Posts from Web/Tech

Google has announced they have made a change to their algorithms to include valid DMCA takedown requests as a negative signal in their search results. I believe this is a step in the right direction and I am pleased to see Google do this.

It's hard to argue that the Internet can regulate itself when content owners point to Google search results that show blatant copyright violators on the first page and fully licensed services buried four pages down. So Google is addressing that. That's a good thing.

But I think we can do more. In the world of spam and malware, there are third party services that provide whitelists and blacklists that are used by various services and platforms to help them keep their services clean. I would like to see this approach extended to copyright.

It would be best if a competitive marketplace developed for copyright whitelists and blacklists. The list providers would use signals like number of valid takedown notices and a host of other data points, ideally provided by the marketplace of services and platforms, to produce real time lists of what services are fully compliant (whitelist), what services are blatantly violating copyright (blacklist), and everyone else (greylist).

Being on the greylist would not hamper a new service from entering the market. All new services built by three engineers in a loft would start out on the greylists. But over time they could get onto the whitelists by properly respecting copyright in their service. Whitelisted content services would benefit in the same way that whitelisted services benefit in the word of email.

Google effectively runs their own whitelists and blacklists in their email business and in their search business. But if there were truly independent and competitive providers of whitelists and blacklists for copyright, the entire market could do this sort of thing. And ideally Google would participate by providing data to these third parties and using the third party lists in their algorithms.

When I think about solving thorny problems like copyright, I like to look at how the Internet has solved similar problems and think about how these approaches can be extended to solve new problems. Whitelists and blacklists have been very effective in areas like spam and malware and I think they would be a great approach to address the copyright issues as long as they are built and managed by independent competitive third parties.

I've written a fair bit about how we are using technologies like Bluetooth and Airplay in our homes and cars to connect our tablets and phones to our cars and home entertainment systems.

I've thought Airplay was the winning model because Apple is pushing it hard and integrating it into their product line across the board. Plus Airplay supports higher bandwidth applications like video and covers greater distances.

But an experience I had this week makes me take pause on that assumption. Our newest car has excellent bluetooth audio capabilities. Everyone's phones are paired to it and anytime anyone wants to take control of the car audio with their phone (iPhone or Android), they can play any audio app they want on their phone and the music plays in our car. This is true of most of the cars coming off the factory floors these days.

My son is particularly fond of taking control of the audio in the car and DJing. Yesterday he asked me why he couldn't do the same thing with our home entertainment system, which is built on Sonos. We have an airport express in the line-in on the Sonos and we can Airplay from iTunes. But that doesn't support Android phones and not all third party mobile apps support Airplay. Airplay is not ubiquitous in the way that Bluetooth is.

So I just bought this logitech bluetooth audio adapter and am going to swap out the airport express for this bluetooth adapter and see how my family reacts to that. I am betting that by replicating the experience they have in the car in our home, they will take control of our home music system with their phones in the same way they do in our car.

This shows the power of an open protocol like Bluetooth vs a proprietary protocol like Airplay. Airplay is a superior technology but it's lack of ubiquity may mean that it doesn't win the market in the end. We will see.

Ron Lieber has a column in today's New York Times called "A Financial Plan For The Truly Fed Up" where he lists some alternatives to investing your savings with the banks and brokerages that make up Wall Street.

His roadmap is basically what the Gotham Gal and I have been doing since the aftermath of the financial market meltdown in 2008. We invested pretty heavily in the stock market as the market was melting down in 2008 and I blogged actively about that here at AVC. But we took our gains early, in the first half of 2009, and then have more or less stayed out of the stock and bond markets since then (we do use our portfolio company Covestor's service).

We are in cash, real estate, venture capital, and private investments centered around our neighborhood and city (retail, restaurants, etc). Other than cash, we are invested in things we can touch and/or impact and understand.

As Ron talks about at the start of his piece, the never ending blowups on wall street are eroding confidence in that system. It certainly has eroded our confidence in that system. So we are staying out of it for the most part.

