So we’ve been debating around the office how much support for older versions of Netscape should be built into our forthcoming project called ImageKind. One of our developers felt pretty strongly that we should develop an experience that degrades nicely back to Netscape version 4. I was concerned that this kind of support would take needless development cycles and started doing some research to see what the latest browser rankings were. While no single information source is anything close to conclusive, I didn’t find a single site that led me to believe that any Netscape versions other than the last two builds are worth taking seriously at all. What surprised me more was how much ground Netscape has given up over the past two years. Some sites had some pretty interesting data which made for good reading but nobody was prepared to say that Netscape has more than 2% marketshare anymore. Two percent! In some ways these stats make me feel old. It really doesn’t feel that long ago that us early (Spry) Mosaic employees were standing around the water cooler talking about all the cool things the Netscape browser could do that Mosaic wouldn’t do nicely. Man, Netscape was cool back then! The smartest and brightest folks wanted to work there. The way we felt about Netscape then is pretty much how people feel about Google today. I’d like to see Google be cool 10 years from now. Wish them luck and Au revoir to you Netscape!

Quite often its said that a start-up requires some kind of sacrifice or contribution that is an order of magnitude higher than working a “normal” job. I suspect there are few who would question the premise although I doubt that you could take a poll of ten people and get more than three people to say the same thing as to what exactly that sacrifice is. I had time to think about this question this weekend as I’ve been recovering from the flu. Starting around Wednesday, I couldn’t hold down any food whatsoever. By Thursday night, I had thrown up about 10 times. Needless to say, it wasn’t fun at all.

The first year (and in particular the first few months) of a start-up is a very fragile time. Employees know they’re in a high risk situation and there hasn’t really been enough time for predictable routines to set in. Most people like routines. They like to know what happens the minute they arrive at the office. Wrinkles in routine can cause some (very valuable) people to wonder in the back of their minds whether or not they are doing the right thing for their career. For a start-up CEO, you are a critical component in this fragile equation because when routines are interrupted, people look to you to reassure them. In a start-up environment, it is the very presence of the founding CEO that is crucial. Long hours aren’t just necessary because there is much to be done and few resources to accomodate but also because the CEO plays the crucial leadership and psychological role that keeps the team together. Given Microsoft’s size, they can lose the bid to block Kai-Fu Lee from working at Google but in the grand scheme of things his departure really has very little impact. Losing one key developer in a start-up with less than 10 people can put the entire project in jeopardy.

For me, what’s so hard about a start-up is that you:

1) Will have to work many, many hours if you are doing your job as a founder correctly
2) You must be accessible at home via phone and email during odd hours
3) You must take responsibility for the smallest detail
4) You must deal with the issue of self preservation with fewer vacation days
5) You accept the burden of stress and the need to be in multiple places at the same time
6) You must do all of this cheerfully and willingly
7) You must assume most everything needs your attention without coming across as a fatalist

I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet about what exactly it is that I’ve been working on lately. By now, most folks know that I’ve partnered with my longtime friend Adrian Hanauer who (among many other things) owns the Seattle Sounders soccer club. We developed Curious Office to make investments in new-gen software/internet companies. But, we’ve also incubated our own software venture within Curious Office that we’re calling ImageKind. We won’t launch for another few months but I can say that it will appeal to the artists, photographers and creatives out there. As I thought about the concept initially, it occurred to me that nothing really new and innovative has been done in the art space for about 10 years. The fact that more and more art is going digital hasn’t really been leveraged in an interesting way. The fact that ‘traditional’ art painted onto canvas and paper can now easily be captured in reprinted thousands of times hasn’t been leveraged in an interesting way. I want to help artists and photographers make more money by providing an innovative framework for production and distribution. I encourage you to sign up for information at the ImageKind site and we’ll let you know as we get ready to launch.

My friend Francesco over at Blackcoil has just finished a nice little design. I felt compelled to mention it because I know how much work it can be to do something really original and to not use one of the readily available templates from the popular blogging systems. I also know how hard it can be to wind up with something that really looks good. In this case, he’s designed and coded a great looking system.

