Troy Angrignon - Adventure Capitalist

I (mostly) agree with Susan Scrupski's assessment of the Spring 2008 Enterprise 2.0 conference: it's a market waiting to happen, there are a lot of vendors, and it's an echo chamber.

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 12:53:09 -0700

Thanks Susan for your post. It reminds me that I never did post my summary of the Enterprise 2.0 conference this spring in Boston.

You say that you are frustrated that there is a slow pace of adoption. I saw the same thing but rather than being frustrated by it, we used that as a data point in our business to say, "this market is not maturing as fast as we thought it would." You can either bang your head on reality (and be frustrated) or choose to view the world the way it is, not the way you want it to be. If there is slow adoption, there is a reason for it. Either this stuff isn't that useful or people don't see the 9x value and so they're not going to adopt anything new.

My take-aways were similar:

There were a plethora of undifferentiated vendors (we have profiles and blogs!!)
"Methinks thou doth declare a market" was pretty prevalent in the echo chamber. It was a lot of vendors telling each other that there was really going to be a market.

I take issue with your somewhat unrelated line at the bottom of your email that declares that once all of humanity is socially connected, that it will "yield a greater humanity." My full response would have to be an entirely different post but in short, "net friends" are not really social connection, despite what people might call it, and so far, interconnectedness does not seem to be causing the emergence of "greater humanity", just more interconnected communication and more ability for people to only hear what they want and block out opposing voices. That's a whole other blog post.

Thanks for the kick in the pants for me to summarize E2.0. Let's see what happens in NY in fall 08. It will be interesting to see how far the market has advanced, if at all.

RightNow: market research and bootstrapping led them to be capital efficient, cashflow positive from day one. Nice work Mr. Gianforte.

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 11:29:28 -0700

Javier, thank you for recognizing businesses like Mr. Gianforte's that are "return leaders". It is too easy these days to continue to buy the "traffic first, monetization second" crap that continues to be perpetuated (and which is really only applicable to about 0.0001% of the businesses out there.)

Greg, I'm glad to see that you have been recognized for your efforts with Right Now. I'm building a company right now where we are following the exact same principles: strong market research, large market waves, cashflow is king, and we're going to use outside capital only for acceleration of the business, and preferably in as few rounds as possible. The fact that a programmer called 400 prospective customers is shocking. I also liked the "100% commission sales person" model which made sense given that Greg knew what the customers wanted at that point.

Great quote: "if you are starting a business, don't spend your time calling VCs; spend your time calling customers, figure out how to solve their problem and get them to pay for it."

And thanks also to the DealMaker team for hosting this excellent post on the art of bootstrapping.

Thanks to all of you for sharing this information. It's encouraging to other entrepreneurs such as myself that we're on the right path.

Successful upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard - this is the best OS yet from Apple

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 09:55:16 -0800

I have been working on Apple equipment since the Apple II+. I ran a Mac computer consulting company for ten years. I have seen much of the good and bad that has come from Apple over the years. I think that this Operating system version is the best Apple has ever released.

It was a long upgrade because I wanted to ensure that it went smoothly.

It involved:

buying two of the five Leopard Take Control books ($15USD for the bundle - CHEAP and GREAT!) http://www.takecontrolbooks.com
reviewing Macintouch reports (1/2 hour)
running Diskwarrior 4.0 on my drive first (and on my backup drives); (1/2 hour)
making two complete bootable clones of my machine; (2 hours) http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper
getting a VersiontrackerPro (http://www.versiontracker.com) membership ($50 for a year) and it helped me find, download, and install updates to about 40 applications. WORTH the price. (3.5 hours)
making room on my drive (1 hour of cleanups);
refreshing both backups again (smart updates using Super Duper - also a great little tool)
running the actual OS (used archive and install) (at least an hour - went to sleep instead)
ran Software updates (1/4 hour);
read "Take Control of Customizing Leopard) and did all system tweaks (1 1/2 hour)
tested out the newest applications (Mail, Calendar, Address Book);

First impression after reading both Take Control books (get them - they're worth it) is that Apple finally fixed many of the annoying things that had been in Mac OS X since the inception.

Pros:

The Finder is WAAAAY better, smoother, more sensible, faster.
Spotlight finally makes sense. They got rid of that sort of pseudo search window that was neither app nor utility nor modal dialogue - what the hell WAS that thing?
The whole system feels faster.
Spaces itch a scratch I have wanted to itch for a long time. I thought they'd be useless. I have used them for a half-hour and think I'll use them forever now.
Mail finally has bulleted lists (and they work!)
iCal finally put all three views (day, week, month) into the same window and it doesn't jump all over the place annoyingly like it used to (each window had its own place and they sometimes jumped around when you switched between windows.
It feels cleaner, more consistent (thank god the brushed aluminum look is entirely gone!!), and somehow more solid.

Cons

I have built at least a thousand backup scripts. Time Machine does what the best scripts in the world do.
But it's not there yet. You can't control it's schedule and you can't make bootable backups with it.
Use SuperDuper for that instead (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper) and use TimeMachine for incremental data snapshots over time.
Safari is fast...but you can't load multiple home pages at start and it still doesn't work with Google Apps properly so it's not really an option for daily use;

General comments

The dock is not as bad as people have been bitching about.
The menu bar's transparency is not a problem as long as you have a background with a light bit at the top.

Great job Apple. I feel like I have a new, fast, clean Mac on my desk!

Inspired by Tim Ferris - working a week in Paris WORKED

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 13:04:28 -0800

I read an awesome book recently that made me rethink many things about location, work, and business. It was Tim Ferriss' book which I highly recommend.

"
"The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich" (Timothy Ferris)

I recently had reason to head to Paris for personal reasons. I thought I would use the trip as an opportunity to try working somewhere other than Vancouver - to see if it's really possible to relocate and still work? Of course, in Ferriss' world, you only work 4 hours a week. Unfortunately I didn't get to experience THAT part of the plan.

It worked. Here's how I did it.

I moved all of my landline numbers into a Vonage account about a month prior - personal home phone, company land-line from San Francisco, company land-line from Vancouver - the works. I set up one voicemail box for all of the numbers and forwarded that to Simulscribe which transcribes voicemails to email (and does a pretty darned great job at it). Then I set up the cell to roll-over to the same Simulscribe address.

Once in Paris, I plugged in the phone and Vonage box. And realized that whoops - you can't plug 110V devices into 220V. I had fried BOTH of them. Or so I thought. It turned out that fortune favours the stupid. One of the plug converters was fried so it never passed any current through.

So I bought some transformers (220V to 110V step down transformers) for my other various chargers, bought a couple of plug converters (for the Apple power supply and the new phone that I bought) and plugged it all in. It took a couple of tries but after a call to Vonage tech support, the Vonage box was up and running on the local DSL connection and voila - my phone was plugged in and ready to receive calls at any of my numbers.

I have to admit that it was freeing (and a bit strange) to have people look at my calling code and say, "OH! You're in Vancouver!" and then have to explain that no, in fact I was in Paris, ten hours ahead of them! The sound quality was as good as it is in Vancouver, which is to say, on par with the regular plain old telephone lines that I had before.

There was only one glitch and that was more to do with the Siemens phone than anything else. It would ring but only at the moment it was actually ringing, could you hit the "ACCEPT" button. In between rings, it didn't look "pick up able". Weird.

But that very small issue aside, it means that with a laptop, skype, Gatherplace (for screen sharing), Simulscribe, a good DSL connection, and a Vonage adapter - have equipment, will travel.

I hear that Puerto Vallarta has good DSL... Or maybe Costa Rica....

