From Istanbul To Sand Hill Road

Will We See The End of The Florist?

The downtown Palo Alto landmark, Mills The Florist, prides itself for being in business since 1903.  They sell fresh, colorful flowers and arrange them in outstanding bouquets.  Their roses may be pricey, but they make a far better impression than Safeway roses.  Husbands, take note of this sentence, you may think your wives can't tell the difference, but they can.  Jokes aside, I wonder though, will this store that has seen a hundred years of business in silicon valley, be around for another twenty?

Before we go forward twenty years, lets go back ten.  Around this time, Nicholas Negroponte had published his wonderful book Being Digital.  He was the first person to popularize the concept of going "from atoms to bits".  The theme of the book was that, information, represented in atoms, need no such embodiment, they could be represented in bits.  Using bits is more accurate, faster to distribute, and longer lasting. 

Atoms in the stone of the statue of David cannot be represented in bits, the arrangement of those atoms is what makes it worth looking at.  The atoms in a piece of paper with writing on it, has no value other than the information it carries, and that can be turned in to bits, eliminating any need for atoms (I don't want to carry this analogy too far, on a hard disk, information is still in atoms).  And the impact from going from atoms to bits massively impacted our society.  If I were to pick three big effects, it would be in mail, music and photography.

Paper mail is replaced by email, photography has gone digital, and records/CD's are now mp3s.  In all these cases, the atoms were completely worthless in their own merit.  All of the instances where the atoms that embody information are not worth much on their own, have and will disappear over time.  So far there are no surprises here, most of what I've said is known.  But what's next?  What's next to go from atoms to bits?

What about an object whose atoms contain some ephemeral value, but value that is tiny compared to the value of the information it embodies?  Can those be next in line to disappear?

The object I have in mind is a flower.  Because a cut flower is another, albeit subtle, embodiment of information.

Yes, they are beautiful, but they disappear in a short period of time.  No trace of them is left.  Not all have an aroma, and those that do, have it for only a while.  It disappears also.  However, the information they carry is immense.  They show that somebody took the effort to get them, they show that somebody is thinking of another, that somebody wants to spend money for another, and most importantly they show that someone loves another.  All that is great information, but information nonetheless. 

I am talking about virtual flowers replacing those flowers, just like email replaced paper mail. 

Virtual flowers can, and will, one day be beautiful, just as rare, and far more expensive.  They surely will convey the same sort of information that real flowers exist to do.  They will never smell as good, and feel as good to touch, but will that benefit one day be outweighed by the fact that, virtual flowers can last far longer, be much easier to maintain, distribute and share?  How about the fact that a girl that receives virtual flowers from that special somebody, can take those flowers wherever she goes, share with her friends instantly, and tag, document/put in a diary?  Will that flower be more valuable to her?

Most of you will read this and say "no way.  A virtual flower will never replace a real one!".  That's true for us, because we grew up with it.  What about our daughters and sons who are growing up playing with virtual goods?  Mine certainly are, just go here to see one of her homepages.  Surely they will see things a little differently than us.  Will real flowers mean the same to them?  Now, do you still say "no way?"  I didn't think so.

As I was thinking of this post, I was holding my 5 month old daughter, she was looking at me trying to figure out whether the shirt I was wearing was one she had not yet spit on (she has a clean 100% hit rate).  I wonder if many years from now, she'll be telling me: "Dad, I love that you got me flowers, but why do you keep getting me real flowers?  I don't have any vases, they go bad so quickly, and I can't show them to my friends far away.  Wouldn't it be better if you spent the same money on a virtual flower I can keep anywhere, put in my electronic diary.  Also dad, you won't be causing the loss of rainforest land to grow flowers.  We need to save the planet."

There you have it, a virtual flower and a lesson in environmentalism bundled in one.

Now do you understand my concern for the second century of Mills The Florist?

P.S.  I have a question for those who've read so far.  What else, like flowers, have small value in its atoms relative to the value of the information they contain?

This is How You Market Your Company

Would you work at Google or at Meetup?

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dg2z5whw_41cb322p

Fantastic.

