Get Small Fast
March 31, 2006
I always appreciated Brian’s ‘Get Small Fast‘ meme and after meeting with Josh Williams and John Critz of Blinksale (firewheel & iconbuffet) I am still a believer. Josh and John have built a great application and are at the start of something big (while staying small). Check out their blog and if you run a small business I recommend considering their invoicing product.
Jobs on getting Fired
March 29, 2006
“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
– Steve Jobs Stanford University commencement address, June 12, 2005 [via]
Putting Dallas on the Map(able)
March 28, 2006
CKS got the jump on me and blogged about a new Dallas-based startup called Mapable. Mark Piller and a secretive fellow known only as Slava started this two person business. Check out their blog. I have not had a chance to meet Mark, but until I do all I can tell you about Mapable is:
Mapable is the place where you can find common online social activities placed on a map. Our first initiative is ‘Mapable Chat’. Many more cool map-based services are set to arrive here soon.
The site looks great. It is exciting to see more ‘mashup’ style businesses starting in Texas - especially here in Dallas.
Wiki Startup Raises $4MM Series A
March 28, 2006
The usual suspects in the Web 2.0 space, Bessemer Venture Partners, Omidyar Network, Marc Andreessen, Dan Gillmor, Reid Hoffman, Joici Ito and Mitch Kapor funded Wikia, Inc. (previously known as Wikicities).
Wikia uses an ad supported Freemium business model. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley started the company in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by Wikipedia (also founded by Jimmy Wales). Here is a blurb from the press release:
Wikia supports the development of the open source software that runs both Wikipedia and Wikia, as well as thousands of other wiki sites. Among other contributions, Wikia plans to enhance the software with usability features, spam prevention, and vandalism control. All of Wikia’s development work will, of course, be fed back into the open source code. Wikia already hosts some of the world’s largest wikis outside of the Wikimedia Foundation, including: uncyclopedia.org, a parody of Wikipedia; memory-alpha.org, a Star Trek encyclopedia; starwars.wikia.com, a community devoted to Star Wars, and hundreds more including topics ranging from politics to pets. Since the site’s launch in November 2004, over 1000 Wikia have been created and edited by over 20,000 registered users. Wikia are available in over 35 languages. A list of Wikia can be seen at www.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Wikia.
Fred Wilson’s Favorite Business Model
March 27, 2006
Our favorite VC blogger, Fred Wilson, described his favorite business model in a post back on March 23rd. Jerid Lukin, from Flatiron portfolio company Alacra, came up with the name: the Freemium Business Model.
Fred described the Freemium Business Model like this:
Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.
We are experimenting with the Freemium model with the Big in Japan toolset. Presently we are quitely releasing each tool (PodServe was first, second came elfURL, then a reskinned FrankenFeed, then InstantFeed, then QwikPing and currently in demo mode is FeedVault and soon to be released is SocialMail and MailFeed) in quite alpha/beta. Once we launch the complete set of tools we will launch our ‘pro’ or premium level paid service offering for each. The idea is to always offer a free version of each tool. Hopefully our Freemium model will work as well as other great tools like Flickr, Skype, Trillian, Newsgator, Box.net, and webroot.
How do you consume podcasts?
March 27, 2006
Do you listen to podcasts? Do you have your own podcast? If so you might be interested in some stats we have been collecting from our Big in Japan project. You may have seen RSS or XML feeds to a bloggers podcast listed in his sidebar under the RSS or XML feed for his blog. We are measuring how people are using podcasts listed in PodServe and we have found that only 1% of subscribers actually use the feed to consume the content of a podcast.
So if you have an RSS or XML feed icon on your blog pointing to your podcast feed you might reconsider how you are delivering your content. I removed my RSS feed and replaced it with the PodServe page that allows a podcast consumer to select various methods of consumption including:
- Subscribe directly via iTunes (iTunes button)
- Listen directly via your browser (built in flash player)
- Subscribe directly via an RSS feed (feed icon)
We have found that 80% of our subscribers use iTunes to consume podcasts and 19% use the built in player (previously via the browser, now via the flash player). Consider linking your podcast to a page where the consumer can choose his method of consumption (or just put an iTunes subscribe button since you will please 80% of consumers). On this blog you will see my podcast link 
just under the RSS feed icon.
Call for help to build a startup blog network!
March 26, 2006
Interested in building a network of startup blogs? How about one for each state? Drop me a line if you want to help - 214.550.2003. Thanks!
Snowballs
March 26, 2006
Throughout high school and in college I was involved in CX debate and one of our favorite concepts was the ’snowball effect.’ Umair had a great post this morning titled, ‘The Snowball is the New Blockbuster About a year…‘
The story is not social media (blogs, podcasts, wikis), it is the snowball effect they can have as a ’self-organizing and interdependent collecectives’. He gives some great examples in his post. Umair calls it ‘cheap coodination’ and I agree that viral marketers are going to figure out how to tap into it very soon.
In college our snowballs were actually red herrings; I think they might be for real this time.
Microsoft supports microformats!
March 25, 2006
In an interesting move, Bill Gates indicated that microformats are a core part of Microsoft’s strategy. Marc Cantor noted that Tim O’Reilly had clued Bill in on microformats the night before the announcement in this . I am not as concerned about the timing - just the fact that Bill is talking about them. The first time I heard Tantek speak about microformats I was excited - structured data WILL change the internet as we know it. Since then I have made sure we use them everywhere possible (specifically in the Big in Japan toolbox). I think this announcement by Bill Gates will only hasten the adoption of microformats.
Goodbye and Hello!
March 25, 2006
It is with sadness that we say goodbye to the classic PHP version of elfURL. I came up with the URL shortener while sitting at SuperNova last year. From idea to launch it took four days. Read about it here. Here is the old skin:
Now meet the new Big in Japan version of elfURL. Completely rewritten using Ruby on Rails we kept the previous features and added optional password protection for the stats. Rodrigo has a few more ideas including integration with the Tagyu API, but that is fairly low on our list. The new logo and css are by Dan Cederholm. Can you believe we have served up elfURL for more than 4,000,000 unique people? Woot! Here is the new skin:
New Toy: WiFi/VoIP Phone
March 23, 2006
Check out my latest toy. It is a WiFi phone that connects to our office VoIP PBX (Asterisk based). I can take it anywhere with an open WiFi connection and receive and make calls as if I am in the office. Watch out, if you call me at the office I might be at home, Starbucks or in the airport. Very cool.
Skiing . . .
March 23, 2006
We are in Durango for our family ski trip. Ethan, almost five, is going to be on the slopes for the first time. Cross your fingers I don’t break my leg. If you need to reach me before Monday try my cell 214-477-4554 - don’t leave a message.
European Web 2.0 Startup Receives Funding
March 22, 2006
Netvibes announced seed funding by Index Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Chappaz, and Martin Varxavsky. The company provides a fairly popular (over one million home pages have been created) Ajax home page product. Mike Arrington calls Netvibe “a Web 2.0 Company [he] couldn’t live without.” The company is located in Paris and London. Via Techcrunch. More here.
Big in Japan profiled on commandN
March 22, 2006
Our favorite TV host, Amber Mac, spent quite a bit of time of the March 20th episode of commandN talking about Big in Japan and our prosumer blogging tools. Check out the iPod video here.
Amber is the host of G4 Tech TV and one of the producers of commandN.
Social media meets the Real World!
March 22, 2006
Weblogs Work, our social media company, is working with MTV’s Real World and their sponsor Mystic Tan to join the social media conversation. The first step was the creation of a blog for the co-founder of Mystic Tan, Ricky Croft - check it out here.
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