The Guidewire

You no doubt heard the raves for FriendFeed in the last week, as the lifestreaming site opened up to the public and people quickly became addicted. As an early beta user, my addiction was broken somewhat with the public opening. The trickle of items became a torrent and, though I still check it multiple times daily, my explicit actions have slowed down. I’m only following 10 people at the moment and find it too much. (I can’t even fathom how Scoble is managing his 500+ streams.)

FriendFeed obviously hit a nerve, appealing to all the social junkies who had tired of visiting myriad sites every hour to plug into their networks. The market has been headed this way for a while; once social services expanded beyond Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, all bets were off. It was every user for themselves and woe to anyone who couldn’t maintain active personas across the board. In fact, back in March of 07, I predicted as much in a market analysis for The Guidewire Report.

…the verticalization of [social networking] will continue for the immediate future, until users reach a point of saturation and discover that they have run out of time with which to devote. It will be then that a new kind of… service/technology will need to step up, an aggregator of all our… content in one place. A master account…from which users can generate the content that feeds into the various and sundry vertical spaces…

That last sentence may be why users are beginning to struggle with FriendFeed. Maybe lifestreaming services are pointed in the wrong direction. Instead of feeding dozens and sometimes hundreds (competitor Profilactic has 135 services) of varied sites into an aggregator, why not reverse the feed and point the aggregator outward? Write your blog posts, add new media, post links and comment on items from one central site. Then your lifestreaming site plug-in blasts it all out to the hundreds of services. We already have favorite sites on which we spend most of our time - Facebook pages or personal blogs. Add FriendFeed as a plug-in to your favorite site and have it do all your socializing for you.

FriendFeed and Profilactic aren’t the only ones honing the lifestreaming model; for an excellent analysis check out Mark Krynsky’s Lifestream Comparison Matrix. Yahoo’s MyBlogLog just launched its entry into the space and iStalkr presents its lifestreams in a visually appealing timeline. And those are just the tip of the iceberg. The sector that set out to ease our social overload is already beginning to groan under its own weight. There is a very real, almost urgent, need for lifestreaming services. But perhaps we should stop and rethink the philosophy behind them before they become yet more noise in the social graph.

Sometimes a phrase just leaps out at you. I was reading a thought-provoking piece on ReadWriteWeb, about whether technology complicates or simplifies our lives, and was struck by the phrase, “the encumbrance of over-choice.” It comes from Richard Szafranski, Partner at Toffler Associates, and I hope he’ll forgive me for stealing it for this post’s title. Szafranski stated it as he participated in an Economist/Oxford 2.0 debate over the following premise: if the promise of technology is to simplify our lives, it is failing. The public isn’t with him on this at the moment, with 64% of voters siding with simplification. The phrase struck a chord with me, though, as it nails precisely what I’ve been trying to put a finger on for several weeks. Where does my social graph end?

Until a couple of months ago, I had admittedly only dipped a toe into the morass of social innovations now available. Screening companies for DEMO and providing analysis to The Guidewire Report monopolizes my time and I tended to try out a service for a week or two, only to leave my profile languishing afterward. But as I wade deeper into emerging tech and blogging - and present myself as an expert on startups - I’d be remiss not to immerse myself fully into key services. So I’ve dove headfirst into FriendFeed and Twitter, Twine and PlaxoPulse, Persai and YouNoodle, Facebook and LinkedIn, and some 10-15 others I won’t assault you with. The problem isn’t that these services are faulty. It’s the exact opposite - I’m loving them. Read the rest of this entry »

I was excited to see yesterday that HiveLive, a Colorado-based enterprise social networking platform, raised an additional $5.6M to bring its total capital raise to $7.8M. Grotech Capital Group led the round and Joseph Zell will take a seat on the company’s board.

I sat down with John Kembel and his sketch books about 18 months ago when he was first mapping out the social knowledge sharing concept that has become a premier enterprise social networking platform. John and his identical twin brother George Kembel (now the director at Standford’s dSchool) founded DoDots during the boom, and the two remain, to my way of thinking, inspired and inspiring collaborators. John, George and I sat around the table with a couple of Sharpies and sketched out ideas and patterns of information flow.

About six months later, the three of us got together again, this time on a cool but sunny Spring afternoon on the patio of Palo Alto’s Empire Grille.  Again the Sharpies came out, and we talked about how people collaborate in around projects and ideas.  I’m not sure if it was the wine or the smell of the indelible ink, but the crack was mighty and the ideas seemed to influence the transition of HiveLive from a personal knowledge manager to an enterprise customer collaboration platform.  At least I’d like to think it did.

Today, HiveLive is a rich platform that enables companies to create collaborative communities within their organizations, and extending them to include partners and customers. The early thinking about how ideas can be shared selectively is foundational to this unified environment.  And while I wanted to see HiveLive come to market as a consumer product (I’ve long believed that controls are key to creating rich collaborative environments that bridge personal and professional networks), the HiveLive team has done the right thing to take this product to the enterprise.

I do hope that at some future point, HiveLive will bring the consumer product to market. But that’s only going to happen if the company can accelerate its growth with business customers that write checks for the software that becomes critical to their business objectives.   This latest round of capital is the fuel the company needs to do that.

Since Chris and I are wrapping up our final report to III in Taiwan, I thought I’d share some impressions from the trip we took to Taipei in December. Contracted through the Taiwanese government to meet with startups and counsel them on succeeding in the US market, we met with 12 companies that week. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Taiwanese tech sector and am happy to report that it is thriving. The majority of the companies were extremely savvy about the tech sector in general, as well as specific ideas and themes in Silicon Valley. We had planned to invite one of the 12 companies to demonstrate at DEMO 08 but were so impressed by the level of innovation and ingenuity that we ended up choosing two. Citiport and atlaspost were big hits at DEMO 08, with atlaspost even winning the People’s Choice DEMOgod award. (I must admit to feeling a bit of the proud parent as they accepted the trophy.)

Though several of the companies are too early-stage to discuss publicly, VooEasy has since launched in beta and received a bit of coverage in Mashable. I like the philosophy of VooEasy - spinning the social network into a networking one-stop-shop for mass-consumer adults - and expect to hear more from them in coming months. Other teams were equally as impressive in identifying holes in the US market and developing engaging products to fill them. An intriguing approach to citizen journalism, mixing in prediction markets for good measure; a drag-and-drop community platform in which all content is reproducible across individual sites; a recommendation engine powered by data mining and semantic analysis; and a really exciting app that could turn the world of Twitter upside down - just a few of the technologies we were introduced to in Taiwan.

It’s yet another example of innovation occurring outside the realm of Silicon Valley. Our week in Taiwan couldn’t have been more enjoyable or the tech talk more stimulating. Our hosts were beyond gracious and the country itself comfortable and welcoming. And its geographical and cultural proximity to China makes its business community an invaluable resource regarding inroads to the mainland. Any investors, executives or like-minded entrepreneurs looking for the next hot tech hub should take a closer look at Taiwan. With such energetic, sharp innovators in its midst, this tech community is due for a growth explosion.

Okay, his wife and kids might find that news shocking, but I ran into him today at Adobe’s Engage event at Dogpatch Studios in San Francisco.  I didn’t recognize him at first, what with at least three still and video cameras extending his line of vision.

But he did capture video of the conversation between Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch and me.  Rather than recap the discussion, here’s a link to Robert’s video for Fast Company.    And thanks, too, Robert, for the photo.  It almost looks as though I have a “good side.”

When you earn your keep vetting startups, it can come as a shock to hear someone say that the startup landscape isn’t as fully formed as it should be. The volume of companies sprouting up these days feels overwhelming at times. But my conversation with YouNoodle CEO Bob Goodson this morning put a new spin on the startup ecosystem. YouNoodle’s assertion is that, while there are plenty of ideas and companies floating around, there aren’t nearly enough being funded. That the entire entrepreneurial process could benefit from more efficiency, created in some part by computers.

YouNoodle launched last week to plenty of blog discussion, with everyone caught up in the idea of predicting the future. Goodson says that’s not exactly what the company is aiming for. (That’s a fine line to walk, though, in the hot field of prediction markets. When you claim the ability to valuate a startup three years in the future, you can’t blame journalists for going where they did.) Read the rest of this entry »

I am spending the morning with about 120 of Adobe’s customers and developers at the company’s second Engage event at San Francisco’s DogPatch Studios.

Throughout the day, developers are showing the work they’re doing with Adobe’s tools, including the AIR platform which was officially launched from beta today. Here are a few of the demos I saw this morning.

ShifD was born of a Yahoo! hack event in London a while ago and was launched last night by The New York Times Company. The application lets you easily move content from Web sites to your desktop and/or mobile phone. We’ve seen this application before, but ShifD seems to be super simple. The app is fresh into beta and there are kinks to be worked out, but the developers expect to open up an API in the future.

