CloudAve

Friday Evening Timepass: Cloud Wars

Krishnan Subramanian — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:23:41 -0700

The Best VC Pitch Tip That I Stole

Mark Suster — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:48:50 -0700

It’s been really fun keeping a blog again. I haven’t been writing since I sold my company to Salesforce.com. One of the things I’ve enjoyed the most is the conversation that it has created for me. More people have left comments on the blog, sent me Facebook notes or dropped me emails with either question, ideas for a post or challenging something that I’ve written.

The best comment that I’ve received was from my friend Jason Spievak, co-founder and CEO of RingRevenue whose company I invested in early this year. His comment was so obvious when I read it that I wish I had thought of it myself:

Given that most capital meetings don’t lead to a next step, I’ve found one great rule to be: never leave a meeting without getting a reference to another capital source. VCs will usually be willing to give you a name of someone else who might know your space better or otherwise be a better potential investor fit rather than just send you out the door with a “no thanks.”

So true. Most VCs want to help even if they don’t think the deal is a good fit for them. And we really don’t enjoy having to tell people “no” all the time (which is maybe why so many VC’s say, “we love your business – just come back and see us when you get some traction.” I call it the “soft” no.)

By the sheer law of numbers we have to say no to most of you. Consider this: I see in person or take web conferences for about 10 business minimum per week. Sometimes it is 15, sometimes it’s less. But that’s about 400-500 deals / year in one stage or another. (That excludes the many plans I receive that I deem not appropriate for a call or meeting). We’re 4 partners and we also have 2 associates and an analyst. As an office we see upwards of 1,000 deals / year. My math might be off a little because it’s late and I had a killer Tanqueray 10 martini tonight but we see a lot of deals.

So assuming that in a good year we fund 10 deals. That’s a 1% hit rate at best. So I like to tell people that by definition we have to turn down 99% of business that we see (a prominent entrepreneur who sold 2 businesses and then worked in VC for 8 years before quitting and going back to entrepreneurship said that he wanted to get out of VC because he got tired of turning people down all the time). So maybe that’s why there’s so many memes about how to best turn down entrepreneurs (see Fred Wilson and Brad Feld). It’s also why my philosophy is, “if most of the people that I see I’m going to need to turn down I might as well be nice to them. If I can’t fund them, at least I don’t want them to think I’m a dick also.”

So for many of the people that I see I try my best to give referrals where I can. If it’s not a good business I really do try hard to protect my friends and colleagues from having to sit through a time-wasting business. In that case the buck has to stop with me to tell the person that I’m not convinced about the company. But for many businesses it might be a matter of: stage too early, stage too late, wrong sector, wrong geography, too competitive to an existing investment, we have past “road kill” in a company that is similar in nature or frankly maybe I’m just working hard on 2 other deals and I don’t have the time or capacity to evaluate the deal. In any those cases I’m happy to give an intro and I usually try my best to offer (as I did with an interesting company I saw today called Ride Amigos that came in knowing they were too early stage for us but I feel confident will raise money from somebody else).

But as with most of life, most people don’t ask. You don’t ask, you don’t get. I always tell people who are in the job market that when you do an informational interview your goal isn’t to ask the person you’re meeting for a job, your goal is to ask for 3 more intros. In a way I think VC pitches are the same. Take Jason’s advice. In a VC meeting if you get the sense that the firm isn’t ready to move don’t be afraid to say, “if you don’t see us as a perfect fit for your firm do you have anybody else in town you think we’d be a better fit for?” And if your rapport is good (and it won’t always be) ask if they’d mind intro’ing you.

Thanks for the tip, Jason.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table)

Enterprise 2.0 – A Reflection

Ben Kepes — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:32:00 -0700

Spending a week in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 conference recently was great. Despite the plethora of channels open to us today (at the moment I have email, Twitter, IM and voice open in front of me) there is no replacement for face to face contact. This is never more so than for someone like myself who lives far from the tech centers of the world – meeting and reconnecting with people is crucial.

It was also refreshing to attend a business focused event after a few much more consumer-centric events that I’ve attended of late – the participants tend to have a much more pragmatic perspective on things – ROI is eminently important.

