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The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- KindleLendingClub Forced By Amazon To Rebrand; Now BookLending.com
- The End Of History, Part II
- Al Jazeera’s Social Revolution (In Realtime)
- Why Engineers Are Better Off Joining Startups
- Search Still Sucks
- Google Explains, Apologizes For, CR-48 Spam
- The Guardian’s David Leigh Talks About Julian Assange and Wikileaks
- The Guardian’s Wikileaks Book Is This Generation’s “All The President’s Men”
- Lissn Strips Down To Its Skivvies: Three Anonymous People Chat While Others Listen
- Why Starting Justin.tv Was A Really Bad Idea, But I’m Glad We Did It Anyway
- Gillmor Gang 2.12.11 (TCTV)
- (Founder Stories) Fred Wilson Explains Why He Wouldn’t Invest In Groupon Or Pandora
| KindleLendingClub Forced By Amazon To Rebrand; Now BookLending.com Posted: 13 Feb 2011 08:00 AM PST
Unfortunately, KindleLendingClub just received a call from Amazon, requesting that the startup change its name and domain. After all, Amazon owns the trademark for ‘Kindle’ and is within its rights to ask the startup to change its name. So, KindleLendingClub is now rebranding as BookLending.com, which is unfortunately not as great of a name for its service. A word of advice to startups—check the trademark data base before picking your name and domain.        
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| Posted: 13 Feb 2011 08:00 AM PST
Fear not. I can explain. Everyone is right, and what’s going on is nothing more than the end of international politics and history as we know them. Welcome to our brave new world, and about time, too. The old one sure was miserable while it lasted. Oh, it was nice enough for those few of us lucky enough to live in liberal Western democracies, where
as Gladwell put it last year. True enough, in America. But then he jumped the shark with his ill-advised post-Tunisia piece pooh-poohing the role of Twitter and Facebook:
The first sentence’s dismissal of all forms of communication as equivalent is breathtakingly stupid; the second drips with privileged ignorance. It does not seem to occur to Gladwell that perhaps a people who have been relentlessly brutalized, impoverished, and humiliated by a coterie of savage leeches for decades might possibly behave slightly differently than his own. He was promptly, and rightly, ridiculed:  @jeffjarvisJeff Jarvis Gladwell logic: RT @ku1185: @jeffjarvis People died before guns were invented, therefore guns don't kill people. …but it’s a little more subtle than that. The Egyptian activists didn’t use Twitter or Facebook to organize the machinery and tactics of their protests—in fact, they explicitly warned against doing so in the manuals they distributed. Twitter and Facebook weren’t the flame of the revolution. They were its fuel. Imagine that you are Egyptian. You are thirty years old and the same man has ruled your country since before you were born. Your world is small, not least because your government censors and monopolizes the media. Official corruption, incompetence(1), and brutality(2) are endemic. While the ruling class enriches itself, 40% of your people live on less than $2/day, and most people’s lives are steadily getting worse. Do you rise up to fight the government? Of course you don’t. Your rage is drowned out by fear and despair, a fatalistic sense that nothing can be done, that this is just how things are and ever will be, and whoever rises or even speaks against it is doomed. Take Khaled Said, an honest man beaten to death by police he refused to bribe. Egyptians are outraged, but what can they do? Nothing. A Facebook page is created in his memory. Malcolm Gladwell can tell you how irrelevant and inconsequential an act that is. …Six months later, that Facebook page has accumulated more than half a million followers, and has become an online gathering place for activists. After Tunisia erupts, an online group called the April 6 Movement reaches out to one of that page’s administrators, Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old Google executive, to ask for help organizing a day of protest. Another administrator asks the page’s followers what they should do. Ideas and plans erupt and snowball. And the rest, as they say, is history. The great paradox of tyranny is that a very small group of people brutalizes, tortures and steals from millions who, if they rose en masse, could shake off their oppressors. Revolution is simply the realization of this fact. Why did the protestors march to Tahrir Square? To show their strength in numbers. They already knew beforehand, despite the Egyptian’s government’s ongoing attempt to divide and blindfold its people, that the numbers were on their side. They only had to look at the sidebar and comment counts of Khaled Said’s memorial page. The Internet—in this case, though I hate to admit it, Facebook—lets oppressed people join in outrage, in shared fury and humiliation, in the sense of being part of a single mass of people