David Cohen

A few meetups ago, I met Elliot Turner. He started Orchestr8 in Denver in 2005 and has been operating in stealth mode since. Orchestr8 is creating a product which Elliot describes as “a mashup platform.” This sounded interesting to me, so I sat down with him for about 15 minutes and we chatted about what the company was up to. I like to think I usually “get it” pretty quickly, but I have to admit that after this first conversation I thought Elliot was a bit out there in a mad scientist kind of way.

Luckily, we arranged to meet again and he was in my office the other day showing me their product, AlchemyPoint. AlchemyPoint is a platform that allows users to apply transformations (called actions) to the web experience. As you’re viewing a page, you can request a series of actions through a browser plug-in. For example, if you see an address on the page, you can enter something like “Show map below the address in Denver.” The system uses heuristics to figure out what you mean, and automagically, a map shows up under the address. Now, any time you visit that page, your experience will always include that map (unless you remove it). Currently, this is done by entering text commands, but in the future Elliot expects a more graphical UI.

Actions that you perform are cumulative, each affecting the result. There are tons of actions, ranging from the simple to very sophisticated. For example, you can say things like “vertically flip the photo under the heading ‘Peter’” or “remove all ‘top stories’ about ‘Bush’ for 6 hours“. (Note to Orchestr8: Make sure to implement “forever and a day” modifier).

From a pure technology standpoint, I’m very impressed by what Orchestr8 has created. However, when this is aimed at a consumer market, I’m not sure regular users will ever adopt such a text based approach. If AlchemyPoint can enable these same capabilities with a point and shoot GUI based system, then it will have more appeal beyond the developer set. Elliot told me that the company was already headed in this direction.

“Teqlo, OpenKapow, and Dapper have been compared to us. These are great companies but only focus on individual subsets of the larger web integration/automation problem — things like extracting data from web sites (Dapper), protocol automation (OpenKapow), and task sequencing (Teqlo). Orchestr8’s approach differs in that we’re providing an integrated solution — full protocol stack, content extraction / manipulation engine, orchestration / task sequencing — with a graphical in-browser UI for controlling everything. Additionally, our solution offers a feature-set simply not available in current products — allowing users to easily share, publish, reuse & modify web manipulations once they’ve been created. This brings a whole new community aspect to the world of web mashups & manipulations, something we’re really excited about.” - Founder, Elliot Turner

So AlchemyPoint will ultimately become a platform where users can share and reuse these mashups. Interesting.

The other burning question is whether or not the consumer market is the right market at all. Elliot believes that this has broad application beyond the consumer web. He expects the company to be able to monetize the technology by providing professional and enterprise editions, as well as by offering pay for placement listings in the mashup directory.

Admittedly, I’m a geek and hacker at heart, but when I experienced the technology in person, I couldn’t help but think about it in a very different way. It struck me as a publishers content management tool. It seems to me like this technology would allow publishers like me to mash up their own content more easily and persist it as the new “original” version, rather than managing messy widget and embed code.

Elliot was the founder of MimeStar, an enterprise network intrusion detection provider, which was sold to Intrusion, Inc. in 2000. Orchestr8 plans to raise an investment round in the near future.

Elliot told me that AlchemyPoint is currently being tested only be friends of the company, but that he expects to open up testing to a second level of testers soon. If you’re interested in this technology and want to learn more, follow along on Ocrhestr8’s blog. This is one I plan to watch.

David Cohen

Here’s the first of the Big or Bullshit series of posts that I’m doing with Brad Feld.

Newsweek recently suggested that 2007 may be the year of the widget. There’s lots of discussion about widgets going on in the blogosphere, widget platforms are popping up all over the place, and WidgetBox (one of the leaders and one I like) is now reporting that the “widgetsphere” (a-hem) is growing at more than 50% per month.

Widgets generally aim to do accomplish one or more of the following things: 1) improve the functionality of a site, 2) act as leaders for e-commerce or other transactions, and/or 3) promote and lead traffic to the site serving the widget. Read any popular blog and you’ll probably see widgets acting in these roles.

