Announced today: something called “Open Media.”
Real naming chutzpah here; makes me think of this list of operational code names.
Archive for the 'Internet' Category
13
Nov
Operation Open Media
A little over a year ago — sometime last August or September — I started faffing about with Twitter, as early adopters here in SF started to spread the word about it.
I liked it immediately, thought it was perhaps a wee bit twee. But we liked enough here at Vodpod we built a way to let you “tweet” a video from vodpod last December, just weeks after we launched our service. And we spent a great couple of hours dissecting its appeal with some very smart lads, Matt Webb and Jack Schulze.
Twitter really exploded in the Spring of this year, championed by Scoble and getting a lot of attention at SXSW. Funny, though, my interest in and attention to the service waned about then.
So I’ve been delighted to re-engage with it the past week or so. In part, it’s been for prosaic reasons. I saw that Rafe Needelman was doing a Twittercast from Web 2.0, and I’ve been checking out the various AIR (totally loving Twitterific) and iPhone clients and playing with twittering from the road. The Twitter folks get an A+ for their API work, something we’re trying to emulate here at Vodpod.
It’s fun to be back using the service. For my money, it’s a far more interesting than the other hyped up service of the day. In the end, both are really about communication, but there is a richness and layered-ness to Twitter I just don’t find with Facebook. And interesting lesson given how much more complex Facebook is, and how simple Twitter is by comparison.
There is no better proof that San Francisco and Silicon Valley are a big echo chamber than the nonsense being written about the new “bubble” and related discussions about the need for startups to “bulk up” (from Om Malik no less, a man full of good sense usually) and palpitations about being five months from a bust.
Are we in a bubble? Most likely.
Are there too many startups with too much money? Yes and Yes!
Should we care? No, not really.
The bubble talk has been going on at least two years, since the 2005 Web 2.0 conference (noted before here, here, and here). For some reason, I almost always find MBAs and trade journalists most obsessed with its eventual bursting (skip a couple of paragraphs to learn why).
At the surface, the bubble talk is always about the anecdotes and atmospherics. More companies being started. More money flowing. More competition. More parties. More difficulty hiring great engineers. More difficulty breaking through the clutter. More Brits (and now French) moving to San Francisco to start up companies.
Interesting cocktail chatter — perhaps. But that’s not driving force of all this bubble-mania.
What is? The notable thing that occurs during a bubble is that some people get far richer than they deserve (exhibit a, Mark Cuban selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo! for $5B). That drives the obsession. Entrepreneurs in it just for the flip worry the bubble will pop soon and that they’re going to miss out. “What if the enormous pile of dough is gone by the time it’s my turn?” For journalists, the anticipation of it bursting and its resulting carnage is perhaps the most exquisite form of schadenfreude in this age.
But really, whether we’re in a bubble, or where we are in the “cycle” matter not at all if you are an entrepreneur. Starting a business is always a long-shot. If you are an entrepreneur, the immutable odds are that you will fail. This was true for startups in 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2007. The even years, too. Where we are in the cycle, or whether or not we’re in a bubble, it just doesn’t matter that much.
One’s success is more likely to be determined by luck (incredibly important, often overlooked); whether you’ve got a good idea and a clear vision; how well you can execute and adapt; whether you have enough money and are stingy with the money you have; how quickly you can make enough money from your product or service to cover your costs; and how relentlessly you focus on making your users and customers really happy and building something useful or cool or both.
Of course, it is a crowded market, so I’m quite happy for my peers to obsess about the bubble and the cycle, and to worry about whether they’ve “timed it just right.” Keep it up!
Bonus for you outside our little cul-de-sac here in the Bay Area: see how it’s all 1999 again.
21
May
The Contrarian Age
VC Fred Wilson started an interesting conversation of few weeks ago about “the mid-life entrepreneurial crisis” in which he noted how few entrepreneurs are over 40.
His initial post was followed by many others.
I’m a first-time entrepreneur in my early 40s, so I’ve found the arguments and debate interesting.
Based on my own experience the past year, I have my own personal theory about this.
I’ve come to the conclusion that a critical attribute — maybe the most important attribute — of a successful entrepreneur is the willingness to be deeply, profoundly contrarian. The fundamental creative, productive act for most entrepreneurs is placing a bet on an idea and product and market that seems compelling and logical to them, but that others perceive as, well, not sensible.
