Last week, we filed the provisional patent for the technology in KlickFu, so now we can gradually start coming out of stealth mode (finally!). One of the ways we are doing that is by running a KlickFu development contest with the UCLA ACM computer science student group. Last night was the kick-off meeting for the contest, in which UCLA CS students will create apps for KlickFu, then next month, we will bundle all the approved apps together in a special KlickFu UCLA version the developers can send to their friends at school. There was a great turn-out at the event last night and we are looking forward to seeing what types of apps the students come up with! (Btw, we have already gotten requests to do a similar contest at USC, which we may do as soon as this one is fully launched.)
We are very excited to be working with students as some of the early developers for KlickFu. Because it enables developers to make small, instant games and apps (as well as more complex ones), we believe KlickFu is an excellent platform for students to build their skills in window management, graphics, and user experience. For the participants, we hope this will be a fun opportunity to build legit shrink-wrapped software they can share with their friends. For KlickFu, we are going to get some excellent feedback on the new (and improved) SDK, as well as some interesting apps to distribute with the free version of the program.
Special thanks to our friends at Microsoft for contributing some great prizes for the developers–an XBox 360 and a Zune HD–we appreciate it! Stay tuned in about 5 weeks to see the Bruin apps.
Last Thursday night I went to the info meeting for the upcoming Founder Institute session in Los Angeles. Founder Institute (FII) is the entrepreneur training and mentoring program started and run by Adeo Ressi, in which I participated last fall. After the initial session in Silicon Valley, FII started additional sessions in NYC, Seattle, Washington D.C., and San Diego. Now they are expanding to Denver, Singapore, Paris, and L.A.
I am particularly excited about FII starting a session in L.A. because: 1) FII is an excellent program and can be a great help to new founders; and 2) through its expanded sessions, FII is creating an amazing network of mentors and alumni–the L.A. session mentors include Michael Robertson (MP3.com), Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese), and Peter Guber (producer of Rain Man, Batman and other blockbusters), among many others–I am looking forward to getting to know the mentors and founders in my local area!
The L.A. session is being run by Ken Rutkowski, founder of KenRadio.com and one of the most engaged and connected folks in the L.A. technology and media scene. The event on Thursday was hosted at Clearstone Venture Partners and there were about 50 founders present. Adeo made the trip from Silicon Valley to present about FII and answer questions and there was a lot of excitement among founders for the program.
I am looking forward to helping out and participating in the FII program in L.A. in any way I can. If you are interested, you can apply here. The early admission deadline is Feb 15–good luck to all the new FII L.A. founders!
Blippy.com is the new social media site where users can automatically publish feeds of everything they buy. Unlike Beacon, the unsuccessful shopping news feed launched by Facebook and then scuttled due to negative user feedback, Blippy is entirely opt-in, and purchase notifications can be limited to specific vendors (Amazon, iTunes) or credit cards.
After using the site a bit, I am not sure if I want to publish my purchases in this way, or view all the purchases of my friends. However, given the early traction the site is getting, along with the A-list investors such as Ron Conway, it seems clear Blippy has an excellent chance of succeeding.
The contrast between Blippy and Beacon, in terms of their approach to privacy as well as user reaction, is striking, especially given Facebook’s recent decision to change the defaults for Facebook to make more content fully public and searchable. Of course, it is in both sites’ interest to maximize the amount of content that is made public by users. The more public content available, the more that content can be used to generate user activity and engagement as well as to target ads.
Throughout its history, Facebook has taken an aggressive stance toward making different types of content public on an opt-out basis (i.e., without getting user permission first). The strategy worked well with publishing the initial News Feed, not so well with Beacon, and the jury is still out on the latest shift in publishing defaults.
As an aside, by adopting a brand identity with users as a company that will periodically “lead the way” to broader public publishing of previously semi-private information, I believe Facebook has a strategic advantage over larger companies, such as Google, who simply cannot take this aggressive an approach due to not wanting to damage the user trust that drives their $185 billion core search business.
Meanwhile, Blippy has established an effective middle ground–publishing data publicly that was previously thought to be highly private, credit card purchases, however doing it in a way where users feel in control. By adding extra value such as filtering for the most important/interesting purchases and linking to vendors for follow-on sales, this will be a highly valuable business if users adopt it.
