Rogelio Choy

Twitter - blogging for the masses

2009-03-17T11:21:00.000-07:00

For a long time I didn't understand why everyone was so enamored of Twitter. It seemed like an effective broadcasting tool, but my gut told me it would suffer the wrath of blogs - a ton of readers/followers with few, concentrated creators. While the blogging model can be monetized effectively through niche, contextual ads, Twitter writers or Twitter itself would have a hard time copying that model. 140 characters seems a huge limitation to line by line context, and as a result context based ads, especially if you're broadcasting random thoughts or daily activities.

Within a few minutes of using Twitter last month though, I 'got' it. Writing a blog to attract a readership is tough work. Readers expect content and blog writers have to produce it in volumes. Don't produce, readers abandon your feed. For the last year or so, I've literally had little to no time or interest in writing (which I love to do). A ton of my friends who blogged have tapered off as well for what I assume are similar reasons. Ultimately, blogging is such a great tool for broadcasting your expertise or opinions due to SEO. But the cost on personal time is material, so 99.9% of blog readers don't end up blogging at all or don't stick with it.

Twitter is effectively blogging for the masses. Most of the upside is still there. An effective tool for self-promotion, quick access via mobile or feeds, an inherent method for creating connection with thousands of readers. But by breaking down the format to 140 characters, everyone can do it simply and almost without thought. It's taking the basics of viral marketing (singular focus, super simple, no thought required) and applying it to something creative. This up-ends the creative/followers ratio from less than 1% on blogs to what I assume is some huge multiple of that (no clue what the writer vs follower % actually is on Twitter).

Given the huge number of writers that are suddenly enabled via tweets, you have to believe Twitter will be larger than Wordpress in short order (100M+ uniques a month), which makes it ridiculously valuable. Capturing user-created contextual data, even if piecemealed, is more valuable than user-read contextual data (i.e. blogs). The former is simply more representative of the individual than the latter, so long as there's enough content being written. Do this across 100M+ people and suddenly you have a massive network of interests, groups and engagement, all of which can be targeted for advertisers for a fee. Doesn't matter how this can be done, whether through behavioral targeting via cookies, search, company tweets, etc. Think of it as a cross of Google, Facebook and MySpace. Search delivers dynamic context (and monetization) on what you're looking for. Micro-blogging delivers dynamic context based on your publicly available status update. Both drive the same difference, an opportunity for a business or advertiser to generate a high CTR. Mix in self-expression and mass-market acceptance and you have a killer service. No doubt that's driving Facebook to open up its pages to the public or consider an acquisition.

Well, you can safely assume I'll be doing a lot more twittering than blogging for now, though at some point when stuff at RockYou calms down I'll come back to writing long-form - hard to do it well in 140 characters, feels like I'm writing haikus. Here's my latest tweet: "for any The Wire fans out there, wife and I settled that she's the Marlo and I'm the Stringer Bell of RockYou".

(I'm rochoy on Twitter btw).

Quick RockYou Update

2008-10-01T01:28:00.000-07:00

We have some ridiculous things going on at RockYou these days. Our owned/operated social applications on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Orkut, hi5, etc have crossed 50M unique visitors a month and over 1.2B monetized PVs (and I mean actual visitors not just 'viewers'). Our ad network for social media, representing over 400 publishers, has grown to 8B impressions and 90M global uniques a month.

A lot of folks continue to heavily discount social platforms' potential for developers and their overall monetization. Let me be blunt. There's a massive opportunity in this space, and RockYou continues to see material, growing business from agencies, advertisers and virtual goods alike. Social networking/engagement is the fastest growing and now primary activity on the web (and soon the phone). To not have some type of deep exposure in this space (whether as a developer or advertiser) is tantamount to missing the entire scope of Internet usage now and what's to come for the next 3-5 years. Are their risks? No doubt. But building on top of Facebook, MySpace, Orkut is no more or less risky than building a site dependent on SEO from Google. At least with the social platforms, you're given some notice of changes to come.

More to tell soon, but wanted to put out this video of our panel at MIXX in NYC last week. Brian Morrissey, editor of digital marketing at Adweek moderated. The other participants included Karsten Weide, Program Director, Digital Media & Entertainment, IDC, Danielle Knopf, VP of Social Media at Deep Focus, Terri Walter, VP of Emerging Media, Avenue A-Razorfish and myself. Never mind that I seem to have swallowed a lemon at the beginning of the video :)

Mixx 2.8 Conference - Ro Choy from Rock You on Vimeo.

Google Chrome is... fast :)

2008-09-02T14:37:00.000-07:00

I've had my critiques of Google in the past (one funnily enough got me into enough trouble at eBay to land me my current job at RockYou). So I guess I have to thank Google twice. The one real reason I thought Google kicked all the search engines in the rear when it first launched was speed. No one matched how outright fast Google performed on searches. Google Chrome is the browser equivalent. Page uploads are 2-3x faster than Firefox/IE. This includes rich-media laden pages and sites which normally are very slow to load on my PC. It takes that type of difference to change my inertia in using Firefox/IE. I'm assuming the same will happen for a lot of folk...

PS - Chrome seems to work REALLY well with Gmail, Google Calender, Google Docs and Google Analytics. Given we use all four at RockYou as business tools, it's a given that we end up using Chrome organizationally as well.

eBay - Look beyond the .com

2008-08-20T15:47:00.000-07:00

With the time/life commitment required of startup life at RockYou, I haven't posted much of anything in 6 months. Guilty. I find that a lot of things I think about or ideas shared from partners, friends and competitors can actually be put to use at the company. I'm left either not feeling comfortable openly sharing things via the blog or not having time to do it.

That said, recent articles and blog posts on eBay (this one actually insightful from Techcrunch)
sound increasingly like memorials or obits. Now that the vast majority of my friends have left eBay (including my wife), I finally have some leeway to add an opinion.

eBay faces two major issues today. 1) Lack of product leadership at the executive level and 2) an almost over-zealous opinion that eBay's problems can be fixed on the eBay site alone. The second issue is obviously a direct result of the first. I actually have great regard for many of the leaders both past and present at eBay. The company hires very smart folks on both the business and product end. But when company-wide strategic decisions continue to focus on things like site pricing, eBay seller feedback and improved buyer experience on eBay.com, it's clear that eBay's top executives are anchored on the wrong assumptions. The primary reason buyers are bleeding off eBay is not due to trust and safety issues, lack of marketing or anything directly site related. Are those things problematic, sure. But take a look at eBay on Alexa or Quantcast. The decline of unique traffic/PVs is accelerating. Now if this was only on eBay, maybe the problems would be site-centric and could be handled on eBay.com alone. But Amazon, Buy.com, Shopping.com and the vast majority of eCommerce sites have a similar decline in activity over time, which spells out the broader problem.

The fortunate/unfortunate truth is that the radical shift in Internet usage, especially with teens and young adults, will continue to erode traffic at former leading mass-market Commerce or content sites like eBay. Simply put, the Internet is becoming WAY social and web-service oriented. If an online site or service is not heavily invested in both, the future is dire. Three years ago, MySpace was the only social-platform among the top 10 visited sites globally. Now, six of the top 10 sites are social in nature (Youtube, MySpace, Facebook, hi5, Wikipedia, Orkut). Additionally, the disaggregation of the web is now a reality (think Iphone, Opera Mobile, Social Platforms, Integrated Activity Feeds, RSS, micro-blogs). Web services are driving this extreme segmentation of user's online experience. In either case, I don't see any material reaction from eBay to the shift.

Companies like Amazon are trying at least to understand that shift, leading the way with cloud computing and hosted bandwidth. There's seems to be no corresponding response from eBay. The company actually has some great platform centric web services, namely Paypal and Skype. But these very services are eroding the need for online commerce and communication to be anchored onto a single site. Paypal has massively increased trust across all eCommerce sites, making SMB marketing through Google the most cost effective and direct route for generating online transactions. Skype has had HUGE adoption (i'm probably one of the few folks who actually still think the acquisition was a smart one) and represents one of if not THE largest P2P network on the web. P2P as near-costless distribution model for media and digital goods is a massive asset. But if I can communicate openly and freely with my customers and embed trust on my commerce site via Paypal, the need for eBay as a central service (i.e. eBay.com the site) is increasingly limited.

One possible solution is to bridge the transactional eBay model to an ads-based business. Unlock the massive amount of transactional data eBay has across its 260M online users and port that off-site to publishers that are looking for higher eCPMs and advertisers wanting more distribution channels based on effective product-based behavioral targeting. Another option is to extend major, high value eBay functions (eBay's feedback, commerce/transaction engine, auction platform, product finding) as web services, which would widely propagate the eBay brand across the web as the eCommerce tool of choice, and make it extremely easy for users of those services to post product into the site or eBay network. I imagine there's a boatload of developers currently building to the iPhone, Facebook, MySpace and the numerous Opensocial platforms that are launching, that would be psyched to engage those APIs to build transaction, commerce-oriented applications, on the very sites eBay has little to no brand presence. If eBay is going to aggressively pursue a true web service focus, it needs product leadership willing to make a material investment in the space (i'm talking a 40-50 person web service team).

What's key is for eBay to accept and embrace the changes that occurring today - widespread usage of social platforms, disaggregation of content and services, increasing trust across all web sites vs focus on a few 'trusted' sites - and build a corporate strategy that at the very least makes material long bets in this new/volatile environment (ala Amazon Web Services).

Now back to work...

P.S. - I'd been waiting to post this for a bit and lo and behold, eBay announced the hiring of a new SVP of Platform, Mark Carges. Let's hope Mark believes in life outside the 'site'.

Bubble 2.0?

2007-11-11T17:21:00.001-08:00

A couple of things. First, here's a simple reason why we aren't going to see Bubble 2.0. U.S. Internet advertising is expected to double to $42 billion over the next four years. I'm seeing a lot of activity and interest from major agencies and advertisers on RockYou's ad platform on Facebook, completely outside of Facebook's own material initiatives with advertisers. Obviously a complete downturn in the economy can derail everything, but outside of that fairly remote possibility, there's a lot of strength beneath the business models of next-gen online destinations.

Sites like LinkedIn, Kayak and Sidestep are generating $30-$50MM in annual revenues with eCPMs in the triple digits. Wordpress.com has over 80MM unique visitors (check quantcast) with all of 18 employees, monetizing hundreds of millions of PVs through Federated Media. Not even going to mention RockYou or Slide :) I find references to Bubble 2.0 completely ignorant of the shifts in both internet usage and marketing $. Enough said.

Buffaloes, Lions and Crocs

2007-06-05T17:40:00.000-07:00

Pretty remarkable video with a happy ending.

Lala has brass...

2007-06-05T00:34:00.000-07:00

Wow. Lala, a company my classmate and friend Billy Alvarado helped start, is taking a huge, impressive gamble. $140MM committed to at least one major label, Warner Music Group, to stream (I assume) their entire catalog at 1 cent a play. At RockYou, we've been pushing the envelope with legal music streams, partnering with SnoCap, Nettwerk, PumpAudio and Fliptrack to maximize our music selection and test if music-based revenue could be material. Lala took it 1000x steps further. Congrats to Billy, Carole and the Lala team. They've taken a massive bet to test whether the free stream to paying download model works or not. Will be really interesting to watch. One standing concern is free services like Audio on Facebook, which offer completely free streams, and whether Lala can draw users away from these semi-legal/illegal streaming services much like iTunes did vs the original Napster. Really hoping Lala makes it big...

Facebook Widgets

2007-06-01T12:01:00.000-07:00

This is a happy time here at RockYou. We have the top 3 fastest growing and 3 of the top 5 largest apps on Facebook's new f8 platform, with an aggregate 1.3MM embeds for Horoscopes, Slideshows and the new X-me application - just 7 days after going live. A ton of great things to say about the f8 platform which I'll reserve for later. Obviously, lots of cool, new apps may ultimately displace us, but it still rocks if only for a couple of days :)

Joost rocketh

2007-05-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

Got my invite to Joost (I meant Hulu ;)) this afternoon and I can only say that this will (make that still can) be a massive supernova success. Think completely accessible, free and remote VOD. With the integration of standard ads (pre-roll) to premium content from the likes of MTV and Comedy Central, there's little to no reason why content providers wouldn't openly participate (least none that I can think of). There are hiccups in the service - video play can get a bit staccato, you need to scroll through a lot of content - but the beta is really impressive. The ability to stream full shows via P2P, combined with an attractive, stupid simple interface will make this super viral once officially launched.

