DISQUS

Here is my comment that I left on PE Hub

The Angel racket has been unreliable for many years. Now that you no longer need to be in the inner circle boys club because of things like social networks, twitter, and the web. Deals can be sourced all over the world. Look at the Boston VCs doing all their deals in CA and Silicon Valley.

As an entrepreneur I don’t care if the VC or seed fund is in Boston or Silicon Valley - I want a partner who will pony up cash after the 500k is gone. Most traditional angels fall down there. That my friends is what kills the dilution factor because the entrepreneur is at the mercy of the VC. Nothing is worse for an entrepreneur with a viable venture and no money left in the bank and they are desparate for a VC round.

VCEntrepreneur: that is when your dilution argument #fails. At that point the entrepreneur is fired and the VC owns 60-80%.

True’s formula is transparent and for companies less than $8 pre then the percentages will statistically work in favor of the entreprenuer yet True gets a good cut.

For me that is why I started the SiliconAngle.com incubator in Palo Alto. It is designed to get the zero to early stage going and all the projects we are working on are way to early for any traditional VCs. Plus entrepreneurs are excited by all the recent activity in new funds being formed for early stage like Marc Andressens new fund among others that already are doing great like First Round Capital.

What you will see as the next *big trend* is early stage incubators like SiliconAngle.com Labs to team up with these new super seed funds.

Comments on Friendfeed where more insight is being shed on this subject. Specifically John Craft has data to share.

It is now confirmed - he has passed. I've done a many of moonwalks in my day in college..

He was good.

I think that AdMob is pissing off developers and that isn't a good thing. In an emerging and growing segment like global trust and reliability are keys to success. If AdMob is truly trying to force a lock in spec for developers then they are cutting themselves off at the legs.

It would seem that a 4th place company in share would want to enable solutions that move them up not down. AdMob is being quiet on this and that makes me wonder what is really going on.

Hey I'm all for clearing up the noise with signal and quality that is why I started SiliconAngle.com group blog of experts. It is precisely for this reason. To have detailed conversations with pros. Keep this conversation going it's important and relevant.

For me the issue is "You can't regulate what you don't understand."

The bigger picture is that legit publishers need to monetize their offerings in some way and google adsense isn't cutting it.. a new standard has to show up. Everyone can't go out of business (including the newspapers and quality online publishers).

The other issue is understanding the difference between a reporting organization and a community. Both have reporting capability but they are mutually exclusive in terms of their methods of publishing but not in their quality. Communities of peers and colleagues (like my new blog SiliconAngle) can provide high quality analysis and opinion and in some cases news but we are not a news organization per se.

I see two standards emerging as prototypes online: 1) All Things D - professional reporting of news first with analysis and opinion second; more general ; and 2) SiliconAngle.com - a community that provides professional opinion, analysis first, and news second; more specialized.

Your thoughts?

I have to say that I'm in agreement with Andrew on many things. This isn't one of them. I believe we need standards but the FTC ...

Here's the rub: the FTC and many don't even know the game that is being played.. how can they enforce rules from another dying game.

As an aside I like the Kara Swisher ATD reference they are doing great "reporting" but they are heavily funded by Dow Jones.

This past week I was talking with CJ Cornell from ASU and I am working on a post about journalism and the current "process journalism" BS that is being tossed around.

Bottom Line: you can't confuse journalism from online communities. They are two different animals. Once you know that then it's clear. The issue is around the word "reporting" ..

This entire FTC debate is comparing apples to oranges. Trust is something that is earned one user at a time. Can't regulate trust.

Chris Anderson's 'long tail' distribution analysis is at play here. I think that the biggest issue is the lack of viable monetizaiton for publishers and that FTC regulation today will "kill" or "stunt" any possible innovation in targeted advertising solutions that can reward legit publishers.

John C D is a one of the smartest guys out there and very entertaining. His point was pure entertainment in it's opinion. He of all should know the power of Twitter as a news source, but I think that he might be on to the main problem which is signal to noise. As more users come on board the noise level gets higher..

