Incidentally, BranchOut is a new startup that hopes to provide a solution to these challenges. It is, essentially, a professional network within Facebook. BranchOut allows users to create connections with individuals at top companies, and it gives businesses the opportunity to professionally recruit, find leads, and more.

Rick Marini, BranchOut’s founder and CEO, said, “It is truly your professional profile within Facebook.”

Although BranchOut has been referred to as the LinkedIn for Facebook, Marini said that it is much more. As he explained, the startup offers a different experience since it brings a gaming feature as well as other “fun” features to the career market.

Up to this point, BranchOut has been focused on the consumer experience. However, Marini pointed out that the next phase of the startup would be geared toward enterprises and would include advanced capabilities.

“We’re really going beyond the consumer experience and trying to build true business tools for people to, hopefully, be able to change their lives,” he said.

TripUp’s less than a year old – a “beta” tag is still prominently displayed throughout the site – so this is quite a win for its owners.  Presumably a win, anyway, as the purchase price remains unknown, but Sam Rogoway, TripUp’s CEO, sounds pleased.

“By joining the SideStep family and collaborating on new innovations, we’re poised to introduce our exciting community and social network to millions of travelers,” he stated in a press release.  In fact, according to the same release, SideStep receives over six million visitors per month.

Now, as long as we’re dealing with SideStep and TripUp, I’ll continue the pattern (in terms of names) and turn to StartUp Beat.  “TripUp came up with a number of social tools for travel enthusiasts, including Trip Gurus, which allows travelers to give and receive advice, meet up with fellow travelers, and hook up with locals,” notes one article.  “The site also includes user-generated travel blogs, photos, videos, maps and reviews.”

Judging by that description, it sounds as if both sides of this acquisition received good deals.  I’m now going to go write about something that doesn’t have two capitalized letters per word.

Like others, the primary activity is messaging to your social network.  You message to all your friends or public like others, or directly like typing "D Username" in Twitter at the beginning of a message, but also lets you select a subset of friends.  Beyond messages, you can share links, files and events.  Beyond doing this on the web, there is a Windows or Mac rich client.

The digerati and diggerati will probably rant away about how it doesn’t have SMS or IM integration like Twitter, how the content is mundane (same thing with blogging five years ago), how it needs APIs and microformats (which it does, and hooks into Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming and Facebook are inevitable), or just complain about adding friends again (Adding friends is the new zen).  The design is slick on both the web and client and they will polish up key details like last names, comment threading like Jaiku, permalinks and need a more public space to explore. 

What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it? — Henry Miller

But here’s the three trends:

YASMS Gets and Ad Format — I admire startups that launch with an actual business model.  They have introduced a new Ad Format, a message broadcast into the stream with the Pownce icon (the green P in the above screenshot is an ad from PBwiki, I love wikis) that doesn’t seem to persist.  I didn’t mind the ad from LaughingSquid (first I saw) in my peripheral attention.  And if I did, I could pay to make it go away, but subscribing to the Pro version for $20/year and also be able to send files over 100MB.

AIR Gets a Viral App — The client is built on the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), formerly Apollo and still in Beta.  Pownce’s virality will give AIR the airtime it needs for base of users to install it, making it easier for the next AIR client to come along.  This should be AIR’s showcase.  That said, Pownce’s model is what I call contained virality, where limits are part of the draw and when you are in you feel in (at least to share music, a hidden driver).

Consumer Collaboration Get Hip — Anyone who follows the enterprise collaboration space will immediately see parallels with P2P collaboration apps like Groove or Shinkuro.  Or IM, Skype and more directly enterprise IM like MindAlign.  The key difference is group forming by social network and default modes of sharing more publicly.  Pownce will appeal to a very different demographic, that’s already collaborating on blogs, wikis and IM, and potentially full a space in between.

