Recently in Internet Infrastructure Category
When I first met with the team at Splunk, they were working away on building a system that could accurately track a transaction as it traversed the entire enterprise stack. If the transaction broke somewhere along the way, their software could help IT discover the cause of that failure. While it was clearly a pain point for some businesses, there was no clear customer and the value proposition was a relatively hard one to articulate. But the technology they were building created a whole lot of intelligence built on the fumes of the data center (namely the log files). I was interested in what they were doing, but not interested enough to fund them. One day I got a call from Michael Baum, CEO of Splunk. He told me that they had "figured it out" and that we should meet up. I was certainly game to hear what they had figured out and we got together again a short time later.
So what had Splunk figured out? They had figured out that if they could track, manage and correlate log files across the entire data center in near real time, that they could create the killer IT Search Engine that would allow an end user to see into their enterprise stack in a way never before possible. The Splunk guys showed me a very simple example using Voip data and how one could track all systems that touched a particular extension by simply searching for that extension in the Splunk engine. I was an instant believer -- it was clearly a better way to manage the massive amounts of IT data that exist in enterprises today. I invested in the Series A and the Splunk team got to building the software that they had envisioned.
A short time after investing in Splunk, I was meeting with a group of managers from one of August Capital's biggest Limited Partners (the folks who invest in our fund). I was describing for them what Splunk was planning to build and they asked me "so what's the market size for that?" I quickly answered as best I could -- "I have no idea." Needless to say, this was not the most satisfying answer they had ever received and they stared back at me with a look that suggested perhaps I should come up with a better answer. But the reality was that I didn't have a better answer. Not because it was unclear if there was any market for what Splunk was building. But, more importantly, because once Splunk had built their search engine, it was unclear what market they would go after. I explained to my investors that Splunk had a number of multi-billion dollar markets in which they might play (management, compliance, BI, security, capacity planning, development, etc.) and the only question was which ones they would choose to go after first.
That conversation with my Limited Partners was over two and a half years ago. And since that time, the Splunk team has built precisely what they promised -- a large-scale, high-speed search technology for your data center. But despite the fact that Splunk's software has been downloaded by over 100,000 users and despite the fact that there are now more than 350 paying enterprise customers (including 21st Century Insurance, BEA, British Telecom, Catholic Healthcare West, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Comcast, Dow Jones, FedEx, Fiserv, GE Consumer Finance, LinkedIn, Mantech, Mozilla.org, NASA, Shopzilla, Telstra, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of State, Vodafone and Yahoo!), I would still have a tough time answering the question posed by my Limited Partner.
Splunk has not built an application. Nor is Splunk merely selling software. Splunk has created a software enabled platform that continues to be extremely broadly applicable. Is Splunk mission critical when it comes to maintaining availability of large scale enterprise systems? Yes. Is Splunk invaluable in the fight to maintain the security of your data center? Yes. Does Splunk uniquely simplify the process of data compliance? Yes. Can Splunk help you dig into your data and analyze it like no other solution? Yes. But, frankly, that's just the tip of the iceberg -- once you are able to query individual pieces of data across your entire data center in real time, the applicability of the platform is limited only by the creativity of its end users. And those end users are driving value back into the platform, creating applications we hadn't thought of before.
So what is the market for Splunk? i still couldn't say for certain. But I can tell you one thing -- it is awfully big. And in the venture business, that's big enough.
It appears that Shameless Self-Promotion Week has become Shameless Self-Promotion Month. Not that I am promoting any more companies than I had originally planned. I am still only talking about those businesses in which I have invested on behalf of August Capital. But, it turns out, it takes more time than I had anticipated to sing the praises of such a fantastic group of companies.