When will I be able to sync my Google docs automagically into my laptop folder for offline access?

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 31 May 2007 08:39:34 -0700

Here's what I (and many thousands of road warriors) want Google.

I want a local cached always up to date copy of my entire Google docs set of files. I want to create a folder on my local drive and it should automagically sync with Google docs without my ever thinking about it so that whenever I get on a plane, not only can I search for it using Google desktop or Spotlight (I'm on a Mac) and see the contents, but I can open and save files into it. And even drag word/excel files into it too. And when I get back online, it should auto-sync to my Google docs folder. I'm currently in chaos with a big batch of old files on my hard drive and a batch of new files on Google docs and duplicates in both places and frankly, it's becoming a nightmare.

Google, I have said it before and I'll say it again. As long as you maintain your commitment to privacy and security, I'm okay with giving you my documents and I'll pay you too. I need this functionality and so do others.

UPDATE: As I was about to post this, my friend Jonathan Lambert pointed me to this article about Google Gears - a toolkit for building offline apps. Looks like we're on the way.

I have joined Hinchcliffe and Company! (out of the corporate world and back into startup chaos)

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 16:24:21 -0700

My time at Business Objects has finally come to a close. It was an awesome two years, with a lot of learning. I met a lot of extremely talented people there and through my association with the company. I was feeling the entrepreneurial urge again so i decided to throw myself back out of the perceived safety of the corporate life and back into the chaotic startup world. I have been out for two weeks so far and couldn't be happier. I feel like I'm "home".

Now that I'm out, I'm taking on a few different projects. I'm working with a group called Hinchcliffe and Company. They are a leading Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 consulting, training, advisory, and media firm headed by Dion Hinchcliffe. I am joined by a top-tier team that is seeding the company and it our goal to ramp up this company very quickly. I will predominantly work in the corporate training, enterprise consulting, and startup advisory area - helping startups with their business planning, go-to-market planning, technology strategy, and/or sustainability practices.

You can see some of our sites here:

Main site: http://www.hinchcliffeandco.com
Training: http://web20university.com
Media: http://enterprise2tvshow.com

This will also give me the time and flexibility to work on some other business, technology, and sustainability related projects that I have been wanting to work on for a while as well as to build out my speaking engagements and writing and blogging.

Some people ask me how I tie this all together? I explain it like this. I have come to the conclusion that it is my mission to use business and technology to create a better world. That includes Web 2.0 (bringing a social aspect to computing and to business) or Sustainability (bringing a social and ecological aspect to business).

In my new role(s), I will be doing all of that - sustainability, web 2.0, business building. I have the best "job" in the world! Because I get to work with entrepreneurs, BE an entrepreneur, and work with people who want to change the world for the better.

It's going to be a crazy and fun year - I can sense it already!

My new contact information is: troy at hinchcliffeandco dot com. My cell hasn't changed: 604-551-8275 (Vancouver). Drop me a note if we haven't spoken in a while and we'll catch up!

Have a great 2007 everybody!

Notes from Web 2.0 Expo Monday April 16, 2007

Troy Angrignon — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 07:58:17 -0700

Here are a few interesting notes from the opening sessions:

Jeff Bezos

a better question than "what's changing in the next five years" is "what is going to be the SAME over the next five or ten years?" because that allows them to build a sturdy business.
he talked about the current services: message queuing, storage, computing and fulfillment. They can take inbound data jobs, store your data, store your physical goods, and provide computing cycles. So what would they build next? He wouldn't say but he did say: "when you build a house, you build from the ground up."
So what would they build next? I think that one of the next services they will offer is a billing platform for all of that so you can turn around and bill your customers for their usage of those services. But that's just my opinion.

Battelle interviewing Mena Trott, Joe Krause, and Jay Adelson (Digg)

Krause: It's relatively easy to find buyers who you can sell it to for $5M. Having a $10M business means having fewer buyers. Having a $50M business means that there are really only one or two potential buyers. This impacts whether or not you want to take VC money. Because if you are taking VC money, you need to go for much higher multiples (see below.)
Joe Krause made an interesting point: You might want to sell and get a 5x or 6x return on the money which is good for you, and good for your employees. But your VC is thinking, "These guys might be the 100x opportunity." So they're not excited about your 5x return and can fight it. Interesting dynamic.
Biggest mistakes: "What was your biggest mistake"?

****Krause: Not launching our business model at the same time as we launched our product. We launched the product and learned a lot about it for six months. But then we launched our business model six months later and had lost those six months - we didn't learn anything about how people valued our application. Because you can't have those conversations with people about value...until you are charging!

Apollo / Kevin Lynch:

COOL demo from Salescorce.com's Apollo desktop. VERY nice. Same with the eBay Desktop application.
WOW. Awesome word processor that is online/offline called Buzzword from Virtual Ubiquity. It does TABLES properly! For an HTML type text editor, that is unbelievable!

UPDATED: Under the Radar Relay Fri Mar 16, 2007

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:47:23 -0700

Many of you know that I was on the selection committee for "Why Office 2.0 Matters" - a one day conference being organized by the Dealmaker Media team in SF. The one day session will look at 32 of the most promising companies emerging in the Office-productivity-on-the-web category.

As part of the run-up to the conference, the team decided to hold a blog relay - "The Radar Relay" - where different writers would summarize the week's Office 2.0 news at the end of the week. This is my week. But you might want to start here first if you haven't been keeping up to date until now.

Also, if you haven’t registered for Under the Radar yet, the readers of this blog can take advantage of a special price at this link. I’ll be there, to see what the judging panel think of the selections that our committee made, and also to give a brief talk about Office 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

On with the Radar Relay. Tthis week has been ripe with office 2.0 news. There is so much that I'm going to do it in point-form:

A web application designed to help people through their bankruptcies was cited for "practicing the law without a license" and its creator was charged and found guilty. The case is currently under appeal. (thanks to Kurzweilai.net for the link).
The Office 2.0 Database tipped the scales at over 450 Office 2.0 startups. 95% of those will be gone in 36 months but who cares? As Paul Kedrosky says, "It takes a lot of dead bodies to fill a swamp" when you want to get to the other side.
Gianpaolo gave us an 8-floor, 3-bullet point "Why SaaS for the Enteprise" pitch. I would add to his points the ability for users to pilot-test without IT involvement (which really rolls up to shorter time to value though). I think his 3 bullets are absolutely awesome. Concise, and to the point.
The world continues to twitter about Twitter. Millions of people pinging each other with little tidbits of information on what they are doing at the moment. I know that many of the things that take off seem to confound people but you have to realize that deep down in biological and spiritual cores, we are social creatures. We are designed to be social from the ground up. But as people leave organized religion, and as fewer people get married, and as fewer people have kids, and as fewer people live in multi-family homes, there becomes a vast social vaccuum waiting to be filled - hence the explosion of blogs (find your community), photo-sharing (meet people with an appreciation for art), SMS'ing silly messages to each other, or signing up for Twitter - these are all manifestations of a desire to find and stay connected to a community in an ever more disconnected world. I don't doubt that we will develop a bunch of these tools along the way and will eventually be in partially aware, partially connected states to our communities at all time - but will be actually be social or have any friends? It reminds me of the quote I read the other day, "I unsubscribed from all of my social networks so that I would have time to invite friends over for dinners!" Also, here is a shortcut to using Twitter.
Google's diabolical plan to plant people in Microsoft is paying off. Microsoft has managed to make Office 2007 and Outlook 2007 both slow and destructive to data at the same time as Google has launched their applications with a service level agreement (that they breached already.) Lots of notes here on Zoli's blog.
Anne Zelenka posted "Ten Things I Hate About You, Web 2.0". Funny list. Anne, how about Office 2.0? I'll start with my top four most annoying things about Office 2.0:

NOT ONE COMPANY has managed to make a text editor that doesn't completely suck.
Do we really need 50 spreadsheet apps? Are we really that lacking in creativity?
Web 2.0 was about wasting time. Office 2.0 is really about being productive with your time. We need more web 2.0 in office 2.0 or the conferences are going to be REALLY dull.
Just because you have an Office 2.0 company doesn't mean you have to forget about: customers, pain points, revenues, or long-term viability.