with a single intent. Where else can you get that, in a blindfolded, fragmented nation? Censored television? Empty newspapers? How else can you look beyond your own life and your own cramped horizon, and realize that you’re part of a movement? It’s possible, Gladwell’s right about that much, but the Internet makes it so much more likely to happen. Simply by linking the oppressed and creating connections, Twitter and Facebook help to stoke the fires of change everywhere. That doesn’t necessarily mean happy endings all around. In 1989, after the Berlin Wall fell, Francis Fukuyama wrote a famous essay called The End of History, about how the entire world would soon and forever be ruled by liberal democracies. Members of China’s Politburo doubtless pass it around for a laugh every so often. The Internet may be the end of crude dictatorships like Mubarak’s, but not in China, which maintains a Great Firewall and a vast army of censors (and where people are generally getting wealthier) or Russia, where the ruling party is far more subtle and competent (and popular.) Evgeny Morozov, born in thug-ruled Belarus, isn’t entirely wrong when he warns of deluded optimism and the danger of the Net as a tool of surveillance and oppression. But the lesson of Egypt is that dictators can no longer rely on their victims’ fatalism and despair. Untrammeled Internet access—by which I mean, in practice, Twitter and Facebook—will make blatant tyranny impossible, by revealing the simple frailty of tyrants. Egypt has a mere 4 million Facebook users, only 5% of the population; even if the Mubarak regime survives Mubarak’s departure, imagine what happens when that number hits 50%. It will no longer be possible to convince the oppressed that they are powerless. (1) A friend of mine worked in Egypt’s Telecom Ministry for years. He tells of the day they moved in to their brand-new headquarters, built of marble, at great expense—only to discover that it had not occurred to anyone that the Telecom Ministry might need wires. Months later workers were still drilling more holes through the magnificent marble slabs. (2) When I flew to Cairo from Athens a few years ago, the police escorted a handcuffed man onto the flight, presumably a refugee being returned to the Mubarak regime. He was seated in the row in front of mine. I have never seen a more terrified human being. He was so frightened that, howling and trembling, he shat himself with fear. Eventually the pilot refused to fly with him, and he was removed from the plane. I wonder what happened to him; but I’d probably prefer not to know.        
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| Al Jazeera’s Social Revolution (In Realtime) Posted: 13 Feb 2011 07:54 AM PST
While you can debate about the exact role of social media, specifically Twitter and Facebook, in Egypt’s revolution, there is no question about its role as a new global media channel. Where once people tuned into CNN to watch governments collapse, this time around they tuned into Al Jazeera on the Web (at least in English speaking countries lie the U.S. where Al Jazeera English is not widely carried on cable systems). Thanks to Chartbeat, we now have a realtime snapshot of what activity looked like on Al Jazeera’s English website on Friday when Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak resigned. Everyone wanted to watch and they flooded to Al Jazeera’s English website. Concurrent realtime visits spiked from about 50,000 right before noon ET to 135,371 when the snapshot above was taken. The number of people simultaneously on Al Jazeera’s website kept going as high as 200,000—that was at any given second, and translated into millions of people watching on the Web. (And this was on top of already higher traffic which had risen 2,500 percent earlier during the uprising). Al Jazeera uses Chartbeat to track realtime visits to its websites, and they allowed Chartbeat to post the screenshots you see here to the Chartbeat blog. In addition to showing the raw number of realtime visitors, Chartbeat can also break them down by source. And here is where it sheds a light on the role of social media in spreading the word and driving people to its coverage of events. If you look at the pie chart in the lower keft-hand corner, you can see that traffic from social media (lavender) was about equal to traffic from search (green), but that is a normalized view over time. If you drill down into the report for the article, “Hosni Mubarak resigns as president,” a full 71 percent of traffic at 11:40 AM ET came from social media (see first screenshot below). The second screenshot below shows a bar chart that breaks up traffic by source across time, and shows how traffic from social media (also lavender) spiked across the site right around noon. And what was the biggest source of social media traffic? It wasn’t Facebook. It was Twitter (followed by Reddit). When it comes to spreading realtime news, the social revolution is very real and Twitter is in the vanguard.
