the labs @ laan thoughts and other ramblings

An open letter to the candidates.

First off why put this on a company blog. Well we are a startup and uncertainty and risk are our business. Entrepreneurs like us are what will help grow this economy again. Innovation and inspiration are what we do and lend to this (once) great economy.

Second before you get the brunt of my rant – watch some videos we have collected on this current crisis – some funny (most not so much).

Wall Street Woes, Bill Moyers PBS, Onion on john mccain, wall street bailout game

Now, back to meat of this rant. We are a little tiny startup – two guys in garage (well a loft actually) – and we are taking a big risk trying to develop a business from nothing. Small businesses like us represent the economy and its growth potential. I am not just talking about the home runs (i.e. google, Microsoft, etc) but the small shops (development included), stores and misc business. Small businesses (startups included) employ almost exactly half the private U.S. labor force of about 153 million. When we increase our headcount, the cumulative effect is dramatic. This crisis will hit us first. We pinch every penny, we are in the business of spinning straw into gold and if the price of straw goes up we are just fucked (not to mention all the support mechanisms like health and other insurances or the ability to get loans to cover payroll until invoices are processed).

What we all saw last night in the debates were a bunch of easy words directed a culture of greed of wall street and bad lending practices. This is not a time for simplified characterizations of our financial industry. The business of making money from money is a necessary one. The capital / commodities markets (fx I have my issues with, but that is another story) are necessary, but these markets are gateways to complicated overdeveloped schemes to push the boundaries of how money can be made. I have been involved in a few software projects over the years that has given me a small insight. Regulation is completely necessary especially when these large industries know they exist in the universe of socialized capitalism. In the past 20 years (or since I have been paying attention) anytime a major driving industry of the US economy missteps (usually from its own idiocy or greed) the government is there with open arms with no oversight.

Now the government is stepping in (or trying to) with 700 billion (and likely much more) to buy up all the mortgage-backed securities to stabilize the markets. Is this the best place or mechanism to put 700 billion in our economy? The truth is no one knows and no one (and I am talking about you candidates) is standing up and saying this is a shit-storm and we need to evaluate the fundamentals of our economy and look for where the real stability and growth potential is.

We need a massive re-think. Basically over the past 10 years (well twenty) the deregulation has allowed financial organizations to take bigger and bigger risks to make money. The goal with not to encourage fundamentals like make a widget (lets let the Chinese do that) / buy a widget, but lets game the system. The game has been called ladies and gentlemen and now us small players are wondering where to go from here. We need leadership, real leadership because as any small business startup leader know, you wake up everyday and make the hard decisions to make it to the next day.

thoughts on ffwd.com demo at DEMO.

a couple of thoughts — a) DEMO really kicks ass — great way launch a product — the amount of twitter on ffwd made me mad jealous.

b) i repeat myself — i cant understate the value of simple. I like ffwd, the people behind it are strong industry vets and their beta has been very interesting from the beginning. They are definitely addressing an interesting problem (well we might be a little bias here) and had a nice social approach. The issue here seems to be that their extended development and beta cycle left a site clearly decided by committee. There is so much going on that all you get it noise (now its entertaining noise, and maybe thats the point) but its almost impossible to navigate to anything of premium quality.

you click on the 30 rock channel and i get some cgc (consumer generated content/crap) of some girl singing muffin-top song. maybe thats what some people find entertaining but i am most definitely out of that bell curve. granted the channel has a disclaimer noting that quality of the channel is improving, but come on — you people have a deal with hulu.

features (features, features everywhere, but not a drop to drink). I know where these features are coming from as i have been tracking the development of the site and all are most useful but i am totally overwhelmed. I have 30 (a little exaggeration) variations on my channel concept and a million ways to fine tune it.

overall the UX is really interesting the UI is very professional and with time i think they are going to have a really great site, but there is that great saying (well actually my saying) — “start with simple, follow with function(allity)”

disclaimer — we are working on this same problem and its a biatch of a big one — i give ffwd serious props for their execution here i just wish they had gone a little minimalist (i.e. Philip Glass for you music nuts following them over from iLike)

evolution not revolution

a great quote….

