Posts from 2009

I use a lot of music web services but I don't like to invest in this sector. Nonetheless, it's an area that I spend a lot of time thinking about. I've written endlessly on this blog about the music web services I use, why I use them, and where I think the music web is going.

The most interesting music web service to me has been audioscrobbler (aka last.fm). I'm not all that interested in last.fm as a social network, but I am obsessed with it's value as a data asset. I report all my music listens to last.fm via the audioscrobbler technology and it has built a deep data asset on my musical listening habits (and therefore musical taste). Since October 2005, I've recorded 60,168 song listens with audioscrobbler. That's roughly 40 listens per day. Sounds like a lot, right? Well we listen to music all the time in our house and we've had audioscrobbler on our Sonos for the past year or so.

There are a bunch of music web services I use that leverage the power of the audioscrobbler data via the last.fm api. So I show up at a new music web service and it can instantly know what I like to listen to by simply asking me for my last.fm user name and password. It's like magic. I love it.

The developer of audioscrobbler is a guy named Richard Jones (aka RJ) who built it while he was in college. He merged it into last.fm and became the CTO.

Well RJ is back to building interesting new web music stuff and his new thing is called Playdar. And like audioscrobbler, I think this could be a powerful foundational platform technology for the music web.

Playdar is a "music content resolver" platform. You put the Playdar software on all the machines you have with music on them. And then Playdar makes it so that you can play your music via the web whenever and wherever you want. This is not the first effort to do this sort of thing, but it is the first time this has been done as an open source platform.

This is an important distinction. Like audioscrobber was the foundational technology for last.fm and many other music web services, Playdar can and will be the same.

The Playdar ecosystem is just getting going but there are already some interesting demos. I like Toby Padilla's Playgrub which turns web pages into playlists. I also like James Wheare's Playlick which turns last.fm accounts into playlists.

Open platforms and ecosystems are powerful and the music web needs more of them. I am excited to see where Playdar goes. I'll be following it closely and if you are into web music, you should too.

Our portfolio company Covestor is looking for a VP Product and a head of marketing. Both positions are in New York City.

Covestor has created an entirely new form of investment product – people powered investing. With Covestor you don't buy stocks and you don't buy funds. You "follow investors" with your capital. I've been investing this way since the summer and it's a very interesting new way to manage your money.

These two job openings are opportunities to help define this new form of investing, from the product side and the messaging side. 

If you are looking for a new challenge and the opportunity to change the game in an important industry, then these positions might just be the thing for you. If you want to learn more, click on the links at the top of this post and if you want to send in your resume, email it to jobs1009 [at] covestor.com.

I saw this tweet from Charlie O'Donnell yesterday:

LinkedIn pulled avatars of @laughingsquid @fredwilson @hunterwalk and me down. Isn't our "professionalism" for our networks to judge?

It's true. Here's my LinkedIn profile this morning:

My avatar is gone, taken down.

That's unfortunate. I'm with Charlie on this one. I think we should be able to determine what we want to use to represent ourselves professionally within reason (no porn, no emotionally disturbing images, etc).

In my case, the "AVC avatar" has become my online brand and I use it everywhere other than the usv.com website where we've opted to go with a consistent presentation across all of the professionals in our firm.

The good news is that Linked In seems to be aware of the issue. I got this tweet last night from their community person.

@fredwilson I hear you. lmk talk to our CS teams abt the profile pic issue. feel free to DM me if you've q's…

So hopefully they'll change their minds and let those of us who choose to use our online brands on Linked In have them back on our profiles. Stay tuned.

I went down to city hall yesterday to participate in a hearing on net neutrality. I realize the NYC city council has no oversight on this issue but the lobbyists were coming out in force so I figured I might as well show up too.

They were live streaming the event. My testimony is about 26 minutes into that stream.

But this post is not about net neutrality. It's about an issue that came up during the questioning. A councilmember mentioned the idea that we should help infrastructure providers protect their businesses.

I am all in favor of the survival instinct in the marketplace. All companies should be executing strategies that will result in their survival.

But the idea that government should "protect businesses" seems very dangerous to me. Businesses come and go. Jobs come and go. Products and services come and go. That's the way of capitalism.

Our government stepped in and protected a bunch of businesses during the financial crisis. Examples are Citibank, AIG, and General Motors. In a time of financial panic, government does have a role of restoring confidence and we can argue whether those actions were necessary or not to do that.

