Lossy data compression methods have captured my attention and imagination from orthogonal sources (day job and Victus Media)

A Curious Coincidence: Photons, Neural Compression, and Perception

Long have I wondered how our minds perform the enormous processing task of transforming incident light into a 3 dimensional reality, while triggering memory and understanding. After a great deal of reading and many years working on sensor simulations I have only a laymen’s understanding of the process. Join me in a journey that crosses thousands of light years to illuminate the magic of our minds.

Photons from Distant Galaxies Become Information to Our Minds

Let’s begin by tracing photons from a distant quasar* at the edge of the universe all the way to a human observer looking at telescope data. The photons first leave their energetic home and traverse space and time over billions of years. Their course may bend many times as the photons near other galaxies and eventually pass close to our own sun and encounter an enormous aperture. Let’s gloss over the complex signal processing that transforms data and imagery, and instead follow the newly made light from a human readable display. The light finds it’s way to curious human eyes. For the next step in the information chain, I’ll borrow from an earlier post on digital and optical Images:

Our optical system quantizes measured photons in a similar manner to a digital focal plane. While rods give us black and white vision in low light conditions, our cones spatial orientation uniquely captures incident photons. While the majority are sensitive to red light (64%), some to green (32%), and only a tiny minority to blue light (2%). The proteins in the cones help trigger a nerve response which is channeled down the optical nerves to the part of brains that transforms these signals into three dimensional representations of our surroundings.

Local light that comes from sources closer to home, like this blog post or your display, are raw data that your senses use to compose a conscious image of your surroundings. But how do these incident photons become a human concept? One vital piece of the puzzle is massive data compression.

Biological Optical Data Compression

The investigators calculate that the human retina can transmit data at roughly 10 million bits per second.. That data rate matches the older Ethernet cable speed of 10mbits/second.
What data rate is available at the visual cortex?
article in scientific american (behind a paywall)

Visual information, for instance, degrades significantly as it passes from the eye to the visual cortex.

Of the virtually unlimited information available in the world around us, the equivalent of 10 billion bits per second arrives on the retina at the back of the eye. Because the optic nerve attached to the retina has only a million output connections, just six million bits per second can leave the retina, and only 10,000 bits per second make it to the visual cortex.
After further processing, visual information feeds into the brain regions responsible for forming our conscious perception.

Surprisingly, the amount of information constituting that conscious perception is less than 100 bits per second. Such a thin stream of data probably could not produce a perception if that were all the brain took into account; the intrinsic activity must playa role.

Yet another indication of the brain’s intrinsic processing power comes from counting the number of synapses, the contact points between neurons. In the visual cortex, the number of synapses devoted to incoming visual information is less than 10 percent of those present. Thus, the vast majority must represent internal connections among neurons in that brain region.

So our optical process distills billions of potential bits of light into 100bits per second. Although the compression is lossy, it’s good enough for us to interact with our surroundings and respond to motion rapidly (reflexes & frontal cortex). My hypothesis is that our mind continually estimates our surroundings and updates that state with a miniscule fraction of the raw input data (the ultimate change detection). I can only guess that massively parallel pattern matching is taking place to compress vital data differences at each moment. This compressed collection of neural signals updates our perception of reality. We continually track and estimate the world around us.

Notes:
*Quasar: there is now a scientific consensus that a quasar is a compact region in the centre of a massive galaxy surrounding the central supermassive black hole. (from wikipedia link at the start of the post)

^Visualization of data: Purely visual representation of distant solar bodies has been a challenge to artists and masters of scale (exaggerating structures for display), and this is how the non-experts experience the data

Pardon the brevity of this post it’s 38F and my fingers are fricken freezing (couldn’t find a good frozen Dr. evil image). It warmed up while I typed

The Bargains We Make to Communicate

Over the past year and a half I’ve been part of a wonderful information sharing expedition. Much of the journey was opting in to new darling social networks, searching for folks just as wild about information and expanding (net) opportunities as myself (there’s just something about startups). Visit my friends and influencers page to learn more about the wonderful folks who influence me, their generosity is a precious gift.

