Posts from VC & Technology

I don’t like the term silicon alley and never have. It’s a wannabe term. And the internet/tech scene in NYC doesn’t need to be like silicon valley. We’ve got a pretty interesting community developing here. Just this year, we’ve seen Doubleclick, Right Media, and TACODA become the objects of affection from the big guys. Twelve of Union Square Ventures’ fifteen portfolio companies are headquartered in the NY metro area. There’s a lot of good stuff happening right here in the Big Apple.

So that’s a long way of saying that I don’t like the name of the NYC’s version of Valleywag, called Silicon Alley Insider. The comparisons to Valleywag only go so far. To date, The Insider (that’s what I am going to call it) has not delved into the private lives of the people in the NY venture/startup scene. It leans toward the kind of analysis that its editor Henry Blodget did when he was in the investment research business. Just this week, we’ve gotten an analysis of the economics of the iPhone price cut and another analysis of the video streaming business.

Just like I read @NY and SAR back in the 90s, I read The Insider religiously. They’ve got the blog format down. The posts are short and get to the point quickly. It’s largely news and linking out to other stories, many of which I’ve already read elsewhere, but every once in a while they’ll post on something I don’t know about.

And they are building an audience quickly. The Insider already gets more traffic than this blog.

It’s good to have a "paper of record" for a community and The Insider is likely to be it for the NY venture/startup community. I particularly like what they are doing with Twitter. They’ve build something they call Community Twitter, but I think of as the Community Water Cooler. If you are in the NY venture/startup scene and use Twitter, you can add your Twitter posts to this page. It’s a nice way to keep track of what’s going on around town at any given time. It looks like this:

I have two suggestions for Henry and his colleagues. First, I’d like to see the posts by reverse chronological order, not grouped by the person making the post. Second, I’d like to subscribe to the whole page via a RSS feed.

Let’s make this our community water cooler. If you work in the NY venture/startup world and use Twitter, join this page and let’s start talking to each other.

  The Finals Of The Wallstrip Blackberry Shootout II 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

Today was the return of the blackberry shootout. I was gunning for a finals rematch with Bijan. Blackberry vs. iPhone. I would have killed him.

It didn’t happen because I lost in a semi-finals tiebreak. You’ll have to wait for the Wallstrip video to see the whole thing. All I can say is I would have won the finals in about a nanosecond.

More coverage and photos are at Alley Insider.

Consumerist has the news about a bill being co-sponsored by Jay Rockefeller and Amy Klobuchar that will require the FCC to "report to Congress on the harmful and anti-competitive practice of locking handsets".

Hell they should just make it illegal. The FCC doesn’t need to study anything to know that locking handsets is screwing over the customers.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." – Charles Darwin

Read this at Bob Lefsetz’ blog.

At Gnomedex, there was a well publicized spat between Jason Calacanis and Dave Winer. I followed the whole thing and felt badly for both of them as neither was being understood by the other very well. But there was one point in the middle of the mess that was very important and got kind of glossed over.

Winer said in his original post:

Bottom-line, he needs to figure out a way to build the company so that
many others can profit from it. Otherwise I don’t think it has a prayer
against Google, which we like less and less as a company, but who
basically offers an equitable proposition to the users of the Internet,
who the Gnomedex crowd represent in a loose kind of way.

Jason responded in his retort:

I’ve never looked at Mahalo as a platform, but rather a product. I
understand Dave’s interest is in things he can manipulate and play with
it. He does fun things with Flickr and Twitter all the time, and I feel
him on that. However, who said Mahalo was closed? So far we’ve had
people create Facebook applications, widgets, and Firefox extensions
for Mahalo, and Dave is certainly welcome to do that. We publish a
bunch of RSS feeds already, and more are on the way. ….

However,
I’ll take the blame. We have not published an official API yet,
although it’s in the works, and also we haven’t released a friendly
copyright policy–although we’re figuring it out.

I do not believe you can build a product in this day and age without focusing on the platform requirements. All the best products are platforms in their own right; Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc, etc

I wrote a couple days ago:

The [twitter] API has >10x the traffic of twitter.com. That’s a great stat and
I’d like to find other companies that have that metric working for them.

I don’t think you can build a very good business just trying to build a platform. Look at YouTube vs Bright Cove. Bright Cove has built an amazing video publishing system for the web. But if you use them to publish your video, you don’t get an instant audience. YouTube has a so-so video publishing system, nothing near as robust as Bright Cove. But you get millions of potential viewers instantly when you publish via YouTube.

