Luckily, in the end, we were able to come up with some basic understandings around IDNs after a lot of work. The Internet held together in one piece, almost impossibly so.

When I joined the Open Source Initiative board of directors, we were also struggling with a similar, but slightly different problem. We called it "License Proliferation". License proliferation was the problem of companies and projects creating their own "vanity" Free and Open Source licenses rather than using existing, established licenses. Because these vanity licenses were tailored (at times even just very slightly from an existing licenses) to address the particular steward's needs, they added to the complexity of the source, causing users to become confused and creating legally incompatible bodies of code.

Copy-left licenses such as the Free Software Foundation's GNU Public License require derivative works be licensed under the same license. This feature - and to many coders this is a feature, not a bug - however, makes it challenging to combine code from projects with different licenses because of the requirement on how derivatives must be licensed. These islands of code looked a lot like a forked Internet, existing IM networks and email before the Internet connected them together.

Two great features of the Internet are the low cost of transaction and the standards and protocols that allow interoperability fueling the massive network effect that drives innovation.

At Creative Commons we have the benefit of hindsight as the "new layer" of the stack and are working hard to keep transaction costs low and interoperability high by trying to prevent license proliferation and "forking".

For instance, Wikipedia was established before Creative Commons licenses were available. Wikipedia, until last year, was licensed under the Free Software Foundation's GNU Free Document License (GFDL). The GFDL is copy-left license, very similar to the Creative Commons share-alike license which allows people to use the content as long as the derivatives are licensed under the same license. However, since the GFDL was primarily designed for documentation for free software, there were a number of attributes that made it sub-optimal for massive online collaborations like Wikipedia.

Also, as more and more content was being created under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license, it created two oceans of content that were not remixable or compatible because of the two different licenses. It was like having two Internets.

After years of discussion with the Free Software Foundation, the Wikipedia and Wikimedia board and community and the Creative Commons community, last year we were finally able to convert Wikipedia to a Creative Commons Share-Alike license. This brought together two communities and two bodies of content so that they could share and collaborate freely.

The moment felt a lot like the early days of email when finally you could send email to anyone instead of only those people on your network.

As the idea of sharing and free culture begins to become more and more accepted and governments, Internet services and even broadcasters begin to implement the idea of sharing, the specter of license proliferation has begun to present a real risk.

Companies and governments are beginning to create vanity licenses either for purely branding and egotistical reason or because there are certain features that they would like to "tweak". What many of these communities don't understand is that tweaking a free content license is a lot like tweaking character codes or the Internet protocol. While you may have some satisfaction of a minor feature or a feeling of ownership, you will introduce the friction of yet another license that we all have to understand and in many cases, fundamental incompatibility and lack of interoperability.

Creative Commons is not just a single license "option". We are a global conversation among lawyers, judges, academics, users and companies in over a hundred countries with extremely rigorous compatible license ports in more than 50 jurisdictions. We are focused on taking into consideration the needs of all of the stake holders in this new ecosystem and updating and modifying our licenses to try to provide as many options as possible while trying to keep things as simple as possible to achieve maximum interoperability and ease of use.

Some would argue that our six core licenses provide too many choices. Some of our critics point -- perhaps rightly -- to the fact that our own licenses are not all compatible with one another. Others would argue that they do not provide enough choices. But we believe, 350,000,000 licensed works later, that we are successfully navigating the sweet spot between simplicity and choice.

As sharing and the adoption of new, free licenses begins to accelerate, I believe we are in danger of creating sloppy licenses or incompatible licenses backed by torrents of content funded by well-meaning governments, non-profits, users and even commercial entities. Poorly drafted licenses, licenses that are not adequately stewarded or supported by a dedicated team of legal experts, content encumbered by onerous neighboring rights and isolated and restrictive licenses can create mountains of unusable content which we might call "free" but which for all practical purposes become puddles of unusable content and what we would call "failed sharing".

I would like to urge all of those people who have seen the benefit of sharing and free licensing to really consider the value of focusing on a single set of licenses and to resist the urge to create vanity or lets-just-add-this-one-feature-for-our-users licenses. We are trying to create a open global dialog and encourage people to join the conversation and present their cases for how our licenses might be improved and listen to the reason why each of the clauses in our license have been written the way they have.

For the future users of our content and participants in the architecture that we are creating, we really MUST try to hold this network together and try to proactively stamp out license proliferation and fragmentation. If the ICANN and OSI experiences provide any guidance and learnings -- and if we are to avoid the challenges and risks those organizations and communities confronted -- we all must be vigilant and uncompromising on this point.