My attention has settled on the more technical friendly information flow sites (Twitter, friendfeed, wave, Buzz?) and shyed away from the Facebook relationship model (I pop in to say hi). One of the hot button topics around the social web is open distributed social networks, where data portability is a fundamental requirement. This way individuals own their data and who they wish to associate with. Current social services have absolute authority to ban or shun you now, disconnecting you from potentially many net friends and associates. A huge number of connections could be lost if the central service fails as a business. I’d prefer a simple data package of my contact data that I can bring with me anywhere I choose to go. A distributed model with portable data jives with my instincts, but is a strict contrast to current centralized financial models (virtual toll booths). The way for businesses to grow with social media is not to own the links between people, but to enrich communication and offer users value. I’m a firm believer in opt in (and easy to opt out) services which provide a clear value proposition (we’re striving to make Victus Media a solid bargain). As an example, this blog doesn’t own your attention (creepy flashback of Clockwork Orange). The value comes from readers such as yourself who choose to return and share your own perspective (comments/links) to broaden my views. Mine is but one voice and vision.

Not long ago we’d laugh at the idea of third party communication services to manage our friendships. But now the fastest growing web business space is connecting people to people, and people to information (Facebook & Google). And this isn’t taking into account the huge opportunities for creative tools that can enrich our social web use. While I prefer a social web where my network and data goes with me (portable contacts list), there are a number of opt in deals I’d consider to save me time when looking for relevant information, or money on service costs. For instance, a “free” phone with voice over IP, with a healthy and expandable monthly data plan  which comes from many competing providers. The creators of the phone can set each device up as an ad-hoc network node (thanks for the reminder Tyler), and serve up targeted ads while we use the device. I see the net transitioning to include more ad-hoc, peer to peer networks to scale and break away from unnecessary virtual tolls.

Dial an IP Address, the Social Web Phone

One concern of any social web service is identity. OpenID attaches our identity to trusted verification sites and opens the door to wide scale adoption of federated networks. For the holy grail of interoperability the trick is services agreeing on standards (protocols) to communicate with each other.

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• What Do We Want? Our Data. When Do We Want It? Now! (wired.com)

I suffered a deluge of information yesterday from my compatriot Tyler on the state of open protocols. My first challenge was to get a feel for the nomenclature and understand the differences between protocols, open source implementations, and specific server instances using those protocols. Only then can I help come up with a plan for how to incorporate the future state of the web information flow. Ideally we’d like to position Victus Media to utilize open message formats (Tyler’s on it).

This is by no means a complete list but it captures many of the topics we discussed yesterday (and it’s a cheat sheet for me to look back to):

• Open Web Foundation and the Open Web Foundation Discussion are dedicated towards providing a common working group for developing community specifications.
  

  The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

  The foundation is trying to break the trend of creating separate foundations for each specification, coming out of the realization that we could come together and generalize our efforts. The details regarding membership, governance, sponsorship, and intellectual property rights will be posted for public review and feedback in the following weeks.

  As we work out the fine details of the foundation, we invite and encourage individuals to come and join the discussion. To ask questions please visit our Q&A page. You are also invited to join the community and discuss ideas and specifications you would like to see developed within the foundation.

  I’m attempting to get involved by getting feedback on a couple of protocol ideas I was batting around. One search like status that will attempt to deal with distributed search over federated servers, and the other meta protocols in the hopes of having a description language to generate protocols on the fly (I just found out this morning this idea may be patented)

• Pubsubhubbub or Push
  

  A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS.

  Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks) when a topic (feed URL) they’re interested in is updated.

