I don't like to be negative about other people's startups, but when I told Howard that I didn't get Acebucks, the company that he, Peter Thiel, Mark Pincus and James Altucher funded, he wrote back...

"You hate it?  I like haters"

I don't *totally* hate it, but I do think a conversation about it would be interesting, because it touches upon a lot of interesting topics, like virtual economies, the Facebook platform, platforms in general, etc.... plus, I'm not sure I see the promise of this.  I say that given that smart people have already invested in it, so who cares what I think, right? 

When I first heard about Acebucks, one of my first thoughts was "Why isn't Facebook doing this?"  It seems natural that a place that supports gifting and various forms of profile bling would want to make micropayments go as smoothly as possible.  Letting someone else handle that would be like the government privatizing the Treasury and the US Mint.  It's almost ludicris IF the governing body sees currency as a major cog in the engine of their society.  Certainly Linden Labs sees it as integral to their economy and strategic to their business to run the currency, as does Habbo and Cyworld.  Why not Facebook? 

Here are a few possible explanations of why Facebook might not do this itself:

1) Facebook sees itself as a network of webpages, not an immersive virtual world. Note the comparisons I made where currencies are big businesses for social spaces.  Those spaces are a lot more like our typical definition of virtual worlds thanFacebook is.  They are places to play, to build, to be someone else.  Facebook is where I connect as the real me to real other people that I actually know.  There's not a lot of "virtual" in that definition, and what that means is that you lack the organic elements that create value in the first place.  The concept of land ownership and the ability to build things in Second Life are the elements native to the system.  Because these take scarce resources, you create the concept of value and the need for currency. 

Acebooks has the unenviable task of needing to do the job of going out and encouraging the development of scarcity, like multilevel games and virtual items to create the need for currency in the first place.  When step one of your business plan is create the need for yourself, that's not going to be easy.  Not only that, one thing that a lot of people don't seem to understand about virtual currencies is that they only make sense when everyone else is just as immersed in the system as you are.  If you buy a sword that cuts through anything in Warcraft, everyone you encounter can see and respect the value of that.  If you buy a picture of a sword in Facebook, people see a picture of a sword which might be cool, but they don't know you spent 1000 Acebucks on it, nor they they really care, because they're not into the games needed to be played to win Acebucks. 

Taking what works in Warcraft, Second Life, and Habbo to Facebook doesn't necessarily guarantee success.  These are all unique communities with their own norms.

2) Facebook doesn't want to be Microsoft and just eat the successful people who build on its platform.  In the 90's, if you made Windows software, there was always the fear that Microsoft would ride up from beneath you in the stack and swallow you whole.  This made for a very uneasy relationship.  Perhaps Facebook is just trying to be as developer friendly as possible, and even when people build applications that should absolutely be a critical piece of their business, they're just going to let it fly, and not make a big stink over their success.  That would certainly make it a more attractive place to develop.

3) Maybe Acebucks is just built to flip and Facebook is just waiting to see if it gets any market adoption before it trades some hyperhyped Facebook stock and a little cash for it.  Facebook has more than enough things to worry about without going off into some kind of currency experiment before it will spend any mental resources and management bandwidth on this.  They could just let the Acebook folks test the currency idea to see if it will fly, sort of like outsourced R&D.  This would be pretty smart on their part and pretty smart on the part of Acebucks so long as their financing was done at a valuation conducive to the flip.

Either way, I'm just uncomfortable with the idea of a startup built on a platform that could just shut it off or compete against it.  You could say that about any app, but few other apps are on missions so critical to revenue generation like micropayments.  I doubt Facebook would want to build its own version of Zombies, but a virtual currency might hit too close to home.   I suppose with Facebook investor Thiel on board, they'd know a little something about what Facebook's strategy is here.  His presence makes this seem a lot more like outsourced R&D on Facebook's part and, in my mind, supports the built to flip possibility.

I was just telling someone yesterday that there's no way this deal currently makes much money for them.  More and more people bring their own access or just go without.  They're better off making it free (or ad supported... click through two video ads to login or something) and getting more fannies in the seats.  Now, every Starbucks can be an incubator.  :)

I have been asked to deliver testimony to the City Council today on promoting the local tech sector, particularly within reference to ITAC's recent report.

Here's what I've written up:

My name is Charlie O'Donnell and I am the CEO and Co-Founder of Path 101--a New York City startup focused on career discovery and development.   I am also the Founder of nextNY, a grassroots, participant driven organization of over 1,000 up and coming technology and digital media professionals right here in the city.  nextNY is made up of entrepreneurs, designers, developers, investors, marketers, and media professionals--all integral parts of the local digital community.  Before founding my company, I worked for Union Square Ventures, a NYC based early stage venture capital fund and then for Oddcast, a local interactive advertising company, as a product manager.

In all of these various roles, I've had a unique opportunity to see the recent growth of the NYC technology community from both the startup and investment perspective--as well as from the perspectives of all of the ambitious people I've met through nextNY.

New York is truly coming into it's own as a hub of innovation and technology over the past couple of years, but I say that knowing full well that innovation has been part of NYC for quite a long time, even long before the Late 90's tech boom.  What's happening now plays uniquely into NYC's hand.  The technologies that once represented a strategic advantage for Silicon Valley and Boston are being commoditized and it is becoming more and more important to be close to your client and user community than to develop your technology in a particular city.  In today's climate, a startup in the video space can and will be just as well served by rooting here in the New York media technology community as it would anywhere else.

Still, given the sheer volume of talent and resources available in the city, we have not reached our full innovative potential.  There are several points of friction that hinder the emergence of NYC as a paradise of business creation and cutting edge digital contribution.

First, much of our technological workforce has largely been trained to work for big companies.  Their jobs are often about maintenance, efficiency, and satisfying business objectives than they are about pushing the envelope, creativity, and true innovation.  They are compensated with lucrative cash compensation, as opposed to the upside that the equity ownership that incentivizes startups.  This creates an environment where joining a startup not only represents financial hurdles, but cultural ones as well.  It’s hard to tell your NYC friends that you’re tossing aside your job in the Goldman Sachs IT department for a startup company—people just don’t accept that as a legitimate job route compared to that being the norm in the Valley.

One of our best strategic advantages, creativity, driven by the city's arts, multiculturalism, globalism, and critical mass of other creative industries, needs to be fostered and guided into these innovative technology fields earlier.  It starts with our education system, and we need to be telling students and showing them how to be the leaders and influential members of the digital community.  I grew up in Brooklyn, went to high school in Manhattan, and college in the Bronx--largely through the late 90's tech boom and I had very little knowledge of the innovation and development going on right here in NYC at the time.  All I saw were bankers and lawyers.  The idea of putting my passions behind creating a company were as foreign as you could get.  There needs to be a significant amount of education around the extraordinary opportunity that NYC brings with it.  Students should be emerging from school with real ideas and real passions, not just jobs they found at the top of a help wanted list.  They need to have the skills necessary to see there ideas through.  We face a serious shortage of engineers, developers, and designers, and even fewer of what we have are proficient in the most cutting edge languages and technologies.  The ITAC report outlines new initiatives in Workforce Development and Education that would go a long way towards addressing those issues.

Information is also critical.  Groups like nextNY serve as a knowledge resource, but even our 1,000+ member collective knowledge is unfamiliar with all of the various grants, city services, and innovation friendly services the city and various independent organizations have to offer.  For example, when I worked at Union Square Ventures, I was constantly discovering new incubators at local universities--places I didn't even know had entrepreneurship programs.

When cities want to encourage tourism, they often spend resources on creating a map, a booklet, and a website--all as exhaustive as possible in trying to advertise all of the possible tourist destinations anyone might want to see.  What NYC needs is a similar information dissemination program as detailed in the ITAC report.  Most importantly, it needs to be a living, breathing, open resource built on some kind of wiki-like platform where the members of the technology community can be just as responsible for its upkeep as various city services can be.

My final bit of support for what ITAC has recommended has to do with real physical infrastructure.  Over the years, those involved in technology innovation in small companies and startups have always made due with whatever physical places we could find to conduct our business.  We shared insider information about where wifi could be borrowed and where businesses wouldn't mind if you worked at a table for a whole morning and just ordered a cup of coffee or two.  This has been highly inefficient.  While there are businesses like Sunshine Suites that have sprung up to service part of the need for startup companies to maintain a home, there exists a severe lack of community space--places where creative minds can collaborate freely and connect to each other.  A good place to start would be to incentivize as many cafes and similar gathering places to provide internet access free of charge.  Municipal wifi may be too difficult to implement, but a very workable, and less expensive substitute would be to make sure that every conceivable place where you would want to set up shop or meet with others, would provide wifi.  In the same vein, there should be incentives for other types of innovation support.  For example, my startup, Path 101, is currently living in two empty desks provided by another larger technology company called Return Path.  It was a favor done for me by the CEO, Matt Blumberg, who knew we were looking for space, but in all fairness, Return Path should probably receive some kind of tax credit for doing its part to support the local innovation community.

If there was one thing I would want to leave off with for all of those who are interested in supporting the technology community in New York City, I'll tell you simply to join it.  Instead of asking us to come here and testify, which is great, don't get me wrong, it shows your interest, show up at our community events.  Come to the a nextNY gathering, join our listserv, or a New York Tech Meetup.  Start reading the blogs of local entrepreneurs and blogging yourselves.  Get off the email newsletters and get on RSS feeds.  Join LinkedIn.  If you don't use the same tools as the technology community and show up to our events (instead of just inviting us to yours), you are never going to be looked upon as a source of active support and your programs will fail to get traction.  Supporting a community is just as much a social undertaking as it is a management or financial one.

...Because that's what you do when you are a little startup with just a little traction and what you're doing isn't core to Google's strategy.  You go to work for them.  Jaiku had a bright team and I'm sure they'll contribute significantly to Google's mobile strategy.

Did you really think that Google bought Jaiku for Jaiku?  Maybe you don't remember, but they already have Dodgeball... and if they really cared about the service, why wouldn't they just buy Twitter?  Look at the traffic between the two sites.  Clearly, this isn't about buying or using the service... and I'm glad, because getting bought by Google at such an early stage, unless you are in the business of directly monetizing audience, is just about the worst thing that can happen to your startup if you want it to grow.

Steve Rubel thinks that it will be 45 days before Twitter gets sold, probably to Yahoo!.  I highly doubt it.  At this point, I think serious entrepreneurs who care about building great services are thinking twice about quick exits.  I'd be highly disappointed if Twitter goes to Yahoo! so soon because there's absolutely nothing Yahoo! could do to help that service grow...  What strategic advantage does Yahoo! have in the mobile space?  Having met @jack and @biz, I feel like they're in it for something more.  Don't get me wrong, I'd never hold it against anyone for taking all that cash, but as a consumer of the service, I'd rather see it grow and innovate rather than become a victim of Web 2.0 Whack-a-mole.

Didn't we learn that early M&A stifles innovation from del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, Dodgeball, etc...?

In fact, I'm willing to bet Steve on Twitter.  I'll bet $50 donated to his favorite charity that Twitter does not get acquired in 2007.  (I have no insider information on that, btw... Blogger's Honor.)  All I have is a hunch that those guys are more focused on building a better service, a real business and a large community.

Whaddya say, Mr. Rubel?

While everyone is talking about Google and mobile advertising, has anyone else noticed the emergence of "Tips" on their Twitter mobile notifications?  This is surely the precursor to mobile SMS keyword ads from Twitter.

Here's an example...  Everyone's favorite CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy answered Nate Westheimer's call for a Silicon Alley band this morning.

Here's what it looked like on the web:

But here's what it looked like on my phone...  26 extra characters tacked on at the end.

Tip: Wow, you look *good*.

Clearly, Twitter is testing out the feasability, useability, and user reaction to things being added on to user twits.   If successful (or if the users are silent) you would imagine that its only a matter of time before this becomes:

Tip: Drink Jamba Juice.

The new tracking feature will probably be used to help power ads, too... and what a powerful ad system that would be...  AdSense for SMS, essentially.  Imagine being able to add 15-25 extra characters onto every single post where someone mentions they are thirsty, or the word "sex" pops up.  (Tip: Use Trojan condoms?)

In all honestly, I love Twitter... completely addicted to it.  I'd pay a monthly fee for the service if they asked, so certainly I don't mind if if this is what the ads look like.  Actually, the ads might make for pretty hilarious content when placed next to the inane things my friends twit about.  I'm absolutely find with this kind of advertising and I doubt I'd pay my way out of it if given the chance. 

Let me paraphrase Dave Winer for a moment:

"The Techmeme leaderboard sucks because, now that we have transparency, undeserving others who didn't close to inventing RSS or the question mark are unfairly stealing my web influence.  People are saying stupid things about Web 3.0 just to get attention.  (PS... Did I tell you what I think Web 3.0 is?  Its when mainstream media acknowledges us little guys...  and clearly that's a more well thought out vision of Web 3.0 than Jason's and clearly I'm not annoyed that more people noticed a tree falling in the forest than my seminal Web 3.0 post.)  There's more important stuff to be blogging about, like Iran.  Now, back to blogging about the blogosphere."

So, that's not an exact quote, but it's close.

Don't you just love it when the big name pundits confuse their popularity for indications of the quality of their writing and support for their thinking?

Knock Jason if you will, but I think he's incredibly self aware and so is Guy Kawasaki.  They seem to understand their role as pot stirrers, and that's why they're so damned good at it.  Truemors?  Maybe the worst startup ever, but it was one of the best PR moves ever.  For 14k or whatever he spent on it, Guy bought himself even more incredible PR and self-marketing, and not for a moment did anyone confuse him with an actual entrepreneur, nor did he.  In the same way, I'm pretty sure Jason knew exactly what he was doing when he proclaimed Web 3.0 to be pretty much exactly what Mahalo was doing.  He's not an idiot, Dave, he's incredibly smart, actually.  Jason being Jason is exactly why Mahalo is as much of a conversation topic as it is.