We do have our cash at a large money center bank. Ron advises credit unions instead. We haven't made that move and I am not sure we will.

Ron also advises people to check out peer to peer lending markets and mentions our portfolio company Lending Club. I was very happy to see that Ron has come around on peer to peer lending. Our firm is a big fan of these markets, having invested in two of them and looking at others.

And he describes a movement he calls Slow Money described in this way:

“Let’s just take some of our money and invest it near where we live in things we understand, starting with food,” as the movement’s founder, Woody Tasch, puts it. He describes returns as being in the “lowish single digits,” ranging from roughly 3 percent to a few percentage points higher.

The Gotham Gal and I are big fans of this approach. We have invested in a number of busineses in our neighborhood and city with expectations properly set for the occasional loss and in general low returns on the portfolio. But we are helping folks start their own businesses and create establishments we can use and that we want to see in our neighborhood. It feels good and I think it will turn out to be as good an investment as cash in the bank. At least I hope so.

As one system seems to be failing on a regular basis, it makes sense that there are new systems that operate differently that are emerging. We are seeking to invest in the ones that can scale at USV and the Gotham Gal and I are also looking to support these efforts in our personal investing. I am optimistic about this emerging movement and I am pleased to see mainstream media starting to talk about it.

This isn't exactly about a feature. Features are the verbs of a web/mobile product. Objects are the nouns. And one thing I always like to think about is what is the most fundamental object of all in your service. I like to call this the "atomic unit."

Here are some examples:

In Twitter, the atomic unit is the tweet

In SoundCloud, the atomic unit is the sound

In Turntable, the atomic unit is the room

In Tumblr, the atomic unit is the post

In Codecademy, the atomic unit is the lesson

In Wattpad, the atomic unit is the story

In Etsy, the atomic unit is the item (although one could argue it is the seller)

In Kickstarter, the atomic unit is the project

In Disqus, the atomic unit is the comment (although one could argue that it is the thread)

In Instagram, the atomic unit is the photo

In Kik, the atomic unit is the private message

In LinkedIn, the atomic unit is the resume

In Foursquare, the atomic unit is the checkin (although they may have just moved it to the venue)

In Gmail the atomic unit is the email, in Gcal the atomic unit is the appointment

In Brewster, the atomic unit is the relationship

In Dropbox, the atomic unit is the file

In Google Docs, the atomic unit was the document, in Google Drive, they would like to it to be both documents and files. And that creates some cognitive dissonance.

I could go on and on, and I apologize to all the USV companies I left off this list. I am not picking favorites. I am just doing stream of consciousness examples.

When you think about an MVP, it's really important to identify the atomic unit and make sure you focus the product crisply and cleanly on that object. If you think you have three or four atomic units, you are going to end up with a clunky and bloated experience and that is what you want to avoid at all costs with your MVP (particularly if you are mobile first).

Can you identify the atomic unit of your product or service? If you can't, then you might want to sit down and think about why you can't and what you might be able to do to address that.

I have been using this line a lot lately. It is a bastardized version of Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke's "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength."

I always encourage entrepreneurs to get on with the business of putting their product in the market. All the planning and designing and strategizing and grand plans of taking over the world are no match for reality.

The real world is messy. Stuff happens that you could never imagine. And then you are reacting to all of that and your grand plans are in tatters. That's reality. It happens to everyone.

So no point in waiting in the hopes that you will nail it. You won't. The enemy will take fire, you will hit the deck and then the good stuff starts.

It's been a while since we've talked about Codecademy here at AVC. I think the last time I blogged about this USV portfolio company was at the start of the year when they did their Code Year thing which resulted in over a quarter million people signing up to learn to code this year.

In the seven months that have transpired since then, Codecademy has been busy adding HTML, CSS and jQuery to their list of languages they supported. You may recall that they launched with Javascript. All of those are "front end" languages and by this summer, Codecademy had a critical mass of languages for anyone wanting to learn front end coding.

