Sawickipedia

Twitter the Open Source Social Platform and Command Live

This is the story of how the Facebook dev platform is sooo 2007, while Twitter - as a platform and social command line - will be the story of 2009.  Twitter’s openness as an app platform could make it the default development platform for community apps.

Facebook: The King of 2007

The incredible popularity of facebook’s dev platform from it’s launch in May of 2007 - shown by both from the huge number of 3rd party app developers as the incredible amount of users - provides firm evidence there is a huge market for social applications.  Users want to engage with other users both friends and the like minded public and platforms and applications that offer that functionality will be very successful.

Despite a platform that was generating 25 billion page views a month with a user base of 25+ million a month, Facebook decided to pull back.  Facebook decided it didn’t want to be a personal billboard service where a user could express themselves with badges from any number of apps.  Facebook is now a controlled sandbox where only certain things are allowed.  Facebook wants to be a personal automated rolodex with built in messaging & annoucements (aka news feed).  There’s nothing wrong with facebook’s chosen direction (except for the fact they pulled the rug out from thousands of app developers but that’s a different story).  Even just as a super, automated personal CRM, facebook is is a hugely valuable business.

In the wake of Facebook’s changes, the opportunity for a truly open, flexible, non-walled garden social platform presents itself.  Myspace as the social expression platform makes sense except Myspace seems to have evolved into the Fan Club platform - again a valuable market but it is what it is. But what has happened is that given

Twitter: The King of 2009

If there is an open source social platform - it’s Twitter. There are a minimum set of rules other then the 140 character messaging limitation. There are no limits on who and how often you message folks who follow you.  All the apps built on Twitter are by default open - as all tweeted items are in the public Twitter domain.  Thus all commands, messages, actions, reactions cause Twitter to look and feel like a public command line.  Twitter is not about private back channel api’s.  For instance, Stocktwits might have popularized the $stock symbol short hand, but it doesn’t own it.  Any other app can take advantage of the $ short hand even co-opting Stocktwits audience.  Tipjoy is popularizing the command “p” for micropayments and so on.  And what’s great about the open command line model - Twitter isn’t dictating functions from inside the kremlin it’s letting its users and developers do it for them.

Twitter is now a powerful platform for social apps and the folks who figure out how to build popular apps and communities on top of it will do very well for themselves.  Facebook might have the social graph, Myspace the fan clubs, but Twitter will have the truly social apps.

Posted in f8, facebook, facebook apps, social networks, twitter | 1 Comment »

You’re making Kia’s with a Mercedes Cost Model - A Car & Startup Guy’s Take on the Big 3 Bailout

I want to preface this post by stating that I am a hard core car guy who’s owned cars from just about every auto company.  I love, love cars.  Innovation, execution and design are all things I long for in a car.  Also as a startup junkie I am biased as every day I am ultimately working to either unseat incumbents or make their lives very uncomfortable.

If you have been following my twitter feed, then you’re familiar with my distaste with the idea of a federal bailout for the auto companies.  Despite my conservative political views, I do accept the idea of the government as the banker of last resort if and when the financial markets come to a screeching halt.

Yes the financial markets are very weak and wounded, but they are still functioning.  The reason the big 3 have turned to the US government tin pail in hand is that not no rationale investor would lend those companies money.  Thus we, as taxpayers, should ask ourselves why should we invest in 3 companies that no private, profit seeking investor is willing will do so?  Economy.com esimates it could take 400 Billion in direct taxpayer financing to save those 3 sceloratic dinosaurs.  In large part because it’s good money after bad and thus you’re really just trying to build new co’s inside the rotten shells of old co’s.

The fundamental problem with the big 3 is not that can’t sell cars - they can and do sell millions world wide.  The problem is that the big 3 can’t sell their cars at a price point where they make a profit.  The market values their often misguided, mediocre offerings at a rate well below what the big 3 need to make a profit and survive.  The reality in terms of brand reputation and actual product performance is that big 3 are more like Kia and a lot less like toyota or bmw.  The problem is that when the big 3 sell at kia’s prices they lose money because they have bmw’s cost structure.

