It continues to amaze me - since December, a steady flow of my friends from grade school, high school, and college have been joining Facebook. But before December it was very quiet. I wonder what happened suddenly to make this happen?
In any case, the fact is that, at least with my relatively small, skewed sample population, Facebook is exploding. And this jibes with compete.com's most recent survey showing that Facebook has passed Myspace as the top social networking site.
[The following added 2/17/09 11:05 AM]
An article in Fortune magazine notes that 18- to 24-year-olds now make up less than a quarter of users - that the newer members are more "mature". But the article doesn't get to the underlying reason why this is so. Younger people are already more in touch with their friends. They see them at school, they see them at events, they see them in the bars. So how much do they need Facebook? Compare this to the more "matured". After college, people start to move to other geographic locations, pair off, get married, and have kids. As that happens, contact between friends inevitably becomes less frequent - and, in the past, often nonexistent. And even if people are happy with their choices, there's a real sense of loss. So now along comes Facebook. As people join - as the network effect takes effect - these "communities" of grade school, high school, and college friends come back together. And the sense of loss lessens. That's powerful.
Showing posts with label networking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label networking. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Lunch 2.0 at Souk today
Went to Lunch 2.0 at Souk in downtown Portland today. As usual, met interesting people:
Taking a step back, once again I'm impressed with the Portland tech community. It seems that Portland has a natural attraction for friendly, creative, open-minded people interested in sharing their knowledge and opinions and building interesting tools and technology together.
- Jim Helms, the blogger behind Today's Best Tools. A medic/soldier turned blogger.
- Lea, blogger behind A.R. and Proud and Camp Naughty, and half of team that published the widget treasurelicious. Blogged about a greater variety of subjects until a posting about Oprah's use of the word "vajayjay" resulted in a surprising number of comments. So now she's spending more blogspace on sex education.
- Dawn Foster (aka famous GeekyGirlDawn), social media consultant and a driving force behind the Portland tech community.
Taking a step back, once again I'm impressed with the Portland tech community. It seems that Portland has a natural attraction for friendly, creative, open-minded people interested in sharing their knowledge and opinions and building interesting tools and technology together.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Innotech
Went to Innotech today. Glad I did.
The Secrets to Predictable Innovation
The first session I attended, presented by Anthony Ulwick, the author of "What Customers Want" and founder of Strategyn. Great session. There's an unending outpouring of articles and books talking about the importance of innovation, but not nearly as much discussion of how to innovate.
Ulwick defines innovation as "the process of devising a product or service concept that satisfies unmet customer needs", and goes on to stress that successful innovation requires an understanding of customer needs. In his presentation he talked about what a customer need is: not specific tools or solutions, which change over time; but improvements to help them with the things they want to get done - their "jobs" - that don't change. For example, people don't need microwave ovens. Rather, they want to be able to cook their food faster. The solution (currently microwave oven) may change, but the need (cook food faster) doesn't.
He discussed how to gain this understanding. You do not ask people what they want. Rather, find out what they want to get done, how they do it, and what their pain points are. Watch them do their jobs. Interview them about their jobs.
When you have this understanding, break down the job into subprocesses; and for each subprocess ask your customers how important it is and how satisfied s/he is with it. Your best opportunities are those that are most important to the customer and with which s/he is most unsatisfied.
I like his process for creating a framework. His process doesn't result in a set of requirements that can be used to create a product or service (more on this in the next paragraph), but it does create a context for ongoing analysis of your market. It also helps reveal adjacent markets. For example, rather than wanting to cook food faster, maybe the customer really wants to get food to the table quicker. In this case, you can also look at the process of getting the food from the cooking device to the table as an area ripe for improvement.
So why doesn't his process result in product/service requirements? Because it doesn't quantify the changes needed to create a successful solution. For example, your customers may want to cook their food faster. But if the product you are able to create doesn't provide enough increase in cooking speed to tip the scale against the perceived costs (e.g., money, size, attractiveness...), your product won't succeed. So having knowledge of customers' general needs is a great starting point, but you need to determine the specifications that will result in success in the market.
