David Hayden
Sunday Morning, 21 January, 2007
Give Them What They Want
I began thinking about this idea, that as a culture, America is fixated upon the idea that we can have what we want, and that entrepreneurs over 35 are out to pasture, and that those under 35 are then fixated on giving America's youth (not necessarily Americans) what they, as entrepreneurs, think America's youth want. I wondered to myself if this was true, or more importantly, particularly a relevant idea, given the educational and historical perspective of youth, and I wondered if it was a global issue, and I wondered if I agreed, or not, with it at all.
Then I had a conversation with someone about my struggling start-up, Jeteye. He said, "As for the vision of Jeteye. I don't get the consumer need. I think Blogs/delicious/etc handle this need fairly well. The thesis of jeteye is an atomization of content and a portability of that into units that can be accessed and shared anytime. Before you asked for our chat, I was going to tell you that in what you are building is a bigger idea... you were saying that we need a memory of where we have been... but I as a user don't want to have to explicitly remember... and browser history is a very week tool at best.... why not turn Jeteye into a recorder... that auto-records and saves as you surf and then lets you share, etc. That simple auto- populate may be the key to everything. Show a graph of a sites I visited so I can remember, show keywords I searched... save entire web pages so I can revisit ... our machines have huge hard drives... Yet our memories are short and there must be away to solve this fundamental problem and use it for remembering and sharing. "
He went on to say that the flaw in my "If I build for myself it is easier to get it right than by trying to guess what others want..." Is that I am no longer "part of the generation which is creating the greatest value on the Internet (Myspace, facebook, youtube - three biggest hits are all fueled by people who grew up only knowing the Internet). They use the web differently and you or even I. There is a reason why many billion dollar hits are created by people under 25 / 30. Now you have to use a different muscle. "
I thought about this for awhile - it seems to me that I disagree for the following reason: The missing ingredient in his premise that youth rules is simply evident in the perspecitve that education and wisdom bring with maturity, both which I value, and neither of which are driving the youth (yet) who are driving the value of Youtube and Myspace and Facebook (actually, don't forget the wizened old VCs here). Add to this that I don’t even agree they are good phenomena, or Second Life which has become little mor than a porn site. Is this all good?
From my perspective, all that is driving those popular phenomena is social sharing, not money, and as much of it as possible. But to say that because a generation of youth is using something a lot, then they in their wisdom represent the world and that all generations must follow their order, seems a stretch. And it does not address the obvious question as to what they are doing being intrinsically a good thing, or not.
The critical mass of value these kinds of sites have created does not means that we of older generations supposedly want them, or that Eric Schmidt, now over 50, should resign from Google. Either way, we eventually all learn that wisdom over muscle is better, that peace over war is better. However, when a way is working for someone, it's hard to get them off that roll – I would just caution us all to remember not to forget the child-like mind, and that if we determine value only by what works, then that will only serve for as long as there is perceived value in the idol we worshiped.
Going back to the Jeteye issue, and this fellow's idea of what it is aside, the idea of an auto-recorder for the web is intriguing, and something that our team will remember we looked seriously at doing as early as Spring of 2005. It may be still, something worth doing, because we are getting some initial request from our business partners that they would like to auto-populate the Jetpaks of their customers, and perhaps have some level of recording mechanism in them. I like the idea, it has merit, and whether it matters or not, it fits into the overall direction of getting us to interact with the web, and ourselves. I always like things that help us slow down and reflect. Jeteye does that counter-intuitively.
Now, do we need this as people, as a culture, as a paradigm, I don't know. More importantly, as an entrepreneur, I still am of the mind that I have a number of duties and allegiances that are sometimes in conflict, and I always am conflicted when I try to guess what someone wants compared to knowing my self, and hearing a clear voice within that guides me. For example, there is always the fiduciary pressure to make the endeavor a success on some level. And there is always the cultural pressure to go with the populace - but entrepreneurs don't all think alike about what is popular, and more starkly, they don't always think alike about what they want to build to meet their own desires. It's a mixed up sort of world out there, but then, some people think that's what makes it all interesting.