As the pendulum shifts toward users becoming increasingly comfortable publishing what until recently has been considered private data, it makes me wonder if we will begin to see other startups publishing data considered now to be even more private, such as:
- medical records, results of doctor visits
- body metric data, including sleep/wake cycles, exercise, and sex
- pay stubs, charitable donations, tax returns, bank balances
- TV watching, including pauses and rewinds
- school grades, attendance, homework, and test scores
- voting for public elections
- DNA and genetic conditions
In other words, is there any type of data so private, users will not eventually be willing to share it in an automated way, with their friends and/or the world? Americans of a certain age (say, born before 1990) have been raised to believe that privacy is a fundamental right, necessary for maintaining a healthy psychology, and a source of national pride. However, if there are enough safeguards in place against discrimination, minimal social backlash against individual habits, and greater value derived from sharing information with friends, we may see users choosing to make more data public than we think.
Happy new year, I hope everyone had a great holiday. I am getting back into the swing of things after returning from a week in Colombia and a brief Disney Cruise to the Bahamas with my family–as well as recovering from the various illnesses one might associate with: a) a trip to South America; and b) a cruise with 800 kids under the age of 10. Business is starting to heat up for KlickFu as well as a few consulting projects, so I have been posting less frequently the past month or so. I will try to write more frequent, shorter posts as we get ready to launch!
One thing that struck me during the trip was this will probably be the last time I bring or use a point-and-shoot camera, even while traveling. In the past year, I had already gotten to the point where I use only my iPhone for a camera when I go out to parties–even with the severe limitation of having no flash–due to the excellent convenience and the fact I always have it with me. I have a fairly nice point-and-shoot camera, a Sony Cybershot that is quite small and takes nice pictures (and which I am now giving away, see below), which I have taken with me on previous trips to Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. However, on this trip–even though I had the camera in my bag and fully charged, I still did not use it to take pics because I simply did not want to have to carry another device. (I already had my iPhone with me to use as a clock and for occasional wifi.)
The iPhone camera is not perfect, there is the previously mentioned no-flash issue, plus the light sensor is pretty bad and the optics/image quality are mediocre at best. Although for me, the convenience trumps everything else. Plus whatever my next phone is, iPhone or Nexus, the camera will be significantly better, including having a flash. So I can’t really see why or when I would use a point-and-shoot camera again.
Not that there needs to be a causal agent in this, however if I had to name one it could be Facebook. By demonstrating the major power of sharing photos as elements in a social conversation, as opposed to for the beauty/emotion of the images themselves, Facebook has made many users (including me) comfortable with the idea that taking lower resolution/lower “quality” images, even while traveling, is “good enough.”
In a related story, since I no longer need the above mentioned Sony Cybershot camera, I am giving it away now. If you’re looking for a point-and-shoot, it’s a pretty good one. Free to the first person who requests it and lives here in L.A.
UPDATE: The camera has been claimed now… 15 minutes after posting at 11pm–not bad! Since that went so well, I also have a few extra suitcases and an end table I am selling, cheap. Just kidding.
Last night, I went to the Jobnob Docstoc Happy Hour at Air Conditioned in Venice. The event was co-hosted by Julie Greenberg and Jason Nazar of Jobnob and Docstoc respectively. The idea behind the meetup is to connect technology startups with prospective hires who may be interested to work for “alternative compensation”–e.g., reduced salary, partial equity, good experience, etc. Jobnob has held 8 events in the Bay Area, where they are based, with huge turnout, not super surprising in a down economy. The turnout last night was excellent, maybe 200 people total, including 30-40 companies and job seekers of all types. The Jobnob folks said they easily could have filled a room twice the size.
At the start of the event, 20 companies each gave a one-minute pitch describing themselves and who they were looking for, then everyone was free to mingle.
The most striking aspect of the night was this: every company there was looking to hire talented developers, based in Los Angeles, and there were not nearly enough developers to go around. Yes, a few companies were also looking for business development or marketing help, however everyone needed engineers. The most common skills being sought were web developers, front-end and back-end, especially in PHP, Python, and ASP.net (Docstoc).
The few developers there–maybe 5 or 6 actual developers out of 200 folks–were the rock stars. CEOs, founders, and VPs were literally following them around the room asking for introductions.
For anyone who believes all the coding jobs are being off-shored to India or Russia or other parts non-U.S., it was clear, there is a lot of demand for developers right here in L.A. If you have solid web skills and a few years experience, either with a commercial company or running your own legit projects, there are dozens of companies in L.A. who would love to talk with you. Based on last night, that does not appear to be changing any time in the near future.
