Archive for October, 2008

Tech Policy in the Next Administration

October 31, 2008 at 11:09 am · Filed under Chris Shipley, Entrepreneurship, Observations ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Sometimes, maybe too often, I don’t realize what I think about an issue, topic, or trend until I’m asked about it.  That was certainly the case this week when Tech Policy Central’s founder Natalie Fonseca asked for my views on technology policy in the new administration.     Tech Policy Central is an outgrowth of the Tech Policy Summit, an annual event entering its third year that “brings together prominent leaders from the private and public sectors to examine critical policy issues impacting technology innovation and adoption in the United States and beyond.”   The event’s speakers are a Who’s Who of policy makers, technology executives, and elected officials.

As a lead up to the Summit in March 23-25, 2009 in the San Francisco Bay Area, Natalie has been polling her Advisory Board members (click here for her Q&A with Craig Newmark), and yesterday was my turn to respond to her questions.  I’d not put much though to tech policy in the context of the current economy, so Natalie’s questions sparked some thinking.

Here’s the Q&A:

Tech Policy Central: When it comes to promoting technology innovation, what do you think the top priorities should be for the next Administration and Congress?

Chris Shipley: Programs that promote and support entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are the driver of the technology economy, particularly in difficult times. They build the companies, hire the workers and create new value.

I’d like to see the National Science Foundation’s business development grants program expanded for technology innovation and tech transfer. The funding, relative to viable ideas/need, is remarkably little. I’d like to see investment in regional Innovation Centers. I’d like to see tax credits for entreprenerus who take personal risk to start their companies.

TPC: You meet with hundreds of entrepreneurs from around the world every year. Based on your conversations with those innovators and your own travels abroad, do you believe that Silicon Valley is in danger of losing its competitive edge in the global economy?

CS: I think Silicon Valley is learning that the global market is spawning innovation in every corner; that Silicon Valley doesn’t have a lock on great technology invention and innovation.  Still, the Valley remains the epicenter of innovation.  Foreign technology companies believe that they must come to the U.S., generally, and Silicon Valley, specifically, in order to grow their company and capture significant market share worldwide. Silicon Valley’s wealth of expertise, capital and experience is a magnetic pull for non-U.S. companies, and I believe it will continue to be in the foreseeable future.

TPC: If you were to name one tech policy area where you’d like to see greater federal government involvement, what would it be?

CS: Broadband digital infrastructure is critical to the economic competitiveness of the United States. And, as importantly, it bridges the divide in the U.S. between those who have and those who have not. Access to information is and will continue to be a tremendously valuable currency.  Investment in universal access to broadband infrastructure is an investment in a wide array of health and human services, including education, anti-poverty programs, public safety, crime prevention and the like.

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The Continuing Evolution of Twine

October 21, 2008 at 10:44 am · Filed under Carla Thompson, Semantics, Startups ·Tagged , , ,

By now, you’ve no doubt read multiple posts on Twine opening to the public with version 1.0. Though breaking news isn’t my strong suit, I have a special affinity for Twine and had to put in my two cents.

I’ve been using Twine for over a year now and wrote about its beta launch back in March. In that post, I called it “an incredibly deep, incredibly smart app that hasn’t yet found its ultimate form,” and said that “in order to ‘get’ Twine, you need to jump into it with both feet and play around.” The former statement still holds true, though version 1.0 takes several big steps in a positive direction. The latter, though, is completely off the table with this launch, a fact that will no doubt take the product further into the mainstream.

There is no longer a barrier to entry with Twine, as there is with so many other online services. I mentioned in a recent unrelated post that “users don’t get the value [of a service] without a large circle of connections and you don’t gain connections without a deep level of involvement.” There is no such problem with the new Twine, which shows you value almost immediately, without signing up. Just plug in a few interests on the homepage and Twine builds your interest feed. Theoretically, one wouldn’t even have to sign up for Twine to get some value out of it; use it as a search engine on steroids. But that would leave its real value on the table, ignoring its ability to organize your content in ways no other service today can.

Chris Morrison at VentureBeat wrote an excellent piece on Twine today, calling it a “modern-day Dewey Decimal System.” For a detailed description of how exactly Twine works, I recommend Chris’ piece, but his Dewey Decimal label gets right at the heart of the site’s real potential. Yes, at its most basic, it’s a bookmarking service, but the broader view reveals a mass categorization and organization system that requires little effort from the user.

Ultimately, I’d like to see Twine as one giant repository for online content – almost another level of the Internet. And that’s not unachievable either, when you consider the services that could plug into Twine. Let’s say that Twine develops plug-ins/partnerships with Facebook, MySpace and other walled-garden environments. You’d still interact socially on Facebook, play your Scrabble games and write on walls. But you would also have at your fingertips in Twine every note, status update, photo, and chat, automatically tagged and categorized and easily searchable. Say you’re planning a trip to Italy and are able to use Twine to find relevant content submitted by other users, alongside personal anecdotes from your Facebook friends. Read the travel article on top restaurants in Italy and see your best friend’s pictures from her Italian honeymoon, all in one place. I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, as walled-garden integration is obviously not available in Twine’s current version. But I’m trying to lay the groundwork for where I think Twine could go, an important point for many who still don’t ‘get’ the service.

The path to an “a-ha” moment in Twine looks different for each user. Mine came with my private Twine, into which I dump notes on startups I meet with. I need to recall companies, people and technologies quickly in daily conversations and there aren’t any services that know my content as Twine does. My key complaint here is that I want the search refinement to improve. It’s not wholly intuitive, can be a bit slow, and I’d like more filter choices. But even with those nits, I’m still able to zero in on the precise information I need. And as a bonus, I also get other applicable articles, comments and conversations from which to draw.

Twine continues to innovate on an impressive trajectory and even more feature upgrades are planned for the next several months. As you delve further into the service and watch its tagging capabilities, think about the other online services you use frequently and what that content would look like in Twine. It could mean a whole new era in information interaction online.


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Address for the Job You Want Done

October 16, 2008 at 7:30 am · Filed under Chris Shipley, Entrepreneurship, Observations, Startups ·Tagged ,

The iconic business book, given to me as I started my career those many years ago, was Women’s Dress for Success. In it, the author prescribed a wardrobe of “power suits” augmented by silky bows, pumps, and pearls.  As I looked around the newsroom at men and women dressed in denim, loafers, and baggy sweaters, I knew I’d chosen the right profession. I am, decidedly, not the silky bow type.

Still, I was admonished to “dress for the job you want.”  I did.  Jeans, a black turtleneck. (And yet I’m not the CEO of Apple.)  I realized pretty quickly, though, that while I was completely comfortable at work, I wasn’t dressing for the job my parents wanted me to have. Still, I’ve done a pretty good job emulating the wardrobe of a tech analyst and, well, nearly 25 years later, here I am.

I was reminded of all this early this week when I sat down to catch up with Soujanya Bhumkar, CEO of Cooliris.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I am an adviser to this incredible company.  More often than not, though, I come away from my visits with Soujanya energized by his thoughtful and insightful leadership of his company.   This visit was no exception.

After reviewing the status of the company (it’s on a roll) and getting a peek at the product roadmap (heading in exciting directions), Soujanya talked about the new hires he’s planning:  a VP of User Growth and a VP of Partner Distribution. Huh?  Not the normal titles you’d see on an org chart, to be sure.

“I call them what they are responsible for,” Soujanya says. “I’m not hiring a VP of Marketing, because you can be sure that person will come up with a plan to spend money on tradeshows. I want my guy or gal focused on growing the user base.”

It’s not a new idea, perhaps:  Reward the behavior you want.  But with a twist: Name the job for the performance you must have.

It’s easy for  a new company to throw up a traditional org chart and label boxes VP of Engineering, VP of Marketing, VP of Business Development.  Oddly enough, it’s harder to talk about what you want those people to do, what you want them do day to day, for what you want them to be responsible.

“I won’t hire a Biz Dev guy,” Soujanya told me.  “What does that person do?  I’m hiring a VP of Partner Distribution because those partnerships are critical to our success.  We need partners to distribute our product. The VP of Partner Distribution is responsible for that.”

Especially now, with daily admonitions to startups to tighten their belts, control costs, and stay focused,  young companies need to hold every employee responsible for the success of the company, and ensure that every day, every employee knows exactly what he or she should be doing.  Forget fancy titles; address for the job you want done.

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I can’t hear you; I’ve got a Jawbone in my ear

October 15, 2008 at 10:14 am · Filed under Carla Thompson, Hardware ·Tagged , , , , ,

I don’t write about hardware much; I’m primarily a software analyst so I’m not on many pitch lists for the latest gadgets. But I’ve recently had the pleasure (sarcasm implied) of shopping for a new Bluetooth headset for my iPhone and had to share my adventures with readers.

I work remotely, far from Silicon Valley, so I spend a good amount of my day on the phone. And when DEMO screening gets hot and heavy, I can find myself bouncing between six and seven hour-long calls a day. So a wireless headset is a necessity for me and it needs to be a workhorse. My last one, the Plantronics Discovery 640, lasted two years and was generally satisfactory. Towards the end of its life, it became almost impossible to use during highway driving – the other party could barely hear me – but otherwise it did the job.

When the Plantronics died, I decided to fork over the cash for a Jawbone 2, a headset that’s received rave reviews. In the past, I’ve purchased headsets with a wary eye and much research into return policies but the Jawbone has been buzzed about so much, I figured it to be a no-brainer. That, unfortunately, was not the case. Much has been made of the Jawbone’s Noise Assassin feature, which isolates the speaker’s voice from background noise, but testing that feature requires that a call actually operate in the first place. It was one of the most haphazard headsets I’ve ever used – one call went through fine, the next had horrible sound quality, and the next didn’t even go through; I found myself repeatedly pressing the “audio source” button on my iPhone. In an effort to make the headset as sleek as possible, the buttons are underdesigned; I was never sure when I had accurately pressed one. And the volume – egads. I know I’ve blown out my hearing at too many concerts, but I’m not that deaf. Far too many callers could barely be heard and frantic pushing (or did I?) of the volume button didn’t help. In short, a big disappointment for a headset heralded as the second coming.

