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I won’t often plug personal things, but I’ve been helping put together some of the panels for TiEcon this year, and spent a ton of time doing it, so I’m just letting you know.  TiEcon is focused on bringing entrepreneurs together – last year there were over 4,000 attendees.  That’s the largest entrepreneur conference in the world, and it’s right in our back yard in Santa Clara.  If you are remotely entrepreneurial, this is a must-attend event.  Some of the speakers include Tony Hsieh (Zappos), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Brad Smith (Intuit) and many more.  The panelists (there are a ton of parallel panel discussions) include numerous venture capitalists (including one of my partners at Opus), lawyers, bankers, and successful entrepreneurs.  There are many ways to network (i.e. Power Connect), which you don’t often find at conferences.

I volunteered as a co-chair of Business BootCamp – a series of 6 workshops that will leave attendees with specific skills and tools.  The workshops consider the practical aspects of managing a company such as funding, cash flow, building teams, scaling sales networking and creating buzz.   And the workshop leaders are all great and have experience leading sessions like this in the past.

The conference is next Friday and Saturday (May 15th and 16th).  I hope to see you all there.  Oh, and the best part – if you want to save $220, use the code “TIE-FRIENDS”.  Enjoy!!

http://www.tiecon.org/home

At this point we have all heard about the swine flu that’s starting to emerge around the world.  However, one label that has been thrown around without much thought is “pandemic”.   It’s an interesting development in our Twitter world where the signal to noise ratio has increased by orders of magnitude, and we tend to sensationalize and exaggerate (it’s like the old telephone game, except multiplied).  Information spreads, and it’s hard to know what’s accurate, but people continue to spread it.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter, but if one were to go search twitter for any variation of swine flu, they would be terribly misguided and most likely freaked out.  Anyways, here’s the WHO definition for an influenza pandemic:

An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness. With the increase in global transport, as well as urbanization and overcrowded conditions, epidemics due the new influenza virus are likely to quickly take hold around the world.

Fortunately, we have not reached this stage yet (last count 20 official deaths according to the CDC, 149 according to Mexican officials, though it’s unclear why there’s such a large discrepancy).  It’s important that we keep some perspective.  Here’s a helpful illustration by WHO that gives some clarity as to where this rates:

My question is this – if we did not have tools like Twitter and Facebook, would the flu news spread like it did?  And if not, would that necessarily be a bad thing?  Or is it a good thing that we all know?  On one side, folks are probably doing things like washing their hands that they should always be doing.  The counter-argument is that misguided information often leads to normal folks to become hypochondriacs and burdening our health care system with unnecessary visits.

I love the way twitter has spread the flow of information, but in my opinion, there’s a a big problem with how we  separate the wheat from the chaff, and I think that if a startup can attack accordingly, there’s a huge opportunity.

UPDATE:  Just saw an extremely relevant XKCD cartoon, which would be funnier if not so true.

Amazon releases their earnings this Thursday, and while most of you probably heard about the controversy regarding Amazon (#amazonfail) last week, what you may have overlooked in all the hubbub was the astonishing 300,000 Kindle 2′s sold in the less than two months since it’s release.  That’s over a $100M in revenue from a single item.  Amazon is expecting to sell 800,000 overall for 2009 – over $280M in revenue.  Absolutely incredible.  Oh and don’t forget the Kindle leads to higher margin book sales through wireless delivery.  So it got me thinking, if there was a executive of the year award (I blame the NBA – it’s award season there), Jeff Bezos would have to be considered one of the frontrunners, right?  Just for kicks, here’s a revenue comparision against their biggest competitor EBay (I guess I have to continue with my proclivity towards graphs):

And stock performance (take with a huge grain of salt, very different companies, and BBuy is signifcantly bigger than the rest with their $40B+ revenue) over the past 6 years compared to Best Buy, Circuit City, Barnes & Noble, Ebay, and the S&P:

And while their commerce side is continuing to grow, their transformative cloud offerings, AWS, could dominate their revenue within 5-10 years.  AWS is currently recognized in the “Other” category on their quarterly reports (last figured at $131M in Q4 2008).    Anyways, who knows what will happen Thursday, but Bezos has definitely impressed me.

It’s not often you hear someone ask to be charged for something they currently get for free.  But I’m asking.  The reason is simple – advertising alone cannot sustain quality news publications.  I look at two of the more successful online-only news publications – Politico and Huffington Post, and both are supported by private investors.  That doesn’t scale long-term.  The WSJ, on the opposite end of the spectrum, has something north of 1M subscribers, each paying north of $100/year – that’s $100 million a year.  

I’m not sure why some of the newspapers continue to stay free.  Nando started in the early 90s as one of the first online publications and they were free.   But they closed shop in 2003.  Let’s look at the NYTimes as an example – they get 15 million uniques per month.  According to comScore (via Alley Insider) they had 173 million unique page views / month in October 2008.  Assuming some growth and round numbers, let’s say they get 200 million / month.  At a generous $20 CPM rate, that’s $4 million / month, or $48 million a year.  That’s not a lot of money.  They would only need to convert 480,000 uniques into paid subscribers (3.2%) to get to that total via subscriptions.  

And that actually assumes they would completely charge for the site.  Check out the WSJ Online, it’s actually pretty solid even as a free website.  They do a great job with mixing paid/unpaid content, and they use advertising as well.   In fact, check out the comparisions for the two websites:

Anyways, NYTimes and other online news publications, if it means you will continue to improve and grow as an organization, please start charging me.

I’m very excited about the new Palm Pre that’s coming out hopefully before the summer.  As an avid Blackberry user, I’ll be the first to admit to its serious limitations compared to the iPhone in usability.  However, I ended up buying the Bold, and not the iPhone, because I hate being at the mercy of one company (or man) – i.e. I liked the openness of the Blackberry, even if it compromised the overall user experience.  However, with webOS, it seems we can get the best of both worlds – openness and sexiness (sure, Android is out there, but I think it is lacking in several areas – both hardware and software).

Now, I haven’t played with the phone, nor have many folks, but based on what I’ve seen and heard, this phone is pretty slick.   Even if it lives up to all our hype (which admittedly is high), it may not be enough.  The iPhone will be two years old this summer, and they most likely will release a 3rd generation device, and who knows what that will have (removable battery, anyone?).  And they released a third version of their OS (in case you haven’t seen the details, here’s a good, short, and amusing summary on the updated OS and how Apple “invented” copy/paste  and MMS).  Oh, and Apple is selling several million iPod Touches per quarter, and it uses the same OS – in fact, this is probably the leading reason why there is so much developer attention to the platform.   Let’s just say there’s a lot of catching up.  

And I think there’s one way they can do it.  Make webOS the de facto platform for ALL types of mobile devices by creating multiple types of devices that support it, or better yet, by licensing it out at an extremely subsidized cost.  The obvious option is a PMP / iPodTouch-like device, which will allow users to cheaply purchase a near-Pre equivalent (minus the phone) at a much lower price.  This is essential (why not seek a partnership with Amazon and become their mobile content delivery platform of choice for video, music, and maybe even books?  Sony just announced they will work with Google Books so Amazon might feel a slight tinge of pressure, and Amazon has demonstrated openness to supporting devices outside the Kindle with their iPhone App).

But what about cameras?  Or navigation systems (even in-dash)?  Or appliances (which are becoming more and more connected)?  Or remotes?  Then it becomes much more interesting to developers to build interesting apps.  If Palm can build multiple non-Phone devices, well then even better.  But the key is they need to propagate their platform and make it more ubiquitous than Apple’s.  Palm has clear advantages over Apple (multitasking, significantly easier programming language, keyboard), but in order to exploit them, it will need to create an ecosystem outside just phones.  Anyways, I’m cheering for Palm to succeed.

Note – I am currently long Apple.

So quick post – I went to the AT&T store in SF the other day to complain about my phone (literally 4 dropped calls in a 5 minute span while driving made me alter my workout plan and drive straight to the store) after weeks (probably months) of issues with “Call Failed” and such.  After waiting 20 minutes while customers ahead of me were buying new phones, they took me.  And I complained about the recent issues, and they told me, to paraphrase, they are aware of the network congestion issues and are working to resolve it.  Translation – you’re SOL and there’s no way we’re going to do anything for you.  She did ask me for where the calls were dropping (it’s a start), but I started to think – if they are having issues, then why in the world are they selling new phones, especially in the exact area where they are having issues?  In my work, we often hear the phrase “carrier grade” specifying a high level of reliability – but if anyone from AT&T asks me about carrier grade, I’ll tell them it just means you have to work most of the time but it’s okay if you drop service half a dozen times in a 30 minute drive.  I don’t know how AT&T is getting away with this stuff, but count me as completely miffed.  I’m glad Blackberry (at least according to rumors) is focusing less on them and more with Verizon and T-Mobile.   Apple, it’s your turn next – abandon AT&T, at least until they get their act together.

There’s a fascinating NYTimes frontpage article about how jurors are causing havoc in the criminal justice system by using Twitter, Facebook, and other real-time communication tools during a court case (via their smartphones and at home on their computers).  Jurors are not supposed to seek outside information related to the case, but with the advent of internet, I’m sure this became tough to avoid.  What I think is particularly fascinating is that jurors not only search online, but they post updates on Twitter.  Here’s an awesome example:

In the Arkansas case, Stoam Holdings, the company trying to overturn the $12.6 million judgment, said a juror, Johnathan Powell, had sent Twitter messages during the trial. Mr. Powell’s messages included, “oh and nobody buy Stoam. Its bad mojo and they’ll probably cease to Exist, now that their wallet is 12m lighter,” and “So Johnathan, what did you do today? Oh nothing really, I just gave away TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS of somebody else’s money.”

What would inspire someone to write that, I’m not sure.  But I think it’s indicative of where our technology is taking us – both for good and bad.  I think the real question here is how do we avoid egregious uses of these services.  It’s only time (and it’s already well underway) when our online personalities go hand-in-hand with our physical personalities.  Employers already use Facebook to research potential employees and their habits, who’s to stop insurers, banks, government agencies, etc to start doing the same (maybe they already do).  It’s scary, but it’s happening.  I think these kinds of cases demonstrate the lack of understanding many folks have regarding their online presence – just because we communicate electronically on a computer or phone and not to a person right in front of us doesn’t mean that our actions go unnoticed.  There is a balance of privacy, but we do need to be held liable for these online actions (in this case taxpayer dollars were wasted due to Mr. Powell’s need to update the world with his sophomoric humor).   Lawmakers need to catch up with the technology so we can penalize such behavior, but I think most of them are too busy twittering to notice.

UPDATE: In case you haven’t seen it, check out this link on how not to tweet after getting a job offer.

I’ll begin by prefacing my post – I do not depend on making a living via generating buzz for my website (and if I did, I’d be more than broke). Perhaps I would feel differently if I did.  I was inspired (or whatever the opposite of that is) to write this post because of all the recent publicity Apple is getting for a potential event where they may potentially announce something about another potential iPhone OS upgrade (which potentially has copy and paste functionality).  Really, that’s a story?  But Apple in a subject line will generate traffic, so they write about it.  All the talk about AIG’s bonuses?  I’m sure you saw those headlines.  Well, the $165 million represents less than a tenth of a percent of the bailout money they received ($173 billion), and was almost assuredly legally guaranteed due to the way employment contracts were structured.  Remember all the hub-bub about the pork in the omnibus bill?  Less than 2% of the budget.  

I’m not arguing that it’s insignificant – in fact I agree it’s very important to understand.  But it would be great if they could talk about it in the context of the entire topic.  Tell me about a product that has some details released (i.e. the Lenovo Pocket Yoga) or tell me about how AIG disbursed the other 99.9% of our money, and give some analysis on the impacts.  

Perhaps the underlying issue here is the depressed state of newspapers and rapidly declining advertising revenue stream.  Either way, do not reward this behavior, and avoid clicking the links – or we’ll be destined for these shenanigans everywhere.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think cell phone reception has degraded over time.  I’m sure upgrading to a 3G-capable phone has a lot to do with it (lots of issues with 2G-3G handshake), but I cannot go for more than 15 minutes driving without a dropped call.  And I’ll have several bars before and after the “call failed” note.  Frankly, it’s ridiculous.  Perhaps it’s my Blackberry Bold having issues, although my iPhone user friends seem to have similar dropped call issues.  But it seems odd, especially given how it often happens in the same exact spot (though this is definitely not always the case).

What I want to know is when did we decide to put up with it?  Back in the day, I used to have Sprint (the evolutionary Palm Treo 650).  And while I didn’t get coverage at my home, I rarely dropped calls.  Perhaps when the Palm Pre comes out for Sprint, I’ll return full circle.  Either that or I’ll just take the hit to the wallet and switch to Verizon.  One more thing, if you’re considering a new phone, check out T-Mobile and get the new Curve 8900.  I’ve played around with it – probably my favorite device out there right now – extremely sleek, durable,  and stable.

Or, perhaps I just need to watch CK with Conan again (highly recommended):