The NY Tech Meetup & Charles Forman

Two weeks ago a controversy erupted when Allen Stern of CenterNetworks wrote a critical piece about the New York Tech Meetup which appeared both in CenterNetworks and Silicon Alley Insider. The NY Tech Meetup is the premier platform for New York Tech companies, primarily Internet companies, to demo their products to the New York community. It also is a great networking venue and has an active, though at times poorly behaved mailing list.

Allen's criticism is a feeling that, in essence, there is not sufficient openness in the management of the events. He even has the feeling that the process of selections may favor friends of the organizers. Allen has written several posts to the mailing list of the group asking to discuss certain issues about group organization and has been frustrated by lack of response.

My view is that some of Allen's criticisms may be valid, particularly as it relates to the appearance of fairness and openness. On the other hand I have 100% confidence that Scott Heiferman, the group's organizer and also the CEO of Meetup, has nothing but honorable intentions. To that end, today, Scott has called an organizational meeting for the group with the intent of opening a discussion about management, direction, and a larger purpose for the group. I think this direction is commendable.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, this discussion has gotten hijacked by perhaps one of the most disgusting and despicable displays I can recollect by a purportedly manistream executive in our business. The details follow.

One of the focal point's of Allen's criticism was that Charles Forman from iminlikewithyou has been allowed to present three times in the last year or so. Interestingly, this was not a criticism of Forman, but of the meetup organizers. Personally, I can understand the organizer's perspective that Forman had something compelling to say. But I also understand the argument that three times in such a short time is too much, and that he was allowed to break the cardinal rule of the meetup which is to actually demo something rather that just show a slide deck. It does seem to me that the rules here should be one size fits all.

Unfortunately, when Forman weighed in with his comments, the discussion went off the rails and was no longer about the merits at all.

Charles Forman left a comment on Stern's post on Silicon Alley Insider that read as follows:

Charles Forman (URL) said:Oct. 13, 5:59 PM
I don't like my name being dropped this many times without a picture of my pretty face attached.
Ah yes. The alley insider is up to rousing rabble for page views from my Google Alerts? Awesome. What's this? Detective Retardo is on the case - the champion of the underdog, and the morbidly obese? Totally fucking awesome.
Did I fail to entertain you? Did I fail to show something interesting? Of
I spent 2 days preparing my presentation so everyone wouldn't be bored to death. I doubt there has been another presenter that has put as much love into their presentations as I have.
Do you not understand what we am trying to do? Of course you do. You know how difficult and truly amazing it is.
I think the real problem is that you are jealous of my ability to run a mile in under 3 days. Maybe its that I date hot girls? Honestly, I don't understand how your beef with me - or your petty, passive aggressive approach.
If you have a problem with fairness, why aren't you paying $20? You very realistically take up 2 seats.
Seriously, if you have such a problem, why don't you just do your own democratic tech meetup and watch as no one shows up?
You are a sad, lonely, disgusting man. I hope you don't die of a coronary before we have a chance to patch things up.
*Kisses*

As far as I am concerned, this is one of the most despicable displays I have ever seen in any supposed professional space. Forman is CEO of a venture funded tech company. And this kind of personally denigrating talk is just shy of the hateful filth spewed by Loren Feldman. But Forman doesn't even have the patina of deniability which might be afforded to someone like Feldman who *claims* to be a comedian. Forman is obviously obsessed with his self-perception of his own physical beauty, but apparently totally tone deaf regarding the perception of his words. Even strategically, to say such things in public, even if you unrepentantly believe and feel them is, if nothing else, incredibly stupid. But then again, Forman doesnt claim to be smart, just capable of dating hot (presumably even more stupid) girls.

And so I have a newsflash for Charles. No matter how many times you appear in Esquire (yes he did), and no matter how many people may reinforce your enormous, but presumably incredibly fragile ego, the truth is crystal clear and cannot be denied. Nothing about your outward appearance can mitigate the reality of an incredibly flawed character. For your investors sake, I hope you can develop some kind of filter, because this is really not a great way to get people to be "in like with you."

