DISQUS

Hi,

That post and the one before was written by a friend of Umair's while he was on holiday.

I agree with Umair that good DNA is crucial to have a long term successful business and I think it would be an excellent idea to seek out these companies as part of your investment strategy.

I am disappointed in the companies that were successful at TechCrunch50, DEMO and seedcamp this year. Not because I don't think they can't be successful or might be useful, but they are nibbling at problems around the edges. Is Yammer really going to produce an order of magnitude in productivity benefits to companies? I don't think so. Its benefit for companies lies in giving them control over the conversation.

Somewhat preachy sorry, but I share Umair's frustration. The turbulence and chaos of the current climate is probably the best time to companies with good DNA to solve real problems as the barriers for these companies are weakened. It is much easier for these companies to establish themselves, upend the status quo and make real inroads to the problem those companies are trying to solve.

Something I think glossed over with the free model is that a lot of people see and say yes I can make money but I won't make as much of it as the old way. This isn't strictly true but it does have truth to it.

Artists are likely to make a steadier income but not reach wealth of previous blockbuster artists. But more artists will make a decent amount of money rather than it all being concentrated into blockbusters.

Labels are the biggest losers as their existence is predicated of the existing business model. In the new business model much of value they brought - manufacturing, distribution, marketing - is now very much in the reach of the artist themselves.

The new models are here to stay as the deflation of costs can't be undone. But it is worth recognising that incomes and wealth will also be changed. Arguably the large incomes paid to blockbuster artists were a distortion in the first place and that the props and barriers that supported those distortions have gone.

Perhaps the scariest thing for artists is the realisation that the market may not value their work as they value it. Having said that the economics of free tend towards increasing overall value rather than decreasing.

I work Google Reader in a similar way to you Robert, scanning through lots of articles quickly using the keyboard short cuts. As with the previous Google Reader for iPhone I can't do this which, for me, cuts down the utility of the app.

My suggestion to the Google App team is to use gestures to provide keyboard like short cuts (e.g. swipe left to set as read, swipe right for emailing, tagging, sharing). The other problem is seeing the article content. Off the top of my head I suggest showing the content of the first article by default and as the user swipes left or clicks on the next article in the stream the content is hidden and content of the next article is opened.

Actually remembered the name - mission command. You set the mission and goals but leave it to the front line to work out how to best achieve the desired goals.

I tend to err on the side of as much competition as possible and as such have a general dislike of them as an anti-competitive tool. And you are right in pointing out that non-competes essentially do create a temporary monopoly on the person's supply of labour.

Following the analogy of IP, then there should be a legal quid pro quo for a company to use non-competes so that some thought does go into their use. For non-competes, I would suggest a legal requirement to pay either on the employees current salary with a penalty rate to reflect the loss of (usually) higher salary that the employee is suffering due to the non-compete. The Austrian legal requirement of null when the employee is fired is also a good idea I think.

I don't think that non-competes are the best method for dealing with cases where the employee has walked off with the contacts DB or similar trade secret. I can understand why they are used that way as they allow the information to "rot" and therefore decrease the value of the information or secret.

My main concern still remains the depression of market price for the persons' labour. I understand Fred's concern as an investor but essentially by enforcing non-competes his portfolio companies are not paying market price for that person's labour. Even though Fred's protfolio companies are paying the person to be the Twelfth Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelfth_Man) they are paying him at the current salary and not the person's market rate. None of the arguments seen about keeping non-competes address the issue of requiring payment of market price for the person's labour.

In someways the non-competes are ways for a company to get out of paying the "market price" for an employee. In particular star employees. While I understand you would pay for someone to sit on the sidelines, even doing that the particular employee is losing out for the six months of a higher salary and other benefits he or she would be accruing at the new company. Are you going to pay what the employee was offered at the new company?

My concern and issue with non-competes (and yes my contract includes non-competes) is that they are anti-competitive tool. By not allowing companies to compete for a labour they end up seeing the market value of the labour priced lower than it would otherwise be. Now should you wish to keep non-competes then there should be a clause that requires the automatic re-negotiation of re-numeration and benefits as the market price for the employee is obviously higher than what is being provided by the company.

My other main issue with non-competes is that they also become an excuse for the company not to deal with employee or morale issues. Without the freedom of movement there is no penalty for a company in not addressing those issues. The fastest and most painful wake up call is for several key employees to leave.