But server side coding was a big hole and Python was the most requested language of all. So yesterday, Codecademy announced that they had added Python to their set of supported languages. In addition, they have made some changes to their archticture so that they can easily add more server side languages in the coming months.

All of the content on Codecademy is created by their users. If you would like to create a coding lesson on Codecademy, you can do that here.

I've been involved in a bunch of projects in the past year to help more folks get technical and learn to code. I think this is a big deal for a bunch of reasons. And I am particularly optimistic about the use of the free and open Internet as a classroom for this sort of thing. And Codecademy is at the front of that charge.

We sat down in the family room and tuned into the Opening Ceremony last night. And out came the Nexus 7. The second screen. I launched Twitter to see what folks were saying and found tweets talking about the event in the past tense. And then it occurred to me that we were watching on a tape delay. Of course we were watching on a tape delay. The opening ceremonies had happened in London in the evening which was friday afternoon New York time.

I get why NBC chose to show the opening ceremonies on tape delay in the US, but I am not sure it is the right call. Everything is live on the Internet. Everything is live on Twitter.

And now I'm thinking of the big events. Football, Basketball, Gymnastics, Swimming, Track & Field. Are these events going to be on tape delay too? Am I going to find out that Michael Phelps won his 19th medal on Twitter or on TV?

That's the challenge for NBC and all broadcasters who are carrying the Olympics. I vote for a live TV schedule and watching the games on my computer at work over a tape delay and the information coming at me before I can see it happening with my own eyes.

I think tape delay is a goner in the age of Twitter. I just don't know when the folks who make these calls will figure that out.

As the world moves from web to mobile (our theme this summer), the idea of one click to do something becomes more powerful.

Did you know you can apply for a job with one click?

There are two services that make such a thing possible, LinkedIn Apply and Indeed Apply. In the spirit of full disclosure, Indeed is a USV portfolio company.

If you have your resume on LinkedIn or Indeed and you come across a job posting where the service has implemented the LinkedIn Apply and Indeed Apply buttons (think tweet and like buttons), then you can apply for the job with one click.

It turns out this is pretty popular. ZipRecruiter, a site that lets you easily post your job broadly across the web, put Linked and Indeed Apply buttons on their service and saw an almost 22% increase in job applications as a result. It makes sense, people will do more of something they can do easily.

So what does this mean for the job seeker? It means you should get your resume on LinkedIn and Indeed. What does it mean for the employer? It means you should put these one-click apply buttons on your job postings.

Some other interesting things came out of that ZipRecruiter blog post:

1) they get 3x the one click applications from Indeed vs LinkedIn

2) Indeed's resume database is growing at over 1mm resumes a month

3) Indeed is better for most job types other than management and executive

The world of recruiting has changed a lot in the past ten years and companies like LinkedIn and Indeed are driving much of that change. One click job applications is yet another example of this.

We have finally gotten videos up on the web from our Hacking Society event that happened in late April. A number of participants are going to blog this week about some of the specific topics and my contribution will be about our conversation about money and politics.

This 14min video clip starts with Larry Lessig outlining the issues around money and politics and then goes into some potential solutions. I advocated for a hack of the campaign finance system that starts with the internet industry contributing something like 5% of its combined ad inventory to a pool that is available to politicans who agree to certain conditions.

There was a debate about what those conditions should be. One group thought the candidates need to sign onto the Internet Freedom Pledge. Others thought that the candidates should renounce traditional campaign finance. Others thought candidates should do both.

Of course, this idea requires the Internet industry (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc, etc) to allocate 5% of its inventory to this kind of a pool. I have had a few conversations with the industry leaders about this idea but honestly it hasn't gone anywhere. It would be great if our industry could rally around this idea and make it happen. Hopefully this post and other actions we are taking this week might get this idea rolling.

Here's the video:

By the way, interested folks should check out the Hacking Society web page. In addition to videos, we now have a transcript of the event as well as audio recordings, photos, and lots of quotes. There's a lot there and its interesting and engaging stuff.