As many of you know I’ve recently joined Aria Systems, and have been deep in the bowels of billing and activity management for SaaS and gaming companies for about 3 weeks now (aside: it doesn’t surprise me we’re in a pretty unique niche position, since this stuff is hard to do right). Being of course the web 2.0 geek that I am, my immediate thought was to reach out to folks at Aria as well as customers on Twitter, Socialthing, Friendfeed, Linked in, etc.

As it turns out a bunch of us are on Twitter, including our CEO. Unfortunately, I was unable to pick up the @aria identifier, because as it turns out there’s a fellow in Teharan who was first in line. About a week after my initial foray into the name land grab, this tweet from Kingsley Joseph at salesforce crossed my Twhirl stream:

So basically nobody in Salesforce.com knows who @salesforce is and nobody at Dell knows who @dell is.

That’s when it hit me - we’re revisiting the days of URL squatting all over again. However this time marketing folks have to worry about not just one URL, but a bunch of identifiers strewn about the social web. While folks like Shel Israel claim it’s silly to have companies on social media communities because one cannot have conversation with a Coke bottle, these identifiers are a good way to reach someone at an organization when you don’t quite know who to reach. So I figure it’s only a matter of time before marketing types start having serious discussions about this.

So, here’s what the questions I’m taking out of this:

- Should we be able to extend trademarks and branding to social media communities as we have with URLs?

- Can an organization take legal action person who registered a trademark on a social community for trademark infringement? Will URL squatting disputes long past be considered as ammo for stare decisis?

- How do we even find the people who registered Aria, Salesforce, Dell, and other trademarks if they used a hotmail account or something of the sort? What would we do if we could contact them?

- How long will it take before an aftermarket develops for Twitter identifiers?

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear from brand managers as well as Twitter/Socialthing/Friendfeed internal folks if you happen to come across this post.

Download day that is.

It looks like they are trying to set the Guiness record for most downloads in 24 hours, according to their post on Spreadfirefox. Techcrunch chimed in on a long but pretty complete post (note to Erick S: I’m guessing start the time 10PDT today and end it 10AM PDT tomorrow).  “The traffic has (predictably) overwhelmed the mozila servers, but mirrors are up and available via the following links.

http://mozilla.isohunt.com/firefox/releases/3.0/

ftp://mozilla.isc.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/

Thanks to Studio Nash Vegas for the heads-up.

Update: Mozilla’s Firefox site is up as of 12:20 PST. This post was updated via Firefox 3.0.

My thoughts and prayers go out to people affected by the quake. There are over 9,000 dead reported in central China and tragically hundreds of school children under a collapsed schoolhouse. Please consider joining me in donating to the Red Cross relief efforts.

After making sure our friends and family are safe, I started to reflect a bit on the earthquake. It never ceases to amaze me how Twitterquaking has become the defacto emergency broadcast system of the web. If you’re new to the term, it simply refers to using Twitter during an earthquake (or any other emergency) and using it to move around information, and find out if friends and loved ones are well. Exhibit A is this morning’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Chengdu, in central China. Twitter is the sole reason I know about it this morning and not the evening’s news.

Logging on this morning, my Twhirl stream was buzzing with activity among the folks I follow living in China. Apparently It was kicked off with Frank Yu’s asking “Earthquake in Beijing?” followed by a momentary comedic interruption of the news with “i twittered as the building swayed…screw running out the door, MUST TWEET !” That’s dedication Frank - or perhaps addiction. According to Marc van der Chijs, “within a few minutes the Twitter community found at least 3 active Twitterers (http://twitter.com/inwalkedbud, http://twitter.com/lyrrael and http://twitter.com/casperodj) that were reporting live from Chengdu. Quite amazing to see how quickly news spreads on Twitter, because we already had all information before the mainstream media picked it up.”

