Netizen

Thursday, March 18, 2010

AnyClip.com: Second Thoughts

Image representing AnyClip as depicted in Crun...

The AnyClip Launch PressLift

I am having second thoughts about AnyClip, but not in the traditional meaning of the phrase. I blogged about AnyClip not long back (AnyClip Is Live Now), and already I have enough new thoughts - a second train of thoughts - about the site that I feel like a new blog post is warranted.

You can't ask for traffic, and then get it, and then complain you have too much traffic. The "fail whale" might be part of doing business also for AnyClip, but the longer the site is on the better. Take care of the server issues best you can. That is basic. Expect traffic. Fulfill the basic promises made.

Add more movies. 2,000 movies are a good starting point. But God knows more than 2,000 movies have been made. Feed the monster, I mean the database.

The embed feature is a powerul one. Every blog and site that is embedding AnyClip video clips is giving AnyClip much needed Google juice. Those are one way inbound links. They matter. And so the embed feature has to "simply work," Google's phrase about their forthcoming Chrome OS.

Social media matters, but of course. There are studies showing Facebook has overtaken Google itself as the most visited site in America. If I find a clip on AnyClip that I like and want to share, I should be able to share easy. Over time there has to be a sense of community at the site itself. As to how you go about it, there are a few different ways. The Disqus integration is a very good idea. A lot of people link their Disqus profiles to their blogs and Twitter accounts. That gives you the option to get to know them better. That builds community.

New movies get made. They put out trailers before they put out movies. AnyClip is like saying no movie ever made has to go stale. The best movies have a timeless quality to them. If you are going to watch four minutes of a movie that you end up liking, you might as well rent or buy the movie. AnyClip's SceneSearch tool is a major discovery engine.

The Netflix, and Amazon integrations on AnyClip are a great first move. I wonder if it would be possible to have those integrations to also be part of the embedded clips. So someone watches a clip at my blog, and they get to go straight to Amazon to buy the movie without having to first go to the AnyClip page.

The summary statement would be, the fundamentals are already in place, just go ahead and deliver on your basic promises. Scale with gusto.

My Comment At TechCrunch

The movie studios are going to have to come around, and come around fast. AnyClip's promise is no movie ever made has to go stale. Otherwise movies go stale. AnyClip for the movie studios is like being able to run trailers of all their movies all the time. And once you grab someone's attention, that is one step closer to them buying or renting that movie. It makes absolutely no sense for the movie studios to drag their feet on this one.

This reminds me of Nepal, the dual citizenship issue, and FDI, Foreign Direct Investment. Issuing dual citizenship to the Non Resident Nepalis is the single best thing Nepal could do to bring in FDI to the country, and FDI is the single best thing that could happen for Nepal's economic growth, but the morons will not do it. The politicians in Nepal have been dragging their feet on the dual citizenship issue for years now. Ignorance can hurt self interest. Defies logic, but happens all the time.

AnyClip is in the movie studios' self interest.

Broader Broadband

Fred Wilson: The National Broadband Plan

My comment to Fred's post that I left at his blog: Of all the blog posts I ever read at this blog, and I have read my share, this post really stands out for me. This topic gets me like nothing else in computing.

"....another 500mhz of hiqh quality spectrum to be used for "terrestrial broadband services" over the next decade...."

This is miserly. This is not going to cut it. TV needs to take second place to broadband. This is not some tertiary concern. This is the number one - Numero Uno - thing America needs to do to become a post-industrial, information age economy. The government just needs to get out of the way. The government selling that spectrum space to a handful of old companies is the government getting in the way. The American people need to revolt like they revolted against the British.

The nastiest part of that phrase is "over a decade. This has to happen in 2010, not in 2020. The jobs are needed now, "look around."

Broad Broadband
Silicon Valley Vs. New York City
Fred Wilson's Insight

John Chambers: Why America Needs A National Broadband Plan
betanews: FCC: Wireless Spectrum 10X More Valuable For Wireless Broadband Than For TV
Steve Cheney: Why Google Broadband Finally Makes Sense
CNet: TV Broadcasters Prepare For Spectrum Battle

Monday, March 15, 2010

Bollywood Needs To Conquer

New York Times: Bollywood Soars Toward Hollywood: Indian cinema has an annual estimated audience of over three billion worldwide. South Asians are avid consumers, as are viewers in countries as varied as Germany, Malaysia and South Korea.

Pictured above, Amitabh Bachchan, the most recognized face on the planet.

Indian cinema went global long before Indian technology did. It is only a matter of time before Indian cinema cracks open the US market as well. It will be less a feeling of conquest, and more of globalization, of cross-pollination. It is a good idea for Hollywood to go to India, and for Bollywood to come to America.