Reflecting back on the four days, I have to concur with a number of my fellow attendees who bemoaned the dearth of user case-studies at the event. Conference organizers always need to balance the relative needs of their attendees and their sponsors and align those with the financial imperatives – the general consensus was that the organisers of the Enterprise 2.0 conference didn’t get the mix quite right. I wouldn’t go so far as to completely agree with conference watcher-from-afar Dennis Howlett who was somewhat scathing in his remarks – that said he does have a point. As with most conferences, the real value was in the back channel and the lobby, hallways and after-parties were alive with the odd deal being done but more importantly connections being made.

As always there were some frustrations – I attended a panel looking at the use of microblogging tools within enterprise. Not surprisingly the panelists, all of them vendors, were completely confident that microblogging heralds the coming of a new paradigm. They were also fairly confident that their own services were in fact “platforms” – it seems the 2.0 world, once high on the prospect of being picked up by TechCrunch, is now high on the idea of being “a platform”. Even more telling were the two questions asked of the audience – firstly do you think microblogging is worth paying for (roughly half did) and secondly who would actually pay for the service (almost no one). In my curmudgeonly way I can’t help but think that there is a real disconnect between the Enterprise 2.0 illuminati who, having drunk the kool-aide of microblogging, have a heightened sense of its utility within an enterprise – I guess time will give the answer to that one.

In terms of highlights for me from the four days, the Booz Allen case study was impressive, showing a real benefit from investing time and resource into social tools. I’ve already blogged about youcalc which I’d have to say was by far the most promising start-up I encountered.

The Enterprise 2.0 organizers are moving two a twice a year format, with events on both coasts. For that to be successful they’ll need to focus much more heavily on user adoption and real world case studies. In the past 12 months the murmurings from attendees at these sorts of events has been that there needs to be real ROI to justify their attendance – the way to drive that is to have real end customers there, hearing real end-user case studies. Let’s not forget that vendor presence is an adjunct to an event like this, not the central theme.

CloudNews for 10th July, 2009

Sameer Gupta — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:30:00 -0700

StrataScale Expedites Time-to-Market for Microsoft SaaS Developers

StrataScale Inc. has announced that it has joined the Microsoft Software + Services Incubation Center Program. "Only the best hosting services are part of the Software + Services Incubation Center," said Aziz Ben Malek, general manager for the Americas at Microsoft Corp. "The program is a result of the evolving software industry which reaches far beyond just bringing software to the browser, and hosting providers are imperative in order for ISVs to be successful in the new world of software plus services." StrataScale Inc. has announced that it has joined the Microsoft Software + Services Incubation Center Program. "Only the best hosting services are part of the Software + Services Incubation Center," said Aziz Ben Malek, general manager for the Americas at Microsoft Corp. "The program is a result of the evolving software industry which reaches far beyond just bringing software to the browser, and hosting providers are imperative in order for ISVs to be successful in the new world of software plus services."

Paglo SaaS offering provides means to harness untamed collection of log and IT resources data

Paglo recently announced a new low cost service that allows companies to tackle the task of trying to winnow out a rapidly growing mountain of log data. As I said in the Paglo release on the news, “Companies need to harness and analyze the information explosion coming from all of their computer, server, network and log data. It’s a very productive way to improve operating efficiencies, gain a clear understanding of true IT costs, and to meet compliance requirements. As an on-demand service, Paglo helps drop the complexity barriers to quick and effective log search and analytics.”

Making SaaS Easy Corp. Aquires IAC-EZ

According to reports, Making SaaS Easy Corp. recently announced that it has acquired IAC-EZ, an online accounting application specifically designed for entrepreneurs, sole proprietors, freelancers and micro-businesses. We chose IAC-EZ as our first Software as a Service product because it has a powerful offering, a dedicated customer base and unparalleled leadership that brought the application to the market quickly and efficiently,” Scott Myers, chief executive officer of Making SaaS Easy Corp. said in a statement.

Auto-Graphics Signs Reseller Agreement with Lyrasis

Auto-Graphics Inc. has announced that it has signed a reseller partnership agreement with Lyrasis to provide Auto-Graphics’ AGent™ suite of library automation products to its membership base. “We are very excited to announce this partnership. Adding Auto-Graphics as a vendor shows our commitment to our members and to offering products that meet their needs. Lyrasis members now have greater access to Auto-Graphics’ suite of automation products and services that are highly regarded as affordable, cutting-edge and well-supported by their user communities,” said Randy Bell, manager, Program Management & Development at Lyrasis.

