Well what can I say? 2005 wasn’t a bad year. My wife and I were reasonably healthy and we appreciate our fantastic group of friends in Seattle more than ever. For a couple in our mid 30’s we sure don’t feel like we’ve slowed down. Sometimes it feels like our friends are the life of the party in Seattle and it makes us smile. The other night at a holiday party I was listening to a friend tell us that he was interviewing for a VERY senior job at a major wireless carrier. It ocurred to me that getting older isn’t always a bad thing. It’s a lot of fun to watch my friends move up in their careers, gain more respect, make more money and get what they want out of life. So, in many ways 2005 was about finding a new respect for our friends and family.

On the tech side, here’s what I’d like to see happen in 2006 in no particular order.

1) I want a major hollywood studio to get serious about releasing their archives to the net. NetFlix is a great service but its a crutch. I can burn my own DVD’s! Let me download what I want and I’ll pay you.

2) Streaming video needs to be a better experience. Let’s see a P2P or grid-based breakout in 2006. I’ll give props to my boys over at GridNetworks.

3) I’d like to see a real breakout in website building tools. I maintain this site. I dictate it’s style. But I know most people cannot do this. Most people must live with poor authoring tools and no real creative control. Even my friends who are longtime VC’s with decades of tech experience either have no websites or poor websites. And the reason is because there are too many tools for the job but too few that let people do what they want.

4) Most web navigation schemes are long in the tooth. For example, on dating sites, let me navigate based on faces I think are attractive. Not drop-down boxes.

5) Check out www.milliondollarhomepage.com This 21 year old kid did something interesting and made more money than most of us in the second half of 2005. Ive been following him since he made his first $5,000 dollars with this site. I learn two things from this. First, don’t EVER EVER EVER think that all the unique ideas are gone. Never quit. Always brainstorm. Second, transparency, efficiency, and relationships in the online advertising business needs to work better. Here’s a true (albeit simple) advertising marketplace that leverages efficiency, honesty and confidence from all parties. The online ad business today is like a black box that always seems to require some kind of secret key. It should be simpler, easier and more straight-forward.

6) I’d like to see more “Flickrs” happen. That is, lightly funded, forward thinking companies with young visionary founders who may not have sterling resumes but nonetheless make a significant mark on how the web will evolve into it’s next chapter.

Happy New Year everyone.
Off to ski in Sun Valley.
Hopefully all my bones will be in one place when I resume these posts.

By no means am I a professional photographer. Not even a good photographer. But the joy of digital cameras is that you can shoot like crazy without burning up any real “film” and sometimes, just sometimes, quantity begets quality. Because when you get one good photo out of hundreds it still counts. I think this is my best so far. It’s from our trip to Antiqua last summer.

Chris Drake and I worked for RealNetworks and lived in Europe together for a couple years. While on vacation in Switzerland we thought we’d visit the last bastion of hand made skis over at the Stockli factory. We were surprised to find nobody in the factory and the door unlocked when we went inside. We just HAD to get a picture You serious skiers out there should appreciate this one…

GoodStorm’s the lastest of the Zazzle, Spreadshirt, CafePress style shops.
Basically they let you set up shop and sell items with your logo on it.

As with all of these services, they do all the hard work - producing and shipping the item, and collecting the money. All the seller has to do is market the shop, set prices and collect their share of the money.

August Capital’s Andy Rappaport is working the project along with Yobie Benjamin and they just launched last week. They have an interesting spin in that they cater specifically to non-profits and donate some profits to charity.

Two things strike me about this company. First is that I think it represents a trend that is on the move…e-commerce with community and heart. Think Flickr mixed with Amazon stores. Second is that these guys show just how fast you can launch a company if you really want to. This system is built on the open source content management system Drupal. Now, personally I’m not sure that will wind up having been a great decision in the long run but it didnt take millions to get this thing off the ground either.

In 2006, you’ll see lots of new stores touting community, tagging, relationships/friendships along with very focused causes. I’m a believer in this approach and can’t wait to see more of this stuff.

Achievers,

Running out of breath but never of courage

Out of money but never of possibilities

Out of supporters but never of vision

Falling down, but always coming back

Persevering, Patient

As grand as their dreams

They always reach the top, one way or another

That’s the magic of achievers!!!

Pat McCarthy over at http://www.conversionrater.com posted some great thoughts about what 2006 might have in store. I totally agree with all of this and would go out on a limb and speculate all ten of these right along with him. It would be nice to see the guys over at the Co-op be rewarded for the work they’ve done.

I’ve very recently come up with my own “Flickr connector”.

For the longest time, I had just used my own system for sharing photos because I like big square thumbnails but the problem with that was that I paid for all the storage. And, I missed out on the community that is Flickr…

So, I’m moving all my photos to reside on Flickr but they also display on my site and use my traditional navigation scheme. I prefer this because users can actually see ALL photos without having to step through them one by one.

I think its a nice little implementation of the Flickr API.

I’ve posted the photos from the holiday party Trish and I hosted at our house. Check them out! Tricia and I were reflecting on Sunday how thankful we are to have such a great group of friends. Thanks to everyone who showed up. The fact that Jeff, Jack, Tyler and I somehow wound up at ANOTHER party in Fremont later that night is just too funny to even consider. You guys crack me up.

Driving home from the Seattle airport last week (returning from Mark Potvin’s birthday in NYC) I saw this plane wrapped up outside US customs. It appears to be an ORIGINAL Nazi era fighter jet. The Messerschmitt Me 262 was the world’s first operational turbojet aircraft. Its first flight as a pure jet was on July 18, 1942. You can still see the Nazi markings on the body. Check out the photos here

You’re looking at my brand new website. To facilitate easier posting of regular content, I’ve FINALLY moved the system onto a decent blogging engine (WordPress in this case) AND I’m using Flickr for all photo hosting from here on out. I LOVED my own photo gallery system with it’s big thumbnails (catch of glimpse of it here) and ease of use but in spite of it I’ve missed out on the community that is Flickr. So, what we’ve done is leverage the Flickr API to write a system where I can still post photos on my site even though the images themselves live on Flickr. That also means that visitors can ‘click out of’ my site and see the same images on Flickr so that I can make photo prints and such. It’s a pretty nice implementation of the Flickr API I think. This is just a few hours old and very much a work in progress so please excuse a bit of construction as I make the final tweaks.