Posts from October 2009

We have an open source database company in our portfolio. The company is called 10gen and the database is called MongoDB. This is a fairly techie subject and the pros and cons of data stores is not a topic I broach very often on this blog.

But MongoDB is worth talking about. As 10gen's marketing says, MongoDB contains "The best features of document databases, key/values stores, and RDBMSes in one".

MongoDB was built by some of the former engineers who scaled Doubleclick to be the largest ad server in the world. In the process they found out that traditional relational databases presented some hard scaling challenges and the experience left them asking if there was a better way. MongoDB is their "better way".

And now MongoDB is available as a hosted web service. So if you want to play around a bit with MongoDB and see if it's a good choice for you next web project, just go to MongoHQ and request a beta invite.

If you do that, I'd love to hear what you think. Either in the comments or via email if you prefer.

Nothing has made my email productivity increase quite like adding the "send and archive" button via the "Labs" tab in Gmail settings. I got to zero inbox for the first time in years last night during the Jets-Dolphins game because I've become fanatical about archiving my email. My inbox is full again this morning but I am confident that I can keep my email under control with this new routine.

But I'd love for Google to add another function in Gmail: send and delete. I don't want to archive every email. I want to delete many of them. So the combo of send and delete and send and archive would make my gmail usage even more productive.

I realize that many people could care less about stuff like this. But when you receive hundreds of non-spam, non-newslettter, non-notification emails a day that demand replies, every second matters.

I'm hoping someone out there works on the gmail team. If you do, please help me by adding a send and delete button. I'll thank you and so will a lot of your power users.

Note: I realize that keyboard shortcuts are the ultimate solution here. I'm getting there with them, but I still think adding a send and delete button to gmail would help a lot of people, me included.

Second Note: I want to thank Kortina for tipping me off about send and archive via Twitter last week. I've received dozens of great gmail tips on Twitter and thanks to everyone for that.

Over the past couple years, many of the best movies I've seen have been made outside of the US. "Foreign films" are nothing new and they have been standard fare for a long time at indie movie theaters like The Film Forum here in NYC.

But I think we are witnessing something more profound. As big swaths of the world modernize and gain large populations who have the time and the means to enjoy films, we will see more and better films come from outside of the US. We are already seeing it.

What that means is we'll need a better way to do subtitles. And we need to look no further than wikipedia and the world of open source to see the future of subtitles.

Last night, The Gotham Gal and I decided we wanted to have a quiet night at home. She made dinner and I downloaded Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo). The Gotham Gal had read the book by Steig Larsson and had really enjoyed it along with The Girl Who Played With Fire. A commenter on her blog let her know they had made a film in Sweden out of the dragon tattoo book and she asked me to set it up on Boxee. So that's what I did.

The film is in swedish and the download I got did not have english subtitles. But fortunately Boxee supports Open Subtitles. If you are streaming or watching a downloaded video in Boxee, you can simply ask for subtitles and Boxee goes out and fetches them from opensubtitles.org.

You can also do this with the VLC player. When you load a file into VLC, you can check the box to load a subtitle file. You can get the subtitle file (a .srt file) from opensubtitles.org or a number of other subtitle services on the internet. Sometimes you need to play around with the delay parameter to get the syncing right, but it works well.

The larger point I am making here is that by open sourcing subtitles, we are making it easier to watch films and other forms of video that are made in other languages. People in Israel can watch TV shows and films made in the US in hebrew subtitles. People in the US can watch TV shows and films made in India in english subtitles. The possibilities go on and on. We don't need to wait for the producers of the films to release them in foreign languages (if they ever choose to do so). We can simply get the footage we want to watch and find a subtitle for it on the Internet.

The open subtitle market today is focused on popular films and TV shows, but there is no reason why it won't eventually grow to support everything from last night's Jon Stewart show to a viral video on YouTube. As the tools get easier to create .srt files and the various video players start to support them, the possibilities are endless. And the world will get just a little bit smaller as a result.

Jason Calacanis has taken on a new cause, outing angel groups that charge entrepreneurs to pitch. I agree with Jason that any angel group that charges an entrepreneur to pitch should be avoided. It suggests to me that the group is more about making money on pitch fees than investing.

I've also seen "startup fundraising agents" out there that charge entrepreneurs upfront cash to make intros to potential investors. They should also be avoided. A basic rule of thumb for fundraising agents is that they must work on a success fee basis or you should not use them. Otherwise, they have no incentive to see you actually get funded.

Both the agent groups and startup agents that want to charge upfront cash make the argument that it is a quality filter. But that is nonsense. Some of the best startups I've ever seen were totally broke and living and working in a friend's apartment. And some of the worst were well off and working in fancy offices. The ability of a startup to pay has absolutely nothing with the quality of the team and the idea.