With two kids in the house, the wife and I use Comcast on Demand a ton in the house (Dora the Explorer on demand is a parent's best friend). With a few more premium shows (Thomas the Tank!, Bob the Builder, you know the good stuff), Joost will be a constant in my home/laptop, and I get the feeling in millions of others as well. And no, I'm not getting paid for this post :)

P.S. - Hulu essentially upended Joost on content and ease of use (browser access). So just replace all the Joost comments above with Hulu and I can retain a little dignity :)

MySpace acquires Photobucket

2007-05-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

Techcrunch confirmed the rumor that MySpace acquired Photobucket for $250M in cash. We're obviously big fans of MySpace and have a good relationship with their team. Acquiring Photobucket provides them with the single largest photo hosting company in the world. Much like the acquisition of MySpace for $580M by News Corp years past (what's the minimum one of the top visited sites in the world would be valued at? $10B?), I think Photobucket's true value will surface over the next several years. 40MM registered users and 17MM unique visitors a month may not have translated to significant revenue today ($6MM in 2006 and a projected $30MM in 2007). But as the widget economy continues to develop, monetizing user photo content will become a significant revenue driver in the near future, especially if that photo content is tagged (better yet auto-tagged Danny ;)). If there's one thing ALL internet users have a ton of is photos (much more so than video content). What better way to know an online user than by their photo content? Interesting things happening here that I don't think many really understand.

eBay To Go

2007-04-30T13:42:00.000-07:00

Some quick thoughts. eBay launched their 'to go' widget recently. My initial reaction is positive. It's good to see eBay give this a go and give some more remote functions to the web service (you can search completely on the widget itself). There's no buying via the widget, but I guess I can't expect everything to come all at once. Some suggestions however.

First, the widget is like a mini-eBay, which isn't necessarily the right approach depending on the demographic target. If eBay was hoping for viral growth with young users, they need to put some serious work into making it more engaging to viewers. Not sure why they don't show the 'hot' styles in apparel or something that would engage young women (who drive viral widget adoption on social networks). Also, the format and design of the widget needs to be tailored for a specific user demo.

All in all though, it's great to see eBay push the boundaries a little. Let's hope there's a lot more to come.

Ping Pong!

2007-04-13T09:41:00.000-07:00

This is one of the funnier sport movie trailers you'll ever see :)

Growth and Free Services

2007-03-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

Not sure what's been keeping me bottled up on blogging these days. Writers block? Maybe startup life is more hectic than I'd assumed. Either way, finally read something which got me fired up again. One of our seed investors, Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital, has a perspective on 'free' business models. According to Josh, getting users to pay for ANY service, even if charging a penny, is the biggest obstacle to material revenue generation.

At RockYou, we've had some some informal statements on TechCrunch related to our funding. Some of the commentary related to RockYou funding focuses on doubts related to the 'free' business model. How can RockYou (or any Web 2.0 consumer facing site) make money? While I generally agree with Josh in his post above, ultimately premium services should never be the singular focus of a 'free' business model. Having worked at eBay where online services to the buyer are completely free, the vast majority of revenue is not generated from premium services but rather from access to the consumer. Whether it's charging for leads, a transaction fee % or CPC/CPM, what makes or breaks online consumer sites is 1) the overall size of the userbase 2) how attractive that consumer demographic is to an advertiser and 3) how effectively said site is able to charge for that access (unrelated to simple onsite advertising via ad networks).

A great case example is Linkedin. Would anyone have predicted that Linkedin, a business social network at its essence, would be able to generate $100MM in revenues for 2007? A friend of mine that works in online recruiting mentioned that Linkedin has 35,000 recruiters signed up for Linkedin services, looking to access their 8MM+ user base. In this case, Linked in 1) has a big but not massive user base, 2) maintains a highly attractive demographic for recruiters and 3) was able to extract sizable but equitable rents from recruiters. Looks like the 'free' business model in this case is a damn good one.

So why invest in RockYou? At RockYou we have 1) a fairly massive & growing user base (8.5MM registered and 14MM unique visitors a month), 2) a very attractive demographic (teen/young adult) and 3) *wink* a plan to charge for access to that user base. Obviously our ultimate success will be based on how good that plan is and how well we execute on it. But with #1 and #2 continuing to grow, the team and our investors are feeling fairly good about the future of our little company.

One more thought - notice that premium services aren't a focus. I expect that premium services will play a material part of our revenue growth in the future, but I'm happy to being completely free to users into perpetuity if I can anchor userbase size and demographics for potential advertisers.

JetBlue

2007-02-22T11:24:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the dearth of posts. Been travelling and dealing with hairy partner issues (figurative not literal :P). One of my trips this past week was to NYC to visit one of our recently signed partners. I'd forgotten how freakishly cold the city can be. Had just gotten on the JetBlue plane to fly back to Oakland, when David Barger, JetBlue's president, jumped on the flight with a very humbling apology. Here he is with his orange flight vest...

I'd read about JetBlue's issues last week and frankly didn't even consider that it would effect my trip. If I'd been a passenger left stranded on the tarmac for 10 hours, I'd probably be considering harsher things to say. But without that luggage, it was great to see the president of a company take full and complete accountability for issues that, in my opinion, seemed fairly out of his control.

That type of direct corporate engagement with me as a customer (6 hours of SportsCenter helped as well) did a ton to increase my loyalty to the JetBlue brand. A rapid rabid response to catastrophic events from the very top of their organization showed JetBlue's true colors. Kudos.

(ex)eBay Bloggers Unite

2007-02-13T11:14:00.000-08:00

Now that Jason (now at Tellme) has finally tired of maintaining BestofeBayBlogs (kudos for the effort), former highflying eBay VP of Corporate Strategy turned filmmaker, Shripriya Mahesh, has put together an eBay Blogs wiki. Such luminaries like myself, Greg Isaacs, Shri and Adam Nash are on this exclusive list ;).

That said, there's quite a lot of 'uninformed' opinion regarding eBay and its properties out there. While most on this list are now ex-eBayers, I'm hoping a few hardy souls at eBay (like Adam Nash) will push on the rich tradition of eBay blogging and continue defending the kingdom. eBay has a lot of things going for it... hopefully blogs can continue to be a good venue for expressing them.

eBay & Distributed Commerce

2007-02-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

Looks like eBay is finally waking up to pushing distributed commerce forward. Apparently eBay is in talks with MySpace to provide an easy way for users to post things for sale (assuming the inverse would apply as well). Hopefully the good folks at my corporate alma mater can get past the notion that 'everything needs to come back to eBay.com'. If eBay really enabled a fully functional eCommerce widget/web service, where a seller can post and a buyer can purchase products all within a profile page (e.g. w/o leaving MySpace), they'd have something huge on their hands. If it's the typical affiliate application with a signpost leading back to eBay, well... it'll be something less than huge.

There's a real opportunity on the widget side for enabling a completely remote & distributable eCommerce experience. Cafepress, Qoop and Zazzle are leading the way here, as they begin introducing web services enabling individual users & sites like Rockyou and Photobucket to buy and sell photo and design-focused products. eBay is the natural winner in this space IF they make registration, trust and purchase completely remote from eBay.com the site. To date the company has pushed back on offering that through their web services due to concerns around fraud (which admittedly is a significant hurdle). But a deal with MySpace could be a fantastic motivator for making this happen and ultimately heralding a true entrance by eBay into the Web 2.0 world...

RockYou on Businessweek

2007-01-29T11:13:00.000-08:00

Businessweek just came out with a report on the MySpace Ecosystem, and RockYou got several mentions in the article. RockYou, Snapvine, Photobucket and Slide got cited as leaders in the space, with specific reference to our partnership with Bebo.

Anastasia (the author of the article), not sure that I agree that widgets are "parasitic in nature". Parasites don't give back to their hosts. Widgets increase user engagement and functionality for a social networking site. The more breadth of widgets, the more a user can do on MySpace for example. That aside, a nice primer article for those who haven't a clue what the heck a 'widget' is.

Mashable & Bloglines

2007-01-25T14:55:00.000-08:00

Having used Bloglines as my RSS Reader for the past year, I've noticed the sheer amount of info I skim/read through has increased at least 10-fold. Content for another post, but increasing the ability to consume that much more information has made Bloglines an incredibly useful tool for both entertainment and professional development. I went from looking at 5 news/content sources a day, to over 70, and with that, my understanding of the Web 2.0/consumer Internet space has increased multiples as well.

Some of the daily rags I read include the now universally subscribed Gigaom and TechCrunch. That aside, one blog I highly recommend that hasn't gotten that level of acclaim yet is Mashable. If you have any interest in the social networking and widget space, Mashable does a great job digesting the daily grind. They have great coverage of new startups and events related to the Web 2.0 space. Kudos to the Mashable team for delivering the goods.

eBay Q4 2006

2007-01-24T17:40:00.000-08:00

Congrats to my friends and former peers at eBay for a fantastic quarter. Across all of eBay's business units - Marketplaces, Paypal & Skype - there were outstanding performances. As mentioned previously on this blog, I remain a big believer in eBay's mission and team. Heck, my wife just joined my old group, eBay Motors, to head up sales. I'd be hard pressed to recommend eBay for her if I didn't still believe... Hopefully all the anti-eBay pundits and naysayers can fall silent for at least a day or two.

Now I'm the last person to able to predict where eBay goes from here. Could eBay do a better job becoming more distributed across the Internet via widgets and remote web services? Yes. Could the company leverage Skype as more than just desktop VOIP given they own the largest P2P network in the world? Absolutely. Is Google Checkout a real threat to Paypal? No comment ;) Lol. (Why no comment? Check out my single reference on Valleywag.)

P.S. Frankly, I have to thank Valleywag to some degree. Without them, I probably wouldn't have gotten back in touch with Jeremy Liew (one of RockYou's early investors/believers) and ultimately joined RockYou as a result.

P.S.S. I wonder how many times anyone's ever thanked Valleywag?

Viral Marketing and Growth (again)

2007-01-22T11:59:00.000-08:00

Was having a conversation about viral marketing with a friend from another startup. He had a valid question regarding how long to test the viralness of a particular widget. It's an interesting thought because I think the answer has changed radically over the past year. When RockYou launched our MySpace slideshow with 6 posts on MySpace help forums, we saw viral growth (subsequent user growth day over day) immediately. But it took several months before this growth actually become material to the business (i.e. millions of users).

Things have changed a lot since then. I'd hazard that the time period for vetting viral growth has become a LOT shorter. With widgets and the process to share preferred content now well known, this process seems to be taking several weeks rather than months. Take a look at Testriffic. Last July they introduced a quiz service for social network users which didn't immediately take off. Then early October they launched Who Knows Me Best, a widget that allows friends to take a short quiz about a user and displays their scores dynamically on the user's profile. If you check the uptick of their traffic on Alexa or Compete, in three weeks the widget (and their site) went massively viral. The same could be said for Zingfu. Again, check their Compete stats. Within a month, their service clearly showed viral growth.

So net net. For anyone looking to launch widgets and generate viral growth for a site, if widget embeds and traffic doesn't accelerate within a 3-6 weeks at most, it's time to start tinkering with the app. My thoughts on what to tinker with are posted below.

Yahoo Ads

2007-01-17T13:59:00.000-08:00

Let me first off say that I'm a big fan of Yahoo. I use their email services, finance, news, sports, etc all the time. That said, Valleywag picked this one up and its too funny not to reverberate. Below is an ad Yahoo Hong Kong is using to recruit new employees.

Pointing a pistol to your own head is probably not what Yahoo wanted to convey to potential hires...

LightSpeed Venture Partners blog

2007-01-06T11:21:00.000-08:00

Quick note. My fellow Stanford Business School grad, former AOL exec & Netscape GM, and now Rockyou investor and Lightspeed partner, Jeremy Liew has started up a blog along with his fellow partners at http://lsvp.wordpress.com/. They've got some great posts on Internet trends and guiding principles for entrepreneurs. Something to consider for your RSS readers...

Friendster Widgets and Slide

2007-01-05T00:16:00.000-08:00

Want to announce Rockyou's integration to Friendster! Just go to "Edit Profile", "Customize" and check the Widgets section at the bottom of the page. We've fully automated the photo upload process and posting of widgets for Friendster members across our entire widget portfolio. We've had a great experience working with the Friendster team. There seems to be a ton of activity there and their site is increasingly well organized, cleanly structured and really simple to set up an attractive profile. Go sign up and check it out!

Also, a quick hello to the Slide team. (I saw your IP on my blog's logs :D). Send me an email at ro@rockyou.com and let's go get drinks. No reason we can't compete over a beer.

Viral Marketing and Growth

2007-01-03T09:56:00.000-08:00

Alright. I've been working with RockYou for 3 months now (part-time and fulltime). Over the past month I've gotten half a dozen calls from startups looking to understand how to 'get' viral in their business models and emulate RockYou's growth on social networks, blogs, etc. Rather than repeat myself continually, I thought I'd put some of my initial thoughts down on why RockYou has been successful growing virally (this December we saw 13MM unique visitors to the RockYou site while spending $0 in marketing).

The way I see it, there are three basic drivers for viral growth within the social networking space.

1) Engagement of BOTH the user AND viewer. I can't emphasize this point enough. Too many startups, even now, focus entirely on the user of their product. While delivering significant value to users is hugely important, it does very little to help drive viral growth. Generally people are not going to become evangelists of a product. They have no time to do it even if they truly like your service/application. What you're left with is the infamous 1% rule... and with only 1% of your users (assuming you have a great product) waxing poetic on forums and through word-of-mouth, it's gonna take a hell of a long time to go viral.

Your product needs to truly engage both users AND viewers. It's the engagement with the viewer of a widget on a social networking profile that will drive viral growth. If the viewer sees something they really like, you don't need the 'user' or profile owner to evangelize on your behalf. The viewer will simply click through and get the product for him or herself. For RockYou this meant making our widgets and slideshows really stand out through transitions, themes and music. Increasingly we're doing this by making widgets more interactive as well (ala Corkboard). By making user's photos and text 'pop' on a page, not only have we captured the viewer's interest (presenting user content that they will look at regardless), we've presented the viewer with something appealing to consider for their own content. Another example are MySpace Layouts (ala Freeweblayouts). Attractive, well-designed layouts generated a lot of value to both the user, allowing them to increase self-expression online, and great appeal to the viewer. The viewer is induced to click through to the layout provider site, generating viral growth.

If your product/service has great value to users but your widget has no self-evident appeal or engagement to the viewers of that widget, simply put, there's very limited viral upside.

2) Viral products are NOVEL products. In the slideshow space, I hazard, the opportunity for viral growth by a new player is nearly non-existant. Rockyou, Slide, MySpace and Picturetrail account for over 90% of the slideshow market. Once top players capture viral growth, it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, since sequential growth will continue to drive increasing market share until the user population for said product is tapped. Once that's happened new players are only stealing share through incremental improvements, not generating viral growth. Think about factor #1 above as well. If a viewer sees a new product they've already seen multiple if not numerous times, the inclination for that viewer to click through and get that product is significantly reduced. Clickthrough rates are key to viral growth, and having a me-too product competing with products that already burned through the viral spiral will elicit low clickthrough. Think video players on MySpace. Do you think there's any viral growth left in the video space? I don't.

That said, if you can create a product that take elements of current offerings and make it truly new and appealing to viewers, viral growth is once again enabled. Two great examples of this are www.zingfu.com and www.viraltags.com. Both have taken the well-played out concept of photo-sharing (Photobucket won that viral race) and made completely new applications for them. These applications, photos and faces within photos applied to templates to maximize a laugh, are both extremely viral. In the case of Zingfu, within 6 months they've driven an estimated 2MM users per month to their site. Novelty combined with something truly appealing to the viewer is a powerful combination.

3) Finally, almost all of the value of your product/service offering has to be FREE. If you're not providing the vast majority of value of your products for free, simply put, you won't have any viral growth. Think Google and Yahoo. Both offer users a ton of value without cost (search, mail, fantasy sports, news, etc). They charge for access to their huge base of users via advertising and also generate revenue from users via premium services. But without a truly compelling and free reason to go to Yahoo and Google, they'd have no traffic. This era of Web 2.0 is based on this concept. Offer free products to consumers to generate massive user bases which are then monetized via ads and premium content. Yahoo, Google and eBay proved that this model can be hugely successful. But you need the massive user base first.

Well there you have it. Obviously there's more stuff which I'm keeping under my hat. Would love to hear more thoughts regarding viral marketing and growth if you have them...

No thanks for the tip

2006-12-28T23:05:00.000-08:00

One of the founders of Firefox has taken issue with how Google Tips work, pre-empting natural search results (blog post here). Take a look at the result for "Wordpress blog" below:

Fairly certain the Wordpress team wouldn't be too excited to see an ad for Blogger better placed than their top natural search result and #1 paid-search link. More amazing still is that comments on Slashdot about this issue aren't all completely behind Google.

What makes Tips faintly nefarious is that they're not algorithmically derived (like the rest of Google results, both natural and paid). It's a fairly blatant marketing decision to drive traffic to contextually relevant Google products. Normally this would be a non-issue, since any company staffed with at least one marketer would attempt to do the same.

But Google's famous "do no evil" stance, and the trust users place in Google that the site will represent the most relevant results for specific keywords, aren't aligned with Tips. Simply put, if a Google product is actually not as relevant or popular as measured by its own algorithm, it shouldn't have top billing over those results (Wordpress blog as a keyword is a great example since the only relevant result should be Wordpress or results related to Wordpress).

Leveragedsellout strikes again

2006-12-28T15:16:00.000-08:00

Another funny post from LeveragedSellOut on an investment banker's night life. This was in response to a businessweek article from some Goldman analyst on his daily work routine. A couple of thoughts. Sadly, both posts are actually fairly true :( In my short stint at an investment bank, the 10-2AM workday wasn't uncommon (at least as an analyst). We didn't use "Rolling hard" back then, but the idioms were just as dumb.

This is the best line from Goldman analyst guy:

"The typical work week is around 80 to 100 hours, including time on weekends. It's tough to manage such a rigorous schedule in addition to relationships with friends and family. On the other hand, I'm exposed to more corporate executives at companies and senior bankers within Goldman than I anticipated, which is a fair trade-off."

Hee-hee. Only a first year analyst at any professional firm (IBanking, Consulting, Law) would say something like that. The best folks I knew at Bain/Morgan Stanley were the folks that got all their crap done from 8-6 and had the ability to stand up, leave and live a semi-normal life.

80-100 hours a week doing something you really love or have a passion for is obviously worth it. Most entrepreneurs live that. However, there is simply no number of corporate executives, senior bankers (or in my case $$$) worth 80-100 hours spent sitting running models :P.

Best MySpace codes

2006-12-24T21:22:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to announce our newly launched Corkboard code for MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and all other sites we work with. One of the things we're trying to do at RockYou is maximize the interaction of social network users. Corkboard lets folks set aside a place on their profiles where their friends can not only leave shared comments, but shared photos and objects as well. Check it out and make sure to put it on your blogs and social network profiles :D

- Add a Note - Get Your Own

Stumbleupon Video

2006-12-17T09:28:00.000-08:00

Stumbleupon Video is freakishly addictive. Check out this documentary on Hugo Chavez (warning -- its long). I'm no fan of his politics (I'm one of those left-leaning Republicans, fiscal conservative and social liberal), but the story is pretty fascinating. The documentary covers the underlying impact of (and trust placed on) the media and captures an actual coup d'etat on film. No easy feat.

Stumbleupon has something significant here. Where most sites are limited to Youtube-capped 5 minute videos, a lot of content on Stumbleupon Video ranges over 30-90 minutes. The videos are also much less focused on gag or shock value. If you choose All Channels, there's a lot of political content (like this Stephen Colbert report). I'm assuming like any good Web 2.0 startup, as Stumbeupon gets to know me better, the content will become increasingly relevant. It solves one of my main frustrations with Youtube, MySpace and the like. While the most popular videos on Youtube can be funny, a lot of times I'm surfing through content which, frankly, I personally find is crap (given I'm no longer aged 13-20).

Dave (VP Marketing at Stumbleupon), one suggestion. Make it easier to take the great content from your site and embed it on blogs, MySpace and other sites. The email sharing function is fine, but in order to embed the URLs above, I had to email myself. Content with an embed code (ala MySpace layouts on Freeweblayouts and photo sharing & slideshows on Rockyou) would be useful...

Bebo Widgets

2006-12-15T17:16:00.000-08:00

Wanted to announce Rockyou's integration to Bebo! Beboers can now upload Rockyou's widgets with a couple of clicks, with photo upload from Bebo albums and embedding of widgets on Bebo profiles all fully automated.

We're big fans of the Bebo team and site. Huge thanks to Michael, Xochi (cofounders), Jim and Darius. For those of you who haven't checked out Bebo, it's a super engaging site. It only takes a few minutes to get fully set up with layouts, video, pictures & albums, music and now Rockyou slideshows :). Everything is fully integrated/seamless and requires no copying of html for layouts, slideshows or other codes like on MySpace. They've got a massive number of bands on Bebo as well. Rock!

Dappit - Scraping at its Finest

2006-12-12T11:15:00.000-08:00

If I hadn't worked in eBay's Platform Solutions group, I wouldn't have a true appreciation for this. Go check out Dappit. While I have some questions whether the publishers/owners of targeted web content will be too happy with the service, Dappit essentially converts any html content (images, listings, text, etc) into a web service available via XML, RSS, alerts and more useful developer stuff. For all you scrapers out there this means not having to continually issue fixes to your scraping tools when a site's formatting changes. You can build an application to work off a true XML or RSS feed and let Dappit/Dapper do the heavy lifting of scraping site content.

What's truly cool about Dappit is its ability to group together content across multiple URLs/sites and bundle it into one web service group called a 'Dapp'. The Dapp is then made public and discoverable to any developer. Check out how many "eBay" Dapps that already exist. Scraping has always been the poor man's web service. Dappit has made scraping into a true web service platform -- which is both awesome (for developers) and frightening (for content owners) all at the same time.

Most Popular Websites

2006-12-11T13:15:00.000-08:00

Interesting post on Compete.com's blog referencing the top 20 most visited U.S. sites for October 06. Notice that only 20 sites have traffic over 20MM unique visitors a month. Our friends at Photobucket nearly break into that category as well. These stats track closely to Comscore's results for October, so kudos to Compete's algorithms for traffic monitoring. Now if only they gave daily results for the data-starved... :D

Translating Women Talk

2006-12-08T09:36:00.000-08:00

Great post from my pal Cindy translating 'women talk'. Unfortunately I hear "Fine", "Five Minutes", "Nothing", "Go Ahead", "Loud Sigh" and "Whatever" fairly often :(

Top MySpace Layouts

2006-12-04T15:23:00.000-08:00

Part of the fun of working at Rockyou as the biz dev guy is doing research on the social networking industry. While Rockyou leads in providing slideshows and other flash-based personalization widgets to MySpace, hi5 and other social network users, profile layouts (from the likes of Freeweblayouts and Pimp-my-profile) are actually more popular than slideshows, countdown timers, GIF icons, alphas or any other single 'pimp' application.

Over the past two months I've been compiling a running tally of MySpace profiles, getting to know how Rockyou sits with competitors and potential partners. Now that I've run past 1000 profiles, thought it'd be interesting to share some data.

First off, over 52% of MySpace profiles have some 'branded' layout embedded. That leaves nearly half of MySpace users without a formatted layout, or with a picture they uploaded themselves as a background. In addition, across those ~1000 profiles, there were over 100 layout providers. Think about that for a sec. For anyone interested in entering the profile layout space, there's obviously a TON of competition (if not a lot of startup cost). That said the top 10 layout providers accounted for a third of all layouts, so concentration is definitely occurring as the viral marketing effect takes place. The top 10 were as follows.

Layout Provider Market Share
1) Freeweblayouts 7%
2) Hotfreelayouts 7%
3) Pimp-my-profile 3%
4) mygen.co.uk 2%
5) myspacesupport 2%
6) Killerkiwi.net 2%
7) Pyzam 2%
8) MySpacePimper 2%
9) Freecodesource 2%
10) Nuclearcentury 2%

Obviously, Freeweblayouts and Hotfreelayouts are leaders in the space, with Pimp-my-profile growing quickly as a strong third. Hotfreelayouts (owned by x92.net) states they have 6.5MM unique users per month alone. What differentiates these providers from the rest? For all three, each have thousands of highly stylized, design-rich layouts for social network users. Pimp-my-profile also offers users to build and submit their own layouts to their site as well. But frankly, what maintains leadership in this hotly contested social networking 'pimp' space is viral marketing. All three were some of the first entrants to providing layouts and their early lead, coupled with a wide variety of dynamic, rich designs, generated significant enough buzz to drive and keep ongoing growth.

At Rockyou we're big believers in the impact of viral marketing, having spent $0 in marketing to reach over 6MM registered users and nearly 10MM unique visitors per month looking for greater self-expression online. We're currently working to support the growth of partners and branded sponsors looking to drive awareness and adoption with social network users (a significant % are women ages 16-30). If we can help, just send me an email at ro@rockyou.com.

The Shitshow

2006-12-03T21:19:00.000-08:00

Now that I no longer work for a public company requiring employees to maintain a fairly pristine image (my blog is once again all my own! woowee.) , I feel emboldened to refer folks to a profane but funny blog post (gasp) The Shitshow. It's hard to tell whether its satire or truth, but either way, anyone who's worked in consulting, investment banking or private equity, or worked with anyone in those fields, will get a chuckle. In summary, the author is a supposed private equity analyst from Deerfield/Wharton, poking fun at a recent hire from Bain, a well-regarded strategic consulting company (I'm biased since I worked there for 3 years post Duke). Best line from the post:

"Bro, I know you only made like $55k traveling to Bumblefuck, Idaho every week to provide 'strategic insight' and 'thought leadership,' but please, at least go to TJ Maxx and get some some slightly imperfect Brooks Brothers. Get on eBay or something and buy that shit used for God’s sakes. Yes, your Mom and your broke-ass girlfriend both got you gift certificates to Banana for Christmas, but that doesn’t mean you wear that Middle-America shit to work, son! This is FI-nance. FI as in 'FIx me a drink, Jeeves.' FI as in 'FIlling my wallet with Benjamins.' FI as in 'FIckle with my private jets.' Not FI as in 'FIt really well when I tried it on at the mall in Piscataway." Ugh."

Hard to imagine that at one point in my career I was gunning for a PE associate post, got the offer and was about to go. My girlfriend (now wife) convinced me to join a startup and my life has gone c0mpletely orthoganal to being "FI" focused :) (Meaning I actually pay for mortgage and daycare -- no yacht, place to 'summer', or live-in cook yet -- but also spend my time pursuing my passions/interests in technology, growing startups and weekends with the family).

First days at Rockyou

2006-11-27T18:39:00.000-08:00

I'm finally moved out of my eBay cubicle and into Rockyou's new offices in downtown San Mateo. It's a nice top floor space - one studio-type room where all 9 of us sit (no cubicles), one conference room (a cardboard packing box is our conference table), a mini-kitchen and a cramped bathroom. As you can tell, still settling in :) We have direct access to the building's roof deck and are within walking distance to my favorite pizza joint on the peninsula, Amici's. So far so good.

A few thoughts from a 4-year corporate guy going back to a startup.

I forgot how all-encompassing startup life could be. Rather than being one of the last to leave, here I'm usually first. Lance and Jia (Rockyou's cofounders) were understanding about my family/kids time requirements (7:30-9:30). That said, with the kids asleep, I'm usually back on the laptop working through deal terms, ripping through MySpace profiles to verify our competitive position or Skyping with Jia/Lance on the week's upcoming activities. I've always been a night owl and don't go to sleep before 1AM or so... except now its spent working/thinking rather than watching Conan or playing poker. Given my poker playing as of late, that's a double bonus.

A large user base is a good thing. Rockyou occupies a very specific niche, personalization widgets for social network, blog and personal website users. As we close in on 10MM unique users in November alone, we're realizing that this niche is more canyon than ravine. While the absolute number is great to have, a large customer base gives us more flexibility to innovate across multiple paths, vs living and dying on one specific product bet (whose focus is to get users in the door in the first place).

This is a lesson learned from eBay and other consumer Internet plays in general... scaling to massive user growth/usage as a primary goal vs monetizing the user base is an absolute requirement these days. Focusing on monetization first gives the competition the opportunity to undercut with a free product. The continuing growth of online advertising ensures that strong traffic will generate $$ at a base level at least. (PlentyofFish's $300K a month from Adsense is a clear example of this). Unlike 1995-2000, when the majority of online advertising spend came from highly volatile, unprofitable web startups (which caused the bubble to pop when they ran out of cash), these days advertising online is being driven by the Fortune 1000, hundreds of thousands of brick/mortar businesses AND online retailers/players. This base of business won't disappear overnight, which helps secure the future for online plays that are able to cross millions of users and keep them engaged. So, for those folks looking to scale users quickly, send me an email ;)

True wireless Internet access is another good thing :) I'm loving the Sprint EVDO wireless hookup on my laptop. We went down to Disney Land this weekend, and I was able to surf the web all 6 hours down I-5. The connection is pretty cheap ($30/month) and fairly fast -- about as good as my old DSL line. Anyone who does serious travelling should get one and no I'm not being paid by Sprint ;)

Lunch with Princesses is expensive... One of the biggest rackets around is Lunch with the Disney Characters at California Adventure. We paid $70 for a burger, fries, mac n cheese lunch for four, but got to meet Princess Belle, Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel and Sleeping Beauty. Woot! I'll post the thrilling pictures tonight. As a result, I'm thinking of opening up a local chapter of Lunch with the Disney Characters in Danville. Honestly, it's an almost perfect business model.

Rockyou.com

2006-11-15T11:58:00.000-08:00

Alright, I was planning on waiting until I made the formal jump, but my friend Cindy outed me. In a couple of weeks I'll be joining the team at Rockyou as their VP of Business Development. Blogging about Internet plays over the past 1.5 years invariably got me riled up about what's happening out there. The disintermediation of the Internet, the increasing personalization and relevancy for individuals online, the mass market acceptance of Web 2.0 sites... it was too hard to ignore.

Now, let me address something right off the bat. I love eBay (especially the eBay Motors team which has a huge vision for the future and a super-talented team to get us there). My last 4 years at the company have been both super challenging and rewarding. For all the naysayers out there, simply put, I firmly believe that there is no better large/public company to work for, especially in the Internet space. eBay cares a ton about all its stakeholders, whether its the community of buyers/sellers, eBay employees or its shareholders. Ultimately balancing all three can be quite a dance, but eBay has a ridiculously strong team across many levels to see this through.

Of course there are challenges and competitors, but if you had a chance to see the day to day here, I'd think you'd walk away impressed by the caliber of folks trying to accomplish the near-impossible - making eBay, Paypal & Skype the universal platforms for online commerce & communications... something which I personally believe will come true, if it hasn't already. Have I had my momentary disappointments? Sure. But they pale in comparison to the positive experiences I've had and the support the company has given me in my professional development. I'm a big supporter of the company and will always be. Semper Fi.

So why leave? Well, it came down to finding a small company which is the leader in its space, doing all the really cool, cutting-edge things that I've been posting about for months. Rockyou is the leading widget provider for social network users (including MySpace, hi5, Friendster, etc) bar none. The Rockyou site had over 8.5MM unique users come through in October (Alexa is so very very wrong) and has way over 100K flash widgets embedded a day on blogs, websites and user profiles. This network of widgets is now in the millions, generating over 100MM views a day. Lance and Jia, the founders of Rockyou, have a great vision of the company's future which mirrored my interests and thoughts about the Internet experience of tomorrow. Better yet, they understand Rockyou's customers, the social network user, and have built some of the most dynamic and coolest widgets on the web with them in mind. The team is also completely geared to work with partners looking to capture that viral marketing magic that propelled YouTube and others to success. Something unique is happening at this company, and to cut the chase, I wanted to be part of it.

So I'm going to miss the heck out my good friends and peers at eBay, but look forward to working with partners and cutting deals in this dynamic online personalization space. More posts to come about going back to startup land :)

Compete.com

2006-11-07T01:07:00.000-08:00

A lot's been written lately about the poor results generated by Alexa. (Here's a rundown on wikipedia) Frankly, I agree with most of them. Alexa can be fairly good when measuring 'like' sites with similar user demographics or capturing directional trends. However, by not supporting Firefox, over-representating Windows users, and with fairly simple gaming of Alexa (Webmasters can ask users to download the Alexa toolbar en masse driving ranking upwards), results can be real spotty.

All that aside, plenty of folks use Alexa as a key reference point for advertising deals, business development, and even fund-raising. Simply put, it was the best available free alternative for web traffic measurement. That's until Compete.com launched their 'Snapshot' function this October. Check it out. Compete runs sampling over 2MM users (including Firefox users ;)) and its results are simply a LOT more accurate. I've been looking at two sites in particular that according to Comscore and Nielsen Netratings have over 2MM uniques. On Alexa, their traffic rank and reach are below 3,000 and 300 respectively. Since Alexa bases their reach number out of a universe of 1MM and knowing that total Internet users equals about 1B, that would equal about 300K uniques... hmm. That doesn't ring true.

On Compete, these sites are measured at between 2MM to 3MM users. The other nice thing about Compete is that they offer actual estimates of users (vs an estimate based out of 1MM user universe). Now, there's a few things I'd like to see improved, such as multiple time ranges and pageview estimates, but the accuracy of Compete vs Alexa has convinced me to switch. Still, I'm going to miss Alexaholic :(

Relevancy and the Internet's sea change

2006-10-24T15:36:00.000-07:00

(Once again need to caveat that this is my personal opinion and has nothing to do with eBay's perspective) Safra Rashtchy from Piper Jaffrey had an interesting (but not completely correct) thought on Internet trends which bears noting...

"(There is) increasing fragmentation of internet sites and users' desire to frequent specialized vertical sites, both in commerce and in content and community. This, in our view, is the last stage completing the Web 2.0 evolution which began with the decline of AOL as its value proposition of a walled garden rapidly faded away. We believe the new Web requires new models and those who do not adapt will eventually vanish. This online Darwinism, while in early stages, could entirely change the landscape over the next five years, if existing players remain slow to react."

At some later date I'll comment on my direct opinion of the above. That said, while I concur that the Web is undergoing a sea change which will require new models, I don't agree with Safra's perspective on users.

Specifically, I don't think users have a driving desire to frequent multiple specialized vertical sites. People still have significant limitations on their time, and users will still want to visit their favorite 5-6 sites per week (as they do now). The BIG difference is that in the past those 5-6 sites were focused on maybe a dozen branded destinations. In my humble opinion, that's the most significant shift occuring these days. The favorites are changing dramatically, as driving relevant content has become a focal point for new web sites/services.

Instead of a dozen destinations, we're talking literally hundreds of potential destinations that are making up the new 5-6 favored sites a user goes to an a weekly basis. Looking at traffic patterns of current top Web 2.0 sites, at least a couple hundred have 750K-1MM+ unique users per month. These sites are no longer concerned about crossing the chasm, but already have a deeply specialized cut of the mass market, driving specific relevancy to specific users. Take Dogster as a clear example with 300,000 registered members (and growing), the recently acquired Grouper with 8MM uniques per month and RSS Readers (like Bloglines) aggregating dozens of feeds into one site. Social networks based on age, demographic (college, adult), and individual idiosyncrasies (Goth, Music, etc) only extend this further. Personally I believe each 'relevant' niche will end up with a winner or two, but we're still far from judging who those winners will be. In the end, it's the huge propogation of relevant and free content/services from Web 2.0 sites which is driving this trend toward site disaggregation (all supported by ad revenue).

Every (and I mean every) major destination site needs to adjust and conform to this new model where that site's services are easily integrated to the NEW 5-6 sites now engaged by users, whether that's Bloglines, Dogster, MyYahoo, MySpace, Netvibes, or Youtube. At some point, consolidation will come (making it easier to partner with winners), but until then it's simply too risky to NOT wildly disaggregate and openly distribute online content/services.

Predicting success and failure

2006-10-17T17:07:00.000-07:00

With no original content to add, here's a couple of great posts. First from Scott Adams on predicting success. Not sure why he titled the post "Knowing when to quit", since he only marginally covers this topic from his own experience... but still some good nuggets on predicting when something will really take off. Here's an example.

"So if you invent a new type of umbrella, for example, and every person who sees it says “that is clearly better than all other umbrellas on the market” then you have nothing. Walk away. But if someone who barely knows you demands to buy six of them for everyone in his family, and doesn’t first ask the price, and is willing to drive to your house to pick them up, then you might have something. Great ideas catch on immediately, and passionately, at least with the early adopters."

I couple this with a post from YCombinator's Paul Graham on startup mistakes (thanks Jeffrey for the lead). Paul lists 18 mistakes he believes bury potential businesses from succeeding. He saves the most impactful fatal mistake for last - "A Half Hearted Effort". At the multiple start-ups my wife or I have been involved in, building a founding team that 1) trusts each other and 2) are fully committed was tantamount. Unfortunately, we found it hard to find both. Because so many elements of a founding team are ridiculously important (i.e. product development, QA, sales, customer management, etc), if the engineer or rainmaker aren't plugged in, it often doesn't matter how passionate you are on your own... If the second, third or fourth leg of the table doesn't match the others, the platform is set to fall. We would waste 3-9 months looking for, signing, managing and ultimately firing engineers, sales people, and marketers who were bad fits for the sake of expediency. Frankly, it would have been better to screen much harder at the outset... Great hindsight is such a drag ;)

Judysbook shopping?

2006-10-13T13:17:00.000-07:00

I wrote a review of Yelp, Judysbook and Insiderpages a few months ago, with Yelp 'winning' the title of local review champ. With that, I was surprised by Judysbook's complete about face. Rather than local store/service reviews, the site is now focused on user-generated 'hot' deals across the web. This includes the now-familiar social network, comment and popularity voting aspects. While it's an interesting space, other sites are far more likely to outduel Judysbook here. In fact, the 69th ranked site per Alexa is a site called Fatwallet which seems to do exactly the same thing. Doh. Even worse, the 22nd ranked site is a little company called Digg whose functionality is directly in this wheelhouse.

Well, you gotta hand it to Judysbook founder/CEO Andy Sack (who has a great blog btw). At least he's got brass...

GooTube and Myspace

2006-10-10T15:08:00.000-07:00

Just an observation. (Completely my own btw and not representative of eBay whatsoever ;)) Now that Google has acquired Youtube, I wonder how the MySpace folks feel about their choosing Google as their search partner. In essence, searches on MySpace leveraging Google will probably end up with either 1) video content from Youtube (will Google maintain its Google Video link or focus on Youtube?) or 2) advertising revenue for Google that can be spent to bolster Youtube's reach/advertising/product. What a twisted web weaved these days thanks to "co-opetition".

Thanks Greg Isaacs!

2006-10-03T20:10:00.000-07:00

My old boss in eBay's Developers Program, Greg Isaacs, announced today that he was leaving eBay. In response, eBay's stock price rose 2.6%. Greg, you should leave every day :) Seriously, Greg was a great manager and friend.

We're going to miss you bro. Look forward to whipping you in Ping Pong and Go-Carts one day in the near future. Hopefully your next company flag football team actually wins something :( (Greg was 0-3 at Meg Bowls)

Amazon and A9

2006-10-02T18:15:00.000-07:00

Looks like Amazon is giving up on some of its search engine dreams. A9 is now being directed to improve Amazon's own site search functionality rather than build a destination site of its own. Not sure why I find this news somewhat disappointing (if unsurprising).

