October 2006 Archives

It is no secret that I'm a big fan of conferences. I use them as both a great source of information and a great source of new conversations. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to speak at a bunch of events and to be an advisor to others. In light of that, I've decided to be a little more systematic about sharing conference info on VentureBlog. I'm going to try to share info about the conferences at which I'll be speaking, as well as the ones I think will be interesting and that I plan on attending. I hope it proves interesting and helpful to those of you reading.

Under the Radar: Mobility!

While the idea of mobility has evolved rapidly in recent years, there is no denying that mobile networks, platforms and devices are going to be a major mover of tech economies for the foreseeable future. I would personally sooner give up television than my Treo. For folks interested in getting a great overview of the cutting edge startups in the mobility space, you should definitely check out IBDNetwork's Under the Radar: Mobility!. This one-day conference is being held at the Microsoft Mountain View Campus on November 16th and will run from 8am to 6pm. Companies like 4Info, EQO, MostionDSP, Plusmo and Sharpcast will be presenting. It should be a fantastic mobility primer.

VentureBlog readers can get a $70 discount when they REGISTER HERE.

Business Blogging Seminar in San Francisco

In an effort to help businesses large and small alike better understand and utilize blogging as part of their business strategies, Six Apart has started running half-day blogging seminars throughout the country. You can see the latest dates and locations at the Business Blogging Seminars home page. Anil Dash and crowd from Six Apart do a great job of helping Marketing, PR and Product Management folks better understand the blogging landscape and put blogging to work for their businesses. The next Seminar is in San Francisco on Monday, November 13th at Le Meridien. You can REGISTER HERE. I don't know if I'll be talking at this one but I'm sure to speak at some of these in the future (count me in for the Honolulu seminar). When you talk with folks who are doing a good job of using blogging as part of their business, you can appreciate the power of the medium. Great stuff.

Web 2.0

OK, this is really a tease I suppose because it is no longer possible to register for the upcoming Web 2.0 conference. It is sold out. And for good reason. I was looking at the latest schedule for the event and was blown away by the lineup. Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle have really pulled together an amazing set of speakers for this year's Web 2.0 Conference. I have no doubt that people will be blogging this event like crazy next week (it runs Tuesday through Thursday). I'll be there for sure. And Craig Syverson and I will be podcasting from the conference one Wednesday. Keep your ears pealed for our VentureCast from Web 2.0.

If you missed your chance to go to the Web 2.0 conference because you registered too late, you should definitely keep your eyes on the Web 2.0 Expo home page. The Web 2.0 Expo is a new conference and tradeshow being launched by O'Reilly Media and CMP Technology this coming spring in San Francisco. The event will take place from April 15th through 18th in the Moscone Center. I will be giving a talk about communicable diseases (no lie), which is worth the price of the ticket alone. It should be another great event from O'Reilly and crew. I'll be sure to let you all know when registration opens.

I guess that is it for my first VentureBlog Conference Roundup. I hope it is useful. Track me down if you're at any of these events.

So what is Vox? Vox is the perfect blogging platform for my family. It is a combination of a really simple, elegant blogging tool and a social network. You can invite people to join your Vox blog and then specify if they are "friends" or "family." With those designations, you can then control who sees what content on your blog. For example, you might post a picture of your baby in the bath and designate it viewable only by "family." Or you might write a post about a recent bachelor party and designate it readable only by "friends." By allowing the granular of control over each piece of content (photos, video, text), you are able to customize the view of your blog for your specific audience members.

So why am I so excited? Finally I have a place where I can post pictures and video of my kids without concern about who is looking at them. I can write about topics I might not otherwise put on the open web. I have the controls I need to use my Vox blog in a very different way than I use my Movable Type blog (VentureBlog) or my TypePad blog (SaysMe). My brother, my sister, my parents, my brother- and sister-in-law, my cousin are all on Vox. I use Vox to share the latest about my life with them and they use Vox to share the latest about their lives with me. Vox is a one-stop shop for staying in touch with my friends and family -- I need go no further than posting on Vox and looking at what they've posted on Vox to stay connected to the people who matter most to me.