Just this past Friday, Craig Syverson and I recorded the latest installment of VentureCast at University Cafe in downtown Palo Alto. I had recently been discussing with a friend the fact that University Cafe has very much become a part of the startup economy again. Folks like Rajeev Motwani and Ron Conway spend a fair bit of time meeting with companies at University Cafe. Practically any time you're there you can look around a see deals getting done. In fact, shortly before Craig and I started recording VentureCast, the guys at the table next to ours were banging out the details of some sort of financing. Unfortunately, they had finished their negotiations before we started recording, or we might have captured the blow by blow on tape.
A couple years ago I was meeting with an executive from one of my portfolio companies at University Cafe. While we were talking, Rajeev wandered by and told me to come say "hi" before I headed out. Rajeev was talking with a smart group of guys about their new company in the local advertising space. Those folks were the founding team from DoneRight (at the time called Perform Local). I was intrigued by their business, impressed with the team, and a short time later I ended up funding their company.
The CEO of DoneRight was -- and is -- Paul Ryan. Paul is a phenomenal technologist. He had most recently been the CTO at Overture and, thus, had been part of the team that had pioneered the very concept of pay for performance. The idea at DoneRight was to create a pay for performance local advertising network that would allow local service providers to purchase valuable leads through DoneRight. By aggregating demand through on and off-line lead generation techniques, service providers could use DoneRight as their marketing arm, paying only for the leads they received. On behalf of the consumer, DoneRight would screen service providers for professional licenses, BBB complaints and the like, and only accept professionals onto the service that DoneRight was comfortable guarantying. Given this data-intensive, data-driven service, there was no one better to build DoneRight than Paul.
Because local services are . . . well . . . local, DoneRight has been rolling out their network on a city by city basis. With each new city, DoneRight gains more insight into how best to provide consumers with the information they need to make informed buying decisions, while providing service professionals with the channel they need to scale their businesses. The service launched in San Diego, and has rolled out to Denver, Chicago, Houston and Dallas over the course of this year. In 2008, DoneRight will expand considerably, using what they've learned in their first five metropolitan areas to optimize the DoneRight experience on a nationwide basis. To date, over 1,000 home improvement professionals have entered into prepaid performance agreements with DoneRight. While other online services have failed to gain meaningful sales traction with local businesses, DoneRight has been able to sign up its first thousand paying customers in record time, because it is providing real, measurable results for its business customers -- In the short time that it has been doing business in these few metropolitan areas, DoneRight has processed nearly 500,000 consumer requests for referral to a DoneRight certified service professional. And that number will scale dramatically as DoneRight expands nationwide.
DoneRight is another business in which I invested because of my love of data. Ultimately, the lead generation business is a numbers game. How much does it cost to acquire a lead? What will a service provider pay for it? Does it scale? Those were the questions that needed answering. And given Paul Ryan's background, I invested, confident that Paul would be able to produce the necessary infrastructure to answer those questions and create a scalable business. And he has. Better yet, as Paul and the company learn more about lead generation on a local level, they are able to apply that knowledge to each of their metropolitan areas, making each city more efficient and the overall business decidedly more profitable. If you live in San Diego, Denver, Chicago, Houston or Dallas and are looking for a guaranteed service professional, DoneRight.com is the place to go. And if you are living elsewhere, stay tuned. DoneRight will be coming to your neighborhood soon.
When I first met with LiveOps' CEO Maynard Webb, I asked him what it was about LiveOps that would get him back to work. After all, Maynard had just recently retired from Ebay where he had served as COO. While head of technology at Ebay he was credited with stabilizing a platform that, at the time, was on the verge or implosion. His reward for fixing the technology mess was a license to fix everything else as COO, which he did with great aplomb. Maynard had a well earned reputation as a tireless worker. Clearly he had earned himself a summer or two (or ten) off. But when Maynard heard the LiveOps story, he found himself back in the saddle.
So what was it about LiveOps that Maynard found so exciting? In his words it was the ability to do well while doing good. That may seem surprising when you consider that LiveOps is a call center software and services platform. At its core, LiveOps is an incredibly sophisticated VOIP software platform that allows a customer to route, track and manage calls in ways that none of the traditional systems allow. And one of the most important byproducts of LiveOps' all-IP system is that agents can be located anywhere that there's a web connection. They may all be located in a call center in Ohio, or they may be scattered throughout the country in their homes.
LiveOps is the biggest customer of its own call center software. Along with selling its platform to big corporate clients who are looking to better manage the performance of their agents (wherever they may sit), LiveOps uses its own software to manage the LiveOps distributed call center that now encompasses 13,000 active agents and growing rapidly. LiveOps agents on the whole tend to be stay-at-home moms and home-bound individuals who are looking for a way to make money while maintaining the flexibility to work where and when they choose, as may be dictated by their own personal circumstances. Which is precisely what appealed to Maynard. As he told me, one of the things he was most proud of with Ebay was that it empowers a whole host of entrepreneurs to create businesses that best suit their particular life circumstances. The same is true of LiveOps. Rather than outsourcing jobs to other countries, LiveOps insources opportunities to underemployed, but well-educated, individuals who need the flexibility to control their own work environment. And, as Maynard pointed out, the more successful LiveOps is at serving its customers with the most efficient and most effective call center available, the greater the number of individuals the company can empower to take control of their own circumstances.
There is another byproduct of this massive distributed phone force; LiveOps is the only call center in the world that can massively scale in short order to suit the needs of virtually any customers. One great example of this capacity to scale came immediately after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The American Red Cross was inundated with requests to donate on behalf of the victims of the hurricane. In an effort to support the generosity of the country, the Red Cross went out looking for a call center that could field the enormous volume of calls for donations. Ultimately, only one company could deliver the necessary scale to support the overwhelming call volume, and that was LiveOps. In a matter of hours, LiveOps was able to route the Red Cross's 800 number to thousands of agents throughout the country, who immediately were able to service the generosity of hundreds of thousands of donors.
LiveOps recently put that capacity to good use again when American Idol had its Idol Gives Back campaign. During two separate American Idol shows, the stars of the show promoted a charitable giving program that included an 800 number on the screen and on their website. While the producers of American Idol suspected that the volume of giving would be quite large, they could not scope the scale of the participation with any specificity. That was no problem for LiveOps. They were able to scale the size of their phone force with demand, continuing to take pledges long into the night, and were unencumbered by the limitations of traditional call centers. What's more, they were able to give the American Idol producers instant feedback as to the scale and velocity of the program. In the end, LiveOps deployed over 3,400 agents who answered approximately 200,000 calls and collected more than $6 Million for charity. That's the sort of thing that makes Maynard Webb excited to come in in the morning. And it is the sort of thing that makes me thrilled to be an investor in LiveOps.
I know that I just started Shameless Self-Promotion Week yesterday but I need to briefly interrupt SSPW to comment on today's huge news. As I am sure all of you know by now, Terry Semel has stepped down as Yahoo's Chief Executive Officer and Jerry Yang has taken his place. What many of you may not know is that Jerry and I have been friends for two decades. Jerry and I were dorm mates at Stanford our freshman year and have been friends since. So I think that it is perfectly fair to assume that I am completely biased when it comes to Jerry and to Yahoo. That said, I am thrilled to hear that Jerry has taken the reigns at Yahoo.
Jerry Yang is one of the smartest guys you'll ever have the good fortune to meet. He is also one of the most ethical and decent executives out there. But, more important still, Jerry is profoundly motivated and motivational. He has the capacity to reenergize the company that he started twelve years ago and helped grow into the leading new media property on the web. At a time when it is very much in vogue to dump on Yahoo, I remain extremely bullish on the future of the company.
Congratulations Jerry! I look forward to seeing the great stuff you do with Yahoo in the coming weeks and months.