Radian6 Listens to the Demand and Integrates with Salesforce.com

According to reports, Radian6 will be integrating with SaaS CRM giant Salesforce.com. The integration of Webtrends enables users to leverage conversational Web analytics within the Radian6 listening platform. Ramsey says the Salesforce.com integration has been in the hopper for about a year. "We've been out talking to customers about this in the market and everyone was asking, 'How do we get this integrated into our overall CRM platform?' " he says. "Ultimately, that's where it’s headed in the enterprise."

SaaS Provider AppRiver Selected for Value by CRN

AppRiver has announced that it has been selected by Everything Channel as a CRN Emerging Technology Vendor. “Solution Providers seek out innovative vendors that create new and innovative ideas to help them build revenue and customer loyalty,” said Robert C. DeMarzo, senior vice president and editorial director, Everything Channel. “Our Emerging Tech list is where Solution Providers go to find these vendors. We congratulate all of the vendors for their innovation and creativity and their commitment to the technology sales channel.”

GMT Corp. to Demonstrate Workforce Management Solutions

GMT Corp. will be showing off its expanded flagship enterprise workforce management solutions, GMT Planet and GMT On-Demand, at the 42nd Annual National Association of Federal Credit Unions Conference and Exposition. “This conference is an ideal venue to show credit union executives how workforce optimization can help them achieve the member service and bottom-line results they desire to remain competitive in the market,” said Simon Angove, chief executive officer of GMT.

Is VC too Fat and Happy?

Mark Suster — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:30:41 -0700

Much criticism has come of our industry in the past few months and in my opinion much of it is deserved (but I’m definitely a believer in the meme that VC isn’t broken but some of the participants are (see here, here and here)). But the VC industry is too fat – a thoughtful piece by Paul Kedrosky on shrinking the industry by half is here.

The latest to weigh in was the NY Times with this well written piece in yesterday’s paper. I think it propely captures the moment and questions whether the structure of the industry for the past 10 years is the the right one for the next 10. In my opinion it also makes Tim Draper truly seem out of touch … we need more VC money to “spread the wealth to the seven billion creative minds out there.” Really? WTF? I’m prefer to assume he was quoted out of context since I’m told Tim isn’t a bad guy. (UPDATE: Great response from Bill Bryant of DFJ is here. As I said, I had hoped it was out of context).

My own views echo those in the NY Times article and come from my experience of raising VC as a entrepreneur over 2 companies and 8 years and working with 9 firms that invested and many VC’s that issued term sheets that we never closed on. Here are my conclusions:

1. There is way too much money in VC – Lowering the amount of money will be healthy for VC’s and start-up companies. When I was a start-up CEO I always believed in charging a fair price for the products that I created. But in 1999-2001 so much money went into our competitors that people were willing to low-ball on price to win deals because they (we all) had too much VC money that would fund our losses. In today’s world this is worse – people are willing to offer products for free funded by 2 years worth of VC money (and I’m not even talking about ad supported businesses).

2. Fund sizes have been way too large – I remember pitching on Sand Hill Road in 2005 for my second company, Koral, and I told VC’s that I only wanted $2 million. A number of investors told me that their minimum was $5-8 million and they encouraged me to take more money, “because I’d need it.” Luckily I was on company number two and I had already painfully learned the lesson of raising too much capital so I didn’t follow this advice. At the time I couldn’t understand this mentality until it was explained to me this way, “look, I have a $600 million fund. I can’t invest $2 million in companies and stay actively involved.”

Actually, I get this. But then I think this fund ought to be a later stage growth equity firm and not a VC or they ought to have more partners in the firm investing smaller amounts. I believe passionately in capital efficient businesses that prove out their model before trying to scale. This suits the interest of the VC but I believe it suits the interest of the start-up founders even more so. Some VC firms like Accel, Index and others have created separate “growth” funds with larger dollar sizes for later stage deals – that makes sense to me.

The incentives for many VC’s has been wrong. They’ve been too happy to have multiple “stacked” funds of large sizes so that their management fees (which are typically 2% of the fund size) can be large. I don’t believe that VC’s who maximize their fees by having large funds are in the interests of their Limited Partners and I actually believe it encourages the wrong people to want to work in VC. (as I side note I wonder how LP’s can justify this size of management fees for the “mega” funds that have billions of dollars. Do they think it creates aligned interests to make partners so wealthy on just deploying capital?)

