Here’s a good post on Backpack, a personal information manager which has been getting a lot of blog attention this week. I tend not to be an early adopter when it comes to productivity tools (Post It Notes are still my primary drivers along with Outlook mail and my Palm Vx), but Backpack sounds promising. Steve Rubel also had a post on Backpack earlier this week where he demonstrated sharing blog links with his client. It’s pretty rare I see Rubel write something is "freakin’ awesome", so it seems it is worth a closer look.
Wists and Visual Bookmarks
Om Malik is blogging about Wists, a visual bookmarking service and a potential competitor to del.icio.us. In my prior post that commented on the del.icio.us venture investment, this what I was referring to in terms of del.icio.us investors getting another look sometime down the road and seeing what other industry markers play out (e.g., what innovations occur, who enters the space). In Fred Wilson’s recent post, Fred does hint that the user base for del.icio.us is very large. What the full range of competitive advantages will be (and how strong barriers will be) is yet to be seen.
Google Makes CIA-Funded Technology Available So US Citizens Can See Their Own Houses
CNN reports that prior CIA-funded technology can now be freely used to view your own house (satellite image quality only covering the US) from 6 to 12 months ago … an efficient way to spend taxpayer money washed in the public equity markets and now available to the world via Google.
Musings on Maven Havens (Not Fully Thought Through)
Malcolm Gladwell, author of "The Tipping Point," uses the term "maven" to describe very knowledgeable people. These mavens are people who would know instantly whether a particular product is priced 10% too much (whereas the average person would not). They are the types of people voracious for product details in magazines like Consumer Reports and Road & Track. They can be the type of people that call the 800 number on the back of a box of Ivory soap to get the full scoop on what the soap ingredients are. Mavens may be both connoisseurs and fanatics.
Gladwell’s basic premise is that under the right conditions when mavens spread their knowledge to connector-types (networked people) which then in turn spread the knowledge to salesmen-types (charismatic, evangelist people), there is the possibility of information spreading virally. Anything from a mini-epidemic to a major epidemic is possible. The best example I have found on how blog ideas spread (in the context of the Tipping Point framework) can be found here.
Building business models around the concept of mavens, connectors, and salesmen seems like a powerful concept then. Businesses want to sell ideas, products, and services in epidemic proportions for sure.
From my vantage point, the social bookmarks platform del.icio.us is becoming a maven haven for certain Internet resources. As an example, it was there that I near instantly discovered the "wisdom of the del.icio.us crowds" was focusing in on this tremendous compilation of search engines. Never would have found that on my own. In part, I wonder whether the maven haven environment is supported largely by the fact that the user interface can seem so intimidating on first blush (see here for screenshots and screencasts of del.icio.us). I made a recent comment to an organization that might be able to improve its workflow by utilizing del.icio.us, and the comment was made back to me that "less than two people would know how to use it". Applying my high-end MBA quant skills, that means one person, right? Duh.
These observations also lead me to believe that features like different GUI interfaces for tagging Internet resources (as a user configurable preference) and the ability to both restrict use by and generate reports for different groups and demographics of people might be useful for better building businesses. More generally, it would be very valuable to be able to lincoln log together and monitor maven, connector, and salesmen puzzle pieces. The magic of creating business epidemics could then be "reduced" to world-class R&D and reading the tea leaves on introducing products in the right market conditions.
Pipe dream … perhaps. As for improving on the tagging of Internet resources, the search engine companies seems like they could move in this direction, but there also seems like there could be opportunities for some vertical integration plays to control the companies that support the maven (e.g., del.icio.us) and maven-connector (e.g., Technorati) model-based companies. From an empowerment perspective, it’s probably too simplistic to view some of these technologies just as "search engines for blogs" or "tagging and folksomy companies". If the world of finance is any example (albeit finance is a quicker market to adjust to information possession and release), the value of proprietary research and information goes up when a single entity has it and goes down significantly as more and more people have it. On the flip side though, it seems as though overall economic value can go up if the technology is designed such that proprietary solutions can be built on top of trusted and broadly available maven and connector technology foundations.
Steve Shu
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Does del.icio.us Have A Supercalafragilisticexpialidocious Mary Poppins Competitive Barrier To Entry Advantage?
I recently posted about the "live business case in the making" surrounding del.icio.us and del.irio.us. I wasn’t aware of the following site before, but it could be useful for analyzing whether there are other investment opportunities or barrier to entry plays. If you follow the link here, you can see why I might coin it a "Supercalafragilisticexpialidocious competitive advantage" for del.icio.us.
