nextNY Social:Rooftop 2.0 This Wednesday!
Want to meet cool folks in the NYC Tech and Digital Media scene? Signed up on the nextNY listserv but haven't met us in person yet?
Come to the LaQuinta rooftop this Wednesday night (6/27/07) at 6:30PM and hangout under the NYC sky. It promises to be a great time.
Let us know that you're coming... RSVP here.
Business Tools for One
I've been really fortunate. Since I announced the fact that I was leaving, a bunch of interesting projects and conversations have come up.
And I've been keeping them all on a Google spreadsheet.
That's ridiculous... but does anyone else have any other solutions?
Basically, I want the Salesforce-like ability to attach e-mail conversations to people. I could actually get Salesforce, but I didn't really like it. Plus, I don't think I can attach e-mails to people unless it's with Outlook, and I've been using Gmail a lot lately. Do any consultants use Salesforce just for themselves? Anything else useful?
LinkedIn's Outlook plugin doesn't quite do it, because I can't add any info to it. I may owe someone an e-mail, but I may have a reason to wait, which I can't add.
And while we're on the subject of Google apps, why on earth doesn't Gcal provide IMAP compatibility so I can sync it with my Mobile phone or Outlook cal? This is a nobrainer and I think a ton of business folks would convert to Gcal fulltime if they could add and view appointments using their mobile phone.
Anyway, it just amazes me how, once you get out of the Outlook/Salesforce world of enterprise focused apps, how poor the tools are for organizing the professional lives of individuals are.
Breaking open Experiential Learning: An opportunity?
On Monday, two people asked me what I *really* wanted to do, and both times what I can up with was to be the head of Career Services for Fordham. (At Fordham just because that's my alma mater and the school I have the closest connection to... not because it needs the most help... seems that most schools are on par with each other in this area.)
That's not really realistic, though, for a number of reasons. First, I don't want to run the current implementation of career services at any university... The whole thing needs to be completely reinvented and its unlikely any university would allow that without a serious change in its approach. Too harsh? Take a poll of current students and graduates...ask them how helpful career services has been to them. Ask graduates how satisfied they are with their current job and whether or not career services even helped them get a job in the first place. Find out how many graduates undergo a complete career change within the first three years of graduating. It's just a broken model. A career staff of 5 can't help 2000 graduates all find their dream jobs without seriously scalable educational structures.
I have no doubt that the numbers are sorrowful, but I also have no doubt that most schools don't even come close to keeping these statistics. I teach. I talk to students all the time and right now, especially right now, they're overwhelmed by the task of career fulfillment. I'll write more later on this, but its not a quality issue in career services personnel. They're dedicated, hardworking people. Its a structural issue with the way these groups interact with students, employers, alumni, and information technology that creates serious inefficiencies.
You've got alumni with a tremendous knowledge base that goes relatively untapped. Counselors get tasked with the impossible task of helping a student get into book publishing one day and mortgage backed securities trading the next. Plus, you've got all these fantastic information and networking resources online like blogs and social networks that the students aren't being taught how to use professionally because most schools don't actually have a career class.
What I realized, though, is that the problems with this kind of education are not limited to the college career office. In general, structures for industry specific learning, particularly when it comes from learning from the accumulated wisdom of successful and experienced professionals, is horribly inefficient. This occurs to me when I compare the success of grassroots efforts like nextNY and BarCamp to the conference industry at large. As nonprofit, community driven organizations, they are often able to attract better, or at least more passionate, participants than their pricey, more capital intensive counterparts in a more open and intimate setting. Many times, conferences amount to members of a community paying hundreds of dollars to talk to themselves--a tax on poor self organization. Plus, you often wind up with industry newcomers having the material go over their heads and veterans finding the content relatively pedestrian. And don't even get me started on how hard it is to find the three people you absolutely should meet.
One of the issues with these grassroots organizations is that the second you turn on the money part, it needs structure, oversight, and it sort of loses its authenticity.
What of this all? I dunno... but what we have now in terms of how I connect with likeminded folks, or how someone learns about a career and makes contacts... is just poor. The amount of work I need to do to accomplish anything the least bit efficient on this front is ridiculous.
