Posts from May 2008

So much of the news in the tech world this morning is about old news, Yahoo!, CNET, Plaxo. I suggest you ignore all of that and focus on what went on last night in San Jose at the annual Churchill Club Dinner. Some of the smartest minds in the venture capital business got up on stage and talked about the future. I have admired Vinod Khosla, Roger McNamee, Steve Jurvetson, Joe Schoendorf, and Josh Kopelman for years. These are people who spend their day looking forward, never backward.

Although I am on the west coast right now, I was not there. But fortunately, Tech Trader Daily has a long blog post with the key takeaways from the evening. Here are some of my favorites.

Vinod Knosla:  The mobile phone will be a mainstream personal computer.
With built in projector. Authentication. Credit cards on SIM cards. ID
cards, passports, drivers licenses. Any information you need.

Jurvetson says the trends are already playing out, other than the
projector piece, particularly in Europe, where cell phones are 8% of
credit card payments

Josh Kopelman: The rise of the “implicit” Internet.
Today your permanent record exists; you create a trail of data exhaust,
digital bread crumbs. Implicit data that exists in silence. Movie
rentals, restaurant reservations, books purchased, Web sites visited,
etc. All of this data existed in silence. No easy way until now to
benefit from the data; but the silos are coming down.

“Privacy is a red herring,” Khosla says.

Roger McNamee – You can not make a great consumer product with unbundled operating system. [this one is interesting to me. i believe open source software like Android is going to prove him wrong]

From Joe Schoendorf: Water tech will replace global warming as a global priority.

Jurvetson: Evolution trumps design… Evolutionary algorithms are a
powerful alternative to traditional design, blossoming first in neural
networks and now in microbial engineering. Near-term trend: year or
two, components of microbial engineering products will involve some
form of evolution. Design for evolution.  Most
of the panel seem to have no idea what Jurvetson was talking about,
really. [i can’t say I do either, but I think Steve’s on to something big here]

Most of the talk was about mobile and technology as an answer to the looming problems of the world. The former is obvious, that’s the next big thing. The latter is gratifying since I believe markets and the flow of capital to fund important innovation is the best way to solve the world’s problems.

First, let me say that I am not sure about the utility of video comments. I’ve seen them and even viewed them on Techcrunch and I think they slow down and break up the conversation more than they contribute to it. But I also firmly believe in trying everything at least once before making up my mind.

So with that proviso behind me, the news this morning is that Disqus, the comment system I use on this blog and the company that my firm, Union Square Ventures, has invested in, has teamed up with Seesmic to offer video comments. They are live on this blog and also on Scripting News where I left a comment just now.

So here we go.

Please let me know what you think in the comments and if you have the time and inclination to leave a video comment please do that. I’ll do all my replies to this post in video.

UPDATE: I take back my promise to leave only video comments to this post. I think this discussion is a good one and I’ll be running around all day in meetings here in Palo Alto and I’ll want to do the email reply thing.

NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) has been pumping out amazing people into the NYC tech scene (and the worldwide tech scene) for almost 20 years now. I think ITP is one of the things that makes NY’s tech/web community what it is. It’s a combination of art/design/technology/media and it’s a special place that turns out special people who do special things.

Every spring they do a "spring show" that gives each student an opportunity to present their work to the public. It last for two days and is open to the public from 5pm to 9pm. Last night was the first night and tonight is the last night. It’s at 721 Broadway at Broadway and Waverly.

I try to go every year because it’s such an awesome experience that fills me with pride and optimism. Pride because I am proud to belong to such a great technology scene that combines art and technology in such incredible ways. And optimism because these projects are going to be the basis for companies in the coming years.

John Geraci’s FoundCity at the 2005 ITP Spring Show blew me away and I played with it for weeks. That work certainly led in part to Geraci’s and Steven Johnson’s Outside.in, which is a USV portfolio companiy.

I am pretty sure that a number of our other portfolio companies have roots at ITP, it’s gotten to the point that ITP has pretty much infected all of NY’s tech companies. And that’s a good thing.

Not only are the students at ITP terrific, so is the faculty, including our friend Clay Shirky who was there last night in a suite and tie. Never seen that look from Clay before!

I took Josh with me last night for two reasons. First I knew he’d love it and he did. And second, his computer programming teacher Pravin was there showing off his work. Here’s a cool shot of his art study on the words Mumbai and Bombay created with a 3D printer.

Here are some more photos of Pravin’s magic with the 3D printer.

Make Magazine had a photgrapher there last night and he’s got all of his photos up on Flickr now. If you can’t make it to the show, spend a few minutes browsing these photos. I suspect you’ll be enchanted and amazed as we all were last night.

Longtime readers know how much value this blog has gotten out of mybloglog (now owned by Yahoo!).

I’ve had the mybloglog faceroll widget on this blog for several years and there are 2,613 members in the AVC community on mybloglog. You can see the faceroll widget on the left siedbar just a little bit below the fold.

Today, Google has announced a service called Friend Connect. I spent a bit of time looking at Friend Connect this morning and this screen shot was the one I found most interesting.

I’ll have to play around with Friend Connect and understand how it fits between mybloglog and ning and other things that it reminds me of. At first blush, I am not entirely sure what I’d use it for. Suggestions?

My daughter Emily was passed down the iPhone I bought when it first came out. It didn’t work for me so I gave it to her. That phone developed a small crack in the screen last fall but she kept using it. The crack got worse, propagated, and yesterday she dropped it again.

Now it’s shattered, it’s brains have been battered, splattered all over manhattan. Sorry about that, just couldn’t resist a little Stones lyrics fun.

So I asked her if she wanted another iPhone. Surprisingly, the answer was no.

She wants the new crimson red Blackberry Curve.

Fortunately, it looks like I can get an unlocked one on eBay for between $100 and $200.

I wonder what this says? I realize it’s a sample size of one, but I’ve heard that a bunch of her friends have also given up their iPhones in search of a better texting device which seems to be the one feature they value most.

Happy Mothers Day to all moms out there, particularly my wife the superhero known as Gotham Gal and my mom who reads this blog religiously so I know she’ll read this post.

Tom Friedman has an oped piece in the Times today titled Call Your Mother. It’s about his mom who passed away this past year at the age of 89. He ends it with the following line:

So on this Mother’s Day, if you take one thing away from this column, take this: Call your mother.

I sure wish I could call mine.

After reading that how could you not call your mom? I’ll be making my call this morning once I am sure she’s up.

The photo that anchors this post was taken by my oldest daughter Jessica who contributed it and two other of her works for a charity art show called Art Action that is running this weekend at 7 Mercer Street here in NYC. We visited the show yesterday.

I wanted to buy something to contribute to the causes that the show is supporting and decided to purchase the photo that anchors this post for my mom as a mother’s day gift. It’s called Lava Rock and it reminds me of my mom. Happy mother’s day mom.

First, I’d like to be perfectly clear that our firm, Union Square Ventures, is an investor in Disqus. So I am clearly biased about what I am about to say. Second, I’d like to point out that the reason we made the investment is largely based on my experience as a Disqus user for the past 10 months and the result it has had on my blog/community. Sometimes seeing is believing and it certainly was in this case.

So, with that disclosure out of the way, here are three reasons I think every blogger, certainly every serious blogger, should consider switching to Disqus.

1) Threaded discussions – When you want to leave a comment that is actually a reply to someone else’s comment, you click on the reply link and the comment/reply is indented right under the original comment. On any comment thread/discussion with a lot of action, this is absolutely necessary to make sense of the discussion. I am shocked that a popular blog like Techcrunch doesn’t have this feature in its comments. Certainly it’s possible for commenters to use an @sign to signify a comment that is actually a reply, but threaded discussion is so much better.

