One of the investment themes I’m intrigued with is human computer interaction (HCI). I believe that in 20 years the notion of typing on a keyboard and moving a mouse around will seem quaint. If you are skeptical about this, remember that punch cards were all the rage a mere 35 years ago when IBM came out with a new 96 column format, our good friend the IBM 3270 came out in 1972, and the ubiquitous VT100 came out in 1978.
If you are in NY and walking down 14th Street near Union Square today, you’ll see is simple example of what I mean by HCI. Adobe has an ad up on the wall of the Virgin Megastore that is interactive. The wall is 7 feet by 15 feet and while it’s a marketing campaign (vs. a functioning UI), it’s a colorful example of some interesting things that are coming – and fast.
While FeedBurner is no longer an investment of mine, I still am a huge FeedBurner fanboy and love everything about those cuddly little guys and gals. Today they announced that they have seemless integration with Blogspot. If you are a Blogspot blogger, you can now be as happy as the TypePad bloggers (at least as far as your feed is concerned.) Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk! – I’m so delighted that the humor gremlin at FeedBurner has not left the building – I guess he likes the free Google food.
Yeah – it’s old news now (announced on Monday) but it has been a busy week with little sleep (due to the existence of a puppy in my life.)
My partner Ryan (congrats man!) has the detailed version of the story if you are interested. I’m extremely proud of the Postini team, especially the co-founder Scott Petry – for their amazing job in building this company. It’s extra gratifying given that 42 days ago I wrote a post titled Google Acquires FeedBurner. Congrats to the folks at Google for acquiring another great company – now Google will really engage in the mission of eliminating the evilness of spam from the universe.
Last week Lijit announced that they had raised a $3.3 million financing. If you aren’t familiar with Lijit, it’s the search box on the top right of my blog.
Now that Google owns FeedBurner, I miss my friends there (ok – we still talk – a lot – but I still miss them.) Think of Lijit as “my next investment like FeedBurner.” While Lijit is a totally different service for publishers, the game plan and strategy is identical – provide as much value of publishers as humanly possible on the dimension of “network search.” Our goal – replace the search function on all blogs with Lijit’s version.
When I first invested in FeedBurner, some of the FeedBack was “nice service for RSS Brad, but where’s the business?” The business strategy was a simple one – provide huge direct benefit from publishers (to drive adoption on blogs) and then create an ad network around a new piece of inventory (in this case the RSS feed.) FeedBurner did that brilliantly – today they have over 450,000 publishers and – as of this morning – now provide all of their services free to the publisher (including the previously charged for Stats PRO and MyBrand.)
Lijit is free to publishers. It’s a trivial install – one click for TypePad and Blogger and a single line of Javascript for everyone else (except WordPress.com – maybe someday they let us in.) If you are a blogger and haven’t tried it yet, try it and tell me how it goes.
While I expect plenty of people to say “network search? – what’s the big deal – I’ve already got Google search on my blog.” If you fall into this category, think back to the distant past of 2005 when FeedBurner’s popularity started accelerating and see if you can remember if you were one of the people that said “RSS feeds – I don’t need any help managing that – I’ve already got one of my blog.”
Typical blog search is crappy. You end up with two common choices: whatever comes with the blog platform (yuck – pages only – and mediocre relevance algorithms) or Google search (better, but now you are a slave to pagerank and still limited to the pages on your site.) In both cases, the search only works for the content on your blog – it doesn’t incorporate any of your other content (e.g. other blogs you publish, your bookmarks (e.g. Blink List, BlueDot, ClipMarks, del.icio.us, digg, Furl, Ma.gnolia, reddit, and Stumble Upon), you photos and videos (flickr and YouTube), your social networks (LinkedIn, Live Journal, MySpace, Twitter, MyBlogLog), or other RSS/OPML you manage or generate. That’s “part 1” of the concept of the “network” (e.g. all of my stuff.)
Part 2 is your actual network. Most blogs have a blogroll – that is a list of common blogs that the blogger reads or respects. This is an easy place to start building a network. Another would be the blogs a blogger reads (pretty easily available via an OPML reader that most RSS readers will export.) Of course, once these bloggers become part of the Lijit network, Lijit will automagically connect all of their own content (“part 1”) up to the network which makes it even richer. If you want to see some great stuff about my network, take a look at my Lijit User page.