Statistical Sociology

If I had children near the age of college, I'd steer them towards studying "statistical sociology".  I am not even sure that there is such a field yet, MIT doesn't seem to have it, but I would bet that this will be a big research area in the very near future (The search on Google yields 1250 results today, I wonder what it will in a year).

We live in the golden age of statistics.  Data is being collected about you in more ways than every before.   Computers are ubiquitous, that's why.  On the web, every click you make is indexed, tagged, measured and calculated.  There is a lot of data collected, and with data comes statistics.  If Google can make a Chinese to Arabic translator without anybody speaking either language, that means with enough data, language translation looks like a statistics (math) problem.  That is the golden age of statistics.  One of my favorite posts, is all about this and how statistics can even expand our understanding of history. 

Sociology is entering its golden age with the help of statistics.  In social networks, one's popularity can now be quantified, it's actions measured, and social effectiveness determined.  Not just popularity, but all social actions of a person, including how many blog posts, comments, chats, winks, links they create are all calculated.  From these, an equation of "social effectiveness" will emerge.  We are seeing signs already.  There is a great company in San Francisco named Red Bricks Media, that's doing a great job in understanding the impact of sociology in our age.  They help companies identify influencers, and create buzz marketing.  "Buzz marketing", while I hate the term, is the first application of statistical sociology.  There will be more and more on the horizon.  Just wait till ecommerce becomes social.

So if you have kids in high school, and they are mathematically oriented, channel them to take probability.

As for my kids, I first have to teach them what a "variable" is, and then find a creative way to generalize the concept and teach them what a "random variable" is.  That may take some time :-)

The Luckiest Company In The World...

...is the Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation.  Based in beautiful Perrysburg, OH, their tagline is: "Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation specializes in buying and selling Used Tube Mills, Used Pipe Mills and Used Rollforming Machines."  So what makes them lucky?

Last year, Google acquired Youtube and the company's servers went down.  They got mad, but instead of taking legal action they decided to turn the problem into an opportunity.

It turns out that this tube & rollform equipment corporation had one big asset.  Their domain name, www.utube.com, gets a lot of traffic by the sheer misspelling of www.youtube.com.  So much that all of a sudden that their machines could not handle it.  That's their luck.

Now, they have conveniently put a search box on the top of their web site, you can search for Free Ringtones, Shakira, Blackjack, Gambling, Extreme Travel and Snowboarding.  One has a hard time relating Shakira and Gambling to Tube & Rollform equipment, but they are there on the site.  See it for yourself.  They are selling tube and rollform equipment, but they are also domain squatting on utube.com.  And from what I hear, that is generating them north of $1000/day.  That's $360K straight to the bottom line, at 10% pretax that's like finding $4M of revenue all of a sudden.  That's luck..

So what's the moral of this story:  "Doesn't matter if you are the turtle or the hare, you can't go wrong if you generate traffic."

Call it La Fontaine 2.0

Planet Earth: Technology That Puts Nature in Context

I am midway through the Planet Earth DVD that I got for my birthday and I could not wait to finish it to blog about it.

Words are not enough to express what an inspirational product this is.  It marks a new era in how nature is filmed and more importantly how it can be understood.  I've grown up watching nature documentaries ever since Life on Earth, but this one takes it to a fantastic new level, thanks to new technology brought by Cineflex called the Heli-gimble.  The photo on your left gives a hint as to what it is.  But before I explain what that does and why it is earth shattering, let me remind you as to how we all grew up watching documentaries.  Imagine a typical scene of lions hunting wildebeest.  There is no spelling error in that word by the way, it aint wilderbeast or wildbeast, but I digress...

The first typical shot is that of the herd, shot from shoulder height or below.  You see a bunch of animals move by in and out of the frame, the scene is covered in dust, it focuses in and out between an animal nearby and an animal far away. 

