Me.dium – Social discovery in real time
October 31, 2006
Me.dium is a new Boulder startup with a big vision. It aims to “reveal the world of people and activity behind your browser.” If you’re like me, this statement will intrigue you while simultaneously leaving you wondering just what the hell such a tool would look like.
I have been playing around with the private beta of Me.dium for about two weeks now. I’ll admit that at first I didn’t get it. But just like my friend and Me.dium CEO Kimbal Musk said I would, I eventually had my “a-ha” moment with Me.dium. It’s just not how we’re used to thinking on the Internet, but we think this way in the real world every day.
Let me give you an an example. Every day when I walk home from work I pass a relatively new restaurant here in Boulder. I’m not doing anything out of the ordinary when I walk home, but yet I’m picking up impressions and real world data points about this restaurant. It’s always crowded. People look like they’re having a good time. The place is buzzing. I see a couple of my friends having a beer there. It must be pretty good. Maybe I’ll try it one day.
Now take that same concept and map it onto the virtual world of the Internet. But instead of just the things that you physically walk by, Me.dium is considering the virtual places you visit, and combining the concepts of attention and social networking to focus your vision. And it’s doing it side by side using a browser extension.
Back to my “a-ha” moment. Today I was sitting in the Me.dium office talking with Kimbal and the founders. We knew that a GigaOM post was about to come out on Me.dium and we could literally see the interest among our friends and other users who were congregating at GigaOM and the Daily Camera story that had been written earlier that day. Something must be going on over there! Aha! As we clicked on GigaOM, we could see that they had posted just moments earlier.
This has enormous potential, because if Me.dium can really figure out what people like me care about and are paying attention to, there’s a good chance I’ll want to check it out myself. It’s a social discovery mechanism similar to Digg, Reddit, or StumbleUpon but it’s quite unique in that it brings a real time input to your peripheral vision as you surf.
Naturally, any product that captures your clickstream is going to be called “creepy” by a few people. My impression from using the tool is that Me.dium has done an excellent job of thinking about these issues and adding simple to use privacy controls.
In my opinion, the major challenge that Me.dium will face will be getting users to quickly and efficiently grok the benefits of a tool like this. The current metaphor in the UI doesn’t help the situation, but to their credit the Me.dium team appears to be taking this sort of feedback quite well.
Me.dium was founded by David Mandell, Robert Reich and Peter Newcomb, who recently relocated from New York to Boulder. The company has obtained funding from sources such as Spark Capital, Appian Ventures, Brad Feld, and CEO Kimbal Musk. The company plans to do an open release by the end of the year, but current users can invite their friends and CU students with colorado.edu email addresses will be immediately accepted into the private beta.
It’s the execution, stupid.
October 25, 2006
I recently said “The competition is never as close as you think.” Apparently, this struck a chord.
The context here was bootstrapping vs. raising angel money. Call me crazy, but it feels to me like there are a whole bunch of “type 3” (don’t really deserve to exist) companies out there who are looking for angel funding*. I would actually slightly modify Brad’s “type 3″ by changing “don’t deserve to exist” to “shouldn’t be asking for angel money in the first place.”
The standard reason given for the need for angel funding is that there is an urgent need to get to the market NOW, before somebody else does. But the competition is never as close as you think. They don’t see the solution or the path to getting there in the same way that you do, or with the same unique passion and insights based on their completely different biases, life experiences, and corporate constraints. Quit worrying about that, and start building. Start executing.
<rant>
*Now, before everyone goes butt crazy and starts sending me emails relating the fact that not all companies are built to be huge, and just because they can’t reach $20M in annual revenue it doesn’t mean they’re not viable companies, yada, yada…. I just want to say that you have to remember that Brad’s “three types of companies seeking angel funding” are those that are (say it with me) seeking angel funding. And if you’re going to go and ask any kind of professional (non-emotional) investor (angel or VC) to open up his checkbook, you had better be talking about building at least a $20M business. Fact.
Yes, there are great companies that add real meaning in the world and have annual revenues of far less than what I’m talking about. I don’t mean to disparage those companies. They often represent the sweat, blood, and tears of their founders who are rightly very proud of them. These are often what investors refer to as “lifestyle businesses.” They exist primarily to create a better life and work situation for their founders, in most cases.
If you’re building something that you can bootstrap, you’re smart to do it that way. Very smart. In fact, perhaps you’re not so smart if you can bootstrap but you aren’t.
</rant>
OK, I’m in Texas today and these people drive like madmen. I don’t mean to take it out on you. Go ahead - comment here or send me that email if you want to. You know I love it.
Bootstrappers unite!
October 24, 2006
My recent post and podcast on angel investing stirred up quite a few comments and emails. While most were supportive of the information presented about angel investing, there was a group of people who were essentially asking for equal coverage of innovative bootstrapping against-all-odds daredevils here in Colorado. I have covered several companies like this lately, including Room 214, Happy Hour Boulder, and Thoos. But I realized that they’re probably right - I tend to cover angel/venture funded companies mostly, because that’s what I’m in contact with the most.
In the podcast mentioned above, Brad Feld pointed out that he invested $10 in his first company, and I was pissed that he beat me, since I invested $50 in mine. Both companies bootstrapped their way to success and had substantial value events.
So, please comment on this post and tell me about a bootstrapped technology company here in Colorado that has taken no outside investment of any kind and has become a $20M+ company. I know they’re out there, and I want to write about them too.
Do you believe in angel investing?
October 22, 2006
At a recent Boulder New Tech Meetup, my friend Kimbal Musk said something to me in passing that, well, I just couldn’t let pass. He said he didn’t believe in angel investing anymore, and that any company worth getting involved with was worth taking right to a VC. This piqued my interest and I started trying to think of companies that had truly made it and become something really remarkable after raising only a small angel round. Not many came to mind. Something rang suspiciously true here - If I had a nickel for every time I heard an entrepreneur say that they’d be raising $500k and then nothing more I could give them all to one of them and find out.
I asked Kimbal if I could follow up on his comment with a podcast (full audio here) and I invited Brad Feld to attend as well figuring he’d have plenty of insight (he did).
The discussion meandered a bit before Brad argued that there are really three types of companies who seek angel funding. They are;
- Those that will ultimately need significant institutional money and won’t get much impact from angel dollars
- Companies that don’t need to raise much money ($250k-$1m) before they can grow and accelerate, but are likely to later need an institutional round.
- Those that don’t really deserve to exist in the first place.
Kimbal goes on to say that his experience is that putting $500k into a company never really changes the first or last page of the business plan, and that anything related to adoption takes marketing and a great team, and therefore money.
At one point in the discussion, Kimbal realized that the disconnect was simply that his philosophy of angel investing is to get very involved and that what he really disagrees with is very passive angel investing. Brad agreed that passive angel investing is really often just “for profit philanthropy.”
So after the discussion, I think Kimbal would now agree that for the second type of company that Brad listed, angels can and do have a large impact especially when they get heavily involved and use their resources, energy, talent, and connections to help the company get to the next level and that such companies would not likely survive to see a venture round without such angels.
So? Are there companies who really make it to a worldwide audience on only a small angel round? Brad points out that while it can and does happen once in a while, that when you hear such a plan it is essentially just “bullshit.”
Give it a listen - I hope you’ll find the discussion as interesting as I did. I learned a great deal from the conversation - but then again I don’t think I’ve ever spent ten minutes with either one of these guys that I haven’t learned something valuable. We did this at Kimbal’s restaurant in Boulder, The Kitchen, so I apologize in advance for the couple of rough edits while coffee was being ordered.
Storage Markets - collective intelligence for the storage industry
October 22, 2006
Storage Markets of Boulder was founded in January, and is building a prediction market in order to help spot trends, anticipate future prices, values and events, and to generally predict the future of the storage industry.
“A prediction market is an online financial market where traders buy and sell a virtual security that is usually tied to the outcome of a future event… Storage Markets will use such as market to serve the storage industry.” : Founder John Ives.
When you first check this out, it almost feels like a gambling or gaming site. Someone poses a question such as “when will iSCSI and Fibre Channel cross paths in terms of market share?” and market insiders make predictions by purchasing “securities” (representing the potential outcomes) with virtual “Bit$” tokens. John went on to explain that the traders in the system take these questions very seriously and are naturally competitive. Traders can actually win real cash prizes by winning trading contests, bolstering their self-image and feeding their desire to participate further.
Storage Markets, however, isn’t in it to earn Bit$. John explained that while the company is still experimenting with the business model, it will initially look like a market research firm. People who want to buy market research can pose questions to the community, get reports that analyze the trading behavior, and data mine the system for other nuggets.
The company just finished a “small angel round” in order to complete their experimentation with the business model, and plans to go through another round to continue moving forward.
There seems to be several new companies emerging in Colorado that are based on the principles found in The Wisdom of Crowds, including Storage Markets, Collective Intellect, and Market Force Information.
You can get more info on Storage Markets by listening to the 12 minute interview that I did with founder John Ives on Friday (below).
TechCrunch does Boulder
October 18, 2006
Neat. TechCrunch has covered two technologies out of Boulder in the last few days. The blog with 127,000 geeky readers (including me) first featured ProtectMyPhotos.com on Friday, and then covered earFeeder (a project of mine) on Monday. Yes, there is some cool stuff going on here in Boulder too - thanks for noticing.
Looks like the TechCrunchers are glad to see ProtectMyPhotos getting the attention it deserves. 4.6 million photos were uploaded in the 5 days since the post. What, no extra love for earFeeder? ;-)
I’ve gotten lots of requests to give a firsthand report about 53,651 and the effect on earFeeder. I can tell you, it’s LARGE. I’ll assemble the data and put a post up after the dust settles a bit. Right now, I’m just trying to stay in the various earFeeder conversations going on out there in the blogosphere.
Rock on Boulder….
CTEK Angels Live recap
October 17, 2006
Despite the bad weather, the CTEK Angels Live event was still packed. About 25 angel investors took the stage and opened up their regular meeting to a live audience of nearly 400 people. Three companies pitched (including Hypersites and Chaperon, both covered here previously), and each of them did a great job under stressful conditions. It’s hard enough to pitch to angel investors and try to explain your business in eight minutes and it’s even harder to do it in front of 400 additional strangers.
After each company made their pitch, the panel of angel investors took turns asking probing questions and seeking clarification or further details. The questions came in rapid-fire fashion, and often related to business model or market size. The presenters did a great job, often pulling up backup slides to address the question more directly. The presenting company then left the room and the “angels only” (+400 listening in) discussion continued. Audience members would later tell me that this was the most interesting part of each segment, because they got to hear the normally private thoughts and concerns that the angels expressed to each other.
“We own a small business and we’re thinking about going after angel funding. It gave us a great look at the kind of questions that investors asked. They were legitimate and fair questions“: Entrepreneur in the audience.
“It was really interesting to see the different perspective of the investors who were looking at opportunities from a very high level. There was so much experience on that panel, it was amazing to watch them dig in.“: Internet entrepreneur with a successful exit looking to build a new startup.
Nobody at CTEK knows of any other highly organized angel group that has ever exposed their process to the public in this way. I applaud CTEK for doing this, and I also think the angels who attended should be thanked personally. Many of them are very private people and obviously worry about everyone knowing their identity. But this was good for entrepreneurs to see, there is no doubt about that.
I’ll follow up in a day or two with a full end-to-end podcast of the event (it takes some time to produce) as well as some post-event reaction from some of the angel investors, presenters, and audience members.
Other bloggers on this event:
5o9’s strategy emerges
October 16, 2006
I covered a new Boulder startup called 5o9 back in March and at that time the founder (Liz Coker) was extremely vague as to what they were really up to.
Today, Liz told me that the company has exited “total stealth mode” as they progress towards their first full scale pilot tests. Indeed, the 5o9 web site provides much more information now. The company appears to be building a platform for content providers to use in order to facilitate mobile connections that securely access opt-in personal information such as identity and location.
5o9 calls their approach Pushing With Permission. The end user uses a mobile application to define what information they’re comfortable with sharing and to which content providers. This includes data such as current location (for GPS enabled mobile devices), name, address, phone number, type of device, etc.
Content providers install the 5o9 platform and in turn have access to this information and can optimize the mobile experience. A great example of this is to serve a location-based coupon, as shown here. The nice thing here is that I can use a single tool on my mobile device to configure what I want to share, when and with whom. This is a critical and missing element in the mobile strategy of most organizations. 5o9 proposes to provide the standard toolset to enable these features for content providers.
5o9 wants to “connect the physical and virtual worlds“, which is certainly quite the challenge. At least one blogger covering the “Personal World Connection (PWC)” space finds the 5o9 solution to have a chance of doing just that. In order to make a dent in this market, it seems to me that 5o9 will need some big time strategic partners such as cellular operators and/or device manufacturers to pre-install the mobile component. Distribution is often the challenge in the mobile space. 5o9’s solution has to be viewed as a well supported standard by the consumer. If not, it will be very hard to get people to make the effort to install the application just to gain benefits on a single site. Liz hinted to me that they are in the process of signing on a “very large strategic partner” which may address this very issue.
5o9 hopes to close a Series A investment round by the end of this year and have an initial product release by Q2 of 2007. Thanks to Liz Coker for the update.
Companies index added
October 16, 2006
I’ve added an index of companies that are mentioned on ColoradoStartups.
Know of a company that should be on the list? Give me a heads up.
Overheard
October 16, 2006
- VCs have raised $21.8 billion so far in 2006.
- Wanna read 103 venture capital blogs?
- Cooley Godward reports on the true costs of venture capital to entrepreneurs. Is the rule of thirds on it’s way out?
- A students guide to startups.
- Interview with ClickCaster CEO, Scott Converse.
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