Posts from August 2006

One of the best experiences I have ever had on an airplane was last winter’s flight to tokyo where I had a wifi internet connection all the way to tokyo

It cost me $27 for the entire flight and it was worth twice that price

Well today I read that boeing is going to discontinue the connexion service that I used on that flight to tokyo

That is a bummer because it was an amazing service. Apparently not many people used it.

I find that shocking and have no idea why people wouldn’t want to take advantage of such a great service

I did read that airbus is going ahead with its internet service so maybe boeing’s loss will be airbus’ gain

Won’t be the first time.

I heard Steely Dan on WEHM yesterday morning and decided to make it a Steely Dan all vinyl afternoon. I started with Gaucho, then put on Aja, then Pretzel Logic, then Katy Lied (a top 50 pick), then Royal Scam, and I finished with Countdown to Ecstasy. We don’t own Can’t Buy A Thrill. It was a great afternoon.

I still agree with the Katy Lied top 50 pick, but Pretzel Logic is a damn good record too. The guitar solo on Night By Night woke me up from my Steely Dan dream and I started paying attention to this record for the first time in a while. Not sure who plays that solo, probably Skunk Baxter, but it sure does rock.

But it’s the middle of this record (or the end of the A side and the start of the B side) that I really love. Barrytown is classic Steely Dan, and Parkers Band and Pretzel Logic are fantastic.

Pretzel Logic is the highlight of the record for me. I love the way the song starts, the groove, the beat, the way the guitar comes in and out, and the totally cool lyrics.

So if you are a Steely Dan fan, dust off that old vinyl record and put on Pretzel Logic. You’ll be glad you did.

As Brad explains in this post on the Union Square Ventures weblog, we’ve hired a new analyst at Union Square Ventures. His name is Andrew Parker and he blogs at The Gong Show.

We’ve gone from This Is Going To Be Big to The Gong Show. Not sure what to make of that.

But we are thrilled to have Andrew on board and so is he.

I’d like to personally thank everyone who came in and talked to us about this job and everyone who responded to the job post on the Union Square Ventures weblog. We met a bunch of really talented and energetic young people in this process. If you are looking to hire a smart young net native, shoot me an email. I’ve got a lead on a bunch of them.

I’ve gotten a great reaction to my Business Development 2.0 post this morning. It’s something we’ve been talking about in our office for the past six months as Charlie points out on his blog but for some reason I never blogged it. I was emailing wtih Caterina and she laid out the exact same thesis and I wrote back, "I’ve got to blog this". She did it and now we’ve got this great conversation happening. You have to love blogs when they work.

But the best part is the comments are coming in fast and furious and they are really good. But this one from Cameron adds an important insight to the conversation:

Fred, your comments are right on in terms of 2.0 as a tool for BD,
but you stopped short of saying what that means to the role of BD.
Nothing has changed. The BD guy has always been the guy who sees how
two companies can play together. Today’s smart (good) BD guy simply
works more with his in-house API guru and less with his Rolodex. Love
your blog…

Posted by: Cameron | Aug 17, 2006 12:57:44 PM

One more thing on this business development 2.0 meme. Charlie has created a bizdev2.0 tag on delicious. If you are interested in keeping the conversation going, please add anything else you find on this topic to the tag.

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  Originally uploaded by Andrew & Nicole.

It used to be that web companies needed to hire one or more smart networkers and set them loose on all the other web companies in search of deals that bring traffic, users, additional functionality, revenue, and a host of other good things. Most of our companies have business development people and they are some of the most talented people in our companies.

But we have witnessed some interesting things happening in and around open apis, rss, search, crawling, embed code, widgets and mashups that suggests there’s a new way to do business development. Here are but a few of the interesting things we have noticed:

• YouTube makes it flash video player available via embed code on MySpace and their traffic takes off.
• TripAdvisor search engine optimizes its service and becomes one of the most popular travel services.
• Technorati hits delicious’ api for its tags and builds the web’s most succesful tag search service.
• Indeed crawls the Internet for jobs and builds a popular job service overnight.
• Kayak crawls the Internet for flights, hotes, and cars, and builds a popular travel service overnight.
• Qoop takes Flickr’s API and builds a Flickr printing service without ever engaging with Flickr’s team.
• Netvibes takes a few RSS feeds and builds a start page that looks as complete as MyYahoo overnight.

You get the picture. These days it’s often better to just take what’s already freely available on the Internet to integrate with other web services. As Caternina explains in this post, the Flickr team didn’t really have enough time to focus on the multitude of companies wanting to offer a printing service. Qoop just built one and when Flickr looked at it, it was an easy decision to offer it to their customers.

We have noticed another thing happening. When you do get a business development deal with a leading web service, the implementation is everything and it often sucks. Witness the job search space. Indeed has a deal with the NY Times. SimplyHired has a deal with MySpace. I’ve looked at the media metrix numbers and neither jobs service (NY Times and MySpace) is delivering any real usage (0.1% of myspace users visit careers.myspace.com which is SimplyHired’s myspace service). Think of the time and energy that went into these deals. And to get 0.1% of the users to take up a service is so deflating. I think it might have been better to do some creative advertising deal that could have gotten done much quicker and might have delivered better results.

The bottom line is that web 2.0 offers a new way to get integration with leading web services and you don’t have to waste your time and the time of other busy people trying to craft deals that will probably work out badly anyway. As Caterina says, "Much, much better this way!"

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  Originally uploaded by powermostro.

A couple years ago I went out and bought a cheap dell desktop and connected it to my home stereo. I wanted to play Rhapsody through my home music system. It was pretty simple. Audio out on the dell into audio 2 on the amp.

Over time I have added music resources to that Dell. iTunes, last.fm, hype machine, napster, yahoo music, mp3 blogs, etc, etc.

When I first did that, the PC was maybe 10% of the airtime on the home stereo. It competed with the CD player, the turntable, the casette deck, the radio.

Today it’s close to 90% of the airtime on the home stereo. It does more, its flexible, I can add services to it, I can customize it, I can download software to it, I can run the web on it.

So the next thing I have to do is connect a PC to my flat panel TV. I used to think I was going to use a media center PC for that. But why would I want to do that?

All I need to do is connect a mac mini, which costs all of $600, to my flat panel. I can buy TV shows on iTunes and watch them. I can subscribe to TV shows with an RSS feed and watch them. I can subscribe to videos tagged with the world "funny" in delicious and watch them. I can go to YouTube and watch stuff. With Front Row and the Apple Remote, the mac mini can easily be a living room appliance.

To start, it’s going to be like it was with my audio PC. It will get used about 10% of the time. The set top box will get 90% of the airtime to start.

But mark my word. Within two years, the airtime will be reversed and the mac mini will be getting 90% of the airtime.

But of course I am a geek. I know how to do this stuff. What Steve Jobs needs to do is outfit a mac mini with the software that does this out of the box. Make it as easy to use a mac mini as a set top box compliment/replacement as it is to use an iPod out of the box.

It’s trivial really. It’s all there for the taking. A few UI tweaks, a few icons on the dock, a few deals with the cable channels, and he’s good to go.

What’s the over/under on the number of months until he does this?

It’s another Bliss McCrum cliche this week. When I was starting out in the venture business Bliss and his partner Milton used to take me along with them to board meetings. And I recall leaving a board meeting with Bliss and he said to me "watch what he does, not what he says".

This is another way of saying the classic cliche that actions speak louder than words. But Bliss meant something more. He meant that when managing someone, you need to pay attention to what they do, not what they say.

I’ve been in a board meeting where the CEO presented a plan to increase sales headcount to increase sales. At the next board meeting, there were less salespeople working for the company than the month before.

I’ve had situations where the entrepreneur said that they were willing to consider a sale of the company to a buyer who had expressed an interest only to find out later that the entrepreneur threw out such a ridiculous number in the meeting with the buyer that the buyer walked away. Clearly the entrepreneur didn’t really want to sell the business at that time to that buyer.

My point is not that management are liars. It’s that people often say things that are not a true reflection of what they want to do. People tell you what they think you want to hear.

But if you focus on what people actually do, you will get a sense of what they want to do, where they want to go, etc. And then you can use that as the basis for a conversation about alignment of interests.

There is more than one way to build a business, make money, etc. I have seen success happen so many different ways that I do not believe that there is one right way. So if management wants to do things their way, I am inclined to try to work with them on it. But you have to figure out what their real plans are. And the best way to do that is to watch what they do, not what they say.

"Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part…"

This is true, of course, unless your goal is to make the person happy, or, at the very least, get rid of them. There were all sorts of clueless people at the airport today, cutting lines, yelling, getting angry just because they didn’t leave enough time. Not the airline’s fault, that’s for sure.

Yet the best way to handle the situation is not to persuade, convince or bully the person into admitting that they were wrong. No reason to teach these people a lesson, because they’re not going to learn a lesson anyway.

Classic Seth Godin. Thanks Seth.

Saul Hansell wrote an interesting story in today’s NY Times where he highlighted some of the targeting technologies that companies like Yahoo!, Google, and our portfolio company TACODA are using to deliver more relvant ads to consumers online.

But he couldn’t stop himself (or maybe his editor couldn’t stop themself) from mentioning the outing of search queries by AOL last week and other privacy horror stories.

I said my piece on this issue last week and today Jeff Jarvis weighs in too.

Yes companies need to have privacy policies. And yes they need to adhere to them. And yes, they shouldn’t be making public people’s search queries. And yes, consumers should be able to easily opt out of these targeting approaches.

But cookies and stored search queries are good things. They make it possible for web services to deliver relevancy in advertising, something no other media has been able to deliver efficiently and reliably.

The reality is that these targeting approaches, whether they be searched based, behavioral, contextual, or whatever is next, are giving us more relevant ads. Ads will be content if this continues. You’ll be planning a trip to mexico this winter and you’ll get ads for places to stay. You’ll be thinking about getting a new car and you’ll be getting images of all of your options when you check the weather in the morning.

And that is a good thing. A very good thing.