Graeme Thickins on Tech

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

Tag: business model

Minnedemo Was Great … Now, How About Those Business Models?

February 8, 2009 / / 5 Comments

If you're part of the Minnesota Internet and software community and you missed Minnedemo on Friday night, you must be bummed — as several of you told me from afar as I was tweetin' it … :-)  Minnedemo-logo
[Evidenced by this clip from my twitterstream that night, which shows a few of those who were talking back at me in real time.]  You missed a great event.  No worries, though, because myself and my buddies at Minnov8 posted lots of audio and video recorded at the event for your listening and viewing pleasure.

Minnedemo_Tweet-outs

But, for those of you who were there, how many of you noticed what I did?  Namely, the almost complete lack of the presenters talking about their business model?

I have something to propose for future Minnedemo pitches: how about, as part of the 7-minute presentation, a new rule is instituted that states a minimum of one minute of that has to be devoted to explaining the business model? Is that an unreasonable request? Even thirty seconds would be a welcome addition.

Now, I realize the traditional audience of Minnedemo is developers, listening to their fellow developers on stage presenting their cool, new code creations.  Elegance in app design and functionality have been the focus of pretty much every presentation I've seen at these events.  Or features.  Or UI design.  But, is not the end-game in all this something that might actually be commercially viable, too?  That is, a business that could make it in the real world?  From where I sit, more and more business people and investors have started to attend these quasi-quarterly events.

I don't mean to imply that none of the presenters on Friday night has a business plan. Of course, all but the very newest, coolest projects must have one, right?  And it would then follow that these presenting companies would have to have a business model for how they will make money.  They just didn't talk about it Friday night — or, in most cases, even mention it.

I say that's a big thing missing from Minnedemo. What do you think?  Should presenters be required to talk more about such things?

Alltop Coverage Misses the Point

March 12, 2008 / / 1 Comment

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?]

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