So I wake up early this morning to check my email and see yet another few dozen emails on the PixelSurgeon topic. As you might guess, most are pretty much hate spam. Much to my surprise though, there were actually several pretty nice (and funny) ones. There are some decent folks out there. I’ll continue [...]
Well, I’ve chosen in my life to work the high-stress start-up life over the more comfortable, guaranteed paycheck. However, it seems age is beginning to catch up with me. Last week, I’ve made a New Years resolution in the middle of the year. I’ve decided to work out at least 5 days a week. Already I’m feeling better. I’m less stressed and I have more energy even though I’m often in the gym around 8pm because I’ve left work at 6:30 and need to run a few errands like everyone else. I always worried I didn’t have the time to do something like this but now I don’t feel like I have an option. I’ve got to be more physically active or I’m simply not going to be as effective as I can be.
I posted over on Curious Office that MetaStories was one cool company. It looks like our good Seattle neighbors just got acquired by Brightcove. Great news for them!
Last night Tom Hughes, Jessica Jensen, Trish and myself went to Cremant over in Madrona. It’s a little French bistro that has been open two days.
Was pretty good and worth stopping by.
David Butler is the Maitre D’Hotel.
1423 34th Ave.
(206) 322-4600
A blonde was sitting on the train reading the newspaper. The headline blared, “12 Brazilian Soldiers Killed.”
She shook her head at the sad news, then turned to the stranger sitting next to her and said, “That’s is really SO sad! Just how many is a Brazilian?”
Netscape.com To Be Relaunched As a Digg-Like Site; Calacanis Heading It
The venerable Mark Cuban once wrote that people should blog for fun and not for money. I basically agree. But, blogging and participation in the web is a bit like networking at a very big cocktail party. The more you do it (correctly), the more likely you are to have a wider array of business possibilities to consider.
In this case, famed Weblogs Inc founder Jason Calacanis got a big check from AOL when they bought his company and he got a fancy job title. I guess its now something like “Vice President, Netscape Recovery Unit 
I guess the idea is to relaunch soon as a Digg-like user-driven news/aggregation site.
I can tell you Jason is doing this to earn out his golden handcuffs. Good plan for him. Dumb sounding project though.
Building websites is still hard. Browsing and experiencing them gets more and more enjoyable thanks to Firefox, Flash, cable modems and lots of cheap RAM in our computers. But actually building a website is not easy at all. Very successful, smart people in other lines or work ask me to help them with it all the time. There are several reasons why I think this is the case. First, graphic design software gets MORE feature rich and complicated to use. Photoshop is one of the most incredible desktop programs ever released to the public but…it isn’t really targeting the public at all. So, designing websites is very difficult. Secondly, there are several other components that are intended to be digested easily by the public. Think about it. You must register your domain. You must select a hosting provider. You must point your domain at your hosting provider. You must deal with DNS records. Then, let’s say you want more than basic pages. You want a blog. So, you’ll have to go download some blogging software, configure it and then upload it to your server. Finally, you need to update your website. You’ll have new photos and content to add all the time. In the web dev world, this is ultimately where small business spends most of their money. The upfront cost usually is lower than the overall annual cost to keep a site updated with fresh content.
My point is that there is still significant opportunity for companies to solve this difficult problem. And difficult it is. I am advisor to a one person company called Sampa run by Marcelo Calbucci. Marcelo has done a great job over the last year or so to try to solve this problem. The product will release in beta format soon and I’m hopeful for Marcelo that testers will see the promise. Certainly, there are some things that I’d still like to see changed. For example, Marcelo has done all the development himself so the interface needs some usability and UI expertise thrown at it. But, he’s just one person who has done an incredible amount while working alone. He’s a real entreprenuer working a very difficult problem and we wish him a lot of luck as he moves forward.
So www.totalvid.com is basically what I tried to do with RocketVox back in 1999 . The basic idea was that there was TONS of video content sitting in vaults that were not being broadcast on television. If someone could go to the producers and aggregate the rights to enough of the content then you might wind up with an interesting online business. My friend Mika Salmi focused on short films. We went after public television and long tail type stuff just like TotalVid is doing now. We got lots of interest from “special interest” media conglomerates like Primedia and others but finally decided to sell to thePlatform and take a more technology intensive route. Fortunately, thePlatform raised a bit of money and is doing just fine now. In fact, they are leaders in the category.
One thing that strikes me is that I MIGHT have made different decisions if I had taken a 10 year perspective instead of a 2-3 year perspective. I think when companies like Writely sell after 10 months that this kind of thing should be viewed as a huge exception and not the norm and not even an aspiration. I may have made different funding decisions. I may have made different hiring decisions. I may have viewed the landscape differently. I might not even have sold the company (but I might have too As I get older, I realize the years fly by so fast and 8-10 years really isn’t that long. A new start-up deserves that kind of perspective. At the very least, some passing time can make a business pretty viable afterall but refusal to think long term could make that viability nothing more than a pipe-dream that couldn’t possibly come true.
Now, I’m not sure that TotalVid itself is much a company today so I don’t mean to suggest that this is some kind of bar that folks should shoot for. Frankly, I really don’t know. But, video on the web is going to be a big deal and I had started doing exactly that stuff quite a while ago. If I had a 10 year perspective, could I now have had the largest online portal of this type of video content to be found anywhere else? Almost certainly.
It’s the “10 year or go home” rule.
Yea, that’s what I’ll call it.
So this company called Next Internet caught my attention because they seemed to have a story that is somewhat like that of our own Curious Office. It seems that Next Internet is stil learning a thing or two about just how small the web2.0 community really is. They got busted for copying Flock’s website and deploying it as their new home page. Looks like it changed now but I’m not sure which is worse…
This is a pretty cool idea that I’d love. If you think about it…is it really so crazy? I don’t think so…