Mike Arrington and a number of other A-listers are proposing an open source, decentralized version of Twitter, to improve performance:

"And we’d never have to deal with outages again."

"Facebook email, which they call messages, is becoming completely unusable as a personal or business productivity tool."

Eran Hammer-Lahav has been a really active member of nextNY.  He recently pulled the plug on his startup midway through his friends and family funding for a host of reasons that touch on a lot of the issues talked about in that group:  hiring, competition, product development/management, etc.   He's moving on to become an Open Standards Evangelist at Yahoo!, but he's learned a lot of lessons and has agreed to talk about them at a small group event this Thursday night (5/1) at 6:30PM here at Path 101/Return Path.

There are a lot of people looking for partners, trying to figure out competition, or just thinking about starting companies here on this list.  Eran's advice could be invaluable.  There are 13 people signed up and we could squeeze up to 30 people in the room.  This is a must-show for anyone in the very early stages of their business as far as I'm concerned and want to encourage as many people as possible in that position to take advantage.

Here's the link to the event:

nouncer.eventbrite.com

I couldn't agree with this more!

"Techies, VCs, and the press are always swooning over the glory of the Bay area. This is where all the excitement, the money, and the people are, they say. And that’s true to the extent that your great big idea fits the current cultural mold of that environment.

If you’re looking to build the next web 2.0 social media eyeball-collecting application, don’t want to worry about boring details like revenues, and hope to either flip to Google for an early $20 million or get that Facebook billion-dollar valuation, the Bay area is exactly where you want to be. No where else do you have the connections, the people, and the atmosphere available to make that dream happen.

But this strain of startups is a highly inbred line that holds more risks than most people realize. It’s not that they never work financially, enough people are sipping Margaritas on sunny beaches from towering buyouts to prove the contrary. And it’s not that they don’t work socially — I personally enjoy YouTube as much as the next guy. It’s that the Bay area pipeline for building web businesses isn’t optimized to carry much else than these stereotypes."

Read on.

Back in 2001, I made a discovery.  The little cable wire in my apartment was actually spitting out scrambled channels--all of them, for free.  I don't know where it was coming from or who was paying for it, but it was obvious that all it needed was a descrambler.  Two hundred bucks later, I had all the channels I wanted for free.  Nice.

After about a year or so of DSL, I gave up on Verizon's crappy DSL service and thought about moving to cable internet.  The only issue was whether I was going to lose my cable stations if I had someone come and setup my internet.   I decided to chance it.  I got my cable setup, and after the guy left, in goes the splitter and the box, and voila... free cable secured. 

When I moved to Brooklyn, I needed internet turned on from scratch... and lo and behold, getting the cable company to give you internet without sending scrambled channels down the line is like trying to give someone hot water without giving them cold.  So, I pay my $44 a month for internet and continued to get free cable with my trusty box, whose cost amortized out to about $2.38.   Given the quality of the TV I was watching, I figured that to be a pretty fair price.

Well, Time Warner seems to have closed that loophole finally, because now I'm not getting anything besides single digit boring old regular TV.  No scrambled, no nothing.

Was it unfair that I was getting the free cable?  Illegal, perhaps, but to be honest, I hardly watch any TV at all.  I'm never home.  I don't care about half the stations.  If I could just get ESPN, SportsNet New York, Comedy Central and SpikeTV, I think I'd be all set, but you can't buy that way.  The cable company forces these bundles of crap on me.  Even if I just wanted basic, it would cost me $57 a month.  TV should not cost more than the internet.  I get way more value out of the internet than I do out of TV.  If I watch 10 hours of television a month, that's a lot for me. 

So what should I do now?  I need to get my Met games...  and ESPN, maybe a bit of Comedy Central.  I can't even go all internet, because MLB.tv doesn't allow me to watch local games...  Only my cable provider can get me access to local games... web video from local teams is blacked out.

I'm thinking of putting a Slingbox at my parents house.... seems like the only viable option without breaking the bank.  Thoughts?

A while back, Donna Bogatin wrote a snarky blog post...   oh.. .sorry... let me be more specific as to which one.  I'm talking about the one she wrote about Path 101 when we wanted to reach out to LinkedIn.

