blog.tonyconfrey.net

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