Then you see a pack of lions stalking the herd.  It is not clear at this point whether you and the lions are looking at the same herd.  For all you know those lions may have been filmed a month earlier.  Then you cut to a scene where you see a mother wildebeest (or gazelle, or kudu, or zebra or antelope) with its calf.  The narration that follows is, I kid you not, identical in every documentary every filmed.  It goes like this:  "The lions are looking for the injured, weak or newborn that will make easy prey."  It must be a standard line you have to include before you are allowed to film in the Serengeti.  I have not yet seen the filmmaker with the cojones to say "We are going to follow this pride of lions until they hunt a badass alpha-male bull in its prime and bring that beast down and we are not going to give up until we film it." But I digress again.

Then the lions start running, after they hear the African drum background music, going tum-tum-tum-tum, which is also a standard, and the chase begins.

At this point, there is confusion, the lions get lost in the grass, the jeep filming the lions can't keep up, the frames are moving up and down, the tum-tums get faster and faster, and somewhere in the distance you see the lion catch the wildebeest, and pow, cut to the next scene where a bunch of lions are eating something.  The catch seemed real, the feast, could have been at a zoo.

The point is, with poetic license to humor, that, during the entire process you lost the big picture of what's going on with the herd, the other lions etc.  I don't want to belittle the effort, many young kids, including myself, saw these in bewilderment.  It was inspiring.  We loved watching it.

Planet Earth takes this experience to a new level.  The heli-gimble is a camera, mounted on a helicopter that can zoom in from 1km away.  More remarkably, it compensates for the motion of the helicopter so the shots are rock solid from far away and close up.  That makes all the difference.

You now can follow the hunter and the hunted from beginning to end, starting from a high up view, zooming down as the chase nears its end.  Since this is all done from 1km away, the animals are completely undisturbed by the camera.  You also see the massive herds move and change the terrain as they do so, rising massive clouds of dust.  You appreciate how big they are.

The series is narrated by the master storyteller of storytellers, Sir David Attenborough.  In his own eloquent words: "For th first time, wildlife can be put in context of the epic landscape in which it lives."

That sums it up.  Our children will grow up with that understanding.  Thank you BBC for making this inspirational series.  This is a must own DVD, one where you don't look at the price tag.  Thank you Ayse and Pete for giving it to me, it's one of the best gifts I've received in years.

Web 3.0 and the Digg Revolt

I was a panelist today at the Red Herring Spring Conference, alongside Gurbaksh Chahal, the CEO of Bluelithium, Eric Hoffert, CEO of ShareMethods and Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia.  Representing the VC's on the panel were Sergio Monsalve and myself.  The panel's title was "Web 2.0...How Passe".  We talked about a few trends and then it opened up to questions.

One question was, "How do you define Web 2.0 and how do you define Web 3.0?"  It's really a silly question, because the right answer is "Who cares?  Why does it matter?" but we had to answer it and we tried.

I don't know if it will be called Web 3.0, 4.0 or whatever, but I believe it will be a web where the connected, super empowered consumer will be able to act.

If Web 2.0 is about self expression, as in blogs, wikis, social networks and tags, Web 3.0 will be about group action.  My previous blog post gives you a glimpse as to how that will be.  But you don't need a vision to see what it will be.  We just recently had a example.  The user revolt at Digg over the takedown of a DVD hack was one of the first times I've seen a user base take action that caused the site to change its policies.  That's taking action.  This example is reactionary, but in a few years it will become proactive.

Here is a hypothetical example.  A group of users can, and will, through their social network (hopefully community owned with its own ad network), send an email to the CEO of Netflix and the CEO of Blockbuster asking each to give their users free months of service.  The email will say something like this:  "Dear CEO, we represent 15M subscribers on your service and would like a discount to our service.  We will switch to whoever gives us the largest discount.  Please click on the following link and follow the instructions to offer us a discount."

For this proactive actions to occur, social networks need to get organized.  This requires a level of hierarchy above 'friends and contacts'.  That level will be determined by a political system within the network.  Leaders will be chosen and they will use the collective power of the network to get ahead in their online lives.

Everything is self-serve, online, quick and simple right?  So they will quickly write code and create widgets to get better deals in everything they do, everything they buy and every service they pay for. 

In Web 2.0 we had friends, in web 3.0 we'll have online governors, mayors and elections.  They will collect taxes from advertisers and build their online countries with very real impact to their physical lives.

Let's wait and see.