Now, I'm all for a good snarkfest now and then, but reckless bashing of people who've worked their whole 20+ year careers helping to build up the startup community--incredibly well-liked and well-meaning people like Fred Wilson?  Seriously?  Fred doesn't even need to defend himself and knowing him, he'll probably ignore it.  I've got a little more Brooklyn in me than to not poke the bear on this one.

Ah... Isn't this your medicine?  Let me give you a dose...

I had the pleasure of meeting Donna last night at David Rose's awesome nextNY Angel Financing 101.  I don't read her blog, but someone pointed it out to me during the session and so I read her anti-Fred post on my phone while I was there.

Here are some highlights:

"Wilson also now puts the fate of delicious traction solely at Yahoo’s doorstop, apparently market unaware of the flood of social media services flooding the Web “market” competing against the not so proprietary delicious asset."

"After years of doing his darndest to sell such non-proprietary Web services to deep-pocketed firms, Wilson has suddenly seen the error of his financial ways: “big companies buy little companies and the innovation stops,“ he announced in February."

"Wilson... oblivious to hundreds of thousands of bootstrapped entrepreneurs for whom a successful “end game” has been, and always will be, the building out of long-term, stand alone, self-sustaining businesses, for their own full accounts."

Characterizing Fred as "unaware" and "oblivious"...      Pot.  Kettle.  Black. 

When she introduced herself to me, I shook her hand and smiled and said, "Wow...  angry post today, huh?"  It was a good natured jibe meant to start a conversation.  She said, "Oh, no... YOU'RE the one with the angry posts..." turned her back, and walked away.

Yeah, literally turned her back and walked away....Wow. 

Mature. 

And kind of hilarious. 

The people I was standing next to were kind of stunned, too.  Last time I checked, that's not the way mature adults act in professional settings.

But that wasn't all.  I didn't realize it was her that asked the question, but during the event, she asked David Rose how he feels about YCombinator trying to build companies in order to quick flip them instead of building long-term sustainable businesses.  Shoulder chips anyone?  David obviously responded that wasn't the case. 

What she failed to disclose in her question was that she had started up her own community advisory effort to help startups called StartupAlpha, which is part group blog, part offline community.  She lists herself as the CEO, so clearly, she's looking to somehow profit. 

The offline community part sounds like a neat idea:

"[It] broadens the tech entrepreneurship conversation by inviting all players in the startup ecosystem to network together offline, in the heart of the business capital of the world: Manhattan!"

Sounds like last night's meeting was the first nextNY event she's been to.  I guess she's missed the NY Tech Meetups, the Founder's Clubs, the Web2NY's ,the Web 2.0 Meetups, the BarCampNYCs, etc., etc. as well.

The best part was the irony of trying to start a community of her own and walking away from me at an event that ran under the banner of nextNY--the 1500+ member community that I helped to found, accidental as it's success may be.  She seems to have the same kind of approach to conversation on her blog, as many of her controversial posts have few or comments on them--because she, um... "moderates" them.

Well, the one thing I suppose she has going for her is that, since October, she has grown her LinkedIn network by 29%   She now has 18 contacts!! 

So here's my question...  How does Donna intend to help promote the startup community in NYC if she rips on SA 100's #3 most influential person in NYC tech who works for the the city's most prominent early stage VC firm, walks away from conversations with people much more tapped into the entrepreneurial community than she is, and poo-poo's Paul Graham's YCombinator?

I have one capitalized word for that and it begins with F and rhymes with pail.

I subscribe to a number of different keywords using the Twitter "track" feature.  Lately, I've been moving those over to Tweetscan (Isn't it only a matter of time before Twitter integrates this themselves?  They should just buy Tweetscan.)

One of the words I subscribe to is "Doostang", because I'm curious about the company.  Alex and I had the pleasure of meeting up with Drew Carpenter last week about how our products could work together--great meeting, Drew's an awesome guy.

Apparently, I'm not the only person interested in the company.  I just saw the following Tweet:

"Doing product research on Doostang. Anybody out there have an account that can invite me? Thx!"

Who said it?

With a little googling, you get to John Rabasa, who is 4 months into his job as VP of Product Development at ePals, which is a "global community of connected classrooms".  Totally makes sense for him to be poking around in Doostang... so, thumbs up John for getting to know the ecology of your space.