Del.icio.us vs. Del.irio.us … Are You Dizzy Yet?
An interesting business and technology case study live in the making. To bring people up to speed:
- Del.icio.us (pronounced "delicious") is a social bookmarks manager that just secured some seed funding (cryptic post)… I liken it to having a free intelligent, sortable, distributable database for managing one’s bookmarks. Proprietary software and free. Pretty easy to use. Quick to sign up and configure your browser (< 2 minutes). I started to use just yesterday although I have known about it for some time.
- Rumors are that the funding involves a prominent venture capital blogger (not confirmed, so I won’t be specific here).
- For those not as adventuresome but perhaps curious, a good del.icio.us screencast demo (with audio) is here. You can watch about 2 minutes of it and get the gist.
- Now I catch wind of a free and open source clone … del.irio.us via this great post at Bubble Generation. Here’s a quick snip of the post:
… If you don’t know, del.irio.us is the perfect example of
hypercommoditization – it’s a total (open-source) clone of del.icio.us.
A shameless clone – it rips off del.icio.us down to the font sizes, and
adds a few bits of it’s own …… there are no entry or imitation barriers until it’s too late – until your network is already
the biggest. This is happening all over again – dot com 2.0s are
failing to build entry or imitation barriers, and are getting
hyperimitated – in every space, we see one innovator, and a huuuge wave
of imitation (networking, tag servers…etc) …
- Jeff Nolan (VC at SAP) now has an interesting $0.02 on the developments too. Basically, do we collectively allow copycat type of behavior? Will the market see this as fair? Fairness is something that should not be underestimated (think about the ultimatum game, "The Wisdom of Crowds," etc.). But is fairness the right frame? By the language some people are using, it seems that fairness may need to be a consideration. Dollars and subscribers talk in this sector.
It would be interesting to take a snapshot of the current subscriber base of each of these companies and how it develops over time. At any rate, if the VC I know (through reputation only) is involved, there will be barriers to entry built up for del.icio.us down the road. I cannot say about del.irio.us. I am only learning about them now.
Steve Shu
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Update (3/31/05):
Screenshot of del.icio.us (click to enlarge) versus screenshot of del.irio.us (click to enlarge)
EVDB – The Next Hot Talk in Event and Calendar Management
Ross Mayfield (CEO of Socialtext) has a good post on the new EVDB demo plus a little background on EVDB’s recent Series A venture financing of $2.1M. EVDB is a maker of an Events and Venues Database. I remember learning about event and calendaring stuff back in December of last year and thought that the area was pretty cool and had a potential value proposition of simplifying people’s lives. Scott McMullan (now with JotSpot) had a good post back then entitled "Google/Internet Archive, Meet Mr. Event," that summarized the emerging area and some of the pertinent technologies surrounding calendaring and event management. Back then, I also remember exchanging some email with Brian Dear (Founder of EVDB). Started to follow both Brian’s postings about raising capital for EVDB shortly after that time and his tribulations with installing QuickBooks. It’s great to see that Brian lined up the financing. As for the QuickBooks stuff, I don’t recall whether he is a fan, but I am.
Steve Shu
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Heard of the Hot Hand Fund? What About Prediction Markets?
This post has been cross-posted at The CIO Weblog.
If you have read James Surowiecki’s book, "The Wisdom of Crowds", you might be interested in this post (Surowiecki’s basic thesis is this: "large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant").
Anyway, Forbes has an interesting article on California investor Ken Kam, who has created a
fund, MOFQX, that has more
than doubled the returns of the S&P 500 since it was founded in
November 2001. The article goes into great detail on the beta of the fund, how it works, etc., but I’ll boil down the basic gist here:
- Ken created a simulation stock market (marketocracy.com)
- People sign up and trade on that market
- Ken allows the best performers of the group in his simulation market to designate the trades in his real fund, MOFQX
- Ken’s real fund is kicking butt.
Backing away from this a bit, it will be interesting to see if prediction and simulation market software takes off. It seems like there could be a need for a generic software platform that could be configured and/or customized by user need. I have heard anecdotally through the grapevine that for some CIOs who have breathing room away from Sarbanes-Oxley, security, etc., that they may spend some time looking at how to set up various artificial markets to support real business decisions. The information on prediction markets is hard to find though. In a very cursory analysis, I did turn up two interesting sites at NewsFutures and MIT Technology Review’s Innovation Futures. Only one of these sites is vendor-related, but at least it does give people a quick flavor of the possibilities.
Steve Shu
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