Video of, Zach Coelius, CEO of Triggit talking about Demand-Side Platforms and Real-Time Bidding. An increasing number of ad networks and exchanges have begun making their inventory available for real-time bidding, most notably Google. This allows companies like Triggit to look at lots of inventory across a number of networks and do real-time bidding based on sophisticated analytics.

This is an interesting trend that I think will change the ad landscape pretty dramatically and could help content providers by dramatically increasing the value of their ads. It also allows a level of control that might give ad agencies a new role to make more creative campaigns than just bulk targeting.

Disclaimer: I'm an investor in Triggit.

Here's a video walkthrough of our Chiba home taken on the last day of my recent short trip there. I'm still getting used to the Flip Video and it tends to be a bit shakey and I'm pointing it a bit too downward. Also, Mizuka is trying to silently guide me through this shoot and sometimes grabs my shoulder which made it even shakier.

Anyway, hopefully my videos will improve through iteration. In the mean time, you can see what my Chiba home looks like during the beginning of summer in Japan.

Christopher Adams is a combination of hacker, designer, activist and publisher which makes him uniquely qualified to be leading this project, Freesouls. Freesouls is our book of my free portraits and essays and comments from my dear friends has been a great success thanks to Christopher. The book brings together many of the elements that I enjoy in life - friends, photography, freedom and the global network of ideas.

In the process of creating the book, we learned a lot about copyright, model releases, web services, open source, publishing, printing, distribution, editing and Python and Ruby. (Actually, Christopher did all of the work and got to do most of the learning too. ;-)

Christopher, being a perpetual learner and a glutton for hard work, has decided to embark on Freesouls 2.

This time we will be automating a lot of what we did by hand in Freesouls 1. We are automating the model release process using Echosign and their API. (If you have a portrait of yourself in my Flickr set slated for the new book, you could save us a lot of time and send us an email with the URL of the image and we'll shoot you the model release.) We'll also make the book dynamically generated into a perfectly designed, laid out and printable PDF using some mad code that Christopher has put together.

Finally, we still have a few copies left of Freesouls 1 so get them while they last. They're available on the freesouls.cc site. Also, thanks, as always, to Boris for the wonderful website production for freesouls.cc.

If you care about CC, and keeping the web open and accessible, please donate today. We need everyone's help!

CC Blog

We're thrilled today to announce the launch of the Catalyst Campaign - from now through June 30, Creative Commons is raising money to fund our recently-launched Catalyst Grants program.

Catalyst Grants will make it possible for individuals and organizations to harness the power of Creative Commons. A grant might enable a group in a developing country to research how Open Educational Resources can positively impact its community. Another could support a study of entrepreneurs using Creative Commons licenses to create a new class of socially responsible businesses.

But we can't do it without your help. Our goal is to raise $100,000 from CC supporters like you to fund the grants that will make all this possible. Donate today to help spread our mission of openness and innovation across all cultural and national boundaries.

Special thanks to the Milan Chamber of Commerce for recognizing the importance of funding this initiative by generously donating EUR 10,000! The Milan Chamber of Commerce and its Promos Network already work to promote international collaboration and innovation and we're honored they've stepped up to jumpstart the campaign.

Will you join in?

Advocate: Take a moment to spread the word about the Catalyst Campaign and Grants program on your blog and social networks with our banners and buttons.

Donate: If you give $75 or more, you can become the proud owner of one of these bright and cheerful, limited edition "I Love to Share" t-shirts. Every bit helps so give what you can today to ignite openness and innovation around the world!

The idea is to do monthly meetings where we will have guests come and speak and provide an opportunity for people with startup projects to meet. ONL will give grants up to $10,000 and provide mentoring, office space and other support in exchange for an opportunity to invest if the idea turns into a good startup investment. ONL will work close with my Singapore fund and mentor team - hopefully providing deals for the Singapore fund and possible partnerships for the startups and entrepreneurs we will be working with in Singapore and across the region.

While I won't be working day-to-day on ONL, we have a young and scrappy team of some of the next generation of Japanese entrepreneurs with the support of three of my favorite Internet companies.

I look forward to seeing what sorts of people and ideas ONL is able to attract and hope that we can launch some stuff with global reach help put Japanese startups on the map Internationally.

In John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison's new book The Power of Pull, they explain that the world is changing and that instead of stocking resources and information, controlling everything, planning everything and pushing messages and orders from the core to the edge - innovation is now happening on the edges and resources are pulled as needed instead of stocked - that the world is going from stocks to flows. There is a excerpt of the book on Techcrunch featuring yours truly.

One of the great thoughts in the book is the idea that you should set a general trajectory of where you want to go, but that you must embrace serendipity and allow your network to provide the resources necessary to turn any random events into a highly valuable one and that developing that network comes from sharing and connecting by helping others solve their problems and build things.

This reminds me a lot of Edward Hall's definition of polychronic time vs monochronic time (p-time vs m-time). In m-time, we delineate time and space into meetings and cubicles allowing organizations and institutions to scale massively. p-time is like a Arab majlis where everyone is invited at the same time and they all mill around in the waiting room of the sheikh while the sheikh has a series of meetings in the open inviting people into the meeting like a long flow of consciousness. P-time lacks scalability and order, but it is rich in context and serendipity. At some level, if you plan everything, you are very unlikely to be able to embrace serendipity or be as "lucky".

Most of my best meetings have been serendipitous and like Granovetter's strength of weak ties, it's those connections outside of your normal circle that often provide the most value, even beyond just the obvious arbitrage opportunities.

So while my life may look completely chaotic and disorganized, my previously post in retrospect, I feel like I am floating in a rich network of highly charged people and serendipitous events, not a single day going by where I don't feel like "Yay! I just did something really good!" Although the heavy travel is wearisome and the lack of stability slightly disorienting, I feel like I'm surrounded by loving, smart people and feel happier than I've ever been in my life.

Although my dream is still to achieve peace of mind and happiness in a becoming-Buddha sort of way, it feels like I'm going to get there through the some sort of Tai Chi action that involves being in a network of energy flows instead of meditating in some mountain cave.

We'll see how this "focus on everything" model works, but I'm not convinced that it doesn't. On the other hand, the standard caveats do apply: "Don't try this at home and your mileage may vary."

Update: Fabian Wolff did a German translation. Yay!

Having been CEO of a number of startup companies, I was looking to transition into the investment side. I had develop a broad network in Japan and felt that I was more suited for managing a portfolio of opportunities than focusing on the operations of a single business.

I had been talking to a number of funds about joining as a venture partner, but the idea of building an incubator together with the readily available funding and favorable terms lead me down the path of setting up Neoteny. At its peak, Neoteny had over 40 people, a facility, a PR team, engineering, HR consulting and R&D. It was a full service incubator and was modeled after many of the large incubators around the world.

We made a number early stage investments and formalized our incubation process. Just as the incubator went into full swing, the Internet bubble burst and incubators around the world crashed and ended up trading at huge discounts to the value of their portfolios.

Some of my investors pushed me to cut my losses and return their money. This was one of the hardest business periods in my life and one where I would swear off ever being a CEO again. (Which was true until Lawrence Lessig and the Creative Commons board convinced me to take over CEO of Creative Commons.) I had to cut the staff down to nearly nothing, shut down the facility and figure out what to do with the future of the business.

As the Japanese Internet market continued to be disappointing to me in terms of the quality of deals, in the last days of Neoteny, thanks to Justin Hall, I discovered blogging and through blogging, I started using Movable Type and decided that we should dump our Japan focus and find a blogging company to invest in in the US.

The first meeting with Ben and Mena, the developers of Movable Type was friendly, but ended with them telling us that they just weren't interested in raising money. We continued to court them, but I really wanted to have a position in this space and I met Evan Williams and the team at Blogger and found them more open to the idea of investment since they'd already taken VC money.

As fate would have it, we sent Evan and his team a term sheet to invest in Blogger the day before they got the acquisition offer from Google, which they took. Soon afterwards, Ben and Mena decided that we weren't that bad after all and took our offer to invest in Six Apart.

I felt very happy (and still feel very happy) with our investment in Six Apart. Although many investors continued to support us, we had some investors who didn't like the shift in focus away from Japan and other investors had various conflicting agendas so we returned the remainder of our money and shifted the focus of Neoteny to be support Six Apart's expansion in Japan and exist primarily as a manager of the existing portfolio and a major investor in Six Apart.

Reflecting on Neoteny, I realize now that most of the best companies that we invested in such as Six Apart didn't really use any of our incubator "services". Really scrappy entrepreneurs found their own cheap office space, figured a lot of the stuff out themselves and knew what they wanted from us. It didn't seem like they needed an incubation "process". It turns out that large corporations trying to incubate ideas internally really liked our process and a spinout of the Neoteny team continued to use the incubation process that we created as a consulting product for large Japanese companies.

In retrospect, the performance of our portfolio of the investments themselves will probably be good. If we had been a fund it would have been a success, even during a tough investment period. However, when you factor in the build-out and the shutdown of the consulting/incubation arm of the business, we'll still need a very strong exit from Six Apart to be considered successful by our investors. (Go team Six Apart!)