MySpace, Yahoo Swap? Worst. Deal. Ever.
Link: Report: Murdoch ponders MySpace, Yahoo 'swap' - CNN.com.
"Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is discussing swapping social networking Web site MySpace for a 25 percent stake in Yahoo, The Times newspaper reports."
Remember when East Germany and West Germany merged and they set the exchange rate at 1:1 and it wound up crushing the German economy to the point where it became known as the "Sick Man of Europe"? That's the kind of effect Yahoo buying MySpace at a valuation of $9+ billion would be.
Thought exercise: Facebook ad network driven by users
Here's a thought exercise:
Why doesn't someone build, as an app, a Facebook ad network.
Facebook sells advertising that puts ads on our pages and in our newsfeeds. Could you build an ad app that people would ad that could become like AdSense for Facebook (or, in fact, an actual AdSense for Facebook app). Conceivably, it could use some of the data of the signed in user to tip off the engine to get more relevent results, and you could pay the person who added the app. Imagine that, an advertising network that never has to pay a dime for the platform itself... you wouldn't even need to cut Facebook in.
Of course, there would be downsides. People might not like you selling stuff within their feeds and bringing a commercial feel to a social environment, so they may turn you off in their feeds... or join you and ad the app themselves so they can make money, too.
I would imagine that if such a thing was successful, Facebook would adjust its policy on ads in apps.
The First Weekend of the Rest of My Life
One thing I'm going to really love about having a little bit of time is the opportunity to meet more people. I'm a sponge for new people and their projects and being able to schedule things during the day is very exciting... so these next two weeks before I go will be very busy.
However, I'm also making some time for play. I spent a good chunk of this weekend dragging Mere around my life, which she was able to document.
Seems to me that any offspring would be genetically predisposed to large smiles...
Keeping a watchful eye over the kayakers... and yes, that's my softball jersey. No reason to change if I was just going to get it dirty later.
Concentration...
Samara almost got lapped... but she did get on with a nice outfield single.
I think I can... I think I can...
Sweet action shots... and yes, I totally popped the ball up to center, but it looked nice, no?
Four of Us Had Lyme Disease goes to 7-0, winning 21-12 even though we only had 8 people.
From Voki Product Manager to just one of many passionate Voki users... leaving Oddcast and looking for challenges, opportunities, and conversations
Softball is often a metaphor for life.
Seriously, hear me out.
I play on and manage two teams. When it comes to writing up the lineups, I always pencil everyone else in at their positions first, and then play wherever we’re missing anyone. Sometimes it means the outfield, sometimes first. Last night, I found myself at shortstop for an inning. I can pretty much hold my own almost anywhere in the field.
I’ve always been like that—playing where the team needed me. I enjoy new challenges and try to take a very systematic and thoughtful approach. I may not play the most graceful first base, for example, but I grew up watching my best friend playing it quite well and I’m always learning, taking notes… studying the game.
So when I started at Oddcast about a year ago as Director of Consumer Products—Voki employee #1 (before it even had a name, and yes, the name is my doing, or my fault, depending on what you think of it)—I played the role of utility player for quite some time. Sometimes it meant working on product specifications, other times consulting on design and UI, and then I also found myself in marketing and business meetings. It was an exciting opportunity not only to cut my teeth on product work, but also participate in all of the various aspects of the operational side.
In time, we filled out the Voki team around me… Business Development, Product, Marketing. As we got closer to launch, internal folks started converging and helping to push things forward. That was great for the product, but not as great for the larger opportunity that I wanted for my career. Essentially, if we're keeping with my metaphor, I started to DH, since all of our positions in the field were being filled. That may have been the most logical move for the team, but I knew deep down that I had the ability to make a bigger impact.