As I sit on a plane today flying back from Spain where I spoke at Chris Shipley's Innovate Europe conference, I find myself fixated, once again, with widgets. There's all sorts of activity in the widget world. The biggest widget news, of course, is the sale of PhotoBucket to MySpace. Meanwhile Slide and RockYou are battling it out for "Biggest Widget Company in the World." And new widget companies/experiences are emerging each week. This universe of web services is what Fred Wilson has long been espousing as the cornerstone to Web 2.0, and it continues to evolve rapidly. And that evolution has been a fascinating one to watch (a bit like watching your character evolve in Will Wright's Spore -- some choice, some interaction, some happenstance, then real tangible change).
As I wandered the pavilion floor of the DEMO conference earlier this year, the challenges posed by the "widget economy" became pretty clear. I talked with lots of companies, and in particular found myself gravitating towards the various widget providers. But what struck me as I talked with the latest generation of media platforms -- be they for photo sharing or video sharing or animation -- was that these companies are going to face a serious challenge when it comes to monetizing their traffic. That challenge is a byproduct of their precarious relationship with the "host" services to which they attach. To the extent those relationships are symbiotic, the combined organism will thrive. However, to the extent those relationships are, in fact, parasitic, the host will need to shed the parasite in the name of survival.
When determining if a widget relationship is symbiotic or parasitic, it makes sense to look at a few different factors. The most widely acknowledged, of course, is monetization. If a widget is doing nothing to monetize its host's traffic (e.g., when Flickr photos are served into MySpace), it might be viewed as neutral or perhaps symbiotic for freely increasing the functionality of the hosts site. If a widget is seeking to monetize the host's viewers (e.g., ads or branding on a voicemail widget), the host may view that widget as parasitic. This relationship, of course, assuming there is a zero sum game of monetizable attention on any given host service, therefore the fact that a widget is monetizing some of that attention means the host has lost that revenue opportunity in return. While I think that a number of hosts may view it that way (there is every indication that MySpace and Facebook do), my view is that if a service's functionality is significantly enhanced as a result of the various widgets that attach to it (e.g., the MySpace experience was massively enhanced early on by the work of both Photobucket and YouTube), one might argue that the widget experience is always symbiotic -- enhanced functionality in exchange for traffic, monetized or not.
Herein lies the tricky dance that is going on in the widget space right now. And the first episode of Dancing with the Widget Stars appears to have ended with MySpace taking home Photobucket after a winning run on the dance floor. MySpace and Photobucket weren't always the well honed dancing machine they appear to have become. Only a few short weeks ago, Photobucket attempted to assert its ability to monetize its traffic on MySpace by serving up branded slideshows. MySpace's reaction was to refuse to dance with Photobucket at all -- shutting off all 15 million of Photobucket's users in MySpace. The question remains who that move hurt more, Photobucket or MySpace? Was it a purely parasitic relationship that MySpace could shed at will without its user base revolting. Or was it a symbiotic relationship, in which both MySpace and Photobucket were hurt by the efforts to shed Photobucket slideshows from the MySpace service? To the outside observer, it would appear that both parties determined the relationship was much more symbiotic than MySpace might have originally hoped and, as a result, MySpace is buying Photobucket to both enhance the user experience and better monetize its own traffic. That feels like a win-win.
While the vast majority of widgets companies have engaged in a strategy of achieving distribution first and monetization second, a few companies have attempted to strike that balance up front. The most notable company on that front is my own portfolio company, VideoEgg. Rather than go down the path of having millions of VideoEgg videos embedded on host sites before engaging in the conversation about monetization, VideoEgg established those relationships early. When VideoEgg monetizes a video on one of its partner's services, that revenue is shared. As a result, the hosts are happy to promote video on their services, and VideoEgg is able to monetize the over half a billion videos it is now serving each month into various host services (and the opportunity to share revenue grows each successive month as VideoEgg's traffic continues to grow rapidly). What's more, social networks, community sites, information services, etc. no longer need to expend the daunting resources necessary to create their own video service. Rather, they are able to leverage VideoEgg's significant development and hosting dollars to give their end users the best available video experience. That again feels like a win-win. Perhaps MySpace and others would come to similar agreements with photo hosts, avatar companies, SMS providers, etc.