What ended up saving the day was a headset from a company I’d admittedly never heard of – BlueAnt. The fabulous folks at Porter Novelli Austin work with BlueAnt and, upon hearing of my travails, suggested I give this one a go. I’ve been using the BlueAnt Z9i about a week now and would give it a 9 out of 10 overall. It connects perfectly to every call, has excellent sound quality with two microphones, and features its own version of Noise Assassin called Voice Isolation. It’s multi-point, so can be simultaneously paired with two phones, and can even be paired with up to 5 devices at one time. You can also set up different ringtones for known and unknown callers – the first headset I know of with that capability. It can be clunky to put on quickly though, which is why I’m not giving it a 10. But if I have to choose between extra seconds to fit a headset on my ear and the ability to hear the other caller, I’ll take the latter every time.

So if you’re in the market for a Bluetooth headset, don’t be a chump like me and believe the hype. Give the BlueAnt a try and let me know what you think.

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DEMOfall 08: Our Top 10 to Out Perform

October 13, 2008 at 10:08 pm · Filed under Chris Shipley, DEMO Conference, Observations, Startups ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This week marks the start of our search for the companies and products that will make their debut at DEMO 09, March 1 to 3, in Palm Springs, California.  But before DEMOfall 08  becomes a distant spot in the rear view mirror, it’s imperative that Guidewire Group puts the cap on that event by selecting the 10 companies of DEMOfall 08 that we think will outperform among this remarkably talented group of companies that presented at the event in September.

The practice of highlighting 10 companies was spurred on by IDG Ventures’ Pat Kenealy, who challenged me at DEMO 08 to identify the companies at the conference that would out-perform typical venture portfolio metrics.  And thus began what with this second issue is a new tradition: Guidewire Group’s list of the 10 companies we predict will prove  most fundable, and most profitable, of the portfolio that is the demonstrating class of each DEMO Conference.  This is no easy task.  Carla and I spent months screening hundreds of companies in order to identify the Class of DEMOfall 2008.   In each company, we found something innovative and important, so calling out just 10 companies is a bit like asking a mother to identify her favorite children.

As with the DEMO 08 Top 10 List, I decided to wait a few weeks for the post-DEMO media to play out so as not to influence coverage of any of the 72 DEMOfall 08. But now, the time has come. So here, in no particular order, are the Guidewire Group Top 10 of DEMOfall 08: Read the rest of this entry »

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Finding Them Where They Live

October 8, 2008 at 8:46 am · Filed under Carla Thompson, Observations, Social Media, Web 2.0 ·Tagged , , , , , ,

The worst part of not being a full-time blogger, i.e., other work precludes me from jumping on every story, is that you curse a lot. As in, “dammit, I was going to say that.” That happened to me this morning when I read this post by Rob Diana. He was building off a post by Chris Brogan that does an excellent job of examining real-world consumers and what technology means to them. Both posts echo Guidewire Group’s sentiment that the current financial crisis should be a call for the tech world to focus attention on the masses.

Rob’s post, though, takes it one step further to just where I wanted to go. The tech world has at its fingertips a ready-made, gargantuan network of users who have dipped their toe into the social media universe and are primed for more – Facebook. Tech insiders regularly deride Facebook and, at times on Twitter and FriendFeed, there seems to be a game of who can hate Facebook more. We could certainly spend an entire post talking about Facebook’s flaws. But the fact remains that the people who are on it are, for the most part, not involved in the blogosphere. Those are precisely the people entrepreneurs need to reach and, for the moment, they’re lying fallow, playing Scrabble and throwing things at each other. Read the rest of this entry »

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Where To Now?

October 6, 2008 at 5:25 pm · Filed under Carla Thompson, Entrepreneurship, Observations, Outside the Valley ·Tagged , , , , ,

Chris and I have been asked one question many times in the past few weeks: how will the financial crisis impact the start-up ecosystem? The answer depends partly on your place in that ecosystem but if I were forced to boil it down to one pithy statement, I’d say this: The real world has horned in on our heady idyll and that is a very good thing.

If there’s one point at which Guidewire Group relentlessly hammers, it is this: Remember the Masses. And when cash and attention are flowing to ideas that don’t make sense for everyday consumers – as they have been the past few years – it’s hard to keep that point top of mind. So what if Joe Six-Pack (sorry, couldn’t resist) doesn’t understand lifestreaming? He’s a hopeless fellow who doesn’t understand technology and should stick with digital picture frames, assuming he can get them to work. But as anyone at Pets.com can attest, Joe Six-Pack very much matters. Without him, your product is destined to a very small market of people who will leave you when the next big thing comes around.

So as markets crash around us and VCs become increasingly skittish, what’s an entrepreneur to do? Read the rest of this entry »

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