Look at the biggest success story of the web to date, Google. Their success, in hindsight, seems so obvious, but we’ve all heard what seem like countless tales of Sergey Brin and Larry Page going into meetings in the late 1990s, and being laughed at for thinking search was relevant or interesting or likely to ever make anyone any money.
I think this is why we see more successful entrepreneurs starting companies in their 20s — it’s just easier for people to hold deeply contrarian beliefs at that age. Push an idea that seems crazy or unlikely, you’ll probably look like a romantic, rebel or revolutionary to your peers — even if you fail.
Whereas it’s harder to do this in your 40s. You are less likely to look cool and revolutionary when you’re betting on a deeply contrarian idea (i.e., an idea that your friends and family and peers will all think is ridiculous or dumb or crazy), and more likely to look like that 40-year-old bachelor on the dance floor, with a paunch, strutting your white-man overbite moves to 50 Cent.
Perhaps this explains why many startup veterans become VCs in their late 30s and 40s? It allows them to back crazy ideas pushed by young entrepreneurs, while appearing stable, reasonable and rational to their friends, family and peers.
27
Mar
Online Schadenfreude!
Sighted: a recent outbreak of VCs complaining about a “bubble” and web 2.0 being over.
Now, it was just over a year ago I sighted outbreak #1 of Valley Bubble Schadenfreude. So why the talk now from VCs about a bubble, and not then (when many, indeed, we’re in the process of writing bubble-inflating posts, not bubble-popping posts)?
My guess is that it’s less about a bubble (has the pace of company creation and startups really changed that much in the last year?) and more about prices.
Last week, Fred Wilson wrote a post about why the embed code matters, and argued they are what’s important because they are “what makes video go viral.”
I’d go further: the embed code is the new hyperlink for video. Not having an embed code for your video is like not having a hyperlink for your site or web page.
Now go wrap your mind around that idea. Something we’ve been doing that the past 6-8 months over here at vod:pod!
Commentary, analysis and posts are flying around the ether the past week in the wake of Viacom’s take-down demands to YouTube, and in the past day, NBC’s threatening words directed at YouTube.
Oddly, many bloggers are simply doing Google’s bidding by simplistically portraying NBC and Viacom as VERY BAD and Google/YouTube as VERY GOOD . When, in fact, this is really a pure and naked power struggle between a rising media behemoth (GOOG) and two old media empires whose golden years are, most likely, behind them (Viacom, NBC).
Many in the commentariat seem to think that the best possible outcome for us is to have all video available on YouTube. And that media companies are idiots for not recognizing YouTube as just a nice, wonderful free promotional engine for video programming. (“Damned fools”, cried one prominent blogger in exasperation).
It all sounds so seductive and alluring if you think about it for only a second; but if you think about it longer than that, it’s not at all clear to me that having all the video on Google (it’s not YouTube, it’s Google), so that it consolidates its position as the dominant place to search for AND watch video, will ultimately benefit us the people.
Google has been perceived as a benign and even helpful power in the search space because their search results bring people to your site. Not true with YouTube. You find the video on YouTube, you watch the video on YouTube.
The declining media powers know that if all their content is available on YouTube — and everyone else’s, too — YouTube will be in an unbelievable position of power and leverage, as we’ve discussed before.
So I have a simple way of framing the choice. Which of these two options is better:
1. All the video we want available on one site, YouTube, owned and controlled by Google?
2. All the video video we want available on millions of sites, owned and controlled by hundreds of thousands of entities?
I think the answer is pretty straightforward.
The complaint with NBC and Viacom shouldn’t be that they’re forcing YouTube to take down their content, but that they aren’t doing more to make more (or all) of their video available online, for free.
And in the end, as we’ve said before on this blog, we think that the trend will be towards distributed, decentralized availability of video, and ultimatley there will be hundreds of thousands or even millions sites that provide video that is “shareable” — probably using flash, probably with an embed code. Why would we expect video, after all, to be any different than other media types on the web?
When SecondLife hype swept the land a few months ago, the recent spasm of SecondLife backlash was sadly predictable.
