Twitter Tech Communities: A New Project

In an attempt to weave some more connective tissue into our community I am launching a few twitterbots.

Each of the bots below is designed so that any message sent to them is published by the bot, making that message visible to all of the bot's followers.  If you follow the bot you will see what everyone is tweeting.  This is effectively a mass email list for twitter. 

Follow the bots, send articles and thoughts to them and be plugged into the tech community.

Special thanks to the man, the myth, the legend: Whitney McNamara.  Whitney created this type of twitterbot (he built the shakeshack bot and others) and took the time to set these bots up for all of us to use.

Here are the links to the various twitterbot communities:

• National (TechieFeed)
• New York (NYTech)
  
• Silicon Valley (ValleyTech)
• Southern California (SCalTech)
• Northeast (NortheastTech)

How I Make Do With A BlackBerry

As a tech nerd, I’m constantly in pursuit of the next gadget.  However, as I mentioned in my post, Why I Don’t Have An iPhone, I’m currently using a BlackBerry Curve.  While from a hardware perspective the Curve is a decent phone, the software platform has left me in a world where there are few apps to choose from.

I have managed to get by – I can do everything I need to do.  Aside from the core phone and office functions (email, tasks, contacts and calendar), here are the five apps that I depend on:

1. Google Talk:  I prefer it to the BlackBerry messenger.  While staying logged onto the app is a constant struggle, having a platform that works on both my desktop, the web and my phone is critical.


2. Viigo:  I’m addicted.  Yes RSS is awesome in general, however what makes Viigo special is that it’s a native app that pulls my feeds down automatically.  When I’m stuck in the subway without a connection, I always have fresh content to read.


3. TwitterBerry:  Not a great UI, but it does the job.


4. Google Maps:  Enough said.


5. Opera Mini:  As my newest app, Opera Mini fills part of the major browser gap on the Curve:  it enables me to see fully rendered web pages.  However, it’s slow and tough to navigate leaving me to use the standard BlackBerry Browser for my basic web activity.  That’s the price I pay for battery life.

Why I Don’t Have An iPhone

I admit it.  I don’t have an iPhone.

While I love the sparkle and glitter of the interface and am often tempted to convert by the number of nifty apps that exist for the iPhone, I’ve haven’t been able to convince myself to make the leap.

Ultimately, the choice not to get an iPhone came down to three considerations.

First, I refuse to carry more than one phone.  I know many people have gone the two phone route.  In the old days they carried their personal phones (usually a razor) and office BlackBerrys; in modern times the razor has been traded in for Apple’s finest.  Maybe these folks have bigger pockets than I do, but either way I hate having that amount of clutter on my person and I’m also generally averse to wearing a makeshift version of batman’s utility belt.

Second, I need a really long battery life.  I’m currently using a BlackBerry Curve which was recommended to me by many people for its long battery life.  Despite how strong the Curve’s battery is, I manage to drain 75% or more of its battery every day (and sometimes kill it).  The iPhone probably wounld't make it through the morning.

Third, typing.  Plain and simple – I do too much emailing each day on my phone to make the leap to a digital keyboard.  However, now that I’m doing my blogging on my laptop (I have a wireless broadband card), I think I could probably make the switch to an iPhone if the battery life was long enough to allow the phone to serve as my sole personal and business phone.

So, I’m holding out for the third generation iPhone or a knockout product from another manufacturer.  Give me a great battery, the ability to cut and paste and a typing interface that allows me to burn through my emails quickly and I’ll join the legions of the tech forward.

Pitfalls Of A Non-Traditional Ad Network

I recently wrote a post about the ways in which ad networks can differentiate themselves.  One of the three key considerations is type of inventory.

With a belief that ads will continue to penetrate more facets of our lives, I think that ad networks targeting non-traditional inventory are quite interesting.  By non-traditional ad inventory, I’m referring to media that does not currently have ads placed on it.

While I spend a decent amount of time evaluating companies that are targeting non-traditional inventories, there are a couple of reasons why we often pass:

• First, the entrepreneurs often haven’t completed a thorough assessment of their addressable market size – often misstating their market as their addressable market. After a bit of probing, I find that these companies have addressable markets that are too small for us and we end up passing. While there might be an opportunity for the business to be large enough to support a profitable business, the addressable market isn’t big enough to provide the types of returns that we need.


• Second, in order for ad networks to scale their businesses they need both advertisers and the owners of inventory to subscribe to their services.  With truly non-traditional inventory, there is often a cultural chasm between the way advertisers and/or inventory owners think about the inventory and the way the ad network intends to monetize it.  I’m told that there was initially hesitance to insert ads into magazines, radio shows and, yes, the Internet.  While the opportunity associated with some non-traditional inventories is sufficient enough to drive adoption, for other types of inventories it’s not.

Ad networks targeting non-traditional inventories are generally very interesting to me (and potentially other investors). Just be sure you really understand the addressable market and try to demonstrate adoption before raising money.

Presidential Candidates On Bandwidth

Wired's Nicholas Thompson ran an interesting article about the role Obama and McCain play in our country's lagging connectivity.  It addresses an interesting facet of our election and is definitely worth a read.

