AppsLab

Jerry Yang’s ignominious resignation as CEO of Yahoo this week further underlined for me what’s broken about the venture capital model.

I’m not referring to the slidedeck presented by Adeo Ressi to Harvard Business School faculty earlier this month, i.e. I don’t really care to cover what’s wrong with the investments made by VCs or the reasons they were made.

I’m talking about using the equity model for startups. By now, everyone has a working knowledge of the usual financial path a startup takes, assuming it successfully stays in business:

1. Incubate an idea and stay self-funded as long as possible.
2. Take small infusions from family and friends to keep the equity spread across people you trust and who trust you and have faith in you and your idea.
3. Seek angel investment, further diluting the equity.
4. Close a round of venture capital with probably a single firm, further shrinking equity.
5. Retain employees by offering equity options in the event of a liquidity event.
6. Close x number of additional venture capital rounds, adding more firms, possibly reupping an existing investor, all the while spreading equity to more parties.
7. Contemplate a liquidity event, which requires the addition of an investment bank to the equity pool.
8. Add more stakeholders when you close the liquidity event, typically in the form of publicly traded shares of your own company or of another company, i.e. in the event of a merger or acquisition.

What you end up with at the end of this path is a whole mess of people who, rightfully, demand to have a voice in your precious company’s affairs. Read More »

It’s pretty hard to keep up with all the stuff Google does. There are several blogs I know of whose only purpose in life is to cover Google.

Anyway, a couple noteworthy Google announcements recently caught my attention. So, I figured I share them and collect your thoughts.

Google Flu Trends
Google.org announced Google Flu Trends recently, which tracks aggregated search data to estimate flu activity in the US (and by state). So your search for any number of flu-related keywords alerts Google Flu Search to the possibility of an influenza rise in your state.

Pretty Orwellian, but cool. At first blush, the logic here sounded weak to me. After all, lots of Internet doctors exist out there (my wife is one), and this approach puts a fair amount of faith into a person’s ability to diagnose symptoms effectively.

Not to mention the fact that the usage of Google state-by-state may not represent a large enough sample to make these assumptions. So, interested, but skeptical, I dug more deeply.

Turns out this theory was tested last year, and it closely mirrors data collected by the CDC. Even more surprising to me is that the data generated by Google Flu Trends estimate with good accuracy the spread of flu, one to two weeks ahead of the CDC models.

Surprising to me and yet another example of what Google knows about us all. Read More »

So, I now have about five or six people sharing their Google Reader shared items with me, which is good.

These feeds function a lot like Twitter for me, i.e. the items in there are sometimes interesting and tend to tell me a bit about each person. For example, Paul shares a lot of gadget stuff from Gizmodo and Engadget, but mainly the vehicles, cameras, and AV stuff. This makes him my gadget filter for those items.

Rich shares mostly Rails posts (surprise) and some theory of development stuff. The Ontario Emperor shares a lot of political stuff. It’s an interesting way to learn about a person’s interests and to cross-pollinate them with your own.

Plus the recent addition of the notes feature to shared items lets you add specific thoughts to each item. Hmm, sounds a lot like blogging (or micro-blogging, to turn a phrase). I’ve not tested this, but I wonder if I share an item with comments that was shared with me if the comments also propagate. This would be equivalent to blog comments.

Case in point, two people shared this item about the Infinity Bookcase, which is a sweet design. I wonder how you physically get to the books inside each loop though.

I love design, form and function. So, now I’ve got a new resource (Make), and I know a bit more about these two Intertubes friends. Very cool stuff, classic network effects in action. Read More »

Here’s some more iPhone goodness, and a teaser to whet your appetite.

Fake Calls
Thanks to Floyd for this tip. I started out to review three fake call apps, but quickly realized there are a lot more than three. Eleven apps matched the keyword search “fake caller” in the App Store, and only one didn’t fit the search.

So, if you ever felt the need to fake a phone call to get out of a personal interaction (conversation, meeting, date, movie, etc.), you have ten iPhone apps to choose from:

• Fake-a-Call (free)
• Fake Calls ($0.99)
• Fake Caller Free
• Fake Call ($0.99)
• Fake Caller Premium ($0.99)
• GottaDash ($0.99)
• GottaGo ($0.99)
• exitstrategy ($0.99)
• HottrixPhone PRO ($2.99)
• Phony ($1.99)

This is really funny to me; until today, I had never thought of this as an app, and I can’t even recall using a fake phone call excuse to get out of a situation.

But now my eyes are open, and from now on, I’ll be suspicious when someone with an iPhone gets a call and bails on a meeting or a conversation with me. The end of innocence I guess.

The question is do these fake call apps make the iPhone more “for business”?

Teaser: Rich has been tinkering with iPhone development. Stay tuned for more on what he’s doing.

Meg’s comment on my post about TiVo (note to self, add TiVo to iPhone as a topic that gets lots of comments) got me thinking about the best of the last 20. She said:

I have said often that Tivo is the best invention of the last 20 years, in my life it is equal to the remote control and far surpasses things like wireless networking and digital cameras (which I love).

At its basest form, blogging is about opinion, i.e. your own and maybe some others for “balance”. Meg brings up an interesting point, not only about how much TiVo rocks, but also about comparison.

Is it fair to compare TiVo with wireless networking and digital cameras? So, for giggles, let’s have an good old town hall around this topic.

What is the best invention of the last 20 years? Bonus points for why. If you’re wondering, here are a few arbitrary ground rules.

There aren’t any, aside from the last 20 years bit. I tried to come up with some guidelines, but I’m pretty sure the fun (if any is to be had) of this exercise lies in an open field. I’m interested to hear thoughts.

Here are a few I like, obviously focused on stuff I use every day, not picking a favorite:

• Digital Video Recorder, i.e. TiVo
• The cellular telephone
• The World Wide Web, i.e. consumer version of ARPANET
• The digital camera
• Satellite and cable television

This is food for thought. Find the comments and share your thoughts.

Another pair of iPhone apps came to my attention today, making it four for the week, and it just so happens one is brought to you by Oracle.

Oracle Business Approvals for Managers
Steven Chan put me on to this one, which looks like an iPhone app that surfaces a lot of the worklist notifications EBS users (managers, in this case) typically see in email and in self-service.

Since I’m no longer a manager (by choice), I fear this app would be useless to me, but someone like Paul would find it totally useful, e.g. to approve my expense reports faster. From the release:

Oracle Business Approvals for Managers is a task-focused mobile solution that enables managers and executives to view and transact pending actions related to expenses, purchase requisitions, as well as HR vacancies and job offers, conveniently and securely on the iPhone.

And in case you were wondering, it’s free (as in beer) to users. Read More »

I saw this post on RWW about Read It Later several weeks ago. I guess Read It Later has been around for a while; it’s a nifty little Firefox add-on that allows you to mark links to read later. Simple enough. Plus it syncs between multiple browser instances, allowing you to have a consolidated reading list.

Sounds similar to Delicious, but targeted at managing stuff to read, rather than storing scads of bookmarks with a network wrapped around them.

What caught my eye was that the new RIL version integrated with Google Reader, my feed reader of choice. So, with the new RIL add-on, I can see the little checkmark to add any feed item to the RIL list. Very useful for me.

I frequently open feed items from Reader into new tabs and leave them open to read later. Sometimes they’ll stay open for days; sometimes Firefox eats up too much memory, forcing a restart. Sometimes I remember to note all the open links, sometimes I don’t.

So, this little add-on sounded like a good way to keep track of my reading list. I promptly installed the Firefox add-on and decided to wait and see how it worked for me before blogging it.

This falls into the “blog it later” bucket. Read More »

Mix is one year old today.

Seems like it’s been around forever, at least to me, but you’ll recall we launched it to very little fanfare at the beginning of OpenWorld 2007.

Mix didn’t really get much promotion at all until Marketing decided to solicit session ideas from the community for OpenWorld 2008 back in May. Over the Summer, Marketing extended Mix quite a bit, and it quickly outgrew our bandwidth for support and operations.

Heading into OpenWorld 2008, Mix made its primetime debut as the front end for the Oracle Participate campaign, and looking ahead, Marketing has big plans for Mix. Stay tuned.

Here are some statistics on Mix through (roughly) its first year:

• 142,220 pageviews a month
• 15,525 visits a month
• 4.92 average connections per user
• 0.45 average sharing activity per user per month

FYI, these stats are also in Paul’s Defrag 08 presentation.

This success belongs to the Oracle community. Without a dedicated collection of Oracle enthusiasts, Mix would have gone nowhere. So, thanks to all of you. Keep on mixing it up and look forward to more cool features from Mix, delivered by Marketing and ENTP.

Last week, FriendFeed added an IM feature, allowing you bring the information firehose into your favorite IM client.

I’m a fan of FriendFeed, but it’s very hard to control the noise level. Typically, each person you subscribe to has several streams of information, e.g. a blog, Twitter, Google Reader, etc., making the amount of noise significantly higher.

I have nine services in my feed, but I’ve seen people with way more than that. An unscientific guess tells me the average number of services per person is probably between four and eight. Depending on who you subscribe to and frequency, your FriendFeed can be very noisy.

This is one reason I’ve never liked the Adobe Air clients for FriendFeed, like AlertThingy or Twhirl, too damned noisy. I simply don’t have the brainpower to follow all those items. Read More »

Looks like I got out of Denver right before a cold front came through, dropping the temperature significantly. Not that the weather is all that great here in Portland.

So, Paul and I were at Defrag Monday and Tuesday, as was Bob, who has done a good job of recapping in near real time.

Overall, I enjoyed the conference, and as is frequently the case for me, the ad hoc hallway conversations were more valuable than the sessions. That’s not to say the session and panel content wasn’t good or interesting; it was both.

Anyway, here goes my recap of noteworthy observations that I can remember from Monday. Read on if you’re interested, and yes, I have enough to separate Tuesday into another post. Just wait and see.

Monday
The conference’s first keynote was from William Duggan, whose book “Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement” was in the conference swag bag. I liked his premise, i.e. that great ideas come from the combination of disparate sources and that great innovators steal. This was a great way to kick off a conference whose tagline is “accelerating the aha moment”. Read More »