Posts from March 2006

The "Feedization" Of The Text User Interface

Most blogs are multi-column (two or three) web pages with a single column of posts organized in chronological order.

Most feeds are delivered the same way minus the extra columns.

This is a technique taken (at least from my vantage point) from the news feeds and other information feeds of the financial markets.

We used to call it a bulletin board system.

Not we call it a blog or a feed.

Most people who have grown up designing magazines or newspapers probably look at this user interface and think of it as ugly and boring.

But I think its super efficient (like the single search field on google.com).

And I think we’ll see two trends, at least in online publishing.

– more and more text oriented content will be organized in this manner

– feeds and blogs will look more and more alike.  there will come a time when you are reading a feed in a reader and you will think you are reading the blog in a browser.

I am not sure whether the feeds wil move more toward the blog style or the blogs will move more toward the feed style, but I feel pretty strongly that we’ll see the two start to merge in the coming year or two.

I have always felt that function wins out over form in mediums where such things can be measured.

#VC & Technology

Blogging Pays In Strange and Mysterious Ways

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Although I run advertising on my blog and feed, I’ve always felt that the big payoff from blogging comes in other less direct ways.  For me, the big payoff is the discussion which I gain from in so many ways it’s going to take too long to list them.

But yesterday, I got some payoff in another way which was just as great.  A longtime blog reader named Howard Lindzon who regularly comments on my posts realized I was in Phoenix for a couple days with my family and offered me two tickets to see the Suns play last night.

Josh and I went, we saw a good game, although Nash and Marion weren’t at their best, and we had a wonderful time.  And I got to meet a long time blog reader and commenter to boot.

What a great night!

#VC & Technology

Writing For The Response

I’ve never been a writer and never plan to be.  I write a lot on this blog but I don’t consider it writing.

Bob Lefsetz made a passing comment in a story he told on his blog today that got my attention.

Bob said:

So this man in the queue at the bathroom haughtily says I must be a
lawyer.  I told him I was once.  But that was long ago.  And now that I
was a writer.  And I lived for the responses.  It wasn’t a chore to
check my Blackberry, but often a key to excitement.

What Bob is referring to (I think) is the excitement of getting an email notifying you of a comment or trackback to your post.

And that is what writing in the new two way medium is all about.

Writing for the response.

#VC & Technology

Google Finance

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I’ve basically been offline all week.  I’ve been skiing with my family in Sun Valley and most of the posts on the blog this week were written on the plane and pre-scheduled.  That allowed me to take the week off and it was a good break.

So I am catching up on the week that was today and one thing that happened was Google Finance.  I have been a heavy user of Yahoo! Finance for over ten years.  It was and is one of the best things about the web for me.  There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t use Yahoo! Finance at least two or three times.  I know the service like the back of my hand and can get basically any information I need on public compnies with it.

So when I read that Google released a competitive service, I was eager to check it out.  And I did this morning.  You know what? Google Finance is better.  Not a lot better, but better.

First and foremost, as you’d expect, Google nailed the search function.  It’s about time that someone let you type in a company name and get the result you want.  The idea that you have to search for the ticker first and then do a ticker search is so 1980s technology that I could never understand how that lasted so long on the Internet.

Now that Google has shown the world the way to do this, I sure hope Yahoo! and everyone else follows quickly.

Second, I love the fact that blog postings on the company are co-mingled with news and other information.  That is a big deal and its about time someone realized that blogs are breaking news on companies as quickly or more quickly than anyone else.

Apparently the feed support is also great in Google Finance, I haven’t tried it but maybe I will do that later.

Bottom line, I am going to start using both side by side for the next couple months.  I suspect I am going to like Google Finance better.  I hope Yahoo! quickly imitates the best features because its always hard to leave a service that has been so good to me for so long.

I’ve now read most of the posts on this topic and the one that really got me was Jeremy Zawodny’s post on how Yahoo! let finance stagnate. It is so hard for companies to continue to invest in market leading platforms.  The temptation is so strong to invest in new stuff and leave well enough alone.  But in this case, that seems to have been a mistake.  I sure hope Yahoo! can rectify it quickly.