I've written about what I called Social Networking 3.0 before. I argued that social networks are not an application in and of themselves but rather help inform other applications. Well Vox is one such application that uses social networking to increase the power of its other features. The ability to specify reader permissioning with greater granularity is a powerful use of social networking. And Vox does a superb job of making that possible.

If you want to check out my Vox blog, click here. What you will see are some fun YouTube videos, discussion of random books and CDs, photos from Yahoo Hack Day, a post about Threat Level Orange, a picture of Mena and her dog in costume, etc. What you won't see is a single picture or video of my kids. Which is funny, because if you are my mom, that's practically all you will see. And that's the beauty of Vox. Everyone sees a clean, well-organized blog that supports all media types, but each view is different based upon your relationship with the author. Which is precisely what I needed in a tool in order to blog about my daily life.

As I said at the outset, I'm biased. But I am also truly addicted to Vox. As are the rest of my family members. For those of you who are interested in checking out Vox for yourselves, as of last week it is open to the public. Just CLICK HERE and you'll be able to sign up for your very own Vox blog and see what everyone is talking about. I hope you like it as much as I do.

I'm very pleased to announce the return of VentureCast. As some of you may recall, for a short while there I would carry around a digital audio recorder in my pocket and take the opportunity on occasion to record a truly stream of consciousness podcast as I drove up and down the Bay Area hightways. There were about a half dozen podcasts in total before my audio recorder ran out of batteries or got replaced by some other gadget in my pocket. And, as these things go, VentureCast was put on hold until the next bit of inspiration or a smack on the head.

I got that smack on the head a short while ago from a friend named Craig Syverson. Craig has a fantastic video podcast called VideoGrunt that is well worth checking out. He and I were chatting and he asked me what ever happened to VentureCast. I claimed laryngitis or some such thing, but he wasn't buying it. By the time we were done chatting, we decided to reboot VentureCast as a conversation between the two of us. We're planning on getting together every other week to talk about the world of technology, entrepreneurship and venture capital (and I'm sure we'll chat about a whole bunch of other extraneous crap as well).

The first episode of the New VentureCast (dare I say VentureCast 2.0?) is now available for download. Here's the link (or you can go the VentureCast FeedBurner page). Better yet, not only is it now available for subscription on iTunes, but it is also one of today's Featured Podcast on iTunes (according to the AskANinja guys, they got their first big boost of viewership as a result of being the featured podcasts on iTunes -- I'm not expecting quite the same impact). Check it out and let us know what you think. We'd love to get your feedback on things you'd like to hear us talk about, things you liked, things you didn't, etc.

And speaking of feedback, here's your first chance to have an impact. When I first started VentureCast, I discovered that someone had already bought the VentureCast domain. Given that I had been blogging at VentureBlog for going on three years at the time, it really annoyed me but I didn't do anything to force the issue. Now not only are there a couple of podcasts using the VentureCast name in some form or other but a separate company is using VentureCast for its services. So here is the question? Should I continue to call the podcast VentureCast? Or should I change the name to something new. How do you like VCcast? Or VentureRant? I'd love your feedback.

Craig and I will be recording the next episode of VentureCast tomorrow. It will be great to do it on a regular basis and I want to give a huge thanks to Craig for motivating me to do it.

With great admiration, I have been watching Chris Anderson's book "The Long Tail" hit the New York Times best seller list and dominate the scarce business book shelf space of the brick and mortar bookstore world. The Long Tail is not just a geeky concept for the O'Reilly crowd, it is now a mainstream driver for the Business Week crowd. And while no longer an absolute requirement of every consumer internet venture pitch (and pretty much every enterprise pitch for that matter), the idea of the long tail continues to permeate many, probably most, of the PowerPoint presentations I see on a daily basis. Chris deserves great credit for simplifying and contextualizing a concept that plays such a big role in the evolving connected economy.

Continuing in his role as shirpa of the new economy, Chris has moved on from the Long Tail to a related but distinct idea that he is calling the Economy of Abundance. In a talk he just gave at the PopTech conference (a fantastic event in the unbelievably beautiful but remote town of Camden Maine), Chris described this new economy. The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste. That is the overriding attitude of the Economy of Abundance -- don't do one thing, do it all; don't sell one piece of content, sell it all; don't store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn't work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all.