DEMO fans got a first look at Sprout last month at DEMO 08. The Engage audience got a look today, as Carnet Williams walked the audience through building a sprout rich media player. Sprout lets you gather up media assets from any live Web site or upload them yourself. The beta is live now and open for public trail.

FedEx showed a desktop application that provides real-time status of package movement through the FedEx delivery system. The app brings better convenience and more information directly to the customer, and provides real-time alerts to improve customer experience. The application was built in-house in about 12 weeks on the Flex platform.

MFG.com is a marketplace that links the global manufacturing economy. The site has created a rich internet application to coordinate transactions among suppliers, manufacturers, and customers. This may not be the application you rush to, but it is a great example of a rich Web application.

I’m on next, in conversation with Adobe CIO Kevin Lynch. We’re due to talk about a range of things modestly summarized as “what’s next for the Web.”

About a week before DEMO, I was talking to Pat Kenealy, managing director of IDG Ventures/San Francisco, about the success rates of startup companies that launch first products at DEMO vs. the average venture portfolio. I posited that while DEMO is really about products rather than businesses that young companies are little more than their first products and that our screening process is designed to bring the best concepts to the surface without the bias and influence that affect many investment decisions. As a result, if each class of demonstrators was a portfolio, I speculated, it would out perform many of the top venture firms.

Pat didn’t disagree, but he did challenge me to “do a Kreskin,” and put the names of the 10 companies I thought would be runaway hits to be opened in a year.

Never mind the envelop. I decided to wait a few weeks for the post-DEMO media to play out so as not in influence coverage, and to name my 10 picks here. Now, as a disclaimer, I will say that I am impressed by all 77 companies - startup and established - that introduced products at DEMO and I believe that each and every one of those products has strong potential to be both impactful and successful in the market.

But the challenge Pat posed was to chose 10 that would out pace the market in terms of growth, valuation, and/or exit. So here they are in no particular order. Read the rest of this entry »

You don’t have to spend too much time getting to know me before you learn that I grew up in the 60s and 70s in Pittsburgh. Then, Pittsburgh was a gritty mill town. My favorite field trip was to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, which I remember as a stately black stone building. In recent years, the building was sandblasted to its original creamy white. Makes me wonder how much soot went through our lungs in those days.

By the mid-seventies, most of the steel workers were laid off. Steel from Japan was much cheaper. The mills along the rivers stopped belching their smoke and, finally, they were torn down. The air improved, but the economy didn’t. Pittsburgh was an industrial town in need of a renaissance. And, like so many cities across the globe, technology would be the renewal.

That was nearly 20 years ago, and Pittsburgh still struggles to be relevant in the global tech economy, and this despite the city’s claim to two world-class universities – Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh – and proximity to dozens of other top private and public colleges (including my own Allegheny College just an hour’s drive up Interstate 79). Pittsburgh has plenty of engineering talent and an entrepreneurial spirit. But its distance from major technology centers hampers the city’s would-be startups from accessing the financial and mentor capital that accelerates business development in other parts of the country. In fact, for all the smarts in the Steel City, I can think of only a small handful of companies with Pittsburgh roots, most recently mSpoke, which launched at DEMOfall 07 and Sim Ops Studio which I wrote about last month.

In one small but important way, that may begin to change. Innovation Works, a State of Pennsylvania program that makes investment in promising startups, has launched AlphaLab, a program and incubator space to catalyze next-generation software, interactive game design and Internet-related businesses. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times stuck its foot in its mouth today by running a story on girls in tech… in the fashion section. This raised a bit of consternation - Mary Hodder was none to happy - but not as much as it perhaps should have. The piece is ranked pretty high on Techmeme but only has three blog posts attached to it. Compare that with the recent hubbub over Seattle vs Silicon Valley (in which we got involved), which generated 158 comments on Arrington’s blog alone.

The premise of the NYT piece, that the majority of Web content innovators is increasingly teenage girls, is a strong one and worth covering. But why not in the Business or Tech section? It’s a question to which I don’t necessarily have an answer. But it adds to a theme that’s been bubbling in my head lately: where do women stand in the tech community?

It’s a subject I find myself returning to every few months. Back in July of 06, I tackled it on my personal blog and the Guidewire site, bemoaning the need to make every gadget “for girls” pink and sparkly. A few months later, I railed against Sugar Networks for throwing up a Digg clone, complete with hearts. (I’m sad to find that site still in operation.) It comes full circle with today’s news of the PopSugar/TechCrunch mixer scheduled for April in Hollywood. TechCrunch presented it in a mostly inoffensive manner; PopSugar just came out and said it directly - find a husband here, girls! Read the rest of this entry »