Here's the link: How Fast Can You Read This Essay Online

How I Evaluate Strategic Positioning Of Ad Networks

Based in the heart of the world’s advertising industry (NYC) and having backed numerous advertising businesses (i.e., Massive (sold to Microsoft), Ingenio (sold to AT&T), ContextWeb, IZEA, and Searchandise), DFJ Gotham is sought out by founders of the newest and most innovative advertising companies.  As a result, I have had the opportunity to learn from many of the brilliant entrepreneurs that have entered this space.  Through those numerous meetings I have developed a framework for evaluating the strategic positioning of ad networks.

The framework is relatively straight forward. Aside from all of the usual considerations associated with an investment, ad networks are generally differentiated in three ways:  inventory, product and targeting.

• Inventory: Ad companies can be differentiated by where they place their advertisements.  As an investor I am always interested in companies that pursue non-traditional inventory – meaning inventory that is not currently considered a location where advertisements should be integrated.
  
  As one entrepreneur informed me, radio, magazines and the Internet where at one point places where pundits believed advertisements should not be placed – clearly our culture has evolved.  Where will ads be next?


• Product:  By offering unique products that are technically difficult to create, ad companies can offer advertisers a differentiated value proposition.  New products are constantly being invented to meet the changing media landscape of the web.


• Targeting:  Ad companies can differentiate themselves by the manner in which they pair their advertisements with available inventory.  Within the worlds of contextual, behavioral and other more nascent types of targeting there is room for lots of differentiation, as strategies within these categories may vary by types of media and device.

While this isn’t a complicated framework, it does help me:

• determine what I am ultimately betting on by investing in a given ad network, and
• advise entrepreneurs on how to further differentiate their business.

If you’re starting an ad company be sure to figure out which of these three characteristics is really your secret sauce, then think about how you can differentiate your company in the other categories.

Top Five Features LinkedIn Should Add

In my opinion LinkedIn is one of the best networking platforms on the web.  However, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

I have spent some time thinking about how the LinkedIn service could be improved and have generated a list of five features which would most enhance my experience:

1. Event Management:  As the organizer of events, I would really like LinkedIn to provide robust event planning features (e.g., scheduling, reminders, RSVP, attendance logs, feedback loops).  While these tools are available on other services including social networks, such as Facebook, and other services that exclusively focus on event management, it would be very useful to have these tools integrated into my business social networking platform.  This way if I meet someone at an event, I can find , connect and communicate with them on the social network.
2. Group Landing Pages:  LinkedIn groups don't have meaningful landing pages.  The first page a potential member might see has only a few hundred characters of text and no information about group activity (conversation or dialog).  It would be great if content and widgets could be made available to group members and accessed through a single group page.  This type of feature would be most effective is LinkedIn's platform were opened up.  See some of the groups I started here.
3. Ability to Invite Friends to Groups:  Every time I visit one of my group pages, I think of another person who would benefit from that community.  Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way for me to point another person to that group through the system.  While the group owner should retain permission rights, it would be nice if group members could invite individuals (or even their whole contact list) to join a group that they are in. 
4. IM Client: Facebook has a great instant messaging feature - it would be useful to have one on LinkedIn - enough said on that.
5. Picture Sync With Outlook Contacts:  I sync my outlook contact cards with LinkedIn to keep my contact information up to date.  Since lots of people are adding their pictures to LinkedIn these days, it would be great if those pictures were also pulled into my outlook contacts.  Right now the syncing feature only pulls through name, title, email, phone and address (as provided by the user).

LinkedIn Adds Discussion Feature To Groups

I started a few LinkedIn groups awhile back to allow people interested in venture to connect without being constrained by LinkedIn’s requirement that two people have a mutual contact in order to connect. Some of those groups are the regional venture communities listed on my blog - you can find links to them below.

New York Venture Community
Silicon Valley Venture Community
New England Venture Community
Southern California Venture Community
Southeast Venture Community

LinkedIn recently launched discussion features, making its groups more functional. There is pent up demand for this feature, as demonstrated by the fact that members of these communities are already starting to actively post job openings, upcoming events and other topics related to the respective group. The communities are communicating.

However, I think LinkedIn could make these discussion platforms function a bit better.

The first problem is that new discussion topics or comments on existing topics are somewhat hidden from group members. There are three ways a user can discover new conversations: 1) by scrolling down their ”Network Updates”, a feed listing all of the activity on the profiles of connections or within groups, 2) visiting the group page directly or 3) reading activity summary emails. It would be nice to have an option to receive an email every time there is a post. This would help us keep up to date on the groups we follow.

The second issue is that not all group interaction is captured on the discussion board. When I post a new topic, comments are both posted and emailed to me. If I respond to the email version of the comment my response is only sent to the person commenting – that part of the conversation is not added to the discussion board. This system facilitates a conversation flow that is outside of the discussion group – excluding the rest of the community from the dialogue.

The discussion features are a step in the right direction, but they need to do a bit more to get it right.

Implications Of TV-Internet Convergence

I participated in a panel discussion yesterday about technology trends. One of the trends that I brought up is the convergence of TV and Internet. With the abundance of mainstream content now on-line and the increasing preponderance of household WiFi, this convergence appears to be nearing its tipping point to widespread adoption.

For those who haven't been following this trend, the convergence of Internet and TV is not about putting TV shows on computers or about putting web pages on TVs. It' s about migrating the vast majority of media consumption from the computer to the living room. The current mainstream entertainment centers are not equipped to deal with much more than video and traditional (non-Internet) radio. As a result, many of us are listening to Internet radio and viewing pictures on our computers. Over time, other currently web-based resources will be available through the TV: entertainment-oriented websites will move to the "big screen" and social features such as chat and conference calling might also make the transition.

While this move will create the biggest change in living room behavior since the advent of the VCR, the implications reach beyond the home. The implications of this convergence are not all entirely clear at this point, but here are three potential repercussions:

On-line Ad Spend
One of the features that the convergence of TV and Internet offers is a changed in the way we consume video. Program schedules may disappear. Rather than waiting for a show to play to be consumed in its allotted time or time shifted by using a DVR, content will likely be available on demand once it is released. This could mean that you might be able to watch an entire "season" of a TV show on the day that it's released, spelling big trouble for TV Guide.

Advertising dollars having been migrating from the TV to the Internet rapidly over the past decade, as the Internet offers advertisers the potential for better targeting and accountability. However, when TV and Internet converge, the shift from traditional TV ad products to the highly targeted and interactive ad products of the Internet will accelerate. What was traditional TV advertising might take on many of the characteristics of Internet solutions: advertisements can be selectively integrated in or around content in real-time based upon targeting metrics (day part, behavior, demographics or other). All video advertisements may be bought based upon who is seeing the ad rather than what show it is playing in.

Democratization of Content
A number of daring media entrepreneurs have tried to compete with traditional TV channels by producing on-line TV series and new shows. They choose to use the Internet as their channel because it enables them to bypass the complexity of the existing entertainment industry - the barriers of entry are much lower - any film student can become an on-line media mogul overnight. While some of the current on-line shows have succeeded, their viewership typically doesn't compare to that of content delivered over the TV; most people's computers aren't connected to their TVs and most people don't want to watch TV shows, news or movies on their computers. Web based media is on the wrong screen.

However, when the TV can access content on the Internet, these small content producers can make their way into the living room and into the mainstream. The barriers to distributing TV shows, news and even movies will go way down. This dramatic change will have a many implications. First, the small guy can finally make it big. Second, as reaching the mainstream becomes easier, more producers are likely to throw their hats in the ring - consumers are likely to have a lot more content to choose from. Third, filtering through the enormous haystack of content will become increasingly difficult, creating the need for solutions that facilitate the search for the needle using crowd filtering and other techniques. Fourth, Hollywood will have to adapt to the new model and make sure that their content remains competitive.

Cable
There are some who believe the TV will bypass the cable cord in the future - one connection point, the Internet connection, will serve the entire household. If these solutions do ultimately enable consumers to "cut the cord", the cable companies might need to reassess their model. I suspect that these companies will endure; many cable companies also offer Internet access - they'll still be part of the supply chain. However, they might have to evolve a bit. For example, if cable access becomes less relevant (because some households access content via the Internet) they might simply begin charging more for Internet access.

Conclusion
When all of this is going to happen is hard to say, but the shift has already begun. Microsoft, HP, Apple, TiVo, your local cable provider, and a host of start-ups have been competing to dominate the digital living room for some time now. As they bring to market better products, the Internet will increasingly be coming to living rooms near you.

Drop.io Injects Steroids Into Twitter

One of our portfolio companies, Drop.io, recently launched some functionality that makes Twitter much easier to use.

Drop.io's mission is to provide simple private sharing via the Internet. The company enables anyone to create a webpage, or drop, to share any type of file (for free) without creating an account. While there are lots of ways to use this platform, I use it a lot for sharing large files because it's super easy.

As part of its making sharing easy mission, the company is trying to enable users to upload or download media to a drop in any way possible. For example, I can upload media by email, SMS, fax, phone, etc. and download via email, SMS, fax, RSS and now Twitter.

The new Twitter feature sets the drop up to broadcast any new content via Twitter. I can email a picture from my phone to the drop and it will automatically become a Tweet. There are a couple advantages to this solution versus other alternatives on the market.

• First, any type of media can be uploaded and broadcasted - it's not limited to pictures. Text, video, etc. also work.
• Second, a repository of all of the content being uploaded is created so that I (or others) can consume all of that content on the drop page.
• Third, a drop can become a many-to-many communication platform because drops can be set to allow anyone to add new content which will in turn be sent out to Twitter accounts.

All-in-all it's an elegant solution that makes sharing viable in a way it never was before. As I'm using Twitter more aggressively now, I have found that Drop.io is the best complementary solution. After doing research to identify the best solutions, all roads led back to our own portfolio.