Marc is absolutely right. In fact, the USGS picked up the quake about 5 minutes after the initial Twitter reports began. Many of us had a map of the quake region before the USGS could post one. Now it’s tempting to chide the experts for showing up late to the party, but frankly Twitter is an unfair advantage for the rest of us (side note: I hope folks at the USGS are following Twitter. They aren’t doing their jobs otherwise). It seems increasingly the web is pushing mainstream news services are in the business of confirmation and analysis rather than actual news dissemination. This missive from Robert Scoble pretty much sums up the role of the mainstream media in the minds of active Twitter users:

For more updates follow the stream of news updates from Twitter users here.

Update 1: From Shanghaiist, Pictures out of Wenchuan. This brings me to the verge of tears.

Update 2: Some folks in China place the toll at 11,922. The BBC’s coverage is here. My friends Jeremiah Owyang and Elliott Ng (CN Reviews) have also donated and stepped up calls for action. Bravo fellas. Elliott’s blog post has a great list of organizations which can use your help. Thank you for the comments and continued support.

I’ve been in Florida enjoying some tunage, sun, and a cousin’s wedding in beautiful Coconut Grove in Miami, FL. It’s been fun, but back to bay area and blogging with me. Clickable pics below.

And a little Miami Beach tourist trap shop zen:

It started as an idea blogged by two guys and turned into an awesome event at Palo Alto based Vysr, where nearly two dozen aspiring entrepreneurs showed up to share ideas, learn, and teach. Startup folks from as far as Australia unconferenced with bloggers, media folks, and angel investors and angel groups about a variety of topics, such as scaling on a dime, finding angel investors, and pitching a deal. We even had the pleasure of meeting a fifteen year old entrepreneur behind Teens in Tech. The most oft-recurring themes of course were bootstrapping (discussion lead by Mukund Mohan), and angel funding (discussion lead by MR Rangaswami of Sand Hill Partners, Guda of Vysr, and Mark Balabanian of Koders). Between participating in a few sessions, I managed to snap a few photos, which can be found here.

Since the majority of sessions and the preponderance of collective interest were focused around angel funding (post-seed), I put together a 14-point list of learnings for entrepreneurs looking to pitch angel investors:

1. Relationships are a discussion starter. Get to know people with personal relationships to angels, and approach angels through those people. M.R. notes he’s never funded anyone outside his network in 11 years of investing.

2. Mind the basics. M.R. and Mark look for a clear value proposition which stands out.

3. Lose the Hockey Stick. The market size looking big is unimportant, as everyone who pitches investors has a habit of putting up impressive looking “hockey stick” graphs of how the total market is set to explode. Everyone can project a big market - what those kinds of graphs do is make your audience cynical. Savvy pitchmeisters specifically talk about total addressable market rather than total market size, which is received as more realistic.

4. Parallelism. Make sure your personal resume supports what you’re looking to do - investors are investing more in people than in ideas, and they want to know you’re not new at what you want to do.

5. Chemistry. The personality and chemistry is important. An investor’s involvement doesn’t end at funding, and they will be looking for people they can comfortably work with over the next 3-4 years time. Investors will sometimes provide a helpful “kick in the rear” and are keen on people who respond positively and decisively to it.

6. Demonstrate incremental success. They will also look into whether the person makes his commitments over a 3-4 month cycle -about as long as it takes to fund a deal. Even a stray comment can be construed as a milestone. Many a pitch has been blown off by a ballyhooed “we’re about to close a deal with Facebook, etc” pitch which never came to pass. If you’re working on meeting a milestone, alert investors to it only after it’s a sure thing, which make it appear you’re executing effectively.

7. Develop your story slowly. This may sound inscrutable but MR and Mark advise sandbagging to some degree. Giddy entrepreneurs usually make the mistake of showing all their cards as quickly as possible. A more effective strategy is to develop the story during the close process to maintain investor interest in your idea. It’s also important to maintain consistency. If the investor feels like they are being pitched a plan to be followed with a backup plan, then they will get cold feet.

