The Guidewire

I’ve been thinking about high school a lot lately. Specifically, the social hierachy of high school; how a certain portion of students are automatically anointed as popular due to athletic prowess and/or beauty. It’s the natural order of adolescence (at least it was in my day) - cheerleaders and football players = popular; geeks = not so much. It’s a precursor, really, to society at large. Generally speaking, there is a pre-determined hierarchy in most circles. Attention is paid to those who succeed financially, athletically, politically, or by sheer force of will (see Tila Tequila).

Sometimes, though, an entirely new sector of society is created in which there are no pre-determined rules. The members of that sector must establish hierarchies on their own and chaos invariably ensues, as people elbow for notice in whatever manner they see fit. The past few years have seen two such sectors brought into being: reality television and the blogosphere. The similarities between the two are striking when you think about it, but most notable is the manner in which “celebrities” in both worlds have risen to the top.

Now before I go any further, let me note one key difference between reality TV and the tech world: there are inordinately smarter people in the latter. The “A-List” in tech is comprised of people who’ve built successful companies on truly innovative ideas, people who can dig down into the trenches of coding languages and produce brilliant technologies used by consumers around the world. For the most part. There are also a few people on that list who would feel right at home on ‘The Real World’ or ‘Survivor.’ (You can tell how long it’s been since I’ve tuned into reality programming.) With no established rules as to what creates success, you’re invariably going to have some who push and scream their way to the top. Read the rest of this entry »

Buzz Bruggeman has lots of ideas, all of them offered with great enthusiasm, and some of them really rather good. The other day, he pinged me about a new post and it really is a good idea. A good idea that is the seed of a great idea.

In essence, Buzz wants to see the Shelfari book review site become a book exchange between individuals who read and value books and libraries that have limited budgets to acquire new texts. Libraries submit a wish list, and as readers complete a book, they review it on Shelfari, then send it on to the wanting library. To quote Buzz:

A friend of mine once told me that having a book shelf full books you had read was like having a six pack of empty wine bottles.

The book exchange idea recycles the “empties,” making a private resource a public one and, one can hope, encouraging literacy and other good things.

Certainly the technology to support such a book exchange is readily available. The LaLa.com platform, for example, supports trading of CDs by matching the recordings people want with the libraries that other people have. Not to underestimate LaLa’s algorithm, but how hard could it be to put that platform or one like it into a public site to support not just Buzz’s library idea (the good one), but also a need-matching concept (the great idea)? Why just stop at putting books in the hands of those who can’t afford or prefer not to buy them and thus rely on lending libraries. Why not match any gently used or excess goods with people and organizations that have a burning need for them.

Buzz’s idea works because the Shelfari site, in his example, creates the link between the have and the want, and perhaps that’s fundamental to making an exchange network function smoothly. But certainly there are other sites and organizations that could serve as a backbone for a trading network that re-distributes goods from those who no longer want or need them to those who do. Such a site gives new life to goods that have served their purpose yet have diminishing value to the original owner but high potential value to someone in need.

If this exchange network exists, I’d love to know about it. If it doesn’t, I’d love to see a few smart business brains figure out how to make it work.

There’s a reason I love emerging technology so much: over the course of one hour, the entire landscape can be turned on its head. The rumor out of VentureBeat this afternoon, that Microsoft will acquire Powerset for $100 million next month, has produced the predictable memes: Microsoft is desperate after the Yahoo debacle; Powerset overhyped itself to bankruptcy and needs a bailout; Powerset only searches Wikipedia and we like Google just fine, thanks. While neither party will confirm the rumors, it now seems likely that something significant will happen in the semantic sector over the next couple of months. Having analyzed Powerset and semantic search extensively, I think we should keep a couple of key points in mind beyond the arguments over valuation and hype machines. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that DEMO, the launch event owned and operated by IDG and programmed by Guidewire Group, has faced stiff criticism for its practice of charging selected companies an $18,500 fee to participate in its program, which is as much about go-to-market and after-launch support as it is about making a six-minute demonstration on a public stage. A new competitor, TechCrunch, does not charge a fee to the companies it recruits to its TC50 conference, coincidentally scheduled to overlap with DEMOfall in early September. As the “free” launch platform, TC50 has positioned itself as the friend of entrepreneurs and its co-producer has taken umbrage at DEMO’s “payola” (his words, not ours) business model.

In fact, Jason Calacanis commented on a post on this blog earlier this week:

At the end of the day I don’t have a problem with you Chris. I actually think you’re very smart and cool. What I do have a problem with is the $18,500 fee. Intelligent folks can disagree about these fees, and the different models of our shows. I believe we have a better model and that the marketplace will vote with our model and “conference payola” (I know you don’t like the term) will stop. As an entrepreneur myself I want to kill the “pay for play” model.

So it was with keen interest that I saw an email yesterday from Heather Harde, TechCrunch CEO, regarding TechCrunch’s MeetUp at August Capital in July. Read the rest of this entry »

Those who know me at all well know that I love words. I delight in a beautiful turn of phrase. I am amused by oxymoronic combinations (”Live Chickens Fresh Killed” remains a favorite storefront sign from my days in Somerville, Mass.) And I can get agitated when words are misused, and worse, abused for the sake of drama.

It was amid that agitation last week that I began a post challenging bloggers to avoid ill-advised use of language.

An excerpt from the offending post: Read the rest of this entry »

It might surprise you to hear that I’m not a gadget freak. I’ve had the chance to review most new digital devices, and I own plenty of them, but I just don’t salivate over electronics very often. I don’t have an iPhone, for example, and perhaps more shocking, I don’t want one.

The Motorola ZN5, announced by Motorola and Kodak on Monday in Bejing, well that’s a different story. While I’ve not laid hands on it yet, the briefing with execs from both companies on Friday got me excited to own one. (I even asked if their China launch was limited to Mainland China or whether I might find a ZN5 in the shops while I’m in Taipei this week; alas, it’s not likely.)

Moto and Kodak have been collaborating on camera phones for a year or so now, and the ZN5 demonstrates the best that both companies have to offer. The 3G GSM phone has all the features you’d expect in a state of the art mobile phone. Slide the lens cover back, though, and the phone becomes a no-compromise digital camera. When in camera mode, the phone’s buttons become inactive and the camera buttons, placed where you’d expect to find them on a digital camera, are activated.

As beautiful as the phone design, it’s really the software that makes this 5 megapixel camera amazing. Tuned for this device, the Kodak image processing software does an amazing job of image correction so that you really don’t need to know anything about photography to take great pictures. The software is effectively identical to the software on the Kodak digital camera I use every day and I’ve found it to be incredibly forgiving of my picture taking.

The phone is bundled with Kodak desktop software to make it easy to get photos off the phone and into other applications. You can also size and manipulate images on the phone, then upload them seamlessly to Kodak’s services via any WiFi connection.

Often, when two great companies combine expertise, the product is a compromise of the capabilities of each. That doesn’t appear to be the case with the ZN5; it really is the best of both worlds.

The phone ships first in China, then in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world later this year and will be “extremely competitive” in price, according to Motorola executive.

I can’t wait.

Back in the old days - or the ’90s as some call them - we utilized the Internet as an information resource. What’s that phone number, where is that address, where can I buy that product - you had concrete questions and were no longer required to speak to a human to get answers. Sure, there were bulletin boards and Usenet forums for discussion but they primarily involved coding arguments and game walkthroughs. The Internet wasn’t truly upended into a community, and all that that entails, until just a couple of years ago. It was then that the inundation of bloggers collided with social networking and lifestreaming to produce a perfect storm of content. (And when I say lifestreaming, I mean the trend of putting as many pieces of our life online as possible - books we’re reading, music we like, etc.) We’ve now backed ourselves into a corner online, raging against the indundation of content even as we scroll through our fifth page of FriendFeed updates. We recommend well-written articles about navigating through the noise, right after sharing 25 items in Google Reader.

The logical next step in this technological journey is to therefore prune, to make our time online more meaningful and relevent, no matter how small the nugget of information. Whether I’m setting out to qualify findings in a drug discovery experiment or wondering when Amy Winehouse was last arrested, I want the most reliable, relevant answer in the shortest amount of time. The problem is no longer whether the information is out there but rather how we can get to it quickly and accurately.

It’s against this background that I’m seeing a gradual evolution of the semantic search market. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of days ago, Carla wrote a post about why she is part of the DEMO team. Forgetting for a minute the overt flattery (sorry, Carla, but I told you a raise was out of the question this year), she is in this game for much the same reason I am: the companies and entrepreneurs we get to meet.

I was talking about that on Friday when I got an email from Tim Musgrove, founder of TextDigger. The company launched at DEMO 07, and Tim was writing to me more than a year later to tell me that the company had closed its funding. Now, I don’t post email messages in my blog without express permission, and I’m glad that Tim said it was okay to share this one: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve fallen off the blog hamster wheel in recent weeks, due to travel and screening companies for DEMOfall. My calendar gets a bit ridiculous around the same time twice a year, as I spend entire days on the phone hearing about new companies. Mind you, I’m not complaining. Even when some days morph into one continuous conference call, it’s still one of the best jobs around. Paradoxically, all this activity precludes my favorite job: telling everyone about the new toys I’m using. So if you don’t mind a laundry list, here’s what’s been on my radar lately. Read the rest of this entry »

For the first time in a long time, companies - young and established - have a range of venues to choose for their product launch. There is DEMO, of course, with its 18-year record of catapulting companies to market success. Newcomers, such as SVASE’s Launch: Silicon Valley and TechCrunch 50, try to emulate the DEMO format, and conference events such as SuperNova and Web 2.0 give some visibility to products and companies. And, of course, there’s always the option to roll your own. The challenge for entrepreneurs, though, is trying to decide which fall launch venue is right for them. Chris wrote an excellent piece yesterday on the particulars of DEMO, which gives a great overview of the entire application process. I’ve pondered my own piece on DEMO for a couple of weeks now, but each draft failed to inspire me. It wasn’t until this morning that the light bulb hit, after receiving an IM from Chris: “Why do you work on DEMO?” So if you’ll allow, I’d like to get personal for a moment. Read the rest of this entry »