blog.tonyconfrey.net

So its been almost year since I posted anything on this blog. I said at the time that I was heads down on a project and I have been and am and will be. It turns out that my model of generating and discussing ideas, building a knowledge base, and evaluating opportunities, all boiled down to stumbling across an idea I believed had potential and jumping in with both feet!

At this point I’ve been experimenting, designing, learning and coding (sometimes coding *then* learning), and endeavoring in a dozen dozen other ways to get TextFlows off the ground. It seems now though that in the lifecycle of this project its time for me to start putting some more effort in to outbound communication. I’m hoping to get back to it semi-regularly.

Here’s where we are in brief.

I met Dennis when he presented at the MIT Enterprise Forum last Summer (’07). Bruce Trvalik and I went together. Dennis presented his idea to the group. He stood in front of a projected Flash animation loop and talked. The animation showed moving text in different formats. Dennis’s thesis was that text as we know and use it was designed for the static medium of the printed page, but that with the advent and proliferation of active display screens in our lives we can leverage a new and more expressive means of communication - by allowing words to fade and move and interact with each other.

Most people at the meeting were intrigued, some were dismissive, I was sold. ( For the record Bruce was unimpressed…)

At the meeting I told Dennis that his plan to migrate an awk prototype to perl would be better handled in Ruby. We later exchanged emails, met and discussed. I decided that Dennis’s path in moving his idea forward would be very similar to any path I would need to take with any idea of mine. I’m interested in applications in the area of knowledge, information, online identity and task management built on social/collaborative/web-2.0 type infrastructures. Since we needed to learn the same things I agreed to sign on to help him put up a prototype Facebook app.

That was a year ago and the path has been longer and windier than I ever imagined. Dennis and I are now partners and co-founders of TextTelevision Inc. and I’m putting all my energies into making it successful.

More to come…

I’m doing a bunch of reading in various areas to get caught up to the state of the art for a project I’m now involved with. We’re building an RIA on RAILS to integrate with Facebook and trade in Flash animations. Its taking up pretty much all my available time but I’m gonna try to put a few short blog entries together to capture where I am on a few of the steeply upward sloping learning curves.

RIAs on RAILS

I’m reading the book Ajax on Rails. Its pretty cool stuff. You write code almost entirely in Ruby on the back end with Javascript created on the fly to pass to the client. The Scriptalicious and Prototype Javascript libraries are totally integrated into the RAILS framework and so most of the UI logic is implemented fully in Ruby. The whole stack makes putting together RIA’s very simple (at least in theory). On the back end the integrated stack of MVC components seems to make implementation very efficient.

I’m drowning a bit in all the gory details and haven’t been able to devote much time to Ruby so I have few anchor points as I read and am probably missing a lot at this point. I’m hoping the whole thing degrades gracefully as you move outside its areas of strength. It seems like very rich soil in which to plant an application and at this point I think its the right choice for my purposes.

I also did a little investigation in to the Amazon Associates program. Signing up was trivial. There are a few ways you can go with them. The spectrum ranges from an engine which can generate adds for you off site totally under their control, to a set of screens which generate javascript to embed in your site to display adds for specific products. I don’t know what information they base their recommendations on. They’re going to give me 4% of sales generated thru my links for the first 7 sales and then up it to 6%. So please feel free to click thru and buy the Ajax on Rails book, it’l help me experiment with their back end reporting mechanism!

The obvious big question, for me, with the start-up route is the potential for payback. To try to get a better sense I’ve read a number of articles on the business models and funding plans for web companies. The ‘Monetizing’ question also came up at a Mobile Monday on social networking sites recently, (with no great answers from the panel, IMO). It seems that there are a lot of people groping around for answers on (or ignoring the question of) how to make money developing web apps, but not a lot of hard data or firm opinions. Here are a few of the pointers to information sources that I came across (I use the word ‘information’ lightly).

• Commercializing-Web-2-0-Hype-vs-Reality : Its a year old but the post remains valid. Dharmesh Shah takes a critical look at the statements that are thrown around claiming Web 2.0 is the best thing since sliced bread.
• joelonsoftware : A quick run down of the popular ‘business models’ for making money with web apps.
• Folknology : A quick run down on the lack of models for making money with web apps!
• O’Reilly : Even O’Reilly’s excellent and highly referenced Web 2.0 article (with Business Models in the title) doesn’t seem to talk about how to make money
• Web-2-0-Crashes-Another-Startup-Being-Sold-On-eBay : Seems the last resort is to sell the whole thing on eBay. [Note, a data point here - 3000 hits a day was netting them $1!].