Clearly, Twitter is becoming more and more valuable as a business information tool.  Has Monitor110 and InfoNgen started mining twitter for market info yet?  For anyone who doesn't think Twitter has a business model, don't think that the financial services world won't pay for a robust, SLA wrapped realtime data feed related to different companies and products. 

...when people start forcing themselves to stop using your service because it sucks up too much of their time and energy.

Where else does this happen?

sex, alcohol, gambling, drugs, video games, tobacco, fantasy sports

All huge, highly profitable businesses!

When I was in 8th grade, I had a zit on my forehead.

It was small, but I started messing with it.  I tried to pop it, but I made it worse.  It sort of semi-popped and then I went in digging the rest out and.... well,  it just got from bad to worse.  I needed a band-aid to cover the gaping hole I'd dug.

I should have left well enough alone, because no good can come from trying to dredge up what should obviously be ignored.

It's really too bad I never learned that lesson, because then I wouldn't be writing this post in response to Hank's "Blame the VC's" post.

Hank's post is misguided from the start:

"I believe it should be possible to start a small business and to have a small number of profitable customers, and to earn a living. From there, it should be possible to work hard, and to grow your business into something substantial. Until recently, this was the American way..."

Actually, "small number" and "profitable customers" rarely go hand in hand unless you run an ultra-premium high-end service--mostly because of this big ugly thing we economics minors like to call "overhead".  While the number may be larger or smaller depending on your business, I know of very few businesses that achieve profitability without some kind of scale. 

I suppose if you were painting people's houses, you charge them more than the paint and your labor cost you, and you're profitable after Customer #1, but that's not really a scalable business. 

And as for the American way, it certainly didn't work for Henry Ford. 

To my knowledge, he didn't charge the first Model T owner the entire cost of the factory.  He lost money at first, only making money when he found a way to innovate, bring costs way down, and achieve scale.

And on who's dime?

The Wikipedia entry on Henry Ford cites several early investors--VCs if you will, or certainly angels--who foot the bills until Ford finally figured out a way to lower the bills enough to pay them... and he seems to have failed several times before finally succeeding.

"- Backed by the capital of Detroit lumber baron William H. Murphy, Ford resigned from Edison and founded the Detroit Automobile Company on August 5, 1899. However, the automobiles produced were of a lower quality and higher price than Ford liked. Ultimately, the company was not successful and was dissolved in January 1901.

- Ford also received the backing of an old acquaintance, Alexander Y. Malcomson, a Detroit-area coal dealer. They formed a partnership, "Ford & Malcomson, Ltd." to manufacture automobiles. Ford went to work designing an inexpensive automobile, and the duo leased a factory and contracted with a machine shop owned by John and Horace E. Dodge to supply over $160,000 in parts.Sales were slow, and a crisis arose when the Dodge brothers demanded payment for their first shipment."

Noticing a trend here?   Ford went out of his way to get these cars as cheap as possible.  It's not a stretch to think that if Ford would have thought of a way to make money giving cars away for free to get scale (maybe make money just on replacement parts or gas or something) he would have done it--and he would have tried doing it on the backs of his investors, too.

Hank blames VCs for essentially breaking this tride and true apple pie model of business.  The reality is that, for years and years, outside investment has enabled businesses to fill the gaps between overhead and incremental revenue until scale has been reached. 

What Hank fails to realize is that profit and revenues aren't the same thing...so, just because you make revenues doesn't necessarily make you a better business nor does it preclude the need for outside capital. Amazon didn't turn a profit for years... and now they're making lots of money.  Without not only venture capital, but public market investment, that business would have never existed... and they were making revenues, just not at a profit.

Today, what has changed is that outside investors don't need to fund nearly the same amount of overhead... and no one likes funding overhead.  You could pour tons of money into the overhead of a company and never turn a dime of revenue or profit.  That's what the semiconductor business is like.  It can cost millions to develop a chip that just doesn't wind up working in production or that gets leapfrogged by a competitor. 

So, when VCs fund a free model, they're still doing the same thing they always did... fund the gap between incremental revenues and overhead... but those numbers look way different than they did previously.

Here's the difference:

- First, investment financing goes into a much higher percentage of variable cost than it used to.  You are at least funding businesses that has costs because people are using the service.  That's a step up from funding a business before you had a clue as to whether anyone wanted the service in the first place.  Your overhead is lower, and even some of your variable costs are lower.  In the "old days", the amount of dollars it took to create a business online was a lot larger than it is now.  Servers were more expensive.  Bandwidth was more expensive.  You paid Microsoft for all sorts of stuff that is now open source--free not because VC's foot the bill, but because thousands of individuals got to got together to collaborate and donate their labor to solve collective problems.   So, you can turn a profit with a lot less cash.