It gets better, but I’ll save that for another post (and yeah – I realize I didn’t tell you the revenue model, but it’s a groovy one like FeedBurners.) For now, try it. The current version of search lives on top of Google’s Custom Search engine, but there is some fancy magic search stuff coming (that you’ll get to alpha test on my blog.)
I was FeedBurner publisher #699. I am Lijit publisher #31. Three years after I started publishing my blog with FeedBurner they had 450,000 publishers and were acquired for a tidy sum. Lijit’s publisher network is growing nicely – it’s up around 2,000 now and expanding at the same daily rate that FeedBurner was early on. Help me help the growth curve continue!
You are going to see SmartLinks start appearing on my site. They are from AdaptiveBlue and are evolving rapidly into a really cool way to enhance the value of a link. For more on what a SmartLink is, check out the post from Alex Iskold titled BlueBlog » SmartLinks Primer: The Idea and the Technology. (<— Click on the little blue square to see a SmartLink in action.)
Yeah, I didn’t know that either. However, through the magic of NewsGator’s syndication services, I can automagically put the Shark Week Widget (from the Discovery Channel) on my blog (yes – I’m just playing around to see how it works.)
I also automagically put Shark Week on my Facebook page. Click, click – widgets everywhere. I love sharks – especially ones with laser beams.
We are moving our offices to Boulder. As of Monday, our new address will be:
1050 Walnut Street
Suite 210
Boulder, CO 80302
Due to the miracle of modern technology, all of our telephone numbers will remain the same.
My office has been in Superior, CO since 2000. We’ve enjoyed being above a liquor store and a pizza joint for seven years. While I’ve gotten tired of telling people that “Superior is basically Boulder”, I figured out that it wasn’t really helpful to say “Boulder is superior.”
We’ve traded our pizza joint for The Rio, Walnut Brewery, The Kitchen, Amanti, and The Foundry (our namesake bar across the street.) If you decide to go for a five minute walk, you’ll pass by a bunch of our friends, including Me.dium, TechStars, Boulder Ventures, Vista Ventures, Kachi Partners, Greenmont Capital, Google (@Last), Confluence Commons, Lacuna, Collective Intellect, Prospect Street, Tango, Applied Trust, Blink Gallery, Paul Berberian and Co., Slice of Lime, Metzger, Van Heyst Group, Ravenwood, Texture Media, Mango, and I’m sure I missed a bunch. Of course, being Boulder, there is sushi everywhere.
We’ll miss the constant entertainment from our friends at Return Path and StillSecure (who we shared offices with in Superior), but I’m sure they’ll enjoy the nice big juicy offices we’ve left them to expand into.
There are two opposite approaches in the world that most software companies take when talking about future products. 1. Say nothing until the day of the release and 2. Talk regularly about your roadmap. There used to be a third – “announcing a product but then not shipping it for a while” (anyone remember vaporware?) – but that’s faded into the background for the most part at this point (and is distinctly different than #2.)
Alex Iskold of AdaptiveBlue has a great example of talking regularly about your roadmap up on his post Work In Progress: SmartLinks WebService and Automatic SmartLinks. I’m very intrigued with AdaptiveBlue and very impressed with the way Alex thinks. I also love that he’s talking about what he’s working on and asking for thoughts and comments.
Greg Reinacker has done this regularly over the years on his blog, dating back to a post on January 4, 2003 titled News Aggregator. If you want to see some fun old posts on “thinking out loud and rapidly interating your product”, look at Greg’s archive posts from January to March 2003.
Guys – keep it up!
With this post, we continue the “Feld Job Board.” If you are a god-like software architect that isn’t intimidated by the notion of making a real-time system work across 10,000 distributed servers, this might be for you. Location doesn’t matter, but we are going to do our best to relocate you to Boulder, CO.
If you’ve been following along at home, you know that I’m very excited about a company in Boulder called Me.dium that I’m involved in.
On the heals of their financing, Me.dium is looking for a superstar Chief Architect. Me.dium is building a real-time representation of all the activity on the Internet. To build a near real-time system that scales to thousands of servers requires intense engineering at every layer. The Chief Architect at Me.dium will work side-by-side with the CTO and is the central point of contact for network, systems, database, and application architectures. Given the volume of data, the complexity of the algorithm, and demanding scaling requirements, this is a unique and challenging opportunity for the right candidate.
If you are interested in a role like this and think you are qualified for it, please drop a note and a resume to careers@me.dium.com. If you want to try Me.dium out and are a Firefox user (IE coming soon), just click on my invite code.