If that heading makes you think "Relax, relax, relax I need some information first" then you have the same Pink Floyd addiction that I have.
Eric Norlin – my co-conspirator in the Defrag Conference – has a very relevant post up titled Beyond Incrementalism 2.0. I expect we are going to hear a new wave of "why aren’t we (where "we" is the computer industry) going after big problems right now."
Tim O’Reilly had a dynamite post up over the weekend titled MicroHoo: corporate penis envy? (anyone bold enough to use the phrase "penis envy" in the title of a blog post is a personal hero of mine.) Fred Wilson weighed in, called it the Best Blog Post In A Long Time and pulled out some of the great one liners. Among other things, his post is about the need for Big Hairy Audacious Goals to move innovation forward.
On my run this morning (during the 60 minutes where I got lost in the mountains and added a very muddy extra 30 minutes to my normal two hour run to the office) I ruminated on the dynamics of incrementalism and whether I was seeing enough radically new stuff – or if the new things I was seeing was merely an incremental build.
In our friendly neighborhood "Web 2.0 space" (god I hate that phrase) there is a ridiculous amount of incrementalism. When the echoes in the echo chamber echo even more than usual, that is a signal – mostly about the signal to noise ratio getting out of whack.
When I think of other areas we are playing around in (HCI, Digital Life) I’m seeing plenty of stuff that I would put in the "radically new / BHAG" category (e.g. "the mouse and keyboard are an anachronism – their time is up – let’s make them vanish.")
Based on Eric’s brain and what he’s thinking about, I expect this years Defrag Conference to step wide outside the Web 2.0 / Implicit Web echo chamber and try to re-energize some seriously cool thinking around BHAGs in this arena. Come play.
Fred Wilson has a great post up today titled Can We Live In Public? If you go back in time to May 4, 2004 when I started blogging, you’ll see that Fred was one of the key inspirations with his post Transparency to my question of To Blog or Not to Blog. At the time, my interest came from a very simple place.
I’m a professional emailer / phonecaller / meeting taker (aka a venture capitalist). Much of my time is spend writing, reading, thinking, talking, and learning. As a result, I’ve been fascinated (and deeply involved) with the evolution of email and web-based communication and technologies.
I just wanted to learn how this stuff worked. Blogging, RSS, user generated content. All the corresponding web-based tools and technologies that were emerging in 2004. To me, learning how this stuff worked wasn’t just reading about it and observing, but actually participating. UGC was a big part of it – I believed that I wouldn’t really understand it unless I was a content creator. So, while my blogging was motivated by transparency, my meta-goal was ultimately a selfish one – to learn.
I massively underestimated the value of this to me. When I reflect on the last four years of my blogging, it’s been one of the most interesting, enlightening, stimulating, and – ultimately – rewarding things that I’ve done professionally. It’s resulted in new investments, new friends, lots of stimuli I doubt I ever would have encountered, plenty of healthy conflict that has caused me to think through things I otherwise wouldn’t have thought much about, and an outlet for my desire to write that is clearly aligned with what I do every day for work.
The notion of living in public is an unintended side effect of this. It’s part of the package if you really want to engage with this stuff. I’ve had my share of bad moments; like Fred the worst is when I piss off my wife Amy with something I write. It doesn’t happen often, but every now and then I get an email saying approximating "please delete that tweet".
Over the past year or so, the ideas swirling around my head have coalesced into a construct that at Foundry Group we are calling Digital Life. As I continue to live in public, the friction and overhead associated with it increases geometrically since I am both a generator and consumer of content. I’m continuing to work on understanding (and investing in) the tools, technologies, and services on both sides of this equation, but I also want to knit it all together at a higher level.
I’ve got a long way to go. I learn a little every day. By doing. Thank you for helping.
Josh Kopleman at First Round Capital has an excellent post up titled Depending on pending… I’m going out to lunch at the Rio today and having a margarita to celebrate the issuance of the original Half.com patent (#7,373,317) that was just issued. 8.5 years after Josh filed for it. And 7 years after eBay acquired Half.com.