- We also have new opportunities for revenue that didn't exist before.  Indeed, for example, is profitable.  They've got 50 employees and they've got a helluva lot less overhead than Monster.  You can get your job crawled for free there.  Their model is that it's easy to get your job in their index, but they charge for sponsorship and placement.  So, basically, most of the people who get value from the service don't actually pay for it.  That's only possible when you're not hiring a bunch of salespeople to charge $300 to post a job on the site. 

Lowering barriers to usage and participation, for them, creates a highly scalable, lower overhead revenue opportunity.  Of course, they needed some outside investment dollars from Union Square Ventures to help them get there and now they've got a strong business.   

This is something Twitter is bound to take advantage of.  If you ever use the "track" feature on a brand, like I do with "jamba", you'll quickly get a sense the data coming off of that thing is way more valuable to brands and marketers for research purposes than it probably is to individual users. 

With costs so low and new data-driven business models emerging, people are trying to launch venture backed businesses that look very different than old business models, and perhaps look, to the untrained eye, like businesses that crashed in the late 90's. 

Some will succeed.  Lot's will not.  That's the way it's always been, so to portray the current situation as being something vastly different problematic is naive. 

When cellphone companies give away free phones to make money on minutes, should we cry out that outside investors are funding a broken business model?  After all, it's debt and capital markets financing that makes this delayed cashflow possible.

What about LinkedIn?  What percentage of their userbase pays for that service?  Yet, they're on track for $100 million in revenues this year.  I'm quite sure David Sze would be happy to "blame the VCs" for that!

Hank, you're way off on this one...  but you certainly started a conversation... I'll give you that.

Good luck if you ever need venture financing for your business, btw...   Regardless of whether you're right or wrong, ripping VCs isn't generally a good business model for financing your business.

"Hey, aren't you the guy that..."    

Need more proof that the inmates run the asylum?

The Mets are having a fan contest to select the song that gets played during the 8th inning of their last season at Shea.

They're being rickrolled.

"To post a misleading link with a subject that promises to be exciting or interesting, e.g. "World of Starcraft in-game footage!" or "Paris Hilton blows Busta Rhymes' dick" but actually turns out to be the video for Rick Astley's debut single, "Never Gonna Give You Up". A variant on the duckroll. Allegedly hilarious."

I subscribe to mentions of the word "Mets" on twitter...  the stream went crazy this morning with the call for rickrolloing.  It has 1500+ diggs at the moment, too!

Check out the TweetScan of this move by the fans to get Rick Ashley's "Never gonna give you up" played at the stadium.

I met Chuck Taylor from Affinity Circles at ERE.  He's a cool guy and there may be a lot of opportunity for us to work together.  I like the ideas they have around the future of their product.

He started using Twitter at the conference and I was showing him the tracking tool.  He decided to start following me and I told him that he'd get all my ridiculous little updates throughout the day.  I knew he had better things to read, but he was like, "No, no, that will be cool."

Apparently, I wasn't as cool as he thought...  busted!!   :)

The command you're looking for is "leave ceonyc"...   No worries, buddy.  "Can't win 'em all..."

The latest shiny sparkly thing in the web world is Muxtape.  For those of you who don't know, Muxtape is a music sharing service that allows users to upload and share a playlist of music though a simple interface.

The only problem is, technically, it's illegal.  Artists are supposed to get paid when their music is played.  While the fine print says that you're only allowed to play music you have the rights to play, we all pretty much know the deal...  The company will throw their hands up and say "we can't be responsible for what people are uploading" and then after they actually do get sued, they'll be forced to scramble to sign deals with the labels--the terms of which you know will somehow kill the user experience.

The path of innovation in the music startup world is horribly inefficient.  To do anything interesting, you basically have to start out doing something illegal, or nearly illegal, or something that will dig yourself in a royalty hole before you even get started.  Sing it with me, "FAAAAAAIL."

What we need is a set of APIs, not just to get legal music, but multiple ways of paying for it, that would allow innovaters to build on top of.  Getting and paying for music should be similar to other types of commodity data...like stock market data or player stats for my fantasy baseball team.  I don't care who gets me Metallica's upcoming album, so long as I have choices as to its form and the ways I can pay for it. 

So instead of having a long line of startups trying to sign deals with labels,, which is horribly inefficient and slow, there should be one company that handles digital delivery, rights management, compensation.  Labels should be purely evaluation, business, marketing, and publicity machines.

This company would have a flexible set of delivery APIs... Every song could be streamed, downloaded, previewed, even sampled.  It would be like the Yahoo! Pipes of music.  So, Muxtape could just stream from this company instead of requiring user uploads and doing the storage themselves.

What's even more useful is that these APIs would have liberal grace periods for new companies related to time and volume.  Give them time to prove out interest in their service, get funding, etc., without fear of prosecution or a big royalty bill.  Frankly, the data on which startups are taking off, who's being played, and by who should be worth it for labels to give the companies using this API a long leash and see where they go with it.

When it comes to payment, the APIs should be equally flexible:  Allow premium subscriptions for various types of all you can eat services.  Make insertion of ads from companies like TargetSpot drop dead simple. 

How about allowing users to buy concert tickets through the service and essentially build up credits for free music in the system?  How many times have you heard, "The artist makes more from the concert, so I'd rather spend money that way and download from Limewire and have it go to the labels?"

I easily spent $1000 on concert tickets last year...  and I'm likely to spend that much every year with easier access to free music--and great tools to help make recommendations to me. 

One breakthrough business model that a more startup-friendly model for music distribution gives you is the ability to buy the attention of the influencers.   If you have standardized data about who's listening to what, and when, you have data about where the influencers are, and you could sponsor their streams with more music.  If I was an indy band, I think I'd pay for placement on Fred Wilson radio if I felt like my stuff was appropriate for that station.  Certainly if I was a record label, I'd do that as well.  It's sponsored content.  Labels spend millions of dollars a year to promote bands--why not use that money to just put the right music in the hands of the right people?  Isn't that the premise of music based social networks like MySpace--only MySpace never built out a reasonable toolset that allows bands to analyze and make marketing decisions around reporting, nor a away to offer music to a targeted set of the right people.  Instead, they just had to spam everyone with friend adds. 

Imagine if you got an e-mail saying, "Metallica would like to sponsor your Muxtape.  If you would like to select a different band to be included as the bonus track on your Muxtape, click here, otherwise Metallica will be added."  You could do that with live streams, full-circle data about who's listening to what, and what else they're listening to, and the right set of business tools to allow Metallica to make that buy at scale when their new album comes out.

Ok, so shread this idea to pieces... why wouldn't this work?  Anyone else doing anything like this?

I'm headed out to the ERE Expo in San Diego--I got a very exciting invitation to be a part of their startup panel along with Benjamin Yoskovitz (Standout Jobs), Clint Heiden (VisualCV), and Dan Arkind (JobScore).  What's so cool about our panel is that we all represent different aspects of the job process...

You will be able to discover a career on Path 101, present yourself well with a Visual CV, engage with a company and apply through Standout Jobs and then hopefully make your way through the company's recruiting process, which might be managed by JobScore.  Nice!

Since I was out there anyway, it was startup cashflow-friendly to swing by the Bay Area and stay with friends.  Given the success of our first "Entrepreneurship Listening Tour" we decided to get in touch with a bunch of experienced people to get some feedback and to get on the Bay Area VC radar for later this year.

We're pretty booked during our days, but we'd love to catch up with and meet a lot of people.  On Thursday afternoon, we'll be co-working out of Citizen Space, and then heading out later to 21st Amendment.  Come work with us (or eat/drink with us)!   Tell us you're coming out that night here!

If there's anyone you really think we should meet--smart VC's, entrepreneurs, developers, please let us know.  E-mail us at us@path101.com or follow us on Twitter (@ceonyc and @alexlines). 

I'm looking at Fred's FriendFeed.   So, I guess it's like RSS for people.  PSS?  PeopleSimpleSyndication.

So now I'm seeing the Fred Channel...  All of Fred, all the time.

But, to be honest, I don't want All of Fred.

Fred and I don't share the same music tastes, which is mostly why I don't follow his Tumblelog.

Not only that, but this feed gives me flat Fred.  It takes Fred out of the context of the medium. 