Ultimately, the disintermediation of Internet usage from current top sites is coming from services that aren't focused on web search, but rather providing relevancy to the user whether user-selected or dynamic in nature. Sites like Netvibes, Live.com, Meebo and MySpace are building pretty strong momentum here. When Hitwise reported that 10-12% of incoming Google traffic was being sourced by Myspace, this was just one example of this trend. As top webtops, chat interfaces, blog aggregators and others drive true relevancy to users based on their shared interests, personal networks and like communities, the increasing number of Internet 'starting points' will build beyond current favorite MySpace (and Youtube) alone. Looks like Amazon figured that out and dropped its own attempt at disintermediation. Still, its sad to see innovation cut at the knees.

Hangover Proxy

2006-09-28T13:23:00.000-07:00

Alright. So I have a headache, feel real tired, and have a bit of a headspin. This is the father of two version of a hangover. (No beer, no whisky, nada) Last night worked late until 1AM or so. Was in bed, ready for a solid 5+ hours of sleep. My son, pictured below, got up at 2:30AM and didn't stop asking for his mom, until she broke down, got him from his bed and brought him in ours. The rest of the night until 6:30AM was spent with him rolling around, fingers/toes digging into my back :( One hour of sleep later, I'm wandering the halls as if I had a real bender...

Create Your Own!

I think his molars are coming in. Anyone with kids have any recommendations?

Zecco - zero commission trading

2006-09-22T16:37:00.000-07:00

While I'm not always a big fan of Google, I have to grant them this. In my most humble opinion, click-through advertising has driven this whole Web 2.0 movement as much as any other factor (low-cost hosting, bandwidth, user-interaction included). Google/Overture made sources of traffic fairly invisible to advertisers. So long as users click-through, advertisers pay. With the aggregation of publishers and advertisers through these networks, the cost of generating (initial) ad sales essentially falls to zero for startups. Coupled with cheap hosting & bandwidth, free open-source code for SQL/databases & web servers, outsourced engineering, the fast growth of broadband access (and numerous other supporting factors), no-cost revenue generation via click-through advertising make prototyping and launching web services and applications very low risk.

Why state the obvious? Om Malik did this write up on Zecco. Apparently Zecco is looking to launch zero commission trading, making up the $2 per trade cost to them on advertising revenue. Paradigm-shift anyone? Trading (and paying for trading) has been around for a wee bit. Bohemoths like Charles Schwab, Ameritrade, eTrade and other personal finance 'retailers' generate billions focusing on trading revenue to the mass-market. If its at all possible to pull off, by the time the big guns try to adapt to this model, Zecco will be driving massive traffic and usage. Yahoo! Finance is already one of the biggest traffic (and ad revenue) draws for Yahoo! Combine that functionality (boards, blogs, real-time stock prices) with zero-trade commissions, and Zecco can eat up share not only from the trading firms, but from the finance portals as well.

Obviously big-name advertisers will wait on marketing directly via Zecco until it has a big enough audience draw, but thanks to Adsense/Overture, Zecco doesn't need to wait on (or invest in) generating revenue on their own. The same could be said for the thousands of other web sites leveraging click-through advertising on traffic volume alone. How does Web 2.0 differ from Web 1.o? These businesses with seemingly no revenue model (paying for $2 per trade in return for $0 would at first seem *cough* irrational), should everything else fail, have a safety net thanks to Google/Overture. Without it, business models like Zecco's would probably be too high risk for even crazy, base-jumping, shark riding entrepreneurs to take on.

Bella's Birthday

2006-09-19T10:41:00.000-07:00

Bella had her birthday party this weekend. She is now 4. Scary :D Here's some photos...

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Eventful Widget

2006-09-18T11:37:00.000-07:00

Check out this calendar widget from Eventful.

Compared to a lot of Web 2.0 companies that are solely focused on user-generated content to drive traffic, Eventful combines user-based content with a proprietary database of events across the web. This database isn't easy to replicate and serves as a great barrier to competitive entry. Eventful also offers a unique 'Demand It' functionality that allows users to aggregate requests for specific entertainers/artists for their location of choice. This function, much like the event calender widget above, is portable and is now used by bands on Myspace to reach out to fans. Unique user functionality, an easy to use web service platform, combined with a proprietary, hard to copy database makes for a compelling business...

Ivan, hit the Events tab, conduct a search for a specific event in your location and look to the right (here's Giants in San Francisco) for 'Save as sticker'.

Feedburner take two

2006-09-17T00:48:00.000-07:00

Quick note. While I'm a big fan of Statcounter (best free service I've found which packs a lot of charting and historical data for blogs), and have started using Mybloglog for the blog community aspects (note to Mybloglog management - make more of your blog log services free), Feedburner has absolutely rocked. It pains me I took so long to adopt the service, assuming folks would go through the hassle of copy/pasting the XML to their reader. With the vast majority of folks still not using any RSS reader and finding blog content through search engines, it's easy to lose potential future readers. The sheer number of people who find this blog by searching on "ro choy blog" makes that obvious. Making feed subscription easy is like building recurring revenue for your business. It's an absolute no-brainer...

Linkedin and The Bachelor

2006-09-15T15:38:00.000-07:00

Just got this email from the good folks at Linkedin...

"Dear Rogelio,

"ABC Television’s hit reality television show, The Bachelor, is searching for its next star. After viewing your profile on LinkedIn, the casting producer has selected you as a potential candidate.

"ABC is using LinkedIn to find its next Bachelor because this time around, they’re looking for an accomplished professional. LinkedIn is about your professional life instead of your personal life, so we don’t know if your marital or relationship status qualifies you for the show. However, your professional profile fits the bill. If you think you’d make a great “Bachelor,” please let me know by reply and I will contact you regarding next steps.

"If you know anyone else that would make a great "Bachelor", feel free to let us know about them"

I love Linkedin. Use it religiously. Who knew there would be these additional perks? Seems the casting producer is OK with my having two kids and a mortgage (it's in my Linkedin Profile). Think how well that would sell with the bachelorettes. Just got to convince the wife of the upside... ;)

That aside, props to ABC for being forward-thinking and using Linkedin to source their Bachelor candidates. If only for that I'll check out who they end up picking.

Update: Btw, there's a nice bounty for finding the next Bachelor, so if you're interested send me an email :)

Spleak and IM chat marketing

2006-09-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

Recently a friend of mine, Josh Scott, decided to join the IMTLabs team. IMTLabs is responsible for Spleak, a virtual girl that can be 'friended' on MSN Messenger. According to the site, Spleak can do a bunch of stuff via natural language queries.

"She plays games. She makes jokes. She can give you all kinds of information, from weather and news to spell checks and definitions. She will find you new friends from all over the world."

Now first blush, IM chatbots seem fairly old hat. My AIM friends Moviefone and ShoppingBuddy must feel pretty lonely and abandoned by me at this point. That aside, with the mass transition from email to IM Chat among the next generation (I'm still firmly stuck between the two - i.e. I'm old :(), a personalized chatbot starts making a lot of sense. With open access to IM via cellphone (Mundu) and browser (Meebo), having real-time answers to questions via Spleak is a nice value-add (vs opening up another browser window, going to a search engine and trying to 'find' the correct answer). Based on that, it's no surprise that Spleak has already been uploaded to a few million chat clients.

Spleak gains a very detailed understanding of each user's interests since she's answering questions across a wide range of topics. With that, focused, niche marketing via IM starts becoming a very real opportunity (I ask a question about local restaurants and get premium and standard listings). Kudos to the IMTLabs team. Looks like they're onto something big...

Rules for Web Startups

2006-09-14T21:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a good read - ten rules for Web startups from the founder of Pyra Labs/Blogger, Evan Williams. Agree with all of them. Apparently Evan broke most of his own rules with his current podcasting startup Odeo. One rule he forgot to include: Be honest with yourself...

Online Communities

2006-09-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

The recent reactions of social networking users to policy and product changes make clear both the leverage and constraints in building a business around community. Some things for future community-enabled site founders to consider:

1) Co-ownership rocks (except when it doesn't). Communities can feel great ownership over a site and its functionality. They work around a site's idiosyncracies and learn from force of habit how to make best use of said site on their own terms. No matter if the site's design is less than appealing, if a community feels ownership over it (like an unattractive baby), they'll perceive it beautiful since it's their own. Open discussion forums, blogs (w/ comments allowed), and user-empowerment (rankings, reviews, networks, etc) are great tools to cement co-ownership with users. Co-ownership is fantastic in terms of generating word-of-mouth marketing and deep customer loyalty. But with that, the expectations of the community are heightened. Co-ownership, whether real or perceived, generates a lot of passion...

2) Vet, vet, vet. If you're an owner of a site, you'd probably prefer changes to said site, whether product, design or policy, be something you can directly influence. If changes are made without involving community members (especially if they're the most vocal members), a user community will feel less empowered, less sense of ownership. This can result in ambivalence to a site (reduced loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing) or worse, antagonistic communities being formed. This is a definite cost to having a community-empowered business model, since the vetting can lengthen development times for product and require multiple reviews of policy decisions.

3) Online communities tend to mirror their offline kin. Once an online community supporting a site has been formed, leaders and influencers arise. Identifying these folks and engaging them in your business decisions and processes are key. Well established communities dont often openly accept radical change since understanding and adjusting to these changes takes a ton of collective work. Just as with any constituency, lobbying for changes with community leaders/influencers can build support across a wide base of users and minimize negative reactions.

4) Never take it personally. The absolute worst reaction to community pushback is to deny, dismiss, patronize or over-react to user concerns. Again, communities are passionate due to sense of ownership. Fully expect strong opinions and strongly-worded expressions of displeasure (and support). Take it on the chin, listen to what's behind the concerns and address them (or at least take them into consideration) as openly and publically as possible.

Tucows buys Kiko

2006-09-05T23:04:00.000-07:00

While $250K might not sound like a great liquidity event, it's still pretty cool that Tucows made it happen on eBay...

Feedburner

2006-09-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

So I've finally signed up to Feedburner and added an RSS widget to my blog (look right :)). Doh. It's only taken me a year and half to realize that folks reading this blog have a hard time getting a feed from the site. While more than half the readers of this blog are looking for "Google Porno" (I'm number #4 out of 14MM results), I imagine a few of you out there are sick and tired of typing in "ro choy blog" on Google.

Btw, I've been tied up in knots with work lately so haven't had a good original thought I could blog about for a bit, but I promise good stuff to come...

Corporate blogging

2006-08-25T09:45:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Mark Cuban for finding this blog post from Rahool Sood, President of Voodoo PC. This is a ridiculously good example of how a company blog can be a great marketing tool. Reading this post (and having no real interest in high-end PCs) makes me want to get to know Rahool and his company better (which ultimately is what great marketing is about).

The post is a good yarn about Rahool's conversations with Michael Dell, and his opinions on Dell and Apple in the high-end PC market. What comes through clearly is Rahool's passion for his company and for his customers. It personifies Voodoo for me as a company that really cares about its target customer segment, about being as cutting edge as possible, and investing heavily to be so, and provides substantiation for the high-price points of their product. Rather than feel 'cheated' by the high price of a Voodoo system, I walk away from this post thinking that IF I bought a Voodoo, 1) I'm buying into something valuable because of the R&D investment and 2) that Voodoo's customer service should be top-notch (given how passionate the President of Voodoo is about his product and customers). All this from a blog post...

Web 2.0 bubble?

2006-08-23T23:41:00.000-07:00

Bumped into this list from Seth Godin on Alexaholic that breaks out the top 'Web 2.0' companies ranked by traffic. A few thoughts. First, I'm glad Seth included eBay on the list :) Also, knowing a few of these companies fairly well, it's surprising to see how much activity and traffic is being generated by at least the top 100 sites. Take Grouper, recently acquired by Sony for $65MM. They stated they had north of 6 million users a couple months ago, but they're only 63rd on the list with Alexa rank of 2,979.

Before the days of Google, eBay, Yahoo and Myspace, 6 million users would have been fairly impressive :) Frankly, even today, any service that manages millions of customers has to be taken seriously. Given there's 61 companies with more traffic than Grouper on Seth's list (and no Alexa isn't perfect, but at least its directionally correct), the sheer amount of activity being driven by these sites collectively is nearly incomprehensible.

There are many comparisons of Web 2.0 to Web 1.0's bubble activity. Only a handful of Web 1.0 sites got even close to a million users, let alone multi-million. Something has dramatically shifted in how Joe Q is using the Internet, and for at least 100 Web 2.0 companies, crossing the chasm isn't an issue anymore...

Microsoft Web 2.0

2006-08-21T12:08:00.000-07:00

This interesting tidbit from Don Dodge at Microsoft:

"George Moore, GM of Windows Live, said there a 240 million Hotmail users, 230 million Live Messenger, 72 million Live Spaces, and 8 million mobile subscribers. He also said that at any given moment, 20 million people are simultaneously connected on Messenger and 5.7 billion messages are sent per day. Also there are 300 million F2F video conversations on Live Messenger every month. George also said Live Spaces is "now the largest blogging service on the planet". It grew to 30M accounts in its first 6 months."