I’ve been wanting to jump in and offer a comment about all this, and the related Bubble Watch & “Web 2.0 DeadPool” fetishes that currently grip the Silicon Valley commentariat for a couple of weeks. And I will do that in a day or two, but first let us celebrate this lovely related development mentioned yesterday on BoingBoing.
Which is: a hardly original (but so many had to just gush, “Hilarious!”) parody of SecondLife hit the web the last day or two called GetaFirstLife. Get it? Hilarious! Totally original! So wry! That’s the exlamation point-with-irony-on, by the way.
SecondLife aka LindenLabs, to their credit, took this in stride and issued a “Proceed and Permitted” letter (instead of a Cease & Desist letter) to the creator of the parody. As the BoingBoing article (and creator) point out, a classy move — and in my book, more clever than the parody that prompted it.
Scoble’s blog today points to a post by Tom Foremski about the fact there are 61 video sharing sites out there.
My guess is that there are going to be a lot more; more like sixty-one thousand. That’s right, 61,000 sites that (a) offer video, (b) in flash (or its future equivalent), and (c) allowed the video to be embedded by the users of the site.
Why? Because:
a. Globally, there are lots of companies and people who own or make video programming;
b. The combination of broadband and flash had made it trivial to distribute video on the Internet now, and for people to watch it;
c. Allowing your viewers to take the programming and “embed” it into their blogs, myspace pages is just smart distribution; and,
d. Video (and audio) unlike text and photos can be delivered in microchunks, untethered from their home site, and still make you money (because you could put ads in the stream if you wanted).
Perhaps this is another way to look at this: one could consider text sites (blogs and others) that support RSS “text sharing” sites. There are probably millions, maybe tens of millions, of those text sharing sites, and I think we’re comfortable with that notion. We should expect nothing less with the video space.
04
Dec
Say Hello to VodPod
Dear loyal readers, all twelve of you (hi mom and dad!) — wanted to let you know the new online service I’ve been working on is open for business as of today.
So what is VodPod? It gives you both a place and tools to you build a video collection - with your own videos that you upload to us, or videos you add in from YouTube and dozens of similar sites — and then watch with your friends or other people who share your interests. Check it out.
Now please allow me to indulge in a bit of solipsism (I do try to avoid it, can’t help myself today). While VodPod is first and foremost the result of a great collaboration with my two partners (Scott and Spencer) since June 1 or so, it’s also the culmination in some ways of things I’ve thought about or worked on for quite a while.
Including the challenge of how people find the video programming they want on the Internet. I first worked on this problem almost 10 years ago when I led the effort to build the RealGuide, the first (or one of the first two or three) comprehensive streaming media guides on the Internet. It was a sort of Yahoo directory for streaming media, with links to the most interesting audio and video clips on the Internet. The big mistake we made was that the guide was the product solely of our editors. It was good, but necessarily limited in scope — the people who used it couldn’t contribute to it.
VodPod is the opposite. We have no team of editors, there are just the three of us here. You are the editors, you do the aggregating. You build your own Pod; you decide what you want friends or others to watch. I guess that makes VodPod a people-powered video aggregator, and I quite like that.
Building VodPod has also reflected an increasing fascination and love I’ve had with people-powered services. Starting with eBay and Live365 back in “Web 1.0″ era, continuing through to services now like YouTube, Last.fm (my personal favorite of the bunch), flickr, WordPress, SecondLife and others. All those — and others — have been big influences, and we’ve tried to tip our hat to a few on our company blog. They all do one thing really well — they know and remember that you’re in charge. I hope we do that as well.
Last, building VodPod has been the product of great collaboration, with some very smart, fun, and creative thinkers. A three-day brainstorming session last December with Matt Webb and Jack Schulze provided inspiration for several ideas that can be found in the final VodPod service. We’ve been fortunate to work with Cecil Juanarena (one of the best designers in the business — you could do worse than to look at his CD-ROM designs from the mid-90s, they provide a masterclass on interaction design for broadband) and Steve Mack at LuxMedia (who has literally written the book on streaming video, and more importantly has great instincts and judgment) on the design and user experience of VodPod. To the extent you like how it works and looks, credit them.
Most of all, a tip of the hat to my two VodPod colleagues and partners, Scott and Spencer. It’s been a great, fun ride so far, let’s keep it going.
