Posts from VC & Technology

I wrote a post a week ago talking about products that become platforms.

I started it off with a discussion about the Mahalo/Gnomedex thing. That was a mistake. It clouded the point I was trying to make. And that point is that the best products become platforms at some point. And things that start out as platforms have a hard time becoming products.

The other day I stumbled upon SquidWho. SquidWho is one of a number people search engines that are cropping up. Other notable "people search engines" include WikiYou, WInk, and of course LinkedIn and Wikipedia can be used for searching people.

What’s more interesting to me about SquidWho is what it represents. It’s an application built on top of Squidoo, the service that let’s people make webpages about things they are passionate about. Squidoo is kind of like a truly peer produced About.com. And despite some recent controversy about Squidoo being spammed up, it’s a fairly popular service.

Squidoo is one of the 500 most popular websites according to Alexa. comScore says Squidoo has over 4mm unique visitors per month worldwide. Squidoo has excellent search engine optimization so the pages you create in it get indexed highly in Google.

That’s a good place to start when you want to build a web app. Like a mini version of Facebook, Squidoo is a platform because it has eyeballs and unlike Facebook, it has great google juice.

According to Seth Godin, the founder of Squidoo, SquidWho was built in five weeks from initial idea to launch. And they have a bunch more of these "apps" coming. What’s next? I sure hope they open up the Squidoo platform to web developers so thousands of apps can be built on top of Squidoo. That’s how a product becomes a platform.

I like to think that this isn’t needed because we all know what’s confidential (the pitches I get every day) and what is not (a twitter or a blog post), but Seth is right. There are gray areas. So just put NFYB in the message and then it’s clear. Thanks Seth.

Some people have accused me of wearing my investments on my sleeve. But that doesn’t hold a candle to Dave Morgan and Rich Levandov who are getting the TACODA logo tattoo’d on their bodies somewhere.

Robert Buderi has the whole story on the Xconomy blog.

From Lefsetz:

Mr. Jobs is on the brink of a Q rating meltdown.

Oh,
he hasn’t changed. Not much. But suddenly, all his wisdom and all his
talent have resulted in Apple being top dog. And EVERYBODY shoots for
the top dog.

Stunningly, Jobs isn’t even aware of the coming
backlash. As evidenced by his failure to foresee the early adopter
reaction to the iPhone price drop.

There have to be fewer
special events. Steve’s got to do some press where he laughs at
himself. The record labels and movie studios and TV networks have done
SUCH a good job of depicting him as a tyrant that some of it is now
sticking. Steve’s RIGHT! But right isn’t everything.

Steve has
always walked a fine line between the industry and the fan. But now,
it’s getting him in trouble. He’s isolated, he’s alone, out in the
desert.

In order to win in the twenty first century, first and
foremost you have to be aligned with the public. The Tommy Mottola
decade is over. It’s not about your flashy life and power, if you
believe that, you’ve watched too much "Cribs". It’s about being honest
and delivering for the public at large, with your cash and power being
mere BYPRODUCTS!

Buying tunes from Starbucks via Wi-Fi on your
iPod Touch? That doesn’t get my hormones going. How about a
subscription that can verify via Wi-Fi, i.e. when you enter Starbucks?
How about more music for less money? How about further illustrating
you’re in OUR world, not THEIRS!

In a case of better late than never, outside.in has added search. It’s on the upper right on the home page.

It really opens up the service. So much of the value of outside.in is buried beneath the start page. My favorite part of outside.in are the place pages that host all the blog discussions about a specific place. This morning I searched for Pier 40 and got this Pier 40 place page. Which is a great summary of the current debate about the development plans for the "central park" of lower Manhattan.

Check out your favorite place in outside.in by searching for it. You might learn something.

I don’t know if this is against the law, but if it is, I would be happy to join a class action suit against AT&T.

Last night I tried to activate the iPhone that I recieved as a gift with a pre-paid plan. A plan that I am sure tens of thousands of people have on their iPhones. The iTunes system would not allow me to activate. I got a message that said:

Additional information required to activate your iPhone

Please call AT&T at 877-800-3701 to complete your activation.