Accessing Innovation in Oregon
Presentation by Dana Bostrom, Director Innovation & Industry Alliances, Portland State University (does this department have a web site?); Chuck Williams, Associate Director, Office of Technology Transfer, University of Oregon; and Rick Fisch, Managing Director, Northwest Food Processors Innovation Productivity Center.
Bostrom and Williams talked about the "Oregon Innovation Portal", a web site they are creating to communicate information about the research and IP being generated at Oregon universities. Sounds like a good start, but I'm disappointed that they are not planning on developing a two-way conversation on the site.
The Changing Landscape of Venture Capital Investing
Christopher Logan, Entrepreneur, & Strategic Advisor; and Randall Lucas, Associate, Voyager Capital put on a good show, with Logan providing the entrepreneur's viewpoint and Lucas the VC's.
Logan started by saying he's noticed a rise in the number of professional angel investors and angel investment groups. He cautioned the audience to make sure working with them would be right for them. In contrast to traditional angel investors (friends and family), these people will want you to issue preferred stock (possibly sooner than you want), and they will expect you to put in place corporate governance structures that require time and overhead. He also cautioned the audience with regard to the micro vc's, who may want a disproportionate percentage of equity (up to 10%) for very little capital infusion.
Lucas compared these groups with traditional vc's, stating that vc's behave predictably. Voyager, for example, reserves an average of $8 million per deal (though they don't inject all of that at once); and you know that they are going to want preferred stock. He also made the point that the pedigree of the financial backer can affect the hype around the startup's future valuation and ipo.
An audience member asked if startups have to have IP to get vc funding. Lucas said they want to see sustainable advantage. It could be IP, a monopoly on knowledge in a specific space... Logan added that the rise of open source is changing thoughts on the value of IP.
Logan talked about the importance of having the right investors. When he was CEO of Driveway, the company received $68 million of vc funding. The dot-com boom ended and things got tough, but he thought he had a business model that could ensure survival. But the investors didn't want to be tied up long-term - they wanted a quick exit. So he was replaced.
Lucas stated that vc's like Voyager don't invest in R&D. If you want funding, you need a couple of credible people (management team), a product or service you can demonstrate, and possibly organizations who are customers or who will say that they will be customers if your business shows viability. He stated that vc's want to minimize 3 risks: technical, market, and execution.
The Secrets to Predictable Innovation
The first session I attended, presented by Anthony Ulwick, the author of "What Customers Want" and founder of Strategyn. Great session. There's an unending outpouring of articles and books talking about the importance of innovation, but not nearly as much discussion of how to innovate.
Ulwick defines innovation as "the process of devising a product or service concept that satisfies unmet customer needs", and goes on to stress that successful innovation requires an understanding of customer needs. In his presentation he talked about what a customer need is: not specific tools or solutions, which change over time; but improvements to help them with the things they want to get done - their "jobs" - that don't change. For example, people don't need microwave ovens. Rather, they want to be able to cook their food faster. The solution (currently microwave oven) may change, but the need (cook food faster) doesn't.
He discussed how to gain this understanding. You do not ask people what they want. Rather, find out what they want to get done, how they do it, and what their pain points are. Watch them do their jobs. Interview them about their jobs.
When you have this understanding, break down the job into subprocesses; and for each subprocess ask your customers how important it is and how satisfied s/he is with it. Your best opportunities are those that are most important to the customer and with which s/he is most unsatisfied.
I like his process for creating a framework. His process doesn't result in a set of requirements that can be used to create a product or service (more on this in the next paragraph), but it does create a context for ongoing analysis of your market. It also helps reveal adjacent markets. For example, rather than wanting to cook food faster, maybe the customer really wants to get food to the table quicker. In this case, you can also look at the process of getting the food from the cooking device to the table as an area ripe for improvement.
So why doesn't his process result in product/service requirements? Because it doesn't quantify the changes needed to create a successful solution. For example, your customers may want to cook their food faster. But if the product you are able to create doesn't provide enough increase in cooking speed to tip the scale against the perceived costs (e.g., money, size, attractiveness...), your product won't succeed. So having knowledge of customers' general needs is a great starting point, but you need to determine the specifications that will result in success in the market.
Accessing Innovation in Oregon
Presentation by Dana Bostrom, Director Innovation & Industry Alliances, Portland State University (does this department have a web site?); Chuck Williams, Associate Director, Office of Technology Transfer, University of Oregon; and Rick Fisch, Managing Director, Northwest Food Processors Innovation Productivity Center.
Bostrom and Williams talked about the "Oregon Innovation Portal", a web site they are creating to communicate information about the research and IP being generated at Oregon universities. Sounds like a good start, but I'm disappointed that they are not planning on developing a two-way conversation on the site.
The Changing Landscape of Venture Capital Investing
Christopher Logan, Entrepreneur, & Strategic Advisor; and Randall Lucas, Associate, Voyager Capital put on a good show, with Logan providing the entrepreneur's viewpoint and Lucas the VC's.
Logan started by saying he's noticed a rise in the number of professional angel investors and angel investment groups. He cautioned the audience to make sure working with them would be right for them. In contrast to traditional angel investors (friends and family), these people will want you to issue preferred stock (possibly sooner than you want), and they will expect you to put in place corporate governance structures that require time and overhead. He also cautioned the audience with regard to the micro vc's, who may want a disproportionate percentage of equity (up to 10%) for very little capital infusion.
Lucas compared these groups with traditional vc's, stating that vc's behave predictably. Voyager, for example, reserves an average of $8 million per deal (though they don't inject all of that at once); and you know that they are going to want preferred stock. He also made the point that the pedigree of the financial backer can affect the hype around the startup's future valuation and ipo.
An audience member asked if startups have to have IP to get vc funding. Lucas said they want to see sustainable advantage. It could be IP, a monopoly on knowledge in a specific space... Logan added that the rise of open source is changing thoughts on the value of IP.
Logan talked about the importance of having the right investors. When he was CEO of Driveway, the company received $68 million of vc funding. The dot-com boom ended and things got tough, but he thought he had a business model that could ensure survival. But the investors didn't want to be tied up long-term - they wanted a quick exit. So he was replaced.
Lucas stated that vc's like Voyager don't invest in R&D. If you want funding, you need a couple of credible people (management team), a product or service you can demonstrate, and possibly organizations who are customers or who will say that they will be customers if your business shows viability. He stated that vc's want to minimize 3 risks: technical, market, and execution.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Web Analytics Wednesday in Portland
Just a quick note - Web Analytics Wednesday, a get-together for web analytics professionals, will be held this THURSDAY at WebTrends in Portland. WAW on a Thursday - isn't that just like Portland?
Friday, April 11, 2008
Lunch 2.0 at eROI
I went to Lunch 2.0 held at eROI on Wednesday.
I didn't see all of eROI's new office space, but what I did see reminded me of HotWired - old building, warehouse-type space, wood floors, bright-colored couches. And the area they are in reminded me of the South of Market area in San Francisco, where HotWired was located. Though there are some parts of my HotWired experience I don't wish to re-live (e.g., the dismantling of the web site, the 3 failed IPO attempts...), I do miss the environment.
About 70 people met for lunch. Of the people I met (and the ones I already knew), it hit me that a surprisingly large number of them are working on ways to improve (or replace) our educational system. And that ties in with Rick Turoczy's recent call to action to make a difference in education. So I wonder if what I'm seeing is an indication of something big going on - and, if so, is it just in Portland, or is it more wide-spread?
I didn't see all of eROI's new office space, but what I did see reminded me of HotWired - old building, warehouse-type space, wood floors, bright-colored couches. And the area they are in reminded me of the South of Market area in San Francisco, where HotWired was located. Though there are some parts of my HotWired experience I don't wish to re-live (e.g., the dismantling of the web site, the 3 failed IPO attempts...), I do miss the environment.
About 70 people met for lunch. Of the people I met (and the ones I already knew), it hit me that a surprisingly large number of them are working on ways to improve (or replace) our educational system. And that ties in with Rick Turoczy's recent call to action to make a difference in education. So I wonder if what I'm seeing is an indication of something big going on - and, if so, is it just in Portland, or is it more wide-spread?
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Startupalooza Continued
Sorry for taking so long to continue my write-up on Startupalooza. Anyway...
Bill Lynch and Matt Tucker, the co-founders of Jive Software spoke next. Their goal is to enable organizations to store their knowledge in Jive's collaboration environment, Clearspace, rather than in emails.
Jive was founded in 2001. They now have 2000 customers. They built the open source Jive Forums in college in Iowa, and subsequently moved to San Francisco. In late 2000 Sun Microsystems approached them (how nice!) and asked them to enhance the software; and pushed them to incorporate. They moved to New York with their business, but found it was too expensive to do business there. In 2004 they moved to Portland, and started over at staffing. Clearspace came out in 2004, at which time they had 35 employees. They now have 140.
They were funded by Sequoia Capital; and, surprisingly, they say Sequoia has never pushed them to outsource their development or move their development staff to a low-cost country (e.g., India or China). Hard to believe, given what I have heard in the past few years about VC's and boards of directors.
When asked, they said they don't see any competition coming from open source - their customers are looking at Microsoft and IBM as their competitors. They showed a surprising lack of concern for open source. With their short track record of quick success and growth, their attitude is understandable. But I think unrealistic. There are plenty of good, viable open source wiki and collaboration projects; and if they continue to maintain developer interest, they can only become more formidable.
I'm also surprised they didn't mention Atlassian's Confluence as a competitor. It's a good product, and it is actively maintained and enhanced. I know less about MindTouch, but I wonder if it will gain traction.
Following this presentation was a panel discussion about working independently. Sarah Gilbert, Justin Kistner, and Rick Turoczy were the panelists, and Adam Duvander moderated.
Following this, there were presentations of OpenId, ExpressionEngine (very pretty CMS - I'd like to research it further to see how deep the functionality is), Unthirsty (funny guys, and I'm impressed with the number of bars they've been able to compile), Earth Class Mail (they handle your mail for you - could be valuable to large organizations), Lunarr (web app that let's you add notes to the "back side" of web pages - interesting concept, slick interface, but I don't know how valuable it is), Sidecar (a gadget you add to your site to enable IM with visitors, provide them with information, and allow them to provide you with feedback - definitely valuable), MyStrands, Fyreball (allows you to post content on their site and share with your friends - I'd love to hear what new value this provides), Toonlet (enables you to become a creator and publisher of online comic strips - what a great way to waste time - seriously!), and I Want Sandy (an innovative devleopment of an automated assistant, though I'm nagged enough by my mobile phone, email, desktop gadgets, RSS feeds...).
All in all, it was a great day - I'm glad I went, and I look forward to the next one.
Bill Lynch and Matt Tucker, the co-founders of Jive Software spoke next. Their goal is to enable organizations to store their knowledge in Jive's collaboration environment, Clearspace, rather than in emails.
Jive was founded in 2001. They now have 2000 customers. They built the open source Jive Forums in college in Iowa, and subsequently moved to San Francisco. In late 2000 Sun Microsystems approached them (how nice!) and asked them to enhance the software; and pushed them to incorporate. They moved to New York with their business, but found it was too expensive to do business there. In 2004 they moved to Portland, and started over at staffing. Clearspace came out in 2004, at which time they had 35 employees. They now have 140.
They were funded by Sequoia Capital; and, surprisingly, they say Sequoia has never pushed them to outsource their development or move their development staff to a low-cost country (e.g., India or China). Hard to believe, given what I have heard in the past few years about VC's and boards of directors.
When asked, they said they don't see any competition coming from open source - their customers are looking at Microsoft and IBM as their competitors. They showed a surprising lack of concern for open source. With their short track record of quick success and growth, their attitude is understandable. But I think unrealistic. There are plenty of good, viable open source wiki and collaboration projects; and if they continue to maintain developer interest, they can only become more formidable.
I'm also surprised they didn't mention Atlassian's Confluence as a competitor. It's a good product, and it is actively maintained and enhanced. I know less about MindTouch, but I wonder if it will gain traction.
Following this presentation was a panel discussion about working independently. Sarah Gilbert, Justin Kistner, and Rick Turoczy were the panelists, and Adam Duvander moderated.
Following this, there were presentations of OpenId, ExpressionEngine (very pretty CMS - I'd like to research it further to see how deep the functionality is), Unthirsty (funny guys, and I'm impressed with the number of bars they've been able to compile), Earth Class Mail (they handle your mail for you - could be valuable to large organizations), Lunarr (web app that let's you add notes to the "back side" of web pages - interesting concept, slick interface, but I don't know how valuable it is), Sidecar (a gadget you add to your site to enable IM with visitors, provide them with information, and allow them to provide you with feedback - definitely valuable), MyStrands, Fyreball (allows you to post content on their site and share with your friends - I'd love to hear what new value this provides), Toonlet (enables you to become a creator and publisher of online comic strips - what a great way to waste time - seriously!), and I Want Sandy (an innovative devleopment of an automated assistant, though I'm nagged enough by my mobile phone, email, desktop gadgets, RSS feeds...).
All in all, it was a great day - I'm glad I went, and I look forward to the next one.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Startupalooza last weekend
Startupalooza was last Saturday in Portland, at cubespace, from noon to 7pm. I stayed until 6:15, so sadly only saw a bit of the presentation on Fyreball, and completely missed the presentations on Toonlet and I Want Sandy. I've looked at the latter two before - toonlet looks like it would be a fun way to waste time (which I don't have), and people rave about I Want Sandy, but I just don't see the need, what with my calendars and cell phone constantly popping up meetings and tasks.
After a quick Lebanese lunch and meeting a couple people, the presentations started:
Garagegames, presented by founder Mark Frohnmayer and CTO Josh Williams. Mark talked about how, while working at Dynamics in the '90's, he noticed that projects required a growing number of members (from a couple people to 10's) and a growing amount of time (from months to several years). So the risk of failures grew (with the increased cost), and the fun grew less. He also saw the number of retailers selling games change from lots of mom & pop stores to just the mega-stores like Wal-Mart and CompUSA. He wanted to create software that could be used to develop games quickly and for low cost.
After slowly moving their company toward their goals, they were acquired by IAC, Barry Diller's company. And get this - they represented themselves in the negotiations. And they're happy with the deal. They have maintained control, and they got agreement to recompense their loyal, low-paid employees with equity.
They're now dealing with a totally different problem - how to handle their growth (they now have close to 100 employees).
They recently announced instantaction.com, an interactive, multi-player games site that runs in your browser.
AboutUs, presented by founder Ray King. Ray sounds like the ultimate entrepreneur. As a kid he took over his sister's babysitting job and turned that into a tutoring business; learned how to use a computer and built a business teaching business people how to use VisiCalc (or was it Lotus 1-2-3?) by putting a pc on a table in front of Grand Central Station and giving people a glimpse of what it could do; moved on building Semaphore, developing accounting software; built snapnames to monitor for availability of domain names and grab them based on his desire for raysworld.com and writing a little program to monitor for its availability; left in 2004 and started AboutUs based on the idea that he could create a page for every existing domain name, based on data in whois. His partner is Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki. AboutUs is now getting ~5 million visitors/month. Their challenge now is to beef up the presentation and user engagement.
The gain revenues from Google adsense, ad buys, and by creating articles on the site to promote their customers' services (called PromoteUs).
There are 27 people in the company, with 15 in Lahore, Pakistan. He admits the difficulty of communicating across time zones but still believes it's worth it. Unlike most offshore and outsourced engagements, he provides his employees (remote and local) with the high-altitude view of what he wants done, and allows them to do the more detailed design and coding. He noted that they publicly describe tasks on their wiki, and also use irc and skype to remain connected.
A lot more was presented, but I will have to write about them later.
After a quick Lebanese lunch and meeting a couple people, the presentations started:
Garagegames, presented by founder Mark Frohnmayer and CTO Josh Williams. Mark talked about how, while working at Dynamics in the '90's, he noticed that projects required a growing number of members (from a couple people to 10's) and a growing amount of time (from months to several years). So the risk of failures grew (with the increased cost), and the fun grew less. He also saw the number of retailers selling games change from lots of mom & pop stores to just the mega-stores like Wal-Mart and CompUSA. He wanted to create software that could be used to develop games quickly and for low cost.