       
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| Why Engineers Are Better Off Joining Startups Posted: 13 Feb 2011 07:50 AM PST
Editor’s note: Guest author Bindu Reddy is the CEO of MyLikes, a word-of-mouth ad network funded by former Googlers. Previously at Google she managed a team of product managers in charge of various Google apps including Google Docs, Google Sites, and Blogger. Her last guest post was on Facebook overtaking Google. It is truly a great time to be an engineer building new things. Gadgets from sci-fi movies of 10 years ago are creeping up on us in the real world and mobile devices and social networking have made the internet go truly mainstream. We are on the cusp of seeing even more world changing ideas becoming a reality when everyone is walking around with powerful computers connected with over 20MBps of bandwidth to millions of people. To top it all off, there is another technology boom happening right now. Anyone who has lived in Silicon Valley through a few business cycles can feel it just by watching the traffic on 101, or reading about "bubbles" in the tech press. In the previous tech booms, a steady stream of top-notch technical graduates from other countries helped fill the recruiting needs of startups flush with VC money. But that is no longer the case. When I talk to recent top graduates from the IITs, my own alma-mater, I can clearly see the trend—very few of the rest of the world’s best recent graduates are planning to build their careers in the US over the next decade. In addition, we have multiple successful large companies, most notably Google and Facebook, which have hired huge numbers of engineers and plan to grow their hiring rates even more. All this has caused a severe shortage of good engineering talent. Which is why, the time has never been better to work at a startup. The downside risk is relatively low. With lots of venture capital funding, salaries and benefits at startups are competitive to those at large companies. And the potential upside possibilities are big, as the IPO and exit markets heat up. Worst case scenarios are also getting better as the big internet companies are doing lots of talent acquisitions and acqhires of failed startups. More importantly, the one thing that every passionate engineer cares about—the ability to build and ship products—is harder at large companies. Engineers become hobbled by large code bases, bureaucratic processes, countless meetings, common infrastructure, and endless email threads, among other obstacles. Amazon web services and other cloud-computing technologies have enabled small teams of engineers to build large scalable products and scale to millions of users without a lot of upfront capital. The competitive advantage has swung over the last couple of years to smaller, more nimble companies. Until recently, engineers developed their careers by becoming proficient at the latest and greatest platforms, languages and techniques either through experience or by having the ability to quickly get up to speed. Today, most interesting technology is built directly for end users and it is a crucial skill for an engineer to understand quick iteration based on user feedback, however complex the technology. Increased technology and distribution leverage means that in the future, smaller teams are going to build higher impact things and being able to build an end to end solution as part of a small team is going to be a necessary skill. A startup is an ideal environment to develop your career for the future as far as both these aspects go. People usually consider making big decisions in terms of what they stand to lose or gain. But often times, the cost to consider is that of an opportunity not taken and a decision not made. So here’s my admittedly self-serving advice to all engineers working at large companies: Yes, it is a comfortable job. You probably don't have to work very hard. There are lots of people to keep you company. But think about the cost of staying. The time is now . . . to join a startup. Photo by Anirudh Koul.        
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| Posted: 12 Feb 2011 11:53 PM PST
It’s been a creeping feeling, growing over the years, but it sort of feels like pre-Google again. Search is a really bad overall experience. Travel searches, for example, are a joke, and startups like Gogobot are popping up to try to fix that. When I’m trying to figure out the best hotel for me when I travel I bail on Google entirely and head to Tripadvisor (shudder), and Gogobot. Same for gadget product reviews. GDGT, Amazon and occasionally Consumer Reports seem to have the best collections of data, so I just go there directly and bypass Google. In fact, I use Google mostly for navigation, not discovery these days. Meaning I know the document I’m trying to find and figure out the best search query to locate it. But pure discovery? It’s a shit show of layer upon layer of SEO madness vying for my click. Is there actual evidence of Google failing at search? Probably somewhere, but certainly not in the search share numbers. They maintain a healthy, almost monopolistic, lead in search despite huge efforts by Microsoft to compete. But then again, AltaVista had huge search share too, right before they suddenly didn’t any more. And while I watch search startups like Blekko make serious attempts to fix search by thinking about the problem a little differently, it’s just too early to know if they’ll succeed. So what is the evidence that search still sucks? Well, you know it’s true, just like me. And the fact that the mighty Google is suddenly taking every opportunity to toot their own search horn shows they know it, too. They tore into Microsoft for stealing data with just a little too much vehemence. In the end it felt like less of a gotcha moment, and more like entrapment. And then today, with this JC Penney nonsense. For months the company gamed Google to get the top result in dozens of lucrative product searches. Google recently discovered it and shut it down. And then, as best I can tell, fed the story to the NY TImes as a sort of victory lap. I say it should be an embarrassing moment for Google, not one to celebrate. In fact I did say it, here. Google’s Matt Cutts responded by lightly trashing Bing: “@arrington the newer/most recent spate of links happened in the last 3-4 months; not over a year. JCP still ranking on [dresses] on eg Bing.” Which is fine. It’s always fun to slap Bing around a little, I guess. Vanessa Fox, who used to fight spam at Google, weighed in as well, saying “@arrington – spam fighting will always be an ongoing battle at Google. Have to balance being aggressive in algorithms w/ collateral damage.” Earlier today she also reported on the JC Penney story. When companies start to flail they nearly always do a couple of things. First, they trash the competitors. Then they talk about how hard the problem is and that the solution is a long term one. Altavista did a lot of that in the late nineties. Right before a competitor came in and fixed the AltaVista problem permanently. Yes, search is very hard. But Silicon Valley is really good at doing hard things. The real problem right now is that there’s a perception that Google is untouchable in search. When a venture capitalist sees a pitch from a new search startup all they can think about is the Cuil debacle. And since venture capitalists are just about the most risk averse people in Silicon Valley, the funds just don’t flow. But all the evidence suggests otherwise. Demand Media is worth $1.6 billion, and their entire business is based on pushing cheap, useless content into Google to get a few stray links. If Google was good at search, Demand Media wouldn’t exist. And Bing wouldn’t be making solid gains in search market share. And JC Penney wouldn’t be able to massively game search results for a few months, during the holiday season, without getting caught until months later. We need to see a real competitor emerge in search. If only because it will make Google up its game, and make all of us a lot happier.        