:O. 72M Live Spaces users is pretty surprising. Currently Spaces ties together social networking, image hosting, blogging and a webtop experience. The webtop feels fairly function rich, and is reminiscent of Netvibes, if still a version behind that service. There seems to be less 3rd party content or web services to add to my Spaces page (though the Live.com beta page seems to have a bunch of 3rd party content available) . The social networking piece is also a bit raw (I was confused whether building 'my' space actually generated a social network profile or not). In terms of people search, for some reason the images are very small. Search results for 'friends' across age groups seem to fall below 50K users per search and the profiles themselves are fairly spartan, so it appears the social networking piece is still developing.

All that being said, this is a forward-thinking attempt at capturing social interaction across multiple channels (photo sharing and blogging seem very popular) and tying them together. With Messenger, Hotmail and blogging as its foundation, Live.com has a lot of room to grow. While beefing up the social networking functionality (via build or buy) seems like an apparent need, MS has an intriguing asset on its hands...

Teen Email Usage

2006-08-16T13:17:00.000-07:00

This from CNN Money on teens not using email. Not that this is at all surprising. With IM/Text Messaging becoming the de-facto mode of communication for the next generation, there's an increasing importance to owning that channel of communication as it relates to marketing. Sites like MySpace and services from Yahoo, MSN, Skype and others are obviously well positioned here... Interesting trend to watch.

Building an Ecosystem

2006-08-16T10:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Greg for finding this article on the value of developer programs to a business. Winning the hearts and minds of developers is an absolute priority where enabling widgets, mashups and generating massive user adoption have become key aspects to success online.

Currently the average Internet surfer focuses on 5-6 sites for both content and services (such as eCommerce or banking). Webtops (and ultimately the social networks will head down this road) are hugely valuable because they allow 2x or 3x the coverage of content and services for the individual user (vs surfing to each specific site) via widget and RSS integration. Based on this value-add, webtops and/or social networks are fast becoming the starting point for an individual's engagement to their personal Internet experience. With mass-market adoption of this trend, offering an application via web services (and not only content as is offered today via RSS) will be one of the most critical aspects to gaining traction among users. It doesn't have to be as broad or deep an offering as eBay has today, but coupling API availability, an SDK or at the very least, a portable Ajax/Flash enabled widget for key application functions are an absolute necessity...

MySpace and Influence

2006-08-07T10:08:00.000-07:00

So I finally joined my fellow eBayer Alan Lewis on MySpace and put more 'stuff' onto my profile like a picture and a general description of who I am and what I'm interested in. Tada! Fully expecting the friends to start rolling in now :) All that aside, all of my recent activity on MySpace got me asking a few questions. If I already have a personal blog, what value does MySpace drive? Shouldn't high exposure of my blog via natural search be enough to expose my personal opinions on things?

With all the focus around open standards, open networks and all things user-generated, the value of the 'traditional' closed network tends to be minimalized. The distinction between a MySpace/Linkedin profile and a blog is a great comparison. I'm (almost) free to do whatever I want on my blog. But frankly the lack of structure to a blog, which is greatly valued by some, is most likely a deterrent to the mass market. For those folks, the value that most closed networks bring are structure and an interface that's more easily adopted.

MySpace/Linkedin are great alternatives/complements to the typical blog. I don't need to write periodically to my profile, just enough one time to capture my shared interests, whether business or personal. The closed network then generates 'demand' for my profile by exposing the tags/descriptions via structured search (more user-friendly than an open search on a search engine). So long as the network is large enough or growing (which comes with mass market adoption), exposure of my profile is sustained regardless of new content. In comparison, demand on my blog correlates very closely to the sheer amount of content I put on it. Without new content, a blog's value to search engines decreases, reducing visibility. Unless you actually enjoy writing, a blog is a fair amount of effort over and above the network profile. Additionally, blogs have few if any of the structured search/marketing tools that closed networks offer.

Beyond the social/dating aspect of MySpace and other social networks, the sheer empowerment of the individual through a social network profile and 'friends' network is fairly awe inspiring. (Potentially even more so than the influence you can have through a blog) Consider comedian Dane Cook and his 1.4MM friends. These are MySpace users who have self-selected to receive blog 'updates' from one of their favorite entertainers. Should Dane head to any city, he has a 1.4MM marketing list to work with. Name me an individual blog with that reach... I don't think it exists.

Update: Thanks for reminding me Jeffrey. Here's my Myspace profile - RoChoy

MeeboMe Doh! moment

2006-08-03T15:05:00.000-07:00

One (significant) complaint I have about Meebome. It looks like you need to be signed into Meebo to be actually 'online' via the widget. Doh. My AIM client is always on. Meebo already knows this and should communicate this to the widget. Without this, the intrinsic value of Meebome for presence detection is actually fairly limited... Honestly, how often am I going to be logged into Meebo?

MeeboMe

2006-08-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

Very clever chat widget from Meebo (look on the sidebar right below the pagefold). I've been using an interoperable wireless chat interface on my Treo from Mundu Wireless which has been a fantastic way to engage with friends/peers while on the road. The Meebo widget is a great step towards tying my 'presence' across multiple sites and via wireless as well (via Mundu).

With multiple potential points of presence (your website, blog, social network profile, linkedin page, etc) starting to proliferate, having a central point to detect presence and engage through one channel is increasingly important as well. In my case, I've put this widget on both this blog and my new MySpace profile (trying to pull together a post on that experience now). Now if Meebo would only give me an equally small widget to log into my chat interface rather than having to 1) go to meebo.com or 2) enable the entire Meebo webtop on my Netvibes page...

Widgets and Postapp Widgetbox

2006-07-26T17:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a bold (not) prediction. The day of the widget is here... Hide the children. Lazy college economics professors will no longer be able to talk about 'widgets' and their marginal cost without a knowing chuckle from the back of the class. Widgets (whether AJAX or Flash-based) are fast becoming mainstream. Now sometimes I hear complaints that my perspective represents the TechCrunch 53K (number of TechCrunch readers) more than the mass market. But the more I read about the rising adoption of services like Netvibes and Live.com (Live.com is a juggernaut btw), it looks like millions of mass market users are in agreement about widgets as well. Check out the traffic patterns of some popular webtops below (and then compare it to live.com -- yow. Mr Softie is doing something right here.)

Widgets are also hugely popular within social networks (with services like RockYou, Youtube and Slide). Check out almost any MySpace page and you'll see image and video widgets in prominent spots. Web services from box.net and Digg are also popular these days. As the number of webtops, social networks and their respective users increase, the increasing complexity of managing these different platforms for placement of widgets becomes strikingly apparent. Everyone from MySpace to AOL to Netvibes to Microsoft Live (and on and on) will have different requirements, policies and means for enabling 3rd party widgets.

Obviously, there is a significant opportunity here to build an integrated platform to enable widgets for wide distribution regardless of end-user platform, and it seems that PostApp/Widgetbox is leading that charge. While they are still in private beta, they have had a lot of interest from the developer community in their offering (who apparently also agree that widgets will be big). They remind me a ton of Appforge that's built a killer business enabling developers to build wireless applications across hundreds of handsets without having to deal with conforming their app to accomodate each and every handset's distinct software requirements. This is exciting stuff folks -- the personal web only promises to get bigger with the increasing value of an integrated web experience via webtops/social networks (see post below). Companies like PostApp are helping accelerate this movement even further.

Netvibes, Meebo and Alexa. A good threesome.

2006-07-26T16:46:00.000-07:00

Netvibes just integrated Alexa and Meebo into their embedded widgets for users. Very cool. Given I use Alexa/Alexaholic on an almost daily basis to measure potential partners' online activity, as well as other sites of interest, the Alexa widget is way useful as a monitoring tool. While I like Meebo, the integration of the Meebo service into Netvibes feels a bit contrived. The interface on Netvibes simply mirrors the Meebo experience. I would have rather had a tighter integration so I could access Meebo chat directly from my Netvibes homepage, rather than a separate 'chat' tab . Maybe fold the contact list into the regular chat window and expand only when needed. Ah well...

Cash Flow and Speed

2006-07-23T01:30:00.000-07:00

Good post on managing cash flow in a startup. Here's a short but pertinent excerpt.

"Even more shocking was the speed at which my business flipped from success to failure. One day I watched my bank account grow at rates that blew me away and the next, I sat looking at all my cool computer equipment deciding whether it was more important to me and my business than paying rent that month was. I didn’t have time to get new customers while supporting my existing ones and my company virtually augered itself into the planet in an instant. I shut down the company just a month or so later and ran to work at a big company to lick my wounds."

The startup I founded with my wife Lisa, Cima Systems, and the following company Lisa ran, VoiceNotify, were great contrasts in cash management (one VC funded, the other bootstrapped). With either investment model, managing cash flow was a time killer in multiple ways (time being the most precious of our resources). First, raising funds soaked up a ton of the day-to-day. Whether it was friends and family, customer funding, angel or venture capital, we ended up doing a lot of road trips and cold calls just getting our business capitalized enough for the basics (phone bills, bandwidth, hardware). Second, because of the constraints on cash, we didn't have anywhere near the time to ponder and analyze whether a decision was the absolute right one. Better to make a decision that's directionally correct over a day or two than spend a month vetting all possible options (a month of payroll and overhead was way expensive for both companies). This is in stark contrast to decisions at a larger company, where the opportunity cost for making the wrong decision often far outweighs the time investment in due diligence and analysis.

Startups aren't necessarily faster than large corporations by nature. From my (limited) experience, cash flow (and the lack thereof) made speed a prerequisite to startup success.

AAIA Aftermarket eForum

2006-07-20T12:18:00.000-07:00

Just got back from a two day visit to Chicago for the AAIA's (Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association) Aftermarket eForum conference. As far as conferences go, the AAIA did a great job pulling together very compelling content and top companies/players in the parts industry. What makes an auto parts conference compelling you ask? Well, this whole web services thing is catching fire in a bigger way with huge, traditional markets than most conceive.

EDI has been a long-standing standard in the automotive industry for data interchange among companies able to afford EDI usage. Recently, the efforts of the AAIA (and other key associations) to enable a standard classification of parts (via PIES and ACES) has resulted in material adoption of these standards across the repair & replace parts market. Standardization of product classifications is a key element to driving the use of web services for data integration among part vendors and customers. The availability of web services makes EDI-type data integration with suppliers/customers more readily available and far less expensive to businesses of any size given the XML/SOAP/REST standards used for APIs today.

There was a surprising number of references to the use of web services for part suppliers and manufacturers at the conference, and wider acceptance among conference attendees that this was an important aspect to improving their future business practices. That said, in some of my one-to-one conversations with distributors and manufacturers, there was also a general frustration with third party applications not offering web services as a direct part of their applications' offering. A hint to all developers out there with an interest in online parts & accessories sales... web services seems to have crossed an inflection point here.

Worst site names

2006-07-17T11:58:00.000-07:00

Credit to Dead 2.0 for pointing out this post "The top 10 unintentionally worst company URLs". For folks looking to buy remote-access software here's #7 -- www.ipanywhere.com. Rofl.

RockYou

2006-07-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

Cool no? RockYou! is appropriately named.

RockYou... wait not yet :)

2006-07-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

Anyone else have issues embedding dynamic elements into their Blogger posts? I keep getting a "Tag is Not closed error" for any picture/slide/video inserts I try to do. And no I'm not an engineer :(

Update: Amazingly, I figured it out....

Jon Stewart

2006-07-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

Here's a surprise. Jon Stewart is really funny. :)

WindingRoad and Olive Software

2006-07-12T18:17:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I read up on Olive Software, a company whose application converts physical documents into standard XML. The end product is preserved in the original format of the document (i.e. the look and feel is that of an offline publication), while making all the content within said document structured and, therefore, searchable. It's was a cool piece of technology but I felt it was fairly esoteric and outside of my scope of interest.

Recently, some very well known editors/journalists in the automotive space have come together and formed Winding Road magazine. They have an interesting business model whereby they give away subscriptions to their pub for free. The content is very high-end (given the founding team's journalistic experience) which should drive enthusiast and consumer interest. What's interesting about this formerly 'traditional' format is that they've licensed Olive's software and embedded advertisements into an online and downloadable publication which has all all the benefits of being built in an XML standard. Much like reading a physical pub, Winding Road's download is picture, content and format rich, making it an engaging read (as opposed to published content on basic HTML pages which lacks a lot of polish). Previous issues can be read in this downloadable form, but are also captured in open HTML pages thereby capturing natural search benefits lost in the download format.

Even more interesting is that because the download/online publication is in XML format, almost all the terms are linkable, including the advertisements. If you're interested in the content of a particular ad, Winding Road will redirect your click to the advertiser's site. I assume Winding Road is then able to exactly measure the true effectiveness of ad spend on their pub. Take away the costs of offline production and distribution and Winding Road has taken a real interesting angle on what the future of magazine publishing should be...

XML/Web services are usually focused on data integration. Olive Software, via Winding Road, has made XML material as a media and advertising tool as well.

Autospies.com

2006-07-07T16:30:00.000-07:00

Interesting new site focused on the automotive space called Autospies. They've integrated Digg like functionality for auto-related news items, along with photos, reviews and videos. This concept seems to be catching steam. One of my favorite auto mags is Car and Driver. Been reading it since I was a kid. Surprisingly, Autospies' online traffic performance has matched Car and Driver's online presence (per the below).
The inclusion of user-elected content to vertical sites (especially in automotive) seems to be generating increased interest from publishers and the public (Carspace from Edmunds and CarCrazyCentral are invoking social networking for car enthusiasts). Even if specific players in this realm fail, looks like the general plumbing of Web 2.0 has 'crossed the chasm' and achieved mainstream acceptance.