One clear advantage to the VideoEgg approach is that it goes a long way to minimizing channel conflict. There is a general sense in online media today that a large and definable audience will necessarily draw advertisers. While as a general rule I think that is true, when it comes to widgets one challenge for advertisers is determining the right channel for their advertisements. Should they advertise on MySpace directly, or should they advertise on RockYou and Slide in order to get distribution on MySpace? Media buyers have a much easier time buying advertisements on a site when the source of that inventory is clear. Thus, when multiple parties sell advertisers inventory on a particular service, the sale becomes significantly harder for each of the parties involved. Given that, the large social networks feel the pain of channel conflict when there is "unsanctioned" selling of ad inventory on their sites by third parties. This necessarily makes their job of selling ad inventory on their own services more difficult and devalues the inventory that they have. So even if these hosts view the widget providers as generally symbiotic, they may find it hard to allow third party advertising on those widgets given the channel conflict that necessarily ensues.
There is one additional wrinkle to this evolving widget economy. In the wake of massive distribution for a number of successful widget companies (consumers are creating over 200K new widgets a day on both RockYou and Slide, resulting in tens of millions of page views a day), there are an emerging set of service providers that are seeking to act as widget aggregators. Companies like SplashCast, Magnify.net, MixerCast, etc. are working to produce a unified experience whereby consumers or producers can aggregate other widget services within a single experience. In other words, one might create a video channel that draws video from YouTube, Photobucket, etc., or a photo experience that draws from Flickr, Slide, and others, or, as is the case with MixerCast or SplashCast, you might intermingle media formats (video, photo, music) from any number of third party sources. The end result is a curated experience drawn from various other widget providers (and, perhaps, some content that is proprietary to the service doing the aggregating). The challenge these widget aggregators face is, again, one of monetization. If they become significant destination sites like a MySpace or Bebo, they will certainly control their economic fate. However, the strategy these aggregators appear to be pursuing is to have their experience embedded into the same hosts that the widgets are going after (MySpace being the gorilla, of course) -- so instead of embedding a widget into your MySpace page, now you are embedding a widget of widgets. If it is challenging to work out the economics for a dominant host and a single widget provider, imagine the challenge of working out the economics for a host, a widget aggregator and an arbitrary number of widget providers being aggregated.
Despite these challenges, I am extremely bullish on the widget economy. I believe that the vast majority of these relationships are indeed symbiotic -- great experiences being enjoyed by millions of consumers are enhanced by additional great experiences developed by third party widget companies. Unmonetized, these widgets are a gift to the hosts -- they allow for a more engaged consumer with a more engaging experience and cost the host nothing. Thus, it will be up to the hosts and widget companies to sort out the economics in the coming months and years. I expect significant progress on that front this year and look forward to being a part of that evolution as I continue to invest in hosts, widget services and content aggregators alike.
In 1991, Andy Rappaport, my partner at August Capital, wrote an award winning Harvard Business Review article entitled, "The Computerless Computer Company." As described by HBR, Andy's paper argued that:
By the end of the century, the most successful computer companies will be buying computers rather than building them. Defining how computers are used, not how they are built, will create real value. Three new rules will guide the computer industry's strategic transformation: 1) compete on utility, not power; 2) monopolize the true sources of added value; and 3) maximize the sophistication of the value delivered, while minimizing the sophistication of the technology consumed.
Well, that century has come and gone and Andy hit the nail on the head. The real value in computers was all about utility. Dinosaurs like Digital Equipment Corporation and Wang that were unable to evolve to deliver utility rather than compute power disappeared in the 1990's, while companies like Microsoft and Lotus thrived. Computers were no longer viewed as valuable independent of the software they ran. They became commodities, upon which value was created through applications.