If non-competes are kept I would limit their use to companies of certain size and/or revenue. I don't think they make sense once a company gets past a certain revenue/size for them to be able to use non-competes.

Interestingly enough the pioneers of C&C are moving away from strict C&C (well at least the Aussie Army is). Instead they have moved to system whereby the key bit of command is accomplished not through detailed orders by via a detailed description of the intent of the orders.

Essentially, the orders from higher up set the bounds and the overall strategy with implementation and adaptation to changing situations left to the people who can best respond.

I see communications lying at the heart of most if not all that is done on the web. Particularly around social communications.

Scaling (of people's networks) is interesting problem. I've notice they already have included the ability to exclude people from your news feed. I think they need to extend that to allow you to specify the "friendiness" of a connection e.g. is this a close friend, acquaintance, business contact, colleague.

Nic,

I don't think Facebook is a "Internet OS" or "Social OS" as Liz Gannes wrote. It overlooks the really important aspect of Facebook of communications. It is this aspect of Facebook that excites me with the possibilities. From my perspective communications will always win over content. Consider how many people use IM/Email versus reads a blog or watches any particular movie.

I see Facebook as a social communications platform. Even without having to continually email/txt/IM you stay in contact with your friends simply by the use of the service. It is like being in a huge room with all your friends. You may be talking and doing something with specific people but you can still keep an eye on what your other friends are doing.

Facebook's strength lies in how it allows you to manage and stay in contact with your friends. The more firmly Facebook promotes the strength of this communication through new tools and other controls will only strengthen Facebook. Integrating communications methods such as IM and SMS more firmly into the platform will only strengthen the usage of the platform. In fact I could easily see Facebook becoming a pre-eminent presence service as well. I wouldn't be surprised if some bright spark wrote an agent based on the Facebook platform that allows you to control and route all your communications.

Simon

Another way to look at it is WAYN could build the travel specific aspects of their specific niche social network around the social communication features of Facebook.

1. My main problem here is the large capital cost of IPTV systems. I'm not sure how the rollout of BT Vision is being accounted for but it is not cheap for a possibly low ROI

2. P2P is good for offloading the infrastructure costs to ISPs/Consumers. I expect the ISPs will start putting clauses into their agreeements limiting the usage of P2P, which will effect the efficiency of the P2P network and consequently the user experience. The Skype protocol is not particular good P2P protocol.

3. I see discovery here as the main problem to success.

I guess the really big area for investment is in the EPG aspects of Internet video. TIOTI is an obvious candidate. The main hurdle I see for them is tying in effective delivery to provide a good user experience. Particularly as Internet TV goes mainstream and the audience is less interested in understanding how the stuff is delivered. It'll be interesting to see how Apple goes. I can see a very powerful service based around their Apple TV device and the FrontRow software.

Without some automatic way of turning existing pages into "semantic web" human lazyness and business tight fistedness is likely to delay the deployment of "semantic web" technologies.

Not that there isn't a lot of promise to "semantic web" technologies. These technologies are likely to join a whole list of technologies that help manage information, but I remain sceptical of magic bullet (killer app) status. I distinctly remember when the same was said of XML.

Much of the magic of semantic web can be achieved by other means. There is certainly something to be said for making it easier to find common information (hell I would love all blogs were marked in a common to make it easy to process them) but there is a lot to be said for statistical analysis as well.

Following Peter's thoughts, what I see is that the "easy" or, perhaps more appropriately, the flashy but ultimately useless services have been done. I can think of few (actually, I can't think of any) web2.0 services that I regularly use or would pay for. The "easy" stuff just proved the concept and now the focus will shift to really useful and game changing web services or the "hard" stuff.

I certainly see opportunity in the web service platform development environments. I'm think along the lines of tools that allow a non-programmer (in this case I am using broad definition of engineers and scientists etc whom don't do a lot of application development) to build a working web based service.

Something along the lines of Ning and possibly Yahoo Pipes. I wonder whether the development of the Eclipse platform will naturally achieve an environment that allows people to build web services by piecing together the program like a jigsaw puzzle (ultimately what John Backus wanted).

For Wiki's I see the power for a lot of corporates is in technical guides, training guides etc. where it is useful to be able to access anywhere, anytime without needing to open Word.

Most of these manuals don't need to have hundreds of authors but do need constant updating, improvement and release. This is where I definitely see Wiki's having strength. A core nucleus of authors is responsible for maintain the documents with others able to comment on the documents (errors, questions for clarity better examples). Similar in many ways to the MySQL Technical Guides.

Nic,

I think operator driven LBS is going to fizzle. It is to much hassle, costs to much and can be achieved via cheaper methods another way. I thinking something along the lines of Google Map that either triangulates the signal on the phone, uses the Cell Tower ID or uses built in GPS to get approximate position that would work for queries such as "Where is my nearest ATMs?" which are displayed with icons along with something showing your current location.

I just remain a sceptic about a lot of the hype surrounding mobiles. I do expect to see new and unknown services to arise that harness the uniqueness of mobile phones and the power of the internet. I just don't see this fundamentally changing the existing internet rather extending is reach and power.

I'm not sure that mobile is as revolutionary as many people expect.

Certainly, there is a lot to be said for effective LBS. My killer app is being able to say show me the nearest ATMs (for some reason London seems to have a dearth of working ATMs). But I

Trying to shoe horn a mobile to do computer based tasks strikes me as silly. Call me a sceptic but until the UI problems are nailed mobile phones will remain a communication device. That to me is the importance of a mobile phone. As a converged communications device (IM, email, SMS, voice calls, video calls, barcodes, presence etc). Get the communications task convergence correct and you will have a very powerful product. I suspect that iPhone (2nd Gen) will be one of the first of these converged communications devices.

Payment point strikes me as a regulatory/political nightmare. The politicians are going to restrict the use of mobile phones for payment. All it will take is a 12 yr boy to buy some porn with his mobile phone for all hell to brake loose. The mobile payment companies are opening themselves to criminal charges for negligence if they do not put in safe guards now.

I keep pushing for plans (whether tech development or otherwise) not because I think the plan itself is important (to quote a military maxim: A plan never survives first contact), rather it is the planning process itself that is important.

For me I am more interested in all the knowledge developed in the planning process as that is vital to allow you to adapt a plan to uncertainty.

Corollary to that is sometimes saying no.

I can see an opportunity for data providers with valuable data to charge for the delivery of data via a widget for inclusion in websites.

Something along the lines of realtime share price graph delivered from NASDAQ to a companies homepage as a widget. For the right price I could see people paying for these "premium" widgets. But I agree with you a pure play widget company is unsustainable.

I'm also thinking along the lines of direct investing in the production of new shows. A VC market for TV production if you will.

Broadband TV is going to be disruptive to the creation and spotting of hits. Broadband TV lends itself to pilots and short initial series for new shows. It also offers a platform for new producers to get their programs aired.

It makes it easier and cheaper for financiers to take punts on new shows that don't necessarily have a known audience or possible audience appeal (i.e. Firefly). Broadband TV also gives new shows a fighting chance to develop an audience where now they have to fight from often poor timeslots.

Perhaps the biggest opportunity isn't in the delivery side of Broadband TV but the financing of new shows and the leveraging broadband TV to build success for the show.

I wonder if this the same of very different than TIOTI. It sounds the same but I've heard that it is different enough that Paul wasn't too worried about it when we last talked.

It strikes me that Venice is about the delivery of content where as TIOTI is about finding, discovering and networking around content. What do you think?

And also...

I see this not only as a maturing of the organisation but a maturing of the management capabilities and leadership in the company. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few noted departures because they are unable to adjust to the new focus and maturity.

I suspect that Marissa Mayer is a candidate for this. But we shall see.

The 20% rule is one that Google needs to be careful about getting rid of. There are two good reasons I can see for keeping the 20% rule:
1) talent retention, and
2) it gives the engineers the opportunity to solve niggles

I suspect that alot of the 20% time goes into creating tools and features that improves the engineer's job rather than products that go onto be sold or even released to the wider internet. Instead they go onto be utilised company wide to improve all the engineers' work.

I had forgotten about the MySQL professional license. I wonder how much revenue that component brings in?

The problem with subscription revenues (in my experience) is finding the balance between what is free and what is premium. Not always clearly split.

Another revenue model that I could see growing is transaction costs/introduction fees. Particularly for companies based around a network or marketplace then a transaction fee is viable. The introduction fees work the same as the physical world. When a company introduces to parties and a piece of business is concluded then a "introduction fee" is paid. A variant on the pay-per-action model I guess.