Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Weblogs/Blogging (Page 5 of 22)

More on Best Buy VC News: Geek Squad Founder Speaks

As a followup to my previous post about Best Buy planning to step up its corporate VC activity, I thought it would be good to get some additional perspective on this news. So, I sought out a couple of my contacts inside the company. Robertstephensgeeksquad
I couldn’t think of anyone better than Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad, which was acquired by Best Buy about five years ago. (He was out on vacation last week when the news broke.) Robert still heads the Geek Squad — in an environment much different from his early days, but one he says he very much enjoys. And the business has expanded significantly. Robert’s a great guy, an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. In fact, he was named the University of Minnesota’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2007, and I blogged about the event where that was announced (the Minnesota Cup Awards), and about Robert’s excellent talk there.

I asked Robert two questions about the recent development at Best Buy:

Tech-Surf-Blog: What’s your take on the news about the formation of "Best Buy Capital"?   

Robert Stephens: This is just the most recent example of a trend that other companies like Intel, Google, and Yahoo have championed.  I think it offers another choice for the entrepreneur.  I chose not to take VC money or other investors because I did not want to see The Geek Squad bought and sold by people just looking for a financial transaction.  The Geek Squad chose to acquire Best Buy because we really help each other in a permanent way.  We help differentiate Best Buy, and we are able to use their size and resources in our quest for World Domination.

With all of the new web technologies and speed of software development, there are some hardware and software products that might be a better fit through partnership with a Best Buy rather than a traditional VC path. Choice is always good.

Tech-Surf-Blog: What does the new Best Buy Capital say about the importance of startup innovation to the company?

Robert Stephens: Well, either you drive innovation inside your company, or it will get driven for you by external market forces.  This new arrangement gives all of us inside the company more choices in how we develop ideas.  Coming from a startup of one person to a 140,000-person strong global company, change never seems as fast as it used to.  I’m all for this if it helps us try more ideas. 

Best Buy is kind of like Madonna.  You may not like her music, but you have to respect the fact that she knows her business, and rarely do pop stars stay on top as long as she has.  It’s the same in retail.  You must constantly re-invent yourself.  I don’t think people realize how dynamic Best buy is.  It’s why I chose them.

They were the first major retailer to pioneer the "grab and go".  First major retailer to develop the gift card.  First major retailer to go commission-free.  On and on.  Best Buy is also smart enough to know that they have to re-invent faster and faster.  You have a lot of choices on where you buy your stuff.  Sure, you might think, "I’ll just buy everything online".  That’s fine, but it’s not that simple.  Some of those new flat screens have to be seen when choosing.  You buy laptops now based on "look and feel".  Did you ever think that Dell would allow themselves to be sold inside a Best Buy?  This means that there are always going to be choices on how you innovate. It also means that trying to predict the future in a linear fashion is futile.  The key to is try a lot of things and fail as fast as possible.

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For more on Robert, see this recent interview in Fortune Small Business: Geek Squad’s Second Act.  And, for insight into the latest with the VC business, check out this article published last week in Wired: VCs Adjust to Facing More Competitors for Fewer Companies. In addition, I recapped recent VC industry developments in this post about a series of Forbes articles back in late January. Finally, I wrote a post a while back about the New Face of Venture Investing.

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I also got this reaction on the Best Buy Capital news from a source within Best Buy who would prefer to remain anonymous: "I’m not surprised. I think it’s a natural outgrowth of Best Buy’s internal environment of encouraging innovation through this kind of de facto process of allowing people to move ideas as long as they can prove their idea’s worth along the way. Cultivating new ideas, iterating them, and learning fast is one of the things that Best Buy excels at, actually. So, it just makes sense they would take this outside the walls of the company to do it for direct profit."

Thanks to both contacts, and I hope their comments provide further perspective for you on this story.

(Postcsript: I mentioned the Minnesota Cup above. This is an annual competition for entrepreneurs throughout the state, and the organization just announced its 2008 program. Details are at www.MinnesotaCup.org.)