Refer to your Activation ID when calling

It was late when I got to that point, so I called AT&T this morning. I talked to a very nice customer service rep who told me that I could not get an iPhone without giving them my social security number. I told her that I was a tech blogger and just wanted to test the iPhone, review it, and then give it as a gift and I had no need or desire to sign a 2 year contract. She told me there was nothing she could do. So I asked for a manager.

After about five minutes, the manager got on the line. I repeated my case, asked him to authorize a prepaid plan for my phone. He said he could not do so. That it was AT&T policy to only issue pre-paid plans to people with valid social security numbers who fail a credit check.

So there it is. You cannot get a prepaid plan from AT&T unless you are a deadbeat. That’s discrimination in my book. And I suspect its illegal at some level.

I will never, ever, use an AT&T service again.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post about my friend Al Warms’ new web service called Buzztracker.

In that post I said:

For all of you who like to use buzztrackers like Techmeme and Tailrank
comes a new service that may blow out the category to a much wider
audience.

I was also critical of the service:

But there are some shortcomings to the buzztracker service. First, I
think it lacks the feed density it needs. if you compare the techmeme front page and the buzztracker tech front page,
you’ll see that techmeme does a better job with that category. Of
course, you’d expect that to be the case since techmeme has been around
for a while and buzztracker is just launching. But it’s even true on
the music page where buzztracker music is missing almost all of the top hypemachine music blogs.
I spent some time trying to find a place to suggest a new feed and
categorize it for them and it wasn’t anywhere I could see it.

Al and his team addressed most of my issues pretty quickly and the service has gotten much better. So much better that Yahoo! has acquired it and made Al its GM of News. Kara Swisher has the scoop on her blog.

Truth be told, I still get my tech news from Techmeme and I care less about the other categories in Buzztracker so I don’t visit it that often. But now that Yahoo! has bought it, and will likely promote it heavily on its news pages (I would assume they’ll integrate the buzztracker technology into their news pages), I am sure that this category is going mainstream. And that’s a good thing because there’s a sea of information out there and we need new tools to manage it.

Most of all, I’d like to congratulate Al and his team on a nice deal (they bootstrapped the whole thing) and I look forward to working with Al in his new role as GM of News. They could not have found a better person for that job. Here’s Al’s take on the transation and his new role.

I just installed my first adobe air-based application. It’s called Snitter and its a new Twitter client. At first blush, it does a few things that Twitterific doesn’t do and I think I like it better.

But this isn’t a post about snitter or twitter. It’s a post about Adobe’s AIR, which is an "integrated runtime".

The neat thing about building an app on top of AIR is that it instantly runs on windows and mac. True cross platform development

That in and of itself isn’t new but building an app on AIR is like building an app in Flash and/or HTML/Ajax. In theory, if you have a web app that you’ve built in Flash or HTML/Ajax, it should be a snap to write it on AIR and launch it as a desktop app.

There are a couple other efforts to do this, including Google Gears, the Parakey effort that Facebook acquired recently, and something from Microsoft (i think). Google Gears is potentially the most interesting because it includes persistent storage which is nice. Imagine being able to do gmail as a desktop app when you are not connected to the web (airplanes, etc). That’s a dream of mine for years and it’s going to come true soon.

So here’s the issues as I see them. If you want to install an AIR based app, you first need to download and install the AIR runtime. I did that yesterday and it was simple, but that’s a problem because most computers don’t have AIR on them and many people won’t want to take that extra step. It would be great if AIR came with Flash because most computers have Flash on them at this point.

So if you are a developer, you have to think twice about developing to AIR. And then there are going to be two or three more of these "web runtimes" out there. Do you need to support all of them in the short run? Probably yes, if you want to get the most adoption that you can.

Ultimately one platform, maybe two, will win out. Flash has won that place for rich media on the web. That doesn’t mean that AIR will win too. My guess is that Google has the best position at this time because if they launch versions of their web apps as gears-based desktop apps, they’ll get a lot of adoption that others can ride on top of.

Nevertheless, this is an interesting area to watch develop.

Yesterday, I suggested that The Insider make some changes to their community water cooler. When I went there this morning, the changes had been made.

Thanks everyone at The Insider. If you work in the NY tech/startup scene and if you Twitter, you should join this page.