The same businesses that are the poster children for the Long Tail, are the poster children for the Economy of Abundance. And the same businesses that are the victims of the Long Tail are the poster children for the Economy of Scarcity. With bandwidth and storage approaching free, iTunes can offer three million songs (P2P offers nine million). In contrast, with limited shelf space, Tower Records can only offer fifty- or sixty-thousand tracks. The end result, consumer choose abundance over scarcity (something for everyone) -- Tower Records gets liquidated while iTunes grows dramatically. Television is undergoing a similar transformation, from scarcity to abundance. TV initially consisted of only the major networks. Consumers were limited to 3 choices in any given time slot. With cable the number of channels was dramatically increased and a broader range of content became available (Food Channel, Discovery Channel, ESPN, CNN, etc.). To many, 250 channels may constitute sufficient abundance as to approach infinite choice in their minds. But the true television of abundance is YouTube. With unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage, television is subject to microprogramming -- millions of shows, viewable on demand at any time. Now not only should NBC be worried, so too should be Comcast.

Unlike the Economy of Abundance, scarcity requires that businesses make tough choices. The Economy of Scarcity is a zero sum game -- new offerings necessarily replace old. Take, for example, Blockbuster. With DVD choices limited to the inventory that fits on the store shelves, the arrival of each new release necessarily displaces some DVD that the day before was available for rent. In contrast, Netflix has no shelf space limitations, thus the arrival of new releases need not replace the old. Blockbuster's user-base continues to wain as consumers prioritize choice over immediacy. And, of course, with the holy grail of movie abundance coming soon -- Rhapsody-style video on demand (made available courtesy of unlimited bandwidth and storage) -- both shelf space limitations and concerns about immediacy will be eliminated. Business owners forced to make choices about inventory are necessarily at a disadvantage. Even the best corporate buyers get it wrong and don't pick the year's hot color of Kitchenaide or the movie that outperforms its box office on the video store shelf. Meanwhile, businesses driven by abundance can make all SKU's available and need not fall victim to poor choices.

The Economy of Abundance allows business owners to defer choices to the end users. What better way to find out what consumers want than to give them everything and see what they actually buy. That is the paradigm of abundance. Why get your news programmed by CNN.com when you can have your news bubble up from the collective wisdom of end users at Newsvine or Reddit? Why get your television programmed by CBS when you can leverage the collective wisdom of the web to find great shows like Lonelygirl15 or Ask a Ninja? No longer will the success or failure of content be dictated solely by the Economy of Scarcity (e.g. Walmart). Rather, it will be dictated by the will of the consumers, as empowered by the Economy of Abundance.

Much like the Long Tail, the idea of the Economy of Abundance is not prescriptive. It does not tell you how to run your business. But it points to another significant force at work in the new economy and suggests that entrepreneurs should think creatively about how their businesses might be transformed by utilizing abundant resources in a disruptive way. Like the Long Tail before it, I suspect that I will be seeing the Economy of Abundance permeate the presentations that I see in the coming months and year.

For those of you out there looking for some practical advice on Internet company building, I'm speaking at an event this week called "From Garage to IPO: How to build a successful consumer Internet company." The event is a day long tutorial being put on by the TiE Internet SiG, of which I'm an Advisory Board Member. There are a lot of great folks involved in the event, including Iggy Fanlo from AdBrite (formerly from Shoping.com), James Currier from Ooga Labs (formerly from Tickle), Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn (formerly from PayPal), Caterina Fake from Yahoo/Flickr, Heather Harde from Fox Interactive, Manish Chandra from Kaboodle, Munjal Shah from Riya, and a bunch of other great people. We'll cover topics ranging from getting started to partnerships to customer acquisition to monetization -- it should be a great discussion for new and seasoned entrepreneurs alike.

Here are the details on the event:

Wednesady, October 18, 2006
7:30 am - 7:30 pm
TiE SV
2903 Bunker Hill Lane
Suite No. 108
Santa Clara, CA 95054

To sign up, click here. I look forward to the conversation and hope to see lots of you there.