If I were a parent with a college-aged child who wanted to know what they could do to get a solid, good-paying job–or for any friends who have recently been laid off and want to improve their chances of getting hired–my advice would be to log onto a coding tutorial site (personally I recommend Python), pick an idea for a simple site, and get coding. Your job is waiting for you.
The holidays are coming up, which means many of us will be spending a lot of time on airplanes and other places where we might have some free time. So I thought it might be helpful to post suggestions for some good books to read while you are getting where you are going, or maybe when you get there.
Below are 5 books I recommend that deal with business or product, often in unconventional ways:
- How Successful People Win–Using Bunkhouse Logic To Get What You Want Out Of Life, by Ben Stein. This is a great book giving insight into how successful people approach life, using the metaphor of the cowboy of the American West. If I were going to give one book to a teenager on how to prepare for life in college and beyond, this would be it.
- Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky. Mr. Shirky is one of the leading thinkers and writers on how patterns of social usage and behavior are evolving on the web and in real-life. In this book he outlines how people are using technology to organize in new ways without formal structures, with great examples from Flickr, MeetUp and other popular sites.
- The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers Into True Believers, by Douglas Atkin. To understand why users become incredibly passionate about some brands more than others–e.g., Apple users going into stores and repositioning Apple merchandise to put it in front of Windows gear–Atkins studied the techniques used by religious groups and other “cults” (he defines the term in a mostly positive way) to derive 10 techniques that can be applied by brands to generate a similar level of passion or even fanaticism. IMHO, this is the most insightful book on branding I have read and the concepts are immediately actionable whether you are selling a web site or consumer products. If you are a developer and you want to read one book to get a sense for how branding works and/or how to build a strong community around your product, this is the one I would recommend.
- The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, And Join The New Rich, by Tim Ferriss. This is the NY Times bestseller that started the craze around individuals “finding their muse”, i.e., creating a company or job that pays the rent in only a few hours a week, and outsourcing parts of their daily lives and businesses to personal assistants around the globe. It offers a great perspective on why and how to take control over how you spend your time, with some excellent out-of-the-box approaches to managing your time… and especially on marketing. (Test, test, test the marketing… before you even build the product!) Also, the discussion of existential issues around what you would do if you really had a job that paid the bills enabling you to spend your time however you want is fascinating.
- Double Your Dating, by David DeAngelo. This is the most unconventional book in this list. Many of you may be familiar with The Game, by Neil Strauss a.k.a. Style, which describes Mr. Strauss’ adventure to learn and master the techniques of pickup artists to meet attractive women. Whereas The Game is mainly a memoir, Double Your Dating is an actual how-to manual for meeting–and more importantly, attracting–women. Fair warning, this is an actual “pickup” book, with some unconventional thoughts you may find a bit off-putting or at least funny. However, DeAngelo has a great way of describing how attraction actually happens (you may find yourself reluctantly nodding your head as you read it) and some attitudes and techniques anyone can adopt–male or female–to become more charismatic, whether it is for meeting members of the opposite or same sex, or attracting business partners, investors, or employees. If nothing else, it is an interesting read, and you may find it is one of the more insightful books on networking and human psychology you have read in a while.
This is my list, feel free to add more suggestions in the comments. (Many of you have told me personally you have been reading the posts, although not commenting yet–this is the time to share the love and meet some of the other folks reading the blog!)
In an interview with Joe Armstrong in “Coders At Work,” the excellent book I described in a recent post, the author Peter Seibel refers to a famous talk by Richard Hamming entitled “You and Your Research” in which Hamming advises young scientists on how to do great work, make significant contributions to their fields, and achieve career success. Hamming addresses numerous issues that are relevant for anyone who wants to make their mark and achieve success, certainly including entrepreneurs. I will go into only one of these points in detail here, although I would advise anyone and everyone to take a few minutes and at least skim through the transcript of the talk. In particular, his comments on why most major contributions to theoretical math and physics are made by researchers early in their 20’s and 30’s are fascinating.
The concept I want to mention today is the point made by Armstrong in paraphrasing Hamming, i.e., the compounding benefits of learning steadily applied over time. In Armstrong’s words:
“…And Hamming said, ‘I always spend a day a week learning new stuff. That means I spend 20 percent more of my time than my colleagues learning new stuff. Now 20 percent at compound interest means that after four and a half years I will know twice as much as them. And because of compound interest, this 20 percent extra, one day a week, after five years, I will know three times as much,’ or whatever the figures are…. You were asking earlier what should one do to become a better programmer? Spend 20 percent of your time learning stuff–because it’s compounded. Read Hamming’s paper. It’s good. Very good.”
Anyone who has worked with senior developers or others who have devoted time consistently throughout their careers to growing their knowledge and skill-set has experienced this firsthand.
This has numerous implications for entrepreneurs as well as all of us as individuals. Imagine if your company can spend even 10% more time innovating than your competition, let alone 20%–after 5 years you could be not 40-50% ahead of your competition but 2-3 times! After 10 years the gap would be insurmountable. Google obviously recognizes this, as enabling developers to constantly learn is one of the main motivations of the well-known “20% time” that encourages all developers to spend one day a week working on any project related to Google’s business that interests them. (As a side note, one of the other excellent perks of working at Google that gets less publicity than 20% time is the fact that EVERY WEEK Google brings in anywhere from 5 to 20 speakers to present on topics ranging from highly technical issues to new books on environmentalism, cooking, and politics, which are broadcast live to Google offices around the world. Overall this contributes to a stimulating intellectual environment that is highly conducive to continuous learning.)
As individuals, it says it is critical we continue to learn and expand our skill-sets. (For entrepreneurs, this could also include improving business networking and presentation skills, which I believe also accrue exponentially.) For example, for me this week on the technical side for a consulting project I learned the basic process for base64 encoding/decoding used to send files as email attachments, and for KlickFu I am now starting to learn some basic C++. Of course, C++ is a large, complex language and I may never become even an intermediate coder in it. However, what I have already learned in terms of the benefits of object-oriented programming and the basics of how programs are compiled has been eye-opening and better prepared me to understand the structure of the KlickFu application. My ultimate goal is to be able to read and comprehend the KlickFu source code and prototype apps directly in C++. I believe this will pay dividends for improving KlickFu as well as other projects.
To quote Albert Einstein: “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.” My $0.02 is to take this to heart and strive to devote 10-20% of your and your company’s time to learning. Best of luck to you and your research.
Today I wanted to give a shout-out to Dr. Tony Karrer, creator of the Southern California Tech Central (SCTC) web site, which aggregates blogs from various folks working in technology throughout SoCal. As of this week, Tony started including this blog on the site, as you can see from the new banner on the right side of the page. I am excited and flattered to be included among such well-known and respected bloggers, so Tony thank you very much and I look forward to working together.
A bit of background on SCTC. Tony founded the site about 6 months ago as a community of bloggers who are involved in web, software and social media around Southern California. Specifically, his goals are:
- Aggregate high-quality content (this blog notwithstanding)
- Provide an easy-to-navigate site with information from diverse but related fields
- Be a jump-off point for users to connect directly to the source material
- Surface new content users might not have otherwise found
Tony himself is CEO/CTO of TechEmpower, a software, web and eLearning development firm based in L.A. Tony has more than 20 years experience as a CTO, most notably as the original CTO at eHarmony, has taught computer science for 11 years, and is considered one of the top technologists in e-learning.
In addition to running TechEmpower and SCTC, Tony is developing a new form of online networking, which he refers to as “visible networking.” The idea is he reaches out to folks in the L.A. tech community with whom he would like to connect, then he interacts with them (through a set of questions) the way he would if he met them at a networking event, except he does it in plain view of everyone on his blog, so everyone in the community can get to know them at the same time. Tony’s latest victim slash contact was me, and you can see our visible networking discussion here for an example.
Tony, these are great resources for the L.A. tech community. Thanks again for including me on SCTC and in your visible networking discussion–best of luck with the sites!
Recently I began reading “Coders At Work, Reflections on the craft of programming,” by Peter Seibel. The format of the book is based on the earlier work by Jessica Livingston, “Founders at Work,” in which Ms. Livingston interviewed founders from a dozen or so successful startups on the details of their approach to starting companies.
In Coders, Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most well-known and respected coders from various disciplines, ranging from relatively younger coders leading the development of scalable web technologies such as Brad Fitzpatrick and Jamie Zawinski to the gods of the craft including Donald Knuth and Peter Norvig.