Dana Settle said it well in the NY Times piece. Start-ups need less money to get going these days and you can get a good return at a $100 million exit provided you didn’t put in too much money and you can get in at an early stage. Venture exits last quarter on average were just $22 million last quarter (vs. $41 million a year before $60 million over the last 8 years). I know we’re all looking for the home run that “returns the fund” but to be successful I believe the industry needs more Greycrofts.

3. There are way too many non-operators - I won’t go as far as to say that every VC needs to have been an operator because I’ve worked with tons who I really respect who don’t come from an operator background. I certainly believe operating experience helps a lot, though, and believe that every firm needs to have a few entrepreneur partners in their stable. I experienced way too many ex i-banker and consultants who never had any operating experience and had a better grasp on whether my operating margin in year 5 was appropriate vs. an intuitive feel on whether my product would be adopted by customers.

No doubt they can do the deep analysis and really help at financing time to analyze the pro’s / con’s of venture debt. And I’m sure they really earn their money at exit time in the sale. But some of them lack the depth of understanding in the key decisions that each entrepreneur faces. They have no idea what it feels like to be 3 weeks away from missing payroll with an employee asking you whether it is a good idea to buy a house (should you actually tell them there is a 10% chance you’ll be out of work in 3 weeks?) or customers are entrusting you with orders that you’re not 100% sure you’ll be able to fulfill. What advice can they give you about dealing with customers in this scenario? If VC’s truly understood the angst and emotional drain this puts their founders under they wouldn’t bleed you until the 11th hour waiting for your internal financing term sheet so that they get more information or negotiate a better deal with you. A great VC wouldn’t do this.

I recently debated with some founders the best way to go about laying off one of their employees. They were telling him they were letting him go for cost control reasons when it was really for performance reasons. I’ll cover the topic some other day but I believed the right thing to do was to fire him for performance and tell him this. I gave them 30 minutes of rationale from my experience on why I thought that would help and not hurt with morale. (btw, they didn’t take my advice ;-) I have been through more downsizing (can you say 2001?) then I care to think about and have had many years of firing based on performance. It’s never fun. Many VC’s have never had to deal with this “dirty” work and never will. Sure, they’ve let an analyst or associate go but in the VC world this is very different than cutting a developer on a tight team of 6 developers when each of the remaining 5 could go out and get another great start-up job without a sweat. Not true in VC.

I like to say that you can’t run a burger chain unless you’ve flipped burgers. I think we could use more burger-flipping VCs. I think that’s why so many people are excited to hear about the Andreessen Horowitz fund.

4. In a strong wind even turkeys can fly – I believe that there are way too many VC’s that believe their own hype from the successes that they had in the late 90’s (or frankly from 05-08). It reminds me of the real estate investors who were telling me what a fool I was not to be buying condos in Florida in 2006. The difference in VC is that many of the senior people in industry who had past successes don’t have real down side when markets become more difficult. They are simply able to stay in their funds and milk it. Obviously the industry luminaries like Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Accel have continued to prove they can pick the best winners but there are also many who had hits by sheerly being in the market.

Years ago a sage mentor of mine told me in 1997, “don’t assess our company relative to competition now. In a strong wind even turkeys can fly. In a down market the best companies separate themselves from the pack. The weak disappear.” So it goes with VC. Eventually those with no leadership will dwindle and help realize Paul Kedrosky’s prediction.

5. Some VC’s lack empathy. Some VC’s simply can’t understand the world of the start-up founders or they’re too far removed from the daily grind to really empathize. Being a CEO is much lonelier than anyone who’s never done it can imagine. I know that there are the breakout successes like Google, Twitter and YouTube. But the rest of companies go through through cycles. Even the best companies go through it. I’m sure that LinkedIn, Facebook, Mint and others have been through tough times.

You don’t have many people to share your problems with because you try to keep it together for all your staff. You need to come in every day to the office and motivate people even when you have your own self doubt and worries. You need to hire, sell, talk positively to the press, etc. while blindly having faith that your next round of capital is going to come. You have co-founder issues. Your clients grind you. Your employees need more money to get by. Your product is shipping late and with some of your key features postponed. Your crack developer quit to move to NY. Your spouse or girl/boyfriend is irritated because s/he hasn’t seen you enough. Or worse you don’t have one and you’re getting too fat. This is an unbelievably honest piece from an entrepreneur coving this topic. Have you been there? That’s when I think you can offer real advice. That’s where a VC needs empathy.