In the context of Andy's description of the computer industry in the 1990's, I believe that a new era is upon us in the 2000's. I believe that we have progressed from the "Computerless Computer Company" to the "Softwareless Software Company." Taking the evolution of computer company one step further, "computer" companies are no longer about selling software, but rather about delivering services. Hosted services have the distinct advantage of meeting all three of the "new" rules suggested in the Computerless Computer Company: 1) they compete purely as a utility; 2) they monopolize the true sources of added value; and 3) they are designed to deliver the greatest possible sophistication with the simplest possible user experience.
Perhaps the best evidence that we are entering this era of Softwareless Software Companies is Microsoft's "Live" push. At a recent VC Summit, numerous Microsoft execs, including Steve Balmer himself, talked about Microsoft's focus on rolling out service offerings under the moniker of "Live." They are now offering LiveDesktop, LiveSearch, OfficeLive, LiveExpo, LiveMeeting, etc. And in support of their massive push into the services space, Microsoft has just opened a new datacenter that will ultimately span just shy of half a million square feet (I hope to write more specifics about this some time soon).
In the era of the Softwareless Software Company, in which value is measured by utility, simplicity and reliability, the greatest asset may ultimately be the near infinitely scaling data center. It will certainly be important that the new computer company deliver great utility through its software-delivered service. But the most significant differentiator may ultimately prove to be the capacity to scale with massive demand. And those companies best situated to deliver that scale will be the winners. Thus, it is no surprise that just up and down the river from Microsoft's new datacenter in Quincy Washington, both Yahoo and Google are contemplating building their own gargantuan datacenters. The Softwareless Software Company may have come full circle from the Computerless Computer Company and be more about hardware and infrastructure than about software after all.
After reading a post by Nelson Minar about Google's Webmaster Tools, I ran on over to Google to see what I could learn about VentureBlog. The setup and verification process for the Webmaster Tools was really simple. After having demonstrated that I was the rightful owner of VentureBlog, I was able to see an interesting analysis of those searches and clicks on Google that point to VentureBlog.
Not surprising, four of the top six Google queries that include links to VentureBlog are "venture capital," "venture," "venture capitalist," and "venture capitalists." The Google tools also tell you the average top link position held by your site for any given search (in other words, what was the highest position held by a link to your site for that search). For all of these "venture capital" related terms, VentureBlog is in the top ten organic links. That makes perfectly good sense to me given my natural tendency to write about Venture Capital. In contrast, however, there is not a single search in my top twenty that includes the term "VC." Not "VC" or "VCs" or "What's a VC" or "Ninja VC" or "Sand Hill VC" or "Tech VC," and certainly not "A VC." Nary a single "VC" search term in the VentureBlog top twenty.
For the life of me, I can't figure out why that is. Admittedly, I don't have "VC" in the title of my blog, like Redeye VC or BeyondVC. But I certainly reference the term "VC" often enough, even occasionally in the titles of my posts. So what's keeping me down? Hopefully as I spend more time looking at the Google Webmaster Tools, I'll be able to better understand the dynamics of page rank.
I thoroughly enjoy writing VentureBlog. As I've said many times before, it gives me the opportunity to engage in a conversation with a really smart community of entrepreneurs. But it also affords me an incredible education. How else would I get an inside view of things like page rank, search dynamics, linking, referral traffic, viral growth, advertising dynamics, etc.? The understanding of each of these elements is invaluable when evaluating Internet businesses and VentureBlog has afforded me a front row seat to the show. I look forward to continuing to use services like Google's Webmaster Tools to make the most of that front row view.
Update: A commenter below writes "Couldn't you be a little less obvious for fucks sake?" Jeesh. Of course I could. In fact, I don't think that I could be any more obvious. That was the whole point. So much for irony.
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.