This evening I had the best pizza of my life. And it was right here in Seattle at Via Tribunali. Now this isn’t the first time I’ve eaten here. I’ve been here dozens of times and in fact I went last night too! This little pizzeria has the most authentic pizza you’ll find outside Naples and its better than most pizza joints in Naples. The joint is located in a fairly non-descript building in Capital Hill which is a neighborhood already well known for its color and cultural diversity.

As we sat at the bar drinking a great bottle of Montepulciano reflecting on what a great city this is. I’ve lived in 38 different cities so far and I admit to having a special love for places like London, Stockholm and New York. But Seattle is special. I doesn’t have nearly the cosmopolitan activity that you’ll find in LA, NYC or Paris but nobody expects that anyway. It does have a unique culture and some incredible landscapes. Sitting directly behind us was Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains and at first we didn’t think much of it. Then I started to realize that in fact Seattle and some of these characters are very much an important part of our modern culture. Some would argue that Alice in Chains was one of the most important bands in the last 20 years. No doubt, Jerry Cantrell will be memorialized in photos years from now and the next generation will look on those photos the way I look on Jim Morrison images today.

Maybe I’m just rambling. But this is just a really great town. I’m sure I’ll move again someday. But this place is nearly as cool as it gets in so many ways.

Those who know me well know I’m a car guy. I love cars. Always have. I’m also a HUGE formula 1 fan. Since Formula 1 gets very little coverage in the US compared to Nascar, I often get asked why I’m such a fanatic. There are several reasons. Mainly, its the technology. It always cracks me up to watch the Speed Channel and listen to how high tech Nascar vehicles are when in fact they are very, very low tech. The cars rev very low RPM’s compared to a Formula 1 car and even though they have higher displacement, they still put out less horsepower. Further, you are not going to find any of tomorrow’s technology on a Nascar. There is no carbon fiber or fancy magnesium/metal compounds to lighten key components. I remember one year that a Formula 1 team even made their gearbox out of carbon fiber! While F1 cars are the fastest, coolest cars on the planet, I do admit that there is one huge downside to the sport. Cost. These teams go through tens of millions of dollars to put on this show each and every year and the barrier to entry is so high that we rarely see new teams get involved.

Last year was a breath of fresh air anyway. Finally, Michael Schumacher didn’t win the championship. This year should be very interesting and I can’t wait. In fact, if all goes well I’ll be in Monaco for the race this year. I know many of our friends will be there and its basically going to be one huge party! In the meantime, I’ve been admiring the new Ferrari design for 2006. This car’s official launch date is January 24 in Maranello.

Since this blog is tending to be about predictions I’ll go ahead and make my prediction for F1 2006 World Champion. Its going to be Fernando Alonso. Again. Don’t agree? Tell me why!

It seems that at least once a day I talk to someone on the phone or I read an article written by some editor (e.g. not someone technical) that talks about ‘how cool Ajax is’. They say things like “…with new software products like Ajax, sites are able to build better experiences.” Or I’ll hear things like “that site was developed in either Ajax or Rails which gives it that cool look”.

If someone isn’t butchering Ajax its probably because they are too busy misappropriating Ruby on Rails for some sentence where the term just doesn’t belong. I don’t think a person has to be technical to go and spend a little time trying to figure out what technologies are used for. You don’t have to know how to write applications that leverage Rails. You don’t have to even know how to write a single bit of HTML. But it sure would be nice if people could at least use these technologies correctly in a sentence. Is that too much to ask?

What’s happening here is a little bit of web 2.0 froth that’s boiled over and now we’re all speaking tech ebonics.

I like predictions. They’re fun. They make you think.

John Cook of the Seattle Post Intelligencer likes them too and he went to various investors and software folk around Seattle (including myself) and asked folks to look into their crystal ball to predict surprises and disappointments for 2006.