Pictured below, me during my high school days and after, imitating Amitabh's hairstyle.

AnyClip Is Live Now

Sex scene from A Boy and His Dog

I just received an email: AnyClip.com is now live. Nate (@innonate) and his team must be proud. A lot of people know Nate as the guy who runs the NY Tech MeetUp. But he is at heart an entrepreneur with one foot clearly in the venture capital world. The NY Tech MeetUp podium just helps him dig deep into those two worlds. What I personally find most appealing about him is his strong belief that New York City can make it on the tech map of the world. (The State Of New York Technology) It also helps that we are both hard core Barack people. (Reshma For Congress)

I enjoy movies. I like watching clips from here and there. This site looks custom made for someone like me. I hope they keep adding movies to their database.

I have been pushing for Morgan Grice to be part of the AnyClip team. I think she has watched every movie made in the past 50 years, and she was Editorial Chair of The Harvard Crimson. She is not a coder, but AnyClip has plenty of those. I doubt she is outmatched in movie passion by anyone currently on the AnyClip team.

The site is in beta. It will go through a few iterations. A welcome jack up in traffic is going to create obvious server issues, for one.

One strong point AnyClip has is this is not a startup hoping to monetize at some future date. It is already closely integrated with Netflix and Amazon. It is a good idea to have a business model from day one.

Nate, my man, you are going places.

Tumblr: Casey, Nina, David, Fred

Casey got me started with Tumblr. I got back home from her panel discussion during Social Media Week (Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever) to sign up for Tumblr, and I realized I had already signed up a long ago, but I had not been active. I became active. I started following people. That is my LinkedIn story as well. I signed up as soon as they launched because I read up on them in the news, but tidied up my LinkedIn page only late last year.

Then I came across Nina at Scoble's blog. And I started following her. She shares some of the very best pictures I ever saw online. Pictures she shares tend to be out of the box thinking type. I reblog her so often. I am going to do a blog post about her TED notes, which is how I found her the first time.

I discovered the founder of Tumblr himself, David. The guy has an amazing, amazing sense of humor, and it is fairly consistent.

A little later I found Fred on Tumblr. (Fred Wilson's Insight) Ends up the guy is a major music man. I think I need some help from him to go beyond the obvious names like U2, Madonna, Bob Marley, Nirvana and such. For the longest time I have stayed with mainstream pop. One layer below lies so much richness. Several layers below lies indie music. I left Nepal for America in 1996. That Fredspace occupied by one layer below stuff, for me that has been all the Hindi film music to when I left Nepal.

I use Twitter to broadcast, Facebook to connect, and Buzz/Tumblr to listen. But my blog remains my favorite social media platform. I feed it into my Twitter, Facebook, Buzz and Tumblr accounts. I like the idea of this big, blank white space that I have to fill up. I am wordy, I am linky. I like to pack it up with pictures and videos on top of the words and links. I am long form, if you will. I only jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon after I realized 140 characters involve links. (My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher) And I jumped with gusto. I am one of the top 100 people in NYC on Twitter.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Broad Broadband

Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher interview Ste...

Image via Wikipedia

New York Times: Vast FCC Plan Would Bring Net To More In US establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network..... Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service........ broadband Internet is becoming the common medium of the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries..... the plan should pay for itself through the spectrum auctions....... a third of Americans have no access to high-speed Internet...... remote locations where private companies have little incentive to build networks....... the F.C.C. is hoping to free up roughly 500 megahertz of spectrum, much of which would come from television broadcasters ...... 100 Squared — equipping 100 million households with high-speed Internet gushing through their pipes at 100 megabits a second by the end of this decade

High speed, universal internet is fundamental to America becoming a post-industrial, information age society. It is the very backbone. It is the foundation.