Phil Wainewright has a good post on the Saugatuck report showing that SaaS has hit the knee of the curve or as he writes: "SaaS hits the hockey stick." I'm sure he meant the curvy part near the bottom of the stick near the big flat part that hits the little round thing-a-ma-jig. Go, Beavers, Go. As you can see, I'm not a hockey fan so I prefer the knee of the curve story a bit more. He writes: "Most surprising of all was a huge jump from 18% last year to 49% this
year of companies planning to use SaaS for mission-critical
applications." I think it's instructive to look at internet banking. People didn't want t o use it either because they were afraid of the web - until seemingly overnight when everybody's Grandma joined web-banking.
Harry McCracken over at Slate wrote a decent review of the Zoho office tools suite. I agree with Harry that their suite seems pretty advanced. However, I have tried to use them for real work and have still found enough holes that I couldn't use them. Particularly Zoho show which was nearly useless. The other apps seemed somewhat better. But they have achieved a heck of a lot and I wish Raju Vegesna and his team the best.
AvenueA-Razorfish's new Digital Outlook Report 2007 was released (thanks Guy Kawasaki for the heads up). Some highlights:

"In retrospect, the massive digital disruption we’ve experienced over the last 12 months should have been anticipated. But it seems few were fully prepared for the speed and depth of the changes. Perhaps it’s because the changes weren’t just about what Web sites became popular or what new technologies were introduced. Rather, it was a broader cultural change. Consumers’ expectations of their media evolved. The places they trusted to provide information and entertainment changed. New outlets for consumers to express themselves emerged."
"“Great service. Creativity. Flexibility. A passion for their product and for finding ways to push innovation within their organization. A desire to understand clients’ objectives and not to retrofit them into their own. The hallmarks of great Web publishers are obvious, yet subjective and elusive. Those who are focused on delivering real solutions are best positioned to become partners to agencies and advertisers.” - Sarah Baehr, VP Media, New York.
"Information seeking equals entertainment: Once upon a time, play was more deeply integrated into our daily lives, but that changed with the introduction of industrialism. Then came the Internet, and with it, a reemergence of play in new ways. Information as entertainment was a core concept we heard from our study participants, and one that we can see around us as well....Any way you look at it, play is back, and it’s here to stay."
"Mobile phone use will grow—but not for talking, according to our participants. Phones calls are considered to be invasive in this hyper-culture, to be used only when necessary. For ordinary use, a quick text message will suffice, and many of our respondents didn’t see themselves reversing this trend in the future."
Overall, this is a fantastic report. Get it. Read it. Take action on it.

Dick Costolo wrote a great post titled Too Many Companies? where he addresses an entrepeneur's question about whetehr or not he/she should go out and try to capitalize on a maket opportunity. I agree with Dick. You can't know anything really when you start. It's all a best guess. Once you have done the basics of identifying whether you are entiering what could be a high-growth market, something that you are passionate about, and that you have (or can soon have) a great team to build something with, then get out there and do it and adjust on the fly. Not wait until you "have it figured out".
Cisco bought Webex. For 64x earnings or 8.4x revenues. ($3.2B for 2006's $50M earnings on $380M revenues). I agree with Michael Arrington who questions the value of such a deal when Webex is being disrupted SERIOUSLY by a lot of light, fast, cheap, and frankly much better competitors. Of course, Webex has real revenues that will accrue to Cisco's bottom line and can actually "move the needle" on Cisco's income statement. Hopefully they were buying the revenues and not the technology. I also agree with Paul Kedrosky who says "While this is not your father's Cisco, it's not clear just whose Cisco it is becoming either." When they bought Five Across, it could have been an aberration. Adding Webex to the mix means it is definitely a trend. For it to make any sense, there would need to be some follow-on acquisitions that signal a clear shift in corporate strategy and a redefinition of what and who Cisco intends to become in the next few years.
Darren Barefoot did a nice little review of three new-to-him Web apps: Harvest for simple time tracking, Buxfer for moving money easily, and WhosOff for tracking holidays in the office. Very fitting for the Office 2.0 Relay!

That's a heck of a week!! Lots of interesting things happening and I'm sure we'll have another crazy week next week as we get close to the actual Dealmaker event.

Have a great week ahead everybody!

Enterprise 2.0: Corporate Wikis reviewed (update)

Troy Angrignon — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 13:01:45 -0800

Over the past month and a couple of conversations, I have had the opportunity to speak with Ross Mayfield, CEO for Socialtext. Ross has very rightly pointed out that there have been major changes since July 2006 when the original posting went up and I agreed that since I'm keeping the post up, that I should be current with where Socialtext is today. They have done a lot of work since my July 2006 post, including:

updating the interface in version 2.0 which was released around August 2006. It is indeed cleaner and simpler than the original one by a long shot. Nice job on that guys.
releasing an open source distribution of the wiki;
they released a mobile version (I have not looked at this);
they released an offline sync tool that allows you to take all or part of the wiki with you offline, make changes, and then resync them. I haven't tested it but that is a really cool feature. Now that we're building out a lot of pages in our wiki at our office, I can see the value in having that ability, although as with all syncing/replication, the devil is in the details.
Basic text-editing, the core of the application is still really really basic. Tables are not functional at all, with no real ability to move rows and columns.
They have also announced that they are working with Dan Bricklin on combining Wiki Calc with Social Text to create Social Calc. I pointed out to Ross that if they are planning on using a spreadsheet tool to also be a table tool, that I'm not sure I believe it. They are different animals with different behaviours (or at least, traditionally they have been.) He is attempting to use Social Calc to be a universal sheet / table editor right within the main wiki page. It will be interesting to see if that bet pays off. I'm all for simplification and innovation. If they can combine the two into one functional sheet/table editing mode, good for them.

So, what does this all mean? Has my opinion changed? Well in the days since I wrote this, Atlassian and Socialtext have continued to grow at reasonable rates, and the market for corporate wikis has heated up. Some of their competitors have been aquired and gone into the horizontal layer (Jotspot into Google). And they are now being joined by companies like Jive Software with Clearspace or Blogtronix and SystemOne. It's time for me to do a new vendor bake-off I think.... Until then, here is my one-line horribly opinionated overview of the vendors at the moment but I realize I'll have to do them all justice by reviewing them more fully very soon. Here goes:

Atlassian/Confluence: solid enterprise wiki with on-premise and hosted options; an ecosystem of partners who extend the wiki functionality; a solid team running the company that is focused on revenue AND profit; and a somewhat dated interface which they are addressing in the next release; extensive management tools; really solid exporting functions. I recommend this product, despite its UI quirks as they are focused tightly on being profitable above all and on knowing who their customers are.
Socialtext/Socialtext Workspace: many deployment options: hosted, on-premise, appliance; nice looking and intuitive interface; focused on solving the hard problems (mobile, offline) but slow in dealing with the fundamentals (the text editor is still really bad - tables are awful and functionality is very limited); have been early and loud proponents of wiki use in corporations; very supportive of the open source movement; are working to integrate in Social Calc - too little too late? Jotspot has spreadhseets, Google has Google sheets, Zoho Office has sheets, everybody has sheets; less obvious management and administration tools; If you need mobile and offline use, Socialtext is your only option. The text editing is limited and the lack of useful tables is a non-starter for me but maybe not for others. Also the only remaining appliance/wiki vendor now that Jot is out of the picture.
Blogtronix: doing some very interesting work by combining blogs, wikis, and social networking for the enterprise. I have not reviewed them but a friend called the other day to say, "These guys are "coooooooooooool" so I'm intending to check them out soon.
Jive Clearspace: a single platform that combines blogs, wikidoc module (for creating documents collaboratively), forums, document management, identity, and reputation into one seamless whole. Great visual design; solid fundamentals (they are the forum technology used by Apple, SAP, and Citrix for example); new product though so may have standard v1.0 issues; wiki functionality is really aimed at document creation rather than large-scale wiki development. I'm just reviewing the product now but haven't made any final determinations at this time.

Stepping up to the bigger picture, there are two overall trends going on here. Much if not all of the features found in collaboration tools today is going to be heading either down into the horizontal players infrastructure (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM/Lotus), or else becoming features inside other industry categories (enterprise software for example!) Second, I believe we're about to see the same pattern we saw with enterprise applications many years ago: the rise and fall of stand-alone applications and then the rise of comprehensive suites, particularly as consolidation hits. In the social software space, I think that will play out as applications becoming suites and both of them being consolidated into larger vendors quickly. It should be an interesting year or two ahead of us.

Event: March 23, 2007: "The business case for social software in the enterprise", presented at the Under the Radar / Office 2.0 Conference in Mountain View, CA

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:40:36 -0800

My friend Debbie and her team at Dealmaker Media are running the "Under the Radar: Office 2.0" conference in Mountain View, CA on March 23, 2007. Aside from having been on the selection committee with some fine folks (Rod Boothby, Richard McManus, Zoli Erdos, Ismael Ghalimi, Stowe Boyd, Ori Weinroth, Brad Feld, and Rafe Needleman), some of whom I know, and others whom I have admired from a distance, I will also be presenting a customer perspective on why it's imperative that we employ and deploy social software in the enterprise.

It should be an exciting day. We have a fantastic slate of presenting companies, Sean Wise and Rafe Needleman will be moderating, and we have a full panel of judges that will vote on the companies that have the most compelling businesses and offerings. Should be fun!

Event: March 21, 2007: "Maximize Your Revenue From Your Web 2.0 Venture", presented to AJAX World in New York

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:27:07 -0800

I have the good fortune of speaking on March 21, 2007 at AJAXWorld and have chosen as my topic, "Maximize Your Revenue From Your Web 2.0 Venture". The event "blurb" is here:

What do you do to maximize your revenue? The options are exploding, the ecosystem is becoming more complex and nobody seems to be able to simplify the ideas to the point that they are actionable. Which pricing model? Which ad network? Where? Why? This talk will look at current strategies for maximizing revenue from your Web 2.0 site. We'll explore what top sites are doing and provide you with lessons you can take away and implement on your own site.

Resourcs: Event site, Powerpoint (not yet available)

Event: April 30, 2007: "From Web 2.0 to Office 2.0: How the social web will impact our working lives" for the High-Tech Communicators Exchange

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:20:32 -0800

Ean Jackson and I will be presenting on Web 2.0, Office 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0 to a group of communications professionals at the High-Tech Communicators Exchange on April 30, 2007. Location is TBA. (Event site, [Powerpoint not yet available]) The purpose of the talk is to explain how the Web 2.0 principles are migrating from the "consumer web" into the office, bringing more collaboration into the workplace.

Who are your all-time heroes of information technology?

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 15:32:41 -0800

My friend Jeremy Geelan has just posted an interesting question on his blog at Sys-con where he asks: "Who Are The All-Time Heroes of i-Technology?" He is attempting to garner a list of approximately 150 names and then find some means to winnow them down to the Top 20.

Personally, I think that the arbitrary number of 20 is too limiting. It makes more sense to me to catalog a list of names and their innovations over time, as much of the innovation was accomplished by individuals who stood on the shoulders of previous giants, as Einstein would have said.

To simplify and justify my own additions to the list, I went to Dictionary.com to get their definition of hero which was:

1.	a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities.

2.	a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal: He was a local hero when he saved the drowning child.

Based on that definition I would certainly nominate some of the following people to be added to the list:

Jaron Lanier: alleged coiner of the term "virtual reality" and generally interesting and eclectic social critic. Nominated for pushing the boundaries technologically but more importantly, having the will to speak up about culture at the same time.

Nicholas Negroponte: father of the MIT Media Lab which was the first place I know of that: didn't accept military funding, had an open access license for sponsors (where every sponsor got to see every project), and which put a kindergarten near the robotics lab and beside the music studio "because they're all related." I'm nominating him for his long-standing dream of building the $100 crank-powered laptop that could be used to bridge the digital divide. It is "impossible" dreams like this that push the human race forward.

Steve Jobs: Nominated for his life-long ambition to unite technology and design, from the very first Mac-Plus ("the computer for the rest of us"), to the NEXT computer, bringing music to the world through the iPod, and through to the reinvention of cellular phones and PDAs with the iPhone.

Jeff Hawkins: For recognizing that in order for a PDA market to be created, he had to throw out all previous assumptions (such as those that drove the failed Apple Newton project) and start with three key principles that drove the entire design: it had to fit in most shirt pockets, it had to work all day without running out of power, and it had to be simple to operate. Even more importantly, in doing so, he sacrificed some key assumptions that had killed other products, namely, that it had to be able to deal with hand-writing recognition. He recognized that that one criteria required too much power and speed to make it a reality and sacrificed it in a bet that won him the fastest product ramp ever up until that point.

Who are YOUR heroes? If you have some, why not link to Jeremy's blog post and tell us about your own heroes?

About this site

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 09:51:09 -0800

This site contains my general blogging, published articles, and information on speaking dates where I discuss how business, technology, and finance can be used to create an open, healthy, and environmentally and economically vibrant society. Please feel free to contact me at troy at troyangrignon dot com to rant, discuss, or have me speak at your organization.

Web 2.0: Cutter IT Journal article that was published in October 2006: "Driving Revenue Growth With Web 2.0"

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 07:42:05 -0800

(For the most recent articles on Web 2.0, check out my full Web 2.0 articles category.)

This article was originally published in the October 2006 issue of Cutter IT Journal. For more information, please visit www.cutter.com/itjournal.html . The full Web 2.0 issue is available as a complimentary download here here: http://www.cutter.com/offers/web2.html

Full article below:

DRIVING REVENUE GROWTH WITH WEB 2.0

Much has been written about Web 2.0 of late. Unfortunately, much of it is too conceptual, too utopian, too granular and technically detailed, or too basic in nature to be used by executives or IT managers to drive their organization’s success. It is the purpose of this article to attempt to fill that gap by clearly articulating a series of tactical applications of Web 2.0 that can be used today to drive increased shareholder value for your company. Much of the content can be equally applied to non-profit or government institutions but those types of organizations are not the focus of this article. It is expected that the reader will be familiar with the general concepts of Web 2.0 and many of the basic terms. This is not meant as a comprehensive laundry list but should serve as a starting point for readers to be able to assess their own organizations to see what would be most appropriate for their specific situation.

