Netpositive

Caterina Fake wrote a post the other day called “It’s a bad time to start a company.” By this she meant an Internet company. She makes some reasonable observations about the tightening of the job market in the Bay Area, the increased competition, and how “Web 2.0 isn’t all that.” Anybody who lived through dot com bubble must’ve had some of these same thoughts. We bubble survivors are well conditioned to go into skeptic mode when the hype machine gets loud.

Indeed, there’s a lot to be concerned about in the economy of Silicon Valley. More than anything, we tend to get ahead of ourselves with our “next big things,” whatever they happen to be. Many of the businesses from the late ’90s weren’t fundamentally wrong in their premises, but they were hopelessly off in their timelines for market adoption. Online advertising did mature into a sustainable growth business. Broadband content did become mainstream. E-commerce has emerged as a fundamental retail channel. But it’s taken time. Time and patience.

The businesses that thrived post-bubble bootstrapped for the most part, and let the market tell them where they needed to be. They didn’t focus on hitting the “hockey puck” revenue curve or fitting into a sexy high-growth business category, but instead followed the money and refined their products to fit. Avoiding the VC pressure cooker enabled them to take their time in figuring out what their business was.

The Internet has become fundamental in our daily lives, and there are countless opportunities to build a successful small to medium-sized business with it. The answer is to make the technology support our focus on customers (rather than the other way around)–what problems do customers have that we can solve for them? For any given industry or consumer activity, there is some pain point that is completely under-served. Our job is to find out what it is and fill that need.

(Alternatively, we can find a new way to entertain or add some joy to a mundane activity. But these aren’t as sure-fire recipes for success.)
As for Caterina’s other critiques:

• There may be a surge of new Web applications and startups, but that’s not the issue for starting businesses. It’s whether there’s an underserved market need. This doesn’t mean we have to find opportunities with zero competition. As Measure Map showed with its foray into the well-established web analytics space, we can build breakthrough products by focusing on the needs of a sliver of the total audience (they focused exclusively on bloggers). I know an entrepreneur who is building software for documentarians to manage masses of video content. I know another who has spent the last five years building specialty information hubs for biotech researchers, and both their businesses are booming.
• On investment bubbles. I know businesses are getting funded more readily these days, but there is no IPO bubble, and it’s not like we’re seeing a giant number of super-rich acquisitions. So far, the market is doing a good job of keeping the supposed bubble 2.0 from getting bigger than the VC petrie dish.
• Talent may be scarce, but teams can remain quite small. It’s a big difference from five years ago. In addition to cheap infrastructure, open source software, best practices, and streamlined frameworks, we are collaborating a lot more. Cooperation within communities is not a distraction, it’s an entrepreneurial style. And a powerful one at that.
• Caterina is right to pick on the view of Web2.0 as a checklist of features and design patterns. They’re largely irrelevant in their business impact. However, let’s pose a different question. Are we seeing new classes of solutions emerge as a result of emergent modes of communicating, publishing and collaborating? I think the answer is obvious. Industries and entrenched players are increasingly defending themselves against maverick companies and open source projects. We’ve been moving from the age of the blockbuster to the age of the indie. We’re increasingly seeing hundreds of small and mid-sized companies in industries historically dominated by just a few giants. The opportunities in this environment are dizzying.

Caterina is a personal hero of mine. She’s a born entrepreneur with great instincts. But she works for a big company that needs to hire hundreds of people per week. It’s not surprising she wants to discourage her fellow Yahooligans from running away and starting companies.

Rubyred started Cerealbar as a weekly breakfast gathering for our friends and neighbors. We assembled an impressive cereal selection, fine-brewed coffee and, of course, grapefruits galore (with handcrank juicer!). Just a way to start the week off right, since we couldn’t compete with all the cocktail gatherings on fridays.

Perhaps you’ve heard tales of Cerealbar and you may have been meaning to check it out. Or perhaps you’ve enjoyed a bowl of cereal with us already and have been craving another. Well, this Monday, March 27th, is the day to do it. Rumor has it there will a reporter* & photographer from the Chronicle here to document the cultural phenomenon that is Cerealbar.

So come. Bring your friends. Help make us look popular.

Details:
Cerealbar
Rubyred Labs HQ
365 Brannan Street (above Adaptive Path)
Monday, 3/27
9:30ish a.m. - 10:30ish a.m.

Amy has been writing the odd post on her secret blog for a few weeks now, all along warning me that I’d be sleeping alone if I told another soul about its existence. Well our friend Maggie, of MightyGirl fame, posted a link to her blog today, effectively outing her.

So I can now jump up and down and point over to Mommybrain, where she’ll be sharing her experiences as a mommy living in the big City while co-founding a new business.

The great thing about having a wife who blogs is I get to discover just how strange she really is. Case in point.

They’re designed to sway as the truck roars forward.

I hung out on the Freenode IRC channels at both Etech and SxSW. While you can argue that the running chat commentary is a distraction from the main presentations, for the most part it enhanced the experience for me. Here’s why:

• It added much needed comic relief from many of the too serious presentations. Come on presenters, lighten up!
• Smart people filled in the gaps of the content with sidenotes, related URIs, caveats, etc. Sometimes this info was richer than that on the slides. Smart mob!
• A great way to meet new people! Okay, maybe not. It was the usual crowd of suspects, but that’s not such a bad thing.
• The memorable lines are celebrated and memorialized. Particularly in the keynotes, some diligent backchannel lurkers would emphasize the really good ad hoc lines (Heather Armstrong: “live the content”; Mena Trott: “Bloggers are stupid”). In backchannel 2.0 I’d expect t-shirts with these phrases by the end of the presentation.
• We are able to razz poorly prepared, cliche-prone or uninspired presenters…behind their back (or behind their channel, or whatever). It’s cruel–a throwback to junior high, perhaps–but so satisfying. A revenge of the nerds?

Here’s a few more observations. Etech averaged close to 100 users on the freenode channel, while sxswi had under 20. The sxsw chats were consequently quite a bit thinner.

Tantek made the observation that  a high volume of chatter is usually a sign that the presentation is not going so well. But in the case of Tom Coates’ etech presentation the intense volume was a direct result of our fawning.

Finally, Stamen design created this neato visualization for the IRC backchannel, which had us all aflutter. It’s just too bad they don’t archive the conference chats.

It’s spring cleaning time. This year I’ve been able to be more ruthless than ever about which books to give away. The Yellow Pages are first to go.

In previous years I couldn’t quite do it, despite knowing I could do a local business search online. After all, what if the connection dropped out? The idea of having an analog backup for inevitable DSL outages has always kept the Yellow Pages safe in our house, if relatively unused.

But one thing has changed. We now have excellent local search on our phones and we know how to use it. It’s still not foolproof, but it’s good enough that we can get rid of that fat dust-collector filled with ads.

The Video Egg team arranged a rock-n-roll party bus trip to The Salt Lick Barbeque, supposedly the ultimate bbq joint in the Austin area. I ran into them between sessions at the Hilton, and they had some last minute cancellations so they did the hard recruitment on me. Despite my desperate need for a shower, I gave in and managed to pull in Jonathan before the bus departed. Once on the road, we discovered that it was a thirty-mile trip to the bbq joint. We were descending into the hinterland.

Here’s the fur-lined interior of the bus, karaoke machine in the background:

Arriving, it was clear that we weren’t in Austin anymore. Our purple and orange swirled paint party bus may as well have said “Freaks Inside,” and our ironic t-shirts and laptop bags probably underscored the point. But it’s a beautiful, flat countryside, with a football field’s worth of picnic tables. There’s a rock patio, where people throw down-home weddings. We were thrilled to be there, especially as we could now smell the smoke from the pit.

The Salt Like is this enormous, rustic complex, the kind of place you imagine Dubya and his people gather at to consume large amounts of animal and tell dirty jokes. Being Sunday, I saw lots of churchgoers eyeing us suspiciously as we discussed the linking strategies of porn sites, and as our busdriver hauled in a couple cases of beer (it’s strictly BYOB at the Salt Lick).

The meat plates were out of control, with the ribs the clear favorite. I don’t know what they do to infuse the deep smoky flavor, but it must involve many days of immersion in secret sauce. You can order Salt Lick Special with Two Racks of Ribs for delivery on their web site. They say it serves 10-12 people, but if you eat as much as we did that day, you should halve that number.

Renee Blodgett has some great pictures here.

Etech and South by Southwest are a study in contrasts. Etech is old school. It’s a serious affair, with a reverence for the tech industry and its history, a gaggle of software companies convening with the usual 9:1 male/female ratio and mild-mannered “receptions” to match. The annual theme (this year was the Attention Economy) gives the whole thing a strong point-of-view; it’s about the content. It also reinforces the echo chamber dynamic. San Diego is the perfect host city–well-manicured, sunny, but culturally sheltered and utterly convinced there’s no better place on earth.

The South by Southwest Interactive conference is the offspring of its famous rock-n-roll parent, and it shows. Here in Austin Web startups may as well be rock bands playing the club circuit, with sex-and-drug-drenched lifestyles to match. There are lots of hot girls, many of whom get excited talking about folksonomies and vlogging, and the vast number of ironic t-shirts are matched by the hordes of sassily-stickered Powerbooks. There’s some good content, but everyone cuts “class” as a matter of course. Austin’s spicy party culture, with its undercurrent of slackerdom and Texas-sized audacity, sets the tone for this event.

Etech, is about the ideas and technologies that will reshape our world. SxSW presenters spend a lot more time talking about css tricks and the monetization of blogs. Etech, charging over $1000 a ticket, gives away a plain black shirt with a giant Foldera logo in their gift bag. SxSWi only costs about $300, and you have to buy your t-shirt separately at a stand, like you would at a concert. But they come in half a dozen kick-ass designs, all pretty cool.

I bought the Harley-Davidson-inspired design.