i have been mulling on this quote for the past few days since we got it as feedback from @aweissman on our idea and just do a quick stock of the the internet major players we see how much of their core business is really just a obvious evolution of their business.

just a few that come first to mind:

• google — take the value proposition of search and make it simple (and better in relevant — the backscratch)
• gmail - web mail without all the noise of visual ads
• facebook - again just a cleaner version of friendster meets myspace…
• basecamp - project management with a reduced feature set for better ux

on the contrary let look at a trend that people are calling radical - twitter.

is twitter is a revolution (or that what the fanatics are telling me)? i was chatting with a friend where i was saying “i just don’t get it” — his response — i get it — i completely get it — twitter is just the next natural evolution in status messages for IM and other services where people want to give little updates (or microblog in web20-speak). so in most all plays we can track its value to a predecessor (prior art anyone?)

for those of you familiar with the innovators dilemma and such such notions — the value is when you able to improve a market concept rather than create it when there is a enough market maturity and momentum to truly capitalize.

so with this new quote in the armory — snackfeed is the next evolution (not the next revolution) in web video…

Silverlight – closing ceremonies

The olympics wrapped up today and I have a few wrap up thoughts on silverlight as I was forced to use it to get any Olympic coverage online. Again, I have nothing against Microsoft (unlike some of some septic responses I see with the younger developers), but they have such a clumsy hand when it comes to web and this required use of silverlight 2 beta was just another example in a clear pattern of behavior.

From my background in rich media advertising, I have witnessed first hand Microsoft throwing their huge cash behind trying to get their technologies implemented by a less than interested market. Because they dominate the OS market, they have such a trickle down effect on all their products. They have the big shops (schematic) and big players (nbc olympics, mlb).

With all the potential the olympics had to offer had to offer as a rich multimedia experience, this year failed to deliver. Was silverlight to blame, no, but it definitely was a major factor in a degraded experience.

I see silverlights blame taking three forms.

Staunching Creativity — what does this have to do with using silverlight – well it takes top designers. Top web designers work on macs. I know this seems like a silly point, but the design community has amazing loyalty to apple and within the last few years many of have moved back onto mac after a good 10-15 lapse. Not to mention expressions (i.e. what you need to develop silverlight applications in) is a bit of beast. Every one the designers I know that take a look at silverlight and go right back to flash.

UX – The install process for silverlight is horrible and on a mac its even worse. Plus all the UI/UX I have seen in silverlight is very basic (maybe with the exception of the MLB player). Obviously this will improve, but is not a good start.

Brand Communication – People hate Microsoft. Its visceral at this point. Whatever designers, developers and users can at this point to avoid ms products they usually take the step. Maybe having Seinfeld as their pitchman  will change all that.

Sure silverlight is going to be a major player and this last little you-must-have-silverlight-to-watch-the-olympics is going to help the technology out, but I really see silverlight being a viewing technology for wmv and movenetworks player rather than a complete UX platform.

Oh – and if you are on a mac, you might need this:
rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Silverlight.plugin
rm -rf /Library/Receipts/Silverlight*.pkg
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Silverlight

Summer ’08 wrapup

The issue here is really big ideas vs little ideas. We (i) went into this summer with the full belief that we would have a fully functioning site up and running by late june and july and august would be spent refining it for a for a big fall rollout. I jotted down some goals when we started:

• Define our idea – some beyond just online video is a big space
• Build / launch a beta-esque site
• Feedback loop
• Market, market and market…

Now that the program has “officially” ended, I have spent the last few days taking stock of the situation. Basically I think the whole think comes back to big ideas vs little ideas. Summer is a great time for little ideas – things that are simple – simple to execute, simple to market. I had a confidence in our ability to refine and execute on “big” market idea. We are close now, but goal was definitely not met. On the plus side we have a strategy that I feel very strongly about and I believe is being validated in a number of spaces and we are going to be the ones to execute in the video space (it’s the feed/activity stream concept for those of you who haven’t been paying attention).