6. Are some VC’s too old?. The NY Times article alludes to this. As for me, I’m not ageist. I see fantastic VCs in their 50’s/60’s that blog, use Facebook, use Twitter, IM people and use Salesforce.com, Google Docs, RSS Readers, etc. (no, using a Kindle and a Blackberry doesn’t count). The NY Times piece profiles one of our industry veterans, Alan Patricoff. He still works incredibly hard. I don’t know how old Howard Morgan at First Round Capital is but I know he’s not 35. He travels more than most 35 year olds I know and knows more about what’s going on in early-stage tech than many of these same people.

I think it’s more about mentality and willingness to accept the creative destruction of the new without being jaded by your past. I remember a conversation I had with a prominent older VC from Sand Hill Road 6 months ago who decided to call it quits. I asked him why and he said, “I just realized that it’s all changing so fast and I don’t have it in my to want to learn all the new technologies that everybody in their 20’s are playing with.”

Blogs are reshaping the publising indutry. Companies like TopSpin Media are finding new distribution channels for musicians. Twitter is chaning our communication landscape. Cloud computing is coming and will change the IT industry. Young people do place real value on virtual goods and define their self worth through online brands the way we do in our offline lives. People will spend hours translating movies, adding restaurant reviews and updating Wikipedia for nothing more than to be part of a community and be “Internet famous” to that community. Virtual reality and augmented reality are real phenomena and not this year’s fad.

As one senior VC partner lamented to me “kids these days don’t read physical newspapers any more” and I showed him how much news I could consume from so many more sources than he could through RSS feeds and after showing him he still didn’t get it. Some people never will.

My advice to entrepreneurs – find a VC you feel can really relate to you and your company on a personal level. Find people that are in it for the passion of building great products and love the rush of the start-up. Find “egg breakers” willing to take risks. And be careful of VC’s that have a gleam of easy money in their eyes.

Update: several people asked me for VC’s that do “get it.” There are many and I don’t want my post to be seen as damning of the whole industry – just several players in it (not to mention that many hedge funds did venture investing in the past 3 years who had no previous VC experience). Here just a quick, non comprehensive list of some obvious VC’s who do get it: I think there’s a host of VCs who do get it. True Ventures, Foundry Group, Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund, and I obviously I feel GRP Partners in LA (who funded 2 of my companies and I worked with for 7 years before I chose to join). There are obviously many, many more.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table)

Handful Of Monopoly Infrastructure Players - A Shortsighted Idea

Krishnan Subramanian — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Some commentators in the field of Cloud Computing like to promote the idea that there will be a single (or a handful) monopoly player(s) in the Cloud infrastructure market. The biggest reason quoted to justify this claim is the high cost of building and maintaining the datacenters. The supporters of this school of thought argue that not many companies can afford this level of investment and hence the marketshare will get consolidated with a few big players who can afford. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. are considered to be the players who will compete in this space. I belong to the opposite camp and I believe that the future of Cloud infrastructure is an ecosystem of open, federated Clouds that interoperate with one another. In this post, I will offer my thoughts to justify my argument against the handful of players idea.

Some of my reasons against the possibility for a single or few players cloud ecosystem are as follows. The first reason has the potential to be controversial and the rest are entirely based on technical and business common sense.