So to summarize how I read these and other sources:

• Advertising - Yes, Adsense and Amazon referrals can generate some revenue, but you need a *lot* of page views and a lot of click thrus. Extrapolating wildly from the HuckaBuck data point (and corroborated by some conversations at MoMo), it seems like you need a few million hits a day and/or a finely targeted site, to generate any kind of reasonable revenue, even for a small team.
• Freemium/Subscription - Free for the individual, with premium or corporate subscription priced versions. Folks like 37-Signals seem to be somewhat successful at this and LinkedIn does it, but I don’t see a lot of successful examples.
• Revenue Sharing - The Ebay model - bring a transaction together and take a small cut. I like this one because you only charge people when you provide value, and it scales nicely. OTOH I don’t see many examples of this one either, especially amongst the smaller players.
• Buyout - This is the big non-advertising model that everyone hangs their hat on. Its hard for a small player to gain enough traction to make money in the everythings-free web 2.0 world, but there are lots of big guys out there racing each other to capture marketplaces and mind-share. If you build something good surely someone will buy you for lots of money.

Since this latter model is where most focus as their endgame, and since for any given idea I can see how I could guesstimate the probability of success with the other models (and since my wife Nancy is most skeptical of this one) I wanted to try to get a bit more quantitative. There’s a lot of information out there on acquisitions. In particular buyouts by the big three - Google, Yahoo and Microsoft - always make news. Wikipedia has entries listing known details of all transactions (ex List_of_Google_acquisitions, but I also found a neat little site which shows them in a time line. Check out - g-y-m.htm .

Here’s a grab bag of purchases from across the web app spectrum:

• Zimbra - Office suite bought by Yahoo for $350M on 9/17/07. Zimbra released on 10/05, first blog post 8/05, development began ~1/04 (there’s a reference to “almost two years”, in a 9/05 blog post).
• Feedburner - RSS aggregator bought by Google for $100M on 6/07. Feedburner launched on 2/04, started maybe 6 months earlier.
• MyBlogLog - Blog plugin tool bought by Yahoo for $10M on 1/07. MBlogLog. Launched 3/05, started 3/04
• YouTube - Social video sharing site bought by Google for $1.65B on in 11/06. Launched 2/05.
• JotSpot - Hosted Wiki creation software, bought by Google, 10/06 for 10’s of millions. Founded in 04.
• JumpCut - Online video editing acquired by Yahoo 9/06 for ~$20M. Jumpcut Launched 4/06.
• Writely - Online word processor bought by Google 3/06, price unknown but “many millions”. Writely Launched 9/05, beta 2/05.
• Flikr - Online photo sharing/tagging bought by Yahoo for $40M in 4/05. Flikr Launched 2/04, husband/wife team no VC

OK, so much for the random walk through the data, how about some random observations and conclusions. The best source I know at documenting web startups is TechCrunch. A quick walk thru their archives shows an average of 40 or so new companies discussed every month, this jives with my intuition which was telling me it seems like one a day. Obviously not everyone shows up on TC’s radar, and there are also the TechCrunch40 type events which announce more new startups in a single day than one person can comprehend. But lets go with the assumption of one to two new companies a day on the supply side.
On the demand side Google has been averaging about one acquisition a month for the last few years (google-acquisitions) but ramping up recently. Yahoo and MS are not far behind (see the wikipedia articles, eg Microsoft Acquisitions). These are not all in the web app space, maybe half of them are. So that makes for one to two acquisitions a month. Of course there are a lot of other purchasing players out there - other ISVs like Ebay (Paypal for $1.5B), Adobe (who just announced a Buzzword purchase) etc; the media players (MySpace bought by NewsCorp for $580M, Club Penguin bought by Disney for $700M etc); the big systems integrators; the telcos, etc, etc. So lets double the monthly demand rate to between two and four.
Making yet another enormous leap of quasi-logic we compare the numbers (apples to wingnuts?). One or two new companies announced per day, one or two acquisitions a fortnight - looks like maybe a 10% chance that a web startup will get acquired?

Obviously there are a huge number of other factors to any given companies success, but this analysis makes me personally a bit more confident that if you attract a strong team and build a compelling application thats somewhere in the whitespace that the big players will need to get in to, then you have a fighting chance of seeing some return.

The entrepreneurial opportunity is obviously all about value creation. So my challenge on both the find-a-job front and on the start-a-company front is the same. It is to find areas were I have an ability to add greatest value. To this end I’ll be identifying trends and discussing them, as I see them along the various informationspace dimensions. This post takes a high level look at some of the general market areas.