All these "big guys"... the Guys, the Winers, the Techcrunches, the Scobles, and the ultimate, the Dvoraks, they serve a function.  They are the conversation leaders.  They give us something to talk about (or in Dvorak's case, someone to send our hate posts to).  In the absence of real news, they suggest topics... and they often do it in a way that inspires others to write a lot more inspiring literature about it.  Does anyone out there think that Scoble's post on anything is going to be the best post on it?  That's not his job.  He points to things... not unlike a Paris Hilton, who we don't actually watch for what she says, but more for the things she "points to" around her... the cult of personality, the flow of news, the lifestyle, etc.   The most thoughtful posts are on the blogs only a handful of people read, because they're too long or not controversial enough or they have too much integrity than to shamelessly linkbait by writing "Why Web 2.0 sucks..." posts.

They are the water coolers.  We gather around them and talk about their topics because we like to be able to connect to lots of other people talking about the same thing.  The tail isn't as long as we think it is, because, at the end of the day, how much fun is it to be the only person actually blogging about cats?  That's my theory on why mainstream TV never goes away...  because people want to go in the next day to work to be able to talk about what happened on Lost or Grey's or whatever.

The problem is when those folks don't realize that they are just water coolers... when the water cooler starts going "blub, blub, blub" so loud that it tries to drown out other people's conversation, thinking that people are actually at the water cooler for the water and only the water.

I was talking to Nate last night about how the nextNY listserv has been getting a little boring of late.  That's because people only seem to be using it for useful things.  No one posts the kind of idiocy that Dave despises, and while on one hand I'm glad my inbox isn't full of 300 post listserv threads with namecalling, it does sort of wake people up and gather them and get them talking and that's an incredibly valuable function.

Despite the fact that I used to work for a "widget" company, I've long been a believer that you need to find a way to get in the feed.  Feeds change.  They're live, full of activity, and people notice them.  They're the backbone of the blogopshere, Facebook, and even MySpace has gotten into the action with its own feed of status updates when you login.

FriendFeed just came out and it aims to help me aggregate all the various feeds of my friends into one place...  essentially creating an open, portable version of the Facebook newsfeed.

I see two issues with that.  One, by number most of my friends who aren't necessarily 2.0Heads don't really have a lot of feeds, or even any.  It seems to me that this isn't nearly as much of a consumer problem as it is a publisher problem.  There are more people consuming content than producing it... and certainly A LOT more people consuming content than the number of people producing it in multiple places.  Perhaps that's why most people don't use aggregation tools.  RSS consumption is still very low and if you think for a second that the average blog is only read by less than a dozen or so people, that makes sense.  I hate to break it to you gurus, but the great majority is absolutely content living inside closed data silos like Facebook and MySpace and doesn't think anything of it.  Hell, people are still using Snapfish for photos, believe it or not.

The other thing FriendFeed fails to address is the atmosphere of social places.  MySpace has a different atmosphere than Facebook.  As danah pointed out, people don't pick one or the other because they are "better", they choose them because the atmosphere matches who they are.

That's why, despite its overwhelming database of information on people, Plaxo's Pulse is never going to turn into an interesting space where people want to hangout, and why I highly doubt that FriendFeed is ever going to be more than just a commoditized utility.

Ok, back to my idea.  As one of relatively few publishers who does produce a lot of feeds, I'd like a better way to get them into my blog than widgets.  No one regularly consumes my widgets or even notices that they've changed.  I want a way to aggregate my own world, but more importantly, I want very specific controls over how it gets published.  Think the del.icio.us autopost, only way smarter.

Basic premise:  Hosted "[insert feed] of the day" posting mechanism.   You throw any RSS or XML feed into it and you can tell it to pull data and post it to your blog on a regular basis.  Most importantly, you control what it pulls, how often, and the format.

So, it needs to do the following:

Accept any RSS or XML feed and pull either the last X entries or be smart enough to pull all the entries since the last time it got the feed.  Or... post every time it hit x entries.

Then it needs to do scheduled blog posting via XML-RPC... work with Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger, etc.  I'd have the ability to create custom titles for these posts as well.  "My last.fm listening this week..."

Plus, the platform should be social in that if I create a really great algorithm for how/when I want to post my last.fm data, other people should be able to use that same template.

I'd also like to be able to insert advertising into each post.

Here's what I'd use on my site:

2 days of New York Startup Jobs of the Day posts from Indeed RSS feeds, Tuesday and Thursday.

Friday, I'd post "Music I Listened to this week" from last.fm.

1 day of the last few days of Brooklyn news from Outside.in.

