Category — Life

• iTunes replaced the record store for distribution of Music
• Netflix replaced Blockbuster as the distribution for Movies’s
• Amazon replaced Barnes and Noble as the distrubtion for Books
• People will pay to read content that matters to them - Micropayments or subscriptions to Online News (WSJ, NYT)
• Google is not evil, but blind love of Google will lead to evilness.

I’ve been neglecting my blog here for some time, but I had this saved as a draft and based on many of the conversations I’ve had in the past few days, I felt that this brief thought captured some good points. Content doesn’t come from Google, it comes from people. Some of those people are professional journalists, but many of them now are just regular “Joe 6-Packs.” You and me posting our thoughts, our pictures - all of us out here sharing our lives.

Regardless of where it comes from, Google doesn’t create any of it and its not claiming it does. Google is out organizing information, which is one form of content. And as we grow less mindful of where our content comes from, or even who is creating it, the medium loses its value and we simply consume content in whatever form it appears in front of us. For me, I see the web as finally having caught up and mimicked our physical world experience with word of mouth. Twitter and Facebook have taken an innate human action, word of mouth, and amplified it online. Almost none of the content I consume comes from Google (except when I am seeking specific information).

My point is that content comes from the people around us, and when we watch, listen or read something that is very interesting to us, it doesn’t often matter who made the content - we remember who told us about it, or where we found it. In todays world wide web, where we found it is rarely on Google, it is from within our social network of friends and acquaintances.

I’ve heard something about this social graph idea…

Facebook is rumored to be launching its own location based checkin service, foursquare and gowalla are getting more hype than a red sox/yankees championship game being played on the moon. Everyone is all about checking in. (But what about standing out?)

I’ve mentioned this before, but I think QR Codes should play a role in the technology of checkins. It forces a check in to be physically located in a given place, not just nearby or walking past and it adds a layer of interaction between the patron and the business.

No major revelations here, just something I have been thinking about lately amongst all this hype.

Manhattan has become a city of iPhone users. No longer do digital cameras rule, but housewives use their iPhones to post pictures of their family on Facebook. Businessmen monitor the markets on their Bloomberg apps, and the digerati is constantly checking in on Foursquare, letting the world know where they are, and not mutually exclusive, how cool they are. Iphones are ubiquitous in the city, everyone seems to have one, and everyone who does seems to love it. Sure there are gripes about Att and 3G and battery life, but for the most part - they’re in love.

In love with what though. I myself am not an iPhone user, so while I see the appeal and emphathize with the functionality of a computer roaming around on a touch screen iPod - I don’t truly understand it. I do, but in recognition of what is quickly becoming a lifestyle choice (to iPhone or not to iPhone) - I don’t. Is it the convenience? My blackberry gets the mobile web, I have hundreds of apps on my phone, many of which are comparable to iPhone apps, my camera is excellent and I can post to Twitpic or Facebook with ease. I can upload music onto my expandable 8GB SD card, I can sync my calendar, I have great email functionality and make really clear phone calls.

I completely understand what people are so in love with, and its becoming more than love. As smartphones become more ubiquitous in society, the functionality of these devices is becoming more of a necessity than a bonus feature.  Do I really *need* to access my boarding pass on my phone and check in with that? Do I really *need* to look up driving directions on the fly? No I don’t, but if I have grown into reliance upon my smartphone, then I don’t take necessary steps to be prepared for life sans smartphone. Smartphones have become integrated into NYC society, our social habits and even our basic needs; smartphones make our lives easier and more quickly. Quickness is of course a longstanding tradition in NY.

But here I write this from Wilmington, NC on my grandmothers porch. She a cellphone for emergencies when she leaves the house, but doesn’t ever use it. I have not seen a single Blackberry or iPhone in the 5 days I have been here (I’ve seen a few sidekicks and Droids). So what is it these people don’t *need* in a smartphone? My initial thought is that this observation is simply an effect of the adoption curve. We are in a remote corner of North Carolina, a place where foreign cars are few and far between. But these people live there lives just fine - even more relaxed one might say. If someone took every iPhone and BB out of New York City overnight, people would be in chaotic states of panic. What would we do, I can’t event Twitter about my problem!