To my great joy, Josh states "I believe there is little-to-no value in depending on pending patents for a "barrier" to entry. " He then adds a line that I love in the never ending "patents are like nuclear bombs" debate: "But if you’re fighting a war today, it’s better to count on weapons you have at hand today — don’t rely on a nuclear program that could take five years to come to fruition."
As an early stage company, saying that your patents pending are a defensible barrier is equivalent to saying that your success is pending. Yeah – maybe. But don’t count on it. However, I can guarantee that the margarita I’m having at lunch in the sunshine is going to be very tasty.
I have a long documented love of APIs. Ever since I started programming in the late 1970’s the idea of writing software that interacted with other software was a cool idea to me. Abstractions 30 years ago weren’t very sophisticated, but when I look back at some of the Apple II documentation in my own personal computer museum I am amazed at what you could peek and poke, even back then.
The API has been a long time staple of established companies. It has morphed around plenty – having a long run as the SDK (software development kit) as popularized by Microsoft in the 1980’s. The API in all its naked glory made a nice comeback in the 1990’s and has subsequently become firmly established as an integral part of the Internet. While occasional arguments about REST, SOAP, and XML-RPC appear, most of the time we are happy with whatever API abstraction layer we get.
Many of our Internet-based portfolio companies – such as NewsGator, FeedBurner, and Technorati – have built APIs to their services. However, the API isn’t limited to consumer companies – we’ve had great success with our friend the API at enterprise software companies like Rally Software.
Recently Twitter reminded us just how powerful an API could be. Twitter’s well documented API resulted in an explosion of Twitter add-on applications which have been key to propelling its adoption. FriendFeed followed suit and launched an API shortly after its service was available. It’s no surprise that the founders of Twitter and FriendFeed have a Google heritage – nor is it a surprise that Google’s API machine continues to crank out a remarkable set of APIs for a wide variety of Google services.
Today there is no excuse if you launch a consumer web service without an API. If you do that, to you I say "you suck". Ok – it’s not trivial to scale an API up, but why not design it in from the beginning? If you wake up in a situation where your service (or API) suddenly becomes popular, you have options like Mashery that you can outsource your API to. According to Oren Michels, the CEO of Mashery, a base API package will including – in addition to the actual API code:
I believe we are once again at the beginning of another conceptual shift. The enterprise software world has been talking about SOA’s while the parallel universe of the consumer Internet has been implementing web services and APIs galore. However, now one has really worked through broad API scale issues on an Internet-wide basis. Imagine the following scenario:
You create new a web site called "CoolNewSite". You create an API for CoolNewSite. You want to connect CoolNewSite (via the API) to the other 531,177 other web sites that have APIs. Yes – you realize that only 1,753 of them actually matter, but you’d like to be able to interoperate with all of them, no matter how large or small. So – you get to work writing 531,177 connectors between your API and all the other APIs out there. 13 years into this process, CoolNewSite becomes popular and suddenly you are overwhelmed with traffic. Your solution – start throttling the number of calls that another service can send you in a given time period so that you don’t continually fall over.
Sound – er – familiar?
There are at least two interesting businesses that come out of this problem. Mashery is one; a company we have funded called Gnip is the second. I’ve got a third one in me, but I’m going to think about it a little more and see if it’s really a business or just a feature of Gnip or Mashery.
In the mean time, this is one case where sucking less doesn’t work. Get going on your API.
When I read the NY Times Article In One Flaw, Questions on Validity of 46 Judges my immediate response was to break out laughing. Then I said – out loud – "no fucking way." Then I laughed some more.
John Duffy, a law professor at George Washington University Law School just might be my new hero. According to the NY Times:
He has discovered a constitutional flaw in the appointment process over the last eight years for judges who decide patent appeals and disputes, and his short paper documenting the problem seems poised to undo thousands of patent decisions concerning claims worth billions of dollars.
His basic point does not appear to be in dispute. Since 2000, patent judges have been appointed by a government official without the constitutional power to do so.
The Justice Department appears not to be disputing this claim. They passed on the opportunity to dispute it in December and said they "were at work on a legislative solution."
Here’s the best part:
"They did warn that the impact of Professor Duffy’s discovery could be cataclysmic for the patent world, casting “a cloud over many thousands of board decisions” and “unsettling the expectations of patent holders and licensees across the nation.” But they did not say Professor Duffy was wrong.
If it was a legislative mistake, it may turn out to be a big one. The patent court hears appeals from people and companies whose patent applications were turned down by patent examiners, and it decides disputes over who invented something first. There is often a lot of money involved.
The problem Professor Duffy identified at least arguably invalidates every decision of the patent court decided by a three-judge panel that included at least one judge appointed after March 2000."
Dear USPTO – we knew all of those software patents were bogus. However, we forgot to tell you that some of the judges were appointed illegally. Therefore, all the decisions about those bogus patents are now – well – bogus.
You can’t make this shit up.
In my quest to abolish software patents, I’ve been pondering "short term approaches" since I doubt the Supreme Court is going to wave a magic wand and make my fantasies come true anytime soon.
I’ve been hearing about something lately that bothers me a lot. More and more companies are paying engineers a bonus to file patents. Not "get patents" – simply generate patent applications. The intended consequence is an obvious one – companies get to file more patents. The unintended consequence is a particularly nasty one – lots of shitty patents get filed and the PTO has to wade through that much more garbage.
A friend of mine – who recently was "paid to file a patent" said he considered requesting that – if granted – the patent only be used defensively. I asked him why. He responded that he felt conflicted and thinks a lot of his peers feel the same way. He didn’t think the patent was particularly valuable, useful, or valid. However, he was reluctant to turn down the bonus that he was getting for simply filing the patent. He didn’t view it as a good use of his time (or of his company’s time or money), but he realized that the patent system is motivating his company to file as many patents as they can. He has little expectation that the patent will be granted, but he was happy to get paid the bonus.
I asked him what would make him feel better. He surprised me when he said "My company should agree to only use the patent defensively if it is granted." I asked him if he thought this was a unique perspective and he said no – he thinks many experienced software engineers are skeptical of software patents. While they are skeptical, they understand the battle going on right now and realize the value of ever increasingly large number of patents for defensive purposes.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a grass roots movement of experienced software engineers around software patents for defensive purposes only.
Whenever someone comes in my office that hasn’t seen me before, they always fawn over my monitor. I enjoy my 30" Apple beast, even though it’s running Vista.
Yes – that would be my next one curtsey of 9X (via Engadget).
I am newly addicted to Skype.
Several weeks ago when I was in Keystone, I had total IP phone failure. We use a Cisco IP phone system in our office. My house in Eldorado Springs has a T1 line connected to the office with a Cisco IP phone set up. My house in Keystone has Comcast business Internet connected via a VPN (running on a Linux box) to our office network with a Cisco IP phone set up. All the phones are configured exactly the same (one number, the 24 ring tone, similar presets.)
There was one problem. Brad and Comcast apparently weren’t having a happy karma time – some of the time when I called someone I could hear them but they couldn’t hear me. Reset, reboot, unplug. Random but inconsistent success.
After two days of this I fired up Skype and tried it. I hadn’t used it in Keystone and spent a few minutes setting it up with my wireless headset (that was connected to my Cisco IP phone.) No big deal – press a button on the headset and I am on Skype; press a different button and I am in sometimes you can hear me sometimes you can’t hear me land.
24 hours after trying Skype again it was all I was using.
I’m now on a new quest to find all the happy useful important Skype plugins for people like me that run on Outlook / Exchange / Firefox as well as additional indispensable Skype software / features. Suggestions?
I just did a search in my address book for someone and came up with the address book entry for someone I know that died last year.
I was sad. I sat – paralyzed – for thirty seconds struggling to decide whether or not to delete the address book entry.
I realized this is a great example of an unintended consequence of technology. I was not particularly close to this person (they were a neighbor of mine) but I flashed back to a walk along our creek that we had one day while scoping out the location for a new gate that Amy and put up in our canyon. He was a nice but somewhat troubled guy that didn’t live long enough.
Those were memories I probably would have never had again if I hadn’t seen his name in the address book entry.
I decided not to delete the address book entry.