Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• Simultaneous Discovery and its impact on stealth mode

  We’ve talked a lot about the anti-stealth movement here and on the nextNY list, and the topic has resurfaced again recently thanks to Brad Burnham’s post about the advantages of being open . I noticed that, at least anecdotally, there was a correlation between how open entrepreneurs were with us and their ultimate success. Simply put the entrepreneurs who are aggressively open in describing their plans seem to do better than the ones who are cagey. There is absolutely no data underneath this observation. It is just my sense after meeting hundreds of entrepreneurs over 15 years as a VC. If it is true, it could be for lots of reasons. The more experienced an entrepreneur, the more likely they are to understand that ideas are rarely unique, but the ability to assemble a team and execute against that idea is rare. Perhaps they are just more confident, and it is confidence that is correlated with success. But recently, I have started to think that there might be something more going... Posted Jun 08 2008, 09:49 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Intellectual Property, Rants, Patent, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Social Behavior, NextNY, Notches

• Innovation, Disruption and The Economics of Free

  Hank Williams managed to stir up quite the controversy with his recent post lamenting the rise of free and blaming the VCs . His assertion is that the venture capitalists have made free, ad-supported businesses the norm and effectively "ruined it for everyone else" (my words). 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, and it applied to technology as much as to any other business. But no more. In today’s “free” world, in most online business categories, it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it. This is because in the digital world, advertising, the only real revenue stream, cannot support a small digital business. If businesses were based on the idea that people paid for services then small... Posted Apr 08 2008, 10:41 PM by Tim with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: Rants, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Venture Capital, NextNY, Notches

• Twitter is, or will be, a Messaging Platform

  Charlie discusses the future of Twitter and touches on what I think are two key points: corporate twitter and content subscription. The key as Charlie discusses is the opt-in and one-way nature of Twitter. That is, I only get updates from someone if I explicitly choose to receive them, and the party I subscribe to doesn't necessarily need to listen to me. That sure sounds a lot like an RSS aggregator, doesn't it? To me, Twitter is exactly that: a messaging aggregator. The future of Twitter is a messaging platform . Twitter has a number of ways to deliver updates - you can get them on your phone (via SMS), from IM, or on the web. And of course, you can get them as RSS and bring them anywhere you want. You can also send the updates from any of those mediums. Ever better, Twitter has an API for putting data in and getting messages out, which means I can update Twitter and have this "status update" sent out to Facebook , my blog , and so on. Delivery based on context and priority The key feature... Posted Jun 18 2007, 03:05 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Web 2.0, Innovation, Business, Blogging

• There's no such thing as Web 2.0

  I've said before that I hate the term Web 2.0 but that it's more than a buzzword . Perhaps what I meant to say is what Marc Andreessen said: there's no such thing as Web 2.0 ( via Fred Wilson ) - thing being the key word there. The first Web 2.0 conference was held in the fall of 2004, and coincided with a large number of people in the tech industry (myself included) peeking our heads out from the fallout from the nuclear winter of 2001-2003 and realizing that the Web was not only not dead, it was thriving. From there, it was easy to conclude that "Web 2.0" was a thing , a noun, something to which you could refer to explain a new generation of Web services and Web companies. Many people have since pointed out that there is no clear definition of Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly, whose organization created the conference (and the term), attempted to define Web 2.0 as follows: "Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the... Posted Jun 11 2007, 03:09 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Web 2.0, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Venture Capital

• Aloha, Mahalo.com

  I found this arrangement in my feed reader mildly amusing this morning: Fred Wilson's post on Mahalo.com directly above a post by Brad Feld entitled "The Computer Should Be Doing the Work for Us". (They are unrelated entries). Mahalo.com is, of course, a people-powered search engine that Jason Calacanis publicly unveiled yesterday (no longer "Project X"). I'll be honest: when I first saw that Jason announced a "people-powered search engine", I was underwhelmed. But the more I think about it, he may really be on to something. If you listen to CalacanisCast or read his blog, you'll know Jason has more than a slight obsession with Wikipedia. I'm certainly not the only one who noticed that Mahalo pages resemble Wikipedia entries more than they do Google results. And according to Dan Farber : Calacanis compared Mahalo to Wikipedia, which he said sucked in the first few years and then took off in year four or five. In the first few years, Mahalo will get to 25,000 search terms and then go into... Posted May 31 2007, 10:46 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Web 2.0, Innovation, Google, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Social Behavior, NextNY

• Microsoft Silverlight

  A lot of people are very excited about Silverlight , the technology that was formerly known as WPF/E. Jesse says it will give Flash a real run for its money because of a better video story (emphasis in original). Unlike Flash, Silverlight (the new name) will support DRM, it supports the industry standard VC-1 codec used in HD-DVD and Blueray, and it can take advantage of the built-in media streaming capabilities of IIS. As for DRM support, I don't think that's of any real consequence. Jesse claims "companies that want to stream TV and movies over the web, will not consider any method that doesn't allow for DRM protection", but we're already seeing a trend away from DRM. That said, there are certainly things to get excited about, particularly the prospect of cross-platform CLR support and the ability to develop Flash-like applications with the power of the Visual Studio environment (and not having to learn a new scripting language at that). One thing worth noting is the fact that Flash is... Posted May 25 2007, 02:30 PM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Innovation, Microsoft, C#, .NET, Video, Programming, DRM

• Getting the first penny

  Josh Kopelman says the first penny is the hardest . The truth is, scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture - it’s getting your users to pay you anything at all . The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny. (emphasis in original) Darren has noticed similar trends with MyPhotoAlbum . Jeff says "people will pay for these services but they have to have some persistent utility in order to cross that threshold, but the persistent utility is what is challenging." Converting free users into paying users is only challenging if you don’t ask them to pay. Premium feature sets is one way to do this, PBWiki being a good example, while increasing consumption thresholds being another. DabbleDB gives you more users for each pricing tier, other companies give you the ability to create more files, etc. Basically, the latter is what I prefer because it gives new users the opportunity to appreciate all the features while... Posted Apr 05 2007, 06:45 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Startup

• Streamburst offers innovative DRM for video

  I've already discussed the German music store using watermarks to discourage piracy , and now it seems another service is applying the same principle to video . Instead of handcuffing viewers who want to view films they purchase on multiple devices and otherwise use content legitimately in ways DRM blocks - Streamburst takes two steps to prevent movie piracy. The first is that every film begins with a 5 second display of the name of the person who purchased that copy, as it appears on their credit card. The second step is that Streamburst eliminates an undetectable but unique series of bits from each copy of a file downloaded. That idea is that the psychological barrier of being named will stop many people from illegally distributing the files and those whom it doesn’t stop can be identified by the unique series of bits stripped from whatever copies make it into illegal file sharing networks. These techniques are just as effective at preventing the bad guys as "real" DRM (that is, they... Posted Feb 28 2007, 01:46 PM by Tim with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Security, Innovation, Video, Social Behavior, DRM

• An Anthropologist's Take on Web 2.0

  The Machine is us. ( Link to the video ) Posted Feb 09 2007, 02:35 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Web 2.0, Innovation, YouTube, Video, Blogging, Entrepreneurship

• Wisdom

  There is an important distinction between factual information and understanding how to apply it in context ( via Matthew ). Data is "the sun rises at 5:12 AM" Information is "the sun rises from the East, at 5:12 AM" Knowledge is "If you're lost in the woods without a compass, follow the direction of the sun to find your direction" Finally, wisdom is "Don't get lost in the woods" Posted Jan 25 2007, 04:40 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Innovation, Business, Social Behavior