8. Quit your job. Investors will be skittish about funding a startup in which none of the founders are working it full time. Said differently, they are looking for entrepreneurs willing to dive into their ideas without reservations.

9. Teamwork beats heroes. All else being equal, a founding team with well segmented duties will be more attractive to a single founder. While single founders do get funded, an angel will likely inquire why an idea is likely to be fruitful if a founder can’t convince others to join him or her.

10. Keep it real. Investors wade through many pitches and will mentally discount hyperbole with nary a thought. Do not pitch divine inspiration or perfection -be open about weaknesses you’ve identified and have a plan to deal with them.

11. Align interest with involvement. Pitching an angel based solely on the numbers is hubris; there are simply too many unknowns. Make sure to pitch to investors who are interested in your market. For instance, if you’re starting up a social network for soccer fans, then find angels who are soccer fans.

12. Advisory boards. Advisory boards are effective leverage: you pay people in stock and benefit from influencers who will talk about your idea to everyone they know. Adding an adviser is also a great way to mitigate risk of disinterest - advisers who do not want to be involved are usually removed quietly, while board members can not be removed to easily. Mark specifically notes that an adviser who is proficient in marketing wizardry is particularly important, since founding teams are usually weak at promotional savvy.

13. You Have No Secrets. Every angel or VC talks to every single other angel and VC. There’s no secrecy here so you have to pitch the idea intelligently and make sure that you retain value.

14. Put Everything on Paper. Many an internal founder power struggle has doomed a startup to failure. Since clairvoyance isn ot part of the business plan, preparedness has to be. Investors will feel more comfortable with a founding team defining their core competencies and their ownership stakes on paper, along with vesting schedules to each founder providing incentives towards continuity. That last thing an investor wants to see if half the team bail with full vesting in hand shortly after funding.

Thanks again to everyone who came and made the event a success. I look forward to the next such event; we’re hoping to put another one together sometime after the summer. Please drop me a line or comment below if you’re game!

General and contact info on Startupcamp:

Wiki: http://barcamp.org/StartupLegalandFinanceBootcamp

Twitter stream: www.twitter.com/startupcamp

Email: startupcamppaloalto@gmail.com

I took a look over at Stowe Boyd’s blog today after chatting it up with him this weekend, and I found a featured post which I missed on the first go around: “Global Weirding“. The term was brought to the mainstream by Thomas Friedman, who gets a whole lot of coverage for writing about globalization, despite the fact this guy knows a lot more about it. But I digress: the the term is certain a far better marketing catch-all than the flaccid euphamism “climate change” or the tropical vacation image-inducing “global warming”. To quote Friedman:

“And sweet-sounding “global warming” doesn’t really capture what’s likely to happen. I prefer the term “global weirding,” coined by Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, because the rise in average global temperature is going to lead to all sorts of crazy things — from hotter heat spells and droughts in some places, to colder cold spells and more violent storms, more intense flooding, forest firesand species loss in other places.”

Like Stowe, I’m also wondering why there isn’t rioting on the streets at the current administration’s denialist policy stance. He believes milquetoast marketing is to blame, which I agree with. I also think the enormity of the problem is keeping people on the sidelines. There’s a perception (at least in mainstream America) that there is significant pain in switching the way we produce and consume energy, with very little added benefit. What I love about the term climate weirding is the connotation that doing nothing is inherently the riskiest and most painful proposition.

Needless to say, you’ll be seeing this term on this blog a lot from now on, and I hope you’ll use “Global Weirding” in your writings and dialogue as well.

Many of the weberatti converged on the Techset BBQ hosted by Brian Solis, co-author of Now is Gone and principal at Future Works. This was a bit of a SXSWi reboot, where the only agenda item was keeping up on friendships old and new, and getting another taste of Austin’s Salt Lick (which was a real treat for me, since I’m a Longhorn). Below are a few pics, more available here.