Smartphones have changed the way we live. We are reliant on them for so many of our basic needs these days and the iPhone is clearly the best in class device. As I grapple with how to pay my current bills, I really want an iPhone. You could even say I *need* one from a business perspective. (My post a few days ago about Stickybits - yeah, you need an iPhone to use the app). I’m in a conundrum, although I am facing bigger issues than should I buy and iPhone or not, this one is a doozy.

A few months ago I finished Jeff Jarvis’s book “What Would Google Do”. It was a fascinating read with much good insight into modern ways of running a business/organization. Google unquestionably runs a great business, but I think at the heart of Google, is an algorithm that returns better search results than any of its competitors. Yes they run their business efficiently as well, but their products superiority is what lead them to success, and leads them to try new things through iteration and openness.

Bijan Sabet recently posted a thought about building an excellent product as a pre requisite to monetization and it sort of summed up my thoughts from WWGD (What Would Google Do). Transforming every industry the way Google does things is sort of like saying being really good at something will make you better at it. Which is true, but doesn’t really mean anything if you aren’t good at that something to begin with.

Google is a child in the business world, it is only 12 years old and hasn’t even been public for 6 years. Of course its a behemoth with Billions of dollars in cash and revenue, it is no doubt a titan of the Internet Industry. But the internet is so young, we’ve had roughly 17 years with a web-browser, look at the automobile after 17 years of the combustion engine - it didn’t exist. Samuel Brown patented the internal combustion engine in 1823, 50 years in 1879 later Karl Benz patented the 2 cylinder engine used in the first automobile, which wasn’t invented for another 7 years. From 1886 when the first automobile was patented, it took until 1914 for an assembly line to build cars for the common man, and not until the 1940s was there a car that resembled autos as we know them today.  So looking back at the history of our modern cars, it took about 100 years from the invention of the underlying technology until it became a useful mainstream product.

Yes we are advancing at a Moore’s Law pace, and using much more powerful technology than they were, my point is advancement takes time. Google right now is at the Model-T level, it has something great that people want and use, but in another 12 years who knows what we may be doing to find information (I don’t think we’ll be using search to find content). Google will probably be powering what ever technology it is that we use in 2022, but that is IMHO solely because its initial product was so excellent that it advanced upon its competitors so far they’ll never catch up and now any new technology that is developed anywhere on the earth, Google has the power to stick its hands in it.

Building upon that great product, Google built a great company - it wasn’t born as a great company. A great product was born around which a great company was developed, and ignoring that product would be to ignore the cornerstone of any great organization: the product that it creates.

Great companies are built around great products. Build a great product and you have a chance to create a great company.

Kudos to Mr. Jarvis for bringing a lot of great lessons to light from Google’s dominance, but my biggest lesson over the past year has been to build great products and let the rest follow. Google’s success is no exception.

I’ve been spending more and more of my time looking at all the data I have surrounding my life and my business. Its interesting to see whats going on at a very granular level, and then zoom out and see the forest itself.

Its also intriguing to see how other people use data. Some people use charts and graphs to tell a story that doesn’t necessarily play out with a closer look, while others take a close look and find something you wouldn’t necessarily see on the surface of the data.

Take for instance Business Insider’s Chart of the Day , they have all sorts of interesting charts compiled from all over the web. Sometimes they are completely outrageous, sometimes they are insightful (mostly they are just charts though). What is interesting is how the headline of the Chart often varies from the data in the Chart. Take this for example:

Yes the people who don't want one doubled, but the people who do want one tripled

Yes, the percentage of people who don’t want one doubled, but the percentage of people who “would like to buy one” tripled, and the percent of people who replied “No, I’m not interested” was cut in half.

Charts are fun ways to take a snapshot of some set of data and to quickly illustrate a point. But is really interesting to see what kind of crazy stuff comes out of the data, not the parts that complement the story you are telling, but the data points you had no idea you’d find.

Look at this chart comparing the last 4 weeks of traffic on one of our sites. The chart covers the exact same days of the week, from a year ago in January. There are no significant events that would drive traffic, other than a slight spike at the end from Valentines Day searches.

Look how each day lines up, fascinating to me

Look how the trend of the days of the week follows so precisely. The first thing I saw when I looked at this chart was the fact that we are down about 7% y-o-y, but then I looked closer and saw the parallel movement across the chart. Look how the dips correlate, and the spikes match up. I’m now intrigued enough to put together a chart of all the data from all our sites and see how this matches up.