There are several vectors in which Pownce could go, or others could go towards including presence, location, public IM, security, indexing and integration.  Pownce will have to open up invites soon (I’m out, please don’t ask) to build its network effect before others encroach.  It isn’t unique enough to gain the continuous or at least partial attention of users for yet another client.  Infrastructure costs will be greater than P2P.  At the risk of breaking the design and making it too complex, Pownce should give serious thought to the role of standards and how they could be a client for Facebook.

Please, I don’t have any invites.

Comments

Tag:

I’m a fan of Joel Spolsky.  I’m impressed with his wit and humor.  Some of his older stuff was really good, but most of his newer stuff just hasn’t struck me in the same way.  But, maybe that’s just me.

I’m a fan of Paul Graham.  I’m impressed with his intelligence and ability to really cover a topic well in a way that makes sense and appeals to my analytical side.

I’m a fan of Guy Kawasaki because despite not having had that much startup experience, he seems to really get it.  He’s got some natural startup instincts and an approachable writing style.

But, none of these is my favorite startup-related blog anymore.  That designation goes to Marc Andreesen’s relatively new blog, blog.pmarca.com (though the name itself is not particularly intuitive).  As evidence, I’ll cite his two most recent articles, which I think are simply brilliant. 

1.  Guide To Startups, Part 1: Why Not To Do A Startup

2.  Guide To Startups, Part 2: When The VCs Say No

I defy you to find more useful and insightful content on the topic of startups.

As a startup blogger myself, I am continually humbled by the quality of content that is out there.  Now, Marc’s raised the bar even higher.  If you are a busy startup founder and don’t have much time to read, you should probably read Marc’s stuff instead of mine.  Trust me, you’ll be glad you switched…

Comments

Tag:

Is 30 Too Old To Be A Web Visionary?

I’m 30 now, so I remember my Twenties well, dead as they are. We say "turning" 30 because that’s what is: turning some crazy corner in life. I’m slower, fatter, and my knees and stomach don’t work like they used to. The music’s getting too loud. I like four-door cars and watching the news.

But I’m not dumber, or less in-tune with things, or limited in creativity. In fact, I’d say I’m better than I used to be at everything except jumping. That’s not arrogance. That’s confidence. I’m smarter, more experienced, less apt to be impulsive and have learned more about how the world works.

I’m responsible, mostly because now other people rely on me, rather than just me relying on myself.

The preceding speech is inspired by a recent blogospheric spat that came to a head over the weekend, pitting old against young – a classic battle, really, an "age-old," if you’ll forgive the pun, tale spanning back even to the Old Testament, where conscientious older observers look back and laugh at the ignorance and capriciousness of their youth, and laugh harder as they watch the once-immortal turn 30.

With Thirty comes the epiphany: I really don’t know everything. I’m just really good at blowin’ smoke.

The debate begins with venture capitalist blogger Fred Wilson, who suggested in a multi-part series that web services entrepreneurs over 30 are becoming obsolete. He writes:

I really don’t want to be the guy who made it harder for anyone older than 30 to get funded in the web services market.

But I’ve been thinking about all the young entrepreneurs we are seeing walk through our offices. I’ve been thinking about Mark Zuckerberg, Rob Kalin, all the ycombinator entrepreneurs, and the 15 year olds who are hacking up facebook apps. You can’t ignore it. There is something fundamental and important going on….

Who is developing this "clearer idea"? Who is developing the set of "design patterns"? It’s the younger generation. And its important to understand why.

It is incredibly hard to think of new paradigms when you’ve grown up reading the newspaper every morning. When you turn to TV for your entertainment. When you read magazines on the train home from work.

Though he made a few concessions later, them’s, apparently, fightin’ words. Dave Winer, Original Blogger that he is, was quick to put school in session.

"I’ve been a net native since before I was 20," he writes. "Yes, I read newspapers growing up, but I also blogged before it was called blogging, and created a lot of the technology that the kids are developing now. Yet I’ve had arrogant idiotic asshole kids tell me I don’t understand the net."

Heh. He used the "A" word.

Steve Hodson, aka codenut, takes the curmudgeon profanity to a new level, on par with Mr. Greenlawn’s raspy command to STAY OUTTA MY YARD: 

To Fred – kiss my ass. Just because I have gray hair, fathered a couple of kids, been divorced more than once – you know … that thing call Real Life … doesn’t make me or any of my generation any less of a potential to shift more than an occasional paradigm.

Who the hell do you think invented the net you duffus – it was us gray haired old farts when you were probably still in pampers…[obligatory reference to Berners Lee and Cerf]

You talk about the 20 something’s being the true harbingers of paradigm shifts. Crap. They wouldn’t know a paradigm shift if it slapped them in the face.

If you’re not on the floor laughing now, then you’ve got no sense of humor whatsoever. Just awesome, Steve.

Wilson wasn’t out there on his own though. There are two sides to this, as usual. A surprising supporter is Don Dodge, Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team and most certainly not in his Twenties. The same way Hodson cites Winer and Kahn, Dodge reminds us of Jobs, Gates, Brin and Page, all in their Twenties when they changed the world:

Young people have vision for what is possible, and are not blinded by "knowledge" of what is not possible….Older, more experienced people ( I am an old guy) are typically better at taking a startup idea and building it into a business. Older people are great at understanding the potential of "paradigm shifts", but not great at seeing them beforehand.

Indeed, they do seem to need each other most of the time. Brin and Page needed Eric Schmidt. Skywalker needed Obi-Wan Kenobi.

But let’s get back to the arrogant a-holes, that was more fun. Marcus Frind, founder of PlentyOfFish.com (featured on the Today show this morning, it just so happens) takes a harder line on the issue, with a very "modern" view on spelling, capitalization, and punctuation:

I agree with fred,  older people dont’ invent stuff,  they tend to take other peoples ideas and improve on them and use their connections/knowledge/money to get credit for it….

People over 30  tend to go out and look for emerging patterns to predict the future  but don’t really understand it.    Free dating never worked before I came along,

Wow. And girls can’t play baseball, I guess, just like Asians can’t drive and all Kentuckians are toothless, shoeless hillbillies. Nice. Just make sure you keep the pigeon in the hole; he’s unruly when he gets out.

It’s been a busy week in tech-land, as media and Internet giants have been snapping up Web startups like kids in a candy store. CBS, which only just finished buying the financial video-blogging show known as Wallstrip (created in part by Toronto venture capitalist and hedge fund manager Howard Lindzon) is paying $280-million (U.S.) to acquire Last.fm, one of the most popular online music tools around today. And as has been rumoured here and other places, eBay — which paid $2.4-billion or so for Skype not too long ago — is buying StumbleUpon, a Canadian creation that was based in Calgary before moving to the Valley.

StumbleUpon is what you might call a “serendipity engine,” in the sense that it randomizes the Internet by serving up web-pages from a vast catalogue of user submissions, either sending you to a completely random page or choosing a random one from a category of your choosing. Users — of which there are about 2.3 million now — can then vote on whether they like the site or not. I have to confess that I still don’t see how it’s going to fit into eBay’s traditional auction business, but someone at Seeking Alpha has done their best to put together a convincing argument here.

Last.fm, which is similar to another site called Pandora, allows users to set up a profile with their favourite music (including their iTunes playlists) and then share that with others. The site then recommends new music based on similarities between their selections and those of people with similar tastes. By contrast, Pandora uses advanced algorithms to determine similarities between songs, and then recommend new ones based on those attributes (there’s a good discussion of the differences between the two here).

Scott Karp has some thoughts on the Last.fm deal as a sort of Hail Mary play by CBS because of its radio assets, and there’s a post from one of the Last.fm founders here. In case you are keeping score at home, according to the Times of London (Last.fm was created in London), the three founders will get approximately $38-million each from the deal.

Comments

Tag:

TechCrunch has them, so does Mashable, and Om Malik’s are telling him that Digg founder, Kevin Rose, is working on a new start-up.

We have learned from sources familiar with the company, that the trio are currently working on a new kind of a communications tool, that can be dubbed as an IM competitor. The company which is currently operating in stealth mode is going launch sometime later this month. When we contacted Rose, he declined to comment. Seems like he is going to work on this in parallel with the other two start-ups.

Would you like to be my “source familiar with the company”. Maybe you know about a pending aquisition, or you have news of Google’s new products, or perhaps you’re just lonely and have no one to talk to, except a ghostly man that lives in a small house, high up on a hill, of an island in the middle of nowhere (yes, Ben, I’m talking about you!). Seriously, any substantiated rumors are always welcomed!

Comments

The latest post in the Official Google Reader Blog actually has all sorts of neat stuff in it – Brad Hawkes, its author, mentions both robot armies and Marge Simpson.  The main focus, however, fell squarely on the latest Google Reader update.

“Now, clicking the ‘Email’ link at the bottom of an item” gives you several benefits, according to Hawkes.  One of them is the ability to “send email from within Reader – no more second window for sending email.”  For another, you may “send the entire item as it appears in Reader, including formatting and images.”

Lastly – and this sort of thing is always convenient – you can “use your Gmail address book (if you have one) to add contacts with auto-complete.”

Initial reviews of these upgrades have been positive; Barry Schwartz (AKA “rustybrick”) seemed genuinely excited, writing, “Not opening in a new window is very cool, but the addition of the gmail address book with auto-complete rocks also.”

Startup Meme’s Bilal Hameed seemed impressed, as well, but he had some suggestions for what Google Reader could do next.  “[W]hy not just integrate the Google Reader and Gmail completely, enabling Gmail users to subscribe to feeds from Gmail and read them in Gmail,” he proposed.  “It would also make sense to show all the posts that are related to a specific news in one conversation, enabling me to quickly skim through what all of my favorite bloggers are saying on a particular issue.”

Google has a reputation for listening to its users, so perhaps the next upgrade update will speak of robot armies, Marge Simpson, and comprehensive Google Reader and Gmail integration.

Viacom hit YouTube with a nastygram in February, requesting their content be removed from the video sharing site. Not long after that, details of Viacom’s deal with Joost emerged, giving the new video site a high-powered content ally.

Joost announced today they have reached agreements with a number of well known brands. Coca-Cola, H-P, Nike, Microsoft, and IBM are among those backing Joost’s efforts.

“Our success in lining up leading brands from around the world is a testament to our delivery of a unique advertising value proposition,” Joost co-founder Janus Friis said in their announcement.

Startup Meme noted Joost has created an ad unit called an Ad Bug, an embedded, animated ad logo that will be placed in the corner of a video. That sounds similar to the ‘Flash Bugs’ Adobe will be able to support in the Media Player they plan to launch this summer.

Joost will test a variety of ad units to find the sweet spot for brand awareness, engagement, and intent-to-purchase. “We’re providing unparalleled user statistics and insights, as well as an unmatched level of interactivity, targetability and measurability,” Joost’s David Clark said of their benefit to those brand advertisers.

The corporate wiki firm Socialtext, for instance, just took on more office space in Palo Alto, but isn’t using it all yet. So it’s offering some of it to software developers who will write open-source wiki software that supports Socialtext’s and other companies’ wiki software.

"Real estate is the leading cause of death for startups," notes Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield. "This is sort of a commune for nerds." That’s the vibe Salesforce will need to create if it wants to hatch its vision of a new software industry.

I think I said geek instead of nerd, but no matter.  And I stand by my fear of real estate not being put to use effectively.

We started Socialtext virtually, and most of the company remains distributed.  When we got our first office space over two years into the company, we had some extra room.  So we hosted the first Barcamp and gave space for Podtech and Mozes to get started.  Now we have some new room next door and the coworking practice (check out coworking spaces in a town near you) provides a more unstructured way of opening the door to others.  A couple of folks stop by and cowork regularly now and the we just finished the noisy construction.  If you are ever in downtown Palo Alto, just stop by.

Comments

Tag: