Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains - June 1, 2007 Business 2.0 magazine has a great feature on Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains. Ham has parlayed users' foul-ups and ignorance about how to use the Internet into a fortune. Try this: type "www.newyorktimes.cm" (not .com) into your browser. You'll come to a website that has lots of come-ons for publications. That's the work of Kevin Ham, who has not only snapped up thousands of erroneous URLs typed by fumble-fingered users but who has cut an ingenious deal with the poor African country of Cameroon - which owns the ".cm" domain - to intercept traffic intended for the big-brand websites.

I had lost track of the value of domains after "business.com" sold for $1 million in the late 90s. This article shows that the domain trade is alive and well and becoming very sophisticated. No one is more sophisticated about it than Kevin Ham. This is an excellent profile of someone who's making money by working under the Internet covers. You can argue about whether his work is contributing in any meaningful way to the economy or furthering the advance of human knowledge, but what you can't argue about is whether Kevin Ham is succeeding. He's filthy rich.  ¶ 9:31 PM 0 Comments

  More evidence of a newspaper death spiral Alan Mutter writes perceptively on the recent plunge in newspaper revenues on his outstanding Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.

"Print advertising sales for newspapers appear to be on track to plunge by $2 billion this year, which would make for the worst performance in a decade other than the disastrous period following 9/11," he writes, noting that this will be the first time newspaper revenues have ever declined in a time of economic prosperity.

First quarter revenues for classified advertising - the most profitable part of the newspaper business - were off a staggering 13.2% in the first quarter, Mutter notes. Automotive advertising, which is newspapers' Rock of Gibraltar, was off nearly 13% last year. Nearly all of this business is going online and it's not coming back.

I've characterized the scenario facing major metro dailies as a "death spiral" in my own writing on this topic. Alan Mutter's statistics and analysis bear this out. In a spiral, the speed of descent increases as the object hurtles toward the ground. The numbers indicate that a spiral could be developing. According to Mutter, print advertising revenues were off .5% in 2005, 4.6% in 2006 and are on track to decline 6.4% in 2007. It's too early to call this a pattern, but in an industry that Mutter notes "has been masterful at increasing its revenues in good times and bad," this twist of fortune is unprecedented and alarming.

Desperate acts like the San Francisco Chronicle's recent decision to eviscerate its newroom staff indicate that the industry is in panic mode. The Chron is basically committing hara-kiri rather than continuing the fight. I suspect it's only the first of many to do so.

Mutter, a newspaper-editor-turned-entrepreneur, offers some historical context:

"In retrospect, it is clear that newspaper publishers were lulled into complacence in the early years of the Internet by their prior skill in achieving consistent sales growth in even negative economic conditions. But the growth was not achieved as much by recruiting new customers – or even selling more advertising to existing ones – as by using their monopoly-like positions to force hefty annual rate increases on advertisers who essentially had nowhere else to go."

Monopolies thrive in the absence of competition, but they tend to let atrophy the skills needed to compete. Newspapers have almost no weapons with which to fight the online hordes that are devastating their business.

Labels: journalism, newmedia advertising

  ¶ 6:30 AM 0 Comments

  Front page of the Merc

Labels: NewInfluencers, PR

  ¶ 10:33 AM 2 Comments

  Tool Talk: saving and finding stuff made easier

Having worked independently for 18 months now, I thought I’d write about some of the technology tools I’ve discovered to make my life easier and my work more efficient. In this installment, I’ll tell how I manage my reading.

Like a lot of people, I need to do a lot of reading to keep current. Nearly all of my reading is online these days, and I tend to get to it in snatches of a half hour or so, usually early in the morning or late at night.

The constant stream of newsletters and RSS updates that cross my desktop don’t live by my schedule, though, so I rely on three tools to help me organize content and find it when I need it. They are Google Desktop, del.icio.us and Firefox, and I wouldn’t want to be without them.

