Disqus - Latest Comments for alasdair

Re: Revenge Of The Nerds

Alasdair — Fri, 06 May 2011 12:09:16 -0000

This is far broader than just Hackers, but a great example of the double-edged sword of 'communities'. Any group of individuals can band together online to pursue a common cause, and affect change through a variety of channels. Hackers are just the most obvious given their ability to directly (and individually) wreak havoc.

Communities can be harnessed to great good (Wikipedia), to gain political power (Obama '08) (Egypt '11), or malice (Sony '11) - the tools and leaders of these communities

Re: I Don’t Get the Buzz about Buzz – Do You?

Alasdair — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:34:47 -0000

I think that's right - I'd argue the only (strategic) thing that Google did wrong was not to launch it using Labs (smaller, quieter). Both Google Wave and Google Buzz died because they tried to 'force' them to get big, before they had found their product/market fit....

On a related note - it's worth considering the stats on startups that fail (over 90%), and that Google is (overall) doing way better than that - precisely because they use a lean/iterative/startup approach to most of their new features and products.

Re: I Don’t Get the Buzz about Buzz – Do You?

Alasdair — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 11:52:48 -0000

"At some point when you’re a “real” company I wonder whether you can really get away with just launching Beta versions of everything and seeing what sticks. Might work for Silicon Valley startups. Not sure it is as effective for big, branded companies that are supposed to stand for quality."

- wow, that seems provocative - I would have thought that the concepts of lean startup, customer development, rapid prototyping etc were exactly what "real companies" needed to embrace. As startups evolve into "real companies" they codify their processes, their mindsets and lose the ability to do all these great things that lead to the efficient pursuit of great new services & products.

Re: New Herbietown

Alasdair — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:15:53 -0000

I am spurned. Alas.

Re: Why Is Microchunked Video for Education Not (Yet) Taking Off?

Alasdair — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:29:47 -0000

yeah - I phrased it poorly. We're still working to crack the online sharing challenge - and when its solved it will dwarf the effectiveness of other modes of viral growth. That said, I do think that there's an important role for traditional word of mouth which will complement the online sharing. There's data to suggest that 4/5 parents take the advice of their students' teacher when purchasing academic products- so either we have to position as an educational, but 'non-academic' product (perhaps this is just a function of price) or we have to find ways to enable the online support of teachers.

Re: Why Is Microchunked Video for Education Not (Yet) Taking Off?

Alasdair — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:08:21 -0000

There are four key challenges in your post:

1) People have to find your content
2) People have to find your content compelling
3) People have to WANT to share your content with classmates
4) People have to have a SIMPLE mechanism to share content

I think #2 is pretty well-solved (or at least solvable), but the challenges lie with #1,#3 and #4.

While the YouTube/SEO approach is an obvious answer to #1 (and one we've experimented with), microchunked content, by definition, is long-tail - and as such any one video attracts minimal traffic. You need to put a lot of content on YouTube to drive any significant views. It doesn't even move the needle on referred traffic though. YouTube has thousands of videos on adding fractions alone - the problem is attention, not information. I don't think 'search' is the way to solve this - but rather integration with existing textbooks, curricula, past exams etc. These are the 'pain points' for most students, and if you can directly tie videos to the context of their pain - I think that's the place to start.

On #3, I think the key lies with incentives. Points, virtual currencies - or somethine more innovative perhaps - it will just take a few cycles of experimentation and iteration to crack this one.

On #4 - this is perhaps the most challenging. Just as with YouTube on my first point, Facebook appears to be the obvious place to start when considering how to share microchunked videos with friends. That's the challenge though - we're not talking about sharing videos with friends - we're talking about sharing them with classmates.

The relationship you have with classmates is different from that you have with 'friends' - its more akin to a twitter hashtag or a LinkedIn group - a set of people with a shared interest in topics that are likely to be distinctinly non-interesting to anyone not a part of the group.

We've experimented with this - but haven't cracked the code on this one. My working hypothesis- it's time to take a step back into the offline world and consider ways to go viral using teacher/parent word of mouth rather than via student clicks...

Re: Incubators

Alasdair — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:31:43 -0000

http://bit.ly/1zdGnz - a spin-out from your alma mater....

