I read Matt Blumberg’s post on Silly, Silly Patent Nonsense this morning. It concerns a bulk email patent that was issued in 2003 that is being used to sue InfoUSA for patent infringement. Matt doesn’t have the detailed data, nor do I, but if it’s true I’ve got to believe it’s totally bogus.
I was involved in a patent suit of bulk email in the 1990’s. I am aware of prior art dating back to the 1980’s. The chance of there being anything non-obvious here is approximately zero. My suit settled for $1 and a cross-license after $1 million of aggregate attorney’s fees and a bunch of unnecessary hard feelings (some of which have cleared due to the fundamental good karma of some of the people involved.)
I despise this stuff. Hopefully the facts will come out in the next few days that nothing of this sort is going on. But – if it is – I volunteer to be an expert witness in the case.
The Common Craft Show has a brilliant 3.5 minute video called RSS in Plain English. If you’ve ever wondered what RSS is and why you should care, it’s a phenomenal explanation. Of course, I wish they had used NewsGator as the example (instead of Google Reader), but the explanation is superb and you can still give NewsGator a try.
Every now and then I stumble upon a piece of software that – after a few months of using it – I wonder how I ever lived without it. My latest instance of this is SharePoint and it surprised even me.
I used to make fun of SharePoint when it was merely Microsoft’s Portal product (going back to 2000–ish.) Folks I knew at Microsoft talked about the incredible number of seats they had sold, but I knew that they bundled it for free as part of their EA program. Whenever it came up, I asked about the number of people that actually used SharePoint and often got blank stares.
In 2005, I first started hearing about Microsoft’s efforts to make Office a platform rather than just a set of desktop applications. There were lots of different names for the various technologies that Microsoft was going to incorporate into this platform – plenty of stuff ending in “Server” or “Platform Technology.” In typical Microsoft fashion, they massaged and massaged and massaged this until they came up with MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Services.)
MOSS is great. We’ve been using a variety of web-based apps, including one for our Wiki. We tried a few CRM approaches (including the incredibly disappointing Microsoft CRM – as happy as we are with SharePoint, we are equally unhappy with Microsoft CRM.) For the hell of it we tossed up a SharePoint server and started playing with it – we’ve never looked back.
Interestingly, we are still only scratching the surface of SharePoint. The Wiki functionality works great, we’ve got a number of databases built, and we are starting to use it for internal document management. Exchange integration works nicely and we’ve actually managed to create the level of CRM system we need with it with zero outside consulting help.
That said, there are interesting weaknesses in the product which several of our portfolio companies can help with. NewsGator has had simple integration with SharePoint around RSS for a while – look for a much deeper integration with MOSS coming soon. Microsoft promises a “Hosted SharePoint” (um – SharePoint Live?) product (expect an announcement at Mix in a few weeks), and there is an opportunity for cleaner integration with non-Microsoft APIs, especially around blogging and user-generated content.
I love finding a gem where I wasn’t expecting it.
All of a sudden I’m seeing Lucene (and Nutch and Solr) being adopted by a bunch of my companies. While several have been using it for a while, it’s spreading rapidly. I’m curious about the experience folks have had with it – everyone I’ve talked to is thrilled; I’ve yet to hear from someone that said “it didn’t work for me and I decided to use ‘X’ instead.” Any feedback?
The Boulder County Business Reporter has a good summary of TechStars, synthesizing some of the stuff we are trying to do. The application deadline is coming up (3/31/07) – there is still time to apply if you are interested.
While the SXSW crowd is a-twitter, I’m still thinking about the range of private emails I’ve gotten about my widget post. While some of the comments were assertions that I’m an idiot, there were a few that caused me to think harder about the opportunities (or non-opportunities) to build real businesses around the construct of widgets. In addition, Mike Hirshland wrote a post challenging several people (including me) to debate whether or not someone could build a company around “widget management systems” that could generate venture returns and one of Mike’s partner at Polaris – Sim Simeonov – wrote an extensive post titled Widgets, Widgets, Everywhere on his view of this.
In the emails I got, several people misinterpreted my point of view so I figured I’d start with a quick summary. I think widgets are an incredible distribution mechanism for web-based functionality. I love widgets – and love the widgetization of the web. However, I’m struggling to see where the real business opportunities are in “wrangling widgets” (or – more simply – “widget management systems and infrastructure.”)
Whenever I think of something like this, I start with the assumption that there are no fundamentally new business models. In my experience, almost every business I’ve ever seen on the Internet either has a non-Internet real world analogy (an analog analogue), a non-Internet software analogy, or a previous incarnation on the Internet in some previous phase (Web 2.0 anyone?) While the technology, implementation, distribution, user-interface, and infrastructure dynamics change, the business models rarely do.
To me, widgets are application packagers that enable you to embed specific functionality from a web site (or web service) into another web site. Sim provided a similar view from a slightly different angle in Widgets, Widgets, Everywhere by saying “widgets are the next step in the trend towards disaggregation of content at the production end and aggregation of content by the consumer.” My view of widgets today is that they are tightly coupled with the long tail – adoption seems exciting (and pageview (widgetview?) ramps seem huge) because of the long tail effect (vs. moving up the curve to mainstream media.)
When I stare at this and think about the different ways to build businesses to support this, I come up with four business models:
I don’t buy that #1 (ad networks) is a big moneymaker. Several people hit me over the head with a brick and have said “widgets will generate 10 zillion ad unit page views per day.” I’m struggling with this – you’ve got issues around form factor, content rights, revenue share, long tail critical mass, and many incumbent ad networks that are dealing with different approaches to widgets. Maybe there’s room for one new one to emerge – the way FeedBurner emerged around feed-based advertising, but that begs another question which I’ll leave for you to ponder.
