Hi, this is Steve Jobs, and I want to welcome you to the NeXT world. We think you’re gonna love this computer. It’s got the most advanced applications of any computer shipping today, AANNNDDD, it’s the first computer designed from scratch to be an interpersonal computer, to extend personal computing into the realm of improving group productivity and collaboration, which we think is going to be the most exciting thing happening in desktop computing in the first half 90’s. So welcome to the NeXT world, and let us know what you think of your new computer.

Audio file: Steve Jobs Welcome to the NeXT World

Careful, it’s catchy!

Talk2Us is not yet ready to announce themselves, but here’s a teaser: anyone out there remember Wildfire, the oh-so-sexy virtual assistant from the late-90’s? This is Wildfire++, modernized, and much more relevant to the work and personal lives of everyone enmeshed in an over-connected world.

I can’t wait for this to go live.

Some first impressions and questions:

• Very cool, very smart, tons of unknowns.
• What will publishers with their own video content think about this?
• Will there be an opt-out setting for publishers who still want to run display ads through their AdSense account?
• SpotRunner and other self-service video ad creative agencies could be big winners from this.
• Do you classify this as display or performance ads? My guess is the model will end up being a mix of both. A display ad teasing the video with a performance component on the click-to-play.
• Will there be a follow-up call to action beyond the first video? A second video, maybe, or another display ad? Or maybe CPC text ads? It could be any or all of these.

One thing is exceptionally clear: the few lines of JavaScript that AdSense publishers have installed on their sites are Google’s gateway to deliver any bit of Web functionality that can be imagined across the incredibly large network with the flip of a switch, and today Google has said clearly that they’re not afraid to experiment. Howard Lindzon says this is a big deal for video and Rafat Ali’s right that there’s a critical if attached to this particular campaign, but there should be little doubt that this is only scratching the surface of Google’s ambitions to leverage the prime real estate they already control on an overwhelming number of Internet properties (and don’t forget mobile fits in there, too). Think someone at Google isn’t wondering how some derivative of Gadgets – Google’s framework for encapsulating pretty much anything you can imagine – might be published and monetized in this same way? What does the Web start to look like when what we think of today as ad units deliver more value to end users than the site where they’re displayed does?

This isn’t just relevant for content providers, either. In fact, it may be an even bigger deal for application providers who may end up with a viable, performance-based model to federate and monetize whatever it is they do as contextual transactions – and I’m using that term about as broadly as it can be applied – across a huge swath of the Web.

Give it time, but the implications of this have the potential to significantly change the economics of the Web and create a new class of opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors. I’ll be watching it closely, and you probably should, too.

Just started to follow you on twitter and found your background / experiences very compelling. So a question I have for you revolves around taking my career to the next level. I am looking to go from in-house digital expert to a more vocal role with in the tech / online community – any suggestions?

Couple of options.

One: go your own way. If you have the connections, drive, and ability to sustain yourself through lean times, there’s no better way to establish yourself as a leader than simply by leading. This is hard, takes tons of time and energy, can tax your family and friendships, and certainly isn’t for everyone.

The other: find a company that could benefit from advocacy and evangelism and align yourself with them. Devour every bit of news, media and information you can about a specific topic related to that business and start speaking about what you learn. Participate significantly in online social communities, and equally important, in the real world communities around you. Make friends, help them as much as you can, stay focused on what you’re doing, and share your passion and drive with others.

[Where you work now] is a good platform. See if there are opportunities to grow within the company – lay out a plan, set goals, set a timeline, and communicate those to your boss or someone else in the organization with whom you’d like to ally. Even if you feel like things have plateaued there for whatever reason, it’s often quite possible to break through any perceived barriers by first changing the way you think then telling others you’ve changed and showing them through performance and results.

Good luck!

TechStars is one of a number of micro funds based loosely on the work Paul Graham is doing at Y Combinator that are exploiting the exceptionally low cost requirements to get a tech company off the ground today. Here in DC we have LaunchBox Digital run by my friend Sean Greene and his partners, Europe now has seedcamp, and there are no doubt others in the works elsewhere that we’ll hear about soon. Even the city of New York is getting in on the action.

Programs like TechStars are just scratching the surface of new models for early stage investing, and in particular there are opportunities to combine these programs with larger funds capable of following the seed stage. Paul Kedrosky and others have talked about the changing model for some time, but what do you think? How would you change the venture model?

Thanks, TechStars. Looking forward to seeing you all soon!

(see: Eric Litman at TechStars)

Let me know what you think!

(see: Eric Litman.com)

Matt Malden, Yield’s CEO, is a great guy with a world-class team behind him. Congrats, Yield!

Listen to 39 minutes of our hour long conversation here:

Read the full story and download the podcast here: Eric Litman interviewed by Mashable

Articles

• Washington Post: “Building his own startup ecosystem”
• CNET’s News.com: “Escape from social network frenzy?”
• Fast Company: Lynne D Johnson reports from Eric Litman’s talk at NextNY Web 2.0

Audio and Video

• CNET’s the404: “The ‘Where I can’t Stop Laughing’ Episode“
• NextNY Web 2.0: Eric Litman speaking at Web 2.0 Meetup in NYC: (part 1)  (part 2)
• Jonny’s Partay: Eric Litman on Jonny’s Partay
• PulverTV/Mediacasters.tv: Eric Litman visits Startup Weekend Boulder

Thanks so much to Zach Goldfarb at The Washington Post, Caroline McCarthy at CNET’s The Social, and Lynne Johnson at Fast Company for the mentions, and for Jonny Goldstein, Jeff Pulver and Laura Fitton, and, of course, the awesome Wilson Tang, Randall Bennett, and Jeff Bakalar of the404 for having me on their shows!

• University Venture Summit, Salt Lake City, UT, Jan 18 @ 8:30 AM: What VCs Look for in a Startup & Industry Trends
• DOMAINfest Gloal ‘08: Hollywood, CA, Jan 21 @ 5PM: Easy Steps for Building Out Domains

If you’ll be at either of these events, feel free to stop by after my talk and say “hi”. 

Always on the lookout for analytics to describe behavior, I ran across a perl script by Damon Cortesi tonight that pulled in my Twitter feed and generated some pretty graphs. The results – my Twitter statistics from April 2007 through today – are below.

Thanks to @dacort on Twitter for the script that generated this output.

[tags]twitter,stats[/tags]

Google’s trust model is based on a broad acceptance that their crawlers do a good job of finding pages and that their indexers and ranking algorithms are likely to lead you to the most relevant results for a given search. Certainly there are flaws in the model and room for improvement, from which the category (of one?) of human-powered search draws its raison d’être, but it has been successful enough to attract an enormous user base. Yahoo!^2., Ask.com, and other algorithmic search engines operate under a similar model.

What’s the trust model for a human-powered search engine (HPSE)? I’d argue that it’s strongly influenced by three factors:

1. Quality and context of search results.
   Not only does the cruft need to be filtered, but results need to be segmented and described on a results page to clearly identify their value.
2. Authority.
   I’m open to comment on this one, but my belief is that for a given HSPE results page to be useful it needs to be a canonical source for the most salient points of a given topic. I don’t want to feel like I need to dig through Google’s results in addition to what an HPSE provides me.
3. Currency.
   People need a transparent view into both when a link was added and when a human last verified that it remains current to trust that content is relevant to them at the time of their search. Note that neither Mahalo nor its older, distant cousin About.com do this today.

There’s a fourth factor I’ll toss out for discussion, and that’s the personal brand of the reviewers themselves. This is much less of an issue today while the model is still proving itself than it will be two or three years from now when people have learned to value the quality of work of the individuals crafting the content. After all, if HPSEs’ primary selling point is that they’re “human-powered”, isn’t it reasonable to think people are eventually going to pay attention to the “humans” powering them?

About.com lost much of its early luster because savvy folks have learned not to trust it. Much of its content is junk, frankly, either because it was hastily written to fill a void or the data represented there are out of date. Mahalo doesn’t really have this problem yet given its newness, but I already find myself questioning the currency of some of the links I find there, just as I do with About.com. Other HPSE’s will have to combat this issue as well.

What influences your trust in search results? Can/do you trust people over algorithms, or vice versa?

Congratulations, buddy. See you at the next SXSW in March!

But while my Windows machines communicate with them without issue, performance with my Macs has been abysmal. Even on an 802.11n network, OS X’s average transfer rate is somewhere around 80KB/s. Fortunately, I tracked the problem down to a tunable network parameter tied to OS X’s FreeBSD roots: net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack.

Under 10.4.10, the default value for delayed_ack is 3. If you’re seeing similar performance issues either with the DNS-323 or other Samba servers in general, try setting it to a value of 0:

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

I recommend doing this while transferring a large file so you can immediately observe any change in performance. To make this setting permanent, add the following to /etc/sysctl.conf (you may need to create the file):

net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

[hat tip to r. i. pienaar's blog]

Since my previous post on the missing iPhone SDK, I’ve spent some time exploring the undocumented APIs on the iPhone and have written a few mini applications just for the fun of delving into relatively uncharted territory^†. Others have done much more than explore, and have released some pretty cool stuff. Granted, none of the released apps serve any mission critical function, but they’re all important precursors to what has the potential to become a thriving software ecosystem.