After slowly moving their company toward their goals, they were acquired by IAC, Barry Diller's company. And get this - they represented themselves in the negotiations. And they're happy with the deal. They have maintained control, and they got agreement to recompense their loyal, low-paid employees with equity.
They're now dealing with a totally different problem - how to handle their growth (they now have close to 100 employees).
They recently announced instantaction.com, an interactive, multi-player games site that runs in your browser.
AboutUs, presented by founder Ray King. Ray sounds like the ultimate entrepreneur. As a kid he took over his sister's babysitting job and turned that into a tutoring business; learned how to use a computer and built a business teaching business people how to use VisiCalc (or was it Lotus 1-2-3?) by putting a pc on a table in front of Grand Central Station and giving people a glimpse of what it could do; moved on building Semaphore, developing accounting software; built snapnames to monitor for availability of domain names and grab them based on his desire for raysworld.com and writing a little program to monitor for its availability; left in 2004 and started AboutUs based on the idea that he could create a page for every existing domain name, based on data in whois. His partner is Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki. AboutUs is now getting ~5 million visitors/month. Their challenge now is to beef up the presentation and user engagement.
The gain revenues from Google adsense, ad buys, and by creating articles on the site to promote their customers' services (called PromoteUs).
There are 27 people in the company, with 15 in Lahore, Pakistan. He admits the difficulty of communicating across time zones but still believes it's worth it. Unlike most offshore and outsourced engagements, he provides his employees (remote and local) with the high-altitude view of what he wants done, and allows them to do the more detailed design and coding. He noted that they publicly describe tasks on their wiki, and also use irc and skype to remain connected.
A lot more was presented, but I will have to write about them later.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Tonight's Beer and Blog
Went to my first Beer and Blog in Portland OR today. Reminded me of my days at HotWired - young, techno-literate, single, creative, uninterested in corporate employment. Friendly group.
Scott Kveton demoed an installation of OpenID with Wordpress. Having one username and password on the Internet sounds great - how many usernames and passwords do you have? And I'm interesting in providing better service to our web site visitors. But it's not ready for us. As it is now, if you don't have an OpenID, you'd have to go to another page to select a provider, then create your id there, and then come back to our site. Scott said there are plans to make it easier with less steps. I look forward to that.
Listened to Matt Monroe talk about the surprisingly huge response he's been getting to his photography blog, the Global Photographer. And if you see him, ask him to show you his Visa card - think early Kenny Loggins.
Adam talked about his work at bestplaces.net. Sounds like a great - virtual - environment.
We talked about the history of Tektronix. Once had over 24,000 employees in Oregon (now it's about 4,000). Once they made just about everything in their products, down to the screws! I love this poster showing the Oregon spinoffs from Tek.
On the way home, I was appreciating the fact that Portland is a warm-bed of creativity and innovation; and I wonder if this society of technogeeks is similar to small creative groups of the past, such as the impressionists Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Cezanne, et al; or the Algonquin Round Table.
Scott Kveton demoed an installation of OpenID with Wordpress. Having one username and password on the Internet sounds great - how many usernames and passwords do you have? And I'm interesting in providing better service to our web site visitors. But it's not ready for us. As it is now, if you don't have an OpenID, you'd have to go to another page to select a provider, then create your id there, and then come back to our site. Scott said there are plans to make it easier with less steps. I look forward to that.
Listened to Matt Monroe talk about the surprisingly huge response he's been getting to his photography blog, the Global Photographer. And if you see him, ask him to show you his Visa card - think early Kenny Loggins.
Adam talked about his work at bestplaces.net. Sounds like a great - virtual - environment.
We talked about the history of Tektronix. Once had over 24,000 employees in Oregon (now it's about 4,000). Once they made just about everything in their products, down to the screws! I love this poster showing the Oregon spinoffs from Tek.
On the way home, I was appreciating the fact that Portland is a warm-bed of creativity and innovation; and I wonder if this society of technogeeks is similar to small creative groups of the past, such as the impressionists Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Cezanne, et al; or the Algonquin Round Table.
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