For the purpose of this article, a very brief definition of Web 2.0 is in order. There are many conflicting, overlapping, and somewhat contradictory definitions under development but for the purpose of this article we define Web 2.0 as the economic, social, philosophical, and technical transitions that are causing the shift from “personal computing” to “social computing”, from a read-only web to a readable/writeable/mixable/hackable web, and from the dominance of the desktop computer to the “web as platform”. That is both broad enough and simple enough to cover all of what we will discuss here.

Shareholder value is comprised of three key drivers (1): value drivers : revenue growth, operating margin, and external expectations. This article, the first in a series, will discuss how to impact revenue growth through the acquisition of new customers, the retention of existing customers, the increased sales from an existing customer base, and finally by optimizing pricing to maximize revenues.

REVENUE GROWTH THROUGH NEW CUSTOMER ACQUISITION

There are two primary drivers of new customer acquisition: marketing & sales; and product & service innovation. Both of these can be positively affected by using Web 2.0 tools and approaches.

Marketing & Sales

One of the first things one would normally be advised to do when looking at marketing and sales activities would be to focus on high-value / high-potential customers. Be warned – this may be a mistake if your business has digital product or could have digital/real product hybrids. If so, it may be subject to Long Tail economics which dictate that sometimes millions of markets of a few may be more profitable than a few markets of millions. (Long Tail theory is beyond the scope of this article - your best bet is to go buy Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail and do an analysis of your business against the Long Tail principles.) Instead, focus on your most profitable products and services...and don’t assume that they are your “hits” and “best-sellers”. If your venture is Long Tail friendly, you may be making more profit off of the products you sell in smaller batches, and there may be an opportunity for you to drive further down the tail to sell fewer products to fewer people and to make more money at the end of the day.

Next, you will want to explore more effective sales channels and advertising channels. This is straightforward. If your product can be sold in a self-serve fashion over the internet and isn’t currently being sold that way, start doing it. If your product is too complicated to sell in that fashion, then consider building a simpler version if there is a market for it and selling it in a self-serve fashion over the internet. As for advertising channels, expand your use of internet search as a channel. Hire somebody or pay somebody to execute an effective internet search engine optimization campaign to maximize lead generation.

If your organization doesn’t already have corporate blogs, it needs to start. This is no longer optional when search is now becoming a primary way that your prospective customers will about you. Blog postings have inordinately high Google rank and always sit at or near the top of the Google listings. If you don’t want to suffer the fate of Kryptonite or U-Haul, both of which find themselves with pages and pages of negative customer rants on their first Google pages, then start blogging as soon as possible and have people say nice things about your company. There are many corporate blogging books and web-articles written on this subject. Two of the better books on the subject are Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel (a good high-level overview of why companies should blog) and Blog Marketing by Jeremy Wright (a detailed look at how to “do” corporate blogging well.)

Product & Service Innovation

There are many routes to product and service innovation that can drive new customer acquisition. Among many other options, a company can: broaden its offerings (by rapidly modifying existing offerings to better suit customers or adding new ones) to appeal to more segments; move from a platform model to an eco-system model; increase the quantity and quality of offerings launches; improve time to market, improve the product design process, or improving the innovation skills of your people.

Following are a few suggestions for how to achieve some of the above with Web 2.0. By employing Long tail theory, there is the option to create more offerings that would appeal to the “Tail”. Or by moving a software company from desktop-based software development to a Web 2.0 “light, small, fast, and cheap” development methodology, there will be more opportunity to get feedback from your customers, learn from it, and adapt the product, leading to more rapid product innovation. Another approach worth exploring is moving from the traditional platform model to an even more richly connected eco-system model, by creating smaller web services that can be linked to many, many more companies, which in turn makes your systems more valuable to a customer. Finally, blogs, wikis, RSS readers, blog editing tools, and RSS aggregators could be deployed as a light-weight knowledge management system with which to share innovation best practices, learning, and content. By opening this system up to a broad set of employees, partners, customers, and even competitors, innovation ideas can come from anywhere in the eco-system, not just from the core design team or business leaders. As an example of this, IBM recently launched an Innovation World Jam where they are asking their entire eco-system to help them innovate in public.

Another significant opportunity lies in creating web services that access your systems, processes, and information. No matter what kind of business it is, there is probably some sort of opportunity to expand the number and type of customers that it serves by offering access to its data, services, and systems such that it makes it easy for a customer to interoperate without having to go down the outmoded and expensive EDI path. Lightweight web services are quickly replacing expensive traditional EDI links. There is a great article by one of the Amazon.com architects on how they re-architected their entire operation around Web Services and how that allowed them to build an ecommerce platform with over a million active retail partners. The article can be found here. Look at your operations. Think about how you could open them up to the world and make it easier for people and companies to do business with you. How could you make it easy for a thousand or a million customers to connect to you?

CUSTOMER RETENTION AND REVENUE EXPANSION FROM THE INSTALLED BASE

Next, let’s look at customer retention and revenue expansion. There are four levers that can be modified to drive higher retention and volume of business: product & service innovation; account management, cross-sell/up-sell, and general retention practices. Since we covered product and service innovation in the previous section, we will discuss the latter three below.

Account Management

Traditional account management best practice would suggest that one should focus on the high-value clients. Just as in the case above, this is a mistake because of the Long Tail. There may be more value found by paying attention to the low-value customers in aggregate. Related to this would be the standard approach of rationalizing your customer base, weeding out the low-value customers and keeping the high-value ones. If you have a potential Long-Tail business, this is a mistake. Do the opposite of what conventional wisdom would suggest and see if you can derive more value from the customers that are buying smaller volumes but that aggregate to be a significant portion of your business. This requires that you drive your costs down as far as possible so that you can make money farther down the tail. This means having a search keyword strategy, using blogs as cheap marketing channels, and moving to a self-service model so that customers can find, learn about, and buy your service without interacting with your staff.

Some other actions one could take under the general category of account management include improving your understanding of customer needs, customer satisfaction, and customer interactions in order to be more responsive to their needs. There are quite a few Web 2.0 ways to achieve this in the following example.

Let’s look at an example company and see where we might apply some Web 2.0 tools and approaches. ABC Widget co. makes consumer electronic devices including toys and games. They are having a tough year after the exploding doll recall incident from last year where they were hammered by bloggers for not recalling the doll sooner. They have supply chain problems that are causing some issues but the biggest problem seems to be the fact that their products of late aren’t really hitting the mark and aren’t selling that well, even when they do get them to the store. Customer support calls are up because of some complex product designs and they have a vague sense that customers are frustrated but aren’t sure how frustrated they really are.

This company needs to start blogging. Yesterday. They need to get out there and tell their side of the story with a human voice. Apologize for the doll incident and ask forgiveness. This is not the job of the PR department or the Legal department, the first of which will speak in corporate speak and the second of which will deny responsibility in order to protect against lawsuits. Next, they could implement some RSS reading infrastructure to start tracking what people are saying about the company. When people say negative things, the company needs to admit it if it’s true, or defend it if it’s false. Engage those bloggers online and learn how to do it well. They are not the enemy – they are ABC’s customers, partners, vendors, and suppliers who now have a forum for their opinions that ABC doesn’t own or control. ABC’s only two choices are to ignore that conversation or to join it. Once it has begun to engage its customers, the company should consider building out some online community for its users so that it can begin to find out what those users really care about. ABC could design and build a site that serves their customer’s needs and that allows them to meet and interact. Post community guidelines up front. Invite customers to help build the community, generate content, and moderate the site. Reward the good contributors, and sanction/isolate those who are harmful to the community. These people are ABC’s future. Now, invite them in to help design new products. Invite them to be on a panel where they can provide both qualitative and quantitative feedback on your plans. Fixing product design and development up front will cause lower support issues later on in time. For now, all the company can do is add more bodies to the support team, and maybe put up blogs and forums where customers can explain their support issues and maybe even help ABC to document the problems in an open wiki. After all, they know ABC’s products better than the designers or the support personnel. If there are any web-based aspects to this business, then ABC must immediately begin to instrument their web-applications so that they can watch every single action that users take. There are nuggets of gold buried in that mountain of “usage pattern data”. By watching their users’ use the web-based systems and applications that interface with the ABC toys and games, it is possible to deduce needs that the users themselves can not even articulate but that are obvious from the patterns. There are many more things that could be done but that is a first sampling of ideas that would all support better account management practices.

