Вокруг самая разная публика - хронически недосыпающие стэнфордские студенты, молодые инженеры из Google, Facebook и т.д., их жены и маленькие дети. Силиконовая Долина отдыхает, чтобы завтра утром снова нырнуть в водоворот бизнеса.

Странное это все-таки место. С виду - обычный американский городок, где без машины никуда не податься. А между тем, десятки миллиардов долларов текут прямо рядом, через подземное оптоволокно, пока невероятно талантливые люди, создавшие этот поток покупают свежевыпеченный круассант в той же очереди, что и вы сами.

You are a passionate person that likes what they do for a living.

You know that hard work, calculated risk and lifelong learning are necessary for lasting success - and live by these principles.

You accept that some things in life are outside of our control.

These facts define you as an entrepreneur, change agent - somebody who takes charge for their own life and the lives of others. But what defines your quality of life?

Your Attitude.

That’s right. If you decide that you will enjoy the hard days of start-up work, treating every new day as a blessing - most days will be happy and fulfilling. If you see start-up life or a career as a never-ending string of challenges and stresses - you’ll feel appropriately. And if you consider life to be a battle where everybody is against you - you’ll end up alone against all.

Mind you, this is different than the myth of “work-life balance”. Nothing can stand between a motivated person and their goal. However, your perception of the process is everything.

Work hard, feel good and be successful!

Умудрился на сутки отключиться от бизнеса, клиентов и почты. И все вроде на месте. Понял важную вещь - не имеет смысла волноваться о будущем. Главное быть в эпицентре событий, иметь четкий план действий и каждый день вкладывать ровно сто процентов - ни больше, но и ни меньше.

Пара фоток из парка прилагается - это действительно райское местечко. До встречи.

Not really mine, but borrowed from Walt - cool music photographer that rented us our place.

The bike is old, really old. Paint is falling off here and there, the seat has seen better days. The “Made in Japan” logo is shiny and fresh, still. The ride is smooth, always.

Some things are built to last…

We have a wonderful apartment where we work until very very late (John) or start really really early (me) - but it’s classy and big enough that it’s feels natural. With Peter, Nick and Matt staying here it’s even more fun!

Across from the street from us is the courthouse. Every day our street is filled with luxury brand black cars with tinted windows. The Mexicans were picking up their people on Tuesday, Wednesday the Russians (”bratki”) came to get somebody as well. As the area is flooded with police, it’s pretty surreal.

The city is beautiful. Sunny, but cool - helps us stay on track.

Good friends are right here with us:

Every day brings a story to remember. Stuck on Golden Gate bridge due to an accident, while getting naughty performance alerts from one of our servers? Check!

And of course… The opportunities are just mind-blowing. Stay tuned for more updates from MOBIFY in SoMa, San Francisco!

The overall impression of the SF tech scene after the first couple of days: it’s like if somebody gave you a tasty treat and then punched you in the face.

It’s amazing to see the quality of the execution even on spare time projects. Stunning when 4 crazy, complete project demos in a JavaScript meetup are an unusually “short meeting”. When the guy sitting next to you is on his 6th startup. Here, it’s for real. And we haven’t even touched the surface of the deal flow of the Bay Area.

The result of this is a heightened sense of urgency combined with an awareness of how competitive the Web game is here… It doesn’t get any more challenging.

But when the going gets tough, the tough get going - that’s something we’ve always believed in.

Come visit us in San Francisco.

It will be one hell of a summer.

If you work really, really hard without achieving what you want, it could be possible that the strategy you’ve chosen is not working. In order to keep moving, it will be necessary to either adjust the goals or start doing things differently.

The problem is this - hard, passionate work feels rewarding, blocking out negative reinforcement. If I am working so hard, sacrificing so much and enjoying what I do, one day I will certainly succeed, right?

Wrong.

At least, if you’re building a growth business, which has to do with meeting milestones, growing revenue, closing deals and other measurable objectives. Passion is a necessity in order to keep going, but accountability - to yourself and your team - is just as crucial.

Today, my wish to every entrepreneur is to have the guts to address the Achilles’ Heel of their business. It is always somewhere in the back of our heads, drowned by the great joys of freedom, creativity and self-improvement that building a business brings. Only through confronting the uncomfortable we can achieve something great and lasting, something that improves the lives of others in a significant way.

The reasons are quite clear to anybody following our work at MOBIFY. Vancouver is fantastic for recruiting top talent and now with Bootup the entrance barrier to starting a company is further lowered. However, to make it through the chasm of customer development to a good exit, a long journey has to take place. The Valley ecosystem is ripe with events, networking, funding and partners that Vancouver doesn’t have today. As a startup, we want to maximize our chances and hit our growth targets - San Francisco has some of the missing pieces of the puzzle. Having the R&D base in Vancouver is a perfect complement to this move.