  The protocol in a nutshell is as follows:

  An feed URL (a “topic”) declares its Hub server(s) in its Atom or RSS XML file, via
  . The hub(s) can be run by the publisher of the feed, or can be a community hub that anybody can use. (Atom and RssFeeds are supported)
  A subscriber (a server that’s interested in a topic), initially fetches the Atom URL as normal. If the Atom file declares its hubs, the subscriber can then avoid lame, repeated polling of the URL and can instead register with the feed’s hub(s) and subscribe to updates.
  The subscriber subscribes to the Topic URL from the Topic URL’s declared Hub(s).
  When the Publisher next updates the Topic URL, the publisher software pings the Hub(s) saying that there’s an update.
  The hub efficiently fetches the published feed and multicasts the new/changed content out to all registered subscribers.
  The protocol is decentralized and free. No company is at the center of this controlling it. Anybody can run a hub, or anybody can ping (publish) or subscribe using open hubs.

  To bootstrap this, we’ve provided an open source reference implementation of the hub (the hard part of the protocol) that runs on Google App Engine, and is open for anybody to use.

• Ostatus
  

  OStatus lets people on different social networks follow each other. It’s transparent to your friends, colleagues and family which software or service you use. They can get your status updates on their own sites and reply, like, or re-post your updates.

  OStatus isn’t a new protocol; it applies some great protocols in a natural and reasonable way to make distributed social networking possible.

  Activity Streams encode social events in standard Atom or RSS feeds.
  PubSubHubbub pushes those feeds in realtime to subscribers across the Web.
  Salmon notifies people of responses to their status updates.
  Webfinger makes it easy to find people across social sites.
  OStatus weaves these protocols together to make an easy-to-implement distributed social network.

  Sites like Google Buzz, StatusNet, WordPress.com, and Tumblr have implemented some or all of these protocols today. We hope that defining the junctures where the protocols work together will encourage adoption of the entire suite.

  The OStatus spec is a first step in this direction. We’re eager to work with other implementers to make it better, to smooth the rough edges, and to improve the overall experience.

• Webfinger
  

  WebFinger is about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach public metadata to them. That metadata might include:

  public profile data
  pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
  a public key
  other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
  a URL to an avatar
  profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
  whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it’s NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
  or even a public declaration that the email address doesn’t have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.
  … but rather than fight about the exact contents of that file, WebFinger is about making that file discoverable at all. The community can explore and innovate within that discovery file later.

• ActivityStrea.ms and the mailing list, and wiki. There’s also a high level description.
  

  an extension to the Atom feed format to express what people are doing around the web
  The Activity Streams format has already been adopted by Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live, Opera, and many others.
  An activity is a description of an action that was performed (the verb) at some instant in time by some actor with some social object (the object).

• DiSo Project
  

  Silo free living.

  Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards – both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard APIs, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides: Information, Identity, and Interaction.

  Diso (dee • soh) is an initiative to facilitate the creation of open, non-proprietary and interoperable building blocks for the decentralized social web.

  Our first target is WordPress, bootstrapping on existing work and building out from there.

  So what does that mean?

  We’re building Wordpress plugins that implement or build on:

  microformats like XFN, hCard, XOXO — wp-contactlist, wp-profiles
  OpenID — wp-contactlist, wp-openid-server
  OAuth
  …and others

• Salmon Protocol, a Google code page and the mailing list
  

  Unifying the Conversations
  As updates and content flow in real time around the Web, conversations around the content are becoming increasingly fragmented into individual silos. Salmon aims to define a standard protocol for comments and annotations to swim upstream to original update sources — and spawn more commentary in a virtuous cycle. It’s open, decentralized, abuse resistant, and user centric.

• Identi.ca is a micro-blogging service based on the Free Software StatusNet tool

There’s a flurry of startup interest and social location apps that are working to glue the web to our physical locations. Tech enthusiast Robert Scoble prompted a Buzz discussion (another location capable media) to determine which was the best service, with varied opinions weighing in. Physical location and orientation is but one piece of the puzzle to seemlessly weave the web within our physical world and social lives. Augmented Reality is the channel of opportunity that will enable a rich blending of mobile web, location/orientation, and most importantly social discovery and connectivity.

Far Out Future

Looking further ahead I can perceive Kevin Kelly’s vision of Internet aware chips connecting all things and beings. In his latest work “What technology wants”, which he crafts using The Technium blog, I suspect we share the same conclusion: technology wants to embrace every aspect of the physical world. My expectation is that we’ll have full control over our personal networks (unless Apple & AT&T build them). Nano-technology will empower monitors within our bodies to probe for health risks. Tiny particle size chips will also enable full 4 dimensional mapping (3D space + time history) of our environments and have instant communication to our minds’ sensory processing centers. We’ll literally be capable of seeing through walls (we already can with crude phone camera apps), and sense all around us zooming in our perception to probe for greater details. The utility and creativity of such adaptive augmented reality tools is near limitless. But there’s a beautiful form of personalization that I haven’t yet explored. The implicit adaption of our surroundings to our wishes.

The Present

The trajectory forwards we’re developing at Victus Media is boosted by semantic social “listening” tools. Like caveman paintings compared to modelling the oceans of Europa, I’ve chosen to help make simple effective utilities that can pave the way towards an adaptive interconnected future. The start of our journey is introducing a pattern of web service behavior. Active web services can recognize the presence of a visitor, and use knowledge about a visitor’s interests to personalize the experience. As developers we’re always guessing and modifying tools to appease a large user base while alienating others. The ability to dynamically adapt a service to individual visitors will help familiarize new users and save proficient users time (two way search).

• A visit to a blog or news site could provide you with a list of posts on the sidebar which match your public expressed interests. This trivial to implement search overcomes the problem of comparing two unknown sets by connecting them (your interests with blog tags)
• A visit to a bookstore while travelling for business can be as comfortable as visiting one near home. By sharing your location and interests to approved third parties (businesses will pay for this privelege), the store could suggest relevant new releases that correspond to your socially expressed topics, previous purchases, and public friend recommendations.
• Upon walking into a coffee shop for the first time the barista could begin making your favorite drink with a simple gesture to approve the process
• A first visit to a virtual world like Second Life could place your avatar in a starting location that best matches your array of current interests, or provide you with a more intelligent short list of highly probable matching defaults

The goal of adaptive information services isn’t to remove choice, but to suggest a more rational selection of defaults to new visitors. Personalization is a competitive advantage future businesses won’t have the luxury of ignoring.

*note: we connect user interest tags to social IDs at the moment but the area of user ID is improving rapidly

Human Capital Trumps Monthly Visits

Startup founders and early stage investors are blinded by explosive user growth numbers (user attention). To be honest I can think of little else at this pre-traction stage of Victus Media. Although I know there’s much more that needs to happen after the first signs of user adoption, without it the project is dead in the water. User excitement, utility, and retention are all factors that drive growth rate. The mistake we make as founders and investors is boiling down human capital to a few coarse metrics.

With any early service you’re much better off with a handful of fanatics than hundreds or thousands of apathetic visitors. Uber fans are committed to your vision for the long haul (they’ll give you months instead of seconds) and will be patient as you ramp up revenue, resources, and a handful of brilliantly executed features (tune in to veteran entrepreneur/investor Steve Blank on features).

Here’s why apathetic visitors are death to your early stage startup:

• disinterested visitors are transients and won’t return to your service
• they won’t provide much needed feedback
• if apathetic users do give feedback, it will mislead a startup. Their interests have no concern for the startup’s success, and diverges greatly from the “best” user base. Each startup has to define and understand who is their ideal market
• they won’t zealously get their friends to try out the service
• they consume resources (time more than server costs) that should be dominated by early adopting uber fans

Power of Numbers

After getting your startup laser focused on over satisfying leading edge fans, you can begin to use the metrics. The value that matters is: Traction which for me is (new users X user retention rate). If you get 100 new users and they don’t return, it’s a obvious signal that you haven’t locked into real traction yet. All the hard work for hypothesizing, refactoring, and exploring value propositions pays off as soon as you see a smoothly growing Traction value week to week (last year I would have said month to month, but trends move faster now).

The true strength of human capital is when you have a sizeable level of satisfied users. The threshold population for enterprise applications may be a single satisfied customer. But for web services bigger is better. Numbers like 50 thousand to 1 million users show real impact. At this level your startup can begin influencing large scale social behavior, and disrupting existing markets. The power of human capital is such that embedded market titans like Microsoft, Google, and Apple have cause for alarm. For evidence look how Facebook, Twitter, and other social media is dominating link sharing and discovery. While buying intent is still highly correlated to BigCo search (Google, Bing), a drastic behavior change may be only a feature away.

The Darker Side

Careful this is a loaded question. As soon as you lock into a value (and it’s going to be less than you’d like unless you masterfully market your time), you will be pushed by those that pay your price to do things that are outside of your passion/interest space. This is a great case for setting boundaries of what you’re willing to work on, and managing expectations. As a business you set prices that enable you to compete efficiently on the features you and your customers value most. Both businesses and individual workers create a wide range of value with their efforts, and it’s best that price is free to fluctuate with value added (can be tricky to measure).

Ultimately other people will meet your price:

• If as a worker: Payees believe they can generate/save more wealth from your abilities than they pay you
• If as a business: Customers and other businesses value your service over alternatives. They generate more value or save time by relying on your team

The negotiation of relative value exchanged is the heart of business and collaboration, so how can we make this system more fluid?

Trust Enables Many to Act as One

The defining characteristic of the deal on the table is Trust. If both parties trust each other, they have confidence that the negotiation of services will be in both parties’ best interest. If there’s an impass that can’t be navigated around, the payer and provider both walk away without bad feelings. Lock in deals are an immediate signal of mistrust. Good business deals communicate and clear up any unknowns at the start. The more honest both parties are about their expectations and genuine abilities going into the deal, the more fruitful the outcome is likely to be. Trust is the true currency between people, and it is the most valuable asset in any relationship. I kid around, and make light of many things in life, but trust is sacred to me. My mind is hardwired never to forget broken trust and to protect it all costs.

The Greatest Networks are Founded on Trust

Individual tolerances for trust vary as much as people do. I’d like to see social net services enable users to create trust based networks. The links in the network between users and groups will each have a public/private measure and duration of trust. In fact these links can have many properties such as connecting topics, expertise, shared business interests, etc.

Trust is Priceless

I was reminded of the transient nature of existence over the last couple of days, while attending a funeral for a family member (Michelle’s Aunt Jenny). It gave me pause to question my planning, habits, and long term life strategy.

For the most part I assume with high confidence that I’ll live for 30-40 more years (and that my life partner will survive me). Conditioned on that, a great amount of my energy goes into building something for potentially the far out future. I dedicate my finest moments to communicating, learning and executing with respect to Victus Spiritus, Victus Media, and other interests. There’s no backup plan, I’ve burned the psychological bridge behind my trail forward. I believe there are only a handful of life defining decisions. The rest of our choices are just noise about some trajectory (we shouldn’t get too hung up on the nuances of every choice, any viable option works). With that thinking, leaning too heavily on past decisions becomes fraught with false assumptions of causation (sunk costs). It’s better we focus on the present and prospective future.

Although friends have cautioned me (thanks David Semeria) against a full commitment, the choice to build a business with real impact and social value was set before I began. The choice I make is to delay immediate gratification, expensive trips and luxuries, to leave open the possibility for enjoying them later. The trade-off is to sacrifice immediate income and free time, for the chance at building something of long-term value.

What if today was my last

Would it discount any decisions I make with respect to nurturing a business that may have only a slim chance of success over the next 5-10years? The driving force behind founding a startup is to magnify my influence on the present and future, and chart my own course into the raw unknown. I embrace the future more now than any time before this. The world is better served by my leadership, daring, and heart than by my passivity. After a good deal of introspection, I find my motivations true, and my resolve is steeled. I sincerely hope you find a similar resolution, it’s one of the driving forces behind my continued writing.

Look in, to project the fire of your life outward. There’s no time to lose

Founder of SocialToo Jesse Stay says the web is no longer open. He states that only a few large entities own the flow of information through both social and searchable web. DeWitt Clinton a Google software engineer responded with an eloquent description of what open means to him, and how even small budget businesses could construct a highly functional search engine (I keep bugging DeWitt and others about open semantic processing tools and interfaces).

I spent a few cycles thinking about the way businesses currently monetize the web. Companies that build better indexes of social and stand alone content win. While I celebrate the free market, I see a flaw in centralizing giant silos of social and web information. I don’t even think monetization is anywhere near where it could be if we embraced a different model. I explain why in the comment I left to both Jesse and DeWitt:

If owning the web comes down to knowing what’s in it Jesse, it’s not a stretch to create a decentralized index. Trusted distributed crawling
While we rely on massive datacenters (Goog, Bing, etc) and web crawling bots now, there will come a time when each node will be part of layers
of distributed indexes based on privacy/ownership. Any attempts to restrict information flow simply get routed around, and most of the revenue generated from web businesses has a short lifetime (decade/two tops?). I predicted the end of big social centralized services within ten years. The same forces that enable all of us to own our own social data (and lease it out to our favor) are the same that will enable all of us to own our own content (and lease it out to our benefit). Sharing all of my data publicly is of course my choice and then it’s “fair game” to remote entities to use.

Social is already implemented with protocols like Push over open source StatusNet. I see that Laconi.ca users can subscribe to public Buzz feeds with Push, this is a great beginning.

As developers we want clear standards, but defacto standards generated without external collaboration usually benefit the parent organization over others. For me social simplifies as one to one, one to many, and many to many relationships. Knowledge of the data index for the web is a one to many relationship today, I suspect that won’t be so for long.

There’s a lot more to both sides of the discussion so to find out more I highly suggest reading both posts. If you’re short on time here’s an excerpt from Jesse and DeWitt’s different perspectives.
Here’s a quote from Jesse capturing what he sees as a problem:

So we’ll soon have 3 ways of identifying our websites on the “open” web. I can identify my site through Facebook, as you see by the Facebook Connect login buttons scattered around. I can identify myself in the Google SocialGraph APIs, which, if you view the source of this site you’ll see a ‘rel=”me”‘ meta tag identifying my site so Google can search it. Who knows what Twitter will provide to bring my site into its network. Each network is providing its easiest ways of identifying your site within their own Social Graph, and calling it “open” so other developers can bring their stuff into their networks easily, without rewriting code.

I think it’s time we stop tricking ourselves into thinking the web is open at all. Google is in control of the web – they have it all indexed. Now that we are seeing that he who owns the Social Graph has a new way of controlling and indexing the web, which we are seeing by Facebook’s massive growth (400+ million users!), I think Google feels threatened. They’ll play every “open” term in the book to gain that control back. Of course the new meta tags are beneficial – is it really beneficial to “everybody” though? I argue the one entity it benefits most is Google. Yeah, it benefits developers if we can get everyone to agree on what “open” is, but that will never happen. I think it’s time we accept that now that the web is controlled and indexed by only a few large corporations, it is far from “open”. ”Open” is nothing more than a marketing term, and I think we can thank Google for that. No, that’s not a bad thing – it’s just reality.

DeWitt Clinton, a Google software engineer who works on and supports Buzz (google’s latest social network) responded to Jesse’s post:

1) Open protocols and formats mean two specific things to me:

The first is licensing of the protocols themselves, with respect to who can legally implement them and/or who can legally fork them. This involves patent and copyright licenses (and sadly yes, lawyers). While a small number of us are always debating the finer details of how it works, eventually there’s a binary aspect to it: a protocol has to be formally licensed for reuse for it to be open.

The second is the license by which the data itself is made available. (The Terms and Conditions, so to speak.) The formal definitions are less well established here (thus far!), but it ultimately has to do with who owns the data and what proprietary rights over it are asserted.

In an ideal, interoperable, and decentralized world, implementors can both clone and/or fork the protocols as desired (without asking permission), and users can get their own data back out without needing to follow to someone else’s restrictions about how they use it.

It’s important to look at both aspects above when judging if a system is open. Can I legally fork and/or clone it? And, am I entering into a arrangement that places limitations on my rights to use my own data? (And the corollary, are other people entering into a arrangement that puts limitations on their rights to share their own data with me?)