And I don’t think you can build a great product without being a platform. Facebook wouldn’t have Scrabulous, Texas Holdem, iLike, Top Friends, and many other good apps without being a platform. You cannot build everything even if you want to. And when you let others build cool stuff on top of your product/platform, you give back to the Internet.

Which is the point that Dave was trying to make. Google is such an amazing business because as much as it takes from the Internet (close to $15bn/year at current run rate), it gives more back. Every single business that operates on the Internet gets value out of Google. Now I think Google could be a lot more generous with its API and if anyone is going to "beat" Google, they are going to do it with a more open platform, one that gives even more back than Google.

When we look at web businesses to invest in, we think hard about the API. What could it be used for? What new services could it open up? When the API is even more exciting than the .com, that’s a big deal to me.

My Facebook profile isn’t a bad start if you want to know what’s going on in my world. My twitter updates are in my mini feed. My blog posts are in the mini feed as notes. I’ve got a last.fm widget on there so you can see what I’ve been listening to lately. I’ve got my delicious links on there too.

It’s a good start, but it’s not exactly what I’d choose if I could create my own mini feed which I am working on and plan to launch shortly.

Yesterday I saw Eric Marcoullier’s version of a "roll your own mini feed". He used feed widgets from Grazr and put a mybloglog faceroll at the bottom (Eric is one of the founders of mybloglog). Here’s what it looks like:

I love SnapnDrag and use it every day to screenshot something.

But lately, I’ve wanted my screenshots to go below the fold.

Maybe there’s a way to get SnapnDrag to do that.

If not, is there a screen capturing tool I should be using to do that?

Biz Stone talks about Twitter on Read/Write Talk. Although there’s a podcast you can listen to, there’s also a full transcription. I love it when podcasters do that.

My favorite part is about the API:

Biz Stone: Yeah. The API has been arguably the most
important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve
done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service
very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top
of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than
our ideas, and build things like Twitterrific, which is just a
beautiful elegant way to use Twitter that we wouldn’t have been able to
get to, being a very small team.So, the API which has easily 10 times
more traffic than the website, has been really very important to us.
We’ve seen some amazing work built on top of it from tiny little mobile
applications like an SMS timer that just allows you to set a reminder
over SMS to call your mom or something like that, to more elaborate
visual recreations of Twitter like twittervision.com which shows an
animated map of the world and what everyone’s doing around the world
with Twitter. Twitter is popping up from Spain and Japan and United
States.And that’s very, sort of like, “Look at that!” It’s like staring
at a fish bowl or something – an aquarium. You just find yourself
getting lost in it. The API has really been a big success for us, and
it’s something that we want to continue to focus our efforts on,
looking forward.

I also like this advice to entrepreneurs:

Something we learned when we were working with Odeo was that we weren’t
as inspired as we should have been when we worked at Odeo. We weren’t
really super into podcasting. I think that was a problem because at the
event that we were working on something…where our passion is 100%. I
think that ends up showing up in everything that you end up doing.So
with Twitter, it was something that we created from scratch and we were
super enthusiastic about it. We were using it. Like I said, we were
literally giggling when we first started working. We just really
enjoyed it and loved it. From that point, it translates to everything
you do. It translates with management and it translates to coding.It
translates to just sending out…I send out an email every couple of
weeks or I try to, to the folks who have signed up on Twitter. And I
love sending out email. I love sending “Here’s what we’ve been working
on and here’s what’s new and stuff.”

The API has >10x the traffic of twitter.com. That’s a great stat and I’d like to find other companies that have that metric working for them.

I talked several weeks ago about the FPhone, the mobile phone that I’d build if I could.

Now my partner Brad has weighed in on the Union Square Ventures blog with the Bug that he’s going to build when Bug Labs launches later this year. It’s not a phone. It’s a device to make biking around the boroughs of New York City more interesting. He’s wanted it for years. And now he’s going to make it.

As both posts point out, there are some of us who will never be satisfied with the products brought to market by the large consumer electronics companies. We want something different for which there is no mainstream market for. On the web today, we simply build it. And sometimes it turns out that lots of others wanted it to. We hope that Bug can unleash that kind of world in consumer electronics. We’ll see. But at a minimum, Brad’s going to get his BradBug.