When I did corporate projects most everything has a 18 month rollout schedule, agile development the internet pace has changed all that. People are routinely putting out prototypes in a matter of weeks (e.g. we did tinydb.org in an afternoon). But big ideas need a lot of thought.  More akin to newtons law on inertia – they take a long time to get rolling as there are a lot of factors involved in their execution.

The summary for the summer here is that now we have some real momentum – the idea is strong, the underlying tech is worked out (mostly) and we have some solid feedback on how to present the UI/experience in way that creates value.

So what has the summer been worth, well for us  (and again in my opinion) its been us finding our stride and building our momentum for the race ahead.

say hello to the cheese

Check us out over on … http://cheese.snackfeed.com

So we have been trying to ‘blog’ about our thoughts / experiences / products here for almost two months now – the output has been kind of  interesting…. (wait for it) but we really think we are more suited to the tumbling (as in bling) style of product updates – our tumblr log is hooked up to twitter snackfeed account (http://twitter.com/snackfeed ) so if you are so inclined follow us there as well.

Our strategy is to mostly use video on tumblr (again as we are a video play) so ask us in a month how that is working. This blog will still be used for product entires that are not related to snackfeed directly or long essays on stuff (i.e. we are brilliant so why aren’t you using our products already)..

the snacks are coming

We are getting very close to putting out our preview release of snackfeed. This is really more of an evolutionary step to what we want. Our new approach is that snackfeed is not going to be built in a day (thanks rome) and that we just need to put a basic version of the site out there with a more utilitarian feature set then start organically developing user path to the “sweet” spots of how people are going to get real value from the site. more on this later…

Uncertainty is an 853lb gorilla

Uncertainty in a startup is that 853 lb gorilla in the room. He is in the corner and for the most part just seeming to bide his time quietly until you are in a pitch session and he decides now is the time to pound his chest.  What do you do?

I think there are two basic reactions one can take to this. One (which seems the more common route in the world of techie startups) is to try to shout above him with answers for every question with a just plain cocky attitude to your idea and position in the market (i.e. I rock, my product rocks and everyone else out there is an idiot). A position to which v.c.’s and angels seem attracted to for some reason.

Or. One can take the approach to admit, understand and control uncertainty. That gorilla is just how the urban dictionary defines him, “An overbearing entity in a specific sphere of activity.”  So, know he is there, publicly admit it and know when to say “we don’t know, but lets look at that.”

There is nothing wrong about being uncertain of particular “what if’s” - One of the first speakers we had a dreamit, stated one hard line fact that when it comes to business plan they all have one thing in common “They are all wrong.”

They key here how to control this “853lb Gorilla of Uncertainty” -  be confident about what you have control over and start to make the “what if” issues simple and testable. Build quickly, then prove or fail quickly.

Let’s close out with some Rumsfeldien poetry on the matter….

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Dashblog - why you need it

Why we built it and why you should want it.

First – why you want this?

If you don’t already have it. Get it now.

Dashblog is all about making blogg’n/twitter’n easier – so you’re out there doing your thing on the interweb and you see this really awesome thing. What do you do. Well first, don’t panic. Second you think how cool it would be to share with everyone, but then you think about how much work doing a screencapture or copying some embed code and then copying that to your blog or twitter (and don’t forget all the loggin’ in, creating post, saving post) whew! I got tired just writing about it.

Well with dashblog its all about one click (actually more like three) to getting what you see onto your blog/twitter. For you more professionally minded it has a ‘save as draft’ feature so you can save a video/image to a blog post and work on it later.

Second – why did we build this?

A couple of reasons. One, we knew we needed to blog more to promote this latest startup and being programmers we thought we could build some tool to speed up that process. Rather than write a bunch of text about something – screencapture it, draw some arrows and you done – clever insight to share with your friends.

On a more strategic level, snackfeed needs a tool for users to collect content that is out on the web.

Next – what is coming?

Some bug fixes, additional blog support and Channels! (more about that later….)

Online Video Explained.

You Got Questions, Ninja Got Answers. | Ask A Ninja - well it took a ranting man in black mask, but finnaly someone has explained online video (damn those ninjas)