The Obama FDR Parallels

Heartthrob’s Barbed Blog Challenges ChinaWith more than 300 million hits to his blog, he may be the most popular living writer in the world..... The Internet, he says, will eventually prod China toward greater openness. No army of censors can completely constrain free expression. “I think the government really regrets the Internet,” he said, pausing for effect. “Originally, they thought it would be like the newspaper or the television — just another way to get their view out to the people. What they didn’t realize is that people can type and talk back. This is giving them a really big headache.”
Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personalthe clash between Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jobs offers an unusually vivid display of enmity and ambition..... cellphones that physically, technologically and spiritually resembled the iPhone .....“We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business” ...“Make no mistake: Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.” ........“You might want to tell me the difference between a large phone and a tablet.” ....Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, considered Mr. Jobs a mentor and, according to a former Apple executive, were regular visitors to Mr. Jobs’s office in Cupertino, Calif., during Google’s early days. ..........Mr. Brin was also known to take long walks with Mr. Jobs near his house in Palo Alto, and in the nearby foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. ......... Schmidt... relished his position on Apple’s board and the proximity it gave him to one of the most famous figures in American business.......Google continued to push ahead with Android and its vision of a more open mobile phone ecosystem. ......Android’s features were based on longstanding ideas already circulating in the industry and that some Android prototypes predated the iPhone. ........“Google is not a company that is particularly afraid of anyone, including Apple.” ........“Everything iDon’t ... Droid Does.” ........with Android and plans for a computer operating system, Google was “unfortunately” entering more of Apple’s “core business.” .........a wrestling match began on the acquisition front. .......Google, which counts Microsoft, FacebookYahoo on an ever-expanding list of rivals .......Bill Campbell .....had a hand in smoothing over the initially turbulent relationship between Mr. Schmidt and Google’s founders..............Apple, where he is co-chairman of the board .........the old dynamics between Apple and Microsoft being recycled, with Apple still trying to control every aspect of the user experience, and Google, like Microsoft before it, working with multiple partners to flood the market with a large number of devices. ............an unlikely sight: Steve Jobs and Apple, running from the arms of Eric Schmidt and Google, into the embrace of Steve Ballmer and Microsoft.
You're the Boss: The Secret to Having Happy EmployeesI fired the unhappy people.
Findings on Lehman Take Even Experts by SurpriseExecutives at other Wall Street banks professed surprise at Lehman’s accounting maneuvers.Goldman SachsBarclaysCapital and other banks said on Friday they did not use repos to hide liabilities on their balance sheets.
Report Details How Lehman Hid Its WoesThe bank’s bankruptcy, the largest in American history, shook the financial world. ......Lehman reverse engineered the firm’s net leverage ratio for public consumption ........Repo 105 involved transactions that secretly moved billions of dollars off Lehman’s books at a time when the bank was under heavy scrutiny. ......firms essentially lend assets to other firms in exchange for money for short periods of time, sometimes overnight. ......Lehman managed to “shed” about $39 billion from its balance sheet at the end of the fourth quarter of 2007, $49 billion in the first quarter of 2008 and $50 billion in the second quarter.
Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy With My Blog and Building My Brand.the Secret Is in the Sauce, a community of 5,000 female bloggers....... blog, about her life as a mother of three, typically draws about 36,000 page views a month. .......BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners .....a modern-day kaffeeklatsch, a vital outlet for conversing and commiserating about day-to-day travails.......“Through Twitter and blogging, I found a whole community of women going through the same thing as I am at the same time.” ......Just as television viewers have a seemingly insatiable hunger for reality shows, mothers often prefer the warts-and-all experiences of other moms online — and the ability to discuss them interactively — to the dry, inflexible pronouncements spouted by experts in books and parenting magazines. ......“The blogosphere is where authentic conversation is happening” .......advertising on blogs will top $746 million by 2012, more than twice the figure for 2007........some defend the growing alliance between bloggers and corporate America as empowering rather than exploitative, giving women a voice in shaping the brands they consume.
One on One: Andrey Ternovskiy, Creator of Chatroulette
One on One: Esther Dyson, Health Tech Investor and Space Tourist the newsletter Release 1.0, which I ran for 25 years......FlickrDel.icio.us....And I made a lot of money from Google through another investment. .........if you want to run a business, you need to monitor costs and revenues. In the same manner, if you want to run your body, you need to monitor intake and returns ......I don’t actually want to be the guy — I want to foster the guys........Partly this whole start-up phenomenon has been very male .........I have a short attention span. I couldn’t stay doing the same thing for 30 years......I often like to quote what the math professors say: The remainder of the proof is an exercise left to the reader.
One Analysis of the Google Buzz Mess “Nothing that the Buzz team did was technologically wrong,” Ms. Boyd said. “Yet the service resulted in complete disaster.” “Neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both”

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Silicon Valley Vs. New York City

New York Times: New York Isn't Silicon Valley. That's Why They Like It.

This article in the New York Times has been making the rounds this past week in the New York tech circles. I have seen it in a few different tweets, buzzes and blog post mentions. It is an interesting article. What is my take on the topic?

Silicon Valley is the old, established company. New York City is the startup. New York City does not need a silicon name, although I hold no grudges against the Silicon Alley Insider. New York City already has a name. The name is New York City.

There is tremendous liveliness in the New York tech scene right now. There is a lot of early stage work going on. An ecosystem is being nurtured. Infrastructure is being laid out. When you get into the tech startup scene in New York now, you are getting on the ground floor. Office spaces that look like evicted starving artists to make room for developers, coders, programmers are in a few different places. There are numerous tech events every week, small and big. There is feverish networking. You might see a string of IPOs in a few years.

What does Silicon Valley have? It has become mature and crowded. Google's sexiest offering to date was Google Search, but that was over a decade ago. Yahoo stands eclipsed and stagnant. Windows is on its way out. Wait, that would be Seattle, but never mind. Steve Jobs just finished work on the final product of his career, the iPad. IBM is upstate New York. Okay, so Oracle bought Sun. Intel and Cisco are humming, but those are global companies, tens of thousands hired in India alone. Facebook started on the East Coast, and many of Mark Zuckerberg's college friends are still in New York City. Zuck, it is not too late to move back. Twitter might be out there, but the next Twitter - FourSquare - is in New York. TechCrunch might be out there, but Mashable is in New York.

New York is the place to be.

Personally I am not in the dot com space, but I am so glad tons of others are. To me it feels like they are all working to better my product for free. My company will bring hundreds of millions of new people online. (Fred Wilson's Insight)

Lady Gaga

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Biggest Open Source Company: Oracle, Google Or Red Hat?

Image via CrunchBase

There is a similar thing going on with blogging. Blogging started as a thing far flung individuals do. By now most of the top blogs are all corporate. Open source seems to share the story. So which do you think it might be? Which is the biggest open source company out there? Oracle, or Google?

We are all open-source companies now. Which also means that none of us are. Open source is simply a way that we enable some aspect of our businesses, whether we're Red Hat or Microsoft or Google or Facebook.

Saturday, March 06, 2010

Fred Wilson's Insight

At the end of his talk Fred Wilson says, "I think that was about 15 minutes, and now I will take questions." That so impressed me. Because that was exactly 15 minutes. How did he do that? I was watching him, he was not looking at his watch. This guy obviously has a black belt in pitching. His body has become a clock.

Okay, this clip 10 is huge. "Why would you want to live in an office park and suburbia when you are 21 years old when you could be living in Williamsburg?" I love this city, so does Fred Wilson. He loves it because he has called this city home a long time. (Did he grow up here?) I love it because this is the first hometown I ever had. I have a refugee's love for the city.

I think this city needs to go head to head with Silicon Valley. Fred shares that thought. I dig that. Silicon Valley is the big, old established company. New York City is the startup.

"The same qualities that make you a great entrepreneur make you a terrible manager." I so buy into that. Visionary startup people need good old school COOs. Keep the trains running on time while I go shake things up.

Fred Wilson is a VC like Al Pacino is an actor. This guy was born to be a VC. You will not see this guy retire for a long, long time because he loves his work so much.

I don't see Fred Wilson invest in my company, not now, not in any of my future rounds. He does what he calls "web services." That is his "domain expertise," his phrase. I make it very clear I am not in the dot com (Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era) space, at least that is not my step one, or two, and those two steps are a 10 year run easy. There we part. But that at some level makes it even more interesting for me to follow him online. I am not someone waiting in the wings thinking only if he knew me well enough, or he liked me enough, he would put his money down on my venture. The conclusion that he is not going to ride my boat gives me a certain detachment, a certain objectivity to enjoying him. Makes me more carefree.

His is my favorite solo blog. The guy is an avid user of many of the products of his portfolio companies. Like Dennis Crowley said some place when he was asked why he let Fred invest in his company. "Fred's entire family is on FourSquare!"

Like I said to the First Round Capital guy Charlie the other day over email, I have heard a lot of good buzz about you and your firm, that you do early stage very good, what I have not figured out yet is if you are stuck in the dot com space.

Fred Wilson: VC
Fred Wilson: A VC
Fred Wilson

Fred says he is in the "web services" domain, but he also bemoans the fact that New York City has not, has not shown any signs of producing a 50 billion dollar company. A company that is worth 500 million is a successful, wonderful company, but it is small. At 10 billion you are mid size. 50 to 200 billion is big. Fred's portfolio is crowded/littered with small to mid size promises. My company is going to be big. (An Immigrant Story For Brad Feld) In my book you can't stick to the dot com space and in the same breath bemoan not seeing any big promise on the horizon. Those two thought trains don't go together. I see a train wreck. So at some level I do feel like maybe I am not totally done with the guy yet. I should not write him off for me completely.

Pages

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Related articles by Zemanta

Related articles by Zemanta

Monday, March 15, 2010

Related articles by Zemanta

Related articles by Zemanta

Related articles by Zemanta

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Related articles by Zemanta

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Related articles by Zemanta

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Related articles by Zemanta

Saturday, March 06, 2010

Related articles by Zemanta