So now I'm seeing his Twitter messages on a webpage.  I hate reading twitter on the web.  I like Twitter because it's live--real time.  It makes me feel connected to people who aren't physically occupying the same space.  Twitter breathes and has a heartbeat.  I don't want to see Fred's twits hours later on a web page.  I want to see when he's listening to some song I prob won't like right at the moment that he's listening to it, b/c it's kinda cool to know what he's up to at that moment--so I get twitter messages on my phone.

A while ago, people asked Fred to separate his blog feeds into VC, Music, and other stuff.  I would have been offended, but Fred complied.

For me personally, if you don't want to read (or at least aren't willing to skip past) my kayaking photos, than don't read my blog... or don't complain. 

How long before people want a VC Fred FriendFeed and a Music Fred FriendFeed.  Than what have we accomplished?  Wouldn't it have just been easier to pipe all the stuff to Fred's blog and locate it all there?  Than, at least each individual node on the network controls itself, its own data, etc.  Now it's all being aggregated up by another social network layer. 

I'd rather hand all my data to myself... on my blog.  I'd still love to post weekly song charts, daily twitter updates (for those who aren't on twitter) on my blog via a timed XML-RPC post.  In the meantime, I like the control of following certain people's blogs, but not their twitters, and their flickr account, but not their blog, etc. 

There's always a lot of talk about ways to promote innovation.  Let's see... you've got incubators, incubator-like investors like Ycombinator or TechStars, StartupWeekends, BarCamps, Coworking, Jelly,

And yet people complain about how hard it is to start a company.  Can't find funding.  Can't find developers.  Need design help.

So when people like Calacanis talk about starting a "startup camp", I actually think it has the pottential to perpetuate a problem. 

There are people who would all too eagerly sign up for Jason's startup camp that, if they don't get in, will just sit on their asses and just work on their TechStars or Ycombinator application.  Don't get me wrong--every entrepreneur should have the attitude that Jason does:

"Perhaps my favorite thing to do outside of building companies is help other folks build companies."

But unfortunately, a lot of startups only look to A-list bloggers and these well publicized programs, but fail to recognize that much of what they get from that kind of connection can and, actually, MUST be replicated to achieve success.  So, it's great if you get into one of these things, but don't wait!!  There may be some people to help you, but no one is going to help if you don't help yourself first.

Build your own "camp"!!

Your industry isn't "Web 2.0."   If you are Snooth, then your industry is wine.  If you are Sportsvite, then your industry is recreational sports.  If you're BricaBox, you need to know the publisher/CMS world.  You need to spend time with the experts, and even the incumbants in the industry--the people who you want to strike business development deals with.

And frankly, you can and should do this on your own.  Established companies want to know who the innovators are.  If they're smart, they want to talk to you earlier rather than later, so you can innovate in a way that helps them out as well, rather than crush them later.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when startups that are stuck in the idea or even early development phase haven't had any conversations with potential customers, partners, etc.  And I don't mean, "Oh, yeah, we talked to one guy who works for Big Media, Inc. and he said they'd use it."   I mean 30 conversations that go in-depth.  Even 50!  Kick the tires of your business plan by talking to the people you're actually trying to get into business with.

Talk to other entrepreneurs, too.  Not everyone can have a sit down with Mark Zuckerberg, but not everyone is trying to build Facebook either--and there are lots of entrepreneurs that are much more local to you and much more accessible that you should be talking to.  Surround yourself with these people.  Join or form small groups of startups that meet weekly to get and give feedback.  Understand the successful companies in your space and what lessons they learned on the way up.

Again, don't get me wrong, it's cool to spend a summer on someone else's dime.  But, if you don't get into Ycombinator, that shouldn't stop you from getting the advice and feedback you need to move forward!

Let me start off by saying this:  Gary Sharma's Alley Reporter site is great, in terms of the service that it offers, the layout, the content, etc.

But, as we all know, the name "Silicon Alley Reporter" originally referred to a trade pub that Jason Calacanis started in 1996.  Jason was a major pillar of the NYC web community in the 90's and did almost as much as anyone to actually make it a community and put it on the map.  He grew a 16 page photocopy magazine into a 256 page glossy through pure hustle, and somehow, even in the worst of times, turn it into something saleable.