Was it a desired outcome? To be honest, not really, but it’s also no one’s fault and there are no hard feelings. I initiated the conversation about transition about a month and a half ago. I thanked Adi, our founder, for believing in me enough to bring me here in the first place and providing a fantastic experience. I talked about my desire to make the biggest impact possible in this social media/startup world we’re in and we came to the mutual conclusion that Voki was in good hands with the team we had put in place. At that point, we set a timetable that would allow me to explore some other opportunities that came up without leaving the team shorthanded. In fact, I will continue to work with Oddcast in a part time role over the next month or so and specifically focus on a couple of product and business development projects that I really want to see through to conclusion.
In an organization moving from a service business to more of a product business, there are bound to be disagreements, changing roles, and tough decisions, but I have to say that, down to a person, I enjoyed working with and respect every single employee here at Oddcast.
So, what’s next for me? Well, I’m not completely done with the sports analogy. Consider this my declaration of free agency. There have been some very compelling opportunities that have come through the grapevine (it was hard to completely keep it a secret that I was leaving) and I’m going to explore those. Frankly, I’m looking forward to having the time and the focus to give every opportunity I have its deserved attention. Trying to think about the next job while still working is hard. In the past, I took a weekend off before I started as an analyst at Union Square Ventures, and with Oddcast, I started working here on weekends even before I left USV. I’m definitely not going to do that again!
As you probably know from this blog, I have an exciting cross country trip planned for the first two and a half weeks of July and will take that time to think about what’s next and where I can make the most out of what I have to offer.
So what do I have to offer?
I’ve been exposed to quite a lot in a very short amount of time… getting more involved in venture capital from the LP side in 2004—the beginning of what people consider to be Web 2.0, jumping to a top tier venture firm in 2005 and seeing just about everything in the space for a year and a half, and then rolling up my sleeves and launching a social web application at a portfolio company that has thousands of users after just a few weeks of its Alpha launch. I’m extremely interested in product work, but also how the social media world has left a very thin line between product, marketing, and business development (see Facebook apps). I’ve been a technically savvy non-developer since 1987, when my dad first game home with our PS/2, and while I understand and believe in the power of “Web 2.0”. But, that goes for a lot of folks my age. What I think separates me is that I also have my feet firmly grounded in a Finance major and Economics/Accounting minors and can help companies take a very rational and effective approach to social media, versus just playing “follow the buzz”.
What could I do with all that? Well, I’m willing to have a conversation with just about anyone in the space and I’m considering everything from being employee #2, employee #8, working at ad agencies, venture firms, incubators, big media companies and maybe even just teaching fulltime. So, if you know of anyone interesting that I should be talking to, please, by all means feel free to make an introduction. My e-mail is charlie (dot) odonnell (at) gmail.com.
In the meantime, I do have a little bit of time on my hands, so if there are any interesting consulting projects or speaking engagements, I think it’s a great opportunity to get to know people I might want to work with and for others to get to know my capabilities. I’ve had a unique opportunity to connect to so many great people… 3 great employers, 2,000 blog readers, 900+ nextNYers, 500+ LinkedIn connections… and I’ve learned such a great deal from them that I always enjoy sharing it, especially with relative newcomers to the social media space, which is why I teach at Fordham’s grad and undergrad programs as well.
In closing, I want to thank everyone at Oddcast for making my time here incredibly educational and helping to lay the groundwork to make Voki successful, particularly Oddcast’s founders Adi & Gil Sideman, Adam G., who Voki could not have come to fruition without and I learned a ton about the technical side of product management from, our tech “hat trick” in Sergey, Dave, and Jon, our VP of Biz Dev Shaival, Hannah the Instigator, Annette, Craig, Yuni, Daphne, James, Cory, Tony, Erez, Gally, Isak, Oren, and Riv.
Is there any reason I'm not getting a Helio Ocean?
Avi told me last night about the Helio Ocean and I checked it out:
So 500 daytime minutes, which is all I need, will cost me $65 a month.
Other features:
- Slideout keyboard (Two thumbs up!)
- Unlimited texts
- Integrated AIM instant messaging
- Integrated Gmail and (coming soon) Outlook Exchange sync (we'll see how coming soon this is, that's important for me)
Does anyone have this phone yet?? This all seems too good to be true.
Tailspin
I just don't know what to say about the Mets. Finally, David Wright starts hitting and the rest of the team completely stops.
