Posts from April 2006

I have been investing in email companies since the mid 1990s and in feed related companies for the past several years.  I believe that both are important ways to deliver content.  Over time, I believe feeds are going to be a better way to deliver commercial messages because the consumer has control over the delivery with feeds and the mailer has control over the delivery with email.

But feeds are too hard for the mainstream user to use right now.  Enter "feeds to email" services.

From the day I started this blog, I knew that I had to offer an email delivery service. I started with Bloglet and moved onto Feedblitz in August of last year.  Feedblitz has been great and really is a true feed to email service.

Today, Feedburner, a Union Square Ventures portfolio company, launched it’s own feed to email service.  Michael Arrington has the whole story on TechCrunch.

What I like most about Feedburner’s launch of this new service is that they are continuing to support Feedblitz and Squeet in their publicize page on even footing with their own feed to email service.  They are letting their customers choose what feed to email service they want to use instead of forcing them to use Feedburner for this feature.

That’s the way to do it.  Let the customer choose.  For now, I am sticking with Feedblitz.  That may change, but not today.

Feedburner is a great company, they deliver a great service to commerical publishers and bloggers, but more importantly they get how to work with others and that is a very important trait.

TypePad launched CAPTCHAs yesterday afternoon.

This is the best news I’ve had all month and it’s been a month of really good news.

I have been moderating the comments on my blog for months to rid the comments pages of spam.

Now, with CAPTCHAs, I don’t have to do that anymore.

When you comment on this blog, you’ll get a preview of the comment and be asked to fill out a field with some letters and numbers that are shown graphically.

So the conversation goes back to real time, I gain a bunch of wasted time back, and life is good.

Thank you TypePad!!!

Return Path, which is a Flatiron portfolio company, is on a tear right now with it’s "spring cleaning".

Just yesterday, I blogged about the launch of their groundbreaking reputation database for commercial mailers called Sender Score Reputation Monitor.

Then yesterday Return Path announced that they had completely rebuilt their Bonded Sender whitelist service around the Sender Score database and were relaunching it as Sender Score Certified.

Long time readers of this blog may remember my outraged post in response to AOL’s Goodmail announcement.  It wasn’t the idea of a paid stamps program that irritated me so much (although clearly it has irritated many people), it was the idea that AOL was exclusively adopting one approach to whitelisting while walking away from what I believe is a better way.  AOL changed it’s tune pretty quickly on the exclusivity thing and I’ve been quiet about that issue since.

I believe that reputation can be measured on the Internet if you take the time and energy to do it right.  In the case of who is a spammer and who is not, Return Path has built a very important service.  Sender Score measures over 60 data points on over 50 million email addresses. They have built a vast database on commercial mailers and have scored every single one of them and will update that score over time to reflect current behavior.

So it’s a smart move to use that Sender Score data to power a whitelist.  And that is what Sender Score Certified is. There are other aspects to it, including accredidation services by TRUSTe, SpamCop complaint data, and several others, but the big deal is the Sender Score data and the ability to whitelist commercial mailers based on their observed behavior over time.

Paid stamps might be a good idea, we will see.  But I believe Sender Score Certified and the reputation data that powers it will be a better approach. I am betting on it.

I heard a venture capital cliche today that I have never heard before.

A friend and fellow VC asked the following question about a potential hire, "does he have the clock speed we need?"

I liked it the moment I heard it.  Of course, its geek speak.  Clock speed is the rate at which a computer performs its basic operations.  It’s the speed of the CPU.  You might buy a computer with an Intel Pentium running at 3 GHz, that’s the clock speed of the chip.

So clock speed refers to someone’s ability to keep pace with the intellectual pace of an organization. And in many startups, that’s a pretty fast pace.  Decisions get made in real time and implemented almost as quickly.

I have seen many really solid, talented people fail miserably in startups because they just can’t operate at the required pace.  They don’t have the required clock speed.

When you build a system, it’s critical that the parts of that system all operate on the same frequency.  Otherwise, you get traffic jams.  And traffic jams are death in startups.

So make sure you know the clock speed of your organization and hire people who operate at that pace.

I blogged this past weekend that the Shake Shack needs to give us a webcam to monitor the line.

I just realized that I was not alone in asking for this.  Gothamist asked for the same thing on Monday of this week.

And yesterday Gothamist posted this email from a woman who works for Danny Meyer:

Thanks for your interest in the Shake Shack. I work for Union Square
Hospitality Group and just noticed your blurb suggesting a web cam. I
wanted to give you the heads up that we have purchased a web cam for
our website, www.shakeshacknyc.com,
and we expect this to be live on our site by Monday. It will display a
new still shot of the line every 15 seconds. Let me know if you have
any questions.

Awesome news.  They are listening (and reading blogs). Cool.

Now they need to double the size of the place to meet the demand they’ve created with their incredible burgers and shakes.