But the financial panic is long gone. We still have big economic issues in this country and it would be a mistake for our government to continue to protect businesses and jobs now that markets are functioning again.

If the telcos and cable companies can't run profitable businesses without government protections, then I think we should let them go under and allow entrepreneurs to pick up their assets and make them work instead.

I also believe that government should be fostering a lot of competition in the access business. That was the idea of the telcom reform act. But it hasn't played out that way. We have an ever increasing consolidation of power in the access business. Just like we had in the banking and brokerage business. This is not good.

I could go on and on about this issue but I'll stop here and let the discussion start in the comments. I'll be in there with you.

 I saw this tweet when I got up this morning:

hey @fredwilson – whats the story behind ur avatar?

While longtime readers know it, I figure many of you don't. So here it goes.

Starting about four years ago, Howard Lindzon started commenting actively on this blog. He was funny, he was smart, and I enjoyed our banter in the comments.

One march vacation, our family made a short stop in Phoenix, where Howard used to live. He emailed me and offered my son and me two tickets to the Suns game. We took him up on that and that's how we met for the first time.

It turned out Howard was hatching an idea for a web show for investors. Think Rocketboom meets Jim Cramer. I told him it was a good idea and encouraged him to do it. Howard would fire ideas at me and I would give him feedback on them.

Out of that came Wallstrip. Here's a post I wrote a little over three years ago announcing the launch of Wallstrip.

One of the original ideas for the show that never really worked out was that there would be a dozen well known bloggers who would write short posts about each daily show. Howard asked me to do that and I agree to do it at least once a week.

So that's how the avatar came to be. Howard asked his friend Jenny Ignaszewski to draw up avatars for all dozen of the stock bloggers using photos of them that were available on the web. The first time I saw my avatar was when Wallstrip launched and there it was along with Howard's and a bunch of others.

From the minute I saw it, I liked it. It uses my favorite color (green) as the backdrop and the eye color (my eyes are sometimes blue and sometimes green and sometimes something else). It looks like me, but not too much.

So I began to use it a bit here and there around the web as I set up new profiles. But by no means was it the only profile picture I used. For corporate oriented services like LinkedIn, I'd use my Union Square Ventures headshot. For social nets like Facebook, I'd use a regular headshot. I used a photo of me taking a photo on Flickr for a long time.

But then I started to realize that the Wallstrip avatar was becoming my online identity. People would comment about it all the time. Around the time we sold Wallstrip, Howard asked Jenny to do a real painting of it which I now have in my office at Union Square Ventures. It's a real conversation starter.

Sometime in early 2008, I just decided to go with it everywhere. It's at the top of this blog and everywhere else I have an online identity. It's my online brand now.

Like this blog, this was not planned. It just happened. That's the way most of the important things in my life have come to be.

I generally take a quick run through audience stats every morning. I saw this chart and thought "hmm, big day yesterday, why is that?"

So I went to google analytics, which confirmed the big day.

And then I went to the makeup of the traffic:

Like most big days on AVC, it was referring traffic that caused the bump. Search and direct traffic are very consistent at about 2,500 visits per day. But referring traffic can be as little as 1,000 visits on a slow day or as much as 5,000 visits or more on a big day. Yesterday was such a day.

Here's where it came from yesterday:

The twitter traffic is probably undercounted because so many of the twitter click thrus are coming from twitter clients that register as direct traffic. The bit.ly stats on my post yesterday say that there were close to 1,200 clicks on that link from the twitter ecosystem. So that means google analytics is undercounting my twitter traffic by about 75%.

The traffic from avc.blogs.com is direct traffic coming from the old URL that this blog ran on.

But regardless of all that, yesterday's big day was largely a Hacker News event. Hacker News runs on news.ycombinator.com and has been an increasingly large source of traffic for this blog in recent months.

This blog used to get a lot of traffic from TechMeme but since labor day, Hacker News has sent 5x the traffic that TechMeme has sent. I believe that is because TechMeme is largely focused on large professional blog networks and mainstream media whereas Hacker News is peer produced and links out to small blogs like this one all the time.

In any case, yesterday was a big day and like most big days it was because others linked out to a post on this blog. That's how the web works and it's always useful to get your head around where the traffic is coming from and going on the pages you control on the web.

I was explaining how I go about finding deals yesterday to a friend of mine and I thought I ought to explain it to everyone.