Now the uaw and big labor had a lot to do with it with 5000 pages of work rules and european style socialist job protections which required the big 3 to produce high volume vehicles instead of focusing on smaller, more profitable niches like bmw. But the big 3’s inability to create products people would pay a market premium (see prius) or dream of driving to show status (bmw, porsche) has left them where they are beggars at the table.

I understand the short term societal cost that putting thousands upon thousands of people out of work.  And I am ok with spending tax dollars helping folks transition to a new world order.  But the future would better served using those government funds to fun 100 startups reborn from the ashes of the big 3.  Unleash the best and brightest teams of designers, engineers, and yes factory workers come together and form new companies.  Yes offer government financing to make it happen.  Dictating to 3 large dinosaurs to build competitive, innovative cars that will sell for a profit when they have essentially shown no ability to do that for 40 or 50 years is maddening to me.

For our country and economy to survive and grow, we need old dinosaurs to die and spawn their replacements from their remains.  Creative destruction has been an amazing blessing.  Look at how the internet grew out of the breakup of ma bell.

It’s easy for our political leaders to look to the past, the hard thing is to look to the future.  Let’s hope (though I doubt it) it happens.

Posted in cars, economy, startups | 1 Comment »

Travel Hack: One way to get free wifi

Recently I was in London for Seedcamp and ad-tech on behalf of Lookery.  One of the challenges of traveling to Europe in this Crackberry/iPhone day and age are the INSANE data roaming charges that mobile co’s like ATT Wireless like to charge.  The standard rate is 2c per KB or $20/MB.  Egads!  For perspective, my mobile twitter home page (http://m.twitter.com/sawickipedia) is 7k so 14 cents everytime I wanted to check. Mobile Wall St. Journal home page - 10k or 20c.  Definitely cheaper to buy the dead tree version at those rates.  300 emails a day (Lookery’s a virtual company and I’m in marketing and biz dev) @ 1kb each = $6/ day.   The moral of the story is it adds up quickly.  Now ATT Wireless offers a bulk purchase plan - great $25 for 20 MB’s (a 60% discount off of rate but still not a lot of data if you’re a mobile data power user).  Great except it requires a 12 month contract (seriously in this day and age I can’t believe we as consumers put up with that customer service B.S.).

So as a frugal, penny-pinching startup guy, I decided that I was going to rely on free wifi as my only means of accessing my email and mobile web needs.  I’m not sure whether or not iPhone’s automagically connect to open WAP’s, but Blackberries don’t.  They require you to manually search available WAP’s and then select the one you want to connect to.  So my first night in London, I arrive at my friends house (another frugal startup tip - don’t stay in hotels in NY and London - stay with friends) and connect to his open WAP still using the default SSID.  So the next day, I’m wondering around London and I notice my phone buzzing.  It’s connected to an open WAP and then it happened again later that day in a different part of the city.  That got me thinking - I should enter all the most popular default SSID’s for WAPs which all just happen to typically be the name of the WAP manufacturer.  And so I did.  Let me tell you, I was astounded at all the free wifi I was able to grab having pre-registered those WAPs on my wifi-enabled Blackberry Curve.  And even back at home in Seattle, I am still finding lots of free wifi as a result.  So I figured I should share the tip.

Here are the SSID’s I’ve entered so far: Netgear, dlink, Linksys, Belkin54g, Buffalo.  And if you wanted to enter more a quick web search would find many more default SSIDs.

Happy Travels.

Posted in startups, travel | 1 Comment »

One Former Physicist’s Thoughts on the Large Hadron Collider (or Will the World End?)

I have a college buddy from Duke - David Hardtke, who is retired physicist who worked at LBNL and CERN (the guys who built LHC) and now Chief Scientist at SurfCanyon a search startup, who sent us his thoughts on what’s going to happen with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as its now online (though not yet attempting the things the world is worried about).  As a geek at heart - I am fascinated by stuff like this.