Don't forget YouTube :-)

I wasn't being overly critical because I like what you're doing.. lists drive people crazy when it's positioned as an authorative list.. maybe you should word it entrepreneurs that you follow.

On the accuracy point I leave it at this ..there is distinction between being an entrepreneur and being entrepreneurial.

add me to the list - founded a few in my day and doing a few now

http://twitter.com/Furrier

btw: one way to get the entrepreneurs is to do some scraping of the profile descriptions with a crawler..

@furrier

wondering how you put this list together? how can someone be an entrepreneur if they have never started or ran a company?

How are you defining "entrepreneur"? maybe this list is best categorized as entrepreneurship.

Great start but very inaccurate

Great post Steven. It's great to see the value of twitter be realized by many. Hopefully this will keep the naysayers against twitter at bay.

Twitter is important and this is a great example

For readers interested in this topic you have to follow my friend Amr Awadallah the cofounder of Cloudera. He's a great guy and "wicked smaaaart".

Amr is at twitter.com/awadallah

Had a great chat with google team and they are focusing on transparency.

I love what Intel is doing.

My Angle:
Josh B over there is on top of social media and has been from day one. I like the blended model of content development with a social component that involves real knowledgeable people - the community manager. This configuration will be the model for social media. The emphasis on content quality not polish is another think that impresses me. They can add that later when the ROI starts rolling in (and it will). Others do polish and no content and no community mgr.

Web programming on targeted segments- very good; vertical media

Four shows
Primary show will be Parallel Programming Talk hosted by Aaron Tersteeg. This show has been on for a year that has 14k listeners mainly on blogtalkradio in the past now appearing on Intel.com every Tuesday at 8am PST


Three new shows
1. Teach Parallel that will be every other week targeting the academic community by Paul Steinberg. Tuesdays at 10:00 am PST

2. Visualize This – targeting the visual computing community hosted by Steve Pitzel and Arti Gupta . Tuesdays at 2:30 pm PST every other week

3. Manageability hosted by Ajay Mungara – coming soon dates to be announced

Also a special show will be held on June 9th at 4pm PST a special one-time show called Moblin will debut on the Intel Software TV site. This was in the news just this week re: android. Moblin is very important trend & tech to watch.

Overall a great move by Intel that combines high quality informative content with dedicated community managers leading the charge. This in our opinion is a great implementation of social media and one to watch as the model of success.

In addition and coming soon to Intel Software a social media newsroom to provide content and social media to initiate and extend conversations about developing new technologies for the future of computing.

Happy to see Intel focus on quality with peers and peer content development verses trying to be popular. Here being popular will come from the value of the content and that means social media conversion.

Obviously this blog is about quality people and quality content so I fully *endorse* this new direction. Kudos to Josh and team.

Moneymaking is certainly a priority agreed. All the bullshit companies are getting weeded out now and the ones that have real value will monetize. The issue of monetization is not a company issue it's the market. Look at Facebook can't even monetize that so how does a startup with a few rounds of venture or a bootstrapped growing business scale with no revenues from the market. They don't.

The ad model has to change or the user's ability to pay has to change. Both are stalled right now. That being said I agree with you. Hooman's company will be around imho, but others won't.

Note the market is gaining ground Dow 10k coming soon.

This actually was a good story by MSM on this one. All very good points. I had an interesting thread the day before this on my FB page then on my blog with more 'inside baseball' views on what twitter is from a platform.

http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2/?p=5380

Initiated by a John Hagel from Edge Perspective in a recent status update on FB.

Congrats Fred to you and twitter team!

George Lanzaro
John, want to share this with you. It maps out the twitter currency quite nicely. i would only add an Educational component to it.

http://applicant.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04...

enjoy

More comments from Facebook...

George Lanzaro

Thanks for all these interesting posts and topics John. SiliconAngle is really on top of the industry and we in Silicon Alley truly appreciate the insight you share. Its spot on.
I see twitter as a modern day CB or Direct Connect 2.0.
The early adapters who know how to use it have a huge opportunity to reach the masses. From my view the masses ... Read Moreuse twitter as a form of entertainment at first, then as a users network grows, it becomes both entertainment and communication platform. The evolution of twitter should interesting to see as it decides on, and develops a business model, grows its user base and encourages more engagement from it. As this occurs the impact twitter has on a local level as a peer to peer, group to group, one to many communication platform will become more evident. The HBR research seems to point to the classic 80/20 rule.
10-4 over and out bandit ....


Donnell Burch

This makes sense. I get a little confused about all those requests to follow my non existent feed about, what(?), my kids(?), on twitter.

Rex you're saying that Twitter is just a shiny new object that has everyone all in tizzy. I would agree and add that the data will enable something compelling to your point web 3.0. Props

My Angle: The Federation will be in charge (couldn't resist the Star Trek reference). We need federation to scale twitter. Interoperability will trump everything in terms of value... Twitter has a great approach for developers - open data hence my line about "data being the developer kit". Next up for Twitter - The Federation.

Had some interesting emails from this story come to me complimenting Suzanne and some were bold to say things like many of the apps built for Android had the HTC devices as the only target--they run but have screen sizes or input presumptions that aren't met by a smartbook. Moving past those will be a challenge for developers. It might be compared to the iPhone vs. MacbookAir challenge: how
many iPhone apps would run on an Air? How many of them would be needed, when there are more general apps to do the jobs?

I am happy that hot off the heels of Google I/O we have many Android developers reading SiliconAngle (SA)

Thanks Suzanne for joining. Can't wait to do a SV Android meetup. If we can get a sponsor I will do it in Palo Alto

Hi Seth: thanks for reading and commenting. Historically, the word defenestration was used to refer to an act of political dissent.

TV failure and the oncoming failure of broadcast advertising was right on. I think of the concept of permission marketing in the next ten years as I sit here at Google's I/O developer event. To me the evolution of permission is a moving train - even Facebook there is known and unknown permissions being granted and at TOS (terms of service) that is just a vague.

I'd love to get your input on the following: With the value of data available from user behavior now being mined both implicitly and explicitly it is driving new experiences, discoveries, and value on the web. What do you think the next 10 yrs of marketing will look like ? This is something of interest to us in our research an area that makes opt-in and permission marketing look like simple concept.

I'd love your "Angle" on that.

I am a moron in tech and think that Leo has a case. All Twitter has to do is throw Leo some stock and it's gone. Leo has been more than "cool" since Twitter launched. We all know each other and never has Leo thrown the confusion issue in Twitters face. In face Leo has been a big supporter of Twitter in the early days on his show and his platform. I take my hat off to Leo for how he's handled this whole thing.

The thing for @ev and @biz to do is take care of Leo with some shares.

Thanks Fred what's more impressive is the feeding frenzy the open data is to developers. If you guys keep in jamming and keep it friendly to us entrepreneurs - twitter will continue to soar higher. Oh yeah being plugged on TV help push the default positioning that you mentioned. Watching CNN, to ESPN say follow us on twitter reminds me when I first saw a URL on TV. I think you guys are all ready there. Congrats.

SMO - Social Media Optimization

That sounds like an industry waiting to be born and it won't come from the PR side

very true indeed. Game changing ventures require game changing thinking. Well said Fred.

For example to add to your post. I've been a big fan of Twitter's approach and have blogged about it many times - nail the user experience and they will own the new category then monetization will be as easy as brushing your teeth. Well that was when they had 2m users. Bada bing. Sill no monetization and boom hello hockey stick growth.. they still have money in the bank so they won't be going out of business anytime soon but more importantly they can just wait til a match between user experience and monetization "shows its head".

That's my ANGLE