I can't decide what is making it harder for me to write this morning. Is it the fact that I am still completely exhausted after a weekend of too little sleep and too much mental stimulation? Or is it the more mundane fact that God-awful music is blasting out of my speakerphone courtesy of the now 57 minutes I've been on hold with Bank of America credit card services? I'm going to go with mental overload because I refuse to cede the power to communicate to B of A musak.
This weekend I was privileged to attend Tim O'Reilly's FOO Camp. FOO stands for "Friends Of O'Reilly" but the crowd is only a small subsection of those who count Tim as a friend. Tim has long been not just a uncanny predictor of future technology trends but a supporter and promoter of both those technologies and the individuals responsible for inventing them and shepherding them from concept to phenomenon. The individuals present at this year's FOO Camp had played significant rolls in the creation and dissemination of some of the most important technologies over the past decades (from Lotus 1-2-3 to Perl, Python, Ruby, Flash, you name it). But the conversations of FOO Camp were clearly pointed at the future, which leaves one's mind spinning.
One of the things that is striking about FOO Camp is that nearly everything that takes place over the weekend is collaborative. Talks are rarely lectures -- they are conversations. Ad hoc projects at FOO take interesting twists and turns because they are necessarily interdisciplinary, driven by experts in hardware, software, networking, who are encouraged by the environment to think out of the box (a child of FOO's inventive environment was unveiled at this year's gathering -- Chumby is an open source hardware and software platform that truly embodies the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of FOO). As I wandered around O'Reilly's campus Saturday night I was struck by the incredibly inclusive, social and creative energy everywhere -- in one room a group of folks were singing and strumming Simon and Garfunkel tunes, in another a crowd was engaged in their 5th or 6th hour of Werewolf, on the patio a few pyromaniacs enjoyed a fire sculpture involving propane and a zen sand garden, others gathered 'round the laser in Make Magazine's office engraving their laptops and cell phones with various a sundry images and insignia.
Two of my favorite sessions during FOO Camp were further testimony to the collaborative nature of the weekend. One of the "talks" was entitled "Halfbaked.com: entrepreneurial improv theatre." It was organized by Dave McClure, Paul Rademacher and James Levine, who had the great idea of randomly assigning teams of participants two word company names and, with fifteen minutes of preparation time, having them then present their business plans to a panel of VC judges (namely, me and Paul Graham). The results were clever and funny and felt sufficiently close to my day job as to be a little disconcerting. The winning team pitched Bottlecap Porn, fully functional (if somewhat under-featured) website and all. The other session I can't stop talking about was called "That Sucked," which was organized by Joshua Schachter. In Joshua's session, he started off by telling about times he'd been faced with technical challenges that really sucked. He then opened up the floor to the crowd to share their stories. The tales of woe expounded were like a history of computers gone bad, from printers shooting parts across the room to infinite loops to missing source code (the inspiration for SourceForge). They were simultaneously the geekiest and funniest stories I'd heard in some time. And like the "Halfbaked" session, virtually everyone in the room participated, making the session all the more illuminating and entertaining.
I hope that Tim and the entire O'Reilly organization get as much out of FOO Camp as do the participants. We all certainly owe him a debt of gratitude for hosting this incredible event.
Post Script: I hung up on Bank of America after being on hold for 190 minutes! I hope there is less of a wait when I call to cancel my card.
I spent most of last week down in San Diego at the Wall Street Journal Conference, D: All Things Digital. I've attended the D conference every year since its inception 4 years ago. The conference is run by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher and primarily takes the form of Walt and Kara interviewing CEO's of major corporations about innovation. In the past, those CEOs have come primarily from the technology and communications sectors. This year, however, there was a larger representation of traditional media companies (Disney, Discovery, Martha Stewart, Random House, etc.) talking about a favorite theme of all D's, past and present -- convergence.