Cross-sell / Up-sell

This leads us to cross-sell and up-sell improvement. Now it will become apparent that when we apply Web 2.0 tools and thinking in one area, it often has positive spill-over effects in other areas. For example, typical cross-sell thinking would have us once again revisit the high potential customers and the high potential products, both of which are covered above. We should also look at our sales and advertising channels to identify opportunities to cross-sell/up-sell to existing customers and when we do that, we now know to be aware of the entire tail and to use low-cost models where appropriate to move further down the tail into potentially more profitable territory.

Back at ABC Widgets, there are a few things that could be done that seem pretty straight forward. They could examine their total customer experience and make sure that those experience touch points are fast and functional. People are getting used to Amazon.com, eBay, and Google where the time space between thinking of what they want and receiving what they want has shrunk and the quality of that interaction has gone up compared to dealing with other companies. Revising heavy ERP systems doesn’t count as Web 2.0 thinking, but there might be some places that ABC could apply some light-weight application development to solve some particularly knotty issues, build out moderated forums for their users to improve the support, and/or move their traditional CD-based software applications online where they can build, learn, and adapt them to the users quickly. This will give them a faster order to delivery cycle time (search for the software/game, click a button, and pay for it and play it immediately.) Again, much of this was covered by earlier initiatives. One big area of weakness and opportunity is in brand strength and goodwill. There is no longer any place to hide. Companies that used to bury their customer horror stories in their online forums (or worse, delete them from the forums as Apple Computer has done many times in the past), are now faced with the ugly truth every day when they search for their name. This was discussed above in the Marketing & Sales section but bears repeating. Chris Anderson said it best: “For a generation of customers used to doing their buying research via search engine, a company’s brand is not what teh company says it is, but what Google says it is.” If ABC wants to retain their current customers and sell them, more they need to react to what their customers are telling them. And if their products are crappy, then they should admit it, fix them, and then move forward in collaboration with their (remaining) customers.

Retention practices

Traditional retention policies use a fairly heavy-handed approach whenever they can get away with it. This would include setting up barriers to switching. The telephone companies used to rest safe in the knowledge that people wouldn’t leave, no matter how awful the service was, because they didn’t want to give up their phone numbers. Once local number portability passed as a law in the United States, people defected in droves (often unfortunately from one frying pan into another fire.) The entire concept of creating barriers to fence your customers in is wrong-headed and disrespectful.

Here are some suggestions for the management at ABC to improve retention. Start by trying to get a grasp on defection drivers, candidates and metrics. This is a lot easier if you are delivering some sort of hosted services. It has been suggested that the sales people at Salesforce.com and Jot (hosted software companies that specialize in CRM and wikis respectively), know within 24 hours if a new customer will become a real paying customer. They also know if an existing customer is declining in their usage and likely to stop paying for the service. They have done this by measuring everything and then looking in the usage pattern data for patterns that predict buy signals as well as defection signals. Without having frequent touch points such as those in an online environment, most companies can not take advantage of this type of approach. But for those with online interactions with their customers, this is a must. Measure, recognize patterns, and then intervene before things go too far wrong and it’s too late to retain that customer. Establishing customer communities, forums, advisory panels and the like are good ways to solicit feedback, find out issues that are causing customers to consider defection so that they can be addressed early and often.

PRICE REALIZATION

Finally, we come to price realization. There are two key levers that can affect pricing. Harkening back to Economics 101, it is easy enough to remember that if you want higher pricing, you can restrict supply or increase demand. And you can also optimize pricing in your market such that it maximizes revenues. Remember the old lesson that if you price your widget at $20 and sell 10 of them, garnering $200, there is also the possibility of selling it for $18 and selling 20 of them, realizing $360. (We’re assuming that you are still profitable at the $18 price point.)

So, where can we apply Web 2.0 to impact the price we receive for our offerings? Let’s start, as we have with the others, by disabusing some traditional thinking. Standard economic pricing theory dictates that you want to find price insensitive buyers so that you can drive the price higher. Except that Long Tail theory challenges that assumption and states that you might find very price sensitive customers way down in the tail that might still buy a lot from you (in aggregate) if you get the offering / pricing matrix right and it can still be profitable for you to produce. Once again, review your offerings with Long Tail glasses and be careful not to be trapped by this old mode of thinking.

Back at ABC Widgets, in order to drive higher prices, they could increase product innovation and work on their brand image (and related search results), both of which have been covered off above. Next, by moving from their software offerings from perpetual license CDs to recurring revenue Software as a service models, they can shorten time to market (using Web 2.0 development methodologies such as Ruby on Rails. AJAX, and general agile development principles), and improve the functionality of those offerings through rapid customer-driven iteration. In order to optimize pricing, ABC could experiment with pricing in the new customer segments and run tests on the web to see how prices affect conversion rates from prospects to customers in order to maximize conversions and therefore revenues. And the blogs, customer advisory panels and communities they have already set up can be used to explore and better understand the benefits of their offerings that their customers really care about so that the features can be modified and the pricing can be optimized.

SUMMARY

The examples and suggestions above are not encyclopedic and nor were they meant to be. They were intended as a general starting point for companies to begin to explore how they might think about driving revenue as well as to begin to understand how the various technologies and attitude shifts fit together and map to the various shareholder value levers.

We have seen how specific Web 2.0 approaches and tools such as Long Tail theory, blogs. wikis, RSS readers and aggregators, online communities, web services, metrics, usage pattern recognition, user generated content, and self-service can be used...today...to drive revenue growth in an organization by impacting the acquisition and retention of customers, the amount of revenue that is earned from those customers, and the prices that your company can charge for its products and services.

As for next steps, pick up a Deloitte Shareholder Value Map (or map out your own business), read up on the various technologies and see if you can fulfill any of your business goals using the tools above. Then prioritize them, and start building. Test, learn, adapt, and repeat!

BIOGRAPHY

Troy Angrignon is the Emerging Technology Strategist for Business Objects, where he is tasked with identifying new growth opportunities, offerings, and business models that arise from new and emerging technologies. He is currently focused on Web 2.0 strategy, software as a service, and web services strategy. Outside of that role, he also mentors and advises startups on business strategy, business planning, and market analysis. In addition, Troy is a passionate outdoor sports enthusiast and non-profit volunteer and lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

1. The fourth value driver in the Deloitte Shareholder Value Map which was used as the basis for this article is “Asset efficiency” but there were very few ways to impact that driver so it was excluded from the discussion. The Deloitte shareholder value map can be found here
2. The Long Tail. Anderson, Chris. p. 99.

IBM is going to spend $100M on Second Life and immersive environments!

Troy Angrignon — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 10:03:53 -0800

IBM rocks. They keep doing cool things. They're spending a ton of money on wikis and light-weight scripting languages. And they asked 100,000 of their customers, partners, and employees to develop an innovation pipeline. Now they are spending a reported $100M (according to BusinessWeek) in an effort to capitalize on Second Life and other immersive environments. Awesome.