But today, Apple made it clear that these efforts are not welcome. Sure, they want to keep people from unlocking their phones to work on other carriers’ networks, as they’re rumored to be getting a 10% cut on the service revenues generated by iPhone customers. Denying all filesystem access, as they’ve done, reduces the attack surface available to groups seeking to remove the carrier lock. But knowing – as Apple certainly does – that in doing so they’re also preventing software developers from continuing to write their iPhone wares, Apple is directly contradicting recent, published comments from senior execs (Phil Schiller, SVP marketing included) proclaiming what I’ll call official ambivalence toward the developer community.

There’s more to the story. A recent Apple job post suggests that they might still be holding onto the Web as a development platform notion for all but Apple’s closest partners.

Updates on attempts from the community to break the latest protections can be found on Engadget, Gizmodo, Nate True’s blog, and the iPhone IRC channels on irc.osx86.hu.

[tags]iphone,apple,mobile,developer[/tags]

And separately, Federico Ini posted this clip of an interview he did with Bruce for his TV show in Buenos Aires:

Thanks to everyone for all of the comments, emails and phone calls.

Update 7/17/07: I’ve posted photos of the memorial and wake.

Update 7/5/07: Memorial services will be held next Tuesday, July 10, from 1-3 PM at the Army Navy Country Club in Arlington, VA. (Map and directions)

UPDATE: If you knew Bruce and would like to share any thoughts or a message feel free to use the comments here. This post has been getting quite a bit of search traffic from Google over the past few days so I am guessing others might want to talk about this.

I’ll update this post with information about a service/memorial once plans have been set.
[tags]bruce waldack,thruport,digitalnation[/tags]

The Apple/Cingular deal represents a significant departure from the typical relationships found between device manufactures and mobile operators. To close their deal, both companies had to evaluate and learn new ways of operating in partnership, and the concessions made on both sides were by industry standards considerable. Apple insisted on driving the launch marketing and channel strategies, including restricting pre-sales, defining retail locations and point of presence collateral, and managing the messaging given to the media. In return they ceded to Cingular on matters related to managing customer acquisition and retention costs, protecting Cingular’s existing revenue models and competitively positioning Cingular against its rivals.

One of the more visible examples of Cingular’s wins – from their perspective, anyway – is the lack of an instant messaging application on the iPhone. iChat, one of Apple’s marquee software products and a core component of Leopard’s personal and enterprise communications strategy is noticeably absent. Why? Cingular offers a competing service – SMS/MMS – which when combined with the other carriers in the US represented a $2.5B market in Q1 2007. As the #2 provider in that market, you can count on them fighting to hold onto their share of it as long as they can.

Steve – and by proxy, Cingular – is concerned that third-party application on the phone represent a threat to the network? Well, there’s a shred of credibility to this one, but it’s a stretch. Others have pointed out that Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm and myriad Java-capable mobile devices have been able to load and run custom applications for years so it should be a non-issue on the iPhone, but the counterpoint to this argument is that the predicted early popularity of the iPhone combined with what would undoubtedly be a dramatically simpler process for loading apps onto it were an SDK available could drive unprecedented levels of network traffic. This would degrade the overall end-user experience and lead to a devaluation of the iPhone and Apple brands, higher support costs for both Apple and Cingular and reduced follow-on sales opportunities for both companies.

It this possible? Maybe. But anyone who’s used a mobile phone knows just how spotty the experience can be. Even with the upgrades Cingular is making to their network in support of the iPhones launch, people are going to get frustrated with slow web browsing, dropped network connections and funky network behavior from Apple’s first generation of mobile Apps independent of any massive, third-party application strain. So is it likely? No.

Sure, this is just the first generation release, and from the tone of the initial keynote announcing the iPhone Steve made it clear that the product teams were pushing hard to get it to general release. But there isn’t such a shortage of talent on the market that would have prevented Apple from staffing up a developer tools iPhone team had they wanted to concurrently launch an SDK. Undoubtedly there’s an element of wanting to see how the market responds to the device before making commitments to developers, but Apple’s lineage is tightly enough enmeshed with the software development community that it’s hard to give this argument significant credence. John Gruber had much stronger words on this.

Where does this lead us? Without question there will eventually be a toolkit that gives developers more than hooks into the browser to build iPhone apps. Apple will start dealing with other operators who will have different wants and needs than Cingular, the software stack will launch through revisions, market forces will drive down flash memory costs and increase capacity, and Apple’s key partners will apply considerable pressure to open up new revenue streams for their applications and services.

Apple has been dallying with selling apps for the iPod through iTunes for several months, so there’s a precedent that this is the likely model for loading applications onto the iPhone. If so, Apple could potentially maintain control over which apps make it into the ecosystem, define how they’re sold, and in the process take a cut of the transaction revenue. In that situation, do you think anyone else might ask to share?

[tags]apple,iphone,steve jobs,cingular,mobile,sms[/tags]

Update: coComment is gone, too. Simplicity prevails. My blog isn’t nearly popular enough to be able to afford missing comments.

[tags]admin,wordpress[/tags]