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| Google Explains, Apologizes For, CR-48 Spam Posted: 12 Feb 2011 11:04 PM PST
Early this morning people who have received a Google CR-48 notebook, and people who’ve requested one, got hit with 100 or more emails from a newly created Google Group. Google sent out an email this evening apologizing for the emails and explaining what happened. Google was planning on launching the group next week for all users who have been selected to be in the program. But someone discovered it early and posted to it. Says the email: “Unfortunately, we had misconfigured this forum to email every post to every member. Thus, the first post started an avalanche of responses…We have since deleted this group.” The full email is below. The best part, in my opinion, are the step by step directions on how to delete the emails (select all, hit delete, etc.).
       
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| The Guardian’s David Leigh Talks About Julian Assange and Wikileaks Posted: 12 Feb 2011 05:57 PM PST
I’ve just posted my review of the Guardian’s Wikileaks book, co-authored by Investigations Editor David Leigh and Moscow Correspondent Luke Harding. The book is full of frankly incredible revelations about the paper’s relationship with Wikileaks and Julian Assange. So incredible, in fact, that I wanted to ask the authors more about them. On Thursday morning, I spoke to Leigh (who is based in London) via Skype. We talked about Assange, the Wikileaks revalations, whether Assange is a journalist or “just an IT guy”, the difference between the “mainstream media” and wiki journalism, Assange’s new-found friendship with the Russian government and a whole lot more. The full video is below, followed by a few of my favourite quotes from Leigh… David Leigh… …on Julian Assange:
…on citizen journalism:
…on Assange’s claims that the book is a smear:
…on civilian casualties:
…on the digital divide:
…on Wikileaks vs Mainstream Journalism:
…on anti-Americanism:
…on pro-Americanism:
…on Assange “palling up” with the Russians:
…on hypocrisy:
‘Wikileaks – Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy‘ by David Leigh and Luke Harding is available worldwide now (US, UK)        
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| The Guardian’s Wikileaks Book Is This Generation’s “All The President’s Men” Posted: 12 Feb 2011 05:56 PM PST
For my money, Keller's account was the stand-out highlight of the book – a behind the scenes journalism thriller, punctuated by details from the leaked documents themselves. In fact, as I read through the bulk of the book, I found myself wishing that Keller's style had continued throughout. Even in edited, compiled form, the revelations from "Cablegate" and the Iraq war logs are a lot to digest and it would have been wonderful to have Keller as narrator to walk the reader through them all. That didn't affect my review, though: it was too much to expect the Times to publish that kind of comprehensive narrative so quickly. You can imagine, then, how delighted I was to receive a copy of the Guardian's new crash-published Wikileaks book and discover that it was all the things I wanted from the Times’ book. And more. Authored by Investigations Editor David Leigh and Moscow Correspondent Luke Harding, ‘Wikileaks – Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy‘ (US, UK) tells the story of the Guardian's relationship with Wikileaks and Julian Assange, from the moment Assange invited Leigh to a hotel room to show him an astonishing video of a US military helicopter killing ten Iraqis and two Reuters journalists – right up to the present day, with Wikileaks hailed for sparking revolution in Tunisia. While the Times' book was largely straight-faced (even po-faced) in its dealings with Assange, the Guardian’s Leigh and Harding don't shy away from applying a very British sense of humour and irony when their subject demands it. Take, for example, the comic scene that opens the book: a paranoid Assange disguising himself as an old woman – Toad of Toad Hall style – to escape an imagined CIA tail. As British newspaper writers are wont to say – you couldn't make it up. The bulk of the narrative, though, is deadly serious, delivering page after page of incredible revelations. Those who hail Assange as an unalloyed hero might be given pause by his reaction when Leigh tries to persuade him to redact the names of informants in the Iraq war logs.