Personal opinion

2006-06-28T12:14:00.000-07:00

Just want to remind folks who read this blog. Any and all posts that I write about are completely my personal opinion and are not representative of eBay's view, opinion or perspective on any subject matter. Apologies for any confusion on this.

Call me the "Ro"ster

2006-06-27T01:18:00.000-07:00

Reading The Alarm Clock this early morning and came across DFJ's investment in "Guidester". Please. For the love of the God. If you care about the physical wellbeing of random strangers... please stop with the 'X-sters'. It's like a punch line you've heard so often to the point you need to run out of a room like some deranged person at the start of the joke. I've taken a vow and now refuse to even go to a site with a "ster" at the end of it. Sorry Friendster, Jobster, Napster and Guidester. Why not call your company Web2OhStR? Now that would rock :D

Netvibes is Tres Cool

2006-06-20T17:53:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned Netvibes a few times in the past. Simply, I think this is a great indicator of the future of Internet usage. Word on the street is that the Netvibes' user base is in the several millions and per the graph from Alexaholic below, showing accelerating growth (over and above other webtop competitors like Pageflakes and Meebo).

Frankly, I still prefer my Bloglines account to access my content. As an RSS reader, Netvibes doesn't collapse the content well enough to aggregate more than a few feeds on the webtop. In addition, the feeds include the title but require a mouse over to see the content underneath (as opposed to a quick view of the content below the title). That said, the integration of web services from Box.net, eBay, Yahoo Mail and inclusion of web search are very compelling. As Netvibes continues to aggregate other web services and/or improve their RSS reader function (I have 49 different feeds on Bloglines), it won't take long for me to transition over completely.

Word of caution to any application or site that isn't investing in web services. Centralized access to your app via APIs will become a key competitive advantage (whether for you or for your competition is your call :)). Netvibes is showing a head of steam in this direction. Hopefully it's enough to become another viable starting point for Internet access...

eBay Sellers

2006-06-20T15:19:00.000-07:00

Please excuse the lack of posts. I spent a week in Las Vegas at the eBay Developer Conference and eBay Live. There's a lot to be said for both.

One of the lasting impressions I got from speaking with developers and sellers alike last week is that eBay has a true closeknit seller community. It's easy to lose faith when eBay is continually referenced as fighting trench warfare with search engines and the like. Attending eBay Live reinforced the fact that the vast number of sellers on eBay have a very directed focus on this marketplace as the primary if not sole distribution channel for sales. While the same can't be said for eBay's very top sellers, many of which have gone multi-channel and are utilizing their own websites and tools like Adwords, this top group accounts for a very small number of overall sellers on the site (albeit a disproportionate amount of total sales). So long as eBay can continue driving value and demand, our eBay-centric seller community will continue to push supply as needed. It's a fantastic barrier to sell-side competition.

Social Networking Revenue

2006-06-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

I found this news item on Yahoo! dropping MySpace publishers interesting. Looks like social networking ads are generating 1/10th the clickthrough rates vs normal contextual ads (1-2% clickthrough) and only $0.10 per CPM for MySpace due to massive oversupply of pages vs demand.

While the articles state that MySpace should focus on brands and businesses creating profiles, I don't think there's a ton of viability to that concept. It's fairly apparent that social networking users aren't appreciative of ads being part of the context of what they read (hence the ridiculously low clickthrough). If I were MySpace, I'd flip this on its head. While readers of blogs/profiles may have no interest in contextual ads, associating and tagging users based on what they write in their profiles and presenting them contextual content (including ads) could be more effective. The reason ads work on search engines is that they're viewed as a value-add for a specific keyword search a user performs. Many times, the ad itself is a more valuable link from a research perspective than the natural search results alone for a specific keyword.

In the case of social networking, the ads have little to no relevance to what's being searched (i.e. a user reads a personal profile or a friend's blog with no specific keyword or search in mind) As a result, contextual ad content which relates to written social-networking content has little to no value-add for the reader of said content. It would however relate to the writer.

Social-networking sites should move more aggressively in evolving the content editing pages of their sites (for profile and blog creators) into a personalized webpage experience (ala Goowy, Pageflakes and Netvibes). In this way, the MySpace's of the world could capture and monetize the interests of said user (tagging that user via their own written content) by presenting personalized, dynamic content related to the content creator. Adding ads at this point once again are a value-add since the ad is presented alongside content the user is actually interested in... (Take a hint here Rupert. Buy Netvibes, Pageflakes or create this capability on your own)

Techcrunch venting

2006-06-07T09:33:00.000-07:00

For those of you who don't know Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, he is a leading influencer among technology-focused bloggers. His reviews of new online applications have become a a formal launching process for start-ups. TechCrunch has become hugely popular because Michael doesn't hold back on his opinions, whether its effusive praise or scathing critique. (It's gone both ways for eBay/Paypal/Skype on TechCrunch)

That being said, his latest rant on Google mirrors my personal opinion. At some point a company's success has to be measured beyond PR-heavy product launches, with minimal to incremental impact. Sometimes you have to wonder if having a great (if blindingly loyal) fanbase can sometimes be as misleading to an organization as it can be supportive.

Clickfraud and Customer Service

2006-06-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

Interesting post from Robert Cringely on issues relating to clickfraud and customer service. There seems to be increasing volume of posts related to this issue, with Mark Cuban staking his point of view. I'm less concerned about clickfraud. Ultimately if its a real issue, advertisers will decrease their focus on Adwords and similar tools. Once (and if) things start going south, I expect the adword-centric platforms will respond accordingly. I do think, however, that Robert's note on customer service is dead-on.

In the absence of timely customer service, customers simply don't give you the benefit of the doubt. Looking back at my own start-up experience, customer support was ridiculously expensive (more from a headroom than a cash perspective). Almost always it required resources across the organization to address an issue, and more than half the times, the issue was customer-centric (i.e. not a site-wide or application-wide issue, but more a problem with a specific customer's environment). Regardless, our customers didn't really care if their hardware met our product requirements, or if the servers we shipped them were self-installed in closets that were reaching the core temperature of the sun. If we didn't respond to these issues, we lost that customer forever. As the COO at Cima Systems, I would spend half of my work week out at customer sites, tooling around with set-ups or underneath desks, rebooting and reformatting things (this was before the renaissance of web services) and generally giving customers greater confidence in our company. So long as we invested time here, even if there were breakdowns (environment, hardware, software issues) customers stayed on...

At eBay, we've built a significant resource with our Customer Support teams. They're given enough degrees of freedom and discretion to actually bring meaningful solutions to the table. This is an area eBay continues to build actively because we recognize that if we're not talking to our customers, they'll be talking about eBay without our point of view or guidance or they'll be talking with our competitors.

Clickfraud, while easily dismissed by the adword platform providers because customers can't quantify it, is still a very real issue to the customers who sense it's there. As the din regarding clickfraud goes beyond a few customers and bloggers, timely customer service and response will be the key to maintaining or losing advertisers in the long-run. And for some, this unfortunately is something that requires direct contact and can't be addressed algorithmically.

National Anthem

2006-06-02T14:53:00.000-07:00

Funny as heck video clip... :)

Blog Marketing v3

2006-05-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

Munjal Shah, former Andale founder, is writing a a bunch of posts recounting the last two months of activity at startup Riya. The first week recount is pretty fascinating stuff. Again, compelling personal content drives traffic, personalizes the service and hopefully generates usage.

Looks like I need to come up with more compelling content ;)

Skype Free

2006-05-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

Take a look at Skype's performance post making SkypeOut free for the U.S. and Canada. Per Alexaholic, Skype's pageviews have increased 55% since mid April (from 180 to 280 PVs per million). Now assuming downloads and registrations have increased in relatively the same magnitude, it looks like free SkypeOut has been a significant success.

(Numbers taken out to protect the innocent). How many web services (let alone VOIP services) are on that growth curve here in the U.S.? I can only think of a handful...

Yelp, InsiderPages and Judysbook

2006-05-25T15:32:00.000-07:00

Been taking a closer look at a lot of local search sites this past week. Thought it would be interesting to compare a few in a post. Let's start with the Web 2.0 sites. There are five factors I looked at to measure local search sites (this includes Web 2.0, local search portals and online directories). 1) Abundance of listings 2) Community content & tools to drive viral word-of-mouth 3) Trust based on availability of ratings and reviews 4) Research availability (excluding reviews) and 5) user convenience.

First things first. For the Web 2.0 sites, Yelp takes the cake. Of the three major Web 2.0 local search sites (Yelp, Insiderpages, Judysbook), Yelp led all three in terms of traffic (Alexa Rank 3605 vs 6657 and 6050 respectively). Given the below, it looks like they did it with more than just better marketing...

Measuring abundance was tricky. Type in 'restaurants' for all three (I did this for SF and NYC). Yelp's listings are 2x the number of the other sites. That being said, Yelp's categorization of listings seems to be screwed up. Insiderpages has 1,700 physicians in their system for SF. Type in "doctor" in Yelp and you get 3,800. Now try to find that 'doctor' category on the Yelp page. Their "Health and Medical" category only has 382 listings for SF... weird. 1) Abundance => Yelp (with a categorization caveat)

While all three sites have a fairly clear community integration to their listings and reviews, Yelp surfaces community more directly (both in user profiles via compliments and on their homepage w/ 'messaging' and 'talk' features up front). InsiderPages has taken more of a business directory experience (focusing on the categories/listings), while I'm not sure how to categorize Judysbook. Yelp's social-network focus seems to have driven a greater concentration of reviews. Taking a broad sampling of listings, Yelp had more than 15%-25% of listings with an associated review. Insiderpages and Judysbook were at 5%-10%. 2) Community => Yelp 3) Trust => Yelp

None of the sites offered any real research content associated to the general category of interest. Citysearch has taken an interesting angle on this, but I'll reserve that review for another post. 4) Research => they all lose

Finally, on user convenience, all three have great interfaces. That said, Yelp definitely needs to work on their categorization of listings. Finding content through their category structure is difficult and doesn't surface anywhere near the number of listings that are actually in their system. Insiderpages has a very clean interface and isn't as cluttered as Judysbook. 5) User convenience => Insiderpages

With Yelp taking 3 out of 5, I hereby award Yelp the best Web 2.0 Local Search site for May 2006 (at least until Judysbook and Insiderpages come out with their v3.0).

Update: Thanks to Jeremy from Yelp for clarifying - Yelp's categorization focuses on user reviews vs listings, hence the lower result. Looks like Yelp is focusing on user reviews vs showing abundant listings alone.

MySpace Mail

2006-05-19T16:47:00.000-07:00

Here's another take on portal traffic from Hitwise. Take a look at the % market share of MySpace Mail. It's almost as much as Hotmail and dwarfs GMail by a factor of 9. Holy Mo.

MySpace = Beer

2006-05-19T15:37:00.000-07:00

Was speaking with former eBay-er, now head of business development at Photobucket, Dylan Swift this morning. Our conversation turned to MySpace, and Dylan made a great observation. All of the recent negative press on MySpace (last night's Primetime on ABC for example) focuses on MySpace exposing kids to drugs, sex and other bad influences. Based on these reports, MySpace is something that parents should control and regulate with their kids, like beer and smoking.

Now, name me a better way to market a product to teenagers than to have an unrelenting, nationwide media campaign with 1) parents stating its bad for kids and 2) that MySpace is a faster, more efficient way to expose teenagers to multiple vices in their local area/network. Is it any surprise that MySpace's growth has rocketed along with the negative press?

I assume at some point when MySpace has signed on every teen in the U.S. that this will result in negative returns for the site. Until then, MySpace is enjoying the ride...

Google Properties Traffic

2006-05-18T18:00:00.000-07:00

Below is the top 20 Google domains as measured by Hitwise. It's interesting to note the share of Google Video traffic at 0.45% of total Google traffic. If you take a look at the comparison of YouTube vs Google in AlexaHolic (neat service btw), YouTube is tracking at 2,500 pageviews per million vs Google at 25,000 pageviews per million. Back of the envelope calculation here - at 0.45% of traffic, Google Video would be capturing about 170 pageviews per million. This would make YouTube about 15x larger in terms of pageviews vs Google Video. A lot of this depends on trusting Alexa pageview measurements (which I do), but still an interesting comparison.

Looks like Google Talk isn't burning up the runway with .01% of Google domain traffic. Compare that with Skype's Alexaholic ranking of 200 pageviews per million. Google Talk is at 2.5 pageviews per million. Assuming a similar download/pageview ratio, that makes Skype downloads approximately 80x greater than Google Talk. Hmm.

Last point, I don't see any reference to Google Base in the table below... Looks like our friends are looking to integrate Base in a different way than having Base as a destination site. Type "cheese recipe" into Google to see.

Bill Tancer from Hitwise adds some great commentary on Google Finance as well.