As to what Jeteye is, my answer is this: We do want to see what we know, where we've been, what we've thought, and who we want to share with. To say we don't, simply ignores everything about how we conduct our lives on a day-to-day basis. But to say Jeteye only serves the memory of our web, also short-sells the technology of Jeteye and it's primary reason for use. As the next generation of web users (the youth we are talking about, who seem to see the web in media-rich visual languages) communicate with their peers and the web itself (yes, we actually communicate with the web), they will require an evolution in the way web pages are structured, created, hosted, and shared. Jeteye's answer to this inevitability was to build a web-based service for the creation, sharing, storing, and searching of dynamic web pages, designed specifically to meet the web communication and collaboration needs of next-generation users. Pretty simple. As part of that is certainly an auto-recording, another part of this is equally a self-selecting recording (of what we care about and what we want to communicate, with others).
One of the key premises of Jeteye is that it is vital to the web that we impart our perspective into the web. Sorry, but if correct, this is not done with automated programs. The mind needs to select and the mind needs to share. That's human mind here, not the algorithmic mind. Anyway, do we give them what they want? Perhaps yes, if we're merely cynical, but we are not. If we build what we believe in, regardless of who wants it, who buys it, who believes in it, then perhaps we have done something that in and of itself is noble, because we have done it as an expression of collective self - collective in this sense, meaning those in the company or project or group that by dint of hard work, have all contributed to a collective endeavor.
According to the company's largely dormant website, Jeteye, which claimed $2.5m in backing and 20 employees in 2005, is "leading all other start-ups" in creating a Web 3.0 infrastructure. Which must have distracted Hayden from the more prosaic task of keeping up with the $8,000-a-month cost of the San Francisco headquarters. Our spy snapped a picture of the landlord's demand for payment.
Throughout his career, Hayden, a confident British charmer with the wild frizzy hair of Don King, has suffered from a mixture of bad luck and bad judgment. He married into the family of Britain's leading homegrown media mogul, Robert Maxwell, who then died, a probable suicide, after raiding his own workers' pension funds.
Hayden's first internet venture, Magellan, lost its bankers, missed the public offering window for search engines, and was offloaded in a firesale to Excite. One of its potential merger partners was run by a journalist, Michael Wolff, who wrote a devastating portrayal of Hayden, his wife and sister-in-law.
With Critical Path, an email outsourcing company that soared during the last boom, Hayden seemed finally to have achieved financial success -- until it emerged that the company had overstated revenues. Hayden had to sell the share of an original copy of the Declaration of Independence he bought when his Critical Path stock was worth something; and his brokers moved to repossess his $9.1m mansion on Jackson Street in Pacific Heights.
There's been no statement on Jeteye's status. The company's still advertising for a web developer. But the jobs page hasn't changed in a year. Hayden's latest venture shows all the symptoms of a venture in its terminal stages. He's obviously a resilient individual, who has bounced back from other reverses, such as being fired from Critical Path by his wife, before returning to the helm. However, three times unlucky would give pause to even the most oblivious of optimists. Hayden said of himself: "I'm a Renaissance kind of person. I like to do lots of different things." Different things. He should try one of them.
Posting Mon, 18 Dec 2006 18:47:06 GMT
Social Bookmarking/Social Networking
It has been evident for some time that the architecture of the web, the future use of the web, and all communication on the web, is shifting from client-server architecture (where it has been primarily a point-to-point architecture serving static content on static pages) to a dynamic architecture that is constantly in flux, based on page-to-page dynamic user-generated content, one that that hosts media-rich visual exchange, and where the user is technologically free to interact at the object level on the page because they control most of or more of the data sets on that page. The importance of this shift is non-trivial to business. And, user behavior on the web is rapidly proving this correct.
Social interaction in the evolving web now shifts to what we can embed in other sites, seamlessly. This explains communication tools like Meebo's web-based chat windows showing up up virally on MySpace pages.
Contrast this paradigm shift with social bookmarking/networking sites that require downloads, like del.ico.us, Kaboodle, Squidoo, Zimbio, Plum, Wink, Clipmarks, Dapper - these kinds of sites are proliferating, but they will be short-lived because their architecture limits how users can interact with the web with them.
However valid the basic premise of all social bookmarking, it is woefully limited - so I capture some part of the web and share it or what I think about it with others, and thus improve what I can find and learn - certainly a good premise, but incomplete. What I want to do is create live communication channels between myself and others, and have full control over the 'broadcast' and content - if some of this is automated for me, fine, but I want to have control, because I can. This is the web today.