I've been fortunate to get to know a lot of people who were around the NYC tech scene back then, and so when I started nextNY and heard people talk about "building the community", it bothered me.  There's been a tech community in NYC dating back years and years--or did everyone think that Mayor Mike had the only startup on the block with Bloomberg, LLC so many years ago? 

In the late 90's, DoubleClick was an alley mainstea, but even before there was DoubleClick, there was Bell Labs.  New York metro area tech has been around for some time.  Fred Wilson's been in New York VC for more than 20 years, for example. 

While I'd say the entrepreneurs of my generation have done a great job in connecting the disparate parts of the tech community, it's important for me to recognize that we are building on the work of lots of hardworking people who came before us.

So when this tech events site called Alley Reporter popped up, it really bothered me.  The only reason anyone would use that name would be to benefit from it's existing cache--built up by someone else's work. 

According to Alley Insider, I'm not the only one it's bothering.  Dow Jones, who acquired the original entity that held that name is looking into asking him to stop using it. 

Apparently, though, the trademark has gone stale.  There may not be a technical reason why it can't be reused, but I don't think this is just a technical issue.  It's an issue of respect.  Jason built up the value of the name, and I think it's just the right thing to do to acknowledge that and get his ok on it.

And frankly, it's also a better business decision.  If Gary went to Jason out of respect and Jason loved the idea of reviving the name, there's no better person in the world who could promote it. 

Similarly, when I started nextNY, I went to Scott Heiferman to get his feedback, because he had been running the NY Tech Meetup.  I didn't need to go to him--I just felt like it was the right thing to do.  By asking Scott if it would be ok to talk about nextNY at a NY Tech Meetup, we were able to get a big boost from his thumbs up and that's where we got a lot of our initial members from. 

The other thing about this project is that there were other people working on putting together event lists that could have been worked with as well.  As a little side project, Lee Semel and I put some resources into NYCTechEvents.com a while ago so that the tech community could have a place to post and share events without signing up for anything.  That site now powers the Silicon Alley Insider's events calendar.  We don't make any money from it--we just wanted the community to have it. 

Somebody once accused me of being down on Alley Reporter because I was jealous his site was "better".  That's just ridiculous. Seriously, I've got better things to do than compete on free events sites that I'm not even running as a business.  If you haven't noticed, I'm trying to run a company. 

Is NYCTechEvents better than Alley Insider?  No, it's not.  It's fine, but like I said, the look and feel of Alley Reporter is really great--top notch even!  Had Gary approached us and said that he had some ideas for an events site, I'm pretty sure we would have just let him update the template or figure out SOME way to work together, because all we want is for people to know what's going on in the community. 

Instead, we have two calendars now...  this is just silly.  I've suggested to Gary that we share events back and forth, but it's been a month since he said he was "giving some thought" to that.  Of course, he can do anything he wants, but since when is playing nice in the sandbox not also a generally good business strategy for startups? 

Similarly, about two weeks after Allen from Center Networks launched a tech directory of local companies, Alley Reporter came out with the same thing.  Again, it was definitely an improvement, but I was actually sort of annoyed for Allen's sake.  He had been promoting Alley Reporter since it came out, and to just copy a feature without even so much as trying to collaborate with Allen?   Seems like it would be better to be friendly with others trying to do similar things and offer to power everyone else's sites rather than just ignore (or copy) the work of others and move forward alone.

My suggestion to Gary is that he take the great site he's built, come up with an original name and domain for it, and open up some conversations about how to work with people already doing things to organize community info.  Play nice in the sandbox and everyone wins.

Paul asked me to come on and talk about Path 101, but I thought it was too early for that.  I didn't want to cross that hype line since we don't have our product out yet.

So instead, I suggested that I might come on to talk about the community behind the name of the show, so last week I recorded a spot about nextNY.

And to answer Jen's question, yes, about half my waredrobe is black t-shirts.

Have you ever tried to learn a language from a native speaker? How about being taught a sport by someone with incredible natural talent? I had a college roommate who was nearly a savant when it came to math, but he couldn't explain to anyone how he did it.

In the same vein, most of the great baseball managers were rather mediocre players. The reason was because they had to learn the sport, make mistakes, and work really hard to even be half as good as the next person. That meant spending twice as much effort to figure out how to gain any advantages they could...all through learned and practiced behaviors--behaviors they can actually teach.