To quote Keanu Reeves — woah. Then there's the sordid little twist of Israel Shamir: the Wikileaks collaborator who, we're told, was paid €2000 by Assange for "services rendered – journalism" and who subsequently wrote articles attacking the two women who have accused Assange of sexual assault. Shamir is now Wikileaks’ official representative in Russia, where Assange has begun to cozy up with the government in order to get back at the American politicians who have called for his head. That story alone is worth the book's price of admission. One of the preemptive criticisms of Leigh and Harding's work (this one from Assange’s new UK publishing partner, the Telegraph) was that it "outs" Private Bradley Manning as the source of the leaked documents. Obviously, the criticism is ludicrous: Manning himself took care of that when he confessed all to hacker Adrian Lamo. What the book in fact does to Manning is humanises him. Like many on both sides of the Wikileaks debate, I had initially been unsympathetic to the plight of a disgruntled soldier who took it upon himself to leak hundreds of thousands of secret documents. But Leigh and Harding's account of Manning’s upbringing, career and subsequent breakdown persuaded me that the reality is somewhat more nuanced. Yes, Manning acted recklessly, but it's clear from the evidence offered that Manning had some pretty legitimate concerns about his superiors' attitude towards Iraqi civilians. One episode in particular stands out: Manning was ordered to investigate the case of fifteen Iraqis arrested by local police for distributing "anti-Iraqi literature". Diligently translating the literature, Manning discovered that the material was little more than a scholarly critique against government corruption. But, on reporting that fact to his superiors, he was told to "shut up" and ordered to "explain how to assist the Iraqi police in finding more detainees." As the authors put it:
Equally persuasive is the authors' defense of the leaks themselves, and their contention that the world is a better place for their publication. Furthermore, for all the sound and fury from the American government, it seems pretty clear that – in redacted form at least – none of the documents published has put lives at risk. When I last wrote about Wikileaks on TechCrunch, a number of commenters demanded to know what business a blog dedicated to technology had writing about Julian Assange. It was a frankly bizarre objection: this is, after all, a story about a disgruntled computer specialist leaking electronic files (some of which concern Google in China) to a hacker who uses encryption and p2p networks to publish documents on the Internet. As tech stories go, it makes the Matrix look like Ben Hur. Hopefully those commenters will be satisfied by the Guardian’s thorough account of the various technologies behind Wikileaks, as explained by technology editor Charles Arthur (disclosure: Arthur was my editor at the Guardian). Arthur’s description of how Assange and his collaborators used TOR (and what TOR is) is the best I've read. The contrast between that explanation and Leigh's self-confessed technophobia are wonderful too, particularly the moment where Leigh has to drive across London in the middle of the night so that Assange can show him how to unzip a file. It’s that same contrast of cultures – between traditional journalism and bleeding-edge hacker culture – that form the backbone of the book. Despite Assange’s loathing of "the mainstream media", he soon learns that "citizen journalism" has its limits. By any metric, Wikileaks’ helicopter video was explosive – and yet when traditional news outlets (including Reuters) stubbornly refused to buy into Assange’s "Collateral Murder" narrative, the story quickly faded from public attention. Likewise it quickly became clear that, when thousands of documents are dumped online without context or explanation, even the combined efforts of a million amateur bloggers can't begin to make sense of them. Yet, in the hands of a small team of professional reporters, those same documents quickly become coherent narratives and world-changing headlines. Those who believe citizen media – or leak-dumping, or crowd-sourcing – is going to kill traditional journalism might ask themselves why, despite Assange having threatened to sue most of his previous media partners, he's still desperately clamoring for new ones – most recently the Telegraph (UK) and Russia Today (described by Leigh as '[an] arm of [the] Russian state'). Indeed, while 'Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War On Secrecy' is many things – a thriller, a story of international diplomacy, a tale of greed and ambition and double-crosses; a comedy, a tragedy – above all it's a manifesto for the future of professional journalism. Like lots of kids who ended up as professional writers or reporters, I grew up reading and re-reading Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's All The President's Men. The tools – and media – might have changed dramatically since Watergate but, as Leigh and Harding show, the thrill and skill of great reporting is just the same. As such, if Wikileaks is this generation’s Watergate, then 'Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy‘ might well prove to be its All The President's Men; educating a whole new generation of would-be reporters on the power and importance of the professional press. … Watch My Interview With David Leigh
On Thursday morning, I spoke to the Guardian’s David Leigh via Skype. I asked him about his relationship with Julian Assange and Wikileaks, whether he stands by some of the more incredible revelations in the book – and how it feels for a liberal Guardian journalist to be described as "the man". You can watch the whole conversation here.        
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| Lissn Strips Down To Its Skivvies: Three Anonymous People Chat While Others Listen Posted: 12 Feb 2011 01:54 PM PST
When Lissn launched on stage at TechCrunch50 in September 2009, we described it as sort of a “broader Twitter meets a simpler Google Wave“. Well, like the latter, the idea behind Lissn never really caught on. By March of last year, the service decided to pivot a bit to be based more around individuals rather than specific conversations. But that didn’t really work either. So now, with version 3, they’ve decided to strip away basically everything. Founder Myke Armstrong says that they started removing features after hearing author Eric Ries talk about creating a “minimum viable product”. He determined that Lissn, at its core, was simply about conversations, not the people having them or the topics they’re about. So here we have the new Lissn, which is sort of like a Chatroulette for conversations now. If that sounds familiar, it’s a bit like what Omegle offers. And Armstrong isn’t shying away from that comparison. But he thinks it’s slightly more than that — he thinks it’s more like Twitter meets Omegle now. Essentially, Lissn now allows for three people to chat while any number of people can listen. The key is that all three people are anonymous except for two things: their location is shown (at the state level) and the site that they came from is shown (Twitter.com, for example). Eventually, the plan is to add other features as well. Armstrong calls three the “magic number” for these type of conversations based on what he observed through Lissn up until now. So will Lissn work this time around? The once red-hot Chatroulette angle cooled off almost as quickly. But some might say that was at least in part due to the exposed male genitalia aspect. At the very least, random anonymous conversations should lead to some really awkward ones. And it couldn’t be easier to start with Lissn now, as you don’t have to sign up at all. You just go there and start chatting.