Google Desktop is an incredibly powerful product that indexes nearly every word on your computer. With it, I can find files by keyword with almost instantaneous speed. The shortcut to bring up the search box is hitting the Control key twice. That brings up a small Ajax applet that delivers results as you type, which is much faster than using the full-page Web interface.

But I find the hidden value of Google Desktop is the information it indexes in hidden and cached files that would never be visible otherwise. This is an invaluable tool when you’ve discarded something you never thought you’d need and then suddenly find yourself wishing you had that information back.

For example, last week I was listing some rental property on Craigslist.org. I wanted to find the original listing that I had used last August when the apartment was last rented. I never bothered to commit that information to a document, but Google Desktop was able to pull it out of cache memory: it literally found the page I had viewed on Craigslist when I posted the ad nine months ago.

This feature is also useful when traveling because it essentially gives you access to web pages when disconnected. Many times I’ve been able to fish information out of my computer that was on a website I visited weeks or months ago but which was still available to me because it was cached.

Which brings me to how I use these tools to manage my reading. Much of my news comes in the form of links in e-mails and RSS feeds. I use Firefox’s tabbed browsing feature to open these links in tabs (Control-click on a link does this automatically), which I can look at later. At some point during the day, I’ll go through these tabs and tag them to my del.icio.us account using the bookmark extension, a plug-in that basically replaces Firefox bookmarks with a del.icio.us back-end.

Saving a page on del.icio.us is as easy as striking Control-D and typing a tag. For articles I want to read later, I the tagl “readit.” Later, when I have time, I’ll select the “readit” tag from the del.icio.us browser plug-in and choose the “Open in Tabs” option. This automatically opens every item with the readit tag in its own tab. If I’m about to hit the road, I can shut the lid on my laptop at this point. When I open it on the plane, all the pages are still there. What’s also cool is that with Google Desktop, these pages are automatically cached for retrieval offline, so I can actually read web pages on the plane, even if I haven’t read them previously.

  ¶ 2:57 PM 0 Comments

  Be there for Thursday's webcast! Be sure to register for the BtoB Magazine webcast on the subject of "Reaching IT Pros through Social Media" on Thursday, May 24. I'll be in the company of Robert Scoble and and Mike Moran, IBM Distinguished Engineer and author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc.

I am seriously not worthy of being in the presence of such remarkable people, so sign up, show up and help me sound good!

Labels: Paul_Gillin_quoted, social_media

  ¶ 10:10 PM 0 Comments

  Who's got time to read fiction? The always provocative Michael Fitzgerald (he writes the Prototype column for The New York Times and is a friend and colleague from way back) blogged recently about declining reader interest in fiction and suggests that perhaps nonfiction is becoming a more appealing alternative to fiction because it's so real.

It's a good point, but I'd suggest that there's another factor at play. People simply don't have time to curl up with a good book any more. We're so assaulted by the demand to keep up with what all the new voices are saying that we no longer have the leisure to kick back and read for pleasure like we used to. I see this in my own experience: right now I have a backlog of 80 or 90 articles in mainstream and social media that I believe I need to read to keep up with my area of expertise. I don't see any air in my schedule for a good Stephen King novel any more. There are 15 million new voices in the blogosphere writing daily and I'm concerned that if I don't keep up with them I'll fall behind.

I suspect that a lot of people are feeling the same pressure and that reading for pleasure - a pursuit that I value and still hope to embrace - may suffer as a result.

Labels: blogging

  ¶ 10:03 PM 1 Comments

  More nice words in the blogosphere Thanks to Renee Blodgett for her kind words about New Influencers. She admits she hasn't read it yet, but expects it to be great. Now those are the kinds of critics I like!

The prolific Rob Enderle also said some very nice things about the book in his TechNews World column, which is widely syndicated. My thanks to him, also.

I have to admit to having developed a fascination with the Amazon sales ranking over the last couple of weeks particularly as New Influencers has moved into the top 10,000. I tend to check it every few hours and my mood can vary according to whether it's up or down.