After winding down the core of Neoteny, I started angel investing with Reid Hoffman. With Reid I invested in Flickr, Last.fm, Technorati, The Sixty One, Kongregate, Rupture, ping.fm, Wikia, Aviary and many other companies. I returned to Digital Garage as a board member, the company I co-founded with Kaoru Hayashi which had gone public and incubated PSINet Japan, Infoseek Japan, Kakaku.com, econtext and other successful Japanese startups. Digital Garage invested in Twitter and is currently helping operate Twitter Japan.

I've been experimenting and thinking a lot about how to how startups should be incubated. Because of my trauma at Neoteny, I grew very skeptical of institutionalized incubation, feeling that there was an adverse selection which attracted entrepreneurs who wanted to be part of a club rather than scrappy entrepreneurs who were independent. I also decided that every country was very different and that in Japan, having a large operating company like Digital Garage was an important component of incubating companies because of the risk adverseness of employees and the difficulty of creating operating relationships for small companies.

Also, since the Neoteny days, because of the cloud, agile software development and the ecosystem of startups, the cost and speed of producing new Internet services has significantly declined and the markets have become more global. I think this significantly changes the value and nature of the incubation process - it makes it more feasible. Investment sizes are becoming smaller and everything is moving much faster. (More on the future of venture capital in another post.)

This year Reid Hoffman, my main angel investment partner joined Greylock and I have finally begun to get over some of my incubation and CEO phobias. I realized that it was the right time to take what I have been learning and the network that I have been creating and try to put some structure around the process that I'd been developing over the last few years.

My new theory is that incubator/accelerators probably make sense in Japan if/when they are tied together with a network of supporting operating companies. Recently, we launched the Open Network Lab which is a collaboration between my team at Digital Garage and Netprice. It's modeled after some of the more successful US startup and accelerator programs and we are considering working with similar programs to create a network, but we have tuned it for the Japanese context.

Having spent the last year or so trying to understand the market in the Middle East, I came to the conclusion that basing an incubator in the Middle East might be a bit early and I found it difficult to get my network in the US and Japan to connect directly with the network I was developing in the Middle East. After visiting Singapore a few times and running an un-conference there, I realized that Singapore made the perfect hub to bring my European, Arab, Israeli, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and American contacts together. The Singapore government is super-supportive and receptive of immigrants unlike most Arab countries or Japan. I decided to raise a small startup fund in Singapore and have received a special deal with six other incubators from the National Research Foundation of Singapore which is providing us a significant financial incentive.

The investment focus of the fund, called Neoteny Startup Fund 1, will be Asia, Middle East and maybe even North Africa. Singapore will be the hub because it is so entrepreneur friendly but I will be creating a network of co-investors, incubators and corporate contacts across the region to try to build companies that are global from the beginning and embrace the multi-cultural mishmash that my network has become.

I'm very excited with what I think will be the beginning of a new phase in my life. I will continue to live in Dubai and I believe that creating Arab entrepreneurs and empowering startups is the most significant contribution to peace and that I can make right now in that region. I'm also interested in trying to see if I can connect to Africa where I believe there is also a tremendous amount of potential.

Only a few years ago, I wouldn't have believed that a network as broad and diverse as this could hold together or that I could rally the support of the diverse network of mentors, investors and partners that I currently have. Having said that, I wouldn't be able to maintain this network without the help of my team at Digital Garage together with Mika, James and Sean.

The initial pipeline of companies and entrepreneurs that we have been meeting has been encouraging.

I will still spend about 50% of my time in my role as CEO of Creative Commons and the remainder of my time working on the new fund in Singapore and the portfolio companies and the pipeline of new opportunities including the Open Network Lab at Digital Garage. Digital Garage will still to be my operating base in Japan. I will keep my current commitments such as my advisory role at Twitter and particularly trying to help with the Twitter activities at Digital Garage and in Japan.

I will continue to serve on the boards of the great for-profit and non-profit organization that I am currently on, but will retire from the ones where I don't think I'm able to contribute significant value.

I realize that I haven't done a good job of making my life any simpler or any easier to manage, but I really believe that I have the opportunity and the responsibility to try to make an impact right now and this current configuration feels optimal to me.

I'll follow up with more detailed posts about Singapore, ONL, the future of Creative Commons and Twitter Japan.

Update: I Made a few edits about Neoteny, my original incubator, to be a bit more accurate. Originally, I said that the investment performance was good, but that includes the value of the Six Apart stock so I changed it to "will probably be good". Also, some investors continued to support us and only a few big investors pushed us to return their money so I modified that section to reflect this.