If the answer to either or both is “no”, then no matter what we may want to believe, regrettably it’s not an open system. (And don’t be misled—even the worst data silos are obviously going to enable some way to get data out, otherwise no one would put anything in. The question is what do you have give up to get it back out? It’s a question I believe more people should be asking, and asking it before they turn their data over to some network.)

So when I say “open” I don’t just throw the word around casually. I mean those two very precise things: what is the license, and what are the Terms. It’s not hand-waving, and it’s not marketing. It’s technical, and it’s legal. Boring to some, easy to ignore for most, but that doesn’t make it less important to understand or less important to get right.
…
3) Google absolutely benefits when the web benefits. That’s not something to be ashamed of—that’s something to be proud of. It’s a wonderful business model. I wish more companies were similarly aligned with the health of the web.

4) And as to why Google doesn’t implement some particular spec or work with some particular data provider? Well … the answer usually is: you’re asking the wrong guy. You really should be asking them.

Startup founders have a dizzying array of choices that will define their strategy, and financial trajectory. A couple of general categories cover a wide range of viable paths towards creating a healthy business.

Seize Opportunities

One strategy is to zero in on an existing market, and capitalize on opportunities that aren’t being addressed by other services. Deep market understanding and execution are key areas that foster this form of startup growth. This business structure is commonly founded on top of existing platforms, as the goal is not to create but to capture. The capture philosophy takes advantage of previous market creation, and leverages the overall sector growth to feed the startup.

Build New Markets

Another strategy for a bold startup is to create an entirely novel market. The risks are greater (unknown demand), but the rewards of creating and leading a new market are compelling. The new market strategy may be a realignment of an existing unfeasible product or service, or it may be a completely new technology or invention. These types of startups are platform builders. The platform benefits greatly by inspiring outside users and developers to utilize it. Generally a share of the revenue is split between platform creator and each service built on it. Lower costs and rich functionality prompt more rapid adoption and growth. This translates into spectacular opportunities for the platform startup.

The million dollar question, is your startup a capture effort, a platform building tool, or a mix of both? Make sure to focus on the areas that have the best fit (profit/growth) for your master plan and legendary startup. At Victus Media we’re leveraging existing social data, and utilities to compliment social search, but we’re working to enable a new market of adaptive web applications that will use our database.

In the blink of an eye, hundreds of new micro corporations have captured public attention. A startling shift is apparent in the decentralization of information authority. Broad distribution of information flow and media usage have revealed a bounty of opportunity to small analysis teams (you and me). In the past, large business structures (Reuters) and institutions dominated the realm of information collection and business analysis. But unless all raw information flows through a filtering choke point, the challenge of identifying every dominant opportunity is beyond centralized organizations. Eureka!

A hefty portion of the disruption of information authority is due to the change in media. We don’t all read the same newspaper, or watch or listen to the same news broadcast. In fact, many of us have chosen not to passively listen, but to create and add to the flow of information by sharing our observations and perspectives. The same activity shift holds true for tools. We can all swap and share our own open source or app store tools instead of relying on BigCo to make them for us*. Instead of short lists of large known corporations, analysts have been forced to look for trends in distributed community patterns. Seemingly overnight, new norms of infomation consumption and distribution are taking hold. The changes are chaotic, beautiful, but dangerous if you expect to coast along.

Resource Juggernauts Want In

Managers of vast capital wealth are trying hard to find a way to maintain and grow their holdings by pushing into the venture capital market. But the venture asset class can’t meet the level of growth and payout desired by investors. It’s a case of too many “hungry mouths” to feed. Venture capital works best for exponentially growing and disruptive startups, and only a limited selection of proto-companies meet this criteria a year. Many smaller business opportunities aren’t of sufficient size to justify limited investor time, and can’t execute expenditure of capital for optimal growth even if they had it. Add to that the falling cost to lock in to viable models (fast iterations around user/market models). It’s cheaper to fail and to find breakout success, so many founders are setting terms in their favor, or getting by with seed/family funding and savings/day job.

*note to self: add the real time tweet ticker mods, and real time image table jquery scripts to git hub.