Like any other sector, the startup sector has its share of scams and scam artists. I think it is great that Jason is outing them.

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• It is ridiculous startups have to pay to pitch (scobleizer.com)
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I heard something this past week that stuck with me all the way to the weekend. To the life of me, I can’t remember who said it but at least I remember what was said:

The three current big megatrends in the web/tech sector are mobile, social, and real-time.

I like to think of this as the golden triangle. You can build interesting businesses in each of these three sectors. The iPhone is the poster child of mobile. Facebook is the poster child of social. Twitter is the poster child of real-time.

But it is what happens inside the golden triangle that is really interesting to me. What if you build a service that is mobile, social, and real-time? Well that’s a big opportunity folks and I’ve been seeing quite a few entrepreneurs doing exactly that. It is an exciting time.

The big moment in the history of TACODA (a company we invested in early this decade that was sold to AOL in 2007) was when they went from charging customers to paying customers.

I was reminded of that yesterday when Paul Forster, the CEO of Indeed, said this at our portfolio summit yesterday:

We tried charging for our API without much success.  Then we paid developers to use it and it took off.

It is such an interesting move to make on the market. In the case of TACODA, they initially built a powerful behavioral targeting solution for publishers to segment their audiences and sell them to advertisers. They sold the technology to about twenty large online publishers. But the sales cycles were long and the license fees were smaller than they needed them to be.

So TACODA built an ad sales force and said to publishers, give us your inventory and we'll send you back money. That was a much easier sell all around and the business took off.

In the case of Indeed, they initially offered online publishers the ability to pay for a real time search API of online jobs. Not many took them up on that offer. But when they injected their sponsored jobs into the API and offered to share the revenue with publishers, the demand was huge.

Not every company that has an API can do this jujutsu move on the market, but many can and should. It makes life much easier.

Just want to say thank to everyone who gave to Donors Choose yesterday. That was quite a response to my post. About 80 of us contributed about $6700 in total to Donors Choose in the past 24 hours. Wow.

If you want to join us, click here.

Eight days into the blogger's challenge, we have contributed a total of $856, including a contribution by me of $100. That's roughly $100/day and at that rate we'll contribute a total of $3000 which is way less than the past two years when we raised roughly $18,000 each time.

I'm not sure what is wrong but something sure is. I'm going to make another $100 donation this morning and I hope you will all take a few minutes to do the same.

Here are a few reasons why you should consider it:

1) You can use PayPal and do the whole thing in less than one minute from clicking this link.

2) If you've never contributed to Donors Choose, you should give it a try because the experience is so awesome, especially the thank yous you get. Click this link and see what I mean.

3) This is one of the ways I get "paid" for showing up here every day and sharing my thoughts and experiences. I don't think the quality has gone down by 6x this year.

4) Everyone who contributes gets an invite to a meetup I am doing in NYC in November. Given the number of contributors so far (ten not including me), it will be an intimate affair. Click on this link if you want to come to that.

I'm done begging and cajoling. Let's see if this changes anything.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced yesterday that New York City was joining the open government movement with a challenge to developers to build apps using open government data.

The challenge is called BigApps (a take on "Big Apple" in case anyone missed that). It will be run by NYC startup ChallengePost. Here's how it works:

Developers compete to build apps "in keeping with New York City's drive to become more transparent, accessible, and accountable and an easier place to live, work and play"

Prizes:

$ 20,000 in cash prizes.

Plus lunch with Mayor Bloomberg and tons of public appreciation.

Here's the timeline:

Competition Submission Period Begins:
5:00pm EST October 6, 2009

Competition Submission Period Ends:
5:00pm EST December 8, 2009

Public Voting Period Begins:
12:00pm EST December 15, 2009

Public Voting Period Ends:
5:00pm EST January 7, 2010

Judging Period:
December 15, 2009 – January 7, 2010

Awards Ceremony:
TBD date in January 2010

And here is the judging panel:

• Dawn Barber (NY Tech Meetup)
• John Borthwick (Betaworks)
• Jason Calacanis (Mahalo)
• Paul Cosgrave (NYC Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications)
• Esther Dyson (EDVentures)
• Lawrence Lenihan (FirstMark Capital)
• Kevin Ryan (Gilt Groupe)
• Danny Schultz (DFJ Gotham Ventures)
• Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures)

I'm excited to be part of this. I've written about the opportunity to use the web and open data to redefine and reinvent government, particularly local government. This is just the start of an important movement.

If you are a developer who wants to compete, click here and get started.

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• Read Write Web on BigApps
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