And I guess Joe Smith realized he was Joe Smith, too.
But back to back to back home runs. Dude... Baseball 101. If two guys hit home runs on you on two pitches, the next guy gets one right in the mouth. Frankly, after you give up one, you should always throw behind the next guy.
Somehow, we're still two up on the Braves, with the Phillies just three behind.
This team better start turning things around, especially now that the Yanks are winning. If, at any point, the Yanks have a better record than the Mets this season, I think I'm going to blow chunks.
And Pedro isn't the answer either... its not the pitching... they're not hitting. They need to get Alou back and figure out how to hit in the clutch.
PS... I played softball last Friday night and the guy on the other team looked exactly like Pedro Cerrano. I yelled out "Hats for Bats" from the outfield, but I don't think anyone got it.
The Future of Twitter: Five Applications to Think About
If there was ever a poster app for Web 2.0 tools you need to use to really understand, Twitter would be it. On the surface, it's quite easy for someone to look at it and go, "It's a bunch of people incessantly blabbering on about meaningless crap." Fred made a great point at lunch today that you could just as well say that about instant messengers, but obviously IM clients represent some of the most valuable and sticky applications users have on their desktops.
Past the incessant microupdates, though, which I, of course, take part in, there's much more potential here. If anything, Twitter's biggest challenge to success may be in defining exactly what it wants to be when it grows up and what customers it wants to serve. And, of course, its fun and interesting for us bloggers to ponder such theoretical exercises.
Right now, very much like del.icio.us at the time of its funding. It has a lot of passionate users, people are building mashups and lightweight apps on top of it, and it has the potential to be a lot of different things. These outcomes don't have to be mutually exclusive, but it will certainly be interesting to see how Twitter brands itself over time, builds features, and what segments of the population it actively goes after. In fact, who the service targets will likely influence what it becomes, and vice versa, so in some sense, defining its audience is largely an exercise in self-definition.
There are a few groups, applications, instantiations, versions, etc. of Twitter that I think could gain a lot of traction that make for interesting thought experiments:
- LiveJournal & other Social Networks: I picked out LiveJournal because it's a perfect fit. Each blogs is read by only a small handful of readers--friends of the LJer. Providing a tool by which they could continue to communicate off the site could help increase loyalty and social interaction to a site that already excels in those areas, but would probably like to extend its reach. Plus, LJ already has a "status" that is a widely used part of the site. It would be only natural to want to allow LJers to publish this status or blog updates across the web, IMs, and mobile. Facebook should be powering its status through Twitter as well. One thing that both of these sites do quite well is promote communication, and I think the keys to their future are implementing features that help maintain the communicative aspects of social networking. Sites like MySpace aren't going to survive if its just about friend adding and profile browsing. Key Feature: Privacy. Social networks need robust privacy features and so do the apps that build on them. Most LJ blogs are closed and making sure they've simplified and completely nailed the privacy features would be key to adoption. Key Business Point: Will SNS realize that enabling more user communication is key to user engagement and loyalty or will they look for immediate paths to monetization? Plus
- Conference Attendees: SXSW really nailed it for me. With various possible tracks and a constantly ebbing and flowing swirl of closely proximated people, Twitter proved to be the perfect conference app. People freely gave out their Twitter screenames knowing that they could always leave or block those people later on, lowering the bar for mobile communication. If you're running a big conference, you should be using Twitter to be the digital hallway, and as we all know, hallways are often the best parts of conferences. Key Feature: Stats, Directories, and Co-Registration. Conference producers would definitely look for ways to get more of their audience on this, and to provide them with enough information to message each other. Streamlining the registration process so that you can sign up for Twitter or publicize your account when registering for the conference would be key. This way, they could publish your screename in attendee directories and make it easier for key networking contacts to find you. In addition, they would probably die for a management view of this app where they could see who the "talkers" were, who they were talking to, connections over time, conference feedback, etc. Key Business Point: What does the management tool look like and could you sell it?
