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: Web 2.0 (Page 2 of 9)

Geeks, Entrepreneurs, Designers, Angels, VCs, and Marketeers ….. Let’s Mix It Up!

Minnebar is Saturday, May 10!  MInnesota’s all-day annual Barcamp event is not to be missed.  New venue this year (bigger and better): the gloriously redone Coffman Union at the U of MN (cool place if you haven’t checked it out yet). To sign up, just go the event site (a wiki page), hit Edit Page, and add your name and links. Minnebar(Minnebar is held once a year, while evening "Minnedemo" sessions are held in each of the other three quarters.)
Already, almost 300 of your compatriots have signed up for this year’s edition of Minnebar, and many more will be as the week progresses. It’s free! That’s right — the whole damn thing! (thanks to the sponsors) … including breakfast, lunch, reception and beers following. You even get a free event t-shirt! And you can come and go as you please, choosing just the sessions that interest you — though I would highly recommend hanging out all day for the networking, which is really the biggest benefit. You can do your own session if you and/or some colleagues have something to say (and if there’s still room). Hit the link that says MinneBarSessions, click Edit Page, and add your title and session description while you still can. In the coming days, the organizers will be cutting off new entries and publishing a full schedule with all the breakout sessions. That should then be available at the event site, or you can pick up a hard copy on your arrival. Come early — the event kicks off at 8:30 am.

Attention Startups and Angels: Note the "Lightning Talks" Session
On the MInneBarSessions page, scroll down and look for a link to apply to give a five-minute pitch.  Ideal if you’re a startup, whether just forming or further along. An entire hour is being devoted to these rapid-fire presentations. This is a great way to see what’s going on out there in our state, hear the latest business concepts and startup ideas, or get updates on the progress of local startups you may have already heard about. [This will be like the DEMO conferences I know so well. My advice: hone the message hard, and practice well!] Minnebar07crowd

This event is gonna be killer, I promise you. If you want to know what’s really goin’ on in tech in Minnesota, you have to be here. Bring lots of business cards, a camera, your laptop (we’ll have mondo wi-fi!), wear your favorite tee, and get ready to learn, share, network, gab, blog and Twitter your brains out, and meet tons of fun, like-minded people.

Hey, in my book, it definitely beats sittin’ on some cold lake fishing!  ๐Ÿ™‚

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 ๐Ÿ™‚ …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… ๐Ÿ™‚ 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… ๐Ÿ™‚

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.

Feeding Frenzy’s Started on FriendFeed

Or so declares Fred Wilson. And I see Josh Kopelman’s on it, too. (Wonder which guy funded it, or both?) Friendfeedlogo_4
A buddy of mine gave me the heads-up in a comment a couple hours ago, to my previous post (see below), saying this could be the next big thing at SXSW. 

What is it about this time of year?  The Web 2.0 crowd just needs something new to get ’em talking?  Okay, I’m tryin’ it — gotta see what this is about.  Only took me a minute or two to set up my FriendFeed account. Looks kinda like a Twitter that ate its Wheaties…  ๐Ÿ™‚

Except, this year, aren’t they jumping the gun a bit?  ETech and GSP come first, next week, ahead of SXSW.  Anyone know how far in advance of SXSW it was last year when Twitter went live?  Should be fun to see how long this one will take to break… ๐Ÿ™‚

UPDATE (1:30 pm CST): Well, we now have the skinny on who’s behind this one — my friend Brian Solis just posted.

 

New Face of Venture Investing: the ‘Small’ Guys

The world of venture investing has changed….in case you haven’t noticed. Yes indeed, "small" is very much in — as in smaller investments — especially for startups having anything to do with the Internet. [And that would include most everything to do with IT and software today, not to speak of consumer services.]  The reason is simply that startups don’t require as much capital in this age of…whatever you want to call it: "Web 2.0" or "the Internet as platform."

A great article in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal drove that point home again: VC’s New Math: Does Less = More?  The main subject of the article was Peter Thiel, the former CEO of PayPal, who now runs a small VC firm that’s become the talk of the Valley.  It invests "sometimes just a few hundred thousand dollars" in its deals, says the article, which also quotes him as saying that the venture-capital world "definitely needs to be shaken up." Thiel and his fellow founders and execs from his PayPal days have built quite a record of investing, including an early stake in Facebook. Last year, the NY Times also published an excellent article about Thiel and his "mafia": It Pays to Have Pals in Silicon Valley.