David Porter wrote a post about music discovery and linked to me.  David was one of the most articulate bloggers in the interesting discussion that evolved out of my pandora vs last.fm post from earlier this year.

In David’s post, he says:

This is why "programmed" radio-style listening is important. Of course,
beyond music discovery, there can be value to music-based radio, in
that people can hear music they own or already know about but just
couldn’t recall top-of-mind to play or acquire. But it is music
discovery that can differentiate a great radio experience from simply
putting all or a subset of one’s existing music collection on shuffle.

Jim Griffin, in his comment to my post on How I Like My Radio Delivered says:

The iPod doesn’t compete well. For me, pull can’t compete with good
push. I like the community megaphone, the shared experience and fact
set. I don’t need Channel Me; I adore Channel We.

Clearly there is a role for radio going forward. We are not all going to listen exclusively to our music collections on our iPods and laptops. But it’s going to be delivered in many ways.  I like CBS Radio’s new tagline:

Broadcast, On Demand, Streaming, HD Radio

It shows that they (like many of the major radio station operators) realize its their programming that matters and they need to support whatever delivery channel the customer wants to use to get it.

But back to my current Internet radio binge.  It’s not discovery that I am after so much.  It’s that excitement you feel inside when the first couple seconds of the next song comes on and you realize its an old or new favorite of yours.  That’s what keeps me listening to radio, and there is a ton of good radio out there, and the Internet lets you get at it regardless of where you are.

I’ve written a fair amount about contextual advertising (adsense, yahoo publisher network, etc) and behavioral advertising (tacoda).

Contextual advertising is when the ads are targeted against specific content.

Behavioral advertising is when the ads are targeted against a specific person who has exhibited a certain behavior.

Contextual advertising is content-based advertising.

Behavioral advertising is people-based advertising.

They are both effective and I believe they result in more relevant advertising which benefits the consumer.

I also believe that we are just seeing the beginning of how powerful these targeting techniques can be.

One of the things that needs to be considered with both techniques is where the ads are placed.

If an ad is being targeted against specific content/context, it should be placed near/in the content that is providing the targeting and it should stay connected to the content as it gets mashed up, syndicated, etc.

If the ad is being targeted against specific behavior, it should not be placed near/in specific content, it should be associated more closely with the environment in which the person is consuming the content.

Which leads me to blog posts.  I have been running adsense and yahoo publisher network on this blog for a while.  These ads are in the right sidebar. I’ve had them near the top, above the fold, and currently below the fold. They are in a tower that usually has three or four ads in it.  And its never clear which ads are being targeted against which blog posts.  I think that is very sub-optimal.

I much prefer the way the ads are displayed in my feed at the end of the post.  The ads in my feed are not particularly targeted at this time, but they can be and they should be.  If I write a post about the new Flaming Lips record, then there should be an ad for that record at the end of my post.  If I write a post about Adsense, there should be an ad for Adsense at the end of my post.

And if my posts end up somewhere else as a result of being resyndicated, then the ads should stay with them and remain in context. The ads should be as much a part of the post as the permalink, the comment link, and the date.

What if there were a database of commercial email senders which published a score (like a credit score) that was based on how well they complied with best practices?

Return Path launched just that last week and its called the Sender Score Reputation Monitor.  It’s a reputation service for commercial mailers.

Return Path is collecting over 60 data points on over 50 million mailboxes. Data points include unsubscribe compliance, complaint rates, unkown user rates, security practices, and identity stability.

Return Path provides this sender score to ISPs who use it to filter mail and they provide it to commercial mailers who want to improve their reputations.

The entire Return Path suite of deliverability services has been renamed Sender Score to emphasize Return Path’s reliance on reputation as the primary way to manage deliverability issues.

If you are a commercial mailer and want to know your Sender Score Reputation, contact Return Path and while you are at it, you should ask about the other Sender Score services.

I haven’t posted much on the IRS regulations (called 409a) that are forcing most of our portoflio companies to spend time, energy, and money getting third party valuations done of their common stock to ensure that their employees don’t end up with tax liabilities.

Brad Feld is the "axe" on this issue having posted on it no less than 14 times so far.  So if you feel like you need to get up to speed on this issue, you should read his posts.

We’ve taken the safe route and the vast majority of our portfolio companies have hired third party valuation consultants to determine the fair market value of the common stock which is the price the options get struck at to insure that there are no tax liabilities for the employee upon issuance.

And guess what?  Most of the valuations that have come in so far have been lower than the fair market values previously determined by the companies and their boards.  It’s counterintuitive but when you think about it the boards have erred on the side of being conservative and the consultants are working for the companies and trying to please them.

So the IRS has handed a gift to the companies and their employees in the form of lower strike prices. Thanks, we’ll take it.

Chalk it up to another case of regulators seeing a problem where none existed and actually creating one in an effort to fix the non-problem.