Bloggers Break ‘Best Buy Capital’ Story; Company Goes Mum

In yet another example of how blogging is changing the news business and the PR business, it’s interesting to go back and look at what happened over the past 10 days or so with a story relating to Best Buy — a company I know well, headquartered right here in suburban Minneapolis. Bestbuylogo
This little tale is instructive to those involved in communications and journalism.

First of all, I think the underlying news story here is a positive one for Best Buy, and for its employees and shareholders. (Full disclosure: I like the company, I have friends there, and I did a little interim gig there myself back in 1999/2000. It is an amazing outfit.) But it’s still interesting to watch big companies like this try to deal (or fail to deal) with the realities of new media.

Here’s the story as it broke locally here in the Twin Cities yesterday (Friday), by our very good Business Journal: Best Buy builds VC unit to find next big things. (More disclosure: I was contacted early in the week by one of the writers of this story to provide reaction to the news, and was quoted in it.) But what’s more interesting to me, even than the news itself, is the fact that it wasn’t first discovered by a traditional media outlet: a blogger had actually broken this story the week before. If you’re in the journalism or PR business and have any sense of the changes being wrought by new media, you of course know such occurrences are becoming more and more common.Bestbuyhq

The Fuse Is Lit
A consumer electronics blogger by the name of Lee Distad in Edmonton blogged this piece of news first on March 18 with this post: Best Buy Capital to Invest in Tech Innovations. He had more to say about it on a weekly recap he did the same day on another blog: Best Buy Opens Their Own Venture Fund. Soon, another blogger, who happens to be a VC (and also a Canuck) — that being Paul Kedrosky of the blog Infectious Greed — had picked up on Distad’s breaking news and posted a link in his own post: Return of Corporate Venture Investors. (A little aside: what he fails to realize, and the others as well, is that Best Buy is not a new corporate venture investor; they’ve been at this game for many years. The new entity appears to signal simply an expansion or formalization of their practice of making minority investments in promising new companies from time to time that are strategic to their business.  The name Best Buy Capital just appears to perhaps be a new name for this entity — though it should not be confused with an old entity called "Best Buy Capital LP," which the company formed in 1994 to raise expansion capital, as this old SEC filing details.)

Then (within minutes, I suspect), the blog TechConfidential (from TheDeal.com) was running a post with an even better headline — With Best Buy Capital, corporate VC goes big box. (Disclosure: I have been invited to be a member of the TechConfidential blogger network, though I did not see their story on Best Buy till this week.) You can see in their post that they included, like good little bloggers, links to the earlier posters, dutifully paying them homage. TheDeal.com exists to serve investors, so you can be sure plenty of people who follow BBY stock got early wind of this story, actually well ahead of the general market. (Did it cause a blip in the share price?  Maybe not all by itself, but I see the stock did trade up that day.  Investors hunger for every little piece of news about the companies whose stocks they hold.)Bbychart0308

Okay, so what’s so interesting about a bunch of bloggers who sniff out a story for their relatively small audiences, which is then broken as a piece of hard news later in Best Buy’s hometown by a large, traditional media weekly that reaches many tens of thousands more people? Nothing so much, since it’s happening a lot these days. What’s interesting to me is that, as Distad reports in his original post, not only could he not get any information or a comment from the company’s PR people — they didn’t even seem to _know_ anything about this particular development within their company! And, as you can see, our local Business Journal was also unable to get a comment from a Best Buy source for their story, a full 11 days after the original blog post.

The Disconnect
If you haven’t picked up yet from one of the links above, here’s how the original blogger discovered the story…are you ready?  From a job posting. That’s right, a little known but valuable source of news that smart people looking for insights about a particular company can often find — right on the company’s own web site! (Or on any of a number of other job boards.) This isn’t news about what’s happening now, mind you. It’s better than that: it’s about what’s coming. Hiring plans definitely qualify as a bellweather of things to come.