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Table of Contents

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 13:33:05 -0800

(For the most recent articles on Web 2.0, check out my full Web 2.0 articles category.)

This posting has links to all of the Web 2.0 Summit 2006 blog posts that I wrote:

Day 1

Enterprise 2.0
SMB Session
Launch Pad
Keynote with Eric Schmidt
Joi Ito on Worlds of Warcraft
Ben Trott of Six Apart, talking about Vox
Discussion with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (Washington Post) and Barry Diller (IAC)

Day 2:

Day 3:

My Summary of the Summit

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 / Summary 100,000 foot view

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 12:26:58 -0800

Here are my summary thoughts on the 3 day Web 2.0 Summit 2006 in SF, CA

There were some overall themes that seemed to prevail in the sessions I attended and I'm going to try to capture them here in no particular sequence. It's one thing to have sat in all the sessions or to review all of the notes but another to reflect on all that was said and see what can be summarized from it all.

Web 2.0 is real. In fact, it's even more important than when Microsoft had their epiphany about the internet ten years ago.
We're at the beginning of the ramp for things like social media and mobile;
This year, we grew users 10-15%, usage 20-30%, and monetization 30+% and that looks like it will continue;
video has surpassed text everywhere all the time;
Internet Advertising is still under-represented so ad spend will shift from 8% of the total spend to about 15% of the total spend and will make this transition very quickly.
It's now possible to build an entirely virtual company by outsourcing every single component of it;
Application development speed continues to leap ahead radically;
find and go towards the large white spaces;
there is lots of capital out there; ideas and good teams are the limiters; there's no excuse for not raising money right now;
web services and mashups are going to explode;
find passionate users, let them drive your products and your business;
In fact, let them help you BUILD your product if possible;
Build your products so that people either love them or hate them; don't aim for the zone of mediocrity.
LOVE your users;
To keep good people, ensure they're passionate about what they're doing, give them the ability to somewhat drive their (and your) success and innovation; engage them in decisions;
Realize that you can build things now collaboratively across the web in ways that were not possible before;
Do something bold that changes the game:

Goldcorp gave up their sacred data and $500K to make $3.4B in revenues
Bob Parsons cancelled the GoDaddy.com IPO because the analysts were too annoying;
Amazon wants to start running your businesses because frankly, they can do it better, cheaper, and faster than you can by a factor of 100x.

the better your product, the less you have to use traditional marketing;
focus on niches;
we're at the beginning of the curve on immersive environments and they will play a larger and larger part in our economy;
help people make money on top of your platform;
Watch the cashflow (daily!); it's more important than profits (for a smaller company);
Making money is better (and way more important) than finding investors
Adapt quickly
Create passionate users who will help you create your business
Listen to yourself; listen to your customers; don't listen to analysts; never listen to the doubters.
measure what counts but remember that "not everything that counts can
be measured, nor does everything that can be measured count." (be
careful what you measure);
operational excellence can be a a defensible long-term strategy, and significant point of differentiation; (Microsoft, Amazon, Fedex)
Profit or size?

Most people: make it profitable right off the bat; then build with revenue as fast as possible;
Bezos: go for size!

On finding the next opportunity:

Calcanis/Dmitry: stay focused on your original business!
Bezos: Always keep exploring down dark tunnels for new business opportunities!

ecosystems beat platforms beat applications beat features;
there was a lot of contradiction regarding how companies should or should not start small. I think it shows that there is no right answer. There will be a plethora of small companies and others will choose to get the funding to get big fast as we did in Bubble 1.0;

Overall, the three days were very worthwhile. I met some fantastic people and am looking forward to attending the Web 2.0 Expo in April 2007 that will focus much more heavily on the tactical details of Web 2.0 deployment.

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 3 / Disruption: Harnessing the Collective Intelligence

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:50:21 -0800

Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:

[My notes are in this square brackets.]

Harnessing Collective Intelligence with Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), Owen Van Natta (Facebook), Toni Schneider (Automattic), and Richard Rosenblatt (Demand Media)

On the panel:

Jim Buckmaster / CEO, Craigslist
Owen Van Natta, COO of Facebook
Toni Schneider, CEO of Automatic
Richard Rosenblatt, cofounder, chairman, CEO of Demand Media

Buckmaster:

We have made major business decisions (do we have sales people, do we get funding, do we expand the site) based on our customers discussions.
We keep having people tell us we should be running text-ads. In theory we would make tens of millions of dollars. But so far...(in a deadpan voice)...none of our users are requesting those ads be there so we haven't done it.

[This got a great response from the audience. It's funny. As audience members, we all want to monetize the web, but as users of Craigslist, we appreciate his user-centricity!]

We have taken no VC money at all.

Rosenblatt:

Demand Media is going to build tools that will let people embed their knowledge and share it with like-minded people and then get paid for it. We're moving into all sorts of niches: hiking, outdoor sports, gradening,
Question: You raised $220M. You bought 9 companies and rolled them into one big platform to start off with a solid base. So they bought "Trails" - that documents the 50,000 "professional trails" that are out there.

Answer: Yes, we saw an opportunity and we moved to dominate it quickly and massively.

Schneider:

We only took a little bit of money (from Polaris)
"User generated content" is too narrow of a term. It doesn't capture the ranking/sorting/sifting functions.
Spam is a huge problem for blogs. We have seen a doubling on the blogs in THE PAST THREE WEEKS alone. We built a completely adaptive spam system. When you mark something spam, that goes back to the server and the server learns going forward. That isn't user generated content but it certainly is collective intelligence or community based ranking/marking/flagging.

Van Natta:

We built some new stuff and our customers got very mad. We had to adjust very quickly. That's good. It's good to have your customers hammer you once in a while to make you realize how adaptable you need to be.

Question: It sounds like you can be very adaptive. Talk about that.

Rosenblatt: We consider product features as marketing. "Feature roll-out IS marketing."

[I **LOVE** that!!! What's our marketing budget? What marketing budget? You mean the money we're spending on talking with customers and making this product "kick ass?"]

Question: what about giving up control. How do you do it?

Schneider: We let our users do the language translation. We set up Wordpress so that our users could hit the button and translate the page and post it directly and it went live that second. We reviewed thousands of lines of translation later and tweaked only a very few things and found only one intentional swap and it was a guy announcing his wedding date in German! It was BRILLIANT and allowed us to do a full language translation in 24 hours!!

[That is a very powerful story!!]

What advice do you have for new entrepreneurs?

Schneider: Don't build a business that people think is a good idea. People will always tell you that it is a bad idea. Focus on what you think is important and ignore the advice.
Rosenblatt: Follow the users. Early.

Question: There is a difference between knowledge and opinion; How do you deal with the fact that a large audience can say a lot of stuff that isn't true?

O'Reilly: Have you ever heard of Sturgeon's Law? A science fiction writer named Theodore Sturgeon had an audience member once say to him, "95% of all science fiction is crap", to which Sturgeon replied, "yes, but 95% of EVERYTHING is crap. So what?"

[This parallells the comment in The Long Tail by Chris Anderson where he says: "The Long Tail is indeed full of crap. Yet it's also full of works of refined brilliance and depth and an awful lot in between." (p.116, The Long Tail)]

Question: All of you have big communities. What is your role? Leader? Cop? Good guy? Bad guy?

Rosenblatt: you are a guide most of the time but you also have the ability to police it to remove/sanction the damaging elements of the community. Your moderators need to have that ability to do that.
Schneider: Your most involved people will begin to feel that they are helping you build your COMPANY, not just your product. You need to realize that ownership feeling is there and treat those people accordingly. You might not actually give them shares but you definitely need to let them be involved in your business.