For any product managers or founders starting web-based companies, I would recommend Coders At Work as required reading. Even if you never plan to write commercial code yourself–although you ARE writing some functional Python apps at least, I hope!–reading this book will give you greater insight into the issues and approaches of your technical partners. It will increase your credibility with your team members, partners, and investors and give you a better basis to identify and manage the technical risks of your project, and maybe a greater ability to create innovations that move your product or your company forward. Here are some of the salient points I have noticed through the first 5 interviews:
- In the past two decades, as software development has become more de-centralized and collaborative (and as processors have gotten faster), writing highly readable code has become at least as important as writing code that is particularly fast or intricate.
- There is no single programming language that is best for all tasks–newer coders should learn several languages to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each.
- Coders are not interchangeable, even the best programmers are better at some things than others. For example, someone who is a genius at developing core libraries may not be as strong for building user interfaces–it is important for engineering managers to make sure developers are working on projects that leverage their strengths.
- Many of the top developers consider writing code as essentially a different form of literature–and the ability to write precise and accurate prose is at least as important as advanced computer science for becoming an excellent and highly productive coder.
- The development of technology does not necessarily move only forward over time to greater productivity and usefulness–sometimes there are significant detours on the way. For example, the trend toward (and, recently, away from) user’s running private environments on their own individual PCs in many ways slowed or reversed earlier progress that had been made in allowing users to interact socially with each other and provide security from viruses and other attacks. Some of the concepts we think of as recent innovations were actually invented in languages 20 to 30 years ago and are only now re-emerging in usable form.
- One of the best ways to build an application is to start with the API (application programming interface), that provides the interface through which your own program and those of others will interact with your main code. Create the use cases for accessing your code through the API first to confirm the design, then build out the main processing functionality.
There are some sections that delve into greater technical detail for sure, although even skimming these will give you a greater context for understanding development. For example, while reading the interview with Brad Fitzpatrick, who created LiveJournal and is now a top coder at Google, I first came across the Perlbal and Memcached technologies, which Fitzpatrick developed out of necessity to scale LiveJournal, and that now have become the de facto standard for scaling web services of all kinds (including Facebook). The very next day I was reading the (excellent) overview on Djangobook.com on how to scale a Django-based web site and there was a detailed section on implementing memcached.
In any case, even if you skim the technical sections, this is a great book for getting a better feel for the issues and dynamics of building and running scalable software technologies. If you want to build better software and have a better time doing it, I recommend it.
There seems to have been an increase recently in the discussion among entrepreneurs and others related to startups of whether and to what extent a startup should remain in “stealth” mode. For those who not familiar with the term, stealth mode refers to a startup explicitly not discussing in public its products or strategies.
The degree to which a company can cloak its intentions can range from simply not publicly demonstrating its product on one hand to using a false company name during development on the other, only to reveal the true name just before launching. A notable example of the latter was WebTV, whose name alone would have revealed their intentions, and who went by the title Artemis Research, complete with an image of the Greek goddess Artemis on the door, for a year before they launched.
Many investors note first-time entrepreneurs are often too closed-lipped about their ideas, asking VCs to sign NDAs (in the process revealing their own naivete) and generally being too uptight about sharing their company story with potential partners who could help the business. My take on this is every situation is different and the founders should employ whatever level of stealth suits the particular company and timing. For example, in the case of WebTV, the fact Microsoft did not know the company was developing this technology enabled “Artemis” to build a sizable technology lead, which essentially required Microsoft to buy the company as a defensive move before their model was tested by the market. This netted the founders and investors $425 million… for a product that ultimately failed. So, the strategy worked fairly well in this case.
However, today a startup called Zyxio announced their new technology, a platform to enable users to control a computer’s (or any product’s) operating system by blowing on an input device–you could think of it as the iPhone app Ocarina for controlling your stuff, for example, when your hands are full (e.g., driving) or for those with physical limitations. Rather than stay in stealth mode and try to decide which of the hundreds of possible applications they should build first using the technology, the founders of Zyxio decided to announce the technology before they had a killer app and instead use crowd-sourcing to suggest and vote on different product ideas. They have created a site called BeAMindBlower.com, where users can do exactly that, with the winners “joining the advisory board” of Zyxio.
This is a case where the company can clearly benefit more by publicizing the technology now even before the application is finalized than they could by waiting. The technology itself is a great idea and the idea and the execution to publicize it are fantastic. Kudos to Zyxio for going anti-stealth and best of luck with your pre-launch launch.