It's hard to teach someone when it comes naturally to you.
For college students, much of their online behavior just seems natural--having grown up around computers and the internet. They don't think about how they participate in social media... they just do. Ask them to participate in social meda on behalf or because of a brand, and you'll get a blank stare--despite the fact that they've got glittery corporate logos plastered all over their MySpace profile.

"You want me to ask people to use this?" That's what you'll get when you put a service or product in their hands. They don't understand that the subtleties of what they d on walls, in chat, over sms is what marketers wish they could capture in a bottle and activate with a single click.

So if you think you're going to go hire a bunch of college or high school kids to push your brand around social media, think again. You'll probably find them to be a lot less adept at it than you'd expect, even though its something they do everyday.

Gizmoz is a favorite of Mike Arrington's, because he likes tech for tech's sake.  Being 3D is all you need to be his favorite avatar service.

So when the news came out that Gizmoz raised $6.5 million, he failed to note that they're getting clobbered in web traffic by Voki--the avatar site that I helped launch as its first product manager.  It was also Voki, not Gizmoz, that got nominated for a SXSW web award.

Still, Voki hasn't fulfilled its potential and that's been really disappointing.  Gizmoz just integrated with AIM and that's a heartbreaker for me because I met with AOL about this exact same integration last June. 

AIM has the ability to trigger sounds from flash through the text you type in your chats.  So, you could record custom messages for your character, and, for example, have it laugh your laugh when you type "lol".   How cool would that be?

In fact, I made a mockup of the user interface for this back in June...

AOL loved the idea.... so why didn't it happen?

AOL's biz dev team was undergoing some reorganization, but, to be honest, it was our side that dropped the ball.   We should have just built the integration and showed them a completed product.  That would have easily gotten a deal signed with them.

Unfortunately, we were always short on development resources, because, instead of being dedicated to a product, they were shared across the whole organization.  Oddcast has two other revenue generating product lines--Sitepal for small businesses and its custom business for agencies (Think Monk-e-mail). 

I was a product manager without a dedicated development team competing against companies like Meez and Gizmoz who only did one thing. 

When I left, I left basic plans for AIM integration, and also integration into blog comments as well.  Imagine being able to leave a talking avatar with your own voice as a comment in a blog post.  Why type "first!" when you can scream it at the top of your lungs!?  It wouldn't be that hard to do either...  Our partner API was designed for that kind of remote creation and comments could be threaded with a piece of javascript at the end of your post, just like Disqus works.

That didn't happen either though...   so while I applaud the marketing work Oddcast has done since I left, I sure wish we'd see some more feature development and interesting integrations.   They're a great bunch of people and I wish them the best in the road ahead.

JP Morgan is buying Bear Sterns for just about the same price as Meebo got valued at, right?

Buzz!!   Wrong.

JP Morgan is buying the EQUITY of Bear Sterns for just about the same price as Meebo's equity.

There's a big difference...  one that at least a few tech writers don't get.  While it makes a good headline to compare the two, it doesn't make the least bit of sense.

In the startup world, we mostly deal with companies that have no debt, so equity value and company (asset) value are usually pretty much the same. But when you're talking Bear Sterns, there are hundreds of millions of dollars sitting on top of your equity, and that debt comes first in line when it comes to liquidation of the company.

So if you're sitting there going, "Jeez... Bear has a billion dollar building... that's a steal!" than think again.  If it actually came down to liquidating buildings, all those debt holders would get paid back before the equity holders saw dime one.

So, if you really wanted to buy the company outright for the assets, you'd have to buy out not just the equity, but the debt as well, and those two combined equal the company's market cap.  As of yesterday, Bear's cap was sitting at around $580 million.  Add to that the value of all it's debt (which gives you the "Enterprise Value", which was at $300+ million as of some recent filings, you've got a company whose assets are worth a lot more than $250 million--but still a far cry from where it was.

But wait, so what does that mean if you own all the equity, but not the debt?  That means you get voting control of the company, but if there aren't enough assets on the books to cover the debt holders, you'll lose it and your equity can be worth squat.

So, you could have a company whose assets are worth billions of dollars, but whose equity is worth zero because there's also billions of debt on the books.  That's what some distressed debt investors do... they buy debt with the hopes that the company will go bankrupt, and they'll essentially be left with the rights to the assets.