#VC & Technology

Nuggets

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As I go through the process of pulling albums out of my collection and throwing them out to all of you, I regularly think to myself, "this one should have been in the top 50" and this week’s pick is no exception.

The violent femmes came blasting onto the scene the year the gotham gal and I graduated from college. That would be 1983 to be exact.

Their debut self titled record is a classic and every single song on it is a must listen.

I was reminded of their brillance this week by tapes ‘n tapes’ cowbell.

Gordon Gano’s angst ridden alt-rock vocal style has been copied by many bands over the years, but any post on the Violent Femmes would be remiss if it didn’t mention the Violent Femmes debt to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and Jonathan Richman, both favorites of mine as well.

I am fairly sure than many late 30s/early 40s readers will be familiar with this record and will share my love of it.

For those of you too young to have this record in your collection/library, I can only encourage you to get it.

Immediately.

#My Music

The Freemium Business Model

I wrote a post last weekend called My Favorite Business Model.  I posted it earlier today. Here is how I described the business model:

Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not,
acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth,
referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium
priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to
your customer base.

At the end of the post I asked for some suggestions of what I should call this business model. I’ve gotten 33 comments already which may make this the most commented post I’ve ever written, surely its the most commented post in the first day I’ve ever written.

And at the risk of calling the game before it’s over, I have to go with Freemium.  I love the name, suggested by Jarid Lukin of the Flatiron portfolio company Alacra.

So from here on in, I will refer to this business model as the freemium business model.  I hope the name sticks because I love it.

#VC & Technology

Looking Ahead

Keshava left this comment to my VC Cliche of the Week post yesterday on getting "ahead of the curve":

So where do you look to get inspiration to stay ahead of the curve?

Well this blog is a big part of that as are other blogs, delicious tags, and a host of other resources on the web.  I just wrote a post on the Union Square Ventures weblog about the process of looking ahead and how we plan to be as open about it as we know how in the hopes that we’ll get a lot back from all of you.

In other words, the best way to look ahead is to do it collaboratively with the community.

#VC & Technology

My Favorite Business Model

Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

Examples:

Skype – basic in network voice is free, out of network calling is a premium service

Flickr – a handful of pictures a month is free, heavy users convert to Pro

Trillian – the basic service is free, but there is paid version that is full featured

Newsgator – the web reader is free. If you want to synch with outlook and your mobile phone, that’s a paid service

Box.net – you get 1gb of virtual storage for free, but you have to pay for more than that

Webroot – you can get a free spyware scan, but for full protection you need to pay

This business model has been around for a long time.  Shareware always used a model like this and there are many successful software companies that have been built with this model.

It works even better with web native services.  A customer is only a click away and if you can convert them without forcing them into a price/value decision you can build a customer base fairly rapidly and efficiently.  It is important that you require as little as possible in the initial customer acquisition process.  Asking for a credit card even though you won’t charge anything to it is not a good idea. Even forced registration is a bad idea.  You’ll want to do some of this sort of thing once you’ve acquired the customer but not in the initial interaction.

Don’t require any downloads to start.  Don’t require plugins.  Support every browser with any material market share. Make sure your service works on various flavors of Windows, OSX, and Linux.  In short, eliminate all barriers to the initial customer acquisition.

And make sure that whatever the customer gets day one for free, they are always going to get for free.  Nothing is more irritating to a potential customer than a “bait and switch” or a retrade of the value proposition.

The best examples of this business model are when the customer implicitly understands why the paid service has to cost money.  More storage costs for photos or virtual storage are good examples. Termination costs on other carriers networks in the Skype model are another.  When it is just additional features that don’t carry an incremental cost to offer, it may be harder to convert free users to paid users. But if your free service is loved and you do a good job articulating the value that comes with the paid service, you can convert to paying users with good results.

I would like to have a name for this business model.  We’ve got words like subscription, ad supported, license, and ASP, that are well understood.  Do we have a word for this business model?  If so, I don’t know it.

#VC & Technology