Have a read.

Well I’m pleased to report that thePlatform has closed a significant (and probably last) round of financing that totals $8 million. The details of the financing and a good company overview can be found here. In many ways, thePlatform is like so many other small technology companies that were founded in 1999. The company raised capital relatively easily to start out and began to grow (and spend) rapidly but without knowledge that the market was about to crash. Optimism quickly turned to ’survival mode’ and the company took drastic steps to stay in business to include downsizing and raising additional capital with onerous terms attached. I understand this all to well because I too started a company which we wound up selling to thePlatform as part of what I would call ’strategic necessity and creative financing’.

The good news is that I think we all knew that the basic business proposition provided by thePlatform was still sound. Businesses didn’t need to hear about how video could be streamed from a server to a client (player). What they needed was a business rules management engine that was purpose built to handle rich media. After all, what is one video clip anyway? A single piece of content? No! It’s often 2-3 formats encoded in 3 bit-rates with advertising inserted in the middle that needs to be changed, updated and reported on every day, every hour or whatever.

Looking back, I developed a huge amount of respect for thePlatform team and I know they are going to thrive. The management team is bright and the development staff has ridiculously high standards. Further, the product direction is managed to the smallest detail by a worldclass product/program management organization.

I’ve been in or around the digital media space since January 1995 when I joined RealNetworks. And I suppose in some ways I’d make the same comment about web-based rich media as I would about the proliferation of IP Television (IPTV). 2006 is going to be a HUGE break-out year. Granted, we’ve been saying that about both sectors for the last 5 years. But this year I really believe it. Here’s at least a few reasons why:

1) The major content holders (e.g. Hollywood) are starting to seriously dabble in a way that I haven’t seen before.
2) Technology works A LOT better. I actually sit and watch video content on my pc all the time now because the experience is that much better than it was several years ago. It’s fun. Before it wasn’t. No need to complicate it much beyond that.
3) IPTV works. Microsoft is behind it. My former middleware developed middleware for IPTV installations and now Siemens owns it. Telcos are deploying it. The raging battle between cable and telcos creates a huge tailwind for vendors looking to invest further in R& D to include middleware, security (conditional access), video on demand servers (VOD), and set-top boxes or other in-home media devices. Guess what? I’m switching my home telco service to Comcast tomorrow. I’m an example of the changing consumer behavior that’s driving the need for IPTV.
4) Other big constituents are in the game big time. Referring to Google. Yahoo. Newscorp. Viacom. Others.
5) Delivery costs are falling. This occurs for several reasons to include commoditization as well as grid and peer-based delivery solutions that work well. Kontiki has languished for years in relative obscurity but their customer list will at least double in 2006.

There are MANY other reasons why 2006 is going to be a big year for rich media but the combined announcements in this sector will basically eclipse all the other movements in other tech sectors. That’s my prediction and I’m sticking with it.

I was reading recently that the founder of Quokka Sports has redeemed himself by making his investors (and himself) and pot of money on a venture that was far less glamorous than a broadband consumer site. You may recall that Quokka had an accumulated deficit of $42 million on revenue of only $2.5 million dollars yet Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget still gave the company a ton of ink. While he and many others were way off on this one I suppose it doesn’t really matter because if you had stayed out of internet stocks altogether I guess you would have missed other trains that actually made sense (GOOG). Alas, that’s another story…

To be honest, I actually think that Quokka was pretty cool and could have been a real business. There were really only two problems. First, they simply spent money the wrong way. That is, too much, to fast. Second, they were WAY ahead of their time. Other than that, it was a compelling experience. Some screens still exist around the web like these.

Anway, Computer Associates paid $375M Wily Technology this week. Wily makes programs that analyze problems in company software applications and Dick Williams, CEO of Wily, previously was founder and CEO of Quokka Sports. Good for Mr. Williams and good for Accell Partners who was in on the deal. Accell was an early investor in my former employer (RealNetworks) and these guys seem to just hit one home run after another.