At the risk of being branded as someone who stereotypes people, I would like to say that this handful of monopoly players thinking is mostly an American thinking. It is a result of the binary thinking that is actively cultivated in US. Having spent the years that shaped my thinking in a country where they play cricket matches for five days and stayed satisfied with a "draw" result, I don't give too much merit to winning or losing in the marketplace. Having spent the formative years in a very diverse country where there is a political party for every single group, I don't subscribe to the binary thinking either. It is not either you are "with us" or "against us" for me. It is not either you are a republican or a democrat for me. it is not either you are a capitalist or a communist for me. I believe in the many shades of grey and hence I lack the idea of binary thinking. Having made my thought process clear, my first point is that there is no need to have big winners and big losers in the marketplace. We can have a perfectly normal and competitive business landscape without a single vendor getting the monopoly status. It is not necessary for the marketplace to have a Microsoft with 90% marketshare in the desktop software business or a Google with 80% marketshare in the search business. The landscape will still be capitalistic with many players having smaller percentage of marketshare. Companies investing in the infrastructure business can still be profitable without grabbing the biggest share in the pie.
The very fact that this world is still divided into many countries and each country has its own regulatory structures is another important reason that goes against the single or handful players idea. Of course, these big players can build datacenters in any country they want. But government regulations, in general, can be really weird and if it involves every single government in the world, I don't have to explain the complexity of weirdness these handful of players will have to face. Let me be blatantly presumptive here and state that it is just not possible for these handful of players to take care of these regulatory requirements.
When you make an assumption that only a handful of cloud infrastructure players will exist, you also make another assumption that only a handful of countries exist in this world. Let us go with this assumption and see what emerges from this kind of thinking. When you have only a handful of players, they will only be building the infrastructure in those countries where they will get a very good return for their investment. These players are private businesses and not charitable organizations (or government). They have no obligation to spend their money if there is no significant return on their investments. This implies that we will be seeing datacenters built only in a handful of nations. Many countries, may be even one particular continent, will never see any cloud infrastructure built inside of their borders. These countries, which by the way will be significant portion of the world, will never get to take complete advantage of the Cloud technologies due to the regulations in these countries. They will also lose out their chance in getting a good network infrastructure. In short, the "handful of players" school of thought is short sighted and cannot happen.
Once upon a time, the consumption in the marketplace was mainly from US or from the western world. Now the world is flat and we are seeing consumption from countries from every corner of the world. We are also seeing innovation from countries in every corner of this world. From an era where people used to stand in line for days to get visa to come into US, we are seeing a reverse migration from the US. Not only the consumption has spread across the world, innovation is also springing up from unexpected places. When people in a country get innovative, you will see investments flowing into these countries. Let us not undermine the power of such investments. There will be investors who pump in money to build datacenters in these countries like the recent investment from a Scottish firm.
The human race has learnt a lesson from the mistakes of the past. They have fully understood the implications of monopoly players in the marketplace. A powerful government is a danger to the freedom of the society and it is the same case with having a single monopoly private player. People have understood the consequences very well after their mistake in the desktop era. They are much more careful now and this "enlightenment" will ensure that there won't be just a handful of players with a potential to lock-in the customer data inside their infrastructure. As we move from the desktop world to the Cloud based world, we are giving up some control over our data in order to take advantage of the benefits of the Cloud. When we give up the control, we are extra cautious and we want to make sure that no one locks-in our data into their infrastructure. This implies that we will definitely have an ecosystem of Open Clouds.
Last, but definitely not the least, many infrastructure companies and enterprises have already spent enormous amounts of money in building their infrastructure. They are not going to let their investments go down the drain. They will definitely ensure that there are many infrastructure players in the Cloud ecosystem. Then, there are companies like IBM, Cisco, HP, Dell, etc. who won't like the idea of having a handful of infrastructure players because it will be detrimental to their businesses. What is the guarantee that these handful of players won't build their systems on their own like Google or go directly to the manufacturing units in China to procure the hardware needed? Even if they buy through these hardware vendors, what is the guarantee that they will not flock to a single hardware vendor and, thereby, making that vendor a monopoly player? These varied business interests among the many hardware players will definitely keep the Cloud ecosystem federated.

In my opinion, the idea that there will be only a handful of players with near monopoly power is simplistic and shortsighted. The world we live is diverse with varying needs and complex regulations. There is no way these handful of players can deliver the requirements of this world.

Gist: Connection Dashboard for Your Life

Dan Morrill — Thu, 9 Jul 2009 23:55:00 -0700

This is something I have been looking forward to, and I’ll be down at the Gist offices on Friday the 17th taking a look around and doing a general interview with them. In preparation for the interview, I got a beta account with Gist and have tied it into almost a life stream dashboard of people I need to pay attention to, people I want to pay attention to, and those that have some good stuff every now and then.

On first blush Gist is a dashboard for following all the important people to you, which is different that FriendFeed. The idea here is not to start a conversation, but follow the things that they are sending and posting across facebook, twitter, gmail, outlook, or import as a CSV file. Once you have that set up, you can start following along with what others are doing across the social networks and into your e-mail. This is more of a business application than a social application, and this is going to be one that I will use a lot. Although I would also like to see support for MSN and Yahoo mail, and a few other services like FriendFeed because not all my friends are in the same place, and I have friends segregated by e-mail as well.

When you are importing from a service, it only takes a few minutes (for under 1000 friends). Gist will not download more than 1000 people that you are following on twitter. This is not a big deal for those of us with a small followership, but for folks with the mega accounts of 10,000 or more people that they are following, this could be an issue.