On that note, does anybody have friends that would rent out a good live/work space to 4-5 guys in downtown SFO? We’ll be forever grateful.

Thanks for your support, Vancouver, let’s hang out this June as we prepare to take on the Bay Area! We’ll be back.

This victory came at a staggering cost - USSR alone lost between 20 and 30 million people.

I just got off the phone with a few veterans who went through that war and saw the horrors of it with their own eyes. It’s great to have them around us today.

The closest I’ve been to the War is looking at crash sites of American fighter jets which my grandfather, a geologist in Siberia, has found. USA provided lots of vehicles to USSR through its lend-lease program - the airplanes were flown through the vastness of Alaska and Siberia by young guys my age, without radars or GPS. Many didn’t make it, to be found decades later in the cold Russian tundra.

Let that be a reminder of how easy life is for many of us today, no matter how hard we work. Let’s thank Russian, Canadian and American veterans for fighting for us, more than half a century ago.

С ДНЕМ ПОБЕДЫ!

Many people starting a business in the Web space for the first time put a lot of emphasis on their idea. Idea seems to be that golden nugget which will attract funding, a great team and result in a nice exit after being executed well. That’s exactly how we started two years ago.

Being technology-obsessed, we tend to look for an idea asking ourselves these or similar questions:

Wouldn’t it be cool if I could have the XYZ feature on my iPhone/BlackBerry/Palm/Mac/PC?

The new XYZ technology/API looks very disruptive. What could I build on it that hasn’t been done before?

There is A in B market, but not C in D market. Can that be fixed via technology?

Most of the time, this leads to the well-known case of “solutions looking for problems” - beautiful technology that can’t become a profitable business.

Best ideas are a side-effect from solving significant problems that the entrepreneurs themselves experience, observe and intimately understand. As young Web entrepreneurs, we aren’t sufficiently aware of important real-world problems, since our life mostly consists of hacking, coffee and occasional entertainment.

There are plenty of examples. Larry Page didn’t set out to build the best Web search engine - as a Ph.D student he designed PageRank to help analyze importance of academic papers based on how they reference each other. Club Penguin, British Columbia’s underrated 700$ million acquisition, was started after the founders couldn’t find good online entertainment for their own children. Steve Jobs wanted to build a computer that could show the beautiful typography that he likes so much.

This isn’t anywhere close to being a rule. However, seeing yet another social restaurant search with status feeds, a Google Map, microformats, video uploads and widgets makes me wonder what ingenious products would the team come up with had their problem been bigger than finding new food to eat.

It took us two years to arrive to Mobify, which is shaping into a great product. Prior to that, we spent too long chasing ideas that were “cool” but wouldn’t stand a chance for making money. With the right kind of guidance, that could have been avoided!

There is a lot of potential for a start-up incubator that looks to match the creative force of young Web guys with experience of the tech-agnostic (but entrepreneurial) older generation - as equal partners. Specifically, the knowledge of life & business outside the IT bubble and the fundamental inefficiencies that can be swept away with the Web.

There’s lots of those left.

The Web is a medium that is now so engrained in the fabric of our everyday lives, that it’s dangerous to treat it as its own ecosystem. It’s an enabler, not a standalone product. We now see that Twitter is a way for people to feel one step closer to knowledge, fame and entertainment they already consume. No “social media” expertise required - just like gossip, interesting content will propel itself from one person to another. It’s important to be on Twitter, not to have many followers. People will find you when the time is right.

There are no shortcuts to lasting success and Twitter certainly isn’t one either. Instead, things like passion, hard work and a good portion of old-fashioned luck seem to do the trick. Take it from Shaq.

All of us have been in the situation when an important call, text message or email was supposed to come in. Waiting seems to take forever and the time between getting an alert and perceiving the message unleashes a range of emotions in a second or two.

Even when nothing particular is expected, anticipation is fun. Clicking buttons of various mobile views on the iPhone I wonder what great articles got posted. Go to the AppStore to see if new cool apps are available. Click Mail to find out whether anybody tried to get in touch.

When anticipation is taken out of the process, things can get tedious, real fast. You know those red circles that appear in the iPhone app buttons to indicate incoming messages? My impulse is to “make them go away”, to clear the queue, returning my home screen to a collection of possible experiences. In fact, I don’t really want to know the outcome before I select one of them.

Anything that brings more anticipation (without a disappointing result) is a positive experience. Anticipation is the reason people like downloading and updating apps - it’s incredibly inefficient compared to Web surfing, but fun to watch. That’s why “splash” screens and fake progress bars still matter.