2a) Email Replies – Disqus emails every comment to the blogger. If the blogger wants to reply to the comment, he/she simply replies to the email and it is posted as a reply (with the indent described above). This feature, which I requested the day I met/saw Disqus for the first time, is the single best thing about Disqus and has transformed my blog comments because I can now participate in them in real time throughout the day as the conversation develops. This is a BIG DEAL.

2b) Email Replies for Commenters – It works the same way for commenters. If you leave a comment in Disqus and have given Disqus your email address, you will get an email when anyone replies to your comment. You can reply to that just like the blogger can. This is also a big deal and leads to much more active commenting and replying – ie discussion.

3) Shared profiles. As more and more blogs add Disqus (over 10,000 at this point), the profiles that commenters create in Disqus are shared across blogs. This is an important network effect that benefits the blogger and his/her community. For example, if you have a blog that is read by a similar audience as my blog, and you add Disqus to your blog, most of my commenters will already be recognized by Disqus the first time they show up in your comments. They don’t need to set up a new profile. They”ll have the same avatar/icon and identity.

There are literally a dozen more reasons why Disqus is great (this guy lists 25 of them), and maybe you all will add them in the comments, but these are the big three.

Since I converted from TypePad comments to Disqus last August, the number of comments I regularly get have gone up by a factor of at least five and maybe ten. It seems that each week I have a post that gets over 100 comments (not this past week though). That never used to happen. And the discussions in the comments have improved dramatically.

If you want to give Disqus a try, go here.

Update: Here’s a fourth reason, courtesy of flipbrad. There’s a greasmonkey script that brings disqus comments and commenting right into Google Reader. You can get it here.

I am fond of saying that what happened in the US in the second half of the 20th century will take place in much of the rest of the world in the first half of the 21st century. The end result will be vastly more geographic balance of wealth and prosperity than we had at the beginning of this millennium.

Today, in a NY Times article on Toyota (TM)’s annual profit guidance to wall street, I came across this comment by Toyota’s President Katsuaki Watanabe:

“Our profit structure has become more geographically balanced, with
growing contributions from resource-rich countries and emerging
countries”

The Times goes on to say:

Toyota, now in a dead heat with G.M. to be the world’s largest car
company, said most of its recent profit growth had come in new markets
like Brazil, China and Russia. It said the growth helped offset
sluggish sales in the United States, traditionally Toyota’s largest and
most profitable market, and other mature economies like Europe and
Japan.

This is consistent with comments I heard at the hedge fund event I attended on wednesday. The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and the middle east, are quickly attaining economic purchasing power parity with the United States and Western Europe.

I may have to amend the statement I started this post off with. It looks like it may not take 50 years for the balancing to occur. It’s likely to happen in the first 25 years of this century.

I went to an event yesterday that featured a number of people active in the hedge fund industry and the financial markets. Here is the series of twitters I sent during that event.

  Headed to the semi annual meeting of a hedge fund of funds. Expect to get some insights and will twitter them

  Observation: great hedge fund managers have come out of goldman, tiger, and michael price’s firm

  Has the financial system crisis run its course? Most likely yes if banks and the fed keep doing what they are doing

  Has housing in the US bottomed? Maybe not, but the bottom is nearing. Watch for change in expectations, not prices

  What about the US economy? A tale of two cities. Not like past recessions.

  Inflation? Watch out, its here and more is on its way driven by massive global liquidity of capital

  Regional banks: look for a wave of regional bank failures. Fed won’t bail them out

  To clarify that string of tweets and what follows: these are opinions I am hearing at a hedge fund event

Systemic risk is largely gone from the
markets but economy risk remains. Market knows how to price the latter
but not the former

  @tweetipFH oil (and food) prices are creating big problems in parts of the economy

Hedge fund manager singing the praises of
aapl. He’s right of course. But his framework is based on the world as
it exists right now

  Had to leave the hedge fund event. I hope you enjoyed the twitters