Move my del.icio.us autoposting over to this to post anytime I hit 10 del.icio.us links... so no more onesies.

1 day of thumbnails of my last week's Flickr photos if there are any.

Service will be located at iminurfeedz.com.  :)

If anyone would like to go out and build this, I will happily promote it and donate the domain name.

A lot of people think starting your own company is a risky proposition.  Sounds like it, right?  Oooh...  could "blow up".  Sounds dangerous.  Images of shrapnel.

Maybe I'm naive and oblivious... but I'm really not that worried, like, at all.

I'm working on Path 101 fulltime and the only income I get now is from my adjunct teaching at Fordham, which is sort of like my checking account's equivalent of flapping its arms as it falls off a cliff.  Yet, somehow, I know it's all going to work out.  I'm confident we'll get our angel round raised... people are lining up now...  but on the chance we don't get all of it, we'll make do with what we have.  We'll take on some consulting if we have to.  It's not ideal, but there's a fallback plan, and frankly, the fallback plans aren't so bad.

Maybe I'll need to start liquidating to fund this.  I already know...  first it's the 401k, than the apartment, and then the car.  Yes, the car is the last to go.  Not ideal, but at least I've faced the reality of the situation.  I can deal with it.

And if this whole thing doesn't work out... if we can't get something compelling built or can't grow the user base or can't monetize, and we have to close up shop.  Then what?  I'll be upset, no doubt, and disappointed, but...   I'll survive to die another day.  I'll just get a job somewhere.  I believe I'm employable and have no fear that I'll wind up homeless on the street.

So what's really the big risk?  I mean, even in the worst case scenario, I'll learn something...  I'll learn a lot, actually.  It will build character and I'll meet a lot of great people along the way...  and build a great relationship with Alex, too (or kill each other... either way). 

Frankly, if you think about what I could gain or lose by taking this on vs. not taking it on, I think I've got a hell of a lot more to lose by not doing it.

Widgetbox has just made public their new "roll your own Facebook app" app called Application Accelerator...   I took my blog and made an app out of it in 5 minutes.

It doesn't do much of anything, but it's pretty friggin' cool that I was able to make an application that anyone can download right now.  Go ahead... let's see how many users the "This is going to be BIG" app can get.

So now I guess I'm a Facebook developer, too. 

Go here and create your own Facebook app...

SAI says that the deal is worth $65-80 million.  In the wide open web, Vault has struggled to keep up with its paid subscription service and offline job guide sales.

Either way, the valuation certainly bodes well for Indeed...

Cosmo: Posit: People think a bank might be financially shaky.
Martin Bishop: Consequence: People start to withdraw their money.
Cosmo: Result: Pretty soon it is financially shaky.
Martin Bishop: Conclusion: You can make banks fail.
Cosmo: Bzzt. I've already done that. Maybe you've heard about a few? Think bigger.
Martin Bishop: Stock market?
Cosmo: Yes.
Martin Bishop: Currency market?
Cosmo: Yes.
Martin Bishop: Commodities market?
Cosmo: Yes.
Martin Bishop: Small countries?
Cosmo:  I might even be able to crash the whole damn system.

- Sneakers

Fred wrote a little while ago about the tough times that are ahead for the web.   Even my partner has a habit of saying that he worked for some startups during the "first bubble", which, to me, presumes a second.

Fred gives a number of macro factors that could effect the cycle and says, "none of those factors directly affects web/tech and the venture markets. But it does directly affect the psychology of the investors who fund the market and to a lesser extent the entrepreneurs who drive it".

Well, if that's the case... and it's about psychology, should we be feeding that psychology with all sorts of talk about a looming crisis?  We shouldn't be naive, of course, but every investment has risk and dumb money will always lose money.  There will always be startups that go under, but that doesn't mean that when the first big one does, we should yell "fire".   That's going to make it worse, because then you'll clear the strategics and the public money out of the room, and you'll wind up choking your own portfolio and your own company.

So, on a positive note, here are five reasons why I don't think we're going to see "Bubble 2.0".  The macro economy is definitely a shakey, but I think you're going to see the tech sector show some resilience this time around.  Here's why:

1. Burn is significantly lower.  In the late 90's, companies raised hordes and hordes of cash because they were spending a lot more than you're average Web 2.0 company.  There were a lot of high burn networking equiptment companies and the dot com's were advertising on television.  Now, you're seeing companies like Mozy get sold to EMC for $75 million after only raising less than two.  Even a company building boxes like SlingMedia only raised about $55 million, making their $380 million acquisition probably a nice win for all involved.  How much would they have raised if this was '99?  $200 million? 
2. VC's aren't tossing around cash like they used to.  In the late 90's a lot of VC funds were up in the $750 million range, and this was for EARLY stage investing.  They were actively competing with the public markets for deals, causing ridiculous valuations and overfunding.  They blew through those '99 funds, often times, in just a year.  This time, you're seeing VC's complain that they just can't get that much into their companies because they just don't need them and you're not seeing too many companies take more than they need, mostly because they don't want all that preferred money sitting on top of them.
3. Incest is low.  In other words, back in the late 90's, there was a lot ponzi action going on.  You had lots of startups selling equipment and services to other startups.
4. No Year 2000 bug.  Millions, probably billions of dollars were spent on internet consultants to fix the Year 200

"The New York attorney general’s office says it has been investigating Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif., for the last month. Investigators posing as under-age members of the service said they could gain access to a wide range of pornographic images and videos and were “repeatedly solicited by adult sexual predators on Facebook.”

Have you seen the "pornographic images and videos" application in Facebook?  I must have missed that one.

Here's a question... if someone e-mails you porn through Hotmail, is Microsoft responsible?  What's the difference between that and private communication through Facebook?  Perhaps they ought to look int arresting the sexual predators instead of trying to hold a social network witchhunt.

I missed this over the summer:

"Nevada based YouDeparted provides an encrypted electronic safe deposit box with up to 5GB of space that can be accessed by loved ones in the event of a members death."

The funny thing is, I blogged about a form of this idea months before the service came out:

"...Sometimes, I think about what might happen to my digital presence when I'm gone. ...people's blogs and MySpace pages become comment section shrines, only because that's the only thing the public has access to.

In my case, at some point, my Typepad subscription and domain registration would expire, and my blog might disappear.

Now, lucky for me, I know a couple of folks over at 6A and so if news of my unfortunate demise reverberated throughout the blogosphere, I hope they might be nice enough to make my blog a freebie.

But then what of my email buddies, Twitter friends, and friends across various social networks? How would many of them even know I was gone? That's prob a big issue. Many of my digital friends, like all those dozens of prospective Match dates waiting in my inbox, wouldn't even know I was dead.

Enter Digital Plot. Digital Plot would enable you to carry out a very specific set of intructions to be carried out for your digital world when you pass.

Sure, its a little different, and more about the digerati, but still, the concept of leaving digital instructions for the Big Day is the same.

The main difference?

These guys went out and did it!

Execution is everything.  The idea is nothing.

What I would do if I was them is to device an upsell mechanism for all of these digital places... domain registry, blog services, hosting companies, etc.   Allow them to offer YouDeparted members a small payment on the side up front that allows them to insure their blog or page will live in perpetuity.  Would I pay Typepad an extra $15 up front to ensure that my blog lives after I die?  Sure.  Does it cost them much to host a blog that no one posts to anymore...  not really.... especially since the liklihood that my page gets any traffic years after I die is pretty slim.

The service is a good idea, but I think if you really want to get word of mouth going, you need to offer something to the geeks.

I had a very interesting experience this morning...  I got turned down by a VC for the Path 101 angel round.

Of course, we're very early and I didn't really expect to get any VC interest to begin with at this stage, but it was just a weird feeling because I'm not used to being on this side of the table.

It was a little bit like that Simpsons episode where Nelson walks by a mirror and does his "Ha ha!" laugh and then realizes, "Oh, that hurts."  (One of my favorite Simpsons moments ever.)

I've turned down tons of companies on behalf of USV even before they got to a funding meeting, but when it's your company, I'll tell you, it really smarts.  I totally get it.

Even more so, I understand the animosity that entrepreneurs seem to have for VCs because of the impression that they only want to take a risk on you after you've already executed.  I'm not saying that's the case, or that VCs aren't well founded to ask to see more traction, but I have to say that's what it honestly feels like.

But, rather than just sit here and complain about it, I'm thinking about what is to be learned from these experiences.  Here's what I have so far:

1. First, if nothing else, practicing your pitch and seeing what resonates with people is enormously helpful.  This is partly why I'm such a big believer in anti-stealth.  You should get in the habit of telling as many as possible about your startup.  Whittle your way down to the elevator pitch.  Alex and I have come a long way with our presentation even just in the last two weeks and these meetings have proven invaluable for that very reason, if nothing else.
2. Product feedback: Instead of thinking that someone else just "doesn't see the vision" or that there's some missing piece of info that you could get someone to make them understand, you have to consider that your product vision sucks, or more likely, its jumbled with a lot of extra crap it doesn't need right now.  In fact, your first response should be to look at what you're not getting, not what they're not getting.   Being pushed on our product thinking will have the long term effect of making Path 101 that much better in the future.
3. Don't burn bridges...hang around the rim.  Go out and get your angels or cobble together what ever you can and just keep everyone posted.  You can't get rebounds if you don't hang around the rim.  Maybe the investor has too many things going on right now or maybe they just took some meetings that scared them off to your space.  If you got in the door once and you weren't laughed out the door, don't waste any social capital you may have gained even by getting turned down.  Sometimes investors come around again and you don't want to lose touch.
4. There's always risk.  Just because someone asks for more traction doesn't mean that you will have taken all the risk off the table by the time you see someone later on, after you've accomplished more.  Companies still go under even after they've generated lots of revenue.  To think that, "Oh, they just want all the risk off the table first", isn't really accurate. 
5. Most of all... it's not personal.  Everyone in this space is trying to run a business.  Shake it off and move forward.  You'll get 'em next time.

So, I've now been trying to port my number from Helio to Sprint since last Wednesday.

First, I tried this Wednesday, and they told me I was all set.

Then, when it didn't happen, I called again Saturday.

Of course, every time I call, I go through my little dog and pony show to tell them what my problem is and of course they need to transfer me to some other department.

But what absolutely kills me is that no one that I get transferred to seems to have any of my information.  You have no idea how many times I've given my name and address to verify the account.

My favorite is when they ask for my password.

Do you know how many different types of passwords I keep for all my different service providers?

What do you want?  Pick a password.... I've got first pet's names, 4 digit codes, last 4 digits of my social.  Mom's maiden name?

And of course, not every representative has the ability to login to the integrated "Sprint together with Nextel" billing system, so I always get transfered at least one extra time.

Now, I'm at the point where we need to call Earthlink while I'm on the phone to get the transfer approved.

So, let me get this straight... Earthlink (Helio) can say "no"?  Yeah, I'm pretty sure they can't, so what's the point of this?

And, as if this wasn't irritating enough, now all the representatives are trained to come back from putting me on hold every 2 minutes to tell me what they're doing.   Don't stop!  Keep doing whatever you need to do until you actually help me!!  I actually told a rep that yesterday.  I was like, "Take as long as you need.  I'm trained to hold for ludicris amounts of time and frankly, I liked that better than this annoying touchy feely, "Is it ok if I place you on hold again... thank you so much for your patience."

I couldn't believe it, but I was actually pleading with the customer service person not to be polite to me, because all these thank yous were wasting some serious time on the clock.

And, of course, I'm doing the whole thing on Skype, because you never call the wireless carrier using the wireless phone itself, just in case they need to do anything on it.

So, at the moment, my number porting has been "elevated" to the technical department to do this manually and will be worked on "as soon as possible" and they'll call me back "from time to time" to check on this.

I don't have from "time to time"!  This needs to be done TODAY, because my new month at Helio starts tomorrow and I don't want to have to pay another month over there.

Perhaps it's the fact that they know I have this cheap SERO account and so they're getting me back for screwing them over by finding the super secret special cheap plan.

Alex and I have been doing a lot of meetings for Path 101 and one of the most difficult things has been adjusting the flow and content of the meeting for the audience.

So, for example, we took a meeting with a VC that we knew well and whose demeanor is usually pretty fun and casual (not Fred, just fyi).  So, we decided not to run through our slide deck and instead stayed at a high level, conceptual, throw some ideas about the space around, kind of thing...  conversation was kind of all over the place, admittedly, and today we got the "sorry, not for us" e-mail.  I'm not sure I would have invested in us either, because we probably seemed a lot more all over the place on product than we really are at this point.  It's unfortunate, b/c we really didn't feel like we put our best foot forward.... basically got fooled on a pitch and looked bad for it. 

Conversely, we tried to walk through the slide deck with another VC and it was 45 minutes before we got past slide two and that conversation was excellent...  and it was our attempts at herding the cats back into the slide deck that actually made the conversation less interesting.   

Predicting what someone needs to see is incredibly difficult.  If you've ever pitched at USV, you know that you should just walk in and show them the product, throw some ideas around, etc...  It will become more like a hack-a-thon than a pitch meeting... and you need to be able to roll with that flow... b/c that's how they like to get to know businesses.  They want to poke and be imaginative about what you could become, who you run into... what is the scope of possibilities for this business and how flexible are you and your model.  Not all VCs are like this...and if you bet wrong, you might not get another meeting.  I like to think that we never held slide deck dependency against any entrepreneurs at USV, but it sure does make it difficult to get in an engaging conversation with someone.

What we've found incredibly useful has been meetings with other entrepreneurs... not for funding or biz dev, but just to see what others think, and also learn a lot about how partnerships and teams function.  We met with Paul and Rony from Indeed the other day.  They have an incredibly focused strategy and clear vision on what they want to be.  We're quite a bit wider and perhaps a little amorphous at this point and so it was an incredibly valuable conversation to have... not just to help us think about focus, but to help marketing our focus.  We know we'll be building something comprehensive, but we don't need to overwhelm the audience with the comprehensive vision before establishing the viability of the first thing we want to build. 

Yesterday, we met with Pete and Josh from Reprise Media (and got to meet the infamous Kate from Searchviews).   As we did with Paul and Rony, we tried to gain a little insight into their working style, which would be hard to match since they were childhood friends.  Still, hearing about the process of hiring, collaborating, product management from people who've done it successfully is invaluable.   Josh finished up our long diatribe on what we were doing with, "You need an elevator pitch", and Pete responded, "So do we."  That's our next step, in addition to all the product strategy work/research we're doing now...  culling the message down to its basic points and tailoring that to investors, schools, the public, etc.

Alex and I were talking about opening this whole company creation process up...  like doing some kind of a regular open meeting where people can just show up and essentially give feedback and here about our progress so far.  I don't know what the right venue for that would be... we'd certainly like to make it as casual as possible, but also somewhat functional.   Perhaps once we wrap up this funding, we can do it in our own tiny little cramped office.  In addition, we'll be adding a wiki to our site and a blog of course to further expose ourselves in public.  :)

What do they have to do with each other?

Well, today, GotVoice introduced some new features to its platform, including avatars that read your voicemail.

Do you know anyone that keeps their photos on Evite?  Seriously, anyone?

It would be so much easier if they just integrated with all the existing photo platforms and allowed anyone, no matter what platform they keep photos on, to show photos to the group.  They should be the photo aggregator for events...  because, believe it or not, not everyone uses Flickr or has friends on Facebook.

This is one of the many things Evite strikes out with, but this particular one just really gnaws away at me.

It's a little disturbing how many of these characters we all know well.

Recently, I've been pretty frustrated because the Helio Ocean Exchange wouldn't sync my calendar and that the contacts wouldn't actually sync the phone's firmware contacts.  Therefore, I could look you up in my Exchange contact list, click to call you, but then if you call back, the phone would have no idea who you are.   The calendar issue was a bug on their part that caused the phone to just completely crash when I tried to sync my calendar.  The guess from Helio was that it was due to old calendar entries...  seems like that's a hell of a bug just to be caused my some old entries.

Well, today, we had a new bug:

Did you spot it?  Look closely.  Yeah, um, the magic triangle spring is supposed to prevent the keyboard and the numeric keypad from opening at the same time.  I opened the keyboard today and something went ping on the inside.  The top slider came loose and not only was I able to open both sides of it, but this is as closed as I can get it now.  So, I basically have an open Swiss Army Knife for a phone.

I went over to the Helio store expecting to get a replacement, because I'm paying the insurance.  Nope.  First, the guy tells me that he doesn't know if this is a warranty item or a claim because, he'd "never seen that happen on any of the phones before", implying that I broke it.  I told him I didn't much care if he had seen this before or not... fact of the matter is that it broke and I was insured.  All he could do was to direct me to a phone and gave me the customer service number.  They implied it was a claim (not a defect) and so they gave me the insurance company's number.  They were going to take 24 hours to process the claim and then get me a phone in 3 business says standard shipping...  i.e. 4 days without a useable phone (It doesn't dial out anymore and the menu buttons are all screwed up b/c it doesn't know which way it's oriented).  Of course, I could pay another $15 in addition to my $50 deductible to get it next day.   Knowing that there was a good chance I was bailing on Helio anyway because of the Exchange issues, I passed on the $65.

Here's the interesting financial outcome of this whole thing, though.  Dave Evans pointed me out to the Sprint SERO plan (Google it), which was a hidden discount program for employee referrals.   The problem was, I couldn't take advantage of it when my prior Sprint phone got stolen because it was only for new customers.  Now, since I left, I'm a new customer again.

So, in the end, even if I eat my way out of my Helio contract, here's the final financial impact assessment:

PPC-6700 stolen...   No immediate financial impact because that phone was purchased as part of USV due diligence on a mobile app company... moved back to old Palm Treo... hated it.

6/13 - Bought new Treo and accessories...       ($274)
3 months of Helio service (@$85) vs. 3 months of old Sprint service (@$116) =    +$93
Early termination fee....   ($175)
Cost of Sprint Mogal...   ($300)

So, basically, the new phone overall cost me $656...

...BUT...

Monthly savings on Sprint SERO plan vs comparable full cost Sprint service  +$40/month.

So, before the end of my 2 year contract is up, the phone will have paid for itself.

Not too shabby...  Can't wait for my Mogul!

I also can't wait for Ken Berger to tell me he told me so.... however, leaving Sprint and coming back did allow me to take advantage of this lower cost plan, so, in the end, it was totally worth it.