Newfaceofvc_2

But Peter Thiel and his gang are hardly the only ones leveraging this new model. I present here six more that have it figured out pretty well, too, with most already reaping rewards, as firms they have backed have either been acquired or achieved big paper valuations. [There are surely other "new VCs" I could feature here, but these six are the ones I know best, from reading and commenting on their blogs, hearing them speak at conferences, or actually meeting some of them in person.] Note that most of these guys began by investing their own money as angels, which they gained from successful careers as tech entrepreneurs or traditional VCs, but all those that did start that way have morphed into the new breed VC, because they’re now investing other people’s money as well. That is, they’ve raised traditional VC funds, but tend to focus those funds on smaller, Internet/Web 2.0 type investments. (Thiel’s new career even goes beyond this, however, as he also manages a hedge fund, as noted in the Journal article.)

Breeding Winners
Who are the others pictured above? Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital is based in the most unlikely of places, suburban Philadelphia, but calls himself the "Redeye VC" (which is the name of his blog) because he’s flying to the Valley so often. His entrepreneurial background includes Half.com, which was acquired by Ebay. Josh was the subject of a feature just published by Fortune on people to keep an eye on in 2008, as the traditional media continues to discover these guys we know, because it’s realizing how much wealth they’re helping create behind the scenes. Josh’s portfolio will impress you.

Fred Wilson is the reigning godfather of Web 2.0 investors from his perch in NYC at Union Square Ventures. And that’s largely on the strength of his blogging — he blogs on his firm’s site, and at his personal blog, AVC. Check out his firm’s portfolio of Internet investments. Fred is hands-down the most prolific of the VC bloggers (with more readers than only Guy Kawasaki). I actually don’t know how he has time for much else with all the blogging and Twittering he does. (He’s an investor in Twitter.) But then, he’ll tell you he actually learns about many of his deals through his blogging. He considers it an unfair advantage, and has caused many other VCs to catch on to the benefits of writing in the blogosphere. For more on Fred, who’s actually a pretty private and low-profile guy (for example, he doesn’t show up at too many conferences), see this profile that appeared on a Wired blog earlier this year. 

Jeff Clavier is one of only two of this group based in the Valley — Palo Alto in this case. [Note that two of the others are in SF, but three are elsewhere.] Jeff has an extremely interesting and eclectic background, starting in France, where he did an IT startup, acquired by Reuters, where he later served as a corporate VC. There, he managed early investments in such firms as Yahoo! and Verisign. He later migrated to the Valley and become one of the early investors in Web 2.0. His blog, Software Only, was an early and influential voice in this new world of venture capital. Just a few months ago, Jeff announced on his blog his new $12 million seed fund.

Brad Feld is based in Boulder, CO, and is one of five partners in The Foundry Group. He’s a prolific blogger, at both Feld Thoughts and Ask the VC. The latter is one of the best resources I know of for enterpreneurs seeking advice online. Brad is an amazing, high energy guy. A marathoner and an inveterate entrepreneur with a masters from MIT, he’s lived the entrepreneur’s life as founder of a
software firm that was acquired by AmeriData Technologies (later acquired by GE Capital), where he served as CTO. Brad was a driving force behind the launch this past summer of the TechStars competition in Boulder, and his firm has already funded some of the winners.

Dave Hornik is a very well known member of this new breed of VC, for two reasons — he was an early player, and he’s based in the Valley. His firm, from its cool digs on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, invests in more than just Internet services, however. Some of the names you would know in its Internet portfolio are Six Apart, Technorati, Evite (acquired), Shopping.com/Epinions (acquired), Postini (acquired), and Tumbleweed. Dave’s VentureBlog was one of the earliest VC blogs, which certainly contributed to his popularity, though he’s posting much less frequently there of late.

Aydin Senkut, by contrast, is probably the newest and least known of the group. An early Google manager, he left in 2005 and now runs Felicis Ventures in SF. You say you’ve never heard of it?  Well, check out his portfolio. He was one of the subjects of a NY Times article a few days ago entitled A Post-Google Fraternity of Investors. While the ex-Googlers now investing in startups (most as angels, some as VCs) are not as tight-knit a group as the ex-PayPal founders and execs, there are potentially many more of them.

What do you think of this new breed of venture investor?  Are they really changing the game, or are they simply more of the same-old Vulture Capitalists, just dressed in tee-shirts and jeans?  ๐Ÿ™‚  And, how early do you think entrepreneurs with new ideas should approach these guys?  Will you?

UPDATE (1/7/08): For more on this trend in venture capital, no one says it better than Chris Shipley, Executive Producer of the DEMO Conferences. Check this out, from a series of recent DEMOblog posts on 2008 predictions: Venture Capital Feels a Pinch[And, by the way, look for me at DEMO ’08 in Palm Desert, CA, January 28-30.]

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