- Corporate Twitter: We have an intra-office e-mail address that blasts messages to everyone that routinely gets abused by reply-alls that I wish I could unsubscribe to. On top of that, there's often the need to message people through phones in short form when you don't know exactly where you are. Putting a smart phone seems like overkill for this and not everyone necessarily wants to give their cell number out to the whole office. Twitter could be a great cross-platform IRC channel for small to midsize offices, and even part of an office's emergency management plans, with its capacity to blast messages out to a large group of mobile users. Key Feature: Privacy and monitoring. Corporate IM applications have needed to not only provide extra levels of security and privacy, but also monitoring of what gets discussed. Twitter would likely have to do the same, lest anyone Twitter corporate secrets. Key Business Point: How corporate would it be? Perhaps just a lightweight app more geared towards small businesses would be a better start, rather than building a heavy locked down version behind the firewall.
- Content subscription portal: There have been lots of fake celebs popping up on Twitter... Steven Wright, Christopher Walken, John Edwards... (oh, wait.. Edwards is real, right?). Adding a celeb or a business to get a stream of content from them makes so much more sense than just being their friend via a profile. It's only a matter of time before bands, movies, comedians, etc. make Twitter a standard part of their communication with fans. Plus, I wouldn't mind a Weather Channel Twitter update on Brooklyn weather conditions, score changes for the Mets, and Hudson River water temps. Key Feature: Spam prevention. Twitter will have to build in some limitations on how often 3rd party content providers can blast out updates, what types of messages are allowed, etc., just in case marketers get overzealous. Key Business Point: There was a land grab on Twitter names when they opened up their API and they may need to boot some squatters, but this is likely to come to pass and I'm sure it will be a revenue opportunity for them. The question is what is a Twitter subscriber worth?
- Gaming: I'm surprised that people haven't built large scale games out of Twitter. (Sounds like a Jane project...) Twitter could blur the line between participants and lurkers, since your public twits related to the game could enable others to follow along and perhaps jump in with answers, route advice for location based games, etc. Imagine adding a game "friend" one day and just knowing that, sometime over the next week, you're going to get instructions for a game. Key Feature: Spam prevention. Twitter will have to build in some limitations on how often 3rd party content providers can blast out updates, what types of messages are allowed, etc., just in case marketers get overzealous. Key Business Point: There's big advergaming potential here, and the great thing about Twitter is that it acts like a portal. You don't have to remember some special shortcode for a mobile game... everything is based on 40404. Gaming and mobile contests can be built in a very social way with Twitter and enable lower barriers to entry and discovery.
What else could Twitter be? Where is it's greatest potential?
Open Source Cross Country Trip: Places to Stay, to See, and Tunes to Listen to
So, the route is pretty much planned out and so is the calendar, but that still leaves a lot of things that need to be done, like what we do at certain places, things to bring, etc.
We could use some help, so if anyone could help us out with the following, we'd really appreciate it.
- Tunes - We'll need quite a lot of tunes on our trip, since we're spending three full days in the car, so if anyone would like to send over some mixed CDs, we'll check 'em out and give you a shoutout, plus a little review. You can either e-mail me playlists or mail me CDs to 7423 Ridge Blvd., Apt. 1B, Brooklyn, NY 11209.
- Western NY - We need to stop in Western NY on our way to Cleveland and we got a tip that Olean, NY has a decent place to say and that pretty close to St. Bonaventure and Allegheny State Park, so that looks like a go to me, but we've set out to spend a fair bit of time trekking through Western NY the next day and would like suggestions on places to stop along the 86/90 route west of Olean. I'm thinking food, farms, nature stuff... quaint little places that no one knows about, etc. It seems like it would be a pretty quaint country drive if we found some nice places to check out. Also, if there's a place in the Olean, NY area that you think is worth staying at, let us know.
- St. Louis - What to do in St. Louis on a Wednesday morning? Brunch? Shopping area? Something historic?
- Sioux Falls, SD - Where to eat lunch?
- Yellowstone - Best place to camp out and also where to go to buy a lightweight tent for two without breaking the bank, since its probably the only time we'll need one. We're going to spend a day in Yellowstone.