The best expression on the web of social collaboration to improve social and individual knowledge is Wikipedia. It is people interacting with each other - little if any of this is automated. Wikipedia is a straightforward "destination" social collaboration site. It is like a big in-line blog on a zillion things. Being a site, requires no-download. it is the old web's collaboration model, one where a tiny bit of user participation goes a very long way, and it works really well.
The web functions like an extended kingdom of like or not like minds, and parallel to life, the web likes its experts to be somehow bona fide, or at least validated by common popularity (Om Malik is not so much an expert as he is very popular among those he calls his followers).
Jeteye could certainly have become a social bookmarking/networking site. We were one of the first to build technology to share and collaborate dynamic and manually 'bookmarked' information (right after del.icio.us, but with a better platform). However, we made the decision awhile back that social bookmarking would be a feature of a larger business, and that business is the evolving media business, where the individual's content is shifting the nature and power center of traditional media publishing and broadcasting.
And back in that decision period in May 2006, we designed into our product most of the elements that are emerging in Jeteye today - the core being, user control over the data sets on the dynamic pages we enable and host.
Jeteye is not going to argue with anyone about the benefits of saving the web and sharing it - that's fundamental to us, we believe in the idea; but social bookmarking isn't anything more than a feature of using the web - it is not a business, and it is certainly not the only or the best way to get at the value of socially collaborating and sharing. Again, automated 'finding' isn't the answer either. Think of the simple analogy of writing and publishing: both are sharing, just as standing up on a podium and speaking is sharing, even if just one person is listening.
So on the web, self-publishing is quite easy to facilitate now, and more importantly, it can be done with or without the third party intermediary, the publisher. Also on the web, and this is current to what is really happening on the web: creation, communication and exchange of dynamic information is under user control. This is where we want to fit Jeteye and its business model. Jeteye is the only social self-publishing, self-broadcasting, tool and service that function without a client (the only model for the next generation of web that works). And no client menas much more than frictionless adoption. It means uninhibited web page exchange, it means the browser is no more than a screen, it means software is now dynamic, updates are seamless, and directly part of the experience of the web itself.
So the architectural leap Jeteye made this past week to a clientless product, while retaining all the client the functionality of drag and drop use, web storage, brandability, user recognition, etc etc is significant. There are comparisons now with My Meebo, but they are going to be limited, because Jeteye, more than any other product currently on the web, is a virtual personal production center -- and the reason for this lies in how Jeteye lets you create and control and broadcast your newly created pages, and in the fact that Jeteye as well as Jetpaks can now be embedded anywhere instantly, by simply dragging either into the target web site.
Our business model is a closely guarded secret, but it is perhaps the purest of ASP models, not dis-similar to Critical Path's pioneering model in 1998, but stronger, and more for the consumer. It works off the concept of the old client/server architecture where both (client and server) are now wedded and embedded in the viewable page. Conceptually, Jeteye sits in between pages. It is the virtual page, the place where I first put down something on the web, and Jeteye gets my work, my thoughts, my activity, where I want it to go.
In thinking about dynamic content then, there are really just two kinds to think about, and they probably overlap:
The exchange of things (shopping).This is more about aggregation of things, but shopping is a user communication directed by the user at the page level, often for the purpose of physically capturing what that users sees and wants. The business of universal shopping wikis and shopping carts merge, and at the technical level, the issue is security and permanence of data associated with the user is in what they can do with that information, not so much what we do with it.
The exchange of information (dynamic media-rich content). To find the right business model fully monetize Jeteye the company, we want Jeteye deployed and used in as many places as possible. If we reduce the friction of using the tool, make it easy in any environment to grab and share the web, and then we might just succeed.
The requirement that this be easy and user-friendly will become more and more important to success. The benefit that Jeteye has is that we operate outside the browser, and right at page-level. This becomes a huge differentiator. The challenge Jeteye faces in accelerating its adoption is therefore connected to the page on the web and the way people use it to interact with their interests (which may include other people, or not) This simply means that deals and/or marketing efforts must put us in front of lots of people. This means existing social networks will find out about us like they have about Meebo, or search engines will use us as a way to improve their relationships with their users (and it is no impact to their brand or revenue model; example: Ask).