This year, more than any before it, the talk of D seemed to acquiesce around a single area of interest. The vast majority of speakers at this year's Wall Street Journal Conference spoke about the digitization of video and the ways in which digital video is changing the media landscape. This shared focus was so stark that it lead me to believe that perhaps this year's WSJ Conference should have been renamed "DV: All Things Digital Video."
As could be expected, the representatives of New Media spent their fair share of time talking about digital video. Bill Gates made clear that Microsoft is extremely focused on the online/offline video experience. Not only is Microsoft working on better approaches to video search and display (Windows Media format is in a bitter battle with Flash for online video format dominance, although I'd give Flash a decided edge at this time), but it is also betting pretty significantly on the home convergence with it's Media Center software which will gain significant distribution as a part of the Vista release. Meanwhile, Marissa Mayer and Terry Semel were in now way willing to cede the video market to Microsoft. Both Google and Yahoo are working hard to bulk up their online video experience with both professional and user generated content.
It would appear from the conversations at D that even the Old Media companies have gotten wise to the user generated content revolution. Judith McHale, from Discovery Communications, talked about their efforts to leverage user generated content for some of their travel programs. Susan Lyne, CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, discussed the power of user demonstrated crafts and cooking projects. Even Al Gore, when not musing about the arcane history of the printing press, talked about his television network's explicit strategy to leverage user generated content for traditional media programming. And Disney's Bob Iger, not to be outdone by the old media posse, stressed not only user generated content but the capacity to play that content on wired and mobile devices alike.
On the device front, while Sony has a powerful foothold in the digital video space, Howard Stringer spent much of his time talking about the eBook Reader that Sony launched at the D conference, not about their digital video solutions. Moreover, it doesn't look like the two segments will likely come together any time soon -- Sony's eBook platform is based upon eInk's technology which is energy efficient but extremely slow switching; therefore, it was clear that the eBook Reader will not be used for video any time soon. On the other hand, the conversation with Antonio Perez made clear that Kodak's cameras are quickly moving from still to moving picture capture. Kodak has quietly claimed the lead in the digital camera category and appears poised to quietly attack the digital video camera market as well.
On a related note, I spent some time with Jonathan Kaplan, CEO of Pure Digital Technologies, at the event and was given the chance to try out Pure Digital's new hundred dollar (or so) video camera that Walt has raved about. It really is a great little device for quick and easy digital video capture and download. The device has a built in USB connector and could not be easier to connect and download video to your computer. I used the Pure Digital video camera to record some video of my 9 month old niece and quickly and easily uploaded it to the new Six Apart blogging platform, Vox (Vox used to be referred to as Comet but has recently been launched to the public as Vox). It is clear to me from the early activity on Vox that sharing video will become one of the predominant features on the service, particularly as Vox gives you more granular controls over who can see your family movies than is available with a traditional blogging platform. To be clear, I am an investor in Six Apart and Vox, so I am certainly biased, but I could not be more excited about the ability to post video of my kids on Vox, knowing that only my parents and siblings can see those videos when viewing my Vox blog.
One thing became very clear to me as I sat and listened to CEO after CEO sing the praises of digital video -- the digital video train has left the station and anyone who hasn't yet made a bet on a particular online video technology is not likely to reap the benefits of this round of online video innovation. On the other hand, I remain really bullish about those bets that were placed on digital video at the front end of the DV revolution. I made one such bet on VideoEgg, which I continue to believe is uniquely situated to act as an onramp for video to the web. During one lunch at the Wall Street Journal Conference, Chad Hurley, founder and CEO of YouTube, was sitting at a table with me and the rest of the VideoEgg board (Cliff Boro, Howard Morgan and Josh Kopelman). We should have called Josh Felser, CEO of Grouper, over from the table next to ours where he was eating and we could have had a mini-digital video summit.
It will be very interesting to see what transpires on the digital video front between now and next year's Wall Street Journal Conference. I imagine that there will be lots more to talk about as video continues to dominate not only the mind share but the bandwidth of the web experience. There is no question, the digital video revolution will be televised.
