the labs @ laan thoughts and other ramblings

Your Brand In Realtime

The punch: a simple little twitter reader (using summize api) to track your brand/concepts/friends in real time. This app is very early stage so use with care.

The backstory:
We are in the age of twitter (hopefully it wont last too long because I have trouble explaining anything in less than 140 characters) and as of this moment it is the ultimate barometer on your brand.

I never thought much of twitter (A] because I am over 35 and B] I have no interest in sharing everything) until summize.com and other such services came along. Now with these tools we have immediate feedback and reading on anything.

CC made this awesome little app over the weekend to help track topics (mainly things we had released). Though it was its was primarily for personal use, we have decided to put it up mainly because of an interesting rant/challenge from the mashable guy (those crazy british) and mr techcrunch himself.

If you don’t want to install the app, definitely check out summize.com. Their deal with huffinton post is gonna be interesting

Stuck in the cable box.

So we moved to Philadelphia last night and are getting close to kicking our summer off with dreamit ventures. But what is most interesting, the people that we are subletting from have the cable box with all the works (ondemand, dvr, etc, etc). It has been well over a year since I (we) had regular cable. (sidenote: when we set up shop in Brooklyn, we got business class internet, netflix and nothing else).

Now we are trying to find something to watch browsing through a channel guide as well as the on demand content. What is this cable box? It took me 10 minutes to carefully study the remote, orientate myself with all its options and browsing methods. First let’s start with the channel guide. Yeah, there is a listing of all the shows and what network they belong to, but do I care anymore? Plus there are a million new channels that have seem to take category viewing to a quantum level. The worst part is they have now integrated a banner ad into the guide that makes the whole screen refresh when it refreshes. On-demand makes more sense, but the response time on any command is sooo slow. Who would make a device that had such slow rendering time (yeah I know the digital compression, cost savings, etc, etc).

The whole experience reminded my when I was a kid and would go to my grandma’s house and would have to make a phone call. There was the rotary dial phone. You could use it and in the end you did make a call, but your fingers were worse for the wear. I remember asking a family member why grandma still had the rotary phone and was exposed to my first taste of monopoly; the phone company owned the phone and they had no reason to change it.

So here we are today with the same problem. The cable companies own the last mile. Innovation is not a real priority (unless it increases their inventory). So to this meme there was a really nice article in the NYT today - - In the Age of TiVo and Web Video, What Is Prime Time? – a good read.

My favorite was how CW’s big move was to pull episodes from the web to improve their broadcast ratings. I understand their logic, but these clustertards are taking their queues from music execs via 1999. I know so many 20 something’s girls that can hardly cut & paste, but do most of their viewing via their laptop.

Back to point, Mark Cuban (my least favorite internet billionaire boy) wrote an interesting piece last year that the internet is dead — I think he is right in a lot of ways. Possession is 9/10th’s of the law as our schoolyard bully used to say and the cable companies are the ultimate bullies. They’re thinking if they can keep the product just good-enough we are just to lazy to start using the computer as entertainment.

But the argument is in the numbers. As the NYT’s article points out, numbers are way down. Cable companies are content providers and have their ads as part of that inventory. They are going to have to make it up somewhere. In a year or two when things like Hulu really start making a dent are they going to realize they brought the lion into the den.

I hope they wake up and realize they are in competitive environment and that if “content is king” then experience is definitely queen.

Google – our gentle giant?

Yesterday, kortina and I attended hack-a-thon here in nyc. It was a good day all-in-all. The app engine is really nice. In the space of 10am to 6pm we were able to concept, develop and deploy a fully functional app, tinydb.org (not to mention do a little presentation on it).

Being in the google offices, it got me thinking about them again. They own everything - all our info is indexed on their servers, most all of our online advertising goes through them now at one point or another, they are recruiting all the best and brightest and continually announcing placements for what seem ludicrous additions. They are one of the best known and most liked brands and are consistently listed as the top place to work.

Now with app engine, their partnership with salesforce.com to take the CRM/enterprise market not to mention all their other amazing apps, they are Wal-Mart of the internet world. They are the nerdy middle school kid who grew up to be the high school football star. They have it all.

So who are they? Are they the Wal-Mart model, where their momentum is turned them into what many industry people describe as a “runaway semi-truck” which will dominate all in its path without obligation to anything but shareholders?*

Or are they our gentle giant? I sure hope so.

A case in point. We had lunch the other day with a friend of our that is at one of the biggest media buyers in new york and her comment about the doubleClick deal finally going through is that 80% of the ads they serve online now go through some part of the google network at some point either for serving or reporting. Should we be scared or be thankful that some intelligence is finally coming to rich media advertising.

I had a chance to work with google way back in 2003 when google was going at the local listing with their now defunct “phone:” function. My little job was to help an investment bank that owned a bunch of phone books throughout Europe integrate with google results. We started with the dutch phone book (it’s still up at http://www.detelefoongids.nl/). Google (or at least google in Europe) didn’t know their head from their @ss then. I even went so far as to call up the VP of European operations and give him a piece of my mind (probably not the best idea since if I had taken a different tone and suggest I could help things might be very different).
But back to my point. They are a great company. They lived up to the hype. They were able to get past the whirlwind of explosive growth an organize the creative chaos that is their organization into something that continues to amaze all of us in the internet space.

So what now. From my perspective as a technologist who get most of his income making rich media apps, google is benevolent (at least for now). With google app engine and some decent api for google data, many of us see them as more of a patron who are giving us the tools to deploy application without having to concern ourselves with many details. I just did a job for a major airline. Had the app engine been primetime it would have cut our workload in half. We also do tons of little widget apps where a simple deployment and costing structure that can basically infinitely scale if the campaign goes “viral” would save me from those dreaded midnight call for some account executive that thinks internet is powered by gnomes (maybe it is).

*not my analogy – it’s from an interview I some wal-mart documentary that I cant remember the reference to.

The value of an incubator.

An internet “old-man’s” perspective:

This venture is being started by two brothers from two very different internet generations. I am 36 and have been through quite a few startups to varying degrees of success and my brother, 24, has worked for one very 2.0 startup out of another incubator.

It’s very easy for me to look at what an incubator provides and say what is it possibly going to offer that I don’t already have access to or already know myself. The answer: a lot.

Learning. An incubator is all about learning. You are watching yourself and the other teams around you learn about everything from market opportunity to the newest technologies. As an old dog (in internet years) it’s important to be constantly in the know. Being a technologist, the most valuable skill I have is my ability to learn. I can’t say how many times I have worked on some little piece of antiquated code knowing that I will probably never touch this technology again. I just want to cry. My comfort is in the fact that I am just constantly in training for learning how to learn. I see a summer program like this as an intensive learning-how-to-learn session.

Direction. Having been through a few startups, staying on task with momentum is key. It’s very easy to get lost in the dark of an untested idea. This program gives you an advisory board that you can actually talk to rather than the one that you usually put together so you look attractive to potential investors.

Environment. Motivation in dealing with the unknown is always a struggle. Putting yourself in a competitive environment just naturally brings the will to succeed. These programs remind me of running track when you had not only the sideline to cheer you on, but the fellow runners to keep you going.

Professional Services. When you are young, this is critical. The basics of business and administration seem overwhelming. Having professionals you can rely on as part of a program helps you navigate company formation, stock plans and all the other legal malaise of ip, copyright and trademark. So as an “experienced” entrepreneur why would I want to make an equity trade for desk space and peripheral services (lawyers and accountants)? Well, being experienced, I know there is always something to learn with each go-around and that this process is really more of a black-art. It’s very time consuming and every professional has slightly varying opinions on how all the boxes need to be checked.

This is most definitely going to be an interesting summer for us. When we looked at our options, we gravitated toward a program we felt offered more opportunity with a lot less of the hype. This process was made even more interesting because we applied and were accepted more under the umbrella of the potential of market space rather than simply summer build plan.

The online video space, really?

Yeah, really. We know this is a very crowded space and there are so many well funded ventures plus VC’s who are adamant about not investing in the space. However, we think it’s one of the most interesting spaces out there for a couple of reasons.

First. It’s chaotic. We have both consumer generated content and premium content (that is content that we consider network/cable worthy even though it may never air there) and everything in between. We got started in this space with tools that we just built for ourselves. When Hulu finally got going, we saw it as the disrupter that we were looking for that would open the opportunity for smaller plays like ourselves (cause god knows there is not space for one more youtube knockoff). Now that the big boys are throwing money at this space everyday, users are going to start looking at the web as viable entertainment rather than just a place to surf.

Second. It’s part of an established media market. The broadcast/cable/satellite video media market is 80 billion – that market is moving to online at an increasing rate. With the recession, advertisers are going to be putting their money into campaigns that have greater transparency. There is plenty of room for innovation in advertising products especially ones that are not disruptive like pre/post-roll and lower third banners.

Third. Ubiquity. Now this point is still a bit way off, but content distribution is really becoming about being able to reach everyone everywhere. Let’s look at our favorite peeps again Hulu. They are distributing everywhere (even limited with youtube). There are so many ways to participate — there is just opportunity everywhere.

So the opportunity is vast – for us, the challenge is to find that “thin-edge-of-the-wedge” to get some traction. More about that later.

Getting started….

So people have been asking us what we are up to. The long and short answer: something in online video. As people who watch a lot of online video we see a market dominated by chaos. Online video is a vast market and if we can bring even a tiny bit of order to that chaos through some of our tools and products, we know there is success to be had.

This new venture is an interesting play for us. Most 2.0 startups take a very simple idea and translate it into a simple execution path (i.e. a dating site for people who love cupcakes) which is an attractive model because of its transparency, measurability and graduability (that’s my word for definable exit opportunities).

We are taking a different path. We are entering a very crowded and very chaotic space. Our intention is to develop micro-products and measure their market resonance while at the same time building an indexing/relevance engine with all the meta-information we collect. (Check out some of products [link].)

The key for us is having a philosophy behind our product development. Right now we are moving forward with three basic principles:

• Simple – If you can’t understand how to use something upon first glance, it’s unlikely you will invest the time later (unless a trusted source makes a good case for you to give it another shot).
• Social – Your friends are you best cultural filters. The phenomenon of social networks is not going away. We don’t want to create another social network, just use the API’s out there. This includes soft-signups and the like.
• Personal – It has to have immediate personal relevance to you. It has to feel like a place your friends (and like-minded people) are (#2) and the data there needs to become immediately personal (i.e. recommendations and psychographic filtering).

Unlike many startups, we don’t have a clear picture of what products to work on first. Being just two people we are looking at simple products that have an attainable development and support cycle.

This is why we chose to get started in an incubator (but that is another story).