UPDATED: Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 3 / The Alumni Report - Web 2.0 Launches from 2005 Revisited

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:24:49 -0800

Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:

[My notes and analysis in this square brackets.]

The Alumni Report - Web 2.0 Launches Revisited:

Michael Tanne / Wink: he gave a very long demo
Veoh Networks: YouTube except for high-resolution long videos. We have figured out how to store them in a distributed peer to peer way and deliver massive bandwidth on demand.
Satish Dharmaraj: Great demo of Zimbra's offline client that syncs to their server and gives the exact same interface whether online or offline (using the "work offline" feature in the browser.)
Calcanis: sold Weblogs to AOL. Is trying to turn Netscape into a social media company like Digg

[I wonder about the sense of taking a brand that has one known name and trying to turn it into something else. I don't get it. Same problem AOL is going to have trying to move from "makers of walled gardens" to "open standards media infrastructure company". It's hard to turn Volvo from "safety" to "sports car" in people's minds after 40 years of brand impressions.]

Satish: We raised $15M. But we haven't touched it yet. We're veryb passionate about the business and think the exit will take care of itself.
Dmitry: We have raised $4M and $12M in two rounds and we need a war chest to go after a very large space.
Question: Do you all have a hiring problem?

Dmitry: Yes, it's very hard.
Satish: For us, we are using a team who have worked together on startups already and who are doing another one. Calcanis: We don't have a hard time finding developers. Go find the best developers who are already employed. If you have a star working for you that the developers can respect, then they'll want to come and work for that person.

Question: What did you screw up royally in the last year?

Dmitry: We tried to solve the more difficult problem of huge bandwidth rather than consumer video. That cost us...1.65 Billion.
Calcanis: I blogged about things at AOL that sucked like AOL Search. That pissed a lot of people off who got defensive about their stuff that sucked. I was used to being an entrepreneur who would "kill the enemies and take the hill" but AOL was like the Senate - "we talk everything through here". I posted that AOL search sucked and that upset the execs and the team. I was used to a level of transparency and to finding out what sucked about my product so that we could make it "suck less" but that whole concept really didn't wash at AOL.

UPDATED: Calcanis has left AOL. Not much of a surprise given his comments.

Question: Any advice on how to deal with how to prioritize once lots of opportunities start to find you?

Calcanis: Cuban said: "remember what got you here. Blogs got you here, they're profitable, keep driving on that and focus, focus, focus." Parallel entrepreneurship doesn't work well. Why have seven moderately successful #3 companies? Bill Gross has done it but he's rare and he's still having problems.
Dmitry: We could take any one piece of our business and turn it into a whole other new business. Keeping focused is a constant challenge.
Mark Tanne: replace "viral marketing" with "grassfire marketing" (:-)) If something is hot, it will tear across the internet. If you don't get that response right off the bat, then it isn't resonating. Great. Shut it down or adjust or do something else.

[This supports the principles of rapid adaptation and mutation. I agree with this a lot. There was a comment from
somebody at some point that when you build something on the net, it either resonates and takes off or it doesn't. Listen to that. Don't say, Well it's growing at 10%/month and that's pretty good. Bullshit. Use Skype as the measuring stick and watch how flat your curve REALLY is. If it's not a wildfire success, mutate quickly and watch the rate of change of the ramp, and if you're not getting hotter and hotter, keep mutating it, or kill it and move on.]

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 3 / From the eBay Labs

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 08:32:14 -0800

Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:

[My notes and analysis are in these square brackets.]

From the Labs: eBay Research Labs, Eric Billingsley:

we now have 800,000 people making part or all of their living on that marketplace.
labs employees are doing a 3 way split:

1/3 consulting; identify new research opportunities; facilitate rapid iteration of ideas with the business
1/3 pure research; moonitor and expermient with emerging technologoies; create new technologies to aid the business; re-examine existing systems to find new problems
1/3 technology transfer Market technology solutions to the business.

50% of their technologies actually make it into production (!)
Key Focus Areas:

Core Technology: adaptive learning; information retrieval (finding);
Operational excellence: systems management (grids); hew hardware platforms and deployments
New Opportunities: Social commerce; Power of Three (?)

They are building new measurement tools that can understand what is happening, how the users are using it, and what they're getting out of it.
Their search system evolves. If you search for iPod Nanom, you get 25,000 accessories. We watch to see what people actually end up clicking on in the results and then those end up getting floated up to the top of the lists as "best match"
Question: how do you decide which projects to work on?

Answer: Typically during our consulting phase. We're known as smart guys. When people ask us to help them with projects, we identify new ideas at that time. We don't have a waterfall approach. The team is allowed to come up with their own projects. And they have added a ton of value. With a 50% hit ratio of converting ideas to actual projects, we think this has been successful.

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 3 / Yahoo! Technology Preview with Brad Garlinghouse and Ethan Diamond

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 08:10:56 -0800

Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:

[My notes and analysis are in these square brackets.]

Yahoo! Technology Preview

Brad Garlinghouse

Web 2.0 is about people and emotions
Technical specs have never been less relevant
Email was sent in fall 35 years ago

[I use a rule of thumb that I think I got from Nicholas Carr, author of the infamous IT Doesn't Matter article, that the first forty years of any technology are the least interesting and that it is the second forty years where all of the interesting stuff happens. So I think that the fact that the internet was born around 1969, making it 37 years old and email in or around 1970/71 (according to the above comment), that we are about to see these technologies finally begin to turn into something larger, more important, and even more valuable than in the first forty years. Can't wait!]

Geeky applications are not relevant; people connections matter the most
Yahoo mail has 250M active monthly users

Ethan Diamond:

demoed the new Yahoo Mail, showing a nice integration between email and IM/chat back and forth. When emailing somebody, you can convert it into IM right away.

[It's nice to see the fluidity being designed into the tools to allow users to switch effortlessly from one mode to another (IM to email or vice versa.) But I wish these companies would get out of their silos and connect their IM networks to each other.]
[See my Technology Buyer's Manifesto from Oct 2004 where I asked companies to start doing this.]

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 3 / The Great Database in the Sky, My SQL and Marten Mickos

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 07:59:27 -0800

Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:

[My notes and analysis are in these square brackets.]

MySQL, Marten Mickos

Referred to a book on open source titled Innovation happens elsewhere
my data + your data + public data = next generation OLAP
We are running trillions of transactions per day on the internet
the biggest database is already out there - it's just not connected.
MySQL wants to federate all of the existing data that is already out there and become the "skype for global data"
what if you could say:

select CurrentWindDirection, CurrentWindSpeed
SQL FROM AllTheWorldsWeatherStations, MyOwnWeatherStation, MyFriendsWeatherStation
WHERE...;

If we could do that, we could develop all sorts of new businesses on top of this.
Technlogy considerations:

As latency decreases, asynchronous approaches syncrhonous so data delay issues go away
we may need a "DNS" server for data sources
routing may be an issue
how do we make the data definitions understandable to others, and over a lifecycle of changes?
we can use simple technologies: RSS, HTML, XML, SMS, etc.

What would it take?

willingness among data owners to make their contents available
Brokerage keeping track of what has what data to offer and in what format
Technology for accessing the desired data (that doesn't really exist in this fashion...but the components exist.)
You!

[So, he's really talking about virtual data warehousing of the web's data.]
"The data is the platform"
[This is the first I have heard of MySQL wanting to provide a massive metadata layer for the entire web. Interesting premise.If they use the principles of taking core data and then letting people modify it until the dataset is even more valuable, then that would imply letting hundreds of millions of people add to the metadata until it became the best metadata for the web that was out there.]