So when asked whether the LHC would create black holes that would destroy the world - here’s what Dave said:

Today the $10 billion dollar Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva
Switzerland took its first baby step towards operation.  The LHC is the
highest energy particle accelerator ever built.  I will now make
predictions about the outcome of these experiments — unlike other
predictions on this list I allegedly know what I am talking about on
this subject.

1)  The main goal of the LHC is to find the last piece of the so-called
standard model.  The standard model is a theory that encompasses all
known particles and their interactions.  There are two types of
particles: leptons (including electrons, neutrinos, and their cousins)
and fermions (quarks) that interact via gauge bosons (photons, gluons,
and the W and Z).  The missing piece is something called the Higgs which
is supposed to give all of these other particles their mass (without the
Higgs, they are all massless).

PREDICTION:  Higgs is found, probably around 2010-2011.  Peter Higgs
dies one month before discovery and is thus denied Nobel Prize.

2)  Most physicists think there is a whole zoo of fundamental particles
more massive than any we have observed.  The reason they speculate of
the existence of these particles is that the standard model is ugly –
it has a bunch of “free” parameters that are arbitrarily tuned to crazy
values (you can reconcile God and physics by positing that only a God
could fine tune such a mess).  The favorite new theory is super-symmetry
which speculates that particles we have observed have a corresponding
superpartner such that there is a super-lepton for each fermion and a
super-fermion for each lepton.

PREDICTION:  Supersymmetry (and all related theories including string
theory) are B.S. (I am in the minority of physicists on this point, but
my paycheck no longer requires that I believe it).

3)  Some predict that LHC will create mini-black holes that may eat up
the earth.  This is definitely not going to happen since it requires
string theory to be true and string theory is BS (see previous
prediction).

PREDICTION: Earth survives

4)  96% of of the gravitational mass of the universe is unaccounted for.
There is something called dark matter that accounts for about 20%.  Many
predict that the LHC will find the Dark Matter.  This requires
super-symmetry or something similar to be true.

PREDICTION:  No dark matter found at LHC.

5)  The LHC is supposed to be a discovery machine that opens up a whole
new zoo of particles.  The next accelerator (the International Linear
Collider) will cost $40 billion and is designed to clean up the mess.

PREDICTION:  LHC is last large atom smasher ever built.

REQUIRED BEER COMMENT:  If you’re ever in Geneva, the CERN cafeteria
serves the cheapest beer in all of Switzerland.

UPDATE: Slight edits to Dave’s background

Posted in science | 2 Comments »

The Fallacy & Conundrum of User Influenced Ad Models

As the online display ad business continues to focus more and more on the idea of user targeting (the idea of targeting the user instead of targeting the site or the context of the page), there is a growing interest and some potential concern around how we’re going to target users.  With some of the more extreme ad models now scaring the bejeebus out of users (see Phorm and Nebuads) and growing concerns about the hegemony of companies like Google and the data it’s collecting about users (see the lack of privacy built into Google’s new browser), some companies are going creating ad networks and systems based on the ideas of users themselves giving explicit feedback about ads they like and don’t like.  Let’s just say I think that any ad model that relies on users giving feedback is a disaster and doomed from the start.

Filed Under - Doomed to Epic Fail

On paper, the idea of allowing users to give direct affirmative consent and feedback about ads they like, things they want, their interests sounds very democratic and utopian.  Power to the People! and all that.  The problem is that any model that relies on users doing anything other then what they really want to do flies in the face of what people actually do online.   Despite the web being about interaction and participation, almost 99% of what people do online is read, not participate.  At any UGC website - only a small portion of the audience actually ever uploads anything.  At YouTube for instance, I’ve heard reports that despite the 100 million users it sees everymonth less then 600,000 users ever upload and share anything publicly.  600,000 might sound like a lot but it’s less then 1% of their user base.  At FoggyGames.com, the casual games website I own, the percent of users who’ve ever rated a game - which only requires a nano second of effort to click on the classic rating star - is less then 1% as well.  Again and again you see participation rates in that range.  So now these new ad models expect the vast majority of users to actually rate each and every ad - even when they have shown again and again they won’t even participate in sites and actions where they actually want to participate - I don’t think so.