Trend: People are creating more and more elaborate online representations of themselves.
It is clear* that in the long term everyone in the developed world will have a significant online presence. In fact if you include mobile Internet access pretty much every person will have some online presence. Just exactly what that presence looks like is the big question. Currently any single individuals presence is very fractured. Valuable and appealing online services are proliferating, so people are signing up with many many providers. [Amazon, iTunes, Flikr/picassa, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, delicious, etc]. There is opportunity to create value both in the providing of individual appealing applications; and in the area of creating a ‘piece’ of the online presence itself, a way to manage it, or some way to help navigate, annotate, or search the vast informational resources people now have at their disposal.

In the appealing apps category there any number of current examples. I have my search history, main email and calendar at Google, public photos at Picassa or Flikr, public movies on YouTube, web homepage at HostMonster, bookmarks on delicious, social networks on LinkedIn and Facebook, blog information in WordPress, songs on iTunes, etc. Every day I come across multiple more little start-ups providing some service of value on the web. See the latest TechCrunch40 for a bunch of examples.

Trend: Migration of desktop apps. There are a number of apps in the category of previously-desktop apps that are migrating to web, to mobile, and to combo web/mobile apps with (maybe) desktop support mixed in, sometimes with offline and syncing capabilities.

Examples of desktop-to-web are Picassa and Flikr, and any number of new Office suites in various pieceparts and at various levels of integration (it seems every big player needs one). Recently we’re also seeing personal finance apps (see mint), PIMs (Scrybe) and other examples I’m sure. Gmail and Google Calendar show the desktop to web/mobile combination example. With GMail I replace my desktop-based Outlook with an equivalent functionality web app that can be accessed from anywhere, including my mobile handset.
It seems like one business idea is to find a desktop app that could be replaced by a new web-based one where multiple-access and/or collaboration can be leveraged, and then figure out how to do it in a compelling way.
Idea: MSProject replacement. I haven’t searched extensively but it seems to me that there’s space for an online MSProject type app, with gantt ui but with GTD or RTM type list management capabilities and SDM like project management capabilities. Personal use and multi-use. The lack of MSProject support on the mac means there are already a number of alternatives out there but I believe a unique slant could be taken.

Trend: Mobile Web apps. As broadband wireless becomes more ubiquitous and cellphone displays increase in size and resolution there are increasing numbers of mobile-based applications. Most mobile apps include some form of PC browser interface using the larger screen size for registration and configuration functions etc. General categories include social networking apps (eg Facebook and MySpace mobile versions, and mobile-focused start-ups like Mocospace>); and Location-Based Services (like Google Mobile), sometimes with the two combined - like geo-tagging start-up Socialight.
The trick here obviously is to take advantage of locality or the inherent always-available nature of the mobile web to provide something of value to a large customer base. Hurdles to be overcome include the need to navigate in waters patrolled by the wireless operators, the big web companies, and the handset vendors.
Idea: Location-based taxi/ride-sharing. In Dublin taxis are plentiful but uncoordinated. Most drivers operate independently and pick up fares on the roadside. Riders who want a taxi from a residence can call one of the few dispatchers but most often end up walking to the nearest main road and waiting. With location capabilities on a handset in the taxi an opt-in service could be easily created which would track drivers locations and send an SMS if a potential fare were nearby. This idea does not work well for taxi’s in the US but there could be similar ideas that work in different verticals. An on-the-fly social network based ride sharing program similar to GoLoco might also work.

Trend: Tagging. More and more apps offer some kind of tagging or categorization mechanisms. I’ve noted my use of Categories in WordPress. I also have a set of tags set up for bookmark tracking in delicious, a set of tags on my emails in Gmail and a set of categries on my songs in iTunes, ditto for Flikr, Picassa and iPhoto, and probably tags and categories other places I can’t even remember right now. Lots of sites are adding a tag capability. I also have a set of hierarchical bookmark and file folders where I categorize data and information sources. Tags are a great addition to my ability to index my information however they have a couple of problems for me. First they are flat, I have no easy way of creating or visualizing a hierarchy of tags. Second they are disorganized and distributed across my different repositories. This means that, since I’m in a different context in each app, I have a hard time using the same name for the same concept.
Idea: Tags Manager. A web and mobile tool to create tag hierarchies thru a rich visual interface. The tags being round-tripped between Tags Manager and all other apps. Permissions and group lists kept synced at the Tags Manager level.

- To Be Continued -
*When I say ‘clear’ I mean clear to me, you can draw a different conclusion. If you do, post a comment and let me know why.

Continuing with a little more boot strapping, this post outlines my plan for using this blog, and other mechanisms, to track information space exploration activities.

As noted previously the information space in question includes the evolving market areas for software applications and the current players, the technologies now available to build applications, the funding sources and business models being used by startups and larger organizations to support the development process, and (somewhat recursively) the tools and mechanisms to document such a shared information space.

Its worth noting here that my personal strength is, I believe, in the area of organizing and working with teams to build high quality software applications. My specific experience has been in the areas of Java development, Network Management, web-based apps, wireline and wireless VoIP, and (back in the day) AI and knowledge engineering. Like many of my peers I’ve had my head down for the last few years and now find myself having to catch up on a lot of the latest developments. As such some of my observations and discoveries will appear naive to those who have been more recently steeped in this stuff day to day. I believe, however, that as our industry expands in all directions more and more people find themselves in my position at the end of each gig. We put our heads down for a few years to get something done, maintaining only a general knowledge of industry trends and keeping up with the specifics of areas close to home. Then when we have the time to look around again the industry has evolved.

So what is my plan?

My plan is to use this blog to capture general information, observations, and thoughts which can stand by themselves; and serve as an interaction mechanism with the rest of the world. Then I’ll use my site on informationspace.net to capture more well structured and long lived information using a wiki and whatever other mechanisms prove to be useful. If I do it well the wiki, blog (and whatever else) will form a single integrated knowledge base. My hope is that this knowledge base will be of use, and contributed to, by folks other than myself; and that having put the effort in to getting back up to speed and documenting what we’ve found it’ll be easier to stay up to date going forward. I’ll also be putting specific actionable business and application ideas up on informationspace, sharing with folks that would like to be involved, and building up a database related to each idea in order to explore its feasibility.

As things evolve I’ll need to come up with a common taxonomy or indexing mechanism to categorize posts and wiki pages. Initially I’ve identified ‘trend’, ‘idea’ and ‘technology’ as categories I’ll apply to posts, some similar tags will apply to the wiki.

Well I made the decision to go with WordPress as my blogging software, got it installed on a new blogging sub-domain and now I’m checking out a first post.

See my manifesto if you navigated here directly.

In the spirit of tracking the process, let me note that getting to the point of having a home page on the Internet and a working blog has taken a lot more time and effort than I would have predicted. I’ll try to capture the outlines of getting an initial web presence in place here in my first post, cover getting started with blogging asap but in a different post, and then stay more up to date with it moving forward.

I knew that over time I intend to build up a knowledge base, some of it public, some with restricted access, using tools such as blogs, wikis, content management systems, bookmarking tools and whatever else is currently out there or evolving. Knowledge representation and presentation are topics of great interest to me so I see my current exploratory activities as an opportunity to educate myself, see what works for me, and see if theres anything I can improve upon.

I spent a while looking at hosted services like WordPress and Blogger for blogs; and wikispaces, wikidot and OpenGarden for wikis. All of these look like good services. There were even a few (like Squarespace) which combined multiple functions. IMO if you are just looking to get a blog out there WordPress.com is the way to go, they’ll even give you a domain name. I’m not sure what advantages Blogger gives you in terms of integration with other google apps but WP just seemed a bit more professional looking. See my delicious links and comments for more on what I looked at.

The alternative to being hosted, obviously, is to roll your own. The consensus on the tradeoffs seems to be as follows.

• Hosting your own tools takes more time and effort but gives you more control, if you are technically inclined enough to make it work and care about that level of control.
• Theres a potential issue of handing off your intellectual property to a third party who may go out of business or get acquired.
• Going with a hosted service means that if you ever get slashdotted your site is more likely to stay up, but if you start generating a lot of traffic its easier to monetize it on a private server.

Since part of my goal here is exploration I decided to self host my site content. My buddy Paul is hard core and has his own hardware set up in someones data center, I’m not that geeky so I looked in to web hosting. My first google click got me what looks like a great resource (top-10-web-hosting) which I have not cross checked with any other information sources. The top rated host - HostMonster seemed to check out fine so I went with them. I knew I wanted to use tonyconfrey.net (rather than confrey.com, which I’ve owned for a while but only use to host personal permanent email addresses). It turned out that with upfront payment for a years hosting (~$80) HM threw in the domain registration, so I registered tonyconfrey.net as I signed up.

At this point in the saga I get into the business of hosting a web server!

Earlier this week I wrote up my manifesto and used iWeb on my mac to create a web site with a first page and not much else. Host Monster gives you a graphical browser-based control panel for site management. I fiddled around with its ftp tool before I discovered I could install a WebDAV client which shows my servers file structure as a mounted volume on my laptop. With that in place it was pretty easy to export directly from iWeb to the site on the Internet. I have run into some issues whereby I seem to need to ‘eject’ the mounted volume to get the server to see the change, but once you learn your way through the maze its pretty trivial. Despite the basic-ness of the content it was pretty cool to have Nancy and Nick look it up on their machines and see it out there on the public Internet.

OK, I think that’ll do as a proof of concept first post. Feel free to post a comment or just fire me an email if you’re trying to retrace my steps and want some input.

Tony