So then, what does Best Buy do (ostensibly on a call from the PR people to the HR people) — they take the job posting down! There, that will fix those pesky, nosey outsiders!  Now, those links in the above original blog posts go to a dead page. Not to worry, however — it took me less than a minute to find the job description had been copied and posted to another job listing site here. That’s the thing about the web: once something’s out there, it’s impossible to fully take it back. (This is the posting for a "Principal," whereas another job had been originally posted by Best Buy for the position of "Associate," which I did not search further for. A source of mine within Best Buy told me this week that three people would be hired for Best Buy Capital; I would guess that to be one Principal and two Associates.)

Now, it could be said that this was just a coincidence — that the job postings were removed because the company had suddenly filled all three positions. Hardly likely, since the original posting appears to have only gone up on March 11. (And I know how long things take at Best Buy.) It seems much more likely the company was spooked by a blogger breaking a story that, for some strange reason, they did not want known. Or did not go through "normal channels." (Hint to Best Buy: the world is changing, and, like it or not…channels aren’t normal anymore.)

But what I find the most interesting of all is that the HR people, through their job-posting system (they use the very common Taleo platform), are putting out news that they apparently don’t realize. That is, no one seems to have explained this to them. I’m surmising they don’t tell the PR people when they do post something like this — witness the original blogger running into complete ignorance of the news when he called PR. By the same token, the PR people aren’t trolling the postings regularly themselves, either, it would seem, to become aware of "news" the company may be putting out in ways other than the limited supply they dish out themselves. And limited it is. They, like most big companies of old (and so many overly regulated public firms, I suppose), seem to spend more time keeping the news in than letting it out.

Two things I would ask: (1) Shouldn’t Best Buy (and other companies of their size) start figuring out how to deal with the notion of transparency in our new world of New Media?  And, (2) Doesn’t it seem to you that somebody should get the HR people and the PR talking?

 

 

Alltop Coverage Misses the Point

Guy Kawasaki’s latest startup, Alltop, launched officially yesterday, and — not unsurprisingly — got a lot of play on the strength of Guy’s (insane) popularity. AlltoplogotagBut a dirty little question still needs to be asked. More on that later…. 


[Photo of Guy taken by me at last year’s National Pond Hockey Championships in Minneapolis.]

Guykawasakihockey
All the usual suspects covered the Alltop launch, right on cue: Arrington peed all over it at TechCrunch, while Mashable gave it a breathless blurb and did a video interview of Guy from SXSW, and my friend Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb gave it a very fair and complete analysis.  Another person I respect, Chris Shipley, executive producer of DEMO, even weighed in favorably at her Guidewire blog. They all, in varying degrees, got the point that this news & blog aggregation site is aimed at the non-RSS literate web population, which is huge. 

However, it seems TechCrunch and its commenters, as geeky and early adopter as they are, don’t seem to want to recognize that anyone could possibly ever need such a site. It’s obvious they don’t grasp how large the non-RSS population is. They use RSS readers all day long and therefore the whole world must?  Chris Shipley, on the other hand, certainly does get the point about the market Alltop is aiming for with this new site. (And she has something to say to TechCrunch in a later post on her blog.)

I agree with Chris. Alltop is undoubtedly a useful site for mainstream web users, those who do not use RSS readers and are not likely to ever do so because the technology is just too darn geeky. Might some of them adopt reader "start pages" like iGoogle, NetVibes, and PageFlakes?  Sure, those are pretty simple, and many mainstream web users could set up their own customized news readers (have already) — but they do in fact have go to that trouble. I think it’s a sure bet that the majority of mainstream web users won’t.  And, for this large population, an aggregator of many sites — a destination site with a single-page view of a whole lot of stuff, from a trusted source, with a very clean, simple UI — definitely has value.

I find it useful myself, and will recommend it. I especially like the "bird’s-eye view" of an entire category on a single page (and there are an impressive 40 categories), and the way you can hover over any headline to see the first part of the story is a real convenience and timesaver.  Is it rocket-science web technology?  No, but mainstream users don’t care about that, either. They just want something that’s fast, easy, and useful… for them.

So, what’s the big question that still needs to be asked about Alltop, which none of the coverage I’ve seen so far gets to?  It’s this: how does Kawasaki intend to make money with the site?  After all, he’s a startup expert, and a VC in his own right as a founder of Garage Technology Ventures. Or is this not a business, just an experiment of some sort?  Does Alltop even have a business plan yet, a business model?  One assumes that this is more than a hobby with Kawasaki — proving he can launch consumer Web 2.0 sites with little money. His previous attempt, some months ago, was Truemors (still going and growing) — a site he later boasted cost him less than $13,000 to develop and launch. But the same question could be applied to that site as well: so what?  He’s now proved that popular authors/pundits/speakers can launch web sites that can get some attention. So, the point then is…?

[By the way, for those of my readers in the Upper Midwest, in case you don’t know: Kawasaki’s developers for both sites are the folks at Electric Pulp in Sioux Falls, SD, one of the perennial sponsors of our great local BarCamp events here in Minnesota, Minnebar and Minnedemo. Hey, Pulpers, way to go! We all now know you aren’t getting paid much 🙂 …but we assume you’re having fun?]

GSP+ETech=A Damn Good Week in San Diego

Despite the fact that I lost my voice halfway through my three days in San Diego (some weird cold thing I picked up), the two O’Reilly events this week were definitely worth attending. I say that even though I wasn’t able to participate as much as I would have liked. Certainly, the networking suffered. I haven’t figured out how to do that without talking yet… 🙂 Gspwest08banner

I did live-Twitter the sessions I sat in on, capturing all the nuggets you can likely handle. If you’d like to see those, just go to my Twitter page. For Graphing Social Patterns, scroll back to March 3 and 4. For ETech, scroll to the March 5 tweets.  I must have written 150 or more total for both events. And there were some darn good speakers and panels, which I captured as best I could (in the requisite sound-bite form).

GSP was Monday and Tuesday, while ETech was Tuesday, Wednesday, and
Thursday. But I only covered ETech on Wednesday, which I had previously
determined was the most interesting day from my perspective.  I definitely wanted to
be at GSP on Tuesday, and I skipped ETech on Thursday for a couple of reasons: to go back home to San Clemente so my voice could recover, and to avoid another expensive hotel night. Etechlobby

I also posted some 118 photos to Flickr in two sets: GSP pix here and ETech pix here. Note that I mostly shot what I thought would be interesting to you: speaker slides, as well as shots of the speakers and panelists themselves, plus other general scenes — as opposed to posed/cutsie shots of my friends, etc… 🙂

Anyway, I found the programming at both events to be very good, and I learned a lot. Plus, I made a bunch of great contacts. (Look for that list in my next post.)  I hope you found my live-Twittering and Flickr pix interesting, at least, and (even better) useful.

GSP West 08: Hot and Cold

It’s a hot conference, and what do I get?  A damn cold!  And I just had a doozer back in January, too.  Is this the worst, hellish year for colds and flu that you can remember, or what?  It sure is for a lot of people I know….

Anyway, I’m sucking it up (oh, god, that’s bad), tryin’ to keep up…. I did my live-Twittering thing yesterday, after getting well practiced at DEMO. Gspopeningscene
See my 40 or 50 something tweets (I lost count) here.  Then chatted over wine with Aaron Fulkerson (MindTouch), Dan Carroll (Somr.org, former Twin Citian, now Mountain View), Chris Messina (DISO guy), Maria Sipka (Linquia, a fellow Aussie and surfer), Chris Gammill (a buddy from LA), and others — all while uploading my pix on Flickr. Gspplatformwars

Afterwards, attended part of AppNite (couple of cool ones!), then managed to hear most of Tim O’Reilly’s keynote at 8:00 — it was good, very inspired. Tim is amazing. Took a lot of notes, but was all out of Twitter juice by that time. So, dragged myself back to my hotel (a very cool little boutique place called the Sophia). Now it’s Tuesday morning, and I’m seriously looking for a Walgreens so I can load up on cold medicine…  🙁

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