       
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| Why Starting Justin.tv Was A Really Bad Idea, But I’m Glad We Did It Anyway Posted: 12 Feb 2011 01:07 PM PST
Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Justin Kan, founder of Justin.tv. Right now I’m neck deep in product launch mode, putting the finishing touches on our new mobile video application—Socialcam. Of course, I've been here before . . . Years ago when we launched the Justin.tv show we had no idea what we were doing. This much was obvious to anyone who watched. Outsiders attribute far more strategic thought to the venture than we gave it. Some think that we planned all along to start a live platform, and that the Justin.tv show itself was a way of promoting that platform. While this ended up happening, none of it had crossed our minds at the time. Emmett Shear and I had been working on Kiko, the first Javascript web calendaring application in the Microsoft Outlook style. We prototyped the application in our final year at Yale, went on to raise money from Y Combinator, then continued working on it for over a year. Then Google Calendar was released—boom—absorbing most of our nascent user base and capturing most of the early adopter mindshare. But to be perfectly honest, Kiko would have failed regardless. We were too easily distracted and hadn’t really thought through the strategic implications of owning a standalone calendaring property (hint: no one wants a calendar without email). A short time later we were burned out and spending most of our time playing Xbox with the Reddit guys in Davis Square—hardly a startup success story. Emmett and I started thinking about possible ways to get out of the calendar business. At the same time, I was startup fatigued. We had spent over a year paying ourselves nothing. The seed and angel investment market conditions were the polar opposite of what they are today. It had been a struggle to even raise a paltry $70,000, and we had failed to build a product with real traction. I was starting to think about moving back to Seattle to try something new, maybe in a different industry. Still, we learned a ton and it was fun to be part of the early Y Combinator startup community (then largely in Boston). We became friends with Matt Brezina and Adam Smith (of Xobni), Trip Adler, Tikhon Bernstam and Jared Friedman (of Scribd), and many others. It's amazing to see how many of those friendships persist today, and even more amazing how well many of those companies are doing. Coming back from one particular YC dinner, Emmett and I were discussing strategic ideas for Kiko, and I remember telling Emmett an idea that popped into my head: what if you could hear an audio feed on the web of our discussion? Wouldn’t that be interesting to other like-minded entrepreneurial types? We kept going, and eventually the idea morphed into a video feed. Then it became a live video feed. Then it became a continuous live video feed that followed someone around 24/7. Then it had chat, and a community built around watching this live show, which was now a new form of entertainment. I was hooked. I couldn’t stop talking about the idea. I mentioned it at YC dinners and to other friends. I even came up with a perfect name for it: Justin.tv. On one trip to DC, I told my Dad and my college friend Michael Seibel what I was thinking. Eventually, in-between drinking sessions, we thought of a brilliant idea for divesting ourselves of Kiko, which is a story for another day. After that, Emmett and I were coming up with other startup ideas (I guess we got excited about staying in the industry after all). One particular favorite was the idea of a web app that would ingest your blog’s RSS feed and then allow you to layout and print physical magazines from it. Excitedly, we drove one afternoon to Paul Graham’s house to pitch it. We explained the idea to Paul and Robert Morris, who just happened to be at the house visiting. I vaguely recall there also being a “this will kill academic publishing” angle, although I can’t figure out how that sensibly fits in now. Paul didn’t particularly like the idea: he didn’t think people would use it. “Well,” he said, “what else do you have?” I said the only thing I could think of: “Justin.tv.” Because it was something I was clearly passionate about, and because creating a new form of entertainment was clearly a big market (if you could invent one!), Paul was actually into it. Robert’s addition to the conversation was “I’ll fund that just to see you make a fool of yourself.” Emmett and I walked out of there with a check for $50,000. Six months later, we’d recruited two other cofounders (Kyle Vogt, our hardware hacker, who we convinced to drop out of MIT on a temporary leave of absence, and Michael Seibel, my college friend from DC, who became our “producer”). We built a site with a video player and chat and two prototype cameras that captured, encoded and streamed live video over cell data networks, negotiated with a CDN to carry our live video traffic, and raised an additional couple hundred thousand dollars. Our plan? Launch the show and see what happens. Now, let me just tell you why this was a bad idea:
How did we get as far as we did?
Ultimately, the show failed. But all told, I’m thankful every day that things went the way they did. Why?
Today, I’m more excited about Justin.tv than I’ve been at any time since we launched the initial platform. Why? We’re taking everything we’ve gathered and learned over the past four and half years building the largest live video platform on the Web (17 million monthly unique visitors in Dec according to comScore's MediaMetrix), and applying it to tackle a new generation of problems in mobile video. Our world class web and mobile engineering team, all of our product development knowledge, our substantial, scaled video infrastructure, and everything we’ve learned about building engineering teams has all been put to work on a new app that we think is going to change everything. Our new app is called Socialcam, but that’s another story. Photo by Terry Chay        
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| Posted: 12 Feb 2011 10:00 AM PST Watching the government fall in Egypt felt a lot like the Berlin Wall coming down. Brian Williams interrupted the Today Show with a special report that left no doubt what had happened before Williams said a word. You could say they wanted a revolution, but this time was different. The difference was real time, as embodied by Twitter and Facebook and the rubric social media. The way it was handled, as part of the story Williams intoned as he announced Mubarek's resignation, came close to rolling up the Twitter trigger as a central element of the event. Yet as with the birth of Twitter, the rush of FriendFeed to real time, and the occupation of computing by the iPad, we almost don't see the completeness with which social mobile has only just begun to flex its muscles. On the Gillmor Gang, I recalled that moment when Gabe Rivera suggested I log into Twitter. Then came the year where I posted nothing, followed by the gaming of Track, the FailWhale, and a lot of noise about how social media and the enterprise didn't have a thing in common. Of course, they were wrong, and Marc Benioff proved us right. Chatter.com was announced at the Super Bowl, and now millions are slowly moving down the runway toward takeoff. Chatter rolled out @mentions and Likes this Sunday, and we heard the same old noises about applying social signals to business processes. Fellow Gangster John Taschek and I have been experimenting with @mentions for some time now on Twitter. Together with direct messages, the two signals have provided a key tool for communicating what we want publicly, and what we want to keep private. Email can kiss its lack of the @sign goodbye. And along with it, the malignant hierarchical constraints that choke serendipity and calcify progress. Email creates the fame monster of who's in charge, who's starting the conversation, who's managing the flow. In a stream architecture, relevance and authority are earned by the subtle observation of cloud dynamics. Not just what you say but what you don't. Not just when you contribute but when you ratify by laying out. Not just what you earn with each comment, but what you put away for a rainy day through an accumulation of signal, rhythm, silence, humor. Email is a fire drill. Here's what we're talking about, when we're expecting it, why you're going to do it. The answers are turned into commitments, performance criteria, weights and balances in calculating your value to the enterprise. But the tools of such arbitrage are to:, cc:, and blindcc:. This message is for you, and fyi for them. And secretly fyi but just listen, don't jump in. The bcc: carries with it an implicit agreement that the very fact of the bcc: is not to be shared. Tweets, @mentions, and DMs can handle most of those email patterns, but add an additional layer of signal to the conversation. A tweet or retweet tells not only what you should learn but who are the presumed listeners. A retweet is essentially an @mention without the overt cc: signal, providing velocity to a stream of ideas, alerts, or items. @mentions add the element of shared experience, the water cooler opportunity, not just for the current item but for future and even past examination. The direct message feels like an email to: with its tunnel from you to them, but it also carries an affinity with its realtime insertion into the push notification stream. Because it shares that alert visibility with @mentions, it unifies the citations that frequent both types into a stream of notifications rich with context and timeliness. But it makes no demands on you to continue the form of the originating message. Often I will respect the privacy of a direct message in thinking about who to pass it along to, but stripped of the commentary to the core citation the message can be shared in open or additional direct channels. Thinking across the public/private axis produces a layer of abstraction about the metadata surrounding the citation and the cloud to which the citation itself can be pushed. Gabe Rivera was reticent to discuss his mix of signals and how they are orchestrated to produce Techmeme, but in general his recent experiments with adding social signals not just as indicators of authority but also as content themselves speak to this same abstraction of the elements of the broader conversation. By whitelisting authoritative nodes, he is adding cloud dynamics to the area between blog posts and micromessages in a way similar to what @mentions and dms do to the area between public and private domains. It's a blend of institutional memory and actionable discovery that proves both valuable and highly authoritative when switched on. With these tools, we can now reinvent work, politics, the notion of expertise, and what constitutes leadership skills. In my own work, the velocity of @mentions and streaming video feeds back on itself to accelerate the progress we can make, which then provides fodder for the streams we produce externally as well as internally. It's much like a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the act of imagining leads to the economy of citation and the velocity of humor to reach the target and the beginning of the cycle simultaneously. The message of Will.i.am's Chatter.com films at halftime was one of transformation, of imagining the world as we intuit it could be, of discovering rather than preaching. If we're wondering what Chatter.com is supposed to be, that's because we intuit what that is going to be. As I reminded Gabe, I had no idea what Twitter was good for, but what it could become? I had a feeling, that's for sure. I've still got that feeling. @mention me and do two things: tell me what you think, and give a clue to what you'll think next. It sounds simplistic, like Scoble publishing his phone number on his blog. But @mentions require just enough work to over time filter the stream to those most invested in the dynamics of the particular cloud. The signals derived from association, of the cumulative nature of @mentions, the dynamics of the conversation, the two-way assent of direct messages. When I want to bring Kevin Marks into the conversation on the Gang, I bait him with some aspersions about the emptiness of the open model, and boom, he's there. It's an @kevinmarks informed by the cumulative stream, and those who seek to game it or inflict insult will eventually tire of the sport. Remember when we got the Twitter religion, when Friendfeed went real time in a big way, when Jobs sat on the couch with the iPad. In the age of too much of nothing, as Bob Dylan wrote, our brains are choking on the stuff in the middle. Short term, we got it covered pretty much: gotta take out the recycling, check Techmeme, oh look, Mubarek quit after all, answer email, rinse, repeat. Long term, somehow we have plenty of room for all those years ago, for the big thoughts, the petty grudges, the songs that carried our dreams along. But middle term, we're screwed. The kids will say it's age, old man, but I see it everywhere: the hunt for the right word, the blank look about something that happened last week or the grunt of frustration at remembering too late what I forgot to do. It's the memory that slips quietly from short to not long enough ago. Soon we'll master the multitasking of push notification, harness the now, corral the middle into a shared memory where we get reinforcement about the value of savoring our success with change. You could see it in the eyes of the Egyptians, in the chorus of their yearning. They just used this moment of social media to stand as a group and through the force of their cloud bring about change. They know better than us how difficult the road ahead is, but they know that turning away is worse. 'Don't you know that you can count me out… in.' @gaberivera @scobleizer @kevinmarks @jtaschek @stevegillmor        
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| (Founder Stories) Fred Wilson Explains Why He Wouldn’t Invest In Groupon Or Pandora Posted: 12 Feb 2011 09:30 AM PST Few VCs have a hotter hand right now than Fred Wilson. His firm, Union Square Ventures, is an investor in Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare, Tumblr, Etsy, Clickable, and more . In this episode of Founder Stories, he talks to host Chris Dixon about Union Square’s investment thesis has changed from going after all web apps to companies that are “building a large networks of engaged users.” (Watch the video above). It has to be be both a large network and engaged users. By that requirement, he says he wouldn’t invest in Pandora (which just filed for an IPO yesterday, although this was taped a couple weeks ago) because Pandora listeners just sit back. The users aren’t doing anything in Pandora,” he says, “even though Pandora is a great company.” Similarly, he wouldn’t invest in Groupon. Not because he thinks it’s a bad business, it’s just not his area of focus. “Groupon is an ad network,” he says, “we wouldn’t invest in that.” Within ecommerce, he feels that marketplaces (like Etsy) do fall under his definition, but things like Diapers.com or Zappos would not. Wilson also mentions some companies that got away which he wishes he had invested in: AirBnB and Bump, which he lost to Sequoia. Dixon and Wilson also talk about the relationship between founders and VCs, and the importance of injecting capital when a company needs to scale, as happened with Twitter and Tumblr. Dixon recalls a study that showed the farther way the VC is from a company, the better it does. Wilson agreed, citing as proof Twitter and Zynga, which are both in California, while Union Square is based in New York (as an early investor in both, this gave the two companies about a year of minimum meddling). In the video segment below, Wilson and Dixon dive into the mechanics of the VC business, and talk about Union Square’s new $165 million Opportunity Fund, the “cancerous management fees” VC firms charge their investors, and why it might be a good thing to let startup founders take money off the table before an IPO or sale. “It allows them to take more risks,” argues Wilson, “because not everything is riding on the company.” If you want to hear more of this conversation, check out Part I where Wilson and Dixon talk about today’s frothy valuations.        
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In early January, Amazon
A decade ago I tried Google for the first time. Like everyone said, it was magic – the result I wanted was right there at the top. For someone who’d been using AltaVista for years before that it was a very pleasant experience. Anyone who was on the Internet before Google came along knows exactly what I’m talking about. Google just felt right. It got the job done.
“Freedom of speech is being denied [to] Luke Harding while Wikileaks and Julian are getting in to bed with these dictators; these enemies of freedom of speech…” – David Leigh 
Two weeks ago, I 
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