The dashboard is very nicely constructed; it makes sense and gives you the information you want in an easy to use and readable format. To pull all your meetings and other information you will need to download the Gist plug-in for Outlook to fully synch the two systems so you can be working off one dashboard in total. It does not have an option to tie into OWA (outlook web access) so remote workers might not be able to fully synch between their mobile systems until they can get to a company computer, and install the Gist Toolbar for Outlook.

Otherwise, pleasantly surprised to see that the product is as good as it is when it is still in beta. Easy to use and understand, importing is very easy, and managing the data is also very easy, from shifting the importance of people, to dropping people who sometimes just end up in an account somewhere. This is promising software, and tons of questions to ask on Friday.

If you have any questions you would like me to ask at Gist on the 17th, let me know, and I’ll ask them for you.

(Cross-posted @ TechWag)

Twitter Observations

Mark Suster — Thu, 9 Jul 2009 22:37:07 -0700

When I first signed up for Twitter on April 25th, 2007 I was curious what it what all about. I had been reading a lot about Twitter on blogs followed through its usage at the SXSW conference in Austin when it really “blew up” (and as you can see here - not everybody thought it would be an overnight success). I sent invites to a number of my colleagues at Salesforce.com (where I worked at the time) and the response by one of the colleagues I respect the most was, “Twitter? What are you, 13?” I sent out the obligatory messages on Twitter but never heard much back from the people I Tweeted to. It felt a bit like owning a fax machine when nobody else you knew had one.

So now that Twitter is starting to gain mass adoption many of you know about all of the benefits (but there are some drawbacks even some experienced users weren’t aware of). So many of my friends & family are new to Twitter and always make the first observation, “I don’t get it”. So I thought I’d write a few observations about Twitter as it stands in July 2009 (more comments another day).

1. Twitter is asymmetric – what does that mean? Up until now in social networks all of our relationships were bilateral. You friended me (or vice versa) and I decided if we wanted a mutual relationship. Before Twitter I thought this was normal. I had a rule on my social networks. If I didn’t know somebody personally I just didn’t accept the request. It was nothing personal, just that in my view I had to at least have met the person somewhere to be connected. I didn’t want people in LinkedIn asking me for intros to people I didn’t really know. On Facebook I post personal information that isn’t too sensitive but is more than I would share with people I don’t know. If you want to read a deeper analysis on the issue see here by Tim O’Reilly (note that Goodreads changed their model from “friending” to “following” as a result of this post).

I think asymmetric following is a big breakthrough because it enables you to follow people who might add very interesting commentary that you can learn from or link to and they don’t feel obliged to follow you if they don’t know you. Examples of people I follow who I don’t even know include Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus and a guy I’ve respected for years), Paul Kedrosky who is an awesome writer on economic topics and VC/PE – his blog is here, andKara Swisher, who writes for the must read website All Things D and whose acerbig humor I love reading. I don’t know any of these people personally and none of them follow me. Yet I enjoy reading their posts.

2. Asymmetric has problems – some not obvious to the user. I don’t follow too many people. As of now it’s 235 people. The reason is that I really want to read the stuff that comes in from the people that I care about without it “getting lost in the sauce”. I know I could segment my traffic a bit on TweetDeck or similar apps but generally I believe the more people you follow the more posts that get missed. Of my 235 I’m guessing only about 125 post regularly. But here is the problem: I have a friend that I’ve met at a few conferences and met for breakfast named Alexia Tsotsis who is journalist at LA Weekly and is really sweet. Back when I was following about 100 people she had 400 people she followed and 2,400 that followed her. So she is used to having tons of “noise” in her feed and she has posted 2,500 updates – so sometimes she “speaks” a lot.

Some mornings I’d check Twitter and I’d have 8 posts from Alexia. I didn’t follow many people so her regular Tweets filled my whole stream. Over cocktails one night I told her I knew everything about what she had been doing over the past couple of months. She forgot the asymmetric rule works in reverse. Because I don’t follow a lot of people if they speak often, I hear all. Other people have commented to me that I Tweet a lot. I actually don’t think I do (851 updates to date) but if you only follow 25 or 50 people I could see how I would seem chatty.