I guess my mood varies a lot, because the book has run the gamut from 1,500 to 70,000 in just the last week. Its rank can easily move 30,000 places in a day. I looked around for an explanation of how the ranking works and found an interesting one on Web Pro News, but the bottom line is that it's Amazon's little secret and no one outside of that company really has a clue.

Perhaps more importantly, no one has figured out a direct correlation between the sales ranking and actual book sales. Perhaps this is why my publisher refuses to pay any attention to it. And I try to ignore it. I can quit whenever I want. Really.

Labels: blogging, NewInfluencers

  ¶ 5:39 AM 2 Comments

  Events that CIOs actually love For the past few months, I’ve been working with a company that has quietly pulled off a major coup in the corporate events business. You’ve probably never heard of Evanta, and that’s just fine with them. What you will be hearing more about – particularly in you’re in tech marketing - is the CIO Executive Summits.

The Summits are a series of regional, one-day events that attract the top chief information officers (CIOs) in the country for a day of speeches, networking and camaraderie. They are without a doubt the best IT events I have ever attended (and I’ve attended hundreds). Marketers and publishers could learn a lot from what Evanta is doing.

Tech publishers have been trying to create successful, sustainable conferences for CIOs for two decades. Their efforts have mostly failed. Believe me; I’ve been involved in several of those failures.

Evanta, in contrast, is not only attracting the right people, but it’s got them actively involved with and enthusiastic about the events. Case in point: last week in New York, more than 300 CIOs showed up for the tri-state event and only 275 were pre-registered. Think about that, event marketers: in a business in which 50% attrition is considered normal, this company is getting negative attrition.

I just got back from Washington, where more than 150 CIOs packed the conference held in the Georgetown University Conference Center. I was privileged to moderate a panel that included the CIOs from the FBI and CIA. The CIO of the Department of Justice had gone on just before us. The CIOs of the State Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (the most important national security body in the U.S.) were in the audience. The CIO of the American Red Cross gave the closing keynote. It goes on an on. Look at the agenda. And there will be 18 events just like the two I mentioned in 2007.

The proceedings are off the record, so I can’t talk about what was said at either event. However, I will point out a few reasons why I believe Evanta is experiencing this phenomenal success:

• They focus on the audience, not the sponsors. The slogan of the event series is “By CIOs, For CIOs,” and they really mean it. Each event has a governing body of CIOs who conference regularly and tell Evanta what they want: topics to cover, speakers to recruit, even the vendors to exhibit. Then the Evanta team goes and does what the board wants. Hundreds of hours of background work go into each event, but the CIOs never see that. What they see is that they describe their perfect conference and then the facilitators make it so. No questions asked.

• It’s off the record. No press is invited except in a speaking or moderating role and proceedings are strictly off the record. No ambiguity about that. The CIOs can talk with each other without worrying about something they say showing up in the press. This is important to them.

• They keep a tight leash on exhibitors. This is where most other efforts crash and burn. Publishers give the bill-paying sponsors too much say in the program, to the point that the stage becomes a soapbox for marketers. CIOs are some of the most cynical people in the world about marketing and they quickly abandon these events.

In contrast, Evanta gives marketers almost no stage presence. A couple of top sponsors get worked into the program, but the speakers must be CIOs themselves or the top officers in the company. You will never find someone with a marketing title on stage. The exhibits area is tasteful and low-key. And you have to be invited by the governing body to even have a chance to exhibit in the first place. To say that the exhibitors are on their best behavior is an understatement.

• They give away good stuff. In Washington, the conference concluded with a drawing in which no less than 13 trips to resort destinations were dispensed to the attendees. With 150 CIOs in attendance, the odds were pretty good. So is it any surprise that the room was nearly full at 5:30 p.m.?

There are many other details, but that’s the nub of it, in my view: give people an event they want; don’t let sponsors take control and give the audience incentives to stay all day. It’s working incredibly well for Evanta because they’ve never taken their eyes off the ball. A lot of media companies could learn from this.

(P.S. If Evanta sounds like a good acquisition candidate, it’s too late. The company was acquired by DMG World Media last year).

Labels: IT events CIO

  ¶ 7:18 AM 2 Comments

  Our podcast interview with David Meerman Scott This week in Tech PR War Stories, David Strom and I chat with David Meerman Scott, author of the forthcoming book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, which is due out any day now. David talks about the ideas that got him elected to Marketing Sherpa's Viral Marketing Hall of Fame two years running, as well as his call for PR people to get a clue about search and start writing press releases using terms buyers care about rather than words they think the media wants to hear.

This will be a two-part interview, with the second running next week. And we barely scratched the surface of what's in David's book. Download the podcast. It's free!

Labels: marketing, podcast, PR

  ¶ 6:12 AM 0 Comments

  The New Influencers in the Merc The San Jose Mercury News' Dean Takahashi devotes a column to The New Influencers today. Takahashi, who's reported for The Wall Street Journal among other journals, touches on several key points from the book and notes that a former colleague of his, Peter Rojas, went on to become a millionaire and a poster child of blogging success. He asks playfully (and a bit ruefully) if there's still time for him to become a new influencer with his popular gaming blog.

Dean took the time to speak to me at some length on Monday evening. He also read the entire book, a fact that is both flattering and impressive in this continuously distracted world. It's a thrill to be cited in such an important newspaper and by a reporter whose work I respect so much.

Labels: blogging, journalism, NewInfluencers

  ¶ 6:03 AM 1 Comments

  Recommended reading If you visit the Amazon page for The New Influencers, you'll probably find that the Amazon recommendation engine pairs the book with the latest from David Meerman Scott: The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I've just finished David's book (his third) and highly recommend it.

David's premise is that marketing and PR have been forever changed by the Internet and that marketers who continue to mine traditional channels of influence are missing the boat. He argues persuasively that the new opportunity is to speak directly to customers - without going through intermediaries - and to engage them in mutually satisfying conversations that lead to long-term relationships.

This is the same basic premise of my book, only I focused exclusively on social media tools. David takes more of a macro approach, incorporating press releases, websites and fundamentals of good marketing. The last third of the book is full of useful how-to information, ranging from basics of tagging and podcasting to some excellent advice on how to write for your customers.

The new world of marketing is scary to a lot of people, but that's because change is scary. In The New Rules, David Meerman Scott outlines an exciting and opportunity-filled landscape that should energize every marketer. You need to read this book.

Labels: blogging, marketing, social_media, viral_marketing

  ¶ 6:29 AM 0 Comments

  Me 'n' Scoble on a webcast I have the pleasure of being a guest on a BtoB Magazine webcast on May 24 on the topic: Beyond the Mainstream: Reaching IT Pros Through Social Media. I'm particularly delighted that Robert Scoble will be the other guest. Scoble's an IT-pro-turned-cultural-icon and he knows this topic as well as anybody.

The webcast is free and you can sign up here. Please come listen!

Labels: Paul_Gillin_quoted, social_media

  ¶ 7:24 AM 0 Comments

  Tech PR War Stories 8 is about "off the record" What exactly does "off the record" mean? To trained journalists, the meaning of that phrase is simple: you can't use this information in any way, shape or form. But to many marketers, business execs and even some reporters, the term is interpreted differently. This confusion can create misunderstanding and embarrassment.

In Tech PR War Stories episode 8, David Strom and I discuss the distinctions between "off the record," "not for attribution," "on background" and other types of digressions. We also give our quick takes on some recent breaking news in medialand.

Labels: journalism, PR

  ¶ 7:15 AM 2 Comments

  Nantucket Conference Day Two: Craigslist's curious success formula Craigslist.org CEO Jim Buckmaster was interviewed this morning on stage. Craigslist drives a lot of Internet and media companies crazy because it cares to little about profits. Its free classified ads undercut newspapers’ most profitable business and its remarkable growth (it’s one of the top 10 most trafficked sites on the Web with a staff of just 24 people) shows no signs of slowing.

Craigslist is a true social media disruptor. It has leveraged user interactivity and self-publishing to create a service that people love. In staying focused on user needs, it has pummeled its newspaper competitors who have historically offered expensive and slow services. Craigslist’s refusal to live by the almighty buck also makes a stirring example of how a service that keeps its eye on the ball – its users – and experience spectacular success.

The following is a more-or-less verbatim transcript of what Buckmaster said.

On why Craigslist doesn't have advertising
"We’ve been told by sales people that we could bring in many millions of dollars by adding text ads but our users aren’t asking us for text ads so we don’t have them. Paid search can create a conflict of interest with site search. The better your site search is, the less need there is for paid search."

On building community
"Something we learned early on is the more we can get out of the way and let users do things for themselves, it sounds lazy but laziness is part of it. The less you have to depend on someone in an office, users are better positioned than staff to serve themselves and help each other. The other thing is following up on feedback. The site has been hammered into shape by millions of requests over 12 years. Everything you see there today is the result of user feedback."

On the site's trademark boring text interface
"You might look to a boring interface as a reassuring thing to cling to as you’re looking at some of the outlandish things you see out there. We’re open in letting people use HTML in their postings, almost to a fault. People aren’t looking for the interface to be exciting. They’re looking to it to be fast, reliable and easy to use."

On preventing inappropriate material from appearing on the site
"We’re approaching 20 million new classifieds per month. The answer (to inappropriate material) has been to let users flag something that’s inappropriate. If enough users flag it, it comes down automatically. Inappropriate ads usually come down within a few minutes. It’s not perfect, but it’s far more effective than a centralized staff could do."

On a recent lawsuit over classified ad content
"A group of attorneys in Chicago filed a suit, tried to take us to task over a small number of postings they thought ran afoul of fair housing laws. Mostly they wouldn’t strike you as inappropriate. For example, the mention of a church in an ad was said to be discriminatory to people of a particular faith. That suit was dismissed. The group was attacking the law that exonerates service providers from being responsible for the content of their sites. If there wasn’t that law, a lot of sites like MySpace couldn’t function."

On why the company isn't more focused on making money
"This is where the descriptions like 'communist' and 'anarchist' come in. It seems to make no sense to let a site be as useful as possible and pay no attention to the monetary side. But it hasn’t been tempting. We enjoy working at Craigslist. Users like it and we’re not sure what we would do with a big surplus of cash. We’d probably look at ways to give it away.

"We give away at least 1% of revenue, but we haven’t had a chorus of users suggesting that we should run ads to generate funds for charity. People have that money now and they can give it away. We’re not in a position to be an arbiter of where that money should go."

On keeping the business simple
"We’re in the top 10 companies in traffic with a staff of 24, whereas the other companies on that list have staffs of more than 1,000. Early in the Internet boom, you tried to raise a lot of VC money and invest in esoteric hardware and expensive software. That never appealed to us. We invested in open source software from the beginning. We don’t have sales and marketing. We mainly have engineers. We don’t have meetings. We’re not trying to maximize revenue. When you’re not trying to maximize revenue, it’s surprising how little staff you need."

On EBay's 25% ownership stake
"That ownership is from an early shareholder who decided to sell his stake. EBay has been helpful to us in a few areas, like consumer protection. But on a day-to-day basis, there hasn’t been a lot of interaction."

At this point, audience questions begin

Q: How about cranking it up a little bit? If you went from 24 employees to 50 you could provide better services.
A: We are planning to hire more tech staff and customer service staff. But we’re not constrained by capital now, so it’s not necessary for us to look for ways to make more money in order to hire people. We’re not looking to become a mid-sized company. We’re happy being a small company.

Q: Do you intend to do anything internationally?
A: We have sites in 50 countries. They’re in English now but we’re laying the groundwork for multi-language support. For a small company to be prepared to offer support in languages you don’t understand is a big job. We’ve taken the approach we’ve always taken, which is to listen to user requests and when there are enough user requests, you do what they ask.

Q: How do you deal with regulators’ requests for information?
A: We’re interfacing with regulators on a weekly basis. It runs the gamut from the Secret Service to local law enforcement to the FBI. We try to keep things small and simple internally and we have good external council. Hiring lawyers would be a, and while I’d like to have that, we also want to maintain a small company that people like to work at.

Q: What can companies like ours (entrepreneurial firms) learn from you?
A: We don’t have meetings. People can work from wherever they are whenever they want. The tech model is built on alpha geek principle. We’re fortunate to have some fairly brilliant technical people. The one aspect of Craigslist that’s behind the scenes is how we manage to run a rapidly growing site with page load times that are among the fastest of any company. Open source is a big part of it.

Q: Who is Craig and what’s his role today?
A: He splits his time between being a hands-on customer service rep and a variety of media-related roles. In the Bay Area, he’s become a kind of celebrity. He was on a game show, for instance.

Q: Have you ever had to fire anybody?
A: It’s been more than five years. We had a rough patch where we had to do layoffs on our small scale. At the height of the bubble, more than 90% of our revenue was coming from dot-com job listings. Those declined by about 95%. By post-9/11, virtually all of the business we had had at the height of the boom was gone. We ended up letting some folks go who seemed to be contributing the least to our performance. That’s the last time that occurred.

Q: Have you ever thought of acquisitions like Angieslist?
A: You see so many mergers and acquisitions go awry and you rarely see a case where companies are better off after a merger. Plus you spend so much time looking at legal documents, and that’s one of the things I enjoy least about the job.

Q: What are principles of someone who would make a worthy partner?
A: Probably someone who’d be 100% focused on creating goodness for the end user without being clouded by sharp business interests that would cloud that. The dynamics of the Internet industry are so powerful that companies increasingly have the luxury of choosing a business model where they don’t come in to an adverse position with their customers. That’s been difficult in the past but you can do it now.

Q: Are you worried about competition, especially internationally?
A: We don’t even look at what other companies are doing. We’re not setting out to conquer the world of achieve any particular market share. We’re just following up on what our users want us to do. We’ve got plenty of things to occupy our thoughts about how to do better by our users. That crowds our thoughts of fighting competition.

Internationally, there are a lot of companies that have copied our model years before we got there. As long as they’re providing the good things that Craigslist tries to provide, we don’t have a problem with that. We try to be there in a the background as an insurance policy in case they try to turn the screws on their customers. We’ll be there if necessary.

Q: If you rolled back the clock to 1999 or 2000, what have you learned?
A: Our lives have gotten more complicated as the site has gotten bigger. Regulatory scrutiny is something we never had to consider in the past. The fact that it’s such a large marketplace invariably draws “bad guys” like spammers and wire transfer con games. It’s very hard to keep those people at bay. Both spam and scams are easy to avoid if you use the site as it was intended.

Q: What’s on your agenda for this year?
A: Internationalization is a large project. Also a less clunky geographical dimension to searching and browsing. Each site is an island under its own. Take Massachusetts: we’ve got a separate site for Boston, a separate one for Cape Cod, a separate one for Worcester. It’d be nice if there were a little more flexibility in the geographic vector. And combating spam and scams is an arms race we’ll always be stuck with. The spammers are resourceful people, they’re technically quite competent, they’re making their living exploiting the big sites. Those are the big areas.

Q: If you were running a newspaper, what would you do? They don’t like you so much.
A: To me, a newspaper’s role is to get high-quality, accurate information in front of readers. Long before I got to Craigslist, I felt that the big newspaper chains had gotten away from that by taking on debt and focusing on how to increase their profit margins. If it was me, I’d try to get back to the principles of how do I serve the role of the Fourth Estate well and keep from falling into this ridiculous war that we’re in. I was very disappointed with how newspapers dropped the ball in avoiding our getting into this war. I love newspapers and I read lots of them, but once you get away from what you’re about, it becomes difficult. You can’t serve Wall Street while you’re also trying to assist the public. If I were to choose, I’d try to serve the public and let the money side take care of itself.

Q: What are your guiding principles?
A: We have a strong sense of laissez-faire: To each their own between consenting adults as long as you’re being legal and not taking advantage of people. And the philosophy of letting people use the site as they want. You have to comply with legalities, but beyond that, in our minds the moral side is largely subjective and users have a much richer sense of morality than we do and they’re empowered to make decisions about what should be on the site and what shouldn’t.

Q: If your users decided they liked another site better and trickled away, would that be okay?
A: If were so inept that we couldn’t provide a value proposition that users found important, yeah, I’d probably encourage them to go away.

Labels: nantucketconference, social_media

  ¶ 1:22 PM 0 Comments

  Nantucket Conference Day One: Cool Products

While the venture capital picture might not be so rosy in New England, there was still some interesting technology to see during a demo session at Nantucket Conference on Friday:

Zink is a printing technology developed by some former Polaroid engineers that eliminates the need for ink by embedding dye crystals in the paper. It’s basically an evolution of the Polaroid photo technology. This makes it possible to produce printers that are an order of magnitude smaller than those based on jets or ribbons. Wendy Frey Caswell, CEO, showed off a printer that fits in your shirt pocket and produces beautiful 2”X3” color images. The initial target market is cell phone users who want to print the photos they take with their phones’ integrated cameras.

I don’t know if that market is very big, but there are some interesting potential applications of this technology. It could be used to create point-of-sale ticket printers, for example, or to produce much more sophisticated and detailed ID tags. Larger but still portable versions of Zink printers could be used to deliver prints instantaneously to people at theme parks and events or to produce printed collateral on the spot. I’d personally like to be able to print out business cards when I’m on the road and run out my supply. Zink paper can also be produced in continuous rolls, making it easier to print banners and posters.

Zink will leave it to partners to figure out applications while it focuses on producing technology.

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Turbine showed off its new Lord of the Rings multi-player game, which just hit the shelves. I was impressed with the scope of work that was needed to create this product. It includes more than 3,000 monsters and 2,000 actors, each of which had to be designed by hand. The company has 25 engineers on staff, but outsources a lot of its development, as is typical in the games business. There are more than 40 developers in China, for example. The whole package probably involved more than 500 person-years of development.

Turbine CEO Jeff Anderson said early results are promising. More than 200,000 people have signed up for the online service that back-ends the game, and conversion rates are running at 70% for the $15/month service. The company is also enabling viral marketing to promote the product. Gamers are already posting customized characters and scenes on the Web

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PublicDisplay is a small Providence, RI-based software startup (really; it has no website yet) that’s building a prototype of what’s often called the semantic Web (I hate that term; no one can understand it). Its service filters lists of information into a format that can be imported into a calendar or spreadsheet. CEO Bill O’Farrell used his hectic personal schedule as a demo. His son’s spring lacrosse schedule is posted on a website, but the flat text document can’t be easily imported into his calendar. PublicDisplay parses the schedule and turns it into an iCal file of individual entries. You could potentially do the same thing with a financial report, price list or any other tabular data. PublicDisplay hopes to have a beta service by late this year.

Labels: innovation, nantucketconference

  ¶ 9:20 AM 0 Comments

  Nantucket Conference Day One: How can New England jump-start innovation?

The topic was entrepreneurship at a luncheon breakout on Friday, but much of the discussion focused on why California has done a better job of nurturing innovative tech startups for the last 30 years, despite New England’s abundance of fine colleges and universities.

One reason noted was that California is the only state that doesn’t enforce non-compete contracts. That makes is possible for the best people to move around at will and quickly disseminate good ideas. There was some discussion of starting a campaign to strike down non-compete laws in Massachusetts, but no one could come up with a candidate to spearhead such a campaign.

A lot of it comes down to culture, people said. The attitude in New England – and many other parts of the country – is that failure in business is something to be ashamed of, whereas in California it’s considered part of the learning process. There’s also just an inherent optimism in the west coast culture. “In California, people refuse to believe that things won’t turn out well, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said one attendee, crystallizing the issue particularly well.

There is clearly some anxiety about the flight of venture capital to the west coast. Firms like Greylock Partners and Carlyle Group have moved more people and even headquarters westward, said one participant. This is an alarming sign that they don’t see the opportunity in New England that they used to.

Google was cited as a source of increasing concern. One attendee said he’d heard Google was offering top MIT graduates nearly $200,000 to join the company (I have no idea if this is true) and another told of how Google had stamped out a promising investment he’d made by introducing the same feature for free. Do I hear antitrust rumblings?

The mood was lifted, though, by one successful and respected entrepreneur who closed the session with a “darkest just before the dawn” remark. He noted that new businesses often experience their strongest growth in challenging economies. “Historically, New England always lands on its feet,” he said. “The bad times are a great time to get things done. The bad times are, in fact, the good times.”

Note: The Nantucket Conference is a not-for-attribution event.

Labels: nantucketconference, venturecapital

  ¶ 7:42 AM 1 Comments

  Nantucket Conference Day 0: A new investment model

The state of venture capital is changing, with federated groups of angel investors emerging as an alternative to big VC firms to fund smaller startups. That’s according to James Geshwiler, managing director of Common Angels, which is one of a new breed of VC firms. Geshwiler spoke at the opening session of Nantucket Conference on Thursday.

Common Angels is one of approximately 120 such groups in the U.S. representing about 4,500 investors, Geshwiler said. The groups are forming to fill a void at the low end of the market left by the big venture capitalists, which have seen the average size of their funds double to $200 million in the last five years.

Basically, he said, VC firms won’t consider funding rounds of less than $5 million. They’re going for the big score. But plenty of viable companies need a couple of million to get going and can yield nice returns in an IPO or buyout. Big VCs can’t be bothered with such small returns.

I was interested by the compelling cost benefits of this approach. Common Angels outsources most of its office space, technology and administrative expenses to its individual members. This federated model takes advantage of the efficiency of sole practitioners and small businesses by leveraging collaborative technology to communicate and make decisions without requiring big investments in real estate and other overhead. I think we’ll see a lot more companies emerging in all sorts of industries to take advantage of the power of this model.

Labels: nantucketconference, venturecapital

  ¶ 7:36 AM 0 Comments

  Bloggers get a magazine of their very own

Blogger & Podcaster magazine has launched simultaneously in print, online and as a podcast. Give credit for creativity coming up with that three-pronged launch plan. I actually used to work with the editor, Anne Saita, but I don't know anyone else on the masthead.

One thing you can count on in technology is that publishers will quickly jump on a new trend and launch a magazine for it. The big thing this book appears to have going for it is that its audience has a defined set of interests. That’s important, since magazines that are specific to a single technology tend not to last very long. But I wonder about the business model. Not many vendors sell products specifically to bloggers/podcasters and the target readers tend to find tools of the trade for free where they can. They don’t have big budgets. Also, while bloggers/podcasters have a medium in common, they don’t share much else. The similarities between me and the guy who writes Daily Kos are few.

On first look, I can't see much reason why this magazine should last very long, but I give credit to the publisher for giving it a try. You never know when you might hit it big.

Labels: blogging, mainstream_media

  ¶ 8:10 PM 0 Comments

  First Amazon review Dianna Huff posted a nice review of New Influencers on Amazon. If you've read the book, or even part of it, and care to post your comments (positive or negative) on Amazon, I'd appreciate it.

Oh, and if you want to buy a used copy for $15 over the cover price, be my guest. What's up with that??  ¶ 5:53 AM 1 Comments