#2 (WMS) is great and helpful to me as a publisher, but I don’t know how to monetize it. I’d love a single WMS / widget container for all my widgets. If I’m a Typepad user, I’ve already got this and I assume WordPress.com will nail this also. I expect the CMS platforms can and should quickly integrate this – it’s not technically difficult and continues to improve the value of their CMS. As a blogger, I’d be hard pressed to pay an incremental fee to a widget CMS company (I’d do a rev share on #1, but I don’t know where the ads would go!) Most of the stuff I’ve seen fits in this category and I’m impressed with what a few of them are doing functionally, but I’m still struggling with “turn the money on.”
#3 (CDN) seems like there should be something interesting there. I’m already having periodic performance issues with some of my widgets and if you’ve been following along with Fred “the king of blog bling” Wilson’s performance issues, you will appreciate that a real CDN could be helpful. However, the long tail bites (or “tangles”) again – the only people that will pay for this are at the head of it so the real network effect doesn’t pay off big here.
#4 (Stats) just won’t work. Google commoditized the long tail stats market when they bought Urchin and made it free. We already saw this with feed stats – the vast majority of them are now free. I believe long tail stats – like Wikipedia (and – according to the FSF – software) – really want to be free.
If you think I’m missing something – obvious or otherwise – I’m all ears. And – if you think I’m really wrong, please keep hitting me over the head with a brick.
As you may know, Denver is hosting the 2008 Democratic Convention. I recently met with a major media company that is looking to do a specialized political information site built around the 2008 election with an initial highlight on the Democratic Convention. I’m interested in talking to people that have unique software approaches to building out content and community in the political vertical.
I am not looking for content providers, bloggers, or generic software vendors (unless you have a specific focus on the political vertical.) I am looking for new, exciting, and unique approaches to this vertical, especially if you can easily integrate into an existing web framework.
In 1995 I made an investment in a company called Net.Capitol. It was one of the very first online politics sites. While it was mostly a directory and email list for various national politicians, it evolved in some interesting ways and had some community aspects that were way ahead of its time. It was bought in 1997 by a public company and was a successful exit for everyone, but it more or less disappeared by the 2000 election cycle. But – I remember tucking away the idea that politics was a great vertical market if you time it right and execute well.
Please leave comments here with links if you’re working on something relevant and/or know of people or companies playing in this sandbox.
Jason is getting riled up about patents over on AsktheVC. I figured it’d be a good time to finish up the set of posts from John Funk suggesting an empirical way to evaluate whether software patents are bad (or good). If you haven’t read Part 1 and Part 2, take a look at them first (they are both short.) Part 3 follows.
But I think there may be another interesting angle. It may be able to be answered with just interviewing software companies or it may require a broader context. Here’s how I’m thinking about it. Map a three-dimensional grid with X-axis being economic value of a patent (or even a software patent portfolio); Y-axis being form of value (e.g., consensual/collaborative money payment, consensual/collaborative cross-license [note: this would appear to be an end-run around the system as it is a forced equality of unequal assets], litigation inspired royalty payments, a successful cease-and-desist/block against competitors, etc.), and Z-axis being number of years since issuance.
I think the X-axis is axiomatic. Y-axis exists to try to document how different forms of “value” represent “clean” vs. “bastardized” forms of value (I would argue consensual payments and successful “blocks” are clean forms of value; litigation inspired payments and cross-licensing are bastardized forms, with cross-licensing being the most dramatic bastardization as I think it’s very rare outside of software patents.) The Z-axis exists to bring some texture to whether software patents in particular are x% of the time irrelevant by the time they actually issue since the business moves so fast.
Now, it may take some other industries like pharma/biotech, consumer products, chemical/mech tech, etc. to show how different the industries and categories are, or it may be evident from the first map how screwed up software patents are vs. the public policy. But I would think that in the absence of some compelling evidence of substantial, “clean” value transfer across the full 20-year horizon, one could disprove the social policy hypothesis of “if we take away patents, innovation will be chilled” since there is little meaningful GDP add without clean value transfer.
Anyone in academia interested in patents should feel free to refine this and do a real study on it. We promise we won’t claim any ownership of it.
In January, I posted Part 1 of an empirical approach to determining whether software patents are bad (or good). The essay was sent to me by John Funk, founder of Evergreen Innovation Partners. This is part 2 (please read part 1 first if you are interested.)
As a quick reminder – the premise of the essay is: What if we attempted to craft a social policy hypothesis that would defend the existence of software patents, and then we went about creating an experiment that would attempt to disprove that hypothesis?
Now, what if we created an interview / survey methodology that talked to hundreds of software companies, ranging from large ones (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Google) to ones as small as small as angel-backed or bootstrapped startups. We define a methodology that attempts to understand whether the basis for the rationale of software patents (1: public disclosure accelerates innovation because future invention rests on prior patent disclosures) or (2: conferring a patent monopoly will encourage innovation that otherwise would not occur due to perceived risk/return) has empirical evidence to demonstrate social policy success.
It would seem that addressing (1:) is easy: For example:
Addressing (2:) may be a little more difficult to accomplish. Some questions might include:
Evidence of any of these would show a business model that is like pharma vs. generics where when a product goes “off patent” there is more competition (and, therefore, the existence of monopoly profits generated during the term of the patent – which would prove the social policy is actually working.)
I’ll post part 3 sometime later this week.