Sampling Don’t Work

OK then what about the idea that you don’t need every user to participate that just getting that sample to tell you about what ads they like or don’t like.  Unfortunately the idea of a sample defeats the whole principle of user targeting.  The basis of user targeting is targeting a specific’s user definite demographics, intents or interests.  And again and again - we’ve seen that sampling doesn’t work since it is the way that most site level targeting works today.  Sites sell ads based on samples of their user base - their user base is 60/40 Female/Male and thus they sell a disportionate number of ads targeting females (it’s largely what Glam Media does across multiple websites - not very sophisticated technically speaking).  Thus lots and lots of men get poorly targeted ads just because they go certains websites in this example.  The whole idea of user targeting is to solve that problem - show ads to men with ads for men in that scenario instead of generic ads based on a sample.  So without finite, user level data no user targeting scheme can work.  So in a web where you’ll likely get more then 1% of users to participate, models that requires something much greater then 10% and more like 25% of users to participate seems like a folly even at the start.

Conundrums and Contradictions

The conundrum and contradiction with user targeting is that users say they don’t like being tracked.  Yet what they won’t do is explicitly tell the advertiser or advertising provider what they want.  And yet, again and again users say they want ads targeting to them individually as way to increase the quality and relevancy of ads.  I’ve done enough research to know users like relevant ads - they actually stop them ads and start calling them information (ads are pejorative term meaning noisy, irrelevant, uninteresing, annoying marketing messages).  Tying a user’s information and interests from where users express them willingly (communities, social networks, etc.) to where they get exposed to ads is a way to solve that.  Doing so in a conscientious and respectful manner is critical for all players in the market (trust me I speak from experience - one bad actor can sink a market) if we want to solve the user targeting and participation problem.  And the folly is we’ll be able to avoid that get by getting the all the users online to vote on each and every ad - I’ll hopefully save everyone some time and investors money ‘cuz it ain’t going to work.

Posted in ad networks, advertising | 3 Comments »

A Little Love for TeachStreet

I’ve been meaning to write about my friend Dave Schappell’s startup TeachStreet since it launched back in April.  With TeachStreet’s launch into it’s second market - Portland today - now seems like the perfect time.

First a little background - I met Dave last year at Seattle Ignite summer 2007.  I was introduced by now TeachStreet board member Dave McClure, once again proving in the Web 2.0 space if you don’t know McClure you might not exist (sort of like a tree falling and no one around to hear it).  In fact, a little TeachStreet history occured in my dinning room as Schappell wrapped up his immigration issues with his co-founder and CTO for TeachStreet.  Glad I could play my small role.

Getting to know Dave over the last year has shown me that Dave is a rock star and why I expect the same from TeachStreet.  TeachStreet’s real genius is much like the genius beyond super successful startups like Yelp.  Yelp’s success is that it owns SEO for restaurants especially on the West Coast.  TeachStreet not only has the opportunity to own SEO for personal instruction, but also the directory and potentially web presense for a sector of the personal services industry that without TeachStreet would ever exist.  Startups that figure out how to own SEO and the web presence for a economic sector have the real potential to do very well for their users, customers (the businesses they help market) and themselves.

So if you’re looking for a tutor, instructor or a personal enrichment class - TeachStreet is the site to try.  If you’re looking for a startup doing something that is very real and has some very interesting potential in a sector that I expect to see a lot of cool things (ie. call it SEO 2.0 startups for lack of a better cliche) then pay attention to Dave Schappell and TeachStreet.

Posted in startups, teachstreet | 3 Comments »

Good history of Lookery

Check it out - written by our publisher relations guru Rex Dixon.