People are asking the question: “Do widgets have a monetization strategy that can really work?” I think too many people are looking for a “direct” monetization strategy here. To me, a widget is often just a functional ad often operating out on the long tail. The approach here is clear - provide something useful to the publisher so they’ll go out of their way to place your brand all over their property. It’s like sticking a billboard in my front yard. I’m never going to do it unless I get something out of it. But that something doesn’t have to be direct and immediate, or even necessarily quantifiable. There are many strategies for the widget economy being tested today, including micropayments for functionality, lead generation revenue shares, sponsorship, etc. I think we’ll learn more about which strategies work and which don’t this year. So far the widgets that seem to be working are just those that do something for me, so I don’t mind doing something for them. That’s the very spirit of the web at work. Looking at it from an economic standpoint, I’m trading ad space for my own cost savings (not having to develop use capabilities myself).

Some people think widgets are destroying the web. The argument is that as people post widgets from servers that are overloaded or just too slow, then every page starts to render too slowly as they wait on these third party servers. I don’t buy that argument. I think people will learn not to use crappy widgets, just like they learned not to use crappy ad servers. It’s self correcting. If they don’t learn, they’ll die too as people just stop coming back. If you think about it, the nature of a widget is very similar to that of an ad - they’re both served up by somebody other than the publisher you came to visit. Nobody serves up ads from crappy little ad servers any more (they used to).

What’s really going on here is that the web is becoming more decentralized and at the same time more personalized. We’re experiencing the web through the eyes of those we trust, and therefore through the widgets they choose.

Take FeedBurner for example - they don’t want you to sit on their web site and read feeds. They are enabling capability (and ultimately an ad network) by sitting in the middle of publishers and subscribers. Take their Headline Animator as an example. Bloggers love this, because it’s a simple brandable way to distribute their feed to potential subscribers via email or their related web sites. Here’s mine, which I haven’t bothered to customize:

If you’re on the web site, you can also see Lijit’s wijit which enables you to search my personal network, ClickCaster’s podcast widget embedded in my shownotes, SonicSwap’s widget which shows you what I was most recently listening to via iTunes, MyBlogLog’s popular recent visitors widget, and some random posts from the Colorado Startups job board. In fact, I selected the JobCoin job board over Job-a-matic mostly because they had widgets that I could use the way I wanted to use them on my site.

The biggest reason that widgets will be big is simply because users love them. Publishers love them because they save time, promote their mission, or are just plain cool. End users love them because they make the web more functional - even the smallest of publishers can pull off some pretty neat tricks on their sites.

Verdict: Widgets will be Big. They’re content with all the same benefits to the creator as ads. They’ll literally be everywhere. Widgets, RSS, and other technologies are being mashed up left and right, thereby accelerating the decentralization of the web. As more and more of the web is experienced through the portals of our choosing, widgets will help us focus on the microchunks of content that we actually care about.

Watch Brad’s blog for his take on widgets soon.

David Cohen

Ok, I figure startups a special market for jobs. So amidst all the fervor about job boards on blogs lately, I decided to give it a shot. Too bad SimplyHired’s Job-a-matic is still full of bugs and doesn’t seem to have working widgets. So I went with a board that’s been around a while, and doesn’t have lots of bells and whistles.

Job postings are free, so have at it. Let’s keep the jobs about Colorado, tech, and startups only. Otherwise, it won’t be free (or exist) for long. If I do ever set a price, proceeds will go towards more of my Kiva loans.

So go ahead, scram.. Check out the Colorado Startups job board. Special just for you, it’s even RSS enabled.

David Cohen

• Entrepreneurs: “The best answer to most questions is no“.
• Scott’s very interesting thoughts on his experiences in board meetings #1, #2, and #3. Disclosure: I’m on that board.
• The new wave of very young entrepreneurs. I’ve gotten to know Ben this month as he’s visiting Colorado for a while. Maybe you should too.
• Second Lifers: Get a first life!

David Cohen

I was driving home from DU today, where Ben Casnocha and I did a tag-team guest lecture (also known as “winging it”) in a class on entrepreneurship.

Right afterward, I had a “quick” board call to discuss one issue that ended up taking 20 minutes. This issue was really just approval of a major decision and everyone just wanted to hear each other say “ok” out loud. It had taken us a while to arrive at a short notice time that we could all sync up on the phone, and we made one poor assistants life difficult trying to sort it out.

There were 4 or 5 people on the call, many coming and going with dropped calls. I was driving, so I had to mute often to keep everyone from hearing the roar of my car. People came back on the call to address the last statement that was made, which the conversation had already moved away from. At one point I laughed out loud as a key word in a very key statement in the conversation was “dinged” out by a rejoining caller, almost as if it were a curse word.

At the end of the call, Ben asked “Do you really find that to be more effective than email?” I thought about that for a minute and I think that it was certainly just as effective (the end result was the same), but nowhere near as efficient as say, email.

Ben recently said that email is not a collaboration medium (or at least it shouldn’t be). I would tend to agree. So I think it should be up to the meeting organizer to make sure there is a need for collaboration before going to a synchronous solution. In this case, there was no debate that couldn’t have easily occurred just as easily by email, and no “yes” vote that couldn’t have been cast that way.

I did a conservative estimate, and I think what could have occurred in 10 minutes of combined effort asynchronously instead occurred with about 100 minutes of combined effort synchronously. So in this case, email would have been an order of magnitude more effective, not to mention convenient. Sure, the end result might have been that we really needed to have a call, and figure some stuff out. But in this case, it really wasn’t one of those situations.

TIP: Aside from the Police album, synchronicity usually sucks. With a known nomadic group and existing strong relationships, reserve it for truly collaborative efforts.

David Cohen

I was at a meeting tonight where three companies pitched their plans to investors. One of the companies had taken on 50 investors who were their customers (doesn’t sound so bad - nice to have customers who are such believers). Then all hell broke loose. Someone in the group asked about the structure of those past investments, and the presenter replied that they had used common stock. Setting aside the obvious concerns about non-accredited investors and how they might have been solicited, the group then asked about the valuation that was used for this past investment.

The presenter replied “25 cents.”

Asking for clarification, we learned that what he meant was that they were sold at 25 cents per share. So, unphased, we pressed on. How many shares are outstanding? Fully expecting this founder to say “they’re all excellent shares”, he instead told us that 6 million shares were outstanding, out of the 24 million that were authorized.

I can hear his investors now: “Wow, 25 cents is a great price for a share in this thing! That’s really low! Most of the stocks I hear about are all worth like ten bucks.’

Tip: If you’re going to present to experienced investors, get some experienced advisors and let them talk if you have to. I like the companies that don’t do simple stuff like this. Saves lots of time in due diligence.

David Cohen

Todd Vernon of Lijit (covered previously) just pinged me to let me know they’ve just announced the general availability of their personal network search widget. You can see that I’m running it on the right hand side of this blog.

I’ve been Lijit for about 6 months now (according to my profile) and I’ve entered in various blog feed and identities that I have on the web, such as my LinkedIn profile and my YouTube account. Now you can use the widget to search my personal network and the networks of my trusted sources.

I’ve long thought that there’s lots of untapped power in peoples defined social and business networks that nobody is leveraging. When I’m approached by “the next myspace” I always ask them first if the power of what they are doing is in defining the social network or leveraging it. Most of these plays are really looking to leverage known relationships and influencers. However, even though this is the case I often find that they are building a social network to support it. Lijit is using a tactic that I often recommend to folks like this - leverage the existing social networks that people give you access to. That way, you don’t force them to change their behavior (and jump over to “your” social network site) but you still give them focused benefits like Lijit is doing with search.

Let me know if you think the Lijit wijit is a hit or a bunch of.. well, you know.

David Cohen

Alex King is one of the more interesting guys I’ve met around the Colorado tech scene lately. I’ve been getting to know Alex over the last six months or so (both via his outstanding blog and in person), and am always interested in what he’s up to.

About a month ago, I was tracking several of my projects using iCal tasks. I was pretty frustrated with the inflexibility of iCal as compared to Outlook, and chalked it up to a lack of knowledge about Mac after my recent switch from Windows. I had read about Alex’s Tasks product on his blog, and decided to give it a shot even though I was a bit skeptical about using a web-based task management solution.

To my surprise, I was immediately hooked on Tasks. I usually tote my MacBook Pro around but once in a while I leave it at the office and use my iMac or ThinkPad at home. I’m able to keep these all in sync very easily using the iCal synchronization capabilities of Tasks. I always have my BlackBerry on me as well, and the ability to create a task by just forwarding an email is very handy. In fact, most of my tasks come as a result of email conversations, so I love the fact that I can set up multiple email catchers and forward any email to the appropriate address and flesh it out and deal with it later.

Wanting to make sure I wasn’t missing any other task management gems, I asked Alex how he manages his tasks.

I throw as much as I can into Tasks Pro so that I can get it out of my brain. That means keeping Tasks Pro open in a tab in my browser and using the Mailboxes feature to create tasks via e-mail from my BlackBerry. I find it much easier to work from a list than to sit there trying to remember and prioritize things in my head. The way I work within Tasks Pro is basically this: 1. Brain dump stuff into Tasks Pro as it comes up, and 2. When I begin work on something, I flesh it out in detail by creating lots of sub-tasks for all the things I need to do. Then I prioritize those, set some goal dates, and get going.” - Alex King

Tasks is actually a product of King Design (Alex’s custom development, design, and consulting company). Alex runs his “one off” work through King Design, which I recently took advantage of by adding some features to this blog. Alex was an original contributing developer of WordPress and is well-known for running the WordPress theme competition, and was also one of the founders of FeedLounge (an online RSS feed reader).

When I was working a day job, I was using 3-4 computers with 2 different operating systems and a PDA. I’d often think of things I needed to do when I got home while at work and vice versa. I’d tried using the to-do list on my PDA, but the text input with the stylus was painful - especially when I was at a keyboard most of the time. I tried using e-mail for a while (sending myself tasks), but found it unsuitable for me. With a web based app like Tasks Pro, you can access your tasks and notes from any computer (including your mobile devices using the mobile interface). I’ve also added features to Tasks Pro to enable you to integrate it with existing tools you might use. - Alex King

Tasks is a great (and affordable) product, and I highly recommend it. In addition, if you use WordPress like I do, Alex also has a great collection of plugins that you can use, among many other projects that I would have to assume are just as solid.

David Cohen

Brad Feld and I are going to do a series of posts called “Big or Bullshit.” We’ll talk about trends we’re seeing, dissect them a bit, and decide if we think they’ll be big or they’ll be bullshit. It’ll be fun to look back - you can all make fun of us in a year or two if (when?) we’re wrong. We have a few topics that we’ll start with, but if you have any in mind, please comment.

Also, we’re nearing the date for our first “Ask the Virtual Board of Directors” podcast. Thanks to everyone who has called in with a question for the board so far. We would love to have more questions to select from, so please remember to send your question in to us by calling (720) 274-0945.

David Cohen

If you’re like me, most of the successful tech companies that you know had more than one founder. As I’ve been looking through the early applications to TechStars, it’s surprising to me that many are single founder companies. Paul Graham started this debate and then threw gas on the fire by listing this first on his list of common startup mistakes, implying that having a single founder is clearly a mistake. Since then the debate has produced some credible rebuttals and interesting counterpoints.

Here are some reasons why I think multiple founders in a startup are important. Like most opinions, this comes from my life experience.

1. Startups are hard, really hard. Before you can afford payroll, there is going to be a whole lot of work to do. More people doing it make sense.
2. It’s easier to raise money with multiple founders. I think investors generally believe that two or three heads are better than one, and someone getting hit by a bus doesn’t necessarily kill the company that way. Not to mention the fact that raising money can easily be a full time job - if there’s one founder, it’s likely that you’re working on the company instead of in the company. That’s bad in the very early stage.
3. In a startup, you go through major emotional ups and downs. You need someone to keep you focused during the highs and pick you up when you’ve just about had it.
4. Peer (co-founder) pressure is good in a startup - even healthy. Who wants to go home early when their partner is still working? I remember counting on my co-founders to deal with an angry customer while I promised to deal with the bug they were complaining about. How could I have done both?

I think there are clear exceptions such as when funding is not a problem and/or when the entrepreneur has a great track record of success. And I know that it can be done - I have friends that are doing it. However, all else being equal, I think those friends would have been better off in the long run with a co-founder.

TechStars is considering single founder applications, as I discussed on that blog. I’d be curious to hear what the investors who are reading this think. Is there a natural bias against one person startups, and why? I’m also curious what entrepreneurs think. I’m sure you know great examples of single-founder companies. Fire away.