This bartender at the Consumating/Adaptive Path/Odeo party was something to behold. To order a drink you literally needed to bark it out like a marine commando, and then he’d begin flipping bottles and oscillating wildly like Tom Cruise in Cocktail. Alas, he didn’t always catch the bottles he flung through the air. A classic SxSW moment.

Watch the video.

Reminder to self: tie up important project details before going to a big tech conference. As it was, my time in San Diego was full of meaningful conversations and meetings, plus  a handful of memorable sessions. But I spent too much time doing intense project work, which had me in the hall with my laptop and on the phone doing reviews. Still worth it, but not ideal.

Here are some of the speakers that left an imprint, with links to the session notes (sometimes complete transcriptions and/or powerpoint slides).

• Bruce Sterling, The Internet of Things
  I enjoyed his sprawling vision of how smart network of physical things can change our waking life, and even more his critique on our use of language to describe our technologies. As Molly Steenson put it, Sterling may be constructing a new literary theory, and it’s fascinating to see him think it through in front of us.
• Ray Ozzie, Simple Bridge-building
  Microsoft’s CTO shows off his Live Clips technology, and it’s very promising. The idea is simple but powerful: structured data streams can be cut-and-pasted into other Web and desktop applications. Could be an enormous leap forward for linking together all these dynamic pieces of the Web in a meaningful way, and extending the linkages beyond the Web.
• Jeff Han, The Future of Interfaces Is Multi-Touch
  I loved this. It’s a new way of interacting with digital objects, making the manipulation of things on a screen an almost tactile experience. I had a similar reaction to this demo as I did seeing the original Macintosh demo back in 1984 (I was thirteen). I want this!
• L. F. Cabrera, Ph.D., Artificial Intelligence: What It Is and What It Means for the Web (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk)
  There are two competing views of artificial intelligence at Etech, one that asserts that machines are inherently non-intelligent, essentially good for “linking, ranking and sorting,” and one that believes that intelligence is an emergent quality of those very activities. Amazon seems to be in the former camp, as its Mechanical Turk turns mobs of microtask-completing humans into virtual computers. It’s the opposite of Moore’s Law: we’re doubling the number of humans needed to fill data processing requirements every eighteen months. Okay, I made that up, but that seems to be the direction we’re heading.
• Eric Bonabeau, Ph.D., Hunch Engine
  There were a lot of interesting ideas in this talk, though some thought it was less coherent than it could’ve been. The core idea is that in the infinite search space that we now have access to, we operate on an “I know it when I see it” basis. The “hunch.” Perfection is not the point, but an approximation of the archetype in our head. Given this, the best approach to getting good results is “evolution via intelligent design.” Think Kai Power Tools for everything, with its interface so good for generating mutant patterns, allowing user selection and then further mutations. Imagine something like this for architecture, or web design–software that generates ideas, and further mutates them in the directions we push them until we’ve got something we like . This is what Bonabeau showed off.Bonabeau makes the point that today we relinquish our control to “heuristocrats,” people like architects who arbitrarily limit exploration of possibilities with their “expertise.” Only by going around heuristocrats can we get full value of the information we have at our disposal.
• Matt Webb, Ben Cerveny, playsh, the Playful Shell
  This is pretty geeky, but also very timely as we look to gaming as a metaphor for compelling user experience of all types. Playsh is a command line interface that uses text adventure (e.g. MUD) metaphors as an interface for roaming the Internet and manipulating data. What’s potentially powerful about Playsh is its ability to recast data and URIs in metaphors and language tailored to a user, and more importantly, have their actions persist in the environment to affect other users.
• Brian Dear, When Do We Get the Events We Want
  Brian unveiled EVDB’s latest feature and it’s very interesting: a demand feature. This gives users the option to specify the events they’d like to see, rather than simply responding to the events put in front of them. Imagine the benefit for an indie rock band: they could plan a whole tour based on the stated demand in various cities across the country, avoiding costly bookings where there was no interest. Very cool.
• Tom Coates, Native to a Web of Data: Designing a Part of the Aggregate Web
  This was one of my favorite presentations, in part thanks to Tom’s cogent and comic delivery, but mostly because his ideas are so well-baked. Open data, or whatever we want to call it, is a particular focus of mine these days, and Tom’s prescription is on-the-money.Money line: “We’re moving from a web of Web pages connected by links, to a Web of data sources connected by APIs.” I couldn’t agree more– thus my excitement about scrAPIs. To get the meat of it all, read the notes or listen to the podcast of the similar presentation he did at London’s Future of Web Apps conference.
• Danah Boyd, G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide
  Danah’s talk was surprisingly practical, with many tips for building and maintaining a thriving online community. The most compelling aspect of the presentation, however, was the section on how language is incredibly nuanced for any given community. Beyond jargon and slang, a single word such as the “N” word can have multiple contradictory meanings that can be misunderstood. This poses challenges to online community managers as they seek to maintain high standards and non-threatening environments.Important research, though I have the feeling it’s just the tip of the iceberg.