Re: Incubators

Alasdair — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:15:35 -0000

I think you're right that every successful company does require a dedicated (and great) entrepreneur, but I don't think that's the nail in the incubator coffin - just the incubator model you describe above in which a single serial entrepreneur looks to incubate his/her ideas and then transition to others once the idea takes flight.

If you consider the Entrepreneur-in-Residence model - that's essentially a one-person incubator. The EIR takes some form of salary and hunts/plays around/founds a startup which the VC has the option to invest in. Additionally, the EIR provides expertise to both the fund and other entrepreneurs in the portfolio companies.

Scale that up and I can imagine a very interesting model which is a Fund/Incubator consisting of a network of EIRs, who share risk and share upside. (i.e. guaranteed some sort of base salary, subsidized by giving up (sharing) equity in the startup. A model like this allows the network benefits but still requires each individual to be 100% dedicated to their startup.

Disclaimer - I'm in such a network so have a biased view of its potential

Re: Give Bing A Chance

Alasdair — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:56:57 -0000

I've been forcing myself to use Bing for the past week. It's like starting a new exercise regime - the muscles complain at first, but deep in your mind you know it's the right thing to do (try it that is).

I'm not there yet - I still check back with Google for certain things. I think I'm just used to it, but I can already feel that urge waning. Before long I suspect I won't have to make the logical case for why Bing is a better search engine, and it will become intuitive, but until then it still feels a little uncomfortable...

The killer feature for me is the infinite horizon in the image search - I search for images a lot, and my mouse scroll-wheel was no use on google.

Re: A Lesson From Morty

Alasdair — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:41:17 -0000

Sounds like your making the case for a slide 15 in yesterday's deck...

Re: You Just Can't Teach This Stuff

Alasdair — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:04:22 -0000

Isn't there an iphone app in which you can

a) select your menus/recipes from a drop down list (or tagged photos in flickr?)
b) automatically populates the ingredients list based recipe.com databases...(5 star recipes get priority)

if not - someone should develop it....

Re: Hacking Education (continued)

Alasdair — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:09:09 -0000

I think your point about it taking a generation to happen is critical, and too easily overlooked - but let me take it a step further.

Today's kids are going to live with their feet in two worlds for the conceivable future. The school world will remain one in which the teachers play the role of 'knowledge sources' rather than facilitators of 'knowledge transfer', kids will continue to sit in large classes and computer will slowly make inroads to labs, but never the classroom itself in any significant way. The home world will be one in which facebook, twitter, youtube and cellphones dominate.

The challenge for the entrepreneur is satisfy the demands of the school environment, with the tools from the home environment - solving as Michael Horn would say, the 'jobs' that the student needs to get done - homework, testing, private tutoring. Clearly, entpreneurs can also tackle the 'jobs' of the teachers - better lesson planning, more interesting resources (such as betterlesson.org)

I think that anyone building tools that require entire classrooms to migrate online, threatening the routines and processes of the incumbent institutions has their heart in the right place but will struggle to gain traction.

To your point on textbooks. They may be going away eventually, but they are the irresistible object around which much of today's education is based. Look at the successes of those sites offering free, open source textbooks or peer-to-peer textbook sharing - they bring new technologies to solve big unsolved problems with the current system, but in a way which is disruptive, rather than radical.

In short - I wouldn't drop textbooks from the equation - in fact, there's a strong case to say, that they should/will play an interesting role in the next generation of startups.

Re: Who is john galt?

Alasdair — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:14:58 -0000

Just caps on cash comp. Stock is still fine and should put some (little) pressure on a longer-term outlook...

Re: Boxee Survey Results

Alasdair — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 09:11:37 -0000

I'd love an invite Fred - thanks!

Re: Testing ScribeFire

Alasdair — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:40:17 -0000

Sort of got used to Flock - is it really worth switching back?

Re: Losing A Phone - A Social Media Security Breach?

Alasdair — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:47:57 -0000

There's a Singapore startup with a nice solution to this problem. www.wavesecure.com

Re: Why Isn't Clothing More Practical?

Alasdair — Mon, 26 May 2008 10:43:37 -0000

Your productivity is hurting because you're writing blog posts while you should be working...