Posted in lookery | No Comments »

Calling BS on Wall Street’s YouTube Revenue Estimates

The recent WSJ article on Google’s difficulties monetizing YouTube has caught a lot of attention with the stat that Google can only sell ads around 4% of the videos on the site (due to copyright concerns).  With roughly a billion videos viewed a day that leaves a lot of unmonetized traffic.

At the same time as noted by SAI and Venturebeat, a bunch of silly and seemingly crack-smoking inspired revenue estimates were published by Wall Street analysts estimating YouTube’s 2008 revenue at around $200 million for 2008 and $350 to $400 million for next year.

As I noted in a recent post - the video ad market has a long way to go to be anything of significance.  Given Wall Street’s ability to hype hallucinogenic estimates I am not surprised to see those crazy numbers thrown out there.  But someone has to take a closer look and expose the crack smoking for what it is.

Let’s take a look - 4% of YouTube’s content is monetizable.  Let’s assume for a moment that 4% represents 10% of YouTube’s traffic - given the 1 billion videos viewed per day - that’s 100 million views.  YouTube is selling a new format - the video overlay with some estimates as high as a $20 cpm.  Now being in the ad business - I doubt very much that Google is actually getting anywhere close to $20 - real 30 second video ads are getting $20 CPM for essentially the equivalent of a 5-10 second banner-sized pop-up ad.

Let’s say Google sales force is good and they are getting a $10 cpm on what they can sell and let’s assume they are achieving a typical premium sell through of 30% of their inventory.  That means that they aren’t selling 100 million overlay ads per day that means they are selling 30 million.  At a $10 CPM that’s $300k per day, $9 million a month and just under a $100 million per year.  And given the amount of inventory - I highly doubt YouTube is seeing a 30% fill rate and a $10 eCPM a much more likely scenario is half that fill rate at half that CPM or $25 million a year.  Also as more inventory opens up to Google, the eCPM’s are likely to fall as the social networks have shown having a ton of inventory puts a lot of downward pressure on CPM’s.

Now a $25 to $100 million dollar a year business is nice especially for a business that’s not even 4 years old but I doubt that even covers YouTube’s bandwidth costs even at the high end of the estimate.

Posted in YouTube, advertising, google, online video | 2 Comments »

Reminder: You can find me on Twitter

Like a lot of folks I am spending less time blogging, more time working.  But I’m still offering up pithy thoughts throughout the day on twitter.  I can found at http://www.twitter.com/sawickipedia.

Posted in blogging | No Comments »

sad day for justice - landis loses CAS appeal

I totally expected Floyd Landis to lose his anti-doping appeal to the Court for the Arbitration of Sport, but not for the reasons most of you would likely expect.  I am biased to think Landis didn’t use testosterone but from a legal jurispudence perspective that’s irrelevant.  What should matter is that one’s guilt and innocence can be proven with fairness and beyond reasonable reproach.  And for anyone who has bothered to pay attention to the evidence and facts of Landis’s appeal knows, neither was found here.  For full details, source documents, commentary and amazingly detailed analysis I refer all to Trust But Verify - an amazing resource.

I used to think all accussed “dopers” were guilty SOB’s, but after reading the literature and background - I am convinced that most anti-doping exercises are witch hunts led by sloppy labs with questionable motives and purposes.  If I were a professional athlete that had their livlihood at the hands and mercy of the French lab that produced the “positive” result in Floyd Landis’s case, then I would shudder with fear every day I gave a sample that today I would be branded a cheat - rightly or wrongly.  With a guilty until proven innocent appeals process with no credence given to outside independent experts there is little hope of overturning “guilty” rulings.  With no checks on procedural errors, omissions, and independence, one’s livlihood is in the hands of a group of people who make McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings look reasonable.

My only hope is that there is a legal path for Landis to pursue this in federal courts where he can contest his lack of justice and expose the anti-doping corrupt jihad for what it is.

Posted in misc | 2 Comments »