Brian and Wendy Solis:

My favorite picture of the whole day:

Lingling and I were able to meet lifehacker Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-hour Work Week

Those of you following this blog have probably noticed a dearth of posts about Socialtext. If you’ve followed Ross Mayfield, Techcrunch and Mashable this morning, you now know why - Socialtext is putting people into wikis. I’ve been itching to talk about this, as has my associate Scott Schnaars, who put together a succinct description of both products launched today. ZDnet writer D.A. Howlett put together the most comprehensive view of the Socialtext People strategy I’ve seen in the media thus far.

The products we’re launching today are “Socialtext People” and “Socialtext Dashboards”

Socialtext Dashboards provide a top level summary view of knowledge both external and internal to the organization. The dashboards provides a widget driven, netvibes-like interface providing an easily accessible feed to conversation streams such as blogs, twitter feeds, and other social objects.

Socialtext People is social networking built for enterprise use. Socialtext now provides people pages atop the wiki environment, allowing you to see a person’s entire conversation ecosystem: blogs posts, twitter tweets, wiki posts, and feeds the person reads. Adam Ostrow describes it as “”business-ish Facebook”, but a deeper peruse will reveal far more. Socialtext people allows making connection and following “people feeds” not based n self-selected criteria (”I like snowboarding, etc”) but rather on actual work history.

That’s an evolutionary change worth repeating: connections are made based on actual work done. Not only are you able to see tags identifying subjects of interest to the person, but you’re also able to see who they’ve collaborated with and are able to extend your social ecosystem to match their own. Twitter users should intuitively recognize the ability to extend your social network by following a interesting person, and then follow those persons the interesting person follows

Ultimately an enterprise solution is only as good as the technology + people + strategy of course. There’s a comprehensive and systematic process we’ve adopted for success, which revolves around four potential usage scenarios

Collaborative Intelligence for sales and marketing, as implemented for market leaders including Humana and SAP

Participatory Knowledgebase for service and support, as implemented for market leaders including Symantec and Microstrategy

Flexible Client Collaboration for professional services, as implemented for market leaders including MWW Group and CoActive Marketing Group

Business Social Networks for partners and customers, as implemented for market leaders including United Business Media and Epitaph Records

In short, there is a strategy and a method based approach for optimal adoption and knowledge diffusion which is driven by however clients define success. For example, success as defined by Humana means providing revenue-driven personnel with the information they need to acquire new clients. Socialtext wikis and Socialtext people provide the infrastructure for synthesis of twitter feeds, rss feeds, and blog posts providing a holistic picture of a prospect for sales personnel, while Socialtext Dashboards provide sales management with a meaningful view of activity which drives higher conversion rates.

If you’re going to be at the Web 2.0 Expo, drop by and say hello. I’ll be happy to show you what the buzz is all about.

Every once in a while, I read a blog post ties together a number of memes I’ve been thinking about. I’ve recently met Elliot Ng at a dinner in San Francisco, and found him to be an incredibly sharp guy whose recent posting me pause to tie together many of the themes I’ve spoken about here.

The World Says We Suck

But let me start at the beginning here. The BBC recently reported on the results of a regular survey of 17,000 respondents around the world, who were asked to rate the influence of countries around the world as positive or negative. Here’s a breakdown of the average:

Elliott compared the results of the U.S. and China responses, and compared the two. The results are sobering:

Which country has a more positive influence in the world, U.S. or China?

• Overall: China. 47% for China vs. 35% for U.S. (excluding subject country)
• Latin America: China. 45% for China vs 32% for U.S.
• Europe: China. 39% for China vs 31% for U.S.
• Middle East: China. 63% for China vs. 34% for U.S.
• Africa: United States. 66% for China, 70% for U.S.
• Asia (ex-China): China again. 40% for China vs 39% for U.S.

In fact, only 9 of 23 countries rated the U.S. higher than China: Portugal, Italy, Israel (just barely), Kenya, Ghana, Phillipines, South Korea, Indonesia, and Japan.

Caveat: Data was collected in December 2007 before the recent March Tibet events and the torch run. Things may have changed.

Neither country garnered a majority positive opinion, but folks in the U.S. may be surprised to note that the bastion of freedom is viewed as a more negative influence on the world than an authoritarian governed nation. How did we get into this mess? It’s misleading to dismiss this as baiting and resentment ala Faux news. The easy answer is Iraq, but more specifically Iraq has become a symbol for the perception that the US has and will in the future act capriciously. Fair warning: here’s where I turn up the ecogeek rant..

The Intersection of Peak oil, Iraq, and the Value of the Dollar.

Geoscientist M. King Hubbert saw this coming. He noted in 1956 that there’s a simple fact to oil production - the amount of hydrocarbons under the ground in any region is finite, therefore the rate of discovery which initially increases quickly must reach a maximum and decline (this is called “Peak Oil“). The U.S. stopped finding places to drill in the 1950s, and domestic oil production peaked in 1970, dropping mercilessly after that. The British were able to float our hydrocarbon dependence for a while from the North Sea oil fields while domestic supplies dried up, but eventually the North Sea production fell precipitously. Enter the complex and inscrutable U.S.-Saudi relationship of convenience. Of course it’s only a matter of time before Saudis’ own production starts falling out. Stuart Staniford believes it’s already happening.

The blue line represents drilling activity and the other graphs are oil production averages. The punchline here is that the Saudis are drilling for new holes as fast as they can, but total oil production isn’t rising. This isn’t OPEC shenanigans here - there’s nothing the Saudis can do about output drops, despite their reassurances.

There’s a double hit to the United States however, as hydrocarbon commodities are traded commonly in world markets in U.S. Dollars. Hence the continued reliance on an unsustainable fossil fuels infrastructure is reinforced by a political need to maintain a system on which the value of the U.S Dollar is predicated - the value of the U.S. Dollar partly relies on demand from countries who need Dollars to meet energy needs.

There’s a number of hydrocarbon reserves adjacent to Saudi Arabia of course, specifically northward. Saddam Hussein virtually sealed his fate in September 2000 when he announced Iraq would no longer accept dollars for oil being sold under the UN’s Oil-for-Food program, and decided to switch to the euro as Iraq’s oil export currency. The Financial Times reported that “Saddam Hussein in 2000 insisted Iraq’s oil be sold for euros, a political move, but one that improved Iraq’s recent earnings thanks to the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar”. He was playing the foreign exchange game as an insider, hoping to reap the windfall. The Bush-meister implemented the currency transition despite the adverse impact on profits from Iraqi’s export oil sales (In mid-2003 the euro was valued approx. 13% higher than the dollar, and thus significantly impacted the ability of future oil proceeds to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure). Funny enough, none of the five U.S. major media conglomerates who control 90% of information flow in the U.S. touched this.

So the perception the U.S. is acting in a unilateral and capricious manner stems from the last few years’ activity, but there’s more to the story. The next chapter is more ominous.

Iran’s nuclear ambitions have taken center stage in the media, but there are again unspoken macroeconomic drivers underlying the second stage of petrodollar warfare. I’m talking about Iran’s upcoming oil bourse. In essence, Iran is about to commit a far greater “offense” than Saddam Hussein’s conversion to the euro for Iraq’s oil exports in the fall of 2000. Beginning in March 2006, the Tehran government has plans to begin competing with New York’s NYMEX and London’s IPE with respect to international oil trades – using a euro-based international oil-trading mechanism. Without some sort of U.S. intervention, the establishment of the Iranian trading center firmly establishes a euro based international energy trading system. That means the U.S. will no longer have the ability to effortlessly expand its debt-financing via issuance of U.S. Treasury bills, and the dollar’s international demand/liquidity value will fall.

Circling Back to China

Will Clark notes that “China’s announcement in July 2005 that it was re-valuing the yuan/RNB was not nearly as important as its decision to divorce itself from a U.S. dollar peg by moving towards a “basket of currencies” – likely to include the yen, euro, and dollar.” Interestingly, the Chinese re-valuation immediately lowered their monthly imported “oil bill” by 2%, over Dollar-denominated oil trade, but it is unclear how much longer this monopoly arrangement will last. Note that 2% is the inflation tax we’ve been passing along to them.

So the negative opinions are grounded in a rational fear of the U.S. intervention as China seeks to diversify its foreign currency reserves and has Sinopec signs a sourcing deal with Iran, which will ostensibly revolve aroudn the Iranian exchange. China’s voracious hydrocarbon appetite would allow an expanding credit-fueled Dollar valuation to continue unabated, effectively passing our inflation abroad. In short, we can float the value of the Dollar by increasing the amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt around the world about our motivations.

Add yet another reason to move the U.S. beyond a hydrocarbon-based economy. I hope you’ll keep this in mind during our 2008 election season and vote for change.

One of the big inflection points (out of many) in any startup’s trajectory is of course series A funding. In speaking to a friend of late who is looking to get into the wacky world of startups, I’ve discovered there’s a perception gap regarding the role of VCs. The perception is that they seed-fund great ideas which someday become the next Google and so on. Some do, but in general this is about as grounded in reality as Santa Claus or the tooth fairy..

It’s worth looking at the heavy lifting in funding, and Don Dodge has done a lovely job of summarizing the data:

“The Center for Venture Research at UNH today released their annual Angel Capital report for 2007. Angels invested $26 Billion in 57,120 companies, up slightly from last year. The report says there are 258,200 active angel investors in the USA. By comparison, Venture Capitalists invested to $29.4B in 3,813 companies in 2007.”

So let’s see, deal ratio is near 20 to 1 with about 50-50 on total cash. So Angel Investors are the ones doing the biggest risk taking (as most people in silli valley know intuititvely). Said another way, VCs are outsourcing early stage investing to Angels. This is of course beyond the tactical scope of the barcamp style conference in Palo Alto on April 26th, 2008 called StartupLegalandFinancecamp (or “StartupCamp” for short). Still, any meaningful discussion of getting funded in 2008 will have a backdrop of credit crunch and real estate bubble burst. As individual investors, angels are invested in land and other credit- fueled investments (heck, everything in our economy seems to be credit-fueled). Many of them may have gotten pummeled on those investments - any angel who was invested in Bear Sterns may recoil at funding anything with those fresh wounds.

There’s another side to this. Sramana Mitra obviously feels this may reign in bloated valuations and gut check-writing. I’m inclined to agree (economics 101 here: misallocation of resources = FAIL). The concern of course is an over-correction. I figure most of what’s going on is a mixed blessing of sorts. According to Valley-watcher Tom Foremski, Jeff Nolan (a former venture capitalist now at Newsgator) says money moved away from VC funds and into hedge funds, but that’s reversing with the large institutional investors will be rebalancing their portfolios and pouring more money will come into VC funds. This might lead to the odd effect of increasing series-A funding while decreasing the amount of seed money spread around. Ever drive down a street with stoplights where the timing is of greens and reds is off, forcing you to stop at every intersection?

A few things seem certain. I’ll bet a significant amount of startup capital is going overseas, since the Euro, Yen, and Reminbi provide capital preservation over the free-falling Dollar. I’ll also bet that we’ll see a number of hot ventures jump out of this recession, just like the last. Recessions seem to do that.

The basics never change too. Investors will keep looking for a sustainable revenue model and a smart exit strategy, and entrepreneurs need to partner with investors for more than just their money. As Paul Kedrosky writes, “Today I had lunch with a smart, seasoned entrepreneur who told me about a 4-inch deal binder he had been forced to create for angel diligence. As I said to him: Run. Hide. Any angel who wants that much security in an early-stage deal is to be avoided like a banker.” Exactly Paul.

Update: Jeff Nolan of Newsgator has an editorial up on incrementalism he’s seeing in the funding market where he discusses how startups’ seed capital now is far below the minimal economically feasible VC threshold.