I write this blog. It's like a broadcast channel of "what is interesting to me." I market it every way I know how and I get somewhere between 70k to 100k unique readers of it every month between web, rss, and mobile.

As a result, I figure entrepreneurs and others have a pretty good idea of what I want to see and what I don't. And I believe they can self select. And for the most part, they do a great job of that.

Given that dynamic, I take meetings, as many as I can. I went back over my calendar for the past few weeks and it seems that on average I take ten meetings a day. I don't filter my calendar that much to be honest. I try to meet with as many people as I can.

I know that if I filtered my calendar more carefully, I'd get a better successful meeting ratio. But instead of spending time on vetting meetings, I spend time taking them.

So maybe I have a 70% success rate, seven good meetings per day, three bad ones.

If I spent a considerable part of my day reading business plans, referencing people on the way in, I might be able to take five or six meetings. But even if they were all successful, I'd still get less successful meetings that day.

So I don't bother too much about vetting meetings. I just take them as much as I can.

That's how I do it. Thought you should know.

After our weekly team meeting yesterday afternoon, I hopped into a cab to the far west side of manhattan to attend the Business of APIs conference. In the cab, I opened socialscope on my blackberry to check into twitter and saw this tweet from my partner Albert:

Love APIs — so excited about @foursquare's announcement http://bit.ly/1Zswju

As I sat down with Quentin Hardy to talk about APIs, I wasn't sure where the conversation would go. Fortunately Quentin is a good interviewer and we had a great chat.

We talked a bit about the foursquare api, and I mentioned that I am most excited about cool games that can get built on top of foursquare, like mob zombie.

We talked about what is a real api, and I seconded our friend Joshua Schachter's assertion that a read-only api is not an api. I believe apis should allow full read/write access and the ideal api in my mind totally replicates the web app's functionality.

That led us to Twitter naturally and I stated that the thing I want most from the Twitter api is sign up via the api. I realize that there are reasons why that hasn't happened yet, but I feel that Twitter has led the web world in providing full access to its application and sign up is a key feature that third party developers could do great things with.

Quentin seized the opportunity to pounce on the monetization question and I stated my belief that the best way to monetize apis is to "send money with the api". I talked everyone through my Business Model Jujutsu post and ended with this line from Paul Forster, CEO of Indeed:

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

We also talked about "api failures". I said that there are two kinds of api failures that I've noticed. The first is when the web app itself is not very popular and therefore developers aren't compelled to build to its api. That is not an issue with the api itself. The second is when the web app itself is very popular but the api is not so much. Usually the issue in this situation is the api is too restrictive and doesn't allow developers to do enough with it. I mentioned the Etsy api, which is read only, as an example of this situation. Fortunately, Chad Dickerson of Etsy, had preceded me at the event by a few hours and talked about how Etsy is taking their api to the next level by offering both read and write.

That's about all I can remember about the talk with Quentin. It was a good one. APIs are such an important topic. I'm surprised there aren't more events about them. I'd like to thank Mashery for putting this one on. And I'll leave you with a blackberry photo I took of the view from the event yesterday evening. That alone was worth the trip to the far west side.

Back in the early days of web video, it wasn't clear who would win the competition for video upload to the web. There was YouTube, Vimeo, and the big dog was Google Video. I tried all of them. YouTube was by far and away the best experience.

Google Video required you to wait for days to see the video you uploaded. It was so annoying that I wrote this post exactly four years ago today (how's that for a coincidence?). This line sort of sums it up:

Posting stuff to the Internet has to be instantaneous.  What if wrote
this post on Tyeppad and it took me 10 minutes to see the result?  What
if I posted a photo to Flickr and it took a day to see it?

I was reminded of that post when I was reading Bijan's post on mobile apps this morning. Bijan makes the same point about developers and the iPhone app store:

Developers are getting extremely frustrated with the Apple App Store
(understatement). I’m hearing it can take developers 4 weeks to get an
update released. That’s dysfunctional.

The argument Apple makes about approving every app is similar to the argument Google made about approving every video. They want to make sure only quality stuff gets into their service. And I suppose it is even more important when we are talking about software running on your phone.

I'm not going to argue with the logic of those points of view, but I'll make this observation. Instant gratification is a very powerful force, for both consumers and developers. The web is full of success stories that have embraced the power of instant gratification and also full of failures that made people wait too long.