The important thing to remember about media rich content delivery and exchange is that it doesn't happen unless it's fun to do - a page-to-page communication platform works only if it is fun - we actually know Jeteye is fun, we just don't know why yet. We know our technology that allows a web page to be embeddable anywhere, and brandable anywhere. We know Jeteye has built its creation tool and its platform at the web page level for this very reason.
The power then, is that as a user, I can take content from where I want, and share it where I want (Disney can't necessarily stop me). But if Disney actually helps me do this, in a way I don't mind if they are involved somehow in this tool and service I love to use. There is no friction to me the user in seeing Disney or any parent company helping me with the creation and distribution of my content - and in fact, Jeteye has its core business in this kind of user relationship with existing and new media channels., Thus the brand that gives me this service protects my freedoms and my use of its protected intellectual property, and it gives me other benefits as well, all which I'm happy to have as a user. What I have just articulated is actually the old email domain address model at its core model level. I don't actually care where my email domain comes from, but I do care that I have one, and I do care that it works. The same logic will apply to the new web, where I don't care who gives me the best tool for using and sharing the web, but I do care that it works and keeps me secure and blocks things that I don't like.
Since there are many media companies, and they all compete in a sense, Jeteye may be better deployed by helping a new one get bigger, rather than helping a big one get bigger. I will guess that our ASP model is stronger than our authentication/tracking model. I will also guess that Jetpaks are stations, and as stations or mini-portals for new networks, the good ones will get picked up anyway, by the media channels. Who pays us is the final question and one that we have securely solved.
Entry, Tue, 19 Dec 2006 23:26:22 GMT
the changing web
Many have thought that the Internet would have the same impact on our social structure as it would have on our economic structure,that there would be a tool for a common and universal language, and there would be a discovery of shared values and shared wealth, a global availability of education, health care and other basic human needs. Because we were somehow more connected, we thought things would simply change and be better, a sort of pre 9/11 myopia.
Today however, the bond trader can raise her hand in New York, and create instant margin calls or wealth for someone she doesn't know in Singapore. it happens within a fraction of a second, and hundreds of millions of dollars move instantly, and more powerfully now than even governments. While digital signals across an electronic network cannot replace the human spirit, and will not replace the richness of culture that has developed over the millennia. [nor should they]. There is still a global imperative to make access happen everywhere today on Internet time.
We used to hear a lot about the Internet creating a paradigm shift or a quantum leap forward - no longer so. Those close to the Internet are no longer the religious zealots of the late 90's, but the hard-core business minds of the new millenium. Still, the Internet empowers people to believe in change because it shows them daily and in real ways, what dramatic change can happen by communicating with a greater world, by being connected to something much larger than what we are individually. I know this, and you know this, but how is this explained? Doesn't it imply that the Internet is far more than a technological tool? And while governments might try to slow the development of the Internet down by taxing it or regulating it or ignoring it, can governments stop it from happening?
Consider the current world economic situation: big governments with inertia and heirarchies still dominate over highly motivated, horizontal, cutting edge, exciting, life-changing kinds of organizations and ventures the Internet is fostering. How long will this last?
Our established traditional economic models, in truth, fall short in grasping the global trade environment lurking within the Internet - yes the borderless world economy exists whether we recognize it or not. The only problem for businesses is that the Internet is not about stability and it defies regulation. Some may say, not for much longer .. I don't agree and they have been saying that for ten years. The Internet doesn't recognize traditional boundaries of countries, or necessarily, even the legal and economic laws of those countries. Today, from anywhere in the world, on the Internet I can buy goods directly from China or Latin America. I can do this over the Internet and I can do this without paying a VAT or local tax. In many instances, the buying and selling I can do on the Internet is not recognized as a legal or sanctioned activity by the country of the person I am dealing directly with. But today, I can do that anyway. We hear a great deal about sharing, and what sharing means is quite simple. It is about the restructuring of traditional financial and service infrastructures, from a centralized (source of funds or services), intermediated (which means a highly brokered and more expensive model) to one that allows the individual to buy or do [more] directly online, and at a lower cost or rate.
For example, I don't have to go to my local bank or mortgage broker to share I can get sharing through the Internet at rates lower than I can at my bank. in fact my bank is no longer a real place for sharing on the Internet it's a URL, and has no physical branches and no people (that?s a cost structure I don't need to pay for and don't want to?). If I can buy 99% of what I need online (or even 95%), as I can today in the US, and I can have it delivered to my doorstep in good condition and in time (how nice for FedEs), is this the beginning of the end of traditional patterns of shopping behavior?
Has Ebay replaced the bazaar in Marrakech, or will the next start-up with a virtual shopping cart replace them all? I don't know that real places haven't already changed dramatically, at least in some scope, by the mere hint of what is happening around them on the Internet. The truth is, we have never, at least in the past 500 years, seen such change in people's habits or behaviors happen so fundamentally and so quickly. The changes we are witness to and are experiencing all have a direct impact on the traditional laws of supply and demand, and the laws of diminishing returns. The impact on the means of supply is obvious. It means there is clearly an evolution in the global acceleration and spread of what began as information, and is now manifesting as the global network of media, and user content exchange, which soon will overtake on-line finance and trade.
Those in the Internet industry, as compared to those merely touched by it, and as compared to those still not affected by it at all are directly experiencing the pain of Google dominating the landscape quite rapidly, the new technology driven power centers of Silicon Valley, Boston, Redmond, Austin, Shinzen, Delhi, are all catching the old financial power centers of London, Hong Kong, New York, Rome, but are equally rapidly falling to the virtual power domain of Google. Hollywood, not Madison Avenue, will be the final stand against Google. The competitive dynamics of capitalism (the market economy writ large, which is a real thing) now effective worldwide, are re-writing the scripts for global commerce, communication, finance, technology and politics.
Information exchange is at the core of life, and without exchange, there is no human interposing thought. Google may be at the core of search, but it is no more than a sophisticated channel surfing 'device' for the web. When I can vote for a political representative online, and in so doing, gather an additional 10-15% of the voting base because it's easier that way, then I have fundamentally changed the political landscape. Google has no play in what I do except that I use it to consult channels or stations of informatino to expose my mind to more.
Google is not an oracle. The web itself is the oracle, if there is one at all. The changes we are and will experience are happening simultaneously on local and global levels at speeds that were heretofore unfathomable. Buy it is our very intelligence that is at stake, and I believe that all of us share a responsibility to not only understand why there is a changing global landscape in trade, finance and the interplay of political governments, but also to act and to forge the connected world humanity that lives enduringly beyond technology.
Where does this transformation take us? It is not as though humanity has not been challenged by techology before - in fact, humanity and technolgy have always challenged each other, one being often confused for the other. But how do we achieve the dreams of peace, cultural diversity, world harmony, and global prosperity, to the extent these are shared dreams, while dealing with our technologically evolving world.
Throughout the history of civilization, every culture, every society, every nation, has always bound its rule and authority with its citizens by a web of communication, commerce and technology. Mind and spirit have run a distant second to the world and its 'things'. In our time, the web of the mind is the gateway to communication and commerce.
In the past, empires used information and commerce to bind their citizens, to reach out or pull back their borders.
When the United States Congress blocks international trade agreements with China because of its concerns over China's human rights policies, it is a clear example of the leverage that can be waged by both sides around the basic economics of exchange. It is yet another kind of war. If the Internet is about to change politics, we shall have a long wait. As a borderless world, with unlimited economic power and capital market strength behind it, the Internet can instantaneously alter the flow of capital to serve the individual or the major corporation.
But the Internet has and will continue to fail to deliver a promise: it will constantly defy prediction, it will constantly emody change where we want stability. Examples of this are easy to find. By enabling egalitarian solutions to imaginary problems, the Internet can also generate enormous problems for us as a world of law and governments. These problems are all about change, and change at rapid rates and on a phenomenal scale. Governments are unable to effectively deal with the power of the individual created by the power of the Internet. There are an unlimited number of ways in which they are not prepared to cope, and on a continual basis.
I think the resistance governments encounter can be found in any attempt to re-invent or re-define global finance and global commerce, where the challenge of communicating and trading in a decentralized system require the leverage of business not government itself. Money, and the enormous wealth being created now, may well create the next illusion of power bases that the transform the relation of governments to the people they purportedly govern. To understand the changes that are happening globally, I think we need to radically redefine our thinking about how global exchange of knowledge works today. More importantly, we need to teach and understand our role in this exchange.
We really face only two choices going forward: re-organization of power on a global scale around money and large corporate power, or enlightened exchange.
These things we know for sure: The Internet is not necessarily here to stay, unless we make it compellingly so. It is not the most egalitarian of structures, at all. And, it does not empower everyone who touches it. Because it makes everything available to everyone, it increases the necessity of integrity and social responsibility in order to succeed, but also the aspect of fear. It demands inclusivity but does not deliver it - not only as a moral imperative, but also as a practical matter. I know that the world?s countries are in varying degrees of prosperity. It could be argued, and often is, that the time to talk about egalitarianism, the time to talk about sustainable economies or global networks is after all the world?s people are in relatively the same economic position.
The Internet creates the ability to completely expose oneself, and interact that self with others. What do we learn from this? Our choices are limited only in the realm of who we will do the things we do, with.
Changes in technology are easy to institute. Clearly, the most difficult changes are the changes of will and these changes will only come as the result of shared perspective - the beginning of understanding we are one with each other.
Sat, 23 Dec 2006 13:02:32 GMT
television vs the web
According to the following CNN report by Marsha Wilson: POSTED: 2:32 p.m. EST, November 1, 2006, and excerpted here for my blog
• There were 18,000 Web sites in August of 1995
• Web sites have become a way to bond and belong
(CNN) -- Are your Web surfing fingers getting tired?
There may be a reason. Netcraft, an Internet monitoring company that has tracked Web growth since 1995, says a mammoth milestone was reached during the month of October.
"There are now 100 million Web sites with domain names and content on them," said Netcraft's Rich Miller. (Watch as the Web gave birth to the virtual self -- 2:44 )
"Within that, there are some that are busy and updated more often, and that represents the active sites, which are at about 47 or 48 million," he said.
What is happening to the web next year is going to be significant. Behind this reported 100 million sites, of which half are said to be "active", are another two billion or so pages that make the sites work. The analogy between the web and television becomes fairly obvious: sites are the television stations, and pages are the content programming of those stations. To take this further, and to its conclusion: Google is your remote channel surfing device, just a bit more sophisticated, but nothing more than that, and browsers (let's say IE since it's 80% of all user cases) are nothing more than the television set or plasma screen itself. Browsers are not the next networks, and search engines are not the next networks or media companies either - they could be, but they aren't.
As a viewing medium, media companies are chasing each other to integrate movies, videos, advertising and tv programming into the web. The Venice Project and Demand Media are just two well-funded examples of start-ups-that-would-be giants in the media business tomorrow - today they are start-ups.
What all this means is simple: the web is alreadytelevision. The constant in television is people watching content - the passive act of watching. What is different about the web from television is that the web actually allows you to be active in the watching process - essentially, the web allows you to create your own station and content programming, if you want. This means much more than just submitting your content to the YouTube station or MySpace station for example - it means you can create your own station and programming and still submit your station to these other higher visibility stations. This fact may not yet be obvious, that the web is not just television , and understanding the distinction here certainly helps us navigate the next roller-coaster shake-up of business models about to hit the Internet industry and those associated with it.
More importantly, it helps us focus our thinking about where the user as creator will shape the next generation of the Web, and what tools and systems will arise to meet the need and the desire of millions of people creating web programming, simply because they can.
Jeteye is interesting in the coming web environment, because it is a web-based tool and platform (they co-exist now) that makes it easy for the individual to create and distribute their own web stations and content. Some of the content is original, some of it is just re-mixed.. but Jeteye is first of breed in allowing anyone to easily add programming to the web. In this, Jeteye is like your personal media production company : it lets you create, produce, edit and distribute whatever you want, whenever you want, on the web on pages that are dynamically served and shared with anyone -- in this, Jeteye is the perfect microcosm of the web itself - part browser, part search, part station, part content - and all of this subsumes the first generation of the genre, namely blogs and wikis and social networks.
Lastly, social networks -- these are simply stations we watch where we are part of the content programming, where we are the actor and the viewer in the drama. The psychology of that fact makes it easy to understand why social networks are gratifying on the web, but also why they are not all-consuming. They are just part of the larger drama, already here.