I’m not sure what to takeaway from this type of find, but if you just look at the headline, you miss the real gems.

As a preface, the guys who started Twitter are brilliant, they created a service which no one realized they wanted, and turned it into hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, and created an entire ecosystem based around sharing links, emotions, and whats happening right now. They have built a cultural phenomenon, I just don’t believe it will last, at least in its current form.

Twitter has been aggravating me of late.  It seems to be full of self-promoting and self aggrandizing on a scale never seen before. The annoying part is that almost none of the “social media experts” on Twitter are even slightly aware of their actions, and seem to be completely oblivious that their “buy from me” spewing is just a new form of spam.

Yes there are many people sharing useful information and generally contributing to the society that exists within Twitter, but they are getting fewer and farther between. What really bothers me about Twitter is not its populous, but its Soapbox promotion of these experts. That soapbox has people yelling very loud, and as PT Barnum learned, if you yell loud enough some people will listen.  See trending hashtag of the #shooturself - these people are not adding anything.

Twitter holds in itself what Twitter seems to believe to be a new version of Alexander Bell’s telephone. Only they don’t own the lines, or the devices, or even the technology that it runs on. It is just a set of protocols, basically serving as a communal text messaging platform. That observation isn’t news, but what I’m getting at here is that Twitter’s use as a business to its owners and investors is purely as a utility. If it tries to be a media company, it will fail, because it is a fad. A fad that didn’t even truly go mainstream yet, it just caught on with the people *trying* to be cool. Twitter is like the person who used to operate the local switchboard for the telephone companies, as soon as the telecoms figured out how to automate that process, those people were no longer needed. As soon as we figure out that real time sharing of information doesn’t have to all go through the same service, Twitter is toast. What I’m doing right now has nothing to do with Twitter.

There is significant value in the positive information that I garner from my daily perusing of Twitter. Links are great, and the people that I’m interested in the techworld share useful and valuable information daily. But all of that is information I could easily get from RSS feeds, friendfeed, facebook, or a multitude of other options (new services are appearing everyday - like Google Buzz). Right now Twitter holds the illusion of control over that data exchange, but in reality, Twitter is simply the latest iteration of information exchange via the web. First came email, then the http protocol, then instant messaging.  All of those are utility-type services that you can get for free and as soon as another service comes up and reveals that Twitters “control” is merely an illusion, users will shift, and along with them, Twitters value will - from ~$1 billion to zero.

Twitter is as much a business as email is a business. Making email better might be a business, and all of the great auxiliary companies built on Twitter are great businesses, but providing the protocols to send a message across the web is not a business. Well, maybe it was in 1997, but I believe we’ve moved on from that.

Sharing information that is valuable to me, is an important part of our open society, and I believe that Twitter has value, just as email and instant messaging have value - those services are still around today - and flourishing. Those services are not being monetized however, and are corollary parts tied into more extensive offerings.  Twitter has the ability to make it as a large company, but I don’t think its heading down the right path. Right now its walking down that path like its the cock of the walk, and I certainly doesn’t deserve that posture.

I spend about 3 hours a day reading stuff. Alot of that time is spent reading TechCrunch and Mashable and Business Insider and several other blogs about Technology and Business. But the really interesting stuff is found in the second level - the links and sources that those sites embed in their posts to attribute thoughts, ideas and specific data. Those links have a more focused approach to specific data points and thought patterns that give you a better insight into that line of thinking. A better insight into what is happening in the world.

I read an interesting quote today - “The beauty of the internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people.” ( - Jaron Lanier) Its very true. The value of the internet is in discovering what other smart and experience people have to say, and have to reflect about their world. Because our world is so interconnected, shared experiences are much more common - even if we don’t know each other or are on opposite sides of the globe.

Reading is a great way to focus your mind and absorb new information that inspires you. I feel like as I read, my unconscious mind is absorbing all the data I read and locking it away in my brain only to be accessed randomly at some other opportune (or inopportune) time. It brings the value of other people’s experiences, their thoughts and advice related to those experiences, it brings that all together and helps me better form an idea of what needs to be said or done here. Reading about how Google is positioning its new operating system, and how a brand new start up is unrolling its new location based social game. Those things matter, they are minute case studies on how to run a business in todays world. Real time case studies - this is happening NOW.

Of course the ultimate action is always up to me, but knowing that this company in Santa Cruz did this crazy thing when they were faced with this really bad situation and it worked brilliantly, or it was the last straw. Well thats not in you’re marketing textbook, or your finance book.

Its a little lesson you learn in the school of life, the school where you are the professor and you decide how well you do - but the rest of the world grades you. Do good things and you will do well.

Reading and absorbing is one of my favorite ways to relax, and it helps inspire me and focus on my ideas because I am always asking - “How does that apply to what I’m doing?” Always ask questions, and question the answers you get.

In the past year, I have had the best times, some not so good times, and some really bad times. I’ve hired and let go nearly a dozen people, all of whom I liked, and all of whom left me feeling down and like they had taken advantage of me. I am generally a kind and compassionate person, I almost always try to get the best situation for people on both sides of the table. But as I’ve heard before and was told recently, if you want a friend - get a dog.

I raised a small (by many standards) amount of Angel money in October last year. I took on a partner who invested time and money and committed to working side by side in the business with me.  He’s a smart and great guy, with a long history of managing successful sales teams. I thought it was the perfect partnership. But I learned the hard way that I gave up too much control of the company I had put so much in and our investors had invested in. So we set out to build a killer sales team.

And we took the right steps, we hired 3 new sales people. We purchased a massive license from Salesforce to manage our team, we did all the right things. Or so we thought. We were so psyched to get our feet on the street and bringing in new clients, that we forgot to build the product out to the specs it really needed. Our developer got behind on the new platform and all of a sudden we were 3 months, then 6 months behind schedule with the launch. But we had been training and building this sales team for those 6 months - and paying them. Not paying me, not paying my partner, but building our sales team; a sales team to conquer the world.

Lesson learned the hardway, if you build a killer product, you won’t have to “sell” it. It will sell itself. I knew we needed to focus on the product, from day 1 I knew it. Thats why I raised money, to build out this great product and then build out a great sales team to come and distribute it. We put the cart before the horse and spent all our time, effort and cash on this sales team, which flamed out and probably (in hindsight) wasn’t the right team to be working for us anyway.

So know here I am, a year later, with investors who still somewhat believe in us, a product that is halfway finished (but still great!) and a sales team 1/4 th the size it was 3 months ago. I’m stuck, because I know our idea will work, I know it does work. I have seen it work for 4 years now! But this economy turned a cold shoulder to our mediocre product, and I’m back where I started 14 months ago. Except much, much, dare I say, MUCH wiser for the experience.

I know this idea is going to succeed. Its just a question of when.

If it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger, or so the saying goes.

The past year has been a wild ride. I have gone through 8 salespeople now. Some people lie, some people cheat, and some people can’t do what you ask them to do (or just won’t). Dealing with people is hard, because when you demand a lot from someone and they don’t deliver, you’re disappointed in them, but when you don’t demand enough from people and they don’t deliver, you are disappointed in yourself. Managing is insanely difficult.

Being an entrepreneur requires you to have a close personal relationship with everyone in your company, and thats a great thing when times are good, but when times are bad - everything changes. All of a sudden daily tasks are questioned, Why do you want this from me? Well you were supposed to be doing it, but we let it slide. Well, I am the first to point the finger back at myself, and I’ve learned that discipline doesn’t make you successful sometimes. Discipline ALWAYS makes you successful, but you can’t be disciplined sometimes. Thats exactly what discipline is, its ALWAYS crossing Ts and dotting Is. Discipline is always doing all of the little things that make you great, that make you successful. Discipline is the toughness to make that extra phone call, write down that last request, finish the play all the way through the whistle.

Toughness makes winners out of players. Toughness makes good people great. Toughness allows discipline to come through and force you to succeed because you did all the right things. Not just some of them, or most of the time, but ALWAYS and EVERYTHING.

You have to be tough to be disciplined, and you have to be disciplined to be successful. If you can’t take some pressure, you will never be tough, and you will never be successful. Success is the overcoming of pressure through toughness and discipline, and it is the relentless pursuit of success that makes life awesome.