Blog Marketing v2

2006-05-18T11:15:00.000-07:00

Move over TechCrunch. This blog's influence is reaching massive proportions. I'm now the #8 search result on Google for "icelandic goats". Booya!

Btw. For all you potential bloggers out there, there's a great free service - StatCounter - to track keywords and traffic to your blog. I think I've mentioned it in the past, but it bears repeating.

2006-05-18T11:10:00.000-07:00

LinkedIn has crossed some magical threshold in terms of its user activity. If you take a look at their Alexa activity, traffic has literally jumped several-hundred fold since April. Over the past year the company has introduced some high-value services that seem to be catching fire (a Plaxo-type service that integrates to Outlook and updates contacts, People Search for jobs and a Reconnect service to job/class peers), all leveraging its growing community of 5MM+ business users. Personally I find myself going back to the well a lot these days, looking for people that I've lost touch with.

There's still a few gaffes in the service. When trying to find my 'analyst class' at Bain & Co, there wasn't an easy way to section off the years worked at the company. It looks like LinkedIn is pushing their old classmates reconnect service more aggressively (this service does look at years attended). That said, LinkedIn (Alexa rank 211) has finally turned into a successful business user community and taken the top spot from the likes of Ryze (1,924) Plaxo (3,394) and Spoke (100,505). More good news for Sequoia and Greylock, LinkedIn's investors. Lucky bastards :)

Skype and SoonR Talk

2006-05-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Alan for mentioning this. As previewed below, SoonR released a forward thinking Skype integration that essentially provides Skype on most cell-phones (via a WAP browser). The one caveat was that it used up your SkypeOut minutes. Given Skype just announced free SkypeOut minutes within the U.S. and Canada, the combination of SoonR with Skype has now enabled free calling within the U.S. on your mobile-phone data plan... now that's some innovative stuff.

eBay Paypal Skype Developers Conference

2006-05-15T22:56:00.000-07:00

Alrighty. If you have any interest whatsoever in web services you need to register for eBay's Developer Conference which is happening this year right before eBay Live in Vegas. We've put together some great sessions covering eBay, Paypal and Skype web services. In addition, thanks to Laura Merling from SDForum (all you startup folks out there needs to get to know Laura - she rocks), we have some fantastic panels covering Pitching and Funding Your Business and Team Building (both manned by a top notch panel of VCs from Hummer and Greylock) and Integrating Community to your online business (with speakers from Digg - founder Kevin Rose, SocialText - founder Ross Mayfield , SixApart - VP Anil Dash and SoftTech Venture Consulting - founder Jeff Clavier). This is like old school Lollapalooza with FishBone, Living Colour and Red Hot Chili Peppers on stage all at once.

Of course even Lollapalooza had a side stage for the C-bands. So I'll be speaking at the Dev Conference too :)

MySpace Oh Oh

2006-05-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

Doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the implications of the chart below from Hitwise.

Apparently 8% of upstream traffic to Google is being driven by MySpace. Holy. Now given Myspace has a search box powered by Yahoo! and MySpace users are still going to Google to conduct search, there's still some work to do. But imagine if MySpace actually built a rich search experience for users (or integrated search into some value add on MySpace), the social networking site would hold significant influence over their users' web search. 8% is no joke to Google or to any search provider.

All this speaks to the power of being the central hub for Internet usage. Much like the browser was in the late 90's, AOL and MyYahoo at the start of the millenium and the search engine homepage since then, users gravitate to a central launching point for the use of the Internet. Where the browsers and Yahoo went wrong was users will take the path of least resistance (like that crazy electron from high school physics) to get to where they want to go. Google offered greater relevancy and users voted with their feet. What MySpace brings is another take on what's revelant to the user (especially the 18-26 age group). Your personal page, your personal network, and path for increasing your network apparently is driving more appeal than mere search results (given the comparable growth between MySpace and Google).

Being the central launching point for Internet usage brings massive leverage. Just ask anyone who signed deals with AOL in 1999 (heck AOL still commands some of that power given the Google deal). MySpace and other social networking sites have some work to do to get there. My best guess is they should pursue the personal web initiatives I've referred to in the past. But if they get there, watch out below...

YouTube and Photobucket

2006-05-11T12:58:00.000-07:00

Great post from a vc on how YouTube became King of online videos. One thing Fred points out that YouTube did well was allow users to post videos on other sites (especially MySpace). Explosive growth came soon thereafter. This isn't an original concept (and maybe the hundredth time I've mentioned it), but enabling an application to transcend beyond the four walls of an owned site has been a winning strategy. Take a look at Photobucket. They followed a similar strategy, enabling users upload pictures and now videos onto their servers (1 Gig of space free), and using their service as a means of showcasing that content on any other site (including eBay and MySpace). 15M users and 2% of Internet traffic later, Photobucket is profitable and still growing by leaps and bounds, according to Alexa. Food for thought...

One path towards innovation

2006-05-11T09:24:00.000-07:00

Good read on Google putting more structure to their product development process, refocusing their efforts on core search.

This begs the question on how to drive innovation within a company the size of eBay, MS, Yahoo or Google. Here at eBay, as in any large company, there are limited resources we contend with. Ultimately our process focuses on placing bets on projects that offer the most potential return. It's a sound rational way of doing things, especially when resource constrained.

That said, as I've posted in the past, innovation is about throwing a hundred ideas on a wall and hoping things stick. Offering a web services platform is great first step since multiple 3rd parties step into the fray and take the risk a corporate entity can't (whether because of margin constraints, potential revenue cannabilization or limited ROI). The investment in the platform reduces the cost of future development, increases flexibility of internal applications and drives 3rd party adoption of your standard. But mulling it over, I think web services is still a first step.

Even as a collective, innovative startups have their own significant constraints (namely financial and marketing resources). Unless the web service provider supports these third parties through distribution or marketing, a lot of this potential innovation simply ends with potential. In some ways, Google's approach towards enabling their engineering staff to focus 20% of their time on new ideas emulates the dilemma startups face. Without real marketing support, the majority of these concepts start to die on the vine if they don't get great initial adoption or go viral (Orkut/Urchin/Pages vs Gmail).

Effectively integrating marketing or distribution of 3rd party applications with a web service platform seems a solid path towards innovation for a large(r) company. As one example, we worked with BonfireMedia (a 3rd party wireless developer) to power eBay's WAP, Java and BREW applications for mobile phones here in the U.S. Once signed we worked jointly to extend eBay Wireless' reach across all major carriers, making eBay Wireless one of the most downloaded/used wireless apps in the market. Thanks Alex :)

Blogburst

2006-05-09T13:53:00.000-07:00

I worked with the folks from Pluck back when they were launching their RSS Reader with an integration to eBay listings (before I started blogging on my own a year ago). Recently they launched Blogburst, a service aimed at providing traditional publishers (including SF Gate, Washington Post, Gannett, etc) access to pre-vetted blogs. I'm assuming the vetting process makes it easier for publishers to tap into 'the blogosphere' without combing through numerous individual posts. Meanwhile bloggers are provided an additional distribution channel for their content via these high-traffic publisher sites. Aligned with Pluck's SiteLife blogging tools, it's an interesting model for Pluck. They're charging publishers for this service (behold a revenue model!) but currently not sharing proceeds with bloggers directly. Dave Panos, Pluck's CEO, commented that they will provide a blogger compensation model after the beta period (check the comments on TechCrunch).

Should they generate material traffic from publishers to bloggers, I imagine they could build a similar model as John Battelle's Federated Media but on a broader basis - helping monetize the collective traffic of their vetted blog network while providing traffic to the blogs themselves. Pretty cool idea.

Today I got an invitation to join the Blogburst network. Looks like their vetting process needs some work ;) That aside, I'll comment on how this goes going forward.

Startup Basics

2006-05-08T00:14:00.000-07:00

I wish I'd written this post. Freaking fantastic overview of what it takes to succeed at a startup. Need to thank Gibu for the reference.

You really can sell anything on eBay

2006-05-06T11:08:00.000-07:00

Apparently there's strong demand on eBay for demonic stuffed animals. This from the Register.

"To cut to the chase here, every time the terrified owners tried to dispose of the Stitch devil toy, it reappeared in the house as if nothing had happened. Attempts to bury it in a landfill site on the other side of the city, burn the monster with lighter fuel, dismember it or offload the emissary of Satan at a local pawn store proved fruitless - on each occassion it turned up again, good as new, atop the TV stand."

Now a knife-wielding teddy bear is up for sale. Current bid is $320 :)

Update: Now its at $810 with 1 day left. Demonic teddies are the next Beanie Babies!

SoonR rather than Later

2006-05-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

Via TechCrunch, SoonR just released "SoonR Talk w/Skype". SoonR offers remote access to a user's PC via their phone. SoonR Talk allows users to access both their Skype Chat and Voice functionality through any WAP-enabled phone. Nice. What makes this app fairly cool is that it's phone agnostic. A lot of wireless applications these days require Java support or a Symbian/Windows CE OS on the phone. This limits the availability of these applications to (currently) a sliver of cell phones out there, namely higher end/smart phones. By enabling SoonR Talk through a WAP browser, any phone that has a data plan/web access can now enable Skype. The functionality requires use of SkypeOut minutes since your PC calls your mobile phone first and then connects to you another party, so it's not free. But this is definitely a great step forward in enabling VOIP broadly.

Btw, this is the type of innovation which is driven by enabling a web-service platform (ala Skype's APIs).

Blog marketing

2006-05-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

One thing I would like to accomplish with this blog is persuade as many people as possible to blog for themselves (especially if you're a start-up). Here's another data point. I wrote a fairly short post on Google Base's traffic this past week. Took me a few minutes to write. Today someone asked me to send the link, and rather than use the Technorati search tool (fix this please :P) on my blog, I put "Google Base Traffic" on Google for the heck of it.

Looking at the results to the left, my post was number 2 out of 13.2MM. Nice :) Now this tells me two things. First, something about how blogs are prioritized on search engines are potentially out of whack (no complaints here of course). Two, even though there are umpteen billion bloggers out there, someone like myself who blogs once or twice a week must be in the minority.

I've been evangelizing the power of blog marketing to a bunch of start-ups that I've worked with this past year. The immediate reaction was always focused on the amount of work required to make it work. Here's a few things to keep in mind.

1) If you share the workload across your team or have someone who likes to write, the workload is minimal and requires only limited sweat equity (not much sweating going on here)

2) Don't use blogs as a marketing tool alone. No one likes splogs :P Use it to personify your business and let readers/potential customers/investors put a face to your site, product or company. Here's a good example from a former classmate of mine, Gibu Thomas, founder of Sharpcast. Gibu posts about his experience as an entrepreneur (plus), his esoteric views on Web 2.0 (minus ;)), pokes a little fun at a Google translation (plus) and in the midst of this, mentions what the heck Sharpcast is trying to do (<= notice the free marketing). And believe me, Gibu is no genius (jk Gibu).

3) (No surprise) titles of blog posts drive a ton of relevancy bar none. I now have near top billing on MSN and Google for "Lockness Monster", "Google Porno" and "Google Base Traffic" based on title choice. As you can tell, I have no idea what I'm doing, but heck, hopefully it proves that if you did choose titles well, it could be an effective way for driving traffic.

I've run out of other points... just start blogging already :)

Kosmix

2006-05-01T18:34:00.000-07:00

Had a chance to speak with Venky Harinaraya and Michelle Sangster from Kosmix this past week. Very cool stuff. While Web 2.0 principles have been readily adopted by start-up companies, larger companies (especially traditional online content providers) have been a bit slower on the draw. Traditional online content providers limit themselves and their users to search their own 'owned' data on their sites. Internet users end up going to Google as a default to find more relevant content with a broader basis than what they find via the 'owned' content alone. (That's a 'duh' moment) Unfortunately (as mentioned below in reference to Google Base) Google's methodology for organizing said content isn't always optimized for a particular category of interest. Vertically-focused search engines have been popping up in response, but haven't caught a lot of fire since they're trying to build activity from the ground up.

Kosmix is tackling this issue straight-on by partnering with high-value/highly-trafficked online content/service providers, leveraging the context of their sites, and tailoring a web-wide but category-specific search experience for their users more directly related to the interests (based on an index of 3 billion web docs and growing). Think about this. This puts a site at risk of giving traffic to other content providers BUT drives increased traffic and usage due to the greater relevancy and utility of a particular category-specific search on said site. It's a great counter to having potentially loyal users HAVE to go to Google/Yahoo/MSN to find what they're looking for. In addition, Kosmix can integrate user-specific data to their service and present dynamic contextual search results per the user. I've been harping on the personal web thing for a bit now where relevant content finds you vs you trying to find/organize your content online. Kosmix enables online content/service providers the ability to integrate into this movement. Very cool.

Kosmix has started in the Health category and signed up Ziff-Davis, Healthcentral, Quality Health, Healthia and others. They just extended their categories to Politics and Travel as well. This is a great foil to having search dominated by the few...

Skype subscribers

2006-04-27T11:37:00.000-07:00

Skype just passed the 100MM user mark :) That's a doubling of users since eBay acquired the company. Now I'd like to see the anti-eBay/Skype blogging community find fault with that...

Update: Just when you thought you were safe. This post from our friends at Techdirt. Lol.