3. Asymmetric has problems (continued) – Another problem I note is that some people have too many followers. In the early days of Twitter when somebody followed a prominent person he / she probably quickly looked to see if he knew the person and if he did he followed the person back. (see stat 4 for proof here) But now that these prominent people have tons of followers they probably don’t always look to see who is now following them. There is no easy way of saying, “which of my friends am I not following?” so the later you join Twitter the harder it is to get more prominent or popular people to follow you. This is a bummer because you want to be part of their conversation and direct message them (which you can’t do if they don’t follow you) but they’re probably not aware they’re not following you (or they are secretly avoiding you (me) ;-) And it’s a bit awkward to email somebody and say, “I noticed you’re not following me.”

4. The problem of the “over follower” – some people have a policy to either “auto follow” everyone that follows them or have a strategy to follow lots of people to get people following them back. Frankly I don’t understand this. What I love about Twitter is reading the posts from friends, colleagues, people I admire and news sources like TechCrunch, VentureBeat and Silicon Alley Insider. If you follow too many people you’re probably sub-optimizing the benefits you could get from following a more concentrated group of people. Note that the founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, has 1 million followers and he follows 887 people (and I think he only increased this when he got critisized publicly for not following enough people).

5. Finding people sucks. Twitter needs to fix this. First, if you want to find my friend Francisco Dao and know that his Twitter handle is “TheMan”? Try typing “theman” into Find People on Twitter. He doesn’t even come up. (I’m sure this will be fixed) When I invested in the company RingRevenue it took ages for their Twitter address to get into the index in time for our launch announcement. Type in the co-founder’s name, Rob Duva, and you get no results and a “did you mean “bob dunn”? OK, so a second search shows that he chose the address @robertduva but you’d think that the search algorythm could pick that up.

It’s even harder when you get into common names like Mike Jones, COO of MySpace who lists his name as Michael Jones and has a handle of @mjones. I would love to get some mapping tools that shows me who all my friends on Facebook and LinkedIn are and maps them to their Twitter address. I’d love an Outlook integration that shows me people’s Twitter address next to their email address. And I’d love to have that functionality like LinkedIn and Facebook that says “people you might want to connect with” and/or a feature that let’s other people suggest friends to you as they have on Facebook. I know it’s all coming – but for now finding people on Twitter sucks.

Update: Useful comment by David that you can find anybody if you know their Twitter name by typing out their name as in www.twitter.com/theman – this is also useful if you want to see all of the updates from that one person.

6. Twitter Newbies – When you first get started it’s hard to figure out. It’s like talking when nobody is listening. When Twitter gets better “onboarding tools” it will be truly ready for the mass market. For now it has a ways to go to be more user friendly. For all the people who are new to Twitter (and all the people who told me, “I don’t get it”) I’d say the following. It’s OK to be a “consumer” of Twitter rather than a “contributer” for a while until you get the hang of things. I spend way more time reading what people write than writing myself. Subscribe to your favorite online news sourcs (me: NYTimes, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOM, AlleyInsider) my wife (Oprah, Perez Hilton and the Happiness Blog).

It’s OK to just read the news, click on links and follow your close friends. When you feeling like joining in – you will. And remember that Twitter is distributed. I enjoy reading it on UberTwitter, which is the app I run on my Blackberry to read when I have down time and feel like getting caught up. On the iPhone there’s a number of apps to choose from such as Tweetie or Twitterific. On your desktop you can read native at Twitter.com or download TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop which give you more tools to consume things.

If you want to check out some cool Twitter stats see here – including that Los Angeles is the fastest growing Twitter city!

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table)

Why Bing is Gaining on Google

Zoli Erdos — Thu, 9 Jul 2009 16:20:42 -0700

OK, I admit, today is humor day. I got special permission from Ben to do one more, then we’re back to regular programming.

Bing is gaining on Google. Do you know why? Check these Google image search results for the keyword Bing. My friend and CloudAve guest blogger Chris Yeh could come up with all sorts of theories on why she is winning, but I'll skip the details.

On a serious note (and it's not even tomorrow) here's an easy way to experiment yourself: either use Bing vs. Google online, or better yet, add it as a search provider to your browser and observe the results for a few days.

pubsubhubbub … yaba daba do… oh, Yeah, Fast RSS, too

Zoli Erdos — Thu, 9 Jul 2009 11:44:26 -0700

This must be video day. First the Chrome OS Prank, then the Office 2010 video. I can’t resist.. or maybe I’m in a light mood, but reading the news on pubsubhubbub all I can say is yaba daba do.

Oh, yeah, pubsubhubbub will speed up feeds and all that… serious stuff.

Thanks for watching CloudTube.