible thing someone wants to do with a PC can be crammed down the HTTP-pipe and decorated with pretty Javascript effects. Below are some of the standard reasons:
FIOS-enabled homes and offices notwithstanding, there is still just too much latency on the Internet, plain and simple. This is the main reason why taking any old desktop application and webifying it usually doesn't work. Word is faster than Writely, Excel is speedier that Google spreadsheets, and no matter how hard we may try, iPhoto or Picasa will always be faster than Tabblo for manipulating photos. Therefore, if you've got an application which sits open on your desktop all day ready for you to edit, compose, and otherwise author 20-50 times a day as is the case with Word, Excel, and Outlook for most office workers, taking that online is a big bet to make.
There are things you just need calls into the OS for which most modern browsers do not give you access to yet. For instance, office applications often produce documents that people want to print, and yet most browser-based printing is still stuck in the stone ages (how many times have your printed Mapquest directions only to get that hanging chad of a last turn on the last page?) Ditto for really rich APIs into other sources of data that live on the local filesystem (Outlook pst files, OSX Spotlight index), or even for rich access to the local filesystem itself. Try as we might, if you have things that you need to either source from the local disk or output to the local peripherals (printers, CD burners), the browser is not your friend. Interestingly enough, Adobe's Apollo projectmay solve this (a big "may" though as many have tried).
Where the data lives is a pretty important thing to think through, especially if you are a business. Sure no one backs things up properly, and for sure your office is more likely to be burglarized, burned down, etc. than a world-class datacenter, but for most people knowing that the data is under their control is more important at times than the data itself. Sure, a service provider can encrypt the data and partition it accordingly, but in much the same way that big financial institutions with liability exposure don't allow their employees to use standard IM, I suspect most big companies will be leery of trusting Google with sensitive, mission critical data. On the consumer side this is also a problem, albeit one that is mitigated by the fact that most consumer data that makes is to the web is not as sensitive (and the fact remains that most savvy consumers see uploading the data to a service as a poor man's backup).
These reasons by themselves should serve as powerful motivators for thinking carefully about trying to move any major desktop application to the web. If an application is going to take on the encumbrances mentioned above, the benefit of living on the network have got to be very high— in terms of ubiquitous access, collaboration, or best of all, the symbiotic relationship that the application can have with its users as it grows up.
Ephraim Schwartz interviewed me about Tabblo recently and wrote a nice piece on this co-development process where I make all sorts of bold claims about the productivity improvements that come from having an online app that lives and grows directly based on the use patterns of the community around it (which is itself growing). That same thin HTTP pipe I mentioned as a problem above becomes your best friend in this regard— by serializing every action into a very digestible set of log entries for subsequent analysis, it gives one a much better real-time view of what is working and what isn't. And because the user-facing application runtime is the web browser, UI flows can be changed near instantly without having to redeploy to an installed base.
The overall mental image I have of the process is that of an acelerated time-lapse movie of coral growing according to its environment and the actions of its co-habitants.
The main problem with trying to grow a coral from a word processor, a spreadsheet, or an email client is that the specs for these products are fairly known and have been pretty fixed in users' minds for about a decade now. Witness Gmail— every time I hear complaints about it, it is from someone who comes from the Outlook worldview and is almost certainly around the most innovative (and web-native) parts of the interface. The patterns are already well-worn so it becomes difficult for the application/community to take on a life of its own.
Paul Graham wrote an essay a while ago about Web 2.0 that argued that Google was succeeding because it was aligned with the "grain of the web." I completely agree which is why it is strange that they would use the office suite as their first beachhead into for-pay SaaS.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (March 1, 2007)
In further helping to middle the line between desktop and web, Adobe held an event this week to showcase the promise of the Apollo platform. For those that don't know, Apollo seems to be the Flash runtime bundled with an HTML renderer and Javascript VM in a desktop application harness. It's supposed to allow developers to write hybrid web/desktop applications that can run offline and take advantage of local services.
I continue to scratch my head over the Apollo platform mostly because it seems so incredibly ambitious and because I really do have a hard time understanding whether it is going to do anything meaningful for adoption (the real problem that rich client software which does not ship on the platform has these days).
My guess would be that the devil will be in the details— after all, the JVM could have owned this layer on the client 10 years ago if a) it wasn't a 10MB download, b) it didn't take 45 seconds to boot, and c) it didn't run and look like a pig. Instead Flash beat it to the punch because it was less that 1MB and much less ambitious. Less is more— which is what is also something that is weird about Apollo. Why dial the ambition back up when they could do so much by just continuing to extend Flash?
As I think about a site like Tabblo, I realize that we would just love to see Apollo deployed on every computer— our users constantly have to struggle with the pain of crossing the desktop-web membrane with their big photos, our engineering team is well-trained in the ways of the browser frame and ECMAscript/Javascript, and there is tons we'd love to see done with the local CPU that we could completely offload from our image front-ends. At the same time I have a hard time believing that if this was going to such a huge win for us, we wouldn't find other clever ways of putting a footprint down on the desktop (see this clever OSX-specific way to run a browser frame as a full flown application).
And while I am on the devil in the details, one huge win from Adobe betting on Apollo internally could be a properly instrumented version of Online Photoshop that sites like Tabblo could easily embed into our experience. We've had tons of inbound interest to partner with the myriad of "online photo editors," that are out and while the promise is always there, for the most part, startups are like mosquitoes looking to sting: not all that likely to work for all when done in groups. On the other hand, easily being able to integrate with the 800-lb gorilla is a tide that would truly lift all boats.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (March 3, 2007)
I've been cynical about the One Laptop Per Child project ever since I first saw Nicholas Negroponte talk about it at the D conference two years ago. That said, I'm really happy to be wrong in that it seems like it's way more than a science fair project and that millions of kids may actually reap enormous benefit from this little $100 laptop that could.
This morning I was reading an article in Businessweek about the OLPC's innovative UI (which the guys tell me was apparently shown on a real X0 at Pycon this year [it's mostly written in Python]) which talks about how innovative the UI is because it abandons a lot of the WIMP metaphor we've been stuck with for the past 30 years.
While I am all for innovative interfaces, I wonder if starting with the world's poor is the best approach to take. It's not that I don't think that an OLPC alum couldn't pick up a WIMP interface very quickly (after all my first "computer" was a Milton-Bradley Bigtrac and that helped me understand programming probably more than any other single toy I had growing up)— it's just that building up a whole new set of interaction primitives seems like a big risk to take on an audience which is already taking on a lot in using the OLPC in the first place. It's taken 30 years to polish windows, menus, and gestures (which of course the OLPC team will no doubt leverage experience from) and it seems a little strange to dump it in favor of something radically different.
Plus, I'm not sure that fancy New York graphic design firms (the article talks about how Pentagram is doing design for the OLPC) are best positioned to take on this job. After all, even the folks at Apple cribbed heavily from Xerox PARC back in the day.
However, I've learned my lesson with the OLPC and my pragmatic cynicism, and am thus optimistically awaiting the release of Sugar and the X0.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (March 3, 2007)
In reading a great piece on the future of social networking in today's NYTimes (via Pete Cashmore's great Mashable blog), I learned that Cisco has been snapping up "social networking" assets— a move that is being universally ridiculed in the blogosphere because Cisco is only apparently supposed to know about routers and switches.
This is indeed a bogus move but not because "social networking" is a perfect example of a feature and not a product. After all, Cisco is the king of buying features and making products out of them. The real elephant in the room on this one is that there is absolutely zero business model overlap here— and this is what will ultimately lead whatever assets they acquire to get marginalized, ignored, and finally written off as a hangover during that crazy "Web 2.0 bubble."
So far as I can tell, the only business model that works with social network sites, once they are at scale, is an ad-based media model (this of course begs the question of why you'd buy a social network site that is not at scale if you don't have the tools to bring it to scale). And I may be wrong here— but I'm not sure that I've ever seen Cisco's ad salesforce pounding the pavement on Madison avenue.
I remember that people laughed when Cisco bought Linksys and commented that the company didn't know the first thing about marketing and selling consumer networking equipment. But at least in that case, the business models (sell chips with RJ-45 ports, make money) was pretty complementary. In this case, I'm afraid of what the ultimate fate of these social networking folks is going to be 12 months from now. Unless of course, then can get good at writing router firmware.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (March 9, 2007)
Jeremy Liew has a very nice piece for anyone interested in online media business models or even for anyone interested in the "build a web property that is popular and figure out how to monetize it later" approach to starting companies. It is a really short summary of the kind of traffic you should expect/need to get to build a big business based on ads depending on the type of content/audience you are hoping to aggregate.
I like the piece for two reasons. First, most consumer Internet entrepreneurs I meet these days do too little thinking about business model, preferring instead to think that either Google or Yahoo will acquire them or that they will just do the "ad" thing. This is the west coast's "build now, monetize later" investment hypothesis taken to the extreme. To that end, the piece does a great job of showing that banking on this approach has the inbuilt assumption that your web property is basically going to be struck by lightning. It happens— but you shouldn't count on it.
I also really dig the post because in looking at the third model for success— vertical content sites that are best positioned through content for certain types of advertisers— I realized what it is that I dislike about the advertising bet in startup business models: as an entrepreneur, it reduces your optionality (is this even a word?).
Having options when the initial plan doesn't work out is a great thing, especially for small companies in quickly developing spaces. But as I looked at the third, and most viable of the ad models, I realized that there is little option if the vertical content you create fails to attract advertisers or a significantly attractive audience. When that happens, you don't have the scale to just pump generic ads (model #1), and you don't have a model that will continue to itself scale without continued investment. You can try a roll-up across verticals but something like this only gives you scale on the sales side of the business and not on the core value propostion.
If you read the comments (and some of the very interesting posts linked therein), you will see people discussing alternative business models that may work better at maximizing optionality in the face of failing to reach a certain scale. My two favorites are product sales (preferably mass customized like Tabblo's because these avoid pricing pressure best) and subscriptions (but very high value like SmugMug's or eHarmony's), but there are others including "freemium" (though you need a little bit of scale to make this one start to work) and marketplace (where you need a very narrow niche or even more scale).
All of these other models seem to offer more levers to tweak when things don't quite go according to plan. Which is almost always— and a good thing to keep in mind when looking at some of the high hurdles that Jeremy lays out.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (March 11, 2007)
I recently got a chance to read Scott Rosenberg's "Dreaming in Code," a story about the ups and downs (mostly downs in this case) of the software development process of Chandler at OSAF. The book is a great introduction to challenges of software engineering, especially for outsiders, though it is nowhere near as good as Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of A New Machine" despite the fact that most reviewers seem intent on comparing the two.
One of the central themes that Rosenberg tackles is that of the "software crisis," or simply put, software engineering's inability to scale the production process in the same way that other engineering disciplines have— most notably, hardware engineering but also mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, etc. In all of these other fields "scale" refers both to being able to linearly apply more manpower while achieving linear or super-linear boosts in productivity, as well as producing less error prone and more predictable output.
This question is of course near and dear to any software person who has ever missed a schedule or over-scoped a feature, so naturally I was drawn to the bibliography where I found an incredibly interesting, albeit dated, book by Brad Cox (the creator of Objective-C) called "Superdistribution" on exactly this topic of scaling software engineering. The book was published in 1996 and is now out of print but I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in software engineering as a fledgeling discipline.
The core of Cox's argument is that the notion of "Software ICs" (software integrated components similar to chips in hardware) has not taken off not because of technical reasons (as he learned after developing Objective-C for just this purpose) but because of economic ones. In essence, he argues that there is no economic advantage to the designer/developer of a software component that can easily be re-used (through good interfaces, cross-language bindings, good documentation, etc.) because the licensed-library model does not provide adequate compensation to create a thriving ecosystem, and because other models (such as per-unit royalties) have not been popular in the software industry for various reasons. Hence capable programming teams are left much more motivated to re-invent the wheel in the hopes of building the next MS Office and are less likely to make a good living at some lower layer (for instance, the word-wrap object, the pagination object, etc.) in the same way that their hardware counterparts have been able to.
His solution turns on a clever attribute of software but is nonetheless completely impractical. Software has no control over its being copied, Cox argues, but it has very tight control over its being executed, and as such, it could establish a payment mechanism based on "useright" rather than "copyright," metering its own use and charging accordingly. This seems counter to the grain of personal computing to me, and in fact the only examples I have ever seen of this model have been with really expensive software ($100K+) where the vendor leaves no other alternative. And of course this is to say nothing of the administrative nightmare that a system like this would be. Current DRM systems would look like "Hello World" by comparison.
So I don't like his solution but I do agree with his conclusion. To scale we do need more modularization, and the reasons for not being there are most likely economic and social at this point— and not because we're still looking for the one runtime to rule them all.
Coincidentally, it is interesting to see how in the intervening decade two trends have helped combat the coming software crisis that Cox predicts in his book. The first, the mainstreaming of open source, has created an alternative economic model for encouraging software re-use, though I suspect Cox would argue that this alternative economic model is not robust enough to survive or scale to what he is imaging. Still, you'd be a moron to try to write an RDBMS or a webserver at this point, and this productivity boost comes directly as a result of the open source production process. The second trend, which seems much more in line with what Cox argues for, is that of metered web services. Amazon S3, EC2, and their brethren are great examples of a pay-per-use model at work, and the fact that the bits are not being pushed down to the client seems to be a great way to solve the language/runtime interop problems that he discusses in the book.
Economic arguments aside, there is tons of good stuff in Superdistribution (if you can get past its datedness and its wonky illustrations). For instance, Cox covers how time-sharing systems have left us with a legacy of independent processes with individual memory address spaces and are thus difficult to integrate in a component-based way while the futuristic systems of the 1970s (Smalltalk in particular) tried to eliminate the distinction between the machine's runtime and the processes running in part to solve this very problem. This was sort of mind-bending to me as I've always seen this as one of UNIX's greatest features (at least when compared to DOS/Windows/Mac OS-pre-X). He also makes a wonderful attempt at building a vocabulary for layers in software and often uses rich analogies from other engineering disciplines to make his arguments.
But best of all, it is clear that Cox is an in-the-trenches engineer who has deep knowledge of languages, platforms, and building big systems. Thus the book avoids that "architecture astronaut" feel that you sometimes get from this kind of effort (sorry but the much beloved Go4 book still feels like that to me). If you are interested in this sort of thing, it's well worth reading.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (March 5, 2007)
I really loved this post on O'Reilly Radar from Marc Hedlund, especially when he says:
One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes.
It makes sense if you think about it: UNIX was after all the first network-native multi-user (social) operating system. All of those users back then in the 1970s were living William Gibson's future: present, just not widely distributed, so they developed patterns for work and play that most of us are still rediscovering today.
That said, I still really don't get Yahoo Pipes. When Yahoo launched this mashup application a few weeks ago, the entire blogosphere lit up like a Christmas tree with raves about how this was bringing the ability to program the web to the rest of the non-programming world. Just like OO and software components were meant to 20 years ago and just like Applescript and Automator were supposed to over the last few years.
I tried two Pipes. The first one (which took me the bulk of the 40 minutes I spent playing around) was meant to test a theory that Jon Udell told me about recently regarding common identity across various web services: Jon said that one way to tell who was who was to look for common usernames like fetching or supergeek57. So I tried to wire a Pipe that would take one of the recent tabblos RSS feeds, strip out the username, and do searches for same-author Flickr photos:
No dice though. Despite having a Fetch RSS component and a Flickr-specific component, I just could not wire the canned components in the right way. In Python this is a 7 line script but in Pipes, it's a whole lot of cool AJAX dragging and no satisfaction.
Then I figured I would do something simpler and take the Huffington Report's heinously monster RSS feed and filter out Chris Kelly (my favorite blogger from there):
This was much easier to do but I've got to admit that there have to be easier ways to get this done than by building a Pipe.
Unix worked where Yahoo Pipes doesn't because people wrote a large ecosystem of small programs and because the real pipe (|) was more loosely typed and flexible than the Yahoo Pipes inputs/outputs. The first problem could be solved with lots of programmers writing Pipes for regular folk but I have a hard time seeing that so long as it is possible for these same folks to whip off quick Perl scripts that do the same. And without the rich ecosystem of Pipes, I'm not sure the inter-connects will ever get flexible enough.
So while I agree with Marc on the overall insight, I think that Pipes is not the web's replacement for bash. I do think that replacement exists though, and its arrived in a really weird first incarnation: MySpace.com.
Sure it is the uber-daddy of social network, but to me to most compelling part of MySpace was the way that it allowed regular folks to copy and paste bits of HTML and Javascript into profile pages in an interactive way that UNIX folks from the 1970s would have been proud of. And by the look of some of these profile pages, it is unlikely these folks stitching random bits of execution together are particularly technical. Just particularly motivated.
So Marc is right— UNIX is getting re-invented on the web, mostly because the problem domain is the same and the social urge is still there. It's just not the geeks anymore which means that the form it takes is not always a clear and obvious mapping of the UNIX of old.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (March 13, 2007)
I was nearly in tears during parts of this cartoon on Steve Jobs and Bill Gates:
My favorite part is Bill Gates on the music prevalent in most of today's PC/Mac ads: "What's up with that music?!? It's like baby music..."
I feel pretty lucky to have grown up during the phase of computing when the titans were Bill and Steve, given that they are both such colorful characters and so distinct from each other. 20-30 years earlier it would have been the Watsons from IBM or the wacky cowboys from the minicomputer revolution. Worse yet, if you were coming out of school today, the titans would be the Yahoo guys, the Google guys, or maybe even the guys from Facebook. Bright and driven, but not terribly distinguishable from each other. I can't really see them inspiring a cartoon like this one— can you?
Update: In digging around on the source of the cartoon, I discovered that it is a show called "Current News," by Josh Faure-Brac, which seems to be cartoon shorts of popular culture/politics hosted on Al Gore's Current TV network. It's too bad they don't serve the shorts as a video podcast feed, but some of the other ones are well worth checking out, especially the Oval Office one.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (March 14, 2007)
Josh Kopelman (of First Round capital) has a nice summary of the argument around how Web 2.0 allows investors to place cheaper bets including some data on how much cheaper it is to launch a web startup today. This means that failure comes faster which he argues is a good thing both for the investor and for the entrepreneur.
Largely I agree with argument he makes, but— as is the case with most hypotheses when they pass into the land of "conventional wisdom—" it turns out to be a little more complicated than just: open source, commodity boxes, off-shore development equals a $200K lottery ticket to riches. I think that this model works very well if what you are doing is taking a social media bet whose main goal is to amass users and flip to a big portal before getting to either the "mass market," or more importantly, the monetization.
Flickr, Delicious, even MySpace— all of these guys fall right into this model as do the 50-100 companies that have been micro-funded like by Josh and others. But what happens when Yahoo, Google, IAC, etc. stop buying? How much of the critical risk of building a business is really removed by initial geek traction? Josh himself in an earlier blog post has a brilliant write-up of why it is so hard to get Internet consumers to part with money. Shouldn't this be the key risk to remove before getting to this key valuation inflection point?
I am biased because at Tabblo, I decided to take a hybrid approach: raise an A-round that is reminiscent of the 1990s ($5MM from Matrix partners) but operate the business as though we really had only about a fifth of that. There were two main reasons for this:
I knew we were going to have to build a bit of technology and felt that we needed a pretty unencumbered 18 months to do so with a decently-sized engineering team
I wanted enough cash to get through proving the monetization phase with what we considered a "mainstream" consumer.
Neither of these goals lend themselves to a "failing fast" test (if by fast you mean 3-4 months) so it's pretty hard to do things the microfunded way. And as far as the Tabblo approach is concerned, the jury is still out, so stay tuned.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (March 22, 2007)
Neil Gershenfeld has this really neat book called Fab about the coming era of "personal fabricators" which are sort of like printers for 3-dimensional objects. In it he argues that soon we will be using simplified CAD programs to design our own objects which we will then just print at home for use.
I think a big part of me loves the idea at the "Star Trek gut level" much in the same way that people loved the original Motorola Startac because it subconsciously reminded them of Captain Kirk's communicator. In the case of the personal fabricators, we're bringing to life the replicator— Gene Roddenberry's utopian answer to renewable resources poverty.
In the meantime, we've got the Tabblo PhotoCube :), the latest product in the Tabblo family. It's a personal favorite for two reasons:
First, it's the first product we are asking folks to build (print, cut, assemble) at home. Despite being outside to our original business model, I think that the PhotoCube captures a lot of the immediacy of the web in a much nicer way (see pictures I like, make them instantly into a 3-D physical world object). It does have that "some assembly required" quality, but in the world of makers, this is a feature and not a bug.
Second, the PhotoCube is great because in being 3-D, it does give one the illusion of being a sort of "matter transporter" where you can literally recreate the thing you've photographed as an object that sits on a desk. Obviously it's not the same dog/car/beach that was photographed, but it is fun to see 2-d facsimiles built back into three dimensions.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (March 22, 2007)
The Acela, Amtrak's high-speed train that runs the length of the eastern seaboard (and my favorite train ride in the world), makes an interesting stop in New Haven Connecticut. As you are heading north on the train, you will spend about 5 minutes stopped there during which the train will jiggle this way and that while something is being done to it. And then, zoom! the rest of the way to Boston, the train speeds at what feels like 150% of the speed that you had coming up to New Haven.
I've never know exactly what happens at that stop but in my cartoon imagination, I've always thought that the Amtrak guys must strap some sort of rockets to the top of the train.
Five minutes ago, a press release went out that said that the Hewlett-Packard company is acquiring us to execute on their web-to-print strategy. Details of the deal were not disclosed, and I am not going to elaborate here, save for three facts:
We (Tabblo and our investors) are very happy with the outcome
We (Tabblo and the Tabblo community) are going to stay on board at HP executing on our combined strategy and building great products
We (Tabblo and HP) are incredibly excited because it feels like someone is strapping that rocket to the top of the car
I think #3 is the reason why I am not simply feeling the "pheew, we're done" emotion that entrepreneurs talk about when they sell their companies. On the contrary, I'm itching to see just how fast we can make this train go now that we've got a rocket to boost the "print engine of the web" strategy. So stay tuned there.
On a more personal note, I could not be prouder to be joining HP. Growing up in Venezuela, HP and Apple were the two companies that represented everything that was great about the American entrepreneurial ethic both in terms of ingenuity and hard work. I still have the HP-29C my father gave me when we first got to the US (its programability got me into college), and have very fond memories of my struggles at Terman (the engineering building at Stanford that Hewlett and Packard gave in name of their mentor).
In short, I am really happy to be merging Tabblo's future plans with such an incredibly rich and long-lasting institution, and I'm really looking forward to what the future holds for us.
On that note, if you are from HP, please don't hesitate to drop me a note to introduce yourself at antonio -at- tabblo -dot- com.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (April 8, 2007)
In what is a great example of how Digg/Reddit have made blog post titles irrelevant, Paul Graham has a piece called "Microsoft is dead" which is really much more about how they are now irrelevant. The thrust of his argument is that Google and AJAX make their platform irrelevant for new hackers.
Fun stuff, appropriately lambasted by wizened veterans like Dave Winer and Don Dodge and put properly in the context of "Rich Internet Applications" by Ryan Stewart. So rather than plumb the depths of the argument, I wanted to keep the plane at 30,000 feet:
For a platform strategy to be displaced (and this is what Microsoft has done brilliantly up until now), you need to have a new platform strategy and a viable economic model.
Are AJAX-enabled web applications enough? Not by themselves. It's cool to have a much richer experience in the browser but I doubt that this alone is discontinuous enough. Outlook web access was after all, the first AJAX-enabled web application, made by the very folks at Microsoft who this new platform is supposed to make irrelevant. Despite the portability advantages of data-in-the-cloud, turning the world of PCs into dumb terminals doesn't even necessarily feel like it is altogether a step forward in the evolution of personal computing.
However, there is something else that makes Web 2.0 a much better candidate as a full on platform: people. Tim O'Reilly has been writing about it for years, and plenty of others have jumped in; collective intelligence, smart mobs, folksonomies— however you label it, the idea that people can come together and trade, write encyclopedias, etc. is really powerful. I don't think we even know how to understand what this new people platform is really defined by, but we can see its outlines in examples emerging from the wild. For instance, Twittervision is a great example of an app built on the people platform.
That said, we still need the economic model to give the platform enough time to grow its ecosystem. Microsoft has had wonderful one here in software licensing. Open source has a pretty good one in the gift economy and ego/reputation (albeit not as good as Microsoft). Web 2.0 most definitely does not have a good economic model in "selling the feature to Google/Yahoo." Furthermore, it's not clear that the ad thing is going to work, especially as we see increasing returns to scale in the online ad networks, and try as we might, no non-content provider has yet to crack the subscription model on the consumer side.
Without a viable economic model, it will only be a matter of time before Microsoft and Google incorporate the features that make the people platform into their respective businesses and leave a vast wasteland of cynical folks capable of using pastels and rounding corners on rectangles. This stuff is really hard to get right; you need the platform shift (timing), the economic model (business), and the emergent ecosystem (developers) to work together for a long stretch of years. And no matter what the cool kids at Y-Combinator are worrying about these days, I'm not sure we've got all of the key ingredients in place.
As an aside, if you want to see a great example of someone who got this right on the money the last time around, go and listen to this long-ish talk by Bill Gates from 1989 when he talks about the PC ecosystem. He must have been in his mid-thirties at the time, and it is just amazing to hear how well he can navigate the level of detail up and down to paint a really cohesive vision of where personal computing was going back then.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (April 9, 2007)
There was a great article about our new owners in today's New York Times which is a great read if you are interested in the internals of HP and the future of printing. Of course it elicited a bunch of emails from my joker friends wishing me well in what seems to be an epic battle as people consume less paper and more screen.
What is most interesting to me is a point which VJ makes in the piece about how most companies don't innovate when they are on top, but rather when they are struggling at the bottom of the heap. One of the most exciting things about Tabblo being part of the new strategy is that we get to take part in the strategy from this rather unique vantage point.
Today Apple shipped its 100 millionth iPod. This is a wild and crazy success and yet it's interesting to think that HP's installed base of home printers is significantly larger than this. Is Apple thinking about what comes after the iPod and are they willing to swing hard to get there?(1) Is Google making acquisitions around what might come after AdWords? Does Microsoft really want to make a product bet on web-based software?
Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma is supposed to be business-101 for anyone working in technology. It's good to see that my new bosses have actually read it.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (April 25, 2007)
Having spent a bit of time thinking about developing APIs since the HP acquisition took place a few weeks ago, I was very amused by an ACM Queue piece, "APIs with an Appetite," which considers how APIs can get too fat too quickly.
In essence the piece argues that a well thought-out API will have just enough method calls to provide the intended functionality plus an "escape hatch" call which may be ugly but which plays a critical role. The example given is the UNIX file-access API with its 5 basic types of calls: open, close, write, read, and ioctl, the last being the escape hatch call which lets one pass almost any data structure down in the guts of the operating system and get almost anything back.
I've always thought of ioctl as the ugly stepchild which somehow broke with the elegance of the "stream of bites" abstraction of its four siblings. And yet, as the article argues, it is precisely ioctl's ugliness that allowed the rest of the API to remain so pure while still actually being useful.
It's interesting to consider this design approach in the newly emerging set of web service APIs. The Flickr API is the posterchild for the new web and yet, while the API is quite useful, the author of the ACM piece may consider it "fat." After all, there are a bunch of repeated methods for dealing with collections of things: photos, people, sets, etc. And yet, each of the method families belongs to a different namespace and returns slightly different data structures.
This short piece is definitely worth reading for anyone working on web service APIs. The final point about monitoring the use of the escape hatch call and learning from it how to evolve the API is perhaps most applicable in the web environment (where everything is centrally logged for later study). As the coolness of just having an API fades and is replaced with an explosion of services and APIs, we'd be well served to take this piece to heart.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (April 28, 2007)
The other night I was up with a heinous toothache and decided to consume some content to forget about the pain. Because the television was borked (HD TV is some sort of early adopter hell these days), I started cruising old episodes of Ze Frank that I had missed and discovered Jonathan Coulton, a kindred spirit of Ze's who set out to do a song a week for an entire year in his "Thing a week" project. Or I should say, I rediscovered Jonathan, as I had first been exposed to him through his hilarious (and great) song, Code Monkey.
I am in awe of guys like Ze and Jonathan not because of how talented they are but because of how hard they are willing to work exploring new means of connecting with their audiences. They truly are the new media entrepreneurs— except that in their case there is no clear path to riches as is the case with most of the folks starting the Flickrs and YouTubes of today. Instead they work between two elephants dancing: 1. the big media companies with their constant threats of "sizing down" to match the new forms on the Internet and 2. the peer production orgy that drives sites like Wikipedia.
In fact, in all this talk of the everyman getting access to the means of production and distribution— after all, anyone can be a record producer now— what is often lost is that most of this user-generated content actually sucks and wouldn't entertain a late-night toothacher for more than 2 minutes. It is an interesting social phenomenon for sure, but ABC has nothing to worry when it comes to the entertainment value of the content created by the average Joe videographer.
The Zes and the Johns? Maybe. Probably if someone figures out how create a viable revenue model that doesn't require them to sign the big record deal or the tv production show contract. And certainly if features like podcasting and products like the Apple TV gain mass market traction. And I for one, can not wait!
One final note: I noticed that Ze went to Brown and John went to Yale which got me to thinking about all the folks that I knew in undergrad who were equally talented and creative but who had not taken to the net with quite the same zeal. It's not for lack of talent— I think the real barrier is sticking your neck out creatively like these two have done. Fortunately as they do so, Ze and John are really paving the way for the torrent of talent that will undoubtedly come behind them.
[Note: to see them both together, go and watch this episode of The Show— a fabulous inside new media joke]
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (April 29, 2007)
I was really looking forward to getting into the Economist's latest survey on wireless ("A world of connections") this weekend. But about halfway through it I realized something that just soured the rest of the experience. Though it was written in 2007 with the central hypothesis being that every "thing" is soon to be connected wirelessly to the Internet, tis very same survey could have been written in 2002. Bluetooth is just around the corner in terms of gaining mainstream adoption (and more importantly, mainstream usability), cool whizbang companies like Ember are just about to deploy millions of wireless sensors (just like they were at the end of 02), and before you know it, your refrigerator will be ordering its own water filter over the Internet from GEappliances.com.
It all reminds me of the old adage, "Don't confuse a long view for a short distance." The Jetsons world of wireless is still not here and rather than drink the kool-aid, we're all well off to remember how little progress has been made in the last five years— possibly because there may just be something quite fundamental about the every appliance Internet-connected model that the industry has been preaching for a while now. COGS that are too high? Too much configuration complexity? No real compelling usecases?
I was surprised to see though, that the absolute best non-WIFI wireless device that I have seen and experienced over the last 5 years got barely one mention in entire piece— the Apple/Nike+ sports kit which effectively combines a wireless transmitter in the sole of your shoe with a receiver docked to the bottom of your iPod so that you can track your run telemetrics closely. I've written about it before, but I just think the world of this general architecture for deploying cheap, semi-Internet connected devices that capture really useful (and fun) metadata about our interactions with the physical world.
The device is cheap ($29) because all of the heavy processing (including the connection to the cloud) runs on what is effectively subsidized infrastructure. First, you've got the 200 MIPS of the iPod to capture the telemetry, and then you've got the harness of iTunes to get it up on the network.
But best of all, the effort of docking the device to the network is subsidized by another activity as well— the act of getting the latest music/podcasts on your iPod before the workouts. What a great way to parasite an already popular activity. Social engineering at its very best!
It bears mentioning that Nike has done a brilliant job of making the application a lot of fun by leveraging competitive tendencies (for instance, virtual challenges with friends are a huge source of entertainment and motivation). However, at the end of the day, the architecture is what bears close study, and copying where appropriate.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (April 30, 2007)
Today was our last day as Tabblo employees and my last day as CEO. To mark the passing of an era in the history of this group, we continued pushing fresh versions of the site (as we do every day) up to production even as the movers were taking our office out to HP's facility, one box at a time. In fact, I had the distinct pleasure of pushing out the last version of the site (including the soon to be announced "Caption of the Day" minisite) to go live from 810 Memorial Drive. And to commemorate the moment, I managed to clobber the private keys we use for storing credit cards on all of the application servers thereby rendering the shopping cart completely useless.
I mention it not because it was a fairly idiotic thing to do (it was) but because it was a bittersweet moment for me. One of the best things about working within a group of a dozen people is that every single person counts— a lot— and the fact that right up until the last day of Tabblo, the CEO had the keys to push builds out the door speaks volumes to the amount of cooperation and trust that we have all built with each other over the last two years.
As folks scrambled to retrieve keys from the offsite backup and fix the site and I walked on to the bar where we were scheduled to have our last Cambridge beers, I thought of how there are jobs you have where it is crystal clear why you get paid, and then those rare ones where you think you've pulled one over on the world because someone was silly enough to pay you for showing up every day. Running Tabblo has been from the latter category for me— mostly because of the folks involved. After all, at the end of the day, the only thing that is more rewarding than knowing that you are making a difference is the feeling that you've helped create a place where everyone can.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (May 7, 2007)
A few years ago when I was talking to him about commercial opportunities in open source, Bob Franskton said something that has stuck with me ever since: he likened the open source geeks to the CB radio fanatics of the 70s— as soon as they finish investing a ton of time getting their Linux machines all set up and connected, all they can do is spend days on end on the Internet talking about their respective setups. It reminded me of growing up with my ham radio dad who'd scramble all over the roof to get the 50 foot antenna perfectly aligned... just to talk to some Australian about aligning antennas.
I think this applies to social media properties as a predictor of mass market appeal much more than it does to open source. Let's call it the CB radio index and define it as the amount of communication/activity/etc. on a given social platform that is about how cool it is to be using that platform relative to total communication/activity/etc. As this number approaches 1, you get an increasingly more niche product that is less likely to appeal to your mom, "Emily," or even your lawyer college roommate.
Here is a great example of a high CB radio index web property: Twitter. Every time I dial up the volume on my Twitter feed I am amazed at how even veteran twitterers can spend an incredible amount of bandwidth writing stuff like "cool, twittering from dentist!"
And an example of the opposite: YouTube. I have never once been sent a link to a YouTube video that is about YouTube (with the painful exception of the acquisition video the founders made).
Now Twitter and YouTube are very different in many ways— but as social media platforms— as examples of the People Platform, I believe they are similar enough to be good tests for the CB radio index. It would be interesting for some grad student somewhere to try this analysis on most of the Web 2.0 sites out there today to see if it indeed has any predictive power.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (May 9, 2007)
You know I need more original blog titles for my posts when the New York Times (the paragon of the trailing edge) is using the same Star Trek jokes to talk about the coming of 3D printing in this recent piece by Saul Hansell. The article essentially covers the startups that are bringing cheap 3D printers to market (where cheap is $5k-$10K, but remember the first laserprinters) and makes a few other points about this technology's broader applicability.
Neil Gershenfeld covers what this is going to mean for regular folks well in his great book Fab— personal fabricators in everyone's home. I'm guessing though that before we get there, we are going to see all sorts of booming businesses that adopt a service provider model much in the same way that the first laserprinters gave birth to a whole slew of Kinko's copycats that basically rented the printers to users on a per-page basis. This is likely to be the case for two reasons: first, even if people shelled out $5-10K I doubt anyone is going to want to wear/use/display they "gray objects with a rather sandy finish" that the low end personal fabricators will be outputting for a while. More significantly though, the web is the ultimate demand aggregation channel for a service bureau business that can make you a custom version of whatever you want.
Sites like Threadless have already proven that user-led design powered by service bureau can be a great opportunity. Now imagine what that can become once you step outside of t-shirts and into just about any physical product you currently buy at the store. Forget about replacing your cellphone cover, and think for a moment about designing custom toys for your kids, custom wardrobes, or just about anything else that currently exists in your life and is made out of simple materials (it's going to be a while before we're printing robots). Or better yet, imagine remixing other people's design in the way that we can now easily remix web content.
What is going to be even more interesting is when we start to explore the possibilities around creating objects that were not born of the physical world in the first place. Hansell mentions Second Life in the piece— so imagine for a moment if we could start seeing the wacky objects that people build for themselves in-game but as part of the wardrobes we see in the physical world.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (June 7, 2007)
I spent this past week in Europe visiting HP sites, partners, and vendors and was taken aback by how much connectivity we now take for granted in our regular work here in the United States. The last time I was in Europe for work was 9 years ago (when we'd be amazed just to be able to dial up from the hotel room), but I guess with all the talk of broadband being much better overseas and the 3G cellphone networks being ubiquitous, I was sort of expecting at least parity with the setup I've got here. Boy was I surprised. Here are some of the things you can expect to go wrong:
Power (this one was on me for being unprepared). Between Spain and England, I discovered 3 different plug types. What is more, if you travel with a laptop and a phone (more than one device to plug in) and check in late, good luck getting the hotels to have anything to lend you to plug your American appliances in.
Consistent SMS/data on your cellphone. Having just switched to a GSM network, I was really excited by the prospect of 3G networks and zippy-fast mobile data. While voice worked everywhere, SMS and data did not. In fact, SMS was the flakiest of all of the services that I've come to rely on— I could receive messages almost everywhere, but I had at best 50% odds of being able to send them.
EVDO and Wi-fi. I knew my EVDO card wouldn't work at all; I guess I just hadn't realized how much I rely on it to stay in touch with the team back in Boston while waiting at airports, in cabs, or in dead times between meetings. And as far as the wi-fi is concerned, it does seem to be fairly ubiquitous, but in 100% of the cases it was expensive and encumbered by either its billing mechanism or by some lame proxy server setup that blocked most of the useful Internet services you'd want to get access to.
Overall Internet speed. Finally, the speed of "broadband" connections (especially in Spain) is painful. In this new world of rich Internet applications, it's easy to forget that we've only just been able to get to the point where we can use them in the US and that this is far from a given for other parts of the world. For instance, in Spain Tabblo.com was completely unusable, and even Gmail was severely hobbled by the dearth of bandwidth.
I'm not just writing this to gripe about my technical defficulties with the "old world," or even to warn other innocent travelers, but because I realized for the first time this week how much I've gotten used to filling the small cracks of free time when I am traveling with little bits of collaborative work and communication. It made me think that the macro effect productivity boost must finally be something that economists can measure as a positive impact of PCs and mobiles— always-on connections to the data and people that you need to get stuff done.
And yet at the same time, it was sort of nice to have a few cab rides and airport stays to do some disconnected work. Or even better, to just sit and think.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (June 15, 2007)
Roger von Oech has a nice short post comparing his behavior when he reads articles online versus in print that makes the basic point that his relationship the content differs depending on whether he is flipping the page or scrolling with the mouse. Expectations, time spent, even conclusions drawn can vary, despite the fact that it's the same exact content.
The post underscores the premise that presentation matters, the fundamental underpinning of the graphics design profession. However, Roger also gets to something more: the commitment that a reader makes to a particular bit of content when he decides to consume it on paper. It is almost as though the act of stepping outside of the natural flow of screen life implies that a different mode of thinking is going to be used a different part of the brain engaged.
When we all became employees of HP, we were given this really sweet All-in-one printer to help us start thinking about how a printer is used in the home. In my case, this was the first time I've had a consistently reliable printer outside of work since I left my college dorm so I've been overconsuming paper and ink quite a bit. In fact, I've got this new pattern of consuming content where I star all of the items in Google Reader that I want to go back and consume on paper at a later point (as a general rule they have to be about 500 words or more and particularly thought-provoking for me though in my "skim to star" mode, I often get the latter wrong). Then, when I'm ready, I'll print off a whole bunch of posts and go through them as I might have a newspaper 10 years ago or the latest issue of the Economist on a Saturday morning. Right now this mode of consumption has two big limitations:
There is no backchannel for communicating feedback on the really good stuff back into my electronic life (I can't add it to del.icio.us for example or email it to a friend)
but outside of these two limitations, I find that I'm doing more careful consideration of the arguments presented in the pieces when I consume them on paper. This whole Facebook/F8 meme for instance, has been something that I've read about mostly on paper where I am more likely to focus on the longer more thoughtful pieces and less likely (frankly because I can't) to jump around from soundbite blog post to soundbite blog post.
Along a somewhat related vein: in anticipation of the most hyped product launch ever, I've been reading "Designing for Small Screens," a book about user interface/interaction design for display-constrained devices. The book is well worth reading if you are interested in this vein of different mediums/different modes of relating to content. It starts from the premise that the visual interface is the most high bandwidth way to consume content and then walks through a number of interface patterns that are useful in maximizing limited real estate. In light of the paper versus screen modalities, you can not help but wonder what mode of relating to content might emerge as these smartphone-like interfaces really do gain mass market traction over the next couple of years.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (June 18, 2007)
I remember Seth Godin from the first Internet boom as the guy who wrote the smallish marketing pieces about colored cows that I never really paid attention to. But then I had his good friend, Lisa Gansky, on my board at Tabblo and heard all about how Seth was really one of the few Internet marketing folks who "gets it."
Which was why reading his recent blog post about John Heilemann's piece on Steve Jobs and the iPhone was such a pleasure. Better yet, in the blog post Seth points to this old Fast Company piece of his where he writes about Walt Disney as the ultimate three-time rifter:
What's a rift? It's a big tear in the fabric of the rules that we live by. It's a fundamental change in the game, one that creates a bunch of new losers -- and a handful of new winners.
I love this notion— that some people are just hard-wired to spot the real rifts— because it explains a lot about the best entrepreneurs that I know. Some people call it "pattern recognition," but for me it has always seemed more like good taste around what really constitutes new opportunities and not just hype and line noise.
As Seth tells it, most rifters wander into their first rift almost by accident and then go on to think that they are gifted enough to spot rifts even when they aren't there (I guess this would be the business equivalent of second system syndrome), but it is those rare few that can keep on spotting the rifts again and again despite position, age, or stature.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (June 24, 2007)
A month ago I switched to Google Reader from NetNewsWire because I was tired of the cross computer synchronization problem. Reader is also one of those nice applications that doesn't just ape its desktop predecessors— perhaps because there isn't a real strong legacy of desktop RSS readers— but that instead tries to make the whole experience of consuming feeds more web native by weaving in social features around the sharing of posted items. I'll have a lot more to say about mixing together feed management and social features over the next few days (as I am on vacation and will have finally have a chance to write about friends, feed management, and the secret of Facebook's success) so for now I will just say that Reader is a good application that anyone interested in going beyond very basic feed consumption should definitely check out.
This post is not about Reader though, but about Google Gears, a new browser plug-in that was released recently around Google's first Developer Day to make it possible to take web applications offline. Basically Gears combines 3 things together in a local runtime: an RDBMS (SQLite), a local web server, and a multi-threading primitive in the form of a worker pool. The plug-in (which currently runs on IE and Firefox and sort of supports WebKit/Safari) provides these three services and leaves the rest to you, the developer.
I have to admit that when I first read about Gears, I was a bit disappointed that Google had chosen to bite off so little in order to solve what is probably the Achilles heel of all web applications, offline use. If solving this problem had fallen to me (which it did in a small way 7 years ago when we were building a bandwidth-enhancing service for the Memora Personal Server), I would also have used a local webserver but made it capable of running server code (in the form of Java/PHP/Python/Ruby plug-ins) and capable of transparently rewriting URLs so that the enduser was unaware of which server was actually handling the request while the developer had less work to do in building out hybrid applications. We pulled this trick off at Memora to serve big video files from a local webserver instead of across the network when the assets existed in both places with the best part being that outside of a bit of middleware which the developer had to be conscious of in certain cases, the rest of was completely transparent.
That said yesterday I got my first chance to test Gears via a synced version of Reader that went "offline" with 755 of my most recent posts for a long airplane ride. Holy smokes, that thing is fast! Though it could have quite a bit to do with the way that Reader itself is architected, the best part of using Reader offline is that you don't have to wait for the server loads as a new bunch of posts is loaded in. It just screams. By comparison, I've got a single user instance of the entire Tabblo website running on my machine for development purposes (MySQL, Apache C modules, Python, Django) and it is much much slower despite having no real server load, so much so, that I'm beginning to think that there may be quite a bit of connection setup/teardown overhead between a web browser and even just a local server, and that the Google guys may have been conscious of this in the design of Gears.
Gears is not without some enduser annoyances that are imposed on it by the browser, the biggest one being that you have to remember to leave the browser window open before you go offline or you're stuck despite the plug-in having all of the data anyway. There is also of course the nasty problem of distribution; despite the fact that it's provided as a smallish .xpi or ActiveX control, it would be a whole lot better if it could come pre-bundled with the browser, or at the very least with the Google Toolbar. There is zero doubt in my mind that Gmail is going to get a Gears life any day now, something which will likely remove the last obstacle for my going to it full time for all of my email needs, so perhaps there are plans to address both of these issues.
In the meanwhile, I can't wait to try using Gears for a project as it's clear that the Gears folks have done a very nice job of doing a UNIX (little small tools that can provide big leverage) to a key piece the "webapps all the time and everywhere" challenge we're all dealing with these days.
Ever since I read Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age, I've been waiting for someone to crack the code on moving books into the digital age. Despite the false starts of local companies like E-Ink, it's clear that paper (or some form of it) is here to stay. The form factor is just perfect for some use cases and, more importantly, the emotional attachment that all of us nerds have to the page-flipping format is way too strong to be broken by even the most over-hyped and anticipated of gadgets.
Moreover, the history of print design is rich with a lot of smart people thinking very hard about the best way to present information to be consumed on the printed page, and it's not likely to be eclipsed by the world of web designers anytime soon. Even the guys at 37 signals are all about how online design may now be making a U-turn and heading back to the realm of print.
For me, the biggest challenge in understanding how the book will transform into a digital object is in creating a proper back channel so that users can continue interacting with content in the way that the web has enabled. Take Digg or Reddit as cannonical examples of how we are used to injecting feedback into the content consumption process: if I read something really awesome, I want people to know about it. I might even want to leave a comment if I think that I can help extend the argument.
Until the book form factor solves the back channel problem, we're stuck with their being static artifacts of the information explosion going on around us. Which is again, why I was sad to miss Manolis's presentation. Of all the work I've seen around e-books, his comes the closest to expressing what could be a very viable product roadmap for the venerable book.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (June 26, 2007)
The only thing I'd ever known about Marc Andreessen was that he was the Netscape guy that brought a ton of shit down on himself by claiming that Microsoft was soon to be relegated to a bunch of buggy device drivers back in the day when Netscape itself was having trouble shipping good browsers. These days though he's writing a stellar blog about all sorts of interesting things and his latest post on startups and success is probably the best single piece I have ever read on the question of success factors specifically, team, product, and market.
His argument boils down to the fact that a killer market trumps all else. My favorite line is that an exploding market will pull the product out of the startup even if both the team and the product vision are less than good. This is readily apparent to anyone who has been on the east coast for a while and had the chance to meet some of the PC and Internet 1.0 entrepreneurs, arguably the two largest exploding horizontal markets.
Well worth reading, especially because it is a bit more nuanced than similar posts that get to the same message by usually arguing for "making something that people want."
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (June 27, 2007)
The first major reviewers of the iPhone have cast their votes and on the whole, the response is overwhelmingly positive. Walt and Katie had a great time with the phone calling it a "whole new experience and a pleasure to use," and thus far David Pouge (New York Times), Steven Levy (Newsweek), and Ed Baig (USA Today) all agree. To be sure there are quibbles about the network and about the number of steps required for certain operations, but that a device this over-hyped has its early reviewers so ga-ga is an incredible achievement for the folks from Cupertino.
I'm really happy to see it, not because I'm thrilled about the iPhone (which as a two-time owner of smartphones, I am) but because I love to see folks rewarding Apple for taking such a big product risk. Founded when I was just three years old, I feel as though I have grown up with Apple; from the Apple ]['s evolution as the first mainstream PC, to the Macintosh's shift to the Intel processor, I can remember all of the major product announcements the way one remembers big family events. With every major product Apple (under Steve) has been bold in crafting a unique product that often times defines a market by disrupting what heretofore has been nothing more than engineers grasping in the dark.
Which is not to say that Apple has not been without its big misses, most of which can be attributed to Steve Jobs: the Lisa, the lack of HD in the original Mac, the absence of licensing for the Mac OS, the Apple Cube, and even the company's deaf ear to the early days of the Web are a few examples of times when Apple was just plain wrong and often stuck with their mistake far longer than what we might refer to as "nimbler" companies.
Overall though, a small price to pay for the company that has given us a great UNIX on our desktops, Wi-Fi in every broadband connected home, the iPod ecosystem (remember when pundits called it an acronym for "Idiots Price Our Devices"), and hopefully the new computing platform that the iPhone is about to usher in.
Few companies are that bold about the things that they put out into the world— and none have survived so many misses at bat as Apple has while at the same time going on to have so many hits. It is precisely because of this that I think the "Think Different" ads best captured what I think are at the core of both Apple and Steve's soul. And as we get ready to line up for the iPhone, I'm just glad that they have kept on swinging hard.
Update: David reminded of this great piece a few weeks ago in the Economist about Apple and innovation that just needs to be added to this post.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (June 29, 2007)
Back in 1999 there was this dot-com company called Third Voice that was the first Internet 1.0 attempt at providing "co-presence" as you surfed on Internet pages. The idea was to use the content of the web as a substrate for building real-time communities where people could interact by "chatting" on top of pages. Needless to say, the concept did not catch on in any meaningful way, and to this day, many Firefox extensions and widgets later (even Flickr 0.1 was just a rehash for photos of this co-presence idea), we're still not there. I'm almost ready to call it and assert that the notion of a layer of people interacting in real time on top of the more slowly moving content of the web is just not likely to be a mode of interaction that will ever catch on. IM is for realtime, Second Life is for realtime— but the venerable and scaleable web— even with its rapidly accelerating update cycle (fueled by wikis, blogs, and microblogs) is just fine without it.
Except of course that every once in a while I experience a content consumption craving that leaves me thinking about the promise of the Third Voices of the world. For instance, today, on the most momentous product launch of 2007, I am sitting thousands of miles away on vacation in Barbados, feeling very far from it all. I'm not sure that I'd be standing in one of the lengthy queues encircling each and every Apple store in the US (though I might be), but I would definitely love to get a better feel than what I can get from the blog coverage, Twitter updates, and occasional big-time journalist dispatch.
A few brave folks are trying video steaming but it isn't working well (because of the lame reason that the multiplexers don't seem to be able to take the load), and the Engadgets of the world are doing a nice job of the constant update to keep feeding us photos.
But overall, cobbling these bits and pieces together is a pretty dissatisfying experience. What I want sort of like Techmeme (who has the right starting approach to this) but faster moving, more tunable to my network of people, and way richer in terms of the multimedia being shared. Discoverable through Google— in fact maybe even promotable through Google, and capable of taking user comments, photos, and videos all one one page and with adequate peak-load capacity planning.
It's not clear to me why this hasn't emerged yet as a sort of web platform for events. It could be used extensively at conferences and then brought out for product launches, political events, even disasters. What is more, it is clear that various folks are bumping around its edges: from the Facebook news feed to the Twitter update, all of the leading-edge social platform experiments are feeling various parts of the elephant in the dark. And eventually I suppose, something might emerge from all of this experimentation that will finally deliver the live web we need to cover these types of things.
In the meanwhile, I'll be clicking refresh on apple.com...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (July 1, 2007)
So I've been on vacation in Barbados this last week where I used to come when I was a kid. One of my favorite things about this island are its people— incredibly friendly and outgoing, they are just a sheer delight (and given Barbados's public beach policy, this is not constrained to just the fancy resort employees). In fact, on the beach most days you are likely to experience Bajan (Barbadian) entrepreneurship at its best with everything from jetski rentals to foot massages being offered by a gaggle of passing merchants*. Everything is negotiable, and surprisingly, the process of being sold is almost as good as the product or service being offered.
My absolute favorite Bajan entrepreneur this year has got to be Stephen, the man who made palm leaf hats for the three of us. The hats are made from a single palm tree branch, curled and cut in just the right way and then woven together from the brim on to the top of the hat. Stephen has been making these hats for 29 years which you can tell from just looking at the way he works with nothing other than an armfull of palm, a sharp knife, and one short 1-inch wire to hold the brim together. From start to finish, he can make a hat in about eight minutes.
As we watched him work (see the tabblo for more), I got to thinking about how nice it is to have mastered a craft in the world, to have a skill making stuff, where you can really get into a groove. This is especially nice when you can make your living from it. In fact, this was the third time in two weeks that I thought of this: the first being 10 days ago when I was in the chair of the most skilled root-canalist I have ever seen. This particular endodontist had all his own tools and the way of a master craftsman about him as he patiently worked his way through all of the canals in the root of my tooth. After he was done I felt compelled to tell him: "I wish that someday I could be as good at anything as you are at doing root canals" to which he replied dryly and without apparent pride, "I wish I was as good at anything else as I am at doing root canals."
The third time that I thought about craftsmen recently was in reading the fabulous The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. In it Joe Kavalier, a brilliant magician/escapist/artist refugee from Prague, comes to the US during the comic book boom in the late 1930s and succeeds as a comic book artist. The novel is a great riff on the American Dream, and all of the best passages in it are all about Joe and his single-mindedness when it comes to practicing his craft.
For me programming a computer comes the closest to practicing a craft. I like to write, and I love to build companies, but at the end of the day, if you dropped me into a strange city with no history, credentials, or reputation to ride on (one of my favorite job interview questions), this is the main thing I know I could do to earn a living. More importantly, I love to be around great software engineers, to read beautiful code, and to talk shop in all of its annoying and seemingly self-centered ways: chatting about tools, approaches, and war stories for hours on end. As I've gotten older, I've dabbled in more and more things but for most of them, it's just that— experimentation until the novelty wears off. With software, time stops and things just seem to fall into a very nice groove for me.
I'm sure that I'll never be as good at writing software or designing big systems as Stephen is at making his hats. But at least I'm glad to know that this is what I love to do, and that in some weird joke-on-the-universe way, I get paid for it.
Incidentally, it feels to me like it is the best time to be alive for all of those people still looking for crafts to love. Kavalier and Clay's comic boom with its creation of a new medium pales in comparison to what we're seeing as the tools of production become ubiquitous and the net binds us ever close together.
*Between writing and posting this, I even had someone come by and ask if I wanted to have my hair braided— my chest hair that is.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (July 2, 2007)
Sorry to everyone that comes here for the "big thoughts" about the following shop talk. Feel free to skip— for those interested in web frameworks, read on...
Being the conservative guy that I am, I was willing to bet millions of dollars of investors' money on an "unproven" open-source web framework, but not my own puny personal blog. But a few days of vacation have finally cleared the head and have caused me to abandon the whole Ruby-on-Rails powered fad (more specifically the twice-abandoned Typo project) for a blog powered by Django.
I can't say enough good things about Django. Professionally, it was one of the best technical decisions that I got to make early on at Tabblo. I had always assumed that we would use it for the alpha, maybe the beta, and then dump it for a custom system that could perform. Instead we rode it from the first alpha until the day we got acquired by HP. In the meanwhile we ran 5 million photos through it, a million users, and over 150,000 content publishers. We had some ugly moments (the shift from mod_python to lighttpd/FastCgi and the move to magic removal stick out in my mind), but overall it performed incredibly well. A lot of props go to Adrian and gang for putting together such a flexible framework. They used it as a lightweight CMS, but we were able to take it and build out a full UG content publishing platform (with a lot of help along the way from memcached and solid engineering on the part of the Tabblo folk).
In fact, the HP folks doing diligence on us started by asking why we had not chosen Ruby on Rails and came out the other end incredibly impressed with our Django choice. We survived our security audit (coming out much more unscathed than a lot of other HP acquisitions) thanks mainly to Django, and have continued to develop on top of it even as we get ready to truly become the "print engine for the web."
For sure there are things, I'd love to see improved, namely: mutliple DB support (sharding), a better testing framework, and general speed improvements. But hey, now that we're HP maybe we can find a way to help out with those things!
In the meantime, theonda.org (or an.ton.io) is now officially "Django Powered." I haven't had this much fun programming since at least 6 months before we got acquired. In fact, I've decided that Django— when it comes to web stuff— is perfect for "vacation programming." What do I mean by this? It's the type of programming where you get to focus on the fun stuff and ignore all the crap you find yourself having to do again and again on every web project. A few examples:
* Generic views: if I had 5 dollars for every time I've parsed URL fragments to present a list of objects by date/type/whatever, I'd be long retired.
* RSS/ATOM framework: this one is a bit messy (tightly coupled) but man is it great not to have to deal with XML encoding/decoding. Wowee, the funnest 30 minutes of the project.
* All sorts of nice html-ifying functions: want to wrap your paragraphs in p tags? Format columns of text? All built in with Django.
Finally, Django is just well architected. I use a venerable Mac program called MarsEdit to write all of my blog posts. Unfortunately MarsEdit seems to support mostly crappy old XMLR-RPC-based protocols for publishing (Blogger1, metaweblog). Fortunately for me, between Python's support for xml-rpc and Django's URL dispatch mechanism, supporting metaweblog was a "nap time" exercise (it would have been less time if there was clean and current metaweblog docs on the web). Fun stuff.
Now that I've moved to Django, I'm really excited to start playing again. The thing about Typo was that it was hard to make any changes to it without having some of that RoR "magic" explode in my face. With the Django there is no magic— just clean, explicit, and simple design.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (July 15, 2007)
I have been a fan of Jon Udell's ever since his awesome "Practical Internet Groupware" hit the stands back in 1999. So when he interviewed the dean of the CS department At Carnegie Mellon, Jeanette Wing, about her views on the importance of "computational thinking" as a core discipline that should be taught to kids early on, I was intrigued. Lego Mindstorms and Milton-Bradley BigTracs notwithstanding, I've always found the ability to reason abstractly and algorithmically about a problem a huge asset that has been helpful to me way beyond of the realm of programming a computer. And now that I've got Alex (my five year old) getting to an age where he can start to grok this, I'm obsessed with taking every opportunity to pass this down.
Which, as you can imagine, doesn't make me (or the rest of my family) that much fun for playing games or doing puzzles. Ever since I can remember, every game we've ever tried to play quickly turns into an excuse for thinking about how a computer might do it better: from Blackjack to Clue, from Stratego to Scrabble. This weekend we had a similar situation with a puzzle called "Scrambled Squares" from a company called B-Dazzle that my in-laws had bought for Alex because the puzzle was about pirates (a long standing obsession of his). On the face of it, the puzzle appears to be about spatial reasoning: nine squares, each with 1/2 of a pattern on each side, have to be put together to form a complete 3x3 super-square where all of the patterns "foot." But with way too many combinations, spatial reasoning and brute force quickly give way to tearing your hair out and declaring the puzzle unsolvable.
And thus, Scrambled Squares is a great puzzle for teaching the principles of computational thinking. The puzzle is mostly governed by very visible constraints which quickly force the issue of more abstract thinking, and to boot, it's got a great graphical interface that encourages all sorts of direct manipulation.
In the end it was unrealistic of me to expect that I could teach him how to solve it for himself (I could barely solve it myself!). But I was very pleased to see that certain lessons (find the middle piece and work outwards, find blocks of two and try those as 'units,' turn the highest 'constraint-pleasing' edges inward) were quickly internalized and then repeated to the gathering crown of befuddled adults. What we ended up with was much less of a formal algorithm (though a subsequent Google search turned up a whole term project on it), and more of set of rules to cut down the space of possible arrangements. But it is precisely this type of early computational thinking that I'm guessing does not get covered in primary school math classes and thus why we may indeed need to introduce a new top-level discipline right from the get-go.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (July 21, 2007)
Lots of people have been spending way too much time blogging about the iPhone (though believe it or not, I still think it is under-hyped), so I'm going to stay away from reviewing mine. That said, I did want to make a quick software comment that the iPhone's keyboard makes clear as day.
Whenever you can turn a piece of complex UI from hardware to software, you seriously accelerate the rate of improvement of the general interface.
I've had two other Smartphones, the Treo 700p and the Nokia e61i. Both have the full tactile keyboard that the RIM Blackberry pioneered— which despite looking like it was made for Smurfs, works remarkably well. However, you make two key compromises with it: the loss of real estate that could either go to the screen or to a smaller overall device, and a hard upper limit as to how fast you will be able to go. In the case of the iPhone, it seemed to me that Apple's engineers valued screen over buttons and went with the soft keyboard as a compromise.
And despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews of the soft keyboard, I never in a million years expected that I would actually find myself typing faster on the virtual iPhone keyboard than on a tactile one. Yet three weeks into it, that is exactly what has happened— I can now type faster on the iPhone than I ever did on the Treo or the Nokia, thanks exclusively to the interface and to the simplistic spelling correction algorithm. More importantly, the rev cycle just went from 12-18 months (the average amount of time between my hardware updates) to whatever the frequency of the iPhone software updates shakes out to be. They've taken something that was tied to the limitations of the physical world and moved it squarely into the realm of the virtual.
ReadWrite web had a thought provoking post on exactly this topic, "digital physics," arguing that an interface which borrows just enough from real world physics but takes it beyond those constraints is the future of all user experiences. At the time I saw it as an esoteric point, but now that I've experienced it, I'm completely sold.
And of course there are other benefits to moving the interface into software. When Tivos replaced VCRs we got a big boost in "recording productivity" just because of how much more heavy lifting was being done in code. I suspect we'll see a lot of the same types of things in the iPhone's virtual keyboard, especially as the API is opened up to third-party developers.
That said, there are clearly examples of when moving an interface from hardware (buttons and knobs) to software can really screw things up: BMW's iDrive and all of those fancy universal remotes being good case studies. It would seem to me though that most of these counterpoints are better examples of poor implementations and not so much a weakness in the idea of moving hardware interfaces to software.
One final caveat: there is this famous Alan Kay quote about how people who are serious about software ultimately build their own hardware (which incidentally Jobs keeps using about all things Apple). I've never understood it until now. It is after all the incredible sensitivity of the panel in the iPhone that lets the software do its magic, and we'd do well to remember that bit of wisdom before even considering the approach.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (July 23, 2007)
I first met Scott Kirsner back in 2001 when he wrote a column about Memora, a company my brother and I had started at the intersection of consumer technology and broadband infrastructure. I liked Scott because of how much he seemed to "get" what we were trying to do, and how far ahead of other journalists he was willing to see. Naturally I was disappointed when he moved west and subsequently glad to see that he's come back, though this morning's Sunday Boston Globe article on how we're just continuing to miss the consumer tech opportunities here on the east coast rankled me a bit. It reminded me of Mike Arrington referring to Boston as a backwater, and even more so, of all of the folks I would meet on the west coast while traveling for Tabblo that argued for moving the entire company out there.
For the record, right before starting Tabblo I almost pulled up stakes and headed to the west coast for most of the reasons given in Kirsner's piece. That I stayed is a tribute to two things: my faith in the depth of the Boston-based engineering talent that I'd been building into my network, and the good efforts of the folks at Matrix who single-handedly funded the plan with little more than a concept, me, and a sales pitch. Which is not to say that it was not a painful process to make the financing happen: it took a lot of education and hard thinking on both of our parts to come to the conclusion that there was a viable, scalable, and ultimately defensible business model in what Tabblo was going to do. But when after just under two years, HP came knocking, I was very glad that we had done the hard work up front and that we had the depth and breadth we needed on the team.
Scott is certainly right about one thing— starting funded consumer Internet "Hail Mary" businesses in Boston is pretty nearly impossible. There is no VC in Boston that I know who would have funded YouTube, and for good reasons too; namely, cost structure and copyright. But those Hail Mary plans rarely succeed and for every YouTube, we've got several Napsters to prove the counterpoint. Instead, we've got the less sexy but more fundamental consumer Internet businesses here: Zipcar, Kayak (ok, in CT), and TripAdvisor to name a few. I know folks at all of these companies and they all share an incredibly analytical view towards what is happening on the "Internet as distribution channel" which is simply not a part of what I know of the west coast ethos.
I certainly do not mean to knock the swing-for-the-fences mentality of the west coast, and as an entrepreneur, I would certainly kill for the recruiting efficiency of being able to drive down to Google or Apple for some talent. To boot, we've still got a lot of Digital/Lotus detritus to clear out of of the VC pipelines before we can really adequately fund the new opportunities the Internet presents with the proper teams of folks. But give us time Scott— don't lose faith quite yet!
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (July 26, 2007)
My friend Jerry Michalski has long held that businesses that think about "consumers" are setting themselves up for failure from the start. In what will stand the test of time as a brilliant quote, he stated that companies who thought about the "consumer" reduced him to "a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash." Now Josh Bernoff from Forrester is arguing that the term "user" has been equally debased and that we should all just stop using it.
The term "user" in the "consumer Internet" space has taken on special importance as a measure of value. MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc. are all measured in terms of "unique users," and every little company looking to make a similar run has a board full of investors asking the same question every month: "how many users have you got?" We certainly did.
The bummer about it is not the use of the term— but rather how much the constant focus on growing the pool of users quickly distorts any connection that the word user actually has to a real breathing person, even in startups that claim to be "user-centric." You stop focusing on the individual people coming through the site and start abstracting away to the clickstream, the userflow, or the suite of A-B tests. All of these tools have their place to be sure— but they tend to further exacerbate the problem brought on by the constant question at all of the board meetings: "how many users?"
In his post, Bernoff cites an essay by Don Norman (a personal hero) who argues that it is really important to focus on the language used to refer to the users of a product or service during the design process. The piece is required reading for anyone who works on anything meant to be used by anyone else, as it will begin to make you aware of all of the in-built biases that the all of the associated practices around user experience have.
If you like the piece, I'd go out and get his book, Emotional Design, which rocked my world when I read it with the seemingly trite starting premise that each of us in just a big bag of emotions and that the sooner we design products that accept and leverage this, the better off everyone will be. For the past year now I've been grinding through cellphones wondering how it is possible that the folks at Motorola, Palm, Nokia, and now Apple, haven't all inhaled and internalized the messages in this book. After all, what is more emotional than the way in which we communicate with the folks we care about the most?
I'm all for dumping user but I'm sure that it won't be long before some other term comes to replace it— author, owner, creator, or perhaps some Sterling-esque made up word. To get rid of the problem of abstracting away the person behind the wallet, the human behind the eyeballs, it takes making their own experience using your product or service the end goal and not just the means to something other goal. And recognizing us as the emotion bags that we are might be a good place to start.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (July 30, 2007)
I've have four different exchanges with folks today about the puff piece that Jason Pontin wrote on Pownce in today's New York Times. Essentially Pownce seems like another social network Web 2.0 application that is trying to build its own messaging infrastructure. Maybe I'm not getting something about what is going on with these sites but my general thinking is that between the web, email, IM, and SMS (all relatively open albeit in decreasing order), we've got enough bricks to play with, and that building closed systems in the name of expediency is a waste of effort.
Jason Kotkenailed the general sentiment a few weeks ago when he accused Facebook of "becoming the new AOL." In jumping on its closed platform, developers are cutting a Faustian bargain at best— and especially so if the revenue model is not clearly split out.
That said, Facebook is a juggernaut, and as such not many can ignore their "platform" play. I'm almost ready to admit that their in-system messaging and status updates make sense. After all, there are millions of college kids hitting refresh 60-70 times a day in order to see what they might have otherwise seen in their inboxes and buddy lists. But a brand new startup attempting to replace email and IM?
I love the implementation of Pownce (especially because it's powered by Django and feels very fast and light). But I just can not see getting onto yet another identity network and another messaging platform just so that I can send big files around. And I think that the Pownce folks would do much better to focus on the features that could complement email and IM instead of wholesale replacing it. For instance, both of these mediums could use much better integration with SMS— and yet Pownce didn't even come out of the gate supporting SMS at all (which to me this was the killer feature that made Pownce's original inspiration so compelling).
Note: to anyone who still wants to try it, I've got a whole load of Pownce invites. Send me an email and they are yours— no need to be bidding on eBay.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (July 31, 2007)
After yesterday's rant about creating parallel infrastructures for messaging, I was amused to read Scott Karp's blog post on the "inefficiencies" of Web 2.0 where he argues that plugging your Twitter stream into Facebook and then consuming both it and the Facebook feed in Google Reader can get annoying.
Absolutely true.
However, parallel messaging infrastructures aside, Scott is missing the point. The cool thing is that we can do these things at all.
Find any three year-old who has discovered Legos and watch him go to town snapping stuff together. For the two years, the creations that he will assemble will look like molten piles of plastic growing haphazardly every which way, really amounting to nothing more than the sheer joy of knowing that force and concentration work magic with Lego pieces. This is exactly where we are with RSS and ATOM feeds and all of the hidden readers that can consume them (Facebook, Jaiku, Google Gadgets, Yahoo Pipes, etc.).
But keep watching that three year-old as he turns into a five year-old and you'll see something really amazing start to happen. The jumbles become ships, airplanes, cars. The haphazard construction gives way to a careful understanding of where a 1x2 makes all the difference and where a right angle join can turn a car into a rocket. And in the best of cases, these new found skills find ways to surprise even the very designers of the kits the respective pieces belong to.
When it comes to syndicating and remixing content and web application functionality, I think we're just about to turn that five-year old corner. We're really about to see the true promise of web services delivered— on a consumer platform and mostly by "user programmers" remixing feeds and plugging things together. And a little redundancy is a small price to pay for that.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Aug. 5, 2007)
While traveling this week, I discovered a really amazing radio show called "Radio Lab" from New York Public Radio (more specifically, I discovered its podcast). The first episode I listened to, on the ephemeral nature of memories, blew me away both from the quality of the content, and the way in which it was brought together by the show's producers.
The basic premise of the episode is that the old analogy that memories in the brain are stored like pages in a book (or more currently speaking, files on a hard drive) is actually flawed, and that memories are in fact stored in such a way that we re-create them every time we recall them (there is a better code + data analogy which I won't make here but is how I currently understand it). The piece really got me thinking about memory, identity, and what may come from all of us web who seem so obsessed with chronicling life in pictures, blog posts, and just about every form of digital excrement.
An example: right after listening to the piece, I found myself giving a toast at a wedding and trying to recall a story about the groom and I from sixteen years ago. As I felt my brain struggling to reform the memories, it occurred to me that this whole process would have been a whole lot easier in today's Facebook-enhanced world. The episode (and I won't go into it here) was exactly the kind of embarrassing thing that someone would now have caught with a digital camera; it would have made its way to Facebook, and ended up tagged with both of our names by all of our friends. And sixteen years from now it would be a trivial exercise for anyone preparing a toast to pull all of the interactions they've ever had with the person being celebrated— assuming of course that Facebook is still around. And not just pictures but comments, wall posts, blog posts— in short a whole lot of data that would go very far in helping assisting a more accurate reformation of those exact memories.
Progress, right? I've always thought so, for two reasons: because the act of chronicling is itself engages and rewards the author, and for the sake of history (even when you yourself are the historian coming back later to see how you've changed). It is after all exactly like Cory Doctorow wrote when he claimed that his blog served as his outboard brain. And in the Facebook example, the collective nature of the chronicling makes this outboard brain proposition even more compelling.
But the folks on the podcast made me think about whether this is in fact absolute progress. Apparently, every time you do the work of recalling a memory, you change it a little, according to the particular way in which your brain processes it at that given time. It is as though the process of bringing it to the surface bumps it against all of the stuff that has accumulated in your brain since the last time you thought about that particular memory. And in the process, the memory itself changes ever so slightly. Then when you put it away again, it goes back changed just a teeny tiny little bit. Less like what may have "objectively" happened, but a whole lot more "you" in the process.
Obviously the incessant chronicling of our lives doesn't have to affect this very human process for grooming memories over time. However, I suspect that this will only be the case for as long as the tools for chronicling our lives are lossy. Writing something down will almost always leave enough room for the memories around the words to evolve, and the photos we take are only snapshots of instants in time. But what happens when we've got Justin.tv style chronicling (assuming we could store, search, and excerpt it all)? What happens when the collective brain of all of your friends tagging and commenting puts enough perspectives in the chronicle to mitigate this process?
One of the hosts on the show made the incredibly insightful statement that in the end all we are is "a bunch of memories strung together." But from the sound of the rest of the show, it is a string that is always moving twisting slightly this way and that. I wonder what will happen as technology starts constraining the way in which we allow ourselves to move the string over time.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Aug. 26, 2007)
One of the best things that I've learned to do in order to improve my "game-changing technologies predictive power" is to look back in 2,3, and 5 year chunks at what the things were back then that I thought were for sure the up-and-coming winners. It is a sobering exercise for understanding how in technology it is so very easy to confuse a long view for a short distance.
For instance, take web services. Back in 01-02 they were all of the rage. Websites were going to syndicate functionality to everyone, and companies big and small were going to reap huge rewards from weaving all of these new-found APIs together. And sure, 5 years later we've got a collection of interesting services from Amazon/eBay/Google, a bevy of Web 2.0 companies with half-baked APIs (mostly following in the lead of Flickr), and the built in expectation that if you're building a website today, you are a nobody until you can offer an API to your web service.
In the meantime though, only one ubiquitous API has truly emerged: RSS. As Steve Rubel pointed out in the blog post that started me thinking about this again, RSS is now the common glue by which developers can weave blog posts, pictures, tweets, and whatever else into one uniform stream of data to be consumed, remixed, and shared as needed.
And indeed, this is pretty awesome, despite the fact that we're just now scratching the surface. Adam Green (who in my mind is one of Boston's best software minds, a guy that really can span generations with his thinking) told me almost two years ago that right about now developers would be waking up to a "feed management" problem. What is more, he then set out to build the tools needed for addressing some of these challenges. I haven't stayed close enough to what he's done thus far, but I do agree with the notion that most of the interesting opportunities out there today for people working in the consumer Internet revolve around orchestration of different services through "feed management," though not quite in the publish-it-all-this-is-who-I-am-hear-me-roar style that is so prevalent among the Web 2.0 set.
Most "regular folks" don't care to be emitting digital excrement about every part of their lives for all to see, all of the time. And unfortunately, the privacy model for sharing items from feed selectively is either not there (most blogging tools), too cumbersome (Vox), or too coarsely grained (Twitter). Of all of the existing services, I've seen, Facebook's Mini Feed comes the closest to representing real life use cases, but only because Facebook is itself a closed system with a nice natural mechanism for representing friends and colleagues (though we'll see if this scales as the company moves beyond its traditional college demographic).
In order to be able to remix feeds in an interesting way, we need not only a service that sucks up RSS output from all of one's online publishing/communication platforms and normalizes it all, but also one which can then provide the right level of access control to the people and services that are likely to want to consume that amalgam of information. Now, who is working on that part of the feed management problem? Who has the scale and scope to pull it off in a way that both users and developers trust? Or can we pull it off with some combination of OpenId and RSS extensions?
It seems to me that cracking this identity/authentication/access problem is going to open up a whole world of interesting opportunities for syndicated content and services that will go well beyond publishing for most regular folks, but only if it is done in an open and distributed way. Let's just hope it doesn't take another 5 years to get there.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Aug. 27, 2007)
I'm headed down to an HP analyst, customer, and press conference in NYC this week to kick off a bunch of initiatives from our overall group, IPG (Imaging and Printing Group). Thus far in my short tenure at HP, I've done one other event like this which I found to be great for a couple of reasons:
First, events like this help to remind us all of the scale and scope of HP's printing business. From the smallest little photo printer on your desk to the largest commercial presses used for printing on buildings, from cellphone camera processing pipelines to multimillion dollar realtime collaboration studios— each of these businesses reports into IPG, and at these events, we all tend to come wearing tails. As a just recently resource constrained startup, the best analogy that I can think of is that before the acquisition, we were this little tiny PT boat in big 30-foot seas, which was lifted onto the deck of an aircraft carrier. There are downsides to this, but plenty of upsides too, and one of my personal favorites is walking the decks and imagining what we could do with all of the fancy gear.
The second reason why I dig these events is because it forces everyone to get on message and clear about what it is that we are all doing here together. I know that it sounds pretty lame to think that a PR/customer event is what it takes— but in a big company every business unit spends most of its time head down getting stuff done, and there is nothing like talking to real outsiders to force the mind to focus.
The big push where that is concerned this year is what has been dubbed the "Print 2.0" transformation, which is essentially a shift in focus to the applications for printing and away from printers themselves. When I tell this to people, their first reaction is often, well obviously that is because printing is dying and you need to figure out how to squeeze the last bit o pulp out of the orange. But the reality is actually quite different. Print output— as defined by printed pages— is actually growing, even a bit faster than the economy itself. And digital printing (what HP does) is growing much faster, due largely to the shift from analog processes to digital ones. Think of what's happened to photos over the last eight years and apply it broadly across everything that gets put down on paper— all 48 trillion pages per year— and you get the general idea.
Anyway, for those of us in the business of building things that people use, the "applications space," this shift away from printer models and ink cartridges to use cases and building end to end experiences is a welcome one for many reasons, the biggest one being that it is only when you start to think about the full end to end experience that you can really engage all of the parts of the carrier towards delivering something really compelling. It is like iPod + iTunes + iTunes Music Store but for the consumption of printed content.
If you're coming to the event, please don't hesitate to find me— and I'll be glad to chat more.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Sept. 1, 2007)
The show was a fascinating— if exhausting— mix of partners, customers, and analysts. The sheer number of products and services introduced by all parts of IPG was overwhelming, so rather than focus on them, I'll just stick to a couple of the observations that came from my meetings with partners and customers and the various conversations in the hall.
Content is getting smaller and smaller: whether I was meeting with content owners or retailers or even just analysts covering the enterprise space, there was a common theme around delivering "just the bits that matter" to users with the implication being that in the past, people had to settle for a more shotgun-like approach to getting the catalog, the newspaper piece, the map, etc. Some of this apparent bias may be because most of these conversations took place in the context of the Tabblo Print Toolkit (which lets a content owner extract and format only the relevant chunks of content), but overall, thinking blog post instead of article, 20 second clip instead of infomercial, and widget instead of website seems to be something that HP's partners and customers are all hip to these days.
Platform is now undefined again: a platform used to be what you built a house on. Then the computer revolution happened and platform became the name for something desirable if you wanted to make mucho money as a vendor. It generally implied lots of up-front R&D amortized over hundreds of products and millions of users— all managed super carefully to yield a closed but self-reinforcing ecosystem. I'm not sure what platform means anymore, but I'm positive that it doesn't mean that. In fact, I was surprised to see that even for those HP partners who pioneered and mastered the platform strategy as defined above, the concept has taken on a whole new meaning. Some people use is to mean community, some use it to mean value chain, and others still use it to mean something between infrastructure and protocols.
I suspect that when real definition emerges it will contain elements all of these qualities but will differ from its preceeding definition in an important way— users will be playing a much more active role. Whether it is a printing platform (a couple of which were introduced this week), a content platform, or an enterprise service management platform, it was very refreshing to see VJ and team embrace the ambiguity of the redefinition and welcome all forms of participation going forward with partners, customers, and even the general content-consuming public.
Now it's time to get back to executing on this whole thing...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Sept. 2, 2007)
I find myself taking either of my real digital cameras out less and less these days which is a little ironic, given where I've just come from. Actually, I still use my Nikon D70 in much the same way (episodically around events where I want to get a set of very permanent pictures), but my small Canon point-and-shoot rarely sees the light of day. It still takes much better pictures than the iPhone, and over the last week I've found myself wanting the zoom and low light shooting a couple of times, but overall, the combined needs just don't get me over the activation threshold (which is telling given how small these little cameras have become).
The other thing I've noticed is that I'm just not super excited about the category of the small, disconnected point-and-shoot camera anymore. It used to be that every 6-9 months I'd find something that would push me to upgrade to the latest and greatest model. Unfortunately, these little cameras have now gotten to Microsoft Office status, with all of their incremental improvements being about as exciting as new Word templates. Even the big reviewers are getting the message— this week, David Pogue reviews a low end Fuji camera that he claims is targeted at "Generation Z" because it has a number of features that prep photos for eBay, Blogger, etc. before they leave the camera. Overall, it seemed like a very ho-hum proposition, though he does mention one interesting feature: the Fujifilm Z10fd comes with an IR port to blast pictures Palm Pilot-style to other cameras similarly equipped. Though this seems like a fairly borked implementation, I'm sure that this is where cameras need to go in the consumer segment to become exciting again.
As he often does, Dave Winer hit the nail on the head a few weeks ago with his concept of the "social camera" where the whole point of the camera's design was to enable the sharing of pictures. I think he hits the nail right on the head in that I can not count the number of times that I've asked for/been asked for pictures tha somehow never make it out of the camera/PC of their owner. And unfortunately, just about all photo-sharing sites (Flickr being the one that comes closer to being the exception) are far too much of a band-aid solution, mostly because of how labor intensive the upload/tagging/sharing sequence is.
The right solution starts from a network connected camera; however, this is a necessary but hardly sufficient precondition. Having had a Nikon S7c, and having been a beta user of the wonderfully clever Eye-Fi wireless SD card, I can attest to the fact that poorly implemented network connectivity can hinder the experience in two key ways. First, if it is too hard to get associated with an wireless access point, and too manual to pick the photos one at a time to send to the cloud, it just won't happen (this is where the Nikon really fell down). And second, if the camera doesn't connect to and send the pictures to a very open cloud-based service with an extremely simple and well-documented API for extracting them for inclusion into other services, there won't be the opportunity for other people to write innovative applications around the photostream.
In fact, if I was a camera manufacturer, I would do two things: first, I'd look at the way that the iPhone works to get on and off of wi-fi networks to see if I could do the same. And if the processing power was just too much for the electronics in a camera, I'd get a Bluetooth module on board and piggyback off the fact that everyone carries a phone, and that increasingly, most of these phones will have Bluetooth and all-you-can-eat data plans. The second thing I would do is build a river-of-photos service backed by Amazon S3 for all of the photos taken by the camera to go to. The challenge would be handling privacy, but with a little thought and some smart defaults, I'm sure something could be worked out (or perhaps early implementations of the system could be just for "Generation Z" who doesn't care about sharing everything).
The closest I've seen anyone come to this is the Shozu series-60 application that would take all of the photos I would take on my Nokia e61i and upload them to Flickr in the background. When I retired my Nokia, Shozu was the thing I missed the most, if only because it hinted at the possibilities of managing my photos as one big feed, with all of the same tools and tricks that I have come to increasingly use with all of the other feeds in my life.
Are you listening camera vendors? I'm ready to buy if you're ready to make!
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Sept. 8, 2007)
Blackberry Internet Mail service seems to have borked this morning, leaving millions of Crackberry addicts without an excuse to avoid their children. I'm sure in the end it will have been some silly admin error that caused it, but as we grow more and more used to (and addicted) the gigantic signaling fabric that the Internet has become, it is going to be harder and harder to cope with these kind of outages. Why just last week, we were just getting over the Skype outage during which I heard podcasters claim they were going to be "put out of business" by bad Skype capacity planning.
What is especially rough about the Blackberry outage is that it is endemic of the types of outages we can expect to see if we continue switching to proprietary (and thus centralized) messaging platforms. For instance, all sorts of web services have sprung up to replace email with varying degrees of success. On some sites, the internal messaging is peripheral to the experience (Flickr), but on others, it is either central (Facebook), or the experience (Twitter). Unfortunately, these systems were designed as centralized web services. And even well implemented web services can go down, mostly because the redundancy is added after the initial design. For instance, I'm sure that Facebook's database layer is sharded and replicated, its assets are on multiple CDNs, and its application servers are geographically distributed— but because the application was never designed to be distributed, these solutions will only take robustness thus far (especially after you add in the potential for human error at each of these layers).
Contrast this to decades-old email, or rather email + DNS. The combination of a very simple protocol for message exchange (SMTP) with a very flexible address resolution system (MX records in DNS) means that is is pretty hard to make all of email "go down." Sure the big centralized services like Gmail and Hotmail can have outages, but all of those law firms running Exchange, schools running Sendmail, and startups running Postfix will keep right on chugging. And even when these small poorly managed mail servers fail, there is usually some marginally better server at the ISP queueing up email just for the occasion.
Ray Tomlinson and his colleagues at BBN deserve a ton of credit for having put together a system in the 1970s that could grow to the scale and scope that it has while remaining more robust than a lot of what has come after. All of the rest of us should take a page out of their book in working towards improving the fabric of the Internet.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Sept. 11, 2007)
A few weeks ago while trying to find someone in the middle of a downpour in New York City, I borked my iPhone (iPhoners be forewarned, apparently, the smooth surface and lack of buttons has little to do with the iPhone's ability to resist water). Since I was away from home and in need of a phone that could make and receive calls, I went to the local Apple store and had it replaced with a loaner unit. Despite my expecting it, the most amazing part of the experience was what happened when I plugged the loaner into iTunes— most of my phone's state was restored from a backup including the state of the various messaging applications (SMSes, emails, read/unread, etc.). While I lost a few things (YouTube bookmarks and ringtones), the overall experience underscored the fact that more and more, the actual devices that we do our computing on are nothing more than interface and an intelligent cache, while the bulk of what matters to us today (data) is increasingly moving to the cloud.
Ok, so I cheated in that paragraph above a little bit. Most of my iPhone's state was actually stored on my Mac laptop, which today is not strictly in the cloud. In fact the Mac makes a bad case for the cloud, because its own state would be so difficult to replicate up to a server farm somewhere. Sure, I can use DotMac to backup files and the datastores of specific Apple applications (Addressbook, iCal), but most of what represents my Mac (my iTunes collection, my tweaked out DarwinPorts, my various .rc files, the rest of my installed applications) doesn't play well with cloud-based services because we currently lack a good protocol for replicating the data and machine state to the cloud.
Or do we?
I guess I must be having a bad month, because the main server I use for experiments (my own personal bit of the cloud) seems to have gotten sick somewhere in its bowels. Every few days the kernel panics and the entire machine locks up. After re-jiggered most of the software installed on it, I've now come to realize the root cause is some bit of flakey hardware on the motherboard or RAID controller. Having probably installed Linux more than 100 times over the last 10 years, I can honestly admit that the magic of building a useless bunch of PC parts into a little piece of the Internet is now all but gone, and that even in the cloud, it's probably a good idea to treat the hardware as ephemeral.
Enter virtualization. A few months ago, I remember seeing Brad Fitzpatrick enamored with the open source para-virtualization project Xen because he could just "spin off VMs for each application." However, at the time I didn't have the cycles to play with it. The intervening months have done little to make the open source part of the Xen project move forward (there is still no bootable CD version of it, most documentation is at least six months out of date, and XenSource is now on the way to the dustbin of acquire-to-kill companies). Since I didn't have quite enough patience for digging through all of that, and since I have been quite impressed by VMWare's Fusion (the Mac OSX version of VMWare's VM runner), I decide to give their free server product, VM Server, a shot.
[A parenthetical aside on those interested in Xen versus VMWare on a technical level— all others skip this paragraph: VMWare Server doesn't quite perform as well as a fully "paravirtualized" VM (like Xen) because it has one more level of abstraction between the guest OS and the hardware. In effect, a guest OS on VMWare Server runs as a process on a base (or host) OS without modification to the guest OS, and with minor tweaks to the host OS (implemented through a set of kernel modules). It's not like those old crappy CPU emulators (Virtual PC comes to mind here) in that instructions are still executed natively by the processor (which is why VMWare primarily supports Intel on Intel configurations), but you will pay a penalty, especially around IO operations. That said, for my workload, the penalty was neglible. In fact the server that pushed this page to you is running in a VMWare instance inside of an Ubuntu Linux based OS— go ahead, hit reload really fast a few times to see how much the network has become the bottleneck these days!]
To make a long story short, I now have a bunch of Linux VMs which I run on two physical machines, as well as my development laptop interchangeably. In and of itself this is nothing special, except that maybe it is interesting to see how some of us like to waste the cycles that Moore's Law gives us with an increasing number of levels of abstraction.
But back to getting my Mac into the cloud, for real. Why couldn't the OS support virtualization natively, and then let me run all of my computing on a guest OS that itself could be streamed up into the cloud? Wouldn't this then become the ultimate (albeit complicated) protocol for syncing state between client devices and the cloud?
There are interesting possibilities around a solution like this one that go well beyond backup and restore from the cloud. At a crude level, this VM-shipping is the same thing as packaging up code and data and moving it around the network. It is in effect an entire execution context that is just mine. Does it mean no more traveling with a laptop? Sure, but it also means being able to keep my computer running all of the time, whether I have it on or not. This isn't anything new for the energy-sucking desktop crowd, but as the world moves to laptops, there may be some interesting new businesses here.
To close, let me come full circle back to my borked iPhone. Naturally, there is little chance that a device that is as power and cycle-constrained as the iPhone is going to grow a virtualization layer any time soon (thought it's amazing what can be put on chips these days). The more relevant question though is: should it? Are there benefits to having every computing platform that we use be able to save its entire state in one bag of bytes that is portable, cloneable, and ultimately, sychronizable across other devices?
I'm not sure, but then again, I've definitely grown up in the simplest possible protocol age where the best thing you can do for an application is emit its data as an RSS feed. It will be interesting to think about what happens when these virtualized devices find more comfortable homes in the cloud.
Postface: I wrote most of this post at 2 am while recovering from my brother's 42nd birthday celebration but then lost it to a fibbing laptop battery (fittingly enough). It's his total and utter lack of respect for conventional wisdom (combined with more than a few drops of crazy) that I've found most inspiring in thinking more broadly than the immediate engineering problems in front of me, and for that reason this wacky entry is my way of saying: happy birthday brother.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (Sept. 17, 2007)
Jon Udell has a great interview on his podcast "Interviews with Innovators" where he talks to Ed Iacobucci, a veteran software guy (founder of Citrix) about his new business, DayJet. Like others before him, Ed is looking at the constant money-loser, customer-displeaser that air travel has been in the United States and asking the simple question: does it have to be this way?
But unlike most others, Ed came out of retirement to start a business around demand aggregation for seats on a network of much cheaper regional jets (made by another software industry veteran Vern Rayburn). The core idea is that the network provides the ability for customers to self-select along a "time arbitrage" spectrum, and that when this is combined with some heavy duty optimization algorithms, the capacity of the overall system can be managed to make what has thus far been a terrible business (regional charters) profitable.
I won't go into the specifics of how this all works because Jon does such a good job of covering it in the podcast (I'm really digging Interviews with Innovators by the way). What I will say is that it is really interesting to see people that come out of the software industry try their hands at other businesses while borrowing a lot of the software thinking that helped them before. Outside of helping him to see two core business problems from the computational perspective (a potentially huge advantage), I was left wondering how much Ed's years at IBM and then Citrix are influencing his thinking in this new endeavor.
I first met Ed during the time when he was having his "false start" in regional air travel. He was brought to our office at Memora by a common friend to see if what he saw us doing would make for an interesting investment. And even back then, my take-away from our meeting was that he was very interested in how we might make a run at the platform that Microsoft was putting together for attacking the home. Though he was a very nice guy, he was rather skeptical about our prospects for making any kind of significant dent in the market. In the end he was both right and wrong: right because we couldn't make it work (Memora), but wrong because worrying about the Microsoft platform (or any platform) proved to be entirely useless. Six years later, the digital home is still unconquered, and the company that looks closest to it today had nothing but an overpriced portable music player which people were convinced was named after the acronym "Idiots Price Our Devices" back in 2001.
Throughout the interview Ed spends a bit of time talking about platform he is trying to usher in— at first making the analogy between the airframe being like the PC, the engines being like the CPU, and DayJet being like the OS/application suite— which is an interesting analogy which I found lacking in its predictive power. Interestingly, I find a lot of the same stuff going on today as software veterans talk about the Internet as a platform, or the mobile handsets as platforms— interesting but not totally insightful.
Meanwhile though, I think I am beginning to develop an aversion to the term platform.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (Sept. 17, 2007)
Hot on the heels of my wondering why I was beginning to hate the term platform, I came across Marc Andreessen's awesome post on the three kinds of things you see labeled as "Internet platforms" these days. Despite only agreeing with half of it, I would say that this is a superb post— the kind of essay that makes you think you should be paying for it. He does a great job of dissecting the entire evolution of the web-as-platform, going through three stages: 1. APIs (Flickr), 2. Plug-ins (Facebook), and 3. runtime (Salesforce), explaining at each step how the developer's work changes. On top of being a very lucid synthesis of what has been going on over the last 10 years in the web, and not being sloppy in his use of the term (platform), he also has a whole bunch of golden nuggets about how stuff gets built today that are worth reading. I can not recommend it highly enough.
Now for the part that I don't totally buy— and I'll mention this only because Marc opens the door at the end of the piece when he argues for programmers to be the ultimate arbiters of what a platform is. To the regular software engineer, platforms have always been about one thing primarily: distribution. When developers were abandoning the Mac for Windows in the early 90s it wasn't about more features and functionality, but about being able to write apps that more people could install and run. When Marc talks about the "ultimate" type of Internet platform (a runtime where developers don't have to worry about running their own infrastructure), I think he overstates the importance of that relative to the relevance of having real reach once you've written an application for a particular platform.
He does mention Facebook, but only as the 2nd type of platform, going so far as to argue for the eventual domination of platforms that also provide their own runtime over those that allow for plug-ins or just provide APIs. What is more interesting still is that Amazon EC2 and S3 get labeled as quasi-type-3 platforms (as does Akamai's new EdgeComputing runtime) because they are attempting to provide some runtime capabilities, but not much more of an API. I think he's got this wrong in that Amazon to me seems to realize that the value in a platform service can either come from distribution or from providing a core set of infrastructure services. I like to think the good folks at Amazon know that the Facebooks of the world will bring the access to distribution, but that it's going to take services like S3 and EC2 to allow developers who win to scale these services out. If you want an example, you need to look no further than Renkoo's wildly successful send-a-drink Facebook application, which is being scaled on the back of Amazon's infrastructure.
Developers are naturally prone to distrust "runtimes," mostly because in the past they've implied lock-in. As more folks try to roll out these Internet scale platforms, they would do well to remember this, and build out accordingly.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (Sept. 26, 2007)
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." —Alan Kay
It was the moment I read that quote a few years ago that I decided that Alan Kay was one of my absolute top software heroes. Of course it also had to do with his pioneering work at Xerox PARC (read all about it in Dealers of Lightning), around object oriented programming, conceiving the first laptop, and a general adherence to both elegance and execution in software design that make him truly stand out among an already pretty impressive class of peers at PARC.
Yesterday I attended a TTI Vanguard conference on behalf of HP and had the chance not only to meet Alan, but to spend 90 minutes talking with him about software design and the state of engineering, as well as a whole bunch of related topics. I've been unwinding the conversation for most of the past twelve hours, and if I have one regret, it's that I don't have a transcript of it so that I could spend some time really digesting what he was getting across to me. He has a way of using very concise terms that carry a tremendous amount of meaning and then backing them up with references to work done by colleagues across a broad range of disciplines that is incredibly dense. If Alan himself were a Smalltalk object, I think he might need a little refactoring on the messages he sends; they are compact for sure, but depend on such a rich shared context of meaning that it can be hard for the rest of us to follow.
And speaking of compactness, I really dig his latest project. He's gotten funding from the NSF (and some other folks) to rebuild an entire personal computing system in 20,000 lines of code. And by personal computing system he doesn't mean a VM like the JVM or .NET, but in fact the "whole stack—" from the interface the user sees to the instruction set on the processor. Yeah, crazy right? When he first said it to me, I wasted the first 10 minutes trying to understand what kind of "whole system" definition he was going to use to cheat his way to the 20K LOC constraint, but it soon became clear that he was deadly serious about doing this soup-to-nuts.
Why? Because according to Alan, the edifice that is any major computing "stack" (Windows, Linux, OSX + drivers + frameworks + applications) can easily run into 100-300M lines of code— far too much for any one person to even hope to begin to understand (20K lines is by comparison, about the equivalent of a 400 page book). And if we can't understand it, there is no way that we could ever hope to begin to fix the entropy that is slowly eating these systems from the inside out, or to innovate enough in software development practices to allow software to experience its own Moore's law-like exponential increase in power per line of code written.
I'm torn over whether I think that working the sort of alchemy that Alan & team are going to have to undertake to pull off this Herculean task so that one person can truly understand the entire computing environment is going unleash the type of revolution that he hopes it will. On the one hand, I love the notion that building this type of system will usher in new tools and ways of thinking about software development that will allow us to keep teams small and productive. I've always been very proud of the small size of our team at Tabblo (especially relative to what we are able to do), and have been a little shocked since joining HP about how many other "lab managers" scoff when I tell them that our team is fewer than 10 people, following it with some statement of size about their own multi-hundred person team. It shouldn't be this way— on this front both Alan and Google are absolutely correct. Small teams make the magic happen; in fact, I can not remember the last piece of software that I was blown away by that had more than 25 people working on the core of it (one of my favorite analogies that he used while we chatted yesterday was that of the pyramids, "hunks of rubble covered with limestone," that took thousands of people years to build and could not stand up to the simple Roman arch built by 2-3 masons).
On the other hand, one of my favorite things about working in software is how well abstractions work to isolate me from the stuff that I don't care to know about. As I type this, I have a vague idea of what the CPU and GPU are doing together to make the characters appear on the screen, but most of the time I don't want to have to think about it. And if I wanted to build a new kind of word processor, I'm not sure I'd really want to think about it either. Furthermore, there is a whole generation of people just like me who probably don't have the training and experience to think that deeply about the low levels of what the OS and the hardware are doing to provide us with our computing environments— and each generation of kids coming out of school knows less and less about this arcane stuff. Today's PHP hacker wants to build the next Facebook, but he is likely to know very little about how PHP executes, how a webserver is built, or even how TCP works to send bytes all over the Internet. Should he have to worry about this if his goal is to build social applications?
Obviously, I am simplifying his argument as I think that what he would argue is that in a properly self-describing, self-bootstrapping system, it's turtles all the way down which would make it a lot easier for our PHP-hacker friend to understand the system to its core.
In fact, it is the pursuit of this elegance that is the most inspiring part of Alan's new project— and of his whole life's work. The fact that he is always looking to make things more logical and concise, to find a new kind of science (and art) in the way that most of us will build software in the future is a very good thing indeed.
And in the meanwhile, the rest of us still working on the pyramids should take a pause to think a bit about how we could move towards that arch.
[Postnote: After writing this, I went and read his NSF proposal. I'm not an expert in grant writing, but this proposal is so good that anyone looking to write any sort of pitch should read it (especially people writing business plans for risky new ventures). It's grand while remaining incredible humble in what is known and what is really hard to do. It covers the depth of experience the team has concisely, and gives a great history of "water under the bridge." But most of all, it inspires with its broad vision of what computing could be for everyone, and why it's so important that we be commissioning this type of work. I don't know who you are NSF person who approved this, but you have definitely spent my tax dollars well here!]
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (Sept. 29, 2007)
So everyone is on fire about the fact that Apple seems to be bricking cracked iPhones with the new 1.1.1 software upgrade, which is a bit surprising to me. Did people not expect one of the most proprietary companies in the industry to take this path when its walled garden is under attack?
In fact, I think that the Apple of today— which is to say the Apple that launched OSX— is actually much more clue-full about how to enable something which is critical for companies in their position: key axes of user/developer participation that enrich the platform without threatening the very aspects that gives it its edge (stability and perception of control for partners). Which is why I'm left wondering why this is such a big deal, and why we can't just all focus our energy on getting Apple to support the right vector of participation for the rest of us, by which I mean enhancing their web appplication platform to the point where developers won't really care about the fact that they can't install binaries to run on the iPhone.
Below are the three things I think Apple could do to cut this gordian knot of control versus user-led innovation. In providing an "SDK" that allowed web developers access to these 3 APIs I think Apple would (as they did with the "open for business" OSX strategy) unleash a torrent of creativity while keeping the relevant bits of their platform closed for the sake of their small-minded (but critical) partners, the phone companies and the content holders.
1. Access to the camera's current "roll:" though it would be ideal to be able to control the camera itself, a great start is being able to take pictures off of the current set via Javascript/DOM scripting. For instance, I would love to be able to write:
var img = document.camera.roll[0].images[0]['thumbnail'];
for manipulating images inside of the browser for say posting as a file upload to a server. One of the coolest things about mobile imaging is the ability to completely bypass the PC; Shozu on Series 60 showed us this in a big way. I'd like to be able to send photos up not only to Flickr but also to all sorts of other cool web applications that could take advantage of basic image recognition to provide all sorts of new functionality.
2. Growl-like notification hooks, preferably tied to the SMS pipeline: this one is hard to describe for people that haven't used the fabulous Growl OSX service, but I'll try anyway. A portable computer like the iPhone (more on this below) needs to be really good at messaging which means that it needs to support as a core capability the ability to have messages "pushed" to the end device. Currently on the iPhone this comes as either phone calls or SMS messages. Why not let developers of web applications register "listeners" for particular SMSes that can the point mobile Safari to specific pages, or, at the very least, get the user's attention. When we look at mobile Meebo or mobile Facebook on the iPhone, the biggest limitation is their inability to push notifications up to the user that is not currently on their respective pages. Sure, each of these apps can send generic SMS messages to a particular phone number, but wouldn't it be so much easier on the user if these SMSes could drive specific behaviors on the phones? The idea of copying a system-wide notification like Growl goes all the way back to the Cocoa framework, so I'm sure Apple would have no problem doing it.
3. Minimal control of the local radio-based networking: Apple is already heading in this direction by giving us Bonjour (local multicast) support inside of mobile Safari in 1.1.1. Taking this further would allow application developers to find out more about the local networking environment, and where appropriate, to make connections with locally available devices for sharing information that do not require connecting to the greater Internet.
Notice that none of the three vectors of functionality I describe above touch either of the two sacred-cow business models that Apple is trying to protect: the carrier lock for using cellular networks, or the content providers' lock on the music they push to the device.
I often tell new iPhone users that the best way to always be happy with their new toy is to not think of the iPhone as cellphone-on-steroids, but to think of it as a laptop in your pocket. When looked at from this perspective features like a battery that lasts all day and a form factor that lets you surf the web in a device that weighs less than 6lbs and doesn't require a keyboard seem more like magic than say the touch screen replacing the number pad, or the constant limitations of the AT&T network. As they build out vectors for extensibility, it would behoove Apple to remember the fact that they are indeed seeding portable computers and not locked phones.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (Oct. 3, 2007)
Two years ago I blogged about this fabulous new writer I had found named Richard Morgan because I found him very clever in how he used his genre (sci-fi) to relax constraints in a way that created very thoughtful fiction. In his first book, Altered Carbon, Morgan sets a basic detective Whodunit in a world where people find it difficult to die due to the complete separation of consciousness from the physical body. The book is great fun and quickly turned into a trilogy that— like all good trilogies— loses steam in the middle, and picks it up again at the end.
Well this summer Morgan came back with another excellent novel— Thirteen— which is the conceptual reciprocal of Altered Carbon. This time he's put the classic Fugitive plot in a world that is populated by "variants" (of the genetic variety) or humans that were bred for specific tasks. I'm not going to ruin the cleverness of the types that he breaks down (let's just say the run to some pretty base human qualities), but will instead recommend it as a highly entertaining (and thought-provoking) twist on the age-old question of nature versus nurture.
I've personally found that where people sit on the nature-nurture question tends to track the dynamic of the old Disraeli quote about 20 year-old conservatives being heartless and 40 year-old liberals being brainless, with the schism rooted right around when people have children. Though all of us want to believe we can be whoever we think to be, there is nothing like seeing fundamental character differences expressed from such an early age in all sorts of ways to make us parents feel that the effects of nurture are sort of irrelevant and that it's mostly about the code running in your chromosomes. And so it is especially entertaining to watch Morgan play with the ideas of nature fully constraining who we are in such a complete and fatalistic way. By the end of the book, you can't help but feel that there is a little bit of variant in all of us.
He also rocks at inventing new terms— in fact so much so that I am sure this guy is turning out idiom in Scotland as we speak). My favorites from 13? Twist and Cudlip. Go read it to find out just what they mean.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (Oct. 5, 2007)
Last week's awesome encounter with Alan Kay left me with quite a few anecdotes; during one particular moment in the conversation, he reminded me in tone of the caught villains on Scooby Doo who always end the episode by claiming that they would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for "those meddling kids." Except of course that he was talking about the stagnant state of the software industry and the meddling kids are all of us failing to read the literature.
I am as guilty of this as the next guy which is why I decided to catch up on my list of queued papers on a recent cross country flight.
The theme of this bunch: the limitations and fallacies of the current web application development stack, and specifically the relational database. In particular, I wanted to point out two interesting articles in the "your architecture sucks" department:
1. In "The End of an Architectural Era" Stonebreaker et al. argue that using relational databases for most of today's web-scale information processing tasks is like throwing a buggy-whip under the hood of the car and expecting it to go fast. It's a good read (at least right up to the point which they start talking about their plan for a distributed transaction processing system) because it covers a lot of the history and design motivations behind the original RDBMS (back in the day of some very IBM sounding thing called "System R") and makes interesting points about places where web scale computing that is done on the back on an RDBMs is taking on unnecessary overhead. My only criticism of the paper is that in the proposed alternative the authors are willing to just toss away one of the most important benefits of a relational database— the ability for developers/administrators/whoever to perform ad-hoc queries on the dataset without having to drop to writing code.
2. Not having been crazy about the proposed alternative in the Stonebreaker paper, I was excited to come across "Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store" by a bunch of smart dudes at Amazon, because of how well it was written, how simple and elegant the solution they propose seems to be, and most importantly, because it describes a system that is in actual production use every day. The basic concept is BerkleyDB on steroids, distributed across an arbitrary number of nodes in a fault-tolerant and self-healing design. In English: you can have persistent, reliable hashtables even in the midst of a semi-reliable infrastructure (node outages and network partitions), all at web scale. After pooh-poohing the relational database (sorry RDBMS, you are just not having a good month!), they go on to describe a system that supports an "always writeable" datastore and fails only in the rarest of cases. Best concept of the whole paper: the "vector clock" that follows each write operation around the network of nodes (a "vector clock" is a pairing of a write's version # with the node that initially takes that write) to solve conflicts across the system. I wish everything I ever did on any computing device came with its own vector clock!
Alan is right— anyone building a website that could someday live at web-scale (millions of users, billions of transactions) should be reading these papers rather than simply taking on the intellectual challenge of re-inventing some of these schemes from scratch (we were guilty of some of this at Tabblo). Fortunately we've got a lot of resources around to help the cause; if you haven't seen the always-entertaining, and frequently excellent "High Scalability" blog (source for both of these papers), you should subscribe.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (Oct. 6, 2007)
I can not for the life of me believe that people who have better things to write about are still debating the definition of Web 2.0, 3.0, 3.x, etc. It has now entered the realm of the absurd. And as a beneficiary of the "Web 2.0 tidalwave," I feel justified in ranting for just a second.
Tim did us all a favor back in 2003 when he coined the term Web 2.0 but for only one very simple reason: he gave the media and investors a conceptual frame from which to begin seeing a world which for the previous three years had been seen as a complete wasteland. It took about a year and bit for this conceptual frame to catch on in a meaningful way, but when it did, entrepreneurs could finally talk to financiers again about the web without being laughed out of the room. And for the most part, journalists who had been burned by the long view/short distance fallacy during the dot-com boom, were coaxed out of crap pieces about "the best places to launch a career" to talk about the impact of the net again. There was a tremendous amount of value in this soft reset, and for that, all of us entrepreneurs owe Tim a beer.
But that is it. There is absolutely no other reason to try to version the web, and any entrepreneur who relies on these dot releases for any sort of consequential decision making or strategy formation is just looking for trouble. Notice that Google— the perennial Web 2.0 company according to a whole load of experts who matter— rarely refers to Web 2.0 in describing itself or the products it is bringing to market (interestingly enough, Yahoo is not shy about cloaking its (re)launches in Web 2.0 lingo).
Most significantly, users don't actually give a rat's ass which version of the web their application belongs to. Instead of focusing on version of the web, the versionites might be better served by thinking about versions of users, as in User 1.0 ("wow, this Internet thing is amazing so I'll put up with anything"), User 2.0 ("if it isn't as simple to use as the Google search bar, I don't care about it"), User 3.0 ("if it doesn't come in my BrainPal I don't care about it), etc. At the end of the day, all of the technologies, data sources, and macro social trends that we are trying to lump into the versioned web need to support these fundamental change in user demands.
Just to end on irony: I'm looking forward seeing everyone at the Web 2.0 conference!
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (Oct. 7, 2007)
Paul Graham, whose writing is usually a real treat for me, has written a lame essay about the impeding abundance of web startups due to how cheap it has become to get one off the ground. In the piece he foresees a world where the startups become like a dandelions sprouting up all over the web. He asks how basic elements of the startup lifecycle (funding, strategy , acquisition) will change as we much into this world of surfeit.
While I think that it is an interesting thought experiment, I doubt that things will fundamentally change all that much. Rather, the current explosion of PHP-monkeys building Zizzl or Dizzl (thank you Fake Steve Jobs), the next great tagging-based version of eBay for digital goods, reminds me a lot of the late 1990s. There may have been a lot more money sloshing around then, and there certainly was a path to exit that is now closed to all non-businesses (IPOing), but the same overabundance of people trying things was around then as well.
Except for one big difference which Fred Wilson mentions in his follow-up post: back in the 1990s the surfeit of entrepreneurs were largely newly-minted MBAs looking to apply their talents to dreaming up all of these new businesses. Today it seems like that particular cattle cart of lemmings has returned to financial services, leaving the mantle in the hands of the geeks who are now "empowered" by Ruby on Rails, virtual dedicated hosting, S3, and essays about how easy it is to build a startup today.
Unfortunately, as is the case with pendulum swings, the sustainable model for startup innovation and wealth creation is probably somewhere in the middle of the two scenarios. From what I've seen it takes three things to have a great startup: 1. an exploding market, 2. a great product that works (herald the great geeks!), and 3. solid thinking about the business model and the go-to-market plan. The need for this third leg of the stool has not been obviated by cheaper infrastructure costs, and certainly not by the emergence of AdWords as "instant businessmodel."
Confusing the success of startups that get $25,000 in funding and sell for $5MM to Some Big Company with a fundamental change in how businesses are built is not understanding the core driver of value for the acquirer. When any big company buys on the cheap like this, what they are generally doing is smart hiring, not actually paying for the opportunity to enter a market or inherit and working business. Vesting schedules being what they are, paying $5MM for 5 engineers that have a proven track record as a capable team, and making them work for 3-4 years for that money is actually a great deal from an HR cost of acquiring talent perspective, especially because it is generally funded out of the balance sheet.
There is no magic— it is hard to start startups, especially if the role of these is to build businesses that work. Making stuff people will use is a good first step, but there are a whole bunch that need to come behind it.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (Oct. 8, 2007)
My brother-in-law gave me an ARC copy of the forthcoming Fake Steve Jobs book, Options, which I have to heartily recommend as high quality trash that is also very good for your soul. Why? Because it has been a long time since I've caught myself chuckling out loud— no, downright crying/laughing in public like this (to be precise, the last time I had this experience was while watching Arrested Development while on long cross country flights). In fact, last week I kept quite a few people up on a redeye flight as I laughed my way across the continent while reading about Fake Steve's trials and tribulations.
The book is great not just because it is an awesome parody of Steve Jobs himself, but because it it also a sendup of all of the famous people in his life. From Bono to Spielberg, from Hillary Clinton to Yoko Ono, no one escapes Fake Steve's wit and acerbic observations.
For me though, the funniest parts always come back to "El Jobso" and his attempt to cope with a world that is quickly moving away from the PC and towards new media company and the "Googletards" that he just can't understand. I'll leave you with one of my favorite passages in the book, where Jobso is celebrating his public company CEO achievements to some fanfare:
They're all raving about us...Cramer, that lunatic, is pounding his desk and screaming at people to buy Apple. "This stock is a must-own!" he says, his face so red it looks like his head is going to explode and splatter his brains all over the set. "Steve Jobs should be elected president of the world!" I'm so psyched that I drive down to the back of the parking lot and do some donuts in my Mercedes. There's smoke everywhere. A bunch of Mexican groundskeepers stand there whooping and waving their arms. One of them scream, "Chinga tu puta madre, cabron!" which I believe means, "Dude, you totally rock!" And you know what? I do. I totally do.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (Oct. 11, 2007)
In the office, 2007 is going to go down as the Year of the Smartphone as everyone seems to have decided to simultaneously update their cellphones to smart ones. At the high end, the classic Jets versus Sharks face-off seems to be brewing between Apple's iPhone and Nokia's N95-3. Both are amazing devices, which clearly herald the era of very powerful things in your pocket. At the same time, they each seem to express such fundamentally different philosophical underpinnings that this promises to be a much more interesting fight than the old Mac-vs-PC spat of the last decade.
I have to admit that until very recently I was deeply ensconced in the iPhone camp. Having gotten used to the crappy quality of the device as a phone, I went about gleefully evangelizing the whole "it's not a phone, it's a computer in your pocket" until Apple pushed its 1.1.1 upgrade. The locked down firmware, the continued lack of 3rd party development support, and most significantly, the sudden appearance of the "iTunes Wifi store" (ahead of say, IM or MMS), has made me start to see my iPhone as a big pipe Apple (and maybe AT&T) is intending to use to sell me stuff (what my friend Jerry might call the ultimate consumer leash, encouraging me to "gulp products and crap cash").
Anyway, after having played with an N95 in the office yesterday, realizing yet again that Symbian is still unusable as hell, I was nevertheless left with the impression that there is something more to this N95 than the iPhone. The combination of really solid still and video capture, integrated GPS, and a rich and open API for third party development makes it almost possible to overlook one of the most byzantine UIs a phone could have. Then this morning I came across Jonathan Greene's excellent head-to-head review of exactly these two phones and realized what that tickling sense of possibility was all about:
The iPhone is for consuming content, while the N95 is for creating it.
—via Steve Litchfield
(to be fair, I think Eddie and Pitkin were trying to tell me this last night but I was just fried)
How true, how true. The iPhone (today) is a great locked pipe for consuming your media, and as of 1.1.1, for buying some too. You don't have to look further than the re-monetization of your own songs as ringtones to see where Apple wants to go. Whereas the N95 feels a lot more like a swiss-army knife for content creation— perhaps not as good as dedicated device for any one of its tasks— but good-enough... and just so handy.
Now we know how this movie ends, at least here in the US. When given the choice between creating and consuming content, most people would rather just sit back and consume. This is why YouTube won when many other more producer-friendly video sites floundered. It's why TV still commands the kind of audience that most "huge" online properties would kill for. And it's why, as a mass market product, I'd be willing to bet that the iPhone will spank the N95.
But there is something potentially different about this particular twist on consuming versus creating. For a long time now, I've been hot and bothered by the idea of the "unwitting blogger," or the regular user who, in the process of doing stuff, becomes a creator of content without really thinking about it. On the PC/Internet, the trick is most successfully implemented by the proper harvesting of either metadata or messaging data. Digg is today's king of metadata, and Facebook the king of messaging. Both sites turn their "consumers" into creators during the very process of consuming the services.
What I would argue in the case of the N95 is that a phone equipped with a really good camera, a GPS, and an open API could become rocket fuel for the explosion of unwitting bloggers. Geotagged automatic upload to Shozu is just the beginning (though a very powerful one), as is Jaiku's twist on presence. We've surely got more to come as developers begin to explore how we bring location, multimedia, mobility, presence, messaging, and the cloud together in new and creative ways.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (Oct. 13, 2007)
Ok, so my last post is starting to smell like blogger's fromunda, if only because I tried too hard to reduce the argument about creation/consumption to make it more fun and polarized. That said, since posting it, I've had a few really interesting conversations with folks about consumption, creation, and the consequences of the tools at your disposal.
The most interesting one was at the weekly office pizza session yesterday where we quickly got off of the iPhone vs. N95 thing (not so interesting anyway) and into the question over whether any type of content creation— even if it is bad, lazily composed content— was better than any type of content consumption (I know, generalizations like this can make one's hair catch on fire). I was somewhat amused to see that this belief was not universally held among the folks that brought you Tabblo, with some preferring to think of some types of content as not worth the bytes they take up. It's an interesting assertion which cuts so against this whole democratization of personal publishing that it took me for a loop-de-loop as I thought about whether this might indeed be true. Certainly worthy of more thought.
One thing which Dave also argued for, but which I'm not on board for was that easier, more ubiquitous, and more connected content-creation and publishing tools (as has been argued about the N95) were not necessarily a net-gain because the serious folks would just take out the big honking iron to get the pictures and videos worth capturing.
It turns out that we are both wrong, but it took another David to prove us both wrong. Talking about his friends Greg and Petra who've just finished documenting a cross-country trip, he wrote to me last night:
I agree the trip is only interesting to close friends it's no On The Road, but great content, great stories, great communication, great pictures. And it requires a very low barrier IMO the same phone greg had in his pocket helped to be able to take pictures and email them to blogger more often than he would have any other time he took a trip.
Now it turns out that these guys used an iPhone and a Blogger account to tell this story. And you know what? Despite not knowing them, I found myself completely captivated by both commentary and photos. This may speak to Greg and Petra being particularly creative, it may be because I've done this very trip a couple of times, and it may simply be because it feels so real, but in any case, here was a clear case of what I had labeled the ultimate "consumption device" being used to tell a really wonderful story. I'm sure someone better equipped could have done a much more artistic job of it, but for the 10 minutes I spent learning about Greg and Petra's sweet adventure, I don't know that it would have made any difference. And in fact, the risk that they would have gotten to the Pacific without the time to edit, compose, and publish it, thereby depriving me of my 10 minutes is certainly not worth it.
So maybe not all content is worth publishing, but I do dig what these guys have done. Oh, and I'm happy to eat crow on my attacking the iPhone (for now).
Postscript: I got a chance to meet these guys last week while out in SF.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (Oct. 17, 2007)
Amidst an environment that is feeling very bubbly to me these days, I'm at Web 2.0 in San Francisco this week. In fact, we (HP) are sponsoring the event at the Palace Hotel, so if you're around please come and say hi. And if you want to know all about how moving your content to output can make your users happy and you rich, drop by our workshop this morning.
I have to admit that I am a little worried about this whole Web 2.0 thing now because no matter what other people say about how much cheaper it is to start a web company, it's still just as easy to go out of business as it was in 1999, and VCs only have to get burned so many times before they crawl back into the hole they spent 2000-2003 in— at least when it came to the consumer web.
And it's not because of the crazy names (like Pizzl and Dizzl) anyone, or derivative concepts that I am worried. It's because, as with 1999, it seems like the "concept astronauts—" the entrepreneurs with the vision to transform X by applying Y— have gotten into high orbit while leaving the business models back on the ground. The mantra seems to be "make something that users will use" and worry about the money later which seems ok only if the ad model really will scale to work for all of these sub-scale players, something which I have some doubts about.
I'm hoping that the next few days leave me feeling that there is indeed something very different about this turn of the merry-go-round and that my Spidey sense is just off. Or at very least that Doc ends up being wrong, and that "Web 2.0" isn't just what we'll call the next crash.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (Oct. 22, 2007)
Of all of the stuff I saw last week at Web 2.0, the most exciting meme was that of the mobile devices in our pockets finally turning into true portable computers. Together, all of these different smartphones are supposed to become a viable platform for innovation— ushering in a new era of social applications that are not only more useful (finally delivering on the whole "augmenting human intellect" thing, but also more ubiquitous and relevant.
Amen to all of that. Except of course that I walked floor and listened to companies big (Nokia) and small (Fizzl, Pizzl, or Dizzl) tell this tale, I kept thinking of the way Steve Jobs talked at D a couple of years ago about how getting to consumers via the phone carriers was like going through "orifices," and that Apple wasn't very good at that.
Fast forward two years. Apple made a deal with the devil and is reaping the profits from it— but the orifices remain. Which is why it is so great to see tech's last great journalist taking an aggressive and thoughtful stance on the issue in his latest blog post, "Free my Phone."
Walt is a real standup guy when it comes to calling it like it is. He is often accused of being too "soft" on the big companies he reviews— but what I've noticed is that when it comes to egregious behavior on the part of companies trying to make profits from consumers, he often pulls no punches.
And the best part: I know first hand that when he writes the folks at Apple listen. Ditto for AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, and all of the other big companies. A very good thing if last week's utopian vision is ever likely to come to pass here in the US.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (Oct. 24, 2007)
This has been a long time in coming. For such a great web app, I've always been amazed that Gmail did not support IMAP. At first I thought it was a result of the fact that Google was really arrogant in thinking that it could totally re-invent email (which Gmail almost does) and that as a result everyone should just always use the web interface— that the POP3 support was only a slight nod towards supporting email clients.
But this announcement shows that Occam's razor always wins in the end: implementing a semi-stateful protocol like IMAP is hard, and especially hard on a platform which is supposed to support millions of simultaneous users and be able to fail-over across nodes instantly. I'm glad Google has tackled it though; in the era of the iPhone (and other mobile devices), IMAP's richer semantics for pulling parts of messages down are much kinder on your battery, and the protocol's ability to let the server push state changes makes good clients (though not the iPhone today) behave as well as Blackberries.
It's not widely available yet but I am going to be glad to be dumping the kludgey forward-to-Dotmac workaround that I've been living up until now.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (Oct. 27, 2007)
The ever-inspiring writer/commentator David Brooks has a great piece in today's NYT called "The Outsourced Brain" where he writes about the way in which net-connected electronic life is making us all smarter by allowing us forget about the mundane. He starts with the wonders of an in-car navigation system, which resonates well with me as I've completely relied on one of these since 1999, and finishes by talking about how he sometimes doesn't know where he ends and his Blackberry begins.
This being the year of the smartphone, the piece is particularly prescient. Brooks is focused on whether this sea change is causing us to lose our individuality and concludes that it is our autonomy that we are giving up instead but I find it much more interesting to think about what the long term effects of the connected ubermind will be on productivity and creativity.
After having wrestled with whether the PC has had a positive impact on economic productivity over the last 25 years, macroeconomists are now going to have to think through how to measure the productivity impact of the always-connected devices in our pockets— an even trickier proposition. I don't have a single friend with a Blackberry who doesn't claim that it makes them much more productive— always available at a moment's notice to return an email. But really, how much better is the economy because the velocity of email is jacked up on on critical subjects like the company's annual dinner or the preference for softer language in the next day's presentation? All of these things feel like work which makes the 7 people playing ping-pong over the chain of emails feel productive on friday night, but I am hard pressed to see how these will show up in GDP data (outside of the increase in data usage and purchases of Blackberries).
And on the flip side, we're giving up all of the dead time in our lives to our electronic leashes, time that was previously spent at the grocery store checkout line daydreaming, free associating about problems, or jut thinking. Now it seems much easier just to check Twitter and see what's been put into the flow.
It is obvious to me that the net is going to go down as the most significant productivity boosting man-made thing ever— bigger than electric power, the steam engine, antibiotics, the book, whatever. Being networked is so transformative in the way that it allows people to communicate, work, and relate in just about any discipline that I find it impossible to believe that anyone would argue against this. Here I'm just curious about extending the net's reach into every place we go and every second of our lives.
And for the record, there is no way I would go back, even if it turns out we're going to be half as productive and twice as boring as a society— if only because I think that being more connected is a worthwhile positive mission to keep on driving. But it is interesting to read Brook's social commentary and think about how much more like the Borg we are slowly becoming.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (Nov. 4, 2007)
One of my favorite topics for fun discussion among technology entrepreneurs and investors is why the west took off while the east languished after the invention of the PC. Here on the east coast, we had the mini computer lock, were awash in people who had one foot in that world and the other in the emerging PC software industry, and still we managed to give up not only the PC boom but the subsequent Internet boom, and the most recent social web explosion as well.
Many many bytes are wasted on the blogosphere discussing a related topic— do you have to be in Silicon Valley to start a cool consumer Internet company?— so I won't belabor that here. In short, I think that you do not in fact have to be located there, though you have to work extra hard to stay connected if you are not.
That said, my favorite entrepreneur-blogger, Ev, had a post this week about people just starting their careers in technology that I wish I'd read 12 years ago, "Going west, as a young man." In it he covers his early career in getting out from Bumbletown Nebraska and out to the Valley (and fortunately for him into the hands of the O'Reilly folk) for his formative years.
Ev is a very special guy— in fact every time I hear him speak or read his stuff, I am impressed with his underspoken wisdom (for instance, I thought he had the most insightful 10 minute slot at the recent Web 2.0 conference). That said, after reading his post, it would seem to me that had he not found his way out there, he may have wasted 10 or 15 years of his career working on some insurance company intranet app in Connecticut or writing Spam copy for one of NY's finer spam companies, only finding out too late that the degrees of freedom life gives you when you are young and independent were gone.
This morning's NYT had a fun piece by John Markoff about Andy Rubin, an engineer-entrepreneur behind some of the most interesting consumer gadgets of the last couple of decades (and the supposed "father of the Google phone"), which also reminded me of how important it is to be around interesting people and bleeding edge big companies when you are bumbling around with the first decade of your career. And bumble we all certainly do— though some of us just hide it better.
The Village People had it right I guess— at least early on in your career.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (Nov. 5, 2007)
I read this weekend that in Japan consumers are slowing their PC purchases in a major way— eschewing them for the likes of iPod Touches, smartphones, and other portable devices that can bring the Internet to their pockets. So much so in fact that major web application vendors are targeting the small screens ahead of the big PC-connected LCDs.
This could just be about the death of the current PC form factor, which in space-constrained Japan might be coming on earlier. And in fact, it would seem that the Japanese love for small computers is extending down in the laptop-for-everyone sweet spot of $300 that OLPC and others are pioneering. But it could also be that the consumer computing platform has now been defined: web applications through the browser that let you do content-consumption things, buying things, social things, and in rare cases, authoring things. With gaming as the one big caveat, it seems that gone are the days where application developers talked about using the GPU to deliver amazing interfaces, or the raw processing power of the PC to do crazy magic around speech/gesture/video recognition, etc. And so cheap access devices are ruling the day, with the feature set being around how well they can support 3G/Wifi (for connectivity) and the web browser.
This is good for us but bad for Microsoft, Dell, HP, and even Apple. When the spec for an application or platform freezes from a features perspective, it's bye-bye hypergrowth and hello slogging it on price/quality/colors deathmarch. Apple gets to avoid this a little more than the others (though not much according to the article), but for all of PC folks it will be ugly. Especially given how much of a device form-factor renaissance we seem to be seeing (iPhone, Nokia N95, Nokia 810, Googlephone, etc.).
Fast forward to Open Social, this Google-led effort to freeze the spec of social networking core capabilities that everyone is going crazy about. For starters, I agree with all of the folks who say that consumers vote with their feet irrespective of standards and that these days they are all voting for Facebook, so I don't really see what the big game-changer is in putting out a standard for widget developers. More importantly though, it doesn't seem like the right time to do it, unless of course, it is an attempt to take some wind out of Facebook's momentum.
The most interesting thing about the "social network platform" is what Facebook calls the Minifeed (Open Social calls it the "Activity Stream"), an aggregation of all of the activity that is going on between connected members of a social network that seems ripe for data mining, advertising, and best of all, experimentation around how it can be used to help people find stuff that is highly relevant (including today's killer app, helping people find each other). Open Social's Activity Stream API seems pretty simplistic and maps directly to thinking of each person's stream as an RSS feed that you might want to read or potentially jam items into. And while this may cover most of today's use cases, I'd be surprised if the tightly integrated social network sites (like Facebook) don't find a whole load of more interesting uses over the next few years. One could argue that their continued dominance sort of depends on it, especially as they build out an advertising platform capable of supporting their crazy valuation.
Don't get me wrong, standardization is a good thing, even if it implies a sort of freezing that tends to kill product categories. I just wonder whether we're quite there in the social network space.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (Nov. 5, 2007)
Andrew got this monkey from his grandfather (who doubtlessly got it after giving Stanford money) that I've been staring at while changing diapers over the last two years. The wide-eyed stare combined with the Stanford t-shirt always reminds me of the heady times during the end of the last decade during my stay there: people in the engineering school were awash with the boundless optimism that is so endemic to Silicon Valley, and over at the business school, just about every embah was convinced their next job would be their last. When friends visited me, they would inevitably point out how foreign the culture felt, not because the crazy dot-com fever wasn't raging on the east coast (it was), but because everywhere but in the Valley, it was somehow tempered by that east coast stoicism (or is it cynicism?) that keeps people from really believing that 60lbs of dog food shipped overnight for $19.95 was really the beginning of something new.
I'm thinking about this because tomorrow morning I'm going to give a talk to the Stanford Alumni Club of New England about entrepreneurs outside the Valley, or more specifically what the key differences are between the east coast and west coast when it comes to starting companies. I'm not sure that I am particularly qualified to do this— after all, despite having worked at 4 startups, none of them were actually begun on the west coast. So the talk may instead be more of a "grass is greener" kind of thing. In fact most of what I'll be talking about is how at Tabblo we were always of the mindset that our next round of funding had to come from a west coast fund in order for us to stay relevant as we scaled. Having had six months of time post-acquisition to reflect on this, I'm not sure I completely agree with our original sentiment. But before I get to that, at the cost of spoiling tomorrow's fun talk, here is what does blow about entrepreneurship on the east coast:
1. When the 495 corridor lost the reigns of the technology-led revolution that started through the mainframe, continued through the minicomputer, and eventually transitioned to the PC and the Internet, we lost a lot more than an industry. We in fact lost a key ingredient in what the Economist has come to call an "economic cluster:" the combination of solid technical research universities, a young workforce, a risk-seeking set of capitalists, and what we lost here after Digital and Lotus navel-gazed their way into extinction: large successful industry bellwethers to train the next generation of entrepreneurial managers.
The hardest part of embarking on a consumer Internet startup here in New England is finding wealthy veins of talent to mine out of big companies that provide relevant experience sets. From my non-technical entrepreneur friends I often hear about how hard it is to find class-A engineers that know "web stuff," and we ourselves at Tabblo had a very hard time finding good direct marketing talent that understood how factors like viral adoption could be weaved into a coherent user acquisition plan. Both skills can be learned by those who are really talented, but this takes time and discipline— something is hard to cultivate because:
2. Thanks to the more conservative nature of investors here, ventures in the consumer Internet space often fall prey to the business equivalent of premature optimization, favoring getting to revenue at the expense of adequate distribution (users) or product refinement. I don't know that I would go so far as to espouse the Y-Combinator idea that you just need to "make something users want" and everything else will take care of itself— in fact if you've taken venture capital and are expected to deliver venture returns, it is irresponsible not to understand what the path to positive cashflow is, and to be testing the key assumptions at every step of the way. But an over-emphasis on this can lead to a dangerous situation where amidst slower growth than expected (which happens to just about every startup I've known at some point), the management team gets distracted by the "monetization problem" just to focus on something that might in the short-term appear to be more directly controllable. And when you've got a board of investors that encourage this trap, things can get ugly quickly.
Incidentally, the VC fund which we raised our money from at Tabblo, Matrix Partners, and our board member David Skok were A+ at helping us to avoid this trap. David was always pushing us to focus on solving the distribution problem at the cost of prematurely optimizing a business which would not at that point not have been at scale. Revenue is important, as is understanding the drivers of the business, but I've seen way too many entrepreneurs prepare for board meetings replete with spreadsheets and powerpoints that are more fitting of HP's printer business than of a rag-tag bunch trying to find a market with their product.
Both of these shortcomings can together create a vicious downward cycle that takes anyone who is not sitting on top of a golden egg idea down quickly.
Now what do we have on the flip side? The short answer: lots. Every other element of the Economist's cluster abounds here— universities, youth, capital— and we've got a whole bunch of other things to boot: access to the media companies from NY (who thanks to Google and Apple are now paranoid of anything that smells of the Pacific ocean), and an undeterred willingness to tackle really hard technical problems for periods of time that would seem like Paleolithic eras on the west coast.
But best of all, the best thing about starting a company that will eventually need regular users to scale (which is the case with all consumer Internet businesses) is that we are much less subject to the echo chamber effect of the Valley. In the Valley everyone is twittering, sharing links on Delicious, digging articles left and right, and uploading pictures to Flickr from their super phones, but the rest of the country is really not quite ready for a lot of these applications. And the sad part is that most of the companies that I've seen started appear to be aping a lot of these initial Web 2.0 experiments instead of trying to think about how to move the adoption curve back into the mainstream.
To be sure, there are some great companies that burst out of the echo chamber and into the mainstream from the Valley: Google, eBay, and YouTube strike me as three really great examples. But monocultures can be very self-reinforcing for most of us, for both good and bad. When I first came to the States, I was a fairly ok student but had the good fortune to go to a private school where there was a strong monoculture of academic achievement. And guess what? It worked its magic on me.
In the same way, I'm sure that were I on the west coast, I would probably not have embarked on Tabblo, worrying about moving bits to atoms, and building better tools out there for folks who just wanted to feel more creative. Instead, I might have been more willing to drop vowels from the name (Tbbl, Tbbblz, ...) and gone with some sort folksonomy-based social platform for content digestion. Over RSS and ATOM, of course.
I love California for its bright-eyed optimism and willingness to experiment (back to the monkey here). For sure. In fact, I'll be surprised if I don't make it out there at some point for more than my 6 day/month average. But for where I am now, I'll take a pass from the monoculture for a while and think through some of what makes the consumer Internet work for the rest of the non-early adopters.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (Nov. 8, 2007)
Dave Thomas, the technical world's version of Mark Twain, has a nice short article "Programming the World in a Browser Real Men Don't Do JavaScript Do They?!," which covers how Javascript is coming out on top of the dynamic language pile and will probably be one of the most popular computer languages in use going forward. It's funny to see the parallels between it and C: how they were both languages created to solve a specific problem (script the browser for JS, write UNIX in C's case) that exploded as their underlying hosts became more pervasive. The lesson seems to be: if you want to write a long-lasting meaningful computer language, get out of the ivory tower of ideal types and find a host that is just going to take off— in fact, the model could be called "Languages as remoras."
In my new job as member of the CTO's office at HP, I am supposed to have opinions on all sorts of "where is this going?" questions, at least from a technology perspective. One popular topic these days is browser-based runtimes for building the next generation of applications or: who will win the death march between Flash/Flex, Silverlight, Java, and DOM scripting with Javascript?
I should note here that I am pretty awful at doing this part of my job because I find it hard to get to an answer I believe from abstract principles— that is, if I haven't worked myself in the specific platforms, it's hard for me to get to a credible opinion on who is likely to win the hearts and minds of the next wave of developers.
But despite who wins the runtime, it is worth noting that Javascript (or its "Kentucky-cousins" ECMAScript, Actionscript, and even VBScript) all underlie most of the solutions out there as glue language at minimum, and the core language in some. So in some way, shape, or form, Javascript is here to stay.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (Nov. 12, 2007)
I remember the first computer I was given as a child as though it were yesterday. When I was 6, my dad bought me a Timex Sinclair ZX81 which was this funky little computer that had a built-in BASIC and BASIC statement macros that you could access through a modifier key. At the time we had both an Apple ][ and an IBM PC at home but that Sinclair was special to me because it was all mine. I would plug it into an old black and white television set in my room and go nuts programming simple text input programs that made me feel as though I was denting the universe.
Today One Laptop Per Child went live with its "Give One, Get One" program— a great hack of the idea of getting an OLPC for yourself. By paying $400, you actually get two— one that gets shipped to you and the other that ends up somewhere in the third world, making a difference for someone who would otherwise never get a computer.
I'm fairly sure that this is too advanced for my 5-year old, but I just can not resist getting this as his Christmas present. For starters, it's a great cause. The machine is also likely to be a collector's item sometime down the road. And maybe, it won't be too much for him; after all, we've got the benefit of better software, richer interfaces, and a machine that sounds like it might just live up to all of the hype.
OK, so what about all the business school stuff? I must tell you a bizarre thing about our company: I believe it's still true that not a single person with an MBA has ever succeeded with us. Probably that's because we're really not a formula-run kind of place. We insist on understanding things from first principles. Which is good if you're trying to do things for the first time. But a waste of time if you're just doing things that have been done lots of times before.
I've always thought that running companies is pretty much common sense. It's stuff that can be figured out just by thinking, practically, about things. And knowing a certain amount about the world.
Now, there are lots of smart people who are great at their specific areas. But somehow they don't seem to engage the thinking apparatus when it comes to other things. And that's fairly crippling in trying to run a company.
I love to see a scientist talking about first principles in describing the entrepreneurial challenge because it rings so true to a lot of the hard thinking you have to do in the process of creating something new. I was talking to a friend while out in California this week and mentioned something about those times at work when you have to sit down to do the hard thinking. She looked at me as though this was somehow an optional part of most jobs which, when I thought about it, is probably true.
But thinking from the ground up is definitely a must in new venture creation. An example: a lot of the VCs that I run into can often be classified as "momentum investors" in that they like to talk about funding the YouTube of X or the Facebook of Y (usually after these companies have had successful exits or massive valuations) without really thinking about whether the translation to X or Y actually fits from what Wolfram would call a "first-principles" analysis. In contrast, the thinking VCs, like my friend Nick Beim from Matrix Partners, think through the idea and the business model from the bottom up, starting from the individual motivations of the customers/users/etc. and building up a micro economic model that fits the behavior. This is usually a much better investment of time than reading "Momentum Weekly" on the crapper or looking through sector sizing reports to find the next high growth segment that the other 1000 investors doing the same haven't already found. And it is anathema to the top-down astronauts (often self-identifying as "pattern recognizers") who must have been the kids in kindergarden jamming the Fisher Price square pegs into the round openings.
Incidentally, I met Nick while doing Tabblo which borrowed its first office from extra Matrix space. While he was not our board member directly, we spent many an afternoon chatting about the fundamentals of the consumer Internet and I often came away thinking that I needed to do more hard thinking about some of our underlying "first principles." Nick also introduced me to a great mentor and now friend, Reid Hoffman, who is his entrepreneurial doppelganger— intellectually honest to a fault, analytical as hell, and never afraid to say "it might work but the concept sucks." Always refreshing, though sometimes painful.
If you're thinking about a startup, in a startup, or even in a big company in a group looking at a new product or market, go read the Wolfram piece— it might help keep you honest next time you get sloppy in a strategy session.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (Nov. 18, 2007)
At the local coffee shop this morning, I found myself in line reading a review of "Love in the Times of Cholera" from the SF Chronicle on my iPhone when I failed to notice that the line had inched forward ahead of me. As the old lady behind me made some "I'm annoyed" grunt noise, I apologized and explained that I had been reading a review in the newspaper. Which of course prompted her to point to the stack of Sunday newspapers behind us and inform me that I might prefer reading "the real thing."
I don't know if it's the recent prodding that I've been taking from friends to be more green or the fact that I'm less and less interested in other people picking my entire reading list, but these days I look at a stack of newspapers like this one and feel a mix of disinterest and revulsion. I love tire fires in the backyard as much as the next under-developed South American, but I'm still bothered by all of those trees getting chopped down for such a disposable form of content consumption.
Nothing super insightful here. I just wanted to mark the day on which the paper newspaper officially died for me. I still love reading parts of the NYTimes on Sunday, but from today on, I'm done buying the newspaper. Sort of reminds me of the day which I bought my last audio tape (a "metal TDK-90") back in 1998. The content lives on but the means of distribution dies.
[Interestingly, I most definitely do not feel that way about magazines, but that is for a different post]
I think I am developing a man-crush for Ev as a product guy.
Though I suspect the ambling style portrayed in the piece may drive me nuts, I can't help but respect the way in which he seems to have pulled two infectious content/communication projects out of the ashes of mediocre ideas. This guy would be worth his weight in gold to any VC-backed company looking to restart its failed me-too consumer website.
My favorite quote in the piece:
Just like Blogger, Twitter was a simple communications product salvaged from the impending implosion of a more complex project. In both cases, Williams didn't really know what he was doing. With both ventures, his genius--if that is the word--derived from what the English poet John Keats, in a letter to his brothers, called "negative capability": "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
Rings so true to being an entrepreneur and making things out of nothing that it almost makes me want to start reading poetry.
On another note, part of my fascination with Twitter (and all of the clones that it has inspired) is how it seems to have— in sitting at the intersection of communication and publishing— nailed what Jeremy refers to as "lightweight self expression for the general public." At Tabblo, I tried very hard to instill this discipline into our content creation experience, and failed repeatedly in the process. On good days I tell myself that this had to do with the fact that we were after a much more complex authoring experience (we wanted to make your stories to look like magazine layouts so you'd buy them as physical products), but I think deep down I've often wondered about my own acumen when it comes to "negative capability" and making key product decisions.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (Nov. 22, 2007)
Jeffrey Zeldman has the essay to ponder during the after-meal coma this year, "Understanding Web Design," on how web design is not about fancy bevels and cinematic effects but instead about creating extensible structures that others can inhabit. More like architecture and typography and less like traditional graphic design. Here is his definition:
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
His definition finally made me get to closure on the ambivalence that I've been feeling around Flash-based web applications. They sure are snazzy, but Flash webapps have this feel to them that has always felt "non-native" when it comes to how we relate to the web which goes beyond their relative heavyness.
With most Flash-based websites these days, you get exactly what the developers and designers wanted to give you and get to take it or leave it wholesale. This can be ok for applications that you use infrequently such as shoe configurators or stationery makers, but often gets overly cumbersome as soon as you start to layer in community or workflows that rely on collaboration of any sort, or more significantly when the users are supposed to help extend the environment. In those cases, thinking through building web applications that ring true to the definition above seems like a better bet to me.
The piece reminded me of Christopher Alexander's definition of "living structures" in architecture— places that are designed from the very beginning to be extended as their occupants learn how the want to relate to the space. As with the best architects in Alexander's world, the most interesting challenge for web designers these days is to figure out how to design for this kind of habitability.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (Nov. 22, 2007)
So today is the day that we are supposed to give thanks in a general way for all of the things we appreciate about life. In my view as an immigrant this is a uniquely American type of holiday— so far as I know in fact, no other country has a holiday specifically dedicated to giving thanks to something that is not a person or an event. And in my own particular case (Venezuela), most of our holiday reasons come with epaulets and egos.
Given the crazy year that it's been, here are my thanks:
Thanks America for not being cynical
No matter what you think of politics or society today, the US is a pretty unique place in the way that it generally tends to eschew cynicism, preferring instead a sort of bounded optimism. I swear that when we look back on the "American Century" decades from now, it is this quality that folks will most associate with what made the US a great place for building Big Things out of nothing.
So thanks to all of the non-cynical investors who are always willing to write checks on the promise of building something out of nothing. Thanks to all of the non-cynical employees who are willing to get on the startup rollercoaster again even after they've been flipped out of it a few times before. Thanks to the big companies who keep buying innovation despite having been burned by it in the past. And most of all, thanks to all of the people out there from Boston to San Francisco who keep buying into the notion that the future is bright, and that we've got more opportunities ahead of us than have already passed.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (Nov. 23, 2007)
Doc has a characteristically thoughtful piece over at Linux Journal on the need for web service creators to be good members of the ecosystem and support APIs that allow data to be federated across services. He uses the example of his Flickr stream being usable at Tabblo (which is a testament to how good and ground-breaking Flickr has been in this regard), making the point that it benefits him as a user when all of us "vendors" play nice and respect both his data— and more importantly, his time. It is just plain silly to make him waste time with the asymmetry in broadband today, having to upload all of his stuff again.
I've written before on how business models that are at odds with this fundamental respect for the user are likely to be doomed (see all of the stuff on the roach motel), so here I'm going to take another angle. Data acquisition, whether it is importing contacts in a social network or uploading assets in a photo site, is just not something that we need to keep on re-inventing over and over again. Let me stick with the latter example for a moment: outside of the Flickr API, at Tabblo we have 7 other methods for ingesting digital photos. Each of these requires constant maintenance as its client environment/runtime changes, something that I think is just too much of a support problem for any small team to take on. And in fact, these days each of our rich uploaders is in some less-than-optimal state: from "outright busted" to "works most of the time."
Contrast this to Flickr which managed to solve the uploader maintenance problem by crowdsourcing it and letting passionate community members maintain all sorts of different clients with varying degrees of success. Not everyone can be a Flickr, but we should all be able to leverage their success, and instead spend out own cycles thinking about how to build the next layer of value.
That said, what I'm having trouble reconciling is how to build simple user experiences in this new layered and federated world. Imagine if we asked the average mainstream user who comes to Tabblo to go and register at Flickr, upload their photos there, authenticate Tabblo as a trusted service, only to then be able to get into their story-telling process. Nightmare, plain and simple.
One potential solution: I'd like to see a white-label services that could be wrapped by webapp builders for core pieces of functionality. To continue the upload example: why doesn't Amazon, or some enterprising entrepreneur looking to build on the cloud computing infrastructure at Amazon, build out a full suite of well-supported file uploaders, along with an associated S3-backed storage infrastructure for everything from photos to videos. By focusing on just the upload experience, this effort could just nail it for all the rest of us— building plug-ins for our favorite apps, clients for our favorite platforms, and even specialized hardware for events and community activities. In Doc's VRM world, such a company might even be able to charge the enduser a nominal fee for pipe and storage, so long as its service integrated easily with enough of the interesting webapps.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (Nov. 24, 2007)
I've had occasion over the last week to use both Evite and eBay and I've got to say that no matter what all of the Internet pundits claim about how much fluff instead of stuff Web 2.0 is about, one thing we've learned is the last 10 years is how to make websites more usable. My god are these two sites horrendous to use! It is a true credit to Amazon and Yahoo that they managed to avoid the absolute stagnation that the eBays of the world seemed to have suffered from.
Ebay is a particular peeve of mine, both because it pioneered the world's best business model (as a market-maker for otherwise illiquid goods), and because it is still the greatest mainstream stealth success out there. When I ask people who I trust to be smart members of the mainstream what they love about their net-connected lives that they didn't have last decade, eBay is what most often comes up as the example of why the Internet is great. That the company has managed to remain in control of the auction market despite a truly horrendous user-experience speaks volumes to the power of positive feedback loops and network effects.
If I were in charge of one of these big winner-take-all Web 1.0 companies that hasn't yet understood that the web application space is going to be won and lost on usability over the next 5 years (and mobile platform support, though that is for a different post), I'd set up a Yahoo Brickhouse style R&D lab for innovating on user experience alone. Combined with proper A-B testing infrastructure (which I happen to know both of the companies mentioned here invested in heavily during the last decade), you'd have a real opportunity to bring user experiences forward to where they ought to be in this day and age.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (Nov. 28, 2007)
The article in Monday's WSJ outing that the rumored Google storage service, where all of your files are stored on Google servers, initially rubbed me me the wrong way. The implication that we'd get all of our data stored in exchange for our eyeballs and our privacy (in light of all of the recent Facebook hoopla) must have struck me as a Faustian bargain that seems hard to extend much beyond email (and even that has been bothering me lately as Google seems to be misreading my email in the ads it is choosing to put inline).
But after thinking about it a little more, I realized that the irritation goes deeper than the business model to the dominant underlying assumption these days that all of personal computing is going to move to the server farm and that maybe, just maybe, we're finally getting ready to go back to the thin client model for computing. [If you see the irony in this given that I've just spent 3 years pushing content creation webapps as the end-all be-all, read on]
Let's review for a second why moving all of our personal computing to the cloud sucks:
1. Offline. Since HP bought us, I've upped the amount of time that I spend on planes crossing from east to west and it's beginning to really get to me that I can't use Gmail, Reader, or Tabblo during these six hour stretches. For instance, I have no problem keeping relatively current with my work email (thanks to the flying), but my personal Gmail account is usually 10 days behind. And even though the Reader team did a nice thing in integrating Google Gears for offline use, the offline experience still feels sort of bolted on with key command sequences not available.
2. CPUs are awesome and universally under-utilized these days. I've lost count of how many cores I have in my laptop but outside of spinning up for buggy Javascript goodness, they are only really ever taxed when I'm doing something to multimedia inside the rich client apps. Why does Flickr have to resize photos for me in a queue that takes 4 times the amount of time that iPhoto would? At Tabblo, we're offenders on this score as well; though the team has done a great job of making image transform operations tolerably fast, there are still operations that would benefit from a little CPU help, especially when the site is under load.
3. Uploading stuff over and over sucks. I've been obsessed with this one lately so here I'll only say that it's now not just about photos— on top of (re)uploading rich media, I've now also got profile picture-uploading fatigue and friend-finding ennui, and status-updating exasperation. And unless you're only going to ever use one company's "cloud," this is just a fact of life these days.
These are all good reasons why cloud-based services are probably not the only model for moving personal computing forward, but this morning while reading Tim O'Reilly's update on the definition of software above the level of a single device, I went back to being exasperated by this mottled relationship we have with our devices and data where everything that we care about seems to be spreading across more devices, more websites, and in most cases more PCs.
Tim writes about what a good model the iPhone/iPod+iTunes+iTMS is for this concept of of allowing software spanning multiple devices to play in delivering a solution. To me this seems to be an opportunity for stuff to get lost in more places. In fact, I've found that having the device tethered to the PC for the sake of connecting to data from the cloud a pretty horrendous proposition. RIM's Blackberry showed us the power of over-the-air sync a decade ago, and with WIFI on more and more of these devices, it's time to extend the model across all types of data. It is great to use the PC's richer interface to configure these more interface-constrained devices (a great example of this being the way that I can now program my Tivo from my PC instead of being deafened the bouncy Tivo noise every time I need to schedule a new recording). And frankly I'm not all that good at actually remembering to sync my iPhone thus exposing myself to all sorts of data loss/sync issues.
Which is of course another way of saying that this cloud thing really does have legs if Google and others can see their way to a good implementation for getting around problems 1-4 described above. As I was racking my brain wondering how they might do that, I thought of my earlier example of being able to answer email on the plane, and realized that we've got a pretty good real world example for what needs to happen in IMAP today (which is partly why I was so excited to see Gmail implement it). A good IMAP server lets me work offline, can more-or-less reconcile changes across devices that need access the mesage store, supports the server pushing status changes to the client, enables rich CPU-intensive activities to take place locally (indexing the cache of my account contents), and provides folders for aggregating items as well as a timeline view of when items are stored.
What if we had a cloud-based service that supported an IMAP-like protocol for read/write? Couldn't I then use iPhoto to begin organizing pictures, Flickr for adding some from friends, and Tabblo for creating a different "view" of the collection? What would it take to get a few of the broadly distributed clients to support this via plug-ins, and a few of the services to support it as a backend store API? Ditto for video, or any other type of multimedia.
Of course this model could also be applied to metadata (addressbook, buddy lists, etc.) The key would be that unlike RSS or even the bidrectional APP (Atom Publishing Protocol), an IMAP-like protocol would start from the assumption of many clients of different shapes and sizes needing rich read/write capabilities first and foremost (as I think about it, APP and a proper RESTful API might get you there, but I wonder if you couldn't simply start by actually using IMAP).
So who knows? Maybe the cloud is the right place to manage data and some of our computing tasks, assuming that we managed to get IMAP going for the rest of our electronic lives.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (Nov. 30, 2007)
It must be a slow end-of-the-month press cycle because the press seems intent on proving to the world that Apple's OS X 10.5 (Leopard) was just too buggy to put out there, joining its Redmond cousin in the land of crappy desktop OS releases.
Personally, I've only been dealing with small annoyances (keyboard locking up, Desktop files flickering incessantly, Spaces not working, the Finder losing its handle to certain running apps) and not the really big stuff (network not working, data loss), but I am somewhat underwhelmed by what Apple delivered with this release both from a polish perspective and in terms of new capabilities.
Maybe what is happening now with OSX is that it has reached that level of maturity that most big software projects get to where it is very hard to make forward progress without noticeable regressions. This would be ok though because I'm fairly certain that better processes (Apple bring back the public beta please?) would take care of this.
But maybe, this is about the fact that all of the big brains in Cupertino are now enamored with Apple's next platform, the iPhone.
Listening to the newly (re)launched Gillmor Group on the airplane a couple of days ago (this show is definitely an acquired taste, but one which I would recommend for nuggets such as this one), I heard Steve Gillmor defend Apple by saying that the iPhone was "the center of Apple's universe now" and that everything else including the computers and Leopard were just "peripherals." Sad as this may be to admit, it sounded somewhat right to me in that there seems to be a lot more "denting the world" potential in putting very capable portable multimedia computers in the hands of tens of millions of folks than in continuing to polish the desktop platform of yesteryear.
I'll be sad though; as the sun sets of the PC platform as the most innovative place to be developing, all of us who were introduced to computers through it will go through our own little pangs of nostalgia.
[Postnote: After writing/before posting, it occurred to me that projects like OLPC may have quite a bit of innovative growth in them... we will have to see]
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (Dec. 1, 2007)
Fred Wilson (VC/blogger extraordinaire) wrote up an interesting analysis of his own investment career viewed from the perspective of startup nimbleness. His main conclusion is that the majority of startups that succeed in achieving superb returns at some point in their history "transform" by being flexible enough to experiment. I love pieces like this because they help to pop the myth of entrepreneur-as-visionary who just seems to know at every decision what needs to be done.
To Fred's point, all of the best entrepreneurs I've seen combine two key abilities: a set of lightweight planning capabilities (to set up measures for success and gates that determine failure), and an unrelenting ability to execute quickly over repeated iterations without the rest of the company getting completely demoralized. In the software space in particular, another key skill is being able to build enough platform assets that can be re-used across experiments. Even in the fast and cheap world of web development, this is a key part of being able to iterate quickly and with as little technical debt as possible, which is why getting some hackers with experience on board can mean the difference between Facebook (iterated well) and Friendster (crapped out).
Finally, the article is also interesting because it applies well outside the context of the traditional startup. I'd say that about 50% of what I've been focused on since the HP acquisition has been on setting up the right execution context for maintaining this nimble experimental capability. Some of that involves figuring out how to work around big corporate process that exist for very good reasons in other contexts, and some of it involves cultural changes that reset the definition of success on the part of key contributors. But most of it— the really challenging bit— involves managing the impedance mismatch between what a big company needs to be successful (predictable success), and what a little startup relies on to make a dent in the world (huge risk-taking and nimble execution that may or may not work).
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (Dec. 7, 2007)
Last year, a couple of us at Tabblo got a chance to get on the beta program of this really neat wireless camera card called Eye-Fi that automatically uploaded your pictures from your camera to your favorite photo site. The idea was very cute, and even as a beta, the implementation was very nice, so it was a fun surprise last week to receive the 1.0 version of the card in the mail. In the intervening year, the Eye-Fi guys seem to have polished their packaging and found great distribution for their product (Amazon, Walmart), while settling on a very sensible business model (sell the card at a slight premium to regular memory cards).
I like the Eye-Fi concept a lot and intend to give a couple of the cards out as Christmas presents this year. But after a week of constant use, I've been forced to rethink some of my assumptions about getting all of your content up into the cloud as quickly as possible, bypassing the PC at all costs.
While it is fun and sort of magical to see pictures just appear on your favorite Internet photo site (though arguably less now now that camera phones are so prevalent, especially those armed with awesome applications like Shozu), but the problem with getting your regular camera pictures sent automatically is that the mode of use for a typical digital camera these days is very much "ready, fire, aim" with most casual photographers using brute force as a substitute for innate skill, knowing that there is a nice editing step waiting inside of Picasa or iPhoto. When photos go straight to the cloud and into a service like Flickr (which is what I've been using with the Eye-Fi), that editing step disappears, which means one of two things happen:
1. you really frustrate people who might be following your picture stream on Flickr with twelve slightly different shots of the same subject in the same composition
2. you frustrate the hell out of yourself using a web interface to take on that first editing pass
Of course, #2 could all be fixed if Flickr were to support an IMAP-like protocol that iPhoto and Picasa could implement as rich clients to help you manipulate the photos and do the editing later (I have to admit that Flickr almost does this with their API today, but no mainstream clients have taken advantage of it). And in that case, having the data resident in the cloud where other applications could use it might justify someone using some basic algorithms around finding good unique pictures to solve #1 (I've seen a bunch of algorithms that do this very well with date-clustering and object detection inside of HP Labs, so this part is not science fiction).
In the meanwhile, it is worthwhile pausing for a moment as we all race to cut the venerable PC out of the content-device-Internet loop, and thinking about what we might be giving up.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (Dec. 8, 2007)
It usually takes me hearing really clever smart (but crazy sounding) ideas three times before they begin to sink in. So hopefully, noticing them at two is an improvement. A couple of months ago, while attending a conference with Alan Kay, I heard him talk about how any new modern computer should be designed with "Internet principles" at its core. That is, the hardware and OS should be designed to support small isolated "components" that behave like nodes on the Internet, sending each other messages through a TCP/IP-based networking fabric even on the bus of the computer itself. Knowing that he is the perennial object & message nut, I filed his statements away as curiosities, thinking only that while his observations about how the unstoppable trends of virtualization and multiple cores as the base substrate for this fundamental change in the architecture of every individual computer seemed clever, the practicality of it seemed elusive.
After all, the stored-program, shared-memory, single instance computer exists for good reasons (simplicity, efficient, cost) right?
Imagine my surprise then while running today to the latest episode of the Google Developer Podcast (hit-and-miss, but pretty good as of late as far as podcasts go), the "All About Android" episode which basically described an implementation of what Alan was talking about in almost every aspect of system design: from the message-passing model for app interop to the way resources are described internally. It gave me pause for thought— after all, if resource-constrained mobile devices are being designed around these architectural principles by smart people, then maybe there is something to this notion of turtles all the way down, from the services we use from the cloud to the devices we carry in our pockets.
I think I've let Fake Steve with all of his Googletard ranting color my perspective too much, as I've paid scarcely any attention to the Android project. And truth be told, I wanted to write this before digging into it— after all, ideas are much prettier as abstractions, and Android seems to be one weird beast of a mix of things on the face of it: Linux + Java + Webkit, all on very resource constrained but heterogeneous hardware platforms. I mean, we're talking about serious potential for a fly in the transporter with this baby.
Still, it's the second time I've heard it, so time to pay attention...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (Dec. 14, 2007)
First they made it so that you didn't have to worry about disks with their S3 storage service. Then they took away the need to manage hardware and a colo with EC2. And now for the final piece: Amazon has just announced SimpleDB, a database hosted as a web service that application developers can plug into. Despite one curious choice, this is just brilliant strategy on their part.
Everyone who hosts a website that has any level of traffic spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about how to tune the database. And as with almost every infrastructure layer in the webapp cake, I'm fairly certain that 80% of this tuning work is just good RDBMS hygiene and adds preciously little "special sauce" to the core application. In fact this is why there are specialists in tuning MySQL or Postgres who bounce from project to project with the same basic bag of tricks.
If Amazon does it right, making a database scale is one time-consuming headache web application developers will never have to worry about again. But it goes beyond scaling too: backups, replication, failover— these are all common database chores that Amazon just makes go away.
On to the curious choice: no support for full (or even partial) SQL. I'm guessing that this may have had something to do with the complexity involved in supporting SQL on their super-scalable, super-distributed architecture as I'm fairly certain the Amazon folks realize just how much momentum SQL has in the web application space. And if anything holds people back from adopting SimpleDB (outside of potential uptime/performance issues), it will be the need to learn a new way to store and query data (albeit a very simple one).
A potential work around: open source libraries that substitute the back end of the most popular ORMs (Rails, Hibernate, Django) with the SimpleDB service. Now that could be a game changer.
Here's to never thinking about sharding databases again.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (Dec. 15, 2007)
When one of my favorite tech blogs titles an article "The Evolution of Personal Publishing," I am most definitely going to bite on it (after all, this is a topic on which I like to noodle). As it turns out, the piece mostly adds color to a post by Fred Wilson who argues that "microblogging" (Twittering, social sharing, etc.) is actually not just blogging under a new guise but a new type of communications/publishing hybrid that not only deserves its own category, but may actually reach into the mainstream Internet userbase in a way that its progenitors (personal publishing and blogging specifically) have not been able to.
Why? Because according to Fred, micropublishing at its core is lightweight (low cognitive load), social, and interactive (which strikes me just social under a different name). In other words, it is easy to do and keeps you in touch with your friends and family as well as the world at large, when appropriate.
And in fact, it seems that this last bit is the critical piece. The relevant part of all of these lightweight tools is that they intercept a communications flow and create a permanent record of it that people who may not have been in the original dialog— people who you may not even know— can have access to it via the archive (the frozen flow).
A little over a year ago, I was eating lunch at Google with Jason Shellen who was the first person to pitch me Twitter. As I was arguing that this seemed just like SMS + groups he said something which has stuck with me ever since: that Twitter allowed every SMS to have its own permalink. I remember my initial reaction to his statement as though it had been yesterday; I thought: Silly Googler, not everything needs to be in your index.
He was absolutely right about the significance being the addressability and persistence of each SMS/tweet, but not because we might be turning up the fact that he had too much to drink for Thanksgiving in the Google index 3 months down the line. Instead what the permalink implies is that what was a disposable message is now a micropublishing event which can in effect become a vector for socializing with people who would otherwise not be in your regular communication stream.
Now the question still remains: how much do regular folks really care about the potential for this type of publishing-sourced social serendipity? Especially when the insertion of micropublishing into some communication channels can have unanticipated adverse effects? An example: I recently tried to give Twitter the good ol' college try by getting everyone at work to use it as well as a few key friends and family members. My older brother (who ironically in this small world was once one of Fred's entrepreneurs) puked on it because he decreed his SMS inbox to be a high-priority near-synchronous channel for communication with a select few. By overflowing his phone with tweets, he was convinced that Twitter was "breaking" the promise of SMS. The serendipity of social experiences on top of micropublishing was just not worth it.
(And before people write to me to tell me that you can turn SMS off on Twitter and just view the tweets on the website, think about this: why would a normal person want one more website to have to go check every day?)
I think that in fact Fred is right that micropublishing done right can go mainstream— but we have to look to models like Amazon reviews and not just the progeny of Blogger to see how we take it there. More on that tomorrow though.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (Dec. 16, 2007)
Yesterday I wrote about how micropublishing comes out of intercepting a communications stream and making the messages chunks of published content, ending the post with an argument that this will only work for a mainstream audience if it can be totally unobtrusive to the communications channel. Even then though, I have my doubts as to whether communications-parasiting micropublishing could really go mainstream (whereby I mean the "regular" folks piling iPhones under the Christmas tree this year).
What I do think serves as a great model for micropublishing is when applications or better yet, devices, can be properly instrumented to emit a steady excrement of relevant metadata that can then be "massaged" into something that resembles a micropublishing content chunk. Since that statement takes the Abstract Award for the weekend, let me follow it with some concrete examples:
Application: I love Google Reader. While the province of true geeks, RSS readers strike me as the next killer application for managing the vast information flows that we're all crumbling under, and as far as they go, Google Reader is tops. It is fast, reliable, and best of all, keeps sprouting these interesting social features that are likely to make it a very interesting product to watch over the next year. While Reader has always had the notion of "shared items" that friends could subscribe to, the process for doing this was cumbersome in that it required your friend to seek out the syndication URL of your shared items and the subscribe to it. This past week, the Reader team launched the ability for you to see what friends have shared without having to explicitly subscribe, a great improvement that I think will finally raise shared items to the level of first-class feature inside of Reader. This matters because every time a user hits Shift-S on an item, that is in itself a micropublishing event (on Tumblr this is called a "reblog" but Reader makes it seem like more of a non-event). And these events strung together make a great frozen flow of ideas.
Device: A location aware mobile device is the best possible excrement generator for review-based micropublishing that I could possibly imagine (assuming of course the phone is open enough to application developers). While we constantly debate the merits of the "thumbs-up" flyby reviewers at the office, there is no doubt that when I'm evaluating a restaurant I've never eaten at, a barber who hasn't yet nicked my ear, or a hotel I'm about to entrust my sleep to, I'd rather have that information no matter how hastily it may have been generated than not. And these are categories of services that I research today— with an ever-present ability to thumbs-up/down anything at any time, who knows what else we might start micropublishing in binary about? Playgrounds? Busy intersections? Barristas? "Hot" spots?
In both of these cases the work we expect from the user publishing is as close to zero as possible within a certain limit. In fact, taken to the limit, you get models where just by doing stuff, you're generating metadata. The Google Pagerank index for instance is the inadvertent result of billions of micropublishing events (links being created) and its aggregate value is huge. Similarly, the new GPS in my car gets its traffic information from over 1MM radio-enabled GPSes that get a free ride on top of all of the semi-tractor trailers you see on the highway.
However, there does seem to be a limit beyond which it really is just metadata— potentially valuable in the aggregate— but wholly useless to the type of micropublishing that facilitates social connections and fires off the creative endorphins in people. I'm not sure where to draw the line (after all some types of metadata can go either way depending on context— for example, my Nike+ running sensor data), but the key is that the closer we get to the line without going over, the faster we might see micropublishing getting a foothold with a huge audience.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (Dec. 16, 2007)
Doc always talks about how much he hates "vendor sports—" well this weekend, we're getting it in the guise of cloud computing all over the place. First, Businessweek has a cover story on some random Google engineer who is fiddling with the CS curriculum at UW which is really just cover for a puff piece on how we're at the beginning of this whole new type of computing which today's CS students need to learn to program for. Then, today's NY Times has a big piece on how Google is headed for a showdown with Microsoft over a new way to deliver applications to computer users. The blogosphere (which unlike Doc does loves vendor sports) is naturally all over it.
I can already see that people are throwing this cloud computing term around so loosely that it's going to cause more confusion than the whole Web 2.0 thing did. For some people, cloud computing means running applications over the web with the interface painted inside the frame while the executable sits far away in an undisclosed data center. For others, the cloud is about a massive amount of CPU cycles available on demand (but metered). And for others still, it's about a hard drive in the sky.
The reality is that the cloud is about all of these things and more. Perhaps the easiest way to see it is as the extension of anything that might be connected to a PC over the public Internet to some magical data center that gets to provide as much you might need. Need more space? Extend it with a Google hard drive over TCP/IP. Ditto for the CPU. And especially ditto for all of the installed applications.
Most importantly, in what is hardly mentioned in all of the articles, the real kicker is the access device doesn't even have to be a PC at all— in fact, most of the real leverage from the cloud is likely to come to all of these really powerful mobile phones that are capable of running a web browser and mimicking that part of the PC. That is where the rubber really hits the road on this stuff!
If you look it as extending the computer on your lap (or in your pocket) on demand, then the next natural question is: what other things are you using today in that computing experience that you'd like to have re-attached in this fashion? Let's take a retro example: what about the 400MM printers we've shipped at HP over the years? What is the cloud version of the print driver? (Our team is actually working on a version of this, but more on that later) We're not doing our PR well here because every cloud article talks about the big four: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, and leaves HP— the only big IT company that spans every type of access device and peripheral with services and servers— out of the running altogether.
Finally, it's funny to see Schmidt (Google's CEO) in the role of the guy with the new disruptive platform, mostly because he's spent almost his entire career (Sun, Novell) fighting for the losing platform— each time getting disrupted by none other than... Microsoft. I'd hardly count those guys out of it at this point, but it is interesting to see how much more the platform disruption can count for over the leadership (stewardship) from the guys in the corner office. Schmidt has had a few losing hands, but this round he seems to be holding a full house and that, more than anything else, may make all the difference.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (Dec. 20, 2007)
As always, David Brooks had a great op/ed piece this week in the New York Times on the real difference between Obama and Clinton. It is worth reading not so much because it helps those of us still trying to make a decision, but because it is a great commentary on leadership in general.
Brooks's character-based argument centers on the fact that the presidency is about more than positions of issues and political experience. He writes:
Many of the best presidents in U.S. history had their character forged before they entered politics and carried to it a degree of self-possession and tranquillity that was impervious to the Sturm und Drang of White House life.
because, according to Brooks:
The presidency is a bacterium. It finds the open wounds in the people who hold it. It infects them, and the resulting scandals infect the presidency and the country. The person with the fewest wounds usually does best in the White House, and is best for the country.
While the presidency of the United States is clearly at the top of this pyramid, all sorts of leadership positions possess this same dynamic: they exert all sorts of pressures that exacerbate character flaws and biases in a way that almost nothing else does. In my limited experience, those that do best as leaders are not necessarily the people who look best on paper, nor even those with the fewest wounds, but those who, aware of their own weaknesses and biases, possess enough reserve of character— knowing who they really are— to avoid being overcome by the bacterium.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (Dec. 22, 2007)
Google made waves last week with the introduction of its "Knowl" product which, on the surface, seems to be a copy of Wikipedia. The conspiracy theorists think that Google is tired of giving up pageviews to the nonprofit (because some ridiculous percentage of Wikipedia pageviews come from Google search results) and would prefer to keep these for themselves. I'm not sure; after all, it would be a really short-sighted case of crapping where they eat for Google should publishers get concerned about the search giant playing with the fidelity of the search results.
Instead, I see Knowl as an interesting experiment in personal publishing that centers around recognizing authorship. The announcement talked about a number of features that Knowl was going to have that Wikipedia didn't which included the standard "Web 2.0 social stuff," but the main thrust of the publishing model is the "highlighting of authors" by recognizing them more explicitly both in branding and in allowing the authors themselves to set the advertising on the specific knowl pages.
While I'm eagerly awaiting the results, I think that Wikipedia has worked (unlike blogs and other forms of personal publishing), specifically because it has made the authors/contributors fungible across the various different pages. Over the years I have contributed content to a half a dozen Wikipedia pages— content that in some cases has been quite a bit longer than this blog post. All of these pages have survived without my constant care and feeding, because other people have taken them well beyond where I felt compelled to in a way that this blog wouldn't were I to take the same fickle approach to it.
"Highlighting the author," or giving primacy to the content creator over the subject matter is not always the answer in getting a big content store, even when this process brings a potential business model to the content creators (just look at all of the abandoned About.com pages or Squidoo lenses). In fact, I would argue that this Menudo-dization of publishing (where authors were buried under the brand "Wikipedia") was Jimmy & team's great hack and their true legacy to field of knowledge creation.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (Dec. 24, 2007)
The whole digital media in the home equation has yet to be solved by any company, big or small. You've got all types of content that needs to get itself to a wide variety of output devices. Then you've got the issue of the control interface for things like selection, volume, play/pause. And to boot you've got an ever-changing set of sources for that very content (Rhapsody, YouTube, iTunes Music Store) which means that almost any dedicated "appliance-like" system is likely to be obsoleted within 12-18 months.
If you're like me, you've found an inelegant but very extensible solution for the last of the three problems in the general purpose PC. Since most of these new content sites are built to run in a web browser (via Flash, Quicktime, or Windows Media), you just can't go wrong with a machine connected to your TV/stereo that can play all of these formats. A concrete example of why a Mac Mini is better connected to a TV than an Apple TV is the studios' new YouTube clone, Hulu.com: while the site has a really nice selection of content, the embedded Flash player is the only way to watch the content, which means that for now all of the Apple TVs, PSPs, etc. are S.O.L.
The second problem around being able to control the PC's output (play/plause, etc.) has been the deal-killer for the whole just "hook your PC up to the TV/stereo and go" scenario for a while now. Back at Memora, we implemented a webserver for rendering an HTML control interface that could start/stop streams either to embedded players or to remote endpoints, but it was always kludgey as the interface tended to get out of sync with what the underlying devices were doing, and in those days cellphone/small device browsers were very limited are hard to come by.
Fast forward a few years though and you've got two key elements on the Mac platform that finally provide a good solution for this problem. The first is the very instrumentable iTunes application which lets any third party developer drive almost all of its controls from an external application. Given that iTunes has built into it the ability to target streams of content to Apple Airport Extreme bricks, you get a free pass on the distribution problem.
The second element is my recommendation for this year's awesome last minute gift (no mall parking lots required!) If you've got a friend with multimedia aspirations, a fixed Mac, and an iPhone, you absolutely must buy them IOSpirit's Remote Buddy, an OSX application that will wow their guests with what it can do. Essentially, Remote Buddy allows anyone with an iPhone (or other decent browser) to control iTunes and whole host of other applications that run that on the Mac itself. In my case the killer app is to drive the Mac Mini's iTunes library to the 3 Airport Express bricks installed throughout my house, but I'm sure this is just scratching the surface.
It's a relatively cheap application (19 Euros) that you can just tell was built with a lot of love and attention to detail. And you can just forget what the Bloggery is saying about the iPhone versions of Meebo or Facebook (or Fizzl and Pizzl)— Remote Buddy is the single best iPhone web application I have used— so good in fact that you forget that it is running inside of a browser within 30 seconds of starting to use it. And best of all, if you're not getting as a gift, you can try it for 30 days after which I would be shocked if you didn't decide to get it for yourself.
It is applications like Remote Buddy— along with the resurgence of the Mac platform as a mainstream alternative— that makes me wonder when we'll see the first venture backed startups that will target the Mac/iPhone platform exclusively. Perhaps a prediction for 2008 is in the making there...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (Dec. 25, 2007)
Most of the presents Santa gave me growing up are now just layers of half broken down plastic in some landfill. Worse still, I can't really even remember them. As I was pretending to sleep despite the clamoring of my two boys this morning, I tried to compile a list in my head of the presents I do remember getting:
The original Space Mission Legos
The Milton Bradley BigTrac
A number of Tintin books
The Timex Sinclair
The Apple Macintosh
Last night at Christmas eve even dinner, I was asking various folks ranging in age from 40-70 what presents they remember. It would seem that in the 1940s, wooden train sets and low power microscopes were the electronics of the day for the nerd children, a trend that held all the way through to the 1970s when semiconductors began finding their way into gifts. I also found it humorous that Tintin books were consistently popular from the 1950s onward (such is the power of story-telling).
Now that I get to play this game from the parent side, I'm trying to maximize the ratio of memorable presents to landfill fodder which is a lot harder than it seems as the noise ratio of blammy, colorful, disposable toys has gone way up. Maybe we could combat this by themed Christmases: this year only wooden toys, this year only abstract toys, etc.
And maybe I should just shut up and go see how the OLPC will go over... Merry Christmas everyone!
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (Dec. 27, 2007)
The biggest advantage that startups have in being in Silicon Valley is proximity to people that have the know-how around how to create something out of nothing. And this isn't just the VCs— lawyers, recruiters, real estate people, even caterers just know how it goes for startups. Sure the talent is concentrated there as well, but talent concentration doesn't seem to be as much of a hurdle in the age of the Internet.
Nor is expertise and experience as you can see from this fabulous Read/Write post on all sorts of good tips for engineering, infrastructure, and marketing/PR. As I read this, I could not help but think of all of the resources at the fingertips of a young college graduate today. From the likes of YCombinator to the nuggets of goodness in the High Scalability blog, there is just a ton of stuff out there for those looking to get a startup off the ground.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (Dec. 28, 2007)
So it's too early to tell whether I can really give the OLPC a firm thumbs-up (or a definite trashing). From using it myself, and watching my five year-old play with it, I have two observations: 1. the hardware is really cute and definitely right-sized for children, and 2. the machine is really slow. About 45 seconds to boot up an application like the web browser and no less than 25 seconds on any other app.
I realize complaining about its slowness is unfair as this is a machine destined for third world hands who will likely never see anything faster and thus not know to expect better. Given that the machine is meant for kids though, I do feel somewhat justified in complaining about the fact that the OLPC folks have jammed too much software into it and made the overall discoverability of the "fun" applications for kids that are not quite literate too hard. Witness Alex (the 5 year-old in the photo) who has thus far only taken to the "Memorize" game (sort of like the old game with pairs of matching cards you flip over) and to typing his name over and over in 48pt type in the word processor. Between these two activities I think he could entertain himself for hours. However, the challenge is that any time he hits some part of the global navigation interface, he quickly gets himself in trouble. And unfortunately, this problem is compounded by the slow load time of new applications and the inevitable swapping that starts to quickly slow the machine to a crawl when you launch more than about 4 applications.
The ultimate test will be whether he sticks with it through these problems, coming to an adult when he is hopelessly stuck. At first I was skeptical that this would be the case, but then I remembered that as a kid, I spent countless hours playing with my father's Heathkit HERO 2000 kit under many of the same conditions: I would often get the robot stuck in such a way that only adult supervision would help unstick me (incidentally, I recently saw on Chris Anderson's blog that the HERO is coming back— yay!). In my case, the promise of controlling a robot kept me coming back for help.
Let's hope that the same applies for the kids looking to learn about the benefits of computers in the third world.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (Dec. 29, 2007)
Steve Rubel has a nice post on how to become a power user of Google Reader, a webapp for consuming syndicated feeds in an aggregated way. I've long been a fan of the feed reader as a great tool for consuming lots of content quickly— at least for as long as I've been confused by the large number of people that I know that consume syndicated content (blogs, news, etc.) without the aid of a feed reader. For me the old "bookmark it and revisit it every once in a while" technique went out of style with the old Netscape browser which is why I'm often amazed when I hear of net mavens who still employ this antiquated approach.
Which is not to say that feed readers, even Google Reader, are anywhere near where they need to be for mass adoption. To me, the standard feed reader is the command prompt of syndicated content; capable of doing the work that needs to get done, but clunky and hard to grok. In order to get to my mother using one, we'll need to get rid of the explicit subscribe/unsubscribe cycle, get competent at de-duping long feed lists, and perhaps most importantly, find an unobtrusive way to make the whole experience social and light-weight, much in the same way that some of the better Web 2.0 experiences have for a select few.
Of all of the folks in the game today however, I have the most faith in the Google Reader team, both because they are willing to experiment, and because they've got the cultural legacy of Google (make it fast, make it work) behind them. So you'd do worse than spending the time to learn how to become a Google Reader ninja in 2008...
For our part, after having spent six months building an initial member base that was attracted to the Tabblo service (either because of the editor, the online/offline combination, or the quality of the products we make), we're now starting to experiment in earnest with products that will begin to motivate members to buy at greater frequency than most other output vendors. 
The third time that I thought about craftsmen recently was in reading the fabulous 
The theme of this bunch: the limitations and fallacies of the current web application development stack, and specifically the relational database. In particular, I wanted to point out two interesting articles in the "your architecture sucks" department:
I'm a software entrepreneur living in the Boston area. I've started some stuff, worked at some
places, and I love making things.