DISQUS

There's one thing I've always liked about New York is people mind their own business. They never approach you to tell you you are walking your dog wrong or going to kill yourself by drinking out of a Nalgene bottle.

And this is just the downside of a city where it's best not to make eye contact or address strangers. It's just not safe to expose yourself to your fellow denizens.

It's still New Jack City after all. I'd be fascinated to see if more scientific tests were done in 20 top cities what the responses would be.

Robert, I think the problem isn't that traditional tech VCs have a disease, it's that they rather focus on where they can make more money. For very reasonable reasons most VCs can't invest in companies which don't have the potential to become $100+M companies (preferably $1+B). So though they love the excitement of exciting new products in new spaces and talking with the entreprenuers, that's not where their bread and butter comes from, and investing in them dilutes their maximum potential.

They have to pass on potential tens of millions in favor or hundreds of millions.

What it also means it they've left a great part of the ecosystem wide open for the early round investors. And all the power to any the parties helping the young companies get from family and friends to Series B (or even better M&A or self-sustaining thriving business).

Many VCs tried to do Angel-like investments in 2005 and 2006, but they just couldn't justify the time spent on a company they could only invest $500k in, and there's no other way for them to do it. After putting in all the research, due diligence, partner reviews and approvals they should really have invested that effort in a $10M deal.

So it's not a disease, it's the nature of how they do business, a business that has historically worked very well, that they may be happy to get get another decade or more out of.

In fact, many young companies are better off not getting too much money too soon. VCs need companies to grow at hyper fast rates, which can cause a company with great potential to fail because they denied themselves to grow at a more realistic pace.

Also of note, there's a great Canadian VC firm, that is doing some very clever things to cut out the front time required to invest in small market deals and thus make it more cost effective for them do sub-million investments. They aren't talking it up, but I've seen and it's the most creative approach to this investment gap I've seen yet.

Finally, maybe you should start a seed fund and get in the game yourself ;)

funny, when I use it doesn't indicate the legend. I can't see how many uniques the horizontal lines indicate.

But much more interesting are the commenters who correctly point out that all google do not returrn results

Yesterday, the burning man had me in an apoplectic fit. TFF!

Scott! You've inspired me to try something on Shrini's Metanotes.

I call it Black Celebration (naturally ;)

http://metanotes.com/tedr/BlackCelebration

Harley weiner dog at Harley gathering? I feel pwned just looking at it.

Sorry, nothing to the story. I just like iminta. Though I will share I'm confused by a company that does a mostly self-funded formal Series A instead of just investing their own money like what is normally done and giving themselves shares. But that is all unqualified armchair speculation. I just been using iminta and enjoy it.

I recommend iminta.com. It's made with love, not self-funded millions.

http://iminta.com/people/tedr

My guess is that Castfire (http://www.castfire.com/) is already way ahead of them. You probably haven't heard of them because they are profitable and not funded, but they are taking business from Brightcove right and left.

Best success to Beau & team.

Something I would have love to have done if the dogs weren't barking so loud.

DeviantArt is the best site that the web2.0 blogarati echo chamber consistently overlooks.

Probably because they are too busy supporting the large and thriving community that pays very well for itself to care what anyone else thinks.

They've been one of our primary role models since we first learned of their genius and amazing community commitment. If you ever have a chance to speak with Angelo, one of their founders, make it so.

Think of the amazingly vibrant community platform they could have integrated into .mac by now. Imagine if each mac owner had an option of creating a user profile to share with all other owners. Of course not everyone would be interested, but mac owners are drawn together as tightly as almost any other brand. But they did nothing other than offer email services you have to pay for. They certainly let a giant opportunity slip away over some cockamamie revenue plan.

Howard gave me a sneak peak last month. What I really like about it is:

a)It narrated in such a way that *anyone* could understand what these social tools are and how to use them, and more importantly start using them right away

b)It will serve as a fascinating time capsule. In 10 years we'll forget much about what was exciting on a day-to-day basis right now. Just as his slice of life from 20 years ago makes you go "oh yeah, that's right, I forgot about that" what he's doing now will be equally beneficial.

I noticed that a couple weeks ago. Made me laugh. I wonder what else they've tweaked in the name of web geekery?

Another Snitter feature I like is the built in tiny url creator.

A feature I'm wanting is key commands to scroll down and up twitters. On Mac only the mouse can control ir

I'd like to go with the "You're a Dick" strategy.

We make a group of people ready to respond on a moment's notice if a CC/CR abuse is found.

Then we each send an email very politely saying we think they have a misused photo on their site. They get 1000 of these they won't do it again.
Of course only works for sites, not print.

The other piece could be a screen shot history with very well titled entries about who misused an item. And these would show up in search results when someone wants to find a company like ZingFu.

Wouldn't change the world but would embarrass people.

Wow! Just happy to be here....

I was a big proponent of the new DRM-free offerings, but I've since realized it's yet another non-permanent format that will be hard for me to own for life.

Just as albums, cassettes and CDs have built-in shelf life, so do MP3 files encoded at sub-CD bitrates. If I'm buying a digital copy of a song and the right to use as I want I should really get the highest quality version of that song, especially as I'm paying a premium over the DRM'ed or CD price. For a file format that may sound quite dated in 3-5 years as audio playback capabilities increase.

I was happy to hear the subscription service Rhapsody will be offering CD quality, so hopefully the rest will follow.

But really bandwidth being what it is, there really is no reason you should have to buy a compressed file of any sort.

Until then I'll keep primarily buying CDs and blogging about the recording industry. The time for baby steps is over. They have got to do what their customers want or lose them for good.

http://www.spideysenses.com/2007/07/08/follow-u...

Here are some photos I took from the first hour:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bmindful/sets/7215...

Ugh! On top of their unethical business model, they lifted their design palette and logo style directly from MyBlogLog. I'd bet dollars to bought links that somewhere out there on eLance or the like you could find a work requests that includes 'and make it look like MyBlogLog'

Lame.

My brother, Gotham22, posted a bunch of photos too.

Brilliant!

Though really, it's a tiny step, IMHO towards integrating collective user intelligence features. Software such as Illustrator or Word or iMovie are platforms waiting to happen. Why not build in hooks so I can see who else is using the tools I'm using right now? Who wants to talk about this feature right now? Where are examples on live on uses of that feature? Of course such sociality would be opt-in, etc. but all software is waiting to be social.

I don't know why it's talking the software makers so long to realize this.

For the love of dog people... work out titles and roles *before* talking with investors about funding. Always prepare for the worst, even at those times when you are hoping for the best.

DP and HC I'm feelin' ya right now. Feelin' deep.

Superb. David Choe is no one trick pony. He constantly impresses me.

There was a great interview in a Juxtapoz earlier this year.

Have you seen ModelMayhem.com? It is a very popular place social site models, photographers and makeup artists. Their groundrules ensure that's it truly for their target audience and it's growing very well. Ranks ~3000 on Alexa.