As we create a new generation of mobile experiences, let’s make sure we tell the story right, without rushing forward.

One of many amazing moments was co-paneling with Rolf Assev, Chief Strategy Officer for Opera Software, at the ThinkMobile conference that Matt put together. Some background - I got into mobile in 2006 after being blown away by the possibilities Opera Mini offered on my shiny new Motorola L6. Three years later, I am on a panel with the person who’s been in charge of that strategy for the last decade, presenting a vision that’s shared by Opera and our team at Mobify.

Where will be in another three years? I don’t know. For sure though, we’ll have a say in defining this future. Right now though, is time to catch the sunset at Central Park…

VanCity, I I’ll miss ya!

I’m proud to say that we won by taking home the Judges’ prize for Vancouver’s “Most Likely To Succeed” start-up. It feels great that our vision is validated by a lot of successful investors and that the local community is backing us up!

Below are some pictures and a video from the event (thanks to John Davis and others). The dolphins were definitely in the pool…

A couple of aspects of this product are especially intriguing.

1) Game Size is 9.4MB. Anybody with an iPhone knows that there is a restriction on apps over 10MB in size - they can only be downloaded through Wi-Fi. What’s worse, the purchase itself can’t be completed until one is in Wi-Fi zone (for customer support reasons, I assume). Therefore, anybody who is serious about distribution must provide a version of their product that is ten megabytes or under. Otherwise a big chunk of “impulse purchases” is gone. How is the quality/depth of an average iPhone game affected by Apple’s 10MB rule?

2) The multi-touch controls provide for a really intense experience. Sometimes it feels like one could use a third hand. After about five minutes it becomes clear that on a touch screen, any game requiring a rapid response (action, shoot-em-up, racing) requires multi-touch. Makes me wonder when and how Apple’s competition will cope with not having the option to do that due to the patent.

Get this one while it’s cheap!

The mood was feisty. I watched Fight Club again and then stumbled on a new video filmed for Russia’s new social advertising campaign. Here it is:

It knocks you off your feet if you can read the words - very simple, hard hitting words which literally gave me chills the first time I watched. Basically, it outlines the achievements of Russia/USSR up until the 21st century. Then, time and time again it says that nothing was achieved since 1991 and blames the consumer-centric, dreamless society for it. At one point it says “In the global economy we are peons. We can’t compete“. You don’t see this ever coming out of motherland’s state-controlled media (partly because nobody wants to hear it). Powerful stuff.

I am now living my 25th year on this Earth and I really hope to use every opportunity to change it for the better. As Web entrepreneurs, we are in charge for making sure that as many people as possible get to pursue their dreams. We must harvest the equalizing power of the Web, its mobile use case in particular. I am surrounded by a dream team at Mobify.Me and my friends & family are one tweet/phone call away. Together, we’ll make it happen. Спасибо вам за это огромное =)

As a present to myself and all of you let me share a 10 year old track from one of Russia’s most unique artists - Delfin. Still gets me pumped up. It’s surprising how little has changed since those days… B-boys in music videos do airflares instead of windmills now, but that’s about it!

My guess is that the feeling of uncertainty that is hitting almost every established player in every market has finally propagated down to the bright young minds somewhere on the bottom of the corporate ladder.

If there is a clear risk working for somebody, why not work for yourself, where the potential rewards are far higher?

Every entrepreneur has their own path and their own lessons learned, but here are three top things I’d recommend to everybody doing a Web start-up in Vancouver today:

1) Sell Everything that’s not important to you on Craigslist (starting with old electronics and up to your car) and move to downtown or Gastown. This is incredibly important for networking and buying time.

2) Get a Co-founder. Seriously, if you don’t have one, you’re off to a bad start. It’s not only about vetting your idea, but also doubling the equity-driven resources. Third guy/girl is good too, although the marginal rate of return will not be as great.

3) Be Mindful of Brain Crack. Brain Crack ( a term introduced by a video blogger ZeFrank ) is really good, high-potential ideas that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but don’t move into the execution stage. Entrepreneurs need it to some extent because the odds are stacked against them and it’s important to focus on the positives. However, if things like execution/launch/market tests are getting pushed back for no apparent reason, you might be hooked on Brain Crack.

Go for it and good luck - everybody needs a little!

The result of half a year of hard work is Mobify.Me - world’s first hosted mobile transcoder. As any product with high potential, it’s breaking a whole bunch of taboos at once. We’re not offering any downloads, installs or new languages to learn. There are none of the exorbitant fees usually associated with building a quality mobile presence. More importantly, we’re approaching medium-size web studios and publishers directly with an outstanding self-serve product, which is completely unheard of in the mobile industry. 2009 will be the year of One Web on Mobile and Mobify.Me will drive it.

These 6 months of R&D didn’t come easy. Everybody worked hard and it’s especially humbling to see the value that Kevin and Nick brought to the development process. The most important event of 2009 is definitely Peter joining the team full-time. Peter was around from back before Handi had any real business. Now it feels like the team is ready to face whatever is thrown our way!

More big announcements coming soon. Stay classy, San Diego…

I find that not enough attention is given to the core advantage of a touchscreen when it comes to Web browsing. For those of us who used to surf on mobile before the iPhone, the difference is clear. With a touchscreen, one can click any link and head straight to the new URL, instead of slowly navigating to it with 10-20 arrow key presses.

iPhone owners enjoy the Web so much not just because the screen is big and WebKit is great (Nokia N95 had most of that a year earlier), but because following links - which is a core part of the Web experience - is seamless, just like on desktop. This makes as much difference in the mobile context as RAM vs HDD does for accessing information on your computer. “Now” vs “Almost Now, just wait a little bit…”.

In this light, Apple’s shiny new patent on MultiTouch technology can make a lot of difference in the years to come. As users get more sophisticated in their use of information, controlling the key means to facilitate their habits is really powerful.

Today, good mobile-optimized content is still tough to find, so we got the AppStore - enhanced with payment functionality, which Yahoo didn’t have back in the day. Sure enough, app developers are already complaining about lack of visibility for their released products. Apple is reporting hundreds of millions app downloads, never mentioning hundreds of billions of iPhone web hits that happened during the same period of time (G1 got several billions in its first couple of months on the market). It won’t be long before Search rules content consumption on mobile and the biggest benefits will go to sites those that are mobile-friendly and SEO-ready.

Want to get there? Keep track of this blog, we’ve got something for you!…

This handoff makes sense for everyone - the carrier, the device manufacturer and the user. It is the answer to tomorrow’s challenges of spectrum congestion. If RIM sticks to its approach of not putting Wi-Fi into its CDMA phones (like the Storm), it will effectively provide an inferior user experience and negatively affect the overall network availability (except Obama’s).

Also, think twice if you’re trying to sell any aggressive optimization/transcoding software to the carriers. Imagine if the end-users get a different experience visiting a website from their desk (Wi-Fi) or backyard (3G). Carriers are afraid to become the dreaded “dumb pipes”, yet they won’t have a say in the future of the Web. Their role is tremendously important, but focused on infrastructure and capacity, as opposed to mobile applications and experiences.

SkyFire is an innovative browser for mobile devices. It has a brilliant tech team which includes Mike Rowehl, a Board of Directors with some powerful VCs and over $17M in funding. Their product could be described as “Opera Mini on Steroids” - proxy-based browsing with a thin client for different mobile platforms, that adapts even the most complicated AJAX/Flash content fetched by a FireFox instance. It can do things no other mobile browser can - like render the desktop versions of youtube.com and facebook.com. The browser is currently in Beta and is free to download.

Without going into a philosophical argument about whether the SkyFire guys are going in the right direction, it is interesting to think about their business model. Here are the options:

1. Offer a premium version of the browser for money. This is going the same way Opera Mobile has gone. Not sure what the sales numbers are, however it is certain that the free Opera Mini is dominating the paid version. In a competitive browser environment, this is not the “hockey stick” VCs would be looking for.
2. Keep the browser free, show ads to all users. No other browsers do that and in a competitive environment, the users would likely abandon SkyFire (sure it does some things that WebKit/Opera Mini can’t do, but those capabilities are rarely needed).
3. License SkyFire to device manufacturers. This is actually something we thought is the secret play here - today most mobiles suck at Web. However, seems more and more of them are jumping on the Android/WebKit wagon. Sure, there is a cost in porting the open-source browser to a platform, but it’s a one-time investment that results in a functional package. SkyFire relies on its proxying - what if the servers go down, or the company goes bust? Would a RIM or a Samsung type of company assume this ongoing risk for all devices they shipped with SkyFire as the default browser?
4. Sell default search engine / initial page placement. These are major sources of revenue for Opera Mini and Firefox. Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are definitely willing to pay. To make this a VC-scale revenue source SkyFire needs a huge customer base - which brings up the problem covered in #3, as the OS manufacturer either acts as a gatekeeper (Apple AppStore) or a competitor (anybody can put a browser on Google’s Android Market, but good luck competing with the default).

Tell me if there is something beyond these options. It’ll be interesting to see how SkyFire evolves from a very cool technology into a big business.

For more mobile blogging, check out this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists!