November 27th, 2006
David Cohen
There has clearly been a great deal of interest in getting simplified yet powerful mapping capability into the hands of the masses. Microsoft has tried to fill this gap in MS Office twice, first with the excel mapping tool and later with MapPoint. It’s never really worked. My experience with this sort of thing is that I can easily whip out simple point plots based on zip codes, but these tools break down when you want do anything a little more sophisticated. They’re decent at visualization of static data, but not so good at helping you to spot or predict trends.
Enter Mud Springs, which was founded in 1999 as a GIS consulting company. It’s a familiar story - some really cool tools come out of consulting companies who build stuff just because they needed it and couldn’t find it (which, of course is how many successful companies get started). Mud Springs is re-inventing itself and is trying to bring their product (aWhere) to the broader market. aWhere is all about ease of use, and it’s evident when you get the product demo.
“AWhere is designed for ease of use and specifically for data dissemination (our patent-pending Exchange technology - one file containing all shapefiles with color rending, projection, metadata etc.). In this way, I can send a gigabyte of simulation results (> 50 shapefiles) to a user all bundled in one file. With MyMaps, I can ’save’ and deliver through AWhere Exchange the exact views of the data I want my client to see - and with these views, our clients are exploring their data in minutes.” - Founder, John Corbett.
I also really liked that you can just throw an excel spreadsheet at it, and it immediately visualizes the relevant data and automatically updates as you change the underlying spreadsheet (sort of like COM/OLE that just works like you’d expect).
I think that mapping users fall into three categories today. Consumers, who use simple tools like MapPoint or Google Maps, those using vertical solutions (such as the public safety system that my previous company built), and those who use sophisticated systems like ESRI. Mud Springs believes there’s a whole class of under-served people like you and me who need more power than simple consumer tools provide, don’t use a vertical solution, and will never invest the time and money in high-end GIS but who still have reasons to visualize their data in order to spot important trends or arrive at actionable conclusions.
aWhere sells for about $700 per seat. At this price point, it’s still an investment for the “every man.” I suspect that Mud Springs will find pretty good success in first attacking specific verticals that know they want these types of solutions but don’t want to have dedicated GIS staff and mess with the hard to learn high end tools like ESRI provides. Hopefully they can focus there and learn more about what it takes to bring mapping to the “non-specialists” of the world. I think they’ll need to get the price point down to a hundred bucks to really make it interesting to everyone.
Mud Springs is currently raising angel investment in advance of a planned venture round.
November 25th, 2006
November 22nd, 2006
David Cohen
Scott Purcell is one of the founders of a six person Denver-based startup called Web Biographies, which lets you keep your life story in one place for future generations. Scott explained to me that this is a great use of what’s called Life Caching. Like so many great companies, Web Biographies was started because the founders simply wanted something that didn’t seem to exist yet.
“I realized I knew nothing about my grandfather, and that unless I started writing my life story then my kids and grandkids would know nothing about me. I’d be forgotten. As if I never even existed. That terrified me, so I looked around the web for a place to start writing my stories and organizing my photos and video…but it didn’t exist. So I started the company.” - Scott Purcell
When I asked Scott if this was really just a blog on steroids, he fired off a PowerPoint to me as if he had answered that question a million times.
“Really it comes down to organization and timeframe. Blogs just aren’t built to Life Cache.” - Scott Purcell
You may have heard of a venture funded company called OurStory that is addressing a similar market opportunity as Web Biographies. When I asked Scott about OurStory he proceeded to ramble off the reasons why Web Biographies is a much more capable solution (better organization, unlimited chapters, family trees, better searchability…) and then quipped “There are 72 million boomers out there, and over 6,000 people die each and every day, so there’s plenty of room for everyone.”
I took Web Biographies for a spin, and while it’s not there yet on aesthetics, it does seem to have more features that the competitive products that I could find. You can essentially keep your life story here through a combination of blog-like posts, photos, family tree entries, etc. Unlike blogs, however, you can easily organize these things into Chapters and subchapters of your life, and even order a book when you’re ready.
Although Scott says that the pricing model is in flux, the plan is that you’ll get a lifetime account for $99 and up, depending on how much storage you’ll need. Once you’re dead and gone, the company promises to keep your information online for eternity at no charge (or at least until Web 9.0, when major compatibility problems will be introduced in FireFox 9.0). Scott also hinted that although he expects the consumer oriented site to do well, he feels like there is a market beyond this to provide private label solutions.
November 22nd, 2006
David Cohen
Not too long ago, Brad Feld challenged everyone to write more about their failures. I was reflecting a bit this weekend on my recent success with my earFeeder project and realized that I never took him up on that with my previous business, iContact.
About three years ago, I got together with two of my buddies and a rock star Java developer and set out to build a mobile social network called iContact. This was about a year and a half before the MySpace acquisition by News Corp. Social networks were well known, but nothing had really blown up yet. It seemed to us at the time that nobody had yet built a social network that was built from the ground up to work on GPS enabled mobile phones, and we felt that would not only be fun but also very compelling.
We wrote a quick prospectus outlining the market, the business model, and the associated risks. We didn’t have much trouble raising about $600k, about half of which came from the founders. Most of the rest of the money came from customers and partners from my previous public safety business, Pinpoint Technologies (now ZOLL Data Systems).
We proceeded to build some really slick technology that operated on phones enabled with Java, BREW, or WAP, which cover the majority of the mobile market. We also built a web-based social network that had all the usual features. The difference was that everything was very phone-centric. We liked to tell people to quit surfing by themselves from their homes and get out into the real world where social networks have much more interesting implications. We even tacked on a pretty nifty unified instant messenger that also streamed your buddies favorite music and information on the events they were attending soon, giving iContact another channel that lived on our users desktops. Within a year, we had a pretty cool product, about 2,000 beta users, and ZERO distribution by the cellular operators.
Our mission was to bring social networking concepts to the phone in a very natural way, but we quickly realized that without distribution agreements with the cellular operators we were going to be dead in the water. The mobile industry is full of pitfalls. If you don’t have connections to cellular operators, you’ll literally need to buy them just to get a shot. It’s an old boys club and the whole industry is just trying to keep control of the closed system they’ve put together. Open APIs are really only open to partners, revenue shares feel like hostage situations, and network aware or location based applications sit in queues waiting for “approval” which is a euphemism for “hell to freeze over.” (No, I’m not sour on mobile!)
We decided about a year ago to shut down iContact and attempt to sell off the assets of the company in order to make our investors whole. We met with a few companies you’ve probably heard of by now who are doing all this stuff and getting deals done with the carriers. Most of them were blown away by what we had created, but there was not a technology and/or strategic match for them. So we never sold it, and it sits on the shelf. We did make a nice return on the domain name itself, but that hardly lessened the blow to our egos. A couple of companies still have an ongoing interest in acquiring the technology so we haven’t listed it on eBay just yet.
In the end, we returned 78% of our investors money. I think we failed well by deciding to to cut our losses before we spent all the money trying to make something happen. The writing was on the wall, so we read it. If you ask me, that’s solid management under difficult circumstances, and I’m glad we pulled the rip chord when we did. At least half of these investors volunteered to invest in my next venture, whatever that might be.
I learned way too much from this experience to explain here. The biggest lesson was clearly to make sure you have control of the distribution of your product. For most software and web services, this is not a problem. I would say that the next biggest lesson is to start small and prove something before you convince yourself that the market really wants what you’re building. Finally, I think we could have reacted even more quickly and returned 85% to 90% of our investors money (or not have raised the round at all) with better market research and more connected industry advisors in the early stage.
Now back to writing about startups that might matter.
November 22nd, 2006
David Cohen
Since TechCrunch covered my earFeeder project last month, lots of people have emailed me to ask for tips on getting their products profiled by TechCrunch. I think earFeeder got covered because it was simple, interesting, and unobtrusive and maybe just kinda “neat”. I only got one email from them asking a few questions, and they wrote what they wanted to write.
Guy Kawasaki recently did a great interview with Mike Arrington of TechCrunch called How to get in TechCrunch. Guy asked Mike flat out how a company can get covered on TechCrunch. The short answer: Get referred. The official answer: Email him or use their contact form. Hint: The short answer works much better.
So what did this coverage do for earFeeder? Well, quite a bit. I demo’d earFeeder for the first time in public on October 3rd at the Boulder New Tech Meetup. TechCrunch wrote about it on October 16th (less than 2 weeks later). LifeHacker followed up with a story 2 days later, exposing earFeeder to half a million people in a two week period. About 100 other blogs then covered it in the following days, and about a million people in total had been sneezed on. A hell of a lot of them came to the site.
Then, just 39 days after I showed it for the first time in Boulder, and just 26 days after TechCrunch covered it, earFeeder was acquired by SonicSwap.
So, is there value to being covered by TechCrunch. Sure. That value is in initial exposure. Take a close look at this traffic graph from the earFeeder co-location site.
With earFeeder, I got lucky and somebody wanted to take it and run with it. But if you’re trying to build a sustainable business, TechCrunch is clearly nothing more than a good jump start on buzz. You have to find some way to convert that and keep it going over time.
November 21st, 2006
David Cohen
There are a couple of cool startups in my building here on Pearl Street. One of them is Six88 that I’ve talked about before, and they’ve continued to grow their business (providing SaaS for direct to consumer wine shippers) by blogging away on the topic and using some innovative tactics like creating useful free widgets for their industry and hosting regional educational seminars. They’ve done a great job of positioning themselves as the thought leaders in their industry. My friend Jason Eckenroth who is their CEO was up on our shared rooftop last night (they get lots of free wine) when one of those crazy Colorado mid-November sunsets occurred. Jason shared some pretty amazing photos like the one you see here. Thanks Jason.
November 17th, 2006
David Cohen
Jay Graves is one of the guys behind BarDiver.com which launched today. Ironically enough, I met him at BarCamp last weekend. BarDiver is a user-driven site listing bars, as you might have guessed. Jay told me that right now BarDiver is a growing side project, and that they’re really just “fans of the dive bar.”
I played around on the site a bit today, checking out some Denver bars such as the Larimer Lounge and Sloans. There are two sharp contrasts to Happy Hour Boulder (covered recently). First, content on BarDiver is user generated. Second, Happy Hour Boulder is more focused on happy hour specifically while BarDiver aims to tag bars with user generated attributes such as “beautiful staff” and “geeks who drink.” As of this minute BarDiver has only about 40 bars listed in Denver.
I always tell people to start businesses that center on their passions, solve real problems, and have some reasonable way to make money other than becoming a top 100 site and selling ads. For side projects that you’re not dedicating your life to, one out of three isn’t bad, and I can prove it. So, you go Jay.
November 13th, 2006
David Cohen
Here’s a podcast that I captured at Barcamp on Saturday. Ari Newman was talking about issues related to startups including:
- Raising capital
- Corporate formation
- Marketing
- Legal issues
- Stealth mode vs transparency
Of course, I couldn’t help but jump in. It was BarCamp, ya know. Thanks Ari!
November 13th, 2006
David Cohen
Podcast episode #7 is a six part podcast covering the CTEK Angels Live event from October 17th. About 400 people attended and three companies pitched to about 25 angel investors. As far as anybody knows, this is the first time an event like this has been done in public and been podcasted.
Since the event was two hours long, I’ve broken it up into six parts so you can focus in on what you’re most interested in. Here’s the deal:
I applaud CTEK for exposing their process to the public so folks can get a sense of what it’s like to pitch and how the process works. Of course, these pitches typically only get a company noticed (or not) and the real work comes later during one-on-ones between the investors and entrepreneurs. It’s nowhere near this easy for the entrepreneurs - nobody writes a check after a first pitch like this. But it gives you a sense of how investors think, so if you’re seeking angel investment or will be in the future, it’s probably worth listening to each of the three pitches at a minimum.
Sorry that this took nearly a month to get out. I just got the audio from DU a few days ago, and it took me a few nights to mix it all. I am now officially sick of editing podcasts, and am going to bed.
November 11th, 2006
David Cohen
Today was the second Denver area BarCamp (previous coverage here), and I found this one to be really interesting. Thanks to the sponsors and organizers for a great event. Let’s do more!
Here are six interesting things I learned today at BarCamp:
6. Single sign on and identity management still sucks. There were several people in attendance who were struggling to figure out if they should adopt some type of identity management standard, just build their own sign on, or both. Sxip and OpenID are two interesting solutions that were discussed. I was wishing that Andre Durand or someone from Ping Identity was here to join the conversation. We had an interesting discussion about the laws of identity and how they relate to these platforms. Many people in the room seemed to think that the issues associated with managed identity and the trust required to make it work may be a bigger headache than the advantages that would otherwise be gained.
5. “Flash vs Ajax” lives. First a quick rant. This was a bit of a sales pitch from Adobe, and was more one way than you would expect at BarCamp. I’d encourage the presenter (Kevin Hoyt) to make the discussion more interactive in the spirit of BarCamp in the future. Anyhoo, it was still pretty damn interesting. This debate has been raging for a while, but it was good to get an update from one of Adobe’s own Flash specialists, Kevin Hoyt. Kevin showed a little Ajaxy web demo that grabbed 1,000 rows from a database, which took about 3 seconds to execute. Kevin talked about scaling of Ajax apps and the problem associated with the fact that in the end Javascript is handling the work. He showed the same demo using the Flex Ajax Bridge (presumably with the same back end database, etc.) which executed in about a tenth of a second. Basically, while Flash still uses the browser stack, it doesn’t have to depend on Javascript to parse and handle the resulting XML. He also showed that with 6,000 rows, the Ajax app really started to break down with browser timeouts, etc. after about 30 to 45 seconds. The Flash demo, of course, returned 20,000 records in about half a second. Cool little demo that makes it pretty clear that Flash is something to consider if scale is an issue for your Ajax app.
4. Some new web sites. At any conference (ok, unconference) like this, I always seem to learn about some cool web sites out there that I didn’t know about before. My favorites from today were Delicious Monster, Steep And Cheap, Motion Based, Swarm, and Getting Real (book).
3. Using Me.dium is pretty cool at a setting like BarCamp. Half a dozen people in the room at Barcamp where Me.dium users, and it was neat to be able to see what they were looking at as the conversation in the room meandered. I could see flocks of people looking at related articles that I would not have otherwise found. This isn’t necessarily the reason behind Me.dium (that’s here) but it’s a neat one none the less. It’s also really fun to “tailgate” people you know around the web while you’re bored between sessions.
2. Functionality is the new beauty. Andrew Hyde led a discussion of web design trends. He cycled through a bunch of sites asking how we felt about the look of each site. People booed at the MySpace design, cheered for the Google design, and generally dug Digg. What I think the room really missed was that that there are two types of responses to web site design. The creative types in the room (designers, Mac freaks, etc) were really looking at the graphic design to make their judgement and they focus in on things like rounded corners and shadows. But I would argue that most people in the room (and certainly most people on the web) don’t focus in on that. It’s secondary to the emotions and overall experience that the site provides. Really, functionality is the new beauty. How else do you explain the runaway success of dead simple sites like CraigsList and Google, or sites with hideous and overbearing designs like MySpace?
1. It’s dead simple to make up a web 2.0 business plan. Ari Newman and Team Hyper pitched a fictional new company, HOTT (Home of Tomorrow’s Technology) and it’s new product Knife Robot. Given just a few keywords to work from, Team Hyper came up with the company, business plan, revenue model, and investor pitch just moments before as part of the “Half Baked” competition. The company provides RaaS (Robots as a Service) and delivers Google Adwords on the robotic knife LCD. But wait, there’s more! HOTT is also introducing an affiliate program with local grocery stores. “How do we make money?” Ari asked out loud, and then followed immediately by saying “Next Slide Please” which of course detailed an amazing hockey stick effect. Fantastic! The Hypersites guys then figured they’d show off and threw up a pretty snazzy KnifeRobot web site (including a blog, online store, etc.) in about 45 minutes in front of the room. There were a total of 5 such spoofs including MilitaryViolin.com (including RAIV, a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Violins), Daily Trace (”no need for a chip in your ass” to track your wife), AirOil (A bottled spray to help start that awkward web 2.0 conversation - “one bottle lasts a full funding cycle”), and FarmStory (RFID for food - “See where all that shit you’re eating has been before it got on your table”). These Web 2.0 business models showed that we get some pretty damn funny and creative people at Barcamp. I’m sure you could license one of these ideas on the cheap if you want to implement it for real.
It was a fun and worthwhile event today. Thanks again to everyone who sponsored it or participated.
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