I'm Back

I spent all of last week out in California. The first part of the week was spent in San Francisco at meetings, and the second half of the week was at our Web 3.0 Conference & Expo.

The trip was incredibly fruitful. I met some great new companies that will I think be great partners for Kloudshare, including Eric Marcoullier at Gnip.  I also reconnected with some great friends.

The conference was fantastic, and we are planning the next one in New York around April. In the aftermath, there was an interesting debate in the comments in a ReadWriteWeb article about the conference keynote, about the definition of Web 3.0 and whether it is at all valid to term the space that the semantic web inhabits as being Web 3.0. Personally I don't care what people say about name as long as they keep talking about it.

There was also some other coverage of the conference at RWW including an article about my panel discussion with Yahoo about their open strategy.

Unfortunately, I returned to a cold which I seemed to get either on the plane, or just after landing and switching from the warm California air to the chilly New York air. As such my post here is decidedly short. I also returned to read about iminlikewithyou.com's Charles Forman and his nasty "fat" comments directed at Allen Stern from CenterNetworks. Forman's comments were triggered by Allen's critique of the New York Tech Meetup and the fact that Forman has presented three times in the last year or so, which Allen considers to be more than his fair share.

Forman's comments were horrific, and deserve a full post, but you can imagine that I might have something fairly substantial to say about this. But I want to be at full strength when I air this one out.

Anyway, the trip reminded me of the value of staying connected to the west coast. There is a whole other eco-system out there, and for us east coast folks, it makes no sense not to be connected to it. While it is certainly true that there can be a bit of a west coast echo chamber, not having a visceral sense of what is going on out there is definitely sub-optimal.

Anyway, more later. I have lots to say but it will probably take a week or so to get it all out so please be patient.

Did Some Insider Just Spill The Beans On New Apple Laptop?

  The below comment was left by someone on this article on CNET about the new apple laptops.

 

by Galaxy5 October 10, 2008 12:03 PM PDT

Sure would be cool if they sold a product that could be used as a laptop or a desktop, a la Mac Mini. $600.00 for the 'brick' and you get what's essentially a Mac Mini. $800 gets you the same thing with a bright, sharp, fully detachable 13" display. Not that I would be in a position to know...I just like leaving cryptic comments. And I drink beer at B.J.s on DeAnza a lot.

Fascinating. People may not have picked up the reference, but DeAnza is one of the main streets running through Apple's cupertino campus. The implication is that he is in the know. A detachable desktop/portable Mac as implied here for $800 would be awesome.

So Tell Me Again Why You Don’t Pay A Dividend?

In one respect the stock market has often baffled me. I understand what stock ownership in a private company means. And I even understand what stock ownership in a publicly traded low growth dividend earning stock means.

What I don’t understand is why a reasonably mature public stock that generates no dividend is worth anything to anybody. Ok that’s not quite true. I understand why a company might be strategic to another company and so, in that context, to have substantial value even if not producing revenue, or even profit. But owning a stock in the hope that someone else will see it as strategic ain't no way to manage a portfolio.

In the tech market, most companies are considered “growth” stocks, and so do not pay a dividend. As the most insane and absurd example, Microsoft only felt it appropriate to start paying a dividend in 2003. In the case of a no-dividend company, what you are doing when you buy their stock is absolutely nothing more than gambling that some other guy is going to think, in the future, that the given stock has more value than you believe it does today, probably based on some nebulous metrics. But if your intent is to hold that stock for a long period of time, how are you getting a return on investment if there is no dividend? As I see it, investing in publicly traded mature stocks that don’t offer a dividend is the most pure (and ridiculous) form of gambling.

As I see it, the stock market ought to work a lot more like private stock ownership. If you own stock in a private company, unless you are in a massive early stage growth phase, the value in owning the stock is that it generates revenue for you. A dividend. This is no different than how you should feel as the holder of a relatively mature private company.

The reason I started thinking about this is I, like everyone else, have been wondering where the bottom of the market is. And in tech, i.e. growth stocks, I have been wondering how you select a bottom for companies that pay nothing to their shareholders.

I think one of the repercussions of this crash is that at all but the earliest stage companies will have to consider a dividend strategy that makes sense not just for the companies but for their shareholders and the stock market as a whole. This may be the only real way of re-establishing underlying value for equities.

The Veruca Salt Economy

I want it now daddy!

That is what drives us. It is what drives every financial meltdown. It is the gorging on stuff that is trivially accessible, while foregoing that which, regardless of value, presents too much challenge. It is the seeking of the low hanging, but tasteless, while eschewing the slightly beyond easy reach but ever so much more delicious. At some point the market always figures out if you have a basketful of flavorless fruit. The apples look like apples, but taste like cardboard. And no matter how easy they were to pick, no one wants cardboard apples.

But the easy way out is, unfortunately, vastly more appealing than the more circuitous route. And so it is with the crisis of confidence in the banking system, and the much less discussed crisis of ideas in the tech economy. Why put several years of design and re-thinking and engineering into something when you can graduate with your freshly minted MBA, partner with some PHP hack, and join the Web 2.0 generation. After all its what all the cool kids are doing.

The market should have punished this trend long ago. And it did briefly after the Web 1.0 bubble burst. But then we got stupid and we forgot how ridiculous we thought the quest for revenue-less eyeballs seemed in the last tech melt down.

So what is worrying me is that there is lots of talk in the tech community about impending danger, but as I see it the focus is all wrong. Yes, in these times it is always prudent to cut expenses to maximize your runway. But the problem is not running out of money. The problem is not doing something that is worth any money. And truth be told, its not that hard to figure that out. The problem is the incredible denial that so many people engage in when they are picking all those cardboard apples. Just because your buddy sold a bucket of cardboard apples to someone who P.T. Barnum might call a sucker, doesn't mean you can too. Its like musical chairs. When the music stops there will be more people than chairs and if you have a basketful of cardboard apples, you are going to be left standing.

And so my message now is about patience and quality. Stop focusing on getting rich, and start focusing on doing something that makes a real difference to someone in the real world. And while you are at it, building something that cannot be copied by a couple of teenage PHP coders over a few weekends would probably be smart too.

Inside Out vs. Outside In

I like to read code on paper. Some people only read code on the screen. I have at times wondered what drives each coding style. The reason I like to code on paper is because it helps me see the big picture. I get to take in all of the code. And it allows me to change venues when looking at code. For example I can print out a big piece of code and go sit in the park or lay on my bed, or sit in the kitchen, or whatever.

I find that being able to flip between pages and mark things and take notes on paper is invaluable for seeing the big picture, or what I would call “outside in” coding. I tend to code outside in, and I think screen only coders write “inside out”. When you write code inside out it means you start writing small functions and you just keep putting them together until you have something useful. Looking at the big picture is less important because you are always focused on one little section at a time and your project grows this way.

Inside out coding is great because you always have something working. The downside is that it doesn’t necessarily help you get to a radically different place. It is harder to chart a course this way. Similarly, writing code outside in has the downside of not necessarily having the benefit of rapid iterative development, and not necessarily seeing all of the opportunities and patterns that may arise from deep in the structure of the code.

I have come to believe that both styles of development are important, and that it is in fact helpful to have a mix of styles on a team. The idea is that inside out is great for creating building blocks, and the outside in thinking provides form structure and direction.

Part of the reason I am thinking about this is because there is a very popular school of thought that currently promotes iterative development, which is often synonymous with inside out development. I believe iterative development is great when you don’t have too far to go. But I think that big picture thinking, as opposed to a purely iterative process is invaluable to certain types of innovation and to getting to a less obvious place. Properly managed, inside out and outside in together can be a very effective combination.

The Tech Market: A Failure of Ideas, Not Execution

I have been having an online discussion with my friend Andrew Badera, who wrote the initial “idea = 1% execution = 99%” posting on the NextNY mailing list that I blogged about last week. His position is that execution is worth far more than ideas. We have been going back and forth in the comments of that article, and in the process I realized something I think is significant enough to elevate to a blog post.

The sorry state of tech entrepreneurship is not a failure of execution, but a failure of ideas. In the last four or five years, the Web 2.0 market has seemed explosively successful. But I would say that from an economic perspective it has been a failure. Because at the end of the day, a market cannot be judged by how much VC has been raised, but by how much actual revenue the companies are making either independently or after acquisition, as parts of larger companies.

The truth is that as it relates to generating revenue, Web 2.0 has been a bust. This is intuitively obvious, but unfortunately I don’t have any hard statistics to back it up. But the clearest indicator is that startups are not being acquired. If the best of the best were accretive to earnings for the acquirer they would be. The idea that the raft of social media companies with no revenue model was going to somehow “figure revenue out later” after building up large audiences of free users has, I think been debunked. Web 2.0 is old enough that there should be way more companies making lots of money.

Which brings me back to the idea vs. execution argument. In the Web 2.0 era, there have been lots of excellent entrepreneurs. The failure of the overall market is not because no entrepreneurs are executing, but because they are, by and large, trying to execute bad ideas. We are currently living through the fallout of that. Yes the overall economy is obviously bad, but this trend is not a new one. It has been clear for at least a year and probably longer.

What the Web 2.0 market actually confirms for us is that bad ideas cannot be overcome with excellent execution. Otherwise we would be seeing lots of hugely profitable social media startups. The proof is in the (lack of) profit.

What Is An Idea Worth?

I am a member of the NextNY mailing list which is a group of New York folks that talk about tech business and entrepreneurship. A recent conversation and actually a persistent theme in that group is that in a startup, an idea is worth 1% and execution is worth 99% or some other highly disproportionate ratio.

I take issue with the concept.

Here’s the problem with the formulation. It belies a misunderstanding of what an actionable “idea” really is. A good idea is almost never some light bulb moment that occurs where you realize some insight that no one else has seen. In truth there are few of those. Very, very few people are that smart or that lucky. Great actionable ideas are really a collection of much smaller ideas, weaved together in such a way as to create something useful unique and compelling. There are few actionable “aha” moments.

In other words, to me, coming up with great actionable ideas requires lots of perspiration, iteration, and ideation. However, once you have an actionable idea that has been achieved through this process it is worth *way* more than 1%. I would say getting to this point is worth easily 50% and perhaps well more than 50% of the value of your enterprise. Actionable and truly compelling business ideas are incredibly valuable. And most people that say otherwise probably don’t have them. For example if you open up a shoe store on Amazon, there is likely no “idea” there. But if you have developed a set of insights which allows you to develop a cost effective and safe hovercraft, that is certainly a valuable idea.

The problem is that people confuse the idea creation process with the execution process. They are different. I think one can, at times, blend the idea creation process with the *development* process, but there are important distinctions. When development is just execution of some defined idea, that is not idea creation. That is part of execution.

On the other hand, when the development process is part of the ideation process, you have set the stage for an environment where real creativity is possible. But in order for this to work, the development process must be more interactive and less goal-oriented. Great ideas come from having a bit of a “lab-like” environment in the early stages of your process. This is because exploration is almost always required to achieve a great compelling concept. Few of us has the ability to see with clarity a really useful idea from the beginning of the process, which is why iteration and stepwise refinement is so important.

This leads to what I think is a very important issue in the idea development process. There are lots of people who strongly suggest that you should do your development in public. It is part of the “release early and often” concept. But I also believe that this concept is not effective in developing great ideas because it is limiting. The minute that you get real customers involved, their needs become much more pedestrian. They will yell loudly about things that may be important to their use of the product, but they will rarely yell about some new game-changing concept. In fact they will resist radical change and rethinking because it messes with their now committed workflow. And now you are comitted to supporting them.

To be clear, I am not saying that a mediocre idea can't be a good business. But good businesses are not all great ideas.

So as I see it, if you want to do something great, you should strongly consider whether you have enough meat on your conceptual bone before you decide to release publicly. Because when you get users involved, it is the equivalent of putting the saw and the screwdriver down and grabbing the sand paper. There will likely be few additional big ideas after that point.

And so the point of all of this is that I feel few people really respect the process of creating big ideas. Compelling idea creation is hard and it is incredibly valuable. And as I see it, the “release early and often” meme is a reflection of a broad-based acceptance of incrementalism, in lieu of real creativity. In truth some of these incredibly popular concepts may be behind the incredible slow down we have seen in real innovation in the tech economy in the last decade.

A Moment Of Silence For Our Economy

Please read this article and this article both from the New York Times. I cannot say it better and so I refer you to people who do say it better. Tell your wacky friends that just want Wall Street to burn to read them too. Apparently calls are flowing in 200 to 1 against doing anything so its time to mobilize. Its one thing to be for something else. Its another to be for nothing. Its not the public's job to understand the importance of credit, but members of The House of Representatives reflect an ignorance that is just a little too representative of Main Street. Please help me turn these articles into email chain letters. Our stupid, craven, spineless politicians need help.

You Really Can't Get Something For Nothing

I am not an economist. I am a software guy. A computer scientist. And while I have not spent my life thinking about economic trends, I have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about complexity. And I know it when I see it. Insane complexity.

We have a market that is driven by debt that no one understands, and by trading activity run by software programs that no one understands. We have created a hive. It operates with a collective mind, but a mind like that of an adolescent or teenager, that cannot be reasoned with. No, it is worse than that. The hive is not even a collection of just people, but also of very inhuman software programs that operate based on rules that are, when executed en masse, totally unpredictable.

It is truly HAL from A Space Odyssey. Our economy is on autopilot and no one knows where the plane is going. And when it gets there, we won’t know why. We will only be able to look back retrospectively to figure out the details using forensic techniques.

But while the details are unclear, the psychology driving the big pattern is obvious: we all want something for nothing.

The truth is our economy has been in trouble for a long time. It is the “too smart for the room” guys that, at some point in, I would imagine the 90’s, figured out how to make money without actually creating any value.

The boom in the financial community economy was always a sham because it produced absolutely nothing. The boom in the real estate market was a sham because it was based on nothing.

There is no reason that moving money from column A to column B should be so disproportionately valuable. In truth it really isn’t that valuable, but we have been willing to pay a lot of money to people who we thought understood what was going on and could protect us from that which we did not understand. But they didn’t understand either. Hence for example, the AIG collapse.

In truth we should be making things that add real value to people’s lives. But in this country we are making less and less as we export real production to countries like China.

But the chickens are coming home to roost.

Ironically, while we are still incredibly expert at producing intellectual property, there is a political and social movement led by wackos like Richard Stallman, and cheer led by wackos like Mike Masnick that want to entirely devalue one of this country’s last great exports by arguing against any protections for intellectual property, and by arguing that even the concept of intellectual property is unjust.

In the tech economy, in the last five years we have produced very little that actually makes any of our lives better. Twitter is cute, but economically unproductive. Ditto Friendfeed. Ditto (fill in the blank with your favorite social media platform). These products are economically neutral. And that is not a good thing. To those of you that would argue with me on this point, I defy you to explain the real world economic value/impact of the social media revolution. How does it help increase the real world GDP even one little tiny bit. I dare you. I double dare you. You can’t do it. Because if all of it went away, the world would be the same the next day. And I don’t want to hear any crap about how we are going to “figure it out”. The time for figuring out how to create value out of economically unproductive concepts has passed. We need to rethink some things.

Just for context, please remember that there is actual precedent for creating value for people with technology. Think of word processors, databases, spreadsheets, web browsers, web publishing, search engines, email, etc. Social media is the first major computing revolution that as far as I can tell, has produced essentially nothing.

But the social media craze is perfectly fitting in a society where producing nothing has been in fashion for years. Mortgages without credit. Profit without product. Riches without risk. Oops.

The truth is that as things have gotten more and more complex it has become easier to abdicate responsibility for understanding. And that has lead us to this incredibly insane place where we can actually believe that things that produce no real value are somehow valuable. Because even if *we* can’t understand it, we assume someone else must. But it just isn’t so. The truth is it is likely if you can’t understand it, no one else can either.

We need to take things back into our own hands. There is safety in really understanding what you are holding in your hand. We need to stop trying to trick each other into buying the pig in the poke. We need to simplify. We need to get back to producing sound products that really do matter. This is as important in the financial community as it is in the tech economy. Because its really all the same fundamental problem. We want to believe you can get something for nothing and it just ain’t so.

Anticipating the Next Generation of Search

Most of the world’s most important information has structure. To be clear, by structure I mean the data has separate fields for its component parts, like for example, a contact has separate fields for first name, last name, address city, country, etc.

This structured information is where most of the value from the Internet resides. For example, all e-commerce is centered around structured data like product information records which have fields like part numbers, prices, descriptions, etc. I would suggest that structured data, on the whole, has one or more orders of magnitude greater economic value than unstructured data.

And yet we currently have no centralized way to find structured information. Today the process is very ad-hoc. We must know where to look in order to find what we are looking for. When we want to buy a new TV perhaps we check Amazon, Best Buy, and Circuit City. If we want to find people to potentially hire, perhaps we go to LinkedIn. If we want to buy Beanie Babies we go to eBay.

But shouldn’t it be possible to find structured information from a centralized source like Google? Yes, we have vertical search engines, but that really is the entirely wrong concept. There is nothing at all vertical (i.e. narrow) about structured search, and creating separate types of engines for each type of data is really the wrong thing to do. Perhaps we think of this problem as “vertical” just because it happens to be hard. But this is indeed one of the broadest remaining problems on the Internet.

While the technical challenges are significant, the opportunity here is huge. This is because the direct economic value of structured data is, as I suggested above, *much* greater that that of raw text. And so the company that brings us structured search might have the potential to be *at least* as valuable as Google.

Understanding the Problem

The current form of the search engine makes lots of sense when the data you are searching is just a river of text, and all you are looking for is whether a set of words is present, or even with semantic search, whether a concept is present. But as the Internet becomes a web of structured data and you want to find records of a particular type with, for example, fields within a particular range, how will that work?

The first thing to consider is that the Web, despite what people would like to think, is not really a collection of millions of independent servers operated by different people and companies. The web is a collection of servers that are all hooked into the major search engines — forming a kind of singular hive. These search engines operate as the brain of the Internet. They mirror a copy of most every bit of data on the Internet and index it inside their own servers.

This mirroring is doable because the task is, at the most basic level, relatively simple: store text and build an inverted index of it. I don’t mean to minimize the implementation complexities of modern search, but the basic concept is very simple. Doing a web scale structured search engine is not nearly so conceptually simple.

We have many years of experience storing structured information in SQL databases. But there are no web scale SQL databases comparable to the hundreds of thousands of servers Google has under the hood for storing and indexing text. And even if such a beast did exist, the whole concept of the SQL/relational database doesn’t work at web scale because you have to know what types of records you are going to store up front. You cannot just have every new user adding new record types.

And yet this ability to search through and understand any kind of structure is *exactly* what you want a structured search engine to do. In the next generation of search, new structures must be as easy to add to the index as new web pages are to add to Google. Just as today’s search engines store any kind of text, tomorrows search engines must be able to grab structured information, understand it, and understand the relationships between structures. For example, you need to be able to ask your search engine, who are John Doe’s friends. You need to be able to tell it that John Doe is a person and to find all the people that are connected to John as friends. This will require a fundamental rethinking of what a search engine does.

The solution to this is really a database problem. You need an infinitely horizontally database that understands structure but is not limited by it. And then you need some new kind of crawler to extract data. Ideally you also have some sort of notification system that allows this new search engine to be notified when individual records change.

Getting There

A broad-based solution to this problem is what I would call Web 3.0 search, and it will be necessary for Web 3.0 to reach its full potential in the same way search engines are critical to the current Web universe. But despite its importance and obviousness, I think this problem will not be solved by one of the major players, but by a startup. The major’s have too much work on their plates already, and it just makes more sense to let a focused startup figure all of this stuff out and to acquire it later.

But once this nut is cracked, it will be possible to explore the world of information in a way that makes the current incarnation of Google seem almost silly. And I believe that creating such a search engine would provide the motivation for almost every holder of actionable, relevant data to make that data available in a form that is searchable by such an engine. I do believe this is an, “if you build it they will come” situation, because of the scale of problems that such a search engine solves, and because way before something like this got to be Google scale it would be invaluable.

As an example, imagine being able to search for all of the flights between New York and anywhere, available on American Airlines that are below $200. From each of the flights you could click to see the cities associated with each flight. From each city you could see the top rated restaurants with prices under $20 a piece. From there you could explore their neighborhoods, etc.

In many respects an interesting presage of this is Metaweb’s Freebase. Freebase allows you to explore data in much the way that I describe, but it is a database, and not a search engine. They present themselves as the structured version of Wikipedia and not the structured version of Google. In its present form, I think Freebase really needs to either become the next generation “structured data” search engine, or they need to hope that someone else invents it. Because without a good central search system users will just never think of Freebase.

There is no doubt that such a structured search engine will come to pass. The need is too obvious and important. The most interesting question is what is the smallest possible implementation of this that actually does something useful will look like. Because while the need is clear, the most capital efficient way to get there never is.

Apple Has Learned The Importance of Play. We Should Too

On Wednesday I attended the Sandbox Summit here in New York, which is a conference about the intersection between technology, toys, play, and learning. For someone deeply embedded in the software development world, but also deeply troubled by the state of education in America, the event seemed fascinating and also pregnant with possibility. And it did not disappoint.

And while many of the speakers had lots of really interesting stuff to say, one statement by Nancy Schulman, Director, 92nd Street Y Nursery School really got my attention. She said “kindergarten is becoming more like regular school, but I think regular school and life should become more like kindergarten.”

For those that may miss the nuance, what she was suggesting is that joyful playful exploration is critical to learning. Rote learning and memorization is less effective. As I sat, I realized how much the ideas I was hearing relate to how we make products. Much of this way of thinking I believe is already embedded in my thought processes, but there is something different and crucially important about codifying it, and expressing it concisely. What Schulman was saying got me immediately thinking about Apple.

I believe that a big part of the reason that Apple has been successful is that they figured out long ago that their products had to have the elements of joyful exploration that are the hallmarks of great toys. The concept of play is generally something associated with children, but I believe that that desire and that need never die. It is just muted by the expectations of adulthood.

The best example of this is my mother’s excitement about her new iPhone. My mother loves her iPhone because it is the best toy she has had since childhood. No, she has not said this to me, but I can see it clear as day. When she played her first YouTube video, she could not wait to tell me. For her, the iPhone is hard enough to still present challenges, and yet easy enough that she can overcome them. And the payoffs are joyous. The sound, the animation, the smooth virtual physics are incredibly compelling and toy-like. But of course it is not a “toy” it is a phone. It has a real function so she could never be accused of “playing.”

And so, the real question here is what does Apple, and what does the Sandbox Summit teach us about our way forward. First, I think that Apple sets a great example of what is possible, and it should inspire us to make our products more playful, accessible and exploratory.

But the second and more important lesson is that adulthood, and teen-hood are not demarcation points for a reduced interest in play – in fact the converse may be the case, meaning play may in fact become *more* important as we get older. And with our high school graduation rates at 50% in our 20 largest cities, something is obviously and seriously wrong with our current process. With that said I suggest that perhaps our educational system could use a serious injection of not so serious exploration and play. It seems to work for Apple.

iPhone, Background Apps, and Android

Apple has claimed that the iPhone does not do background processing because supporting it would hurt the performance of the phone. Jobs has said Apple’s concern is that because the processor is limited, loading up the phone with background apps is likely to crash the machine or bring it to its knees.

I have discussed this issue in the past. I have also discussed Apple’s response to the issue, which is an improved way of handling notification of inbound events like instant messages, which would normally be implemented through a background task.

I understand Apple’s concern about background processing, but I personally think its pretty lame. As I have written, there are ways to handle Apple’s concern. But the interesting thing is that the first Android phone, The T-Mobile G1 has been announced and will be out in the wild available on October 22nd. Android has no restrictions at all on background processing, and the first Android handset, the G1 is pretty similar to the iPhone hardware.

The question is, will Android demonstrate that Steve was somehow disingenuous about this whole background processing thing, or will the Android team be shown to be foolhardy about this critical performance issue? Nokia’s Symbian-based phones seem to handle background tasks just fine, but admittedly I don’t think many people are motivated to load up a Nokia smartphone with software in the same way that people are doing with the iPhone. But Android is really a true test. There will be lots of software, an easy to use app exchange, and a sense of openness that will encourage experimentation.

I am personally very curious to see what happens in the Petri dish.

Web 2.0: Making Friends / Web 3.0: Making Money

Web 2.0 is really at its core about user interface. Interface technologies such as Flash and AJAX have allowed web pages to be more active and engaging and to really become application-like. By and large, we have used this power to make social applications. Unfortunately while these social applications are entertaining, they are, for the most part, not making us money, and they are not providing any great enhancement to our productivity. In fact many would argue they are robbing us of our productivity.

But Web 3.0 is different. Web 3.0 is about the data. In a Web 3.0 world there are no silos between applications and data objects in application “A” can be connected to or related to items in application “B”. This is really just a natural extension of the concept of the mashup. Web 3.0 is about allowing for data across applications to be organized so that it becomes useful information.

Many people will refer to the Web 3.0 as the Semantic Web. I don’t use that term because it is tied to certain specific technologies from the W3C standards organization, but the concept of Web 3.0 is much bigger than one set of technologies or specifications. In fact the W3C Semantic Web specifications do not actually cover all of the requirements for making your application data open, and so companies are appropriately inventing their own solutions. One amazingly powerful example of this is Yahoo’s new Yahoo Query Language(YQL), which, through one language, gives access to huge parts of the yahoo data universe.

Ok, so how does open access to data and new organizations for data lead to making money?

It’s simple. When you properly organize data, you can extract actionable information that leads to profitable or productive decisions. There are two types of value that can be extracted from hyper connected data: direct value and indirect value.

• Direct value is value that you get from realizing that there is a relationship between two items that your human mind would not have made. For example, imagine receiving a new email from a potential customer, and having the application be able to tell you (perhaps in a rollover) that this prospect is someone who you met at a get together last year (because it was on your calendar) and that you have several friends in common. That little bit of information might be enough to help you make that sale. In previous articles I have referred to this concept as serendipity.
  
  
• Indirect value is value that may be derived from *analyzing* the connections between objects in your data universe, typically using some kind of machine learning techniques. For example, imagine collaborative filtering, but applied not just to your book or movie purchases, but across your entire life. For an overly simple scenario, such a system might be able to suggest, based on the fact that you read a lot of books on Australia, that an airfare sale by Quantas might be of interest to you. This is only possible in a Web 3.0 world where activity stream data is accessible across all of your applications, and is not just locked into one service.
  

In summary, Web 2.0 was about making the web a compelling application interface platform. And now, in this Web 3.0 phase, we will be leveraging that interface platform combined with open data interfaces. This combination will yield services that help us to live more productive and profitable professional and personal lives. As I see it, this is the *real* Internet revolution.

If you want to participate in this discussion, we will be talking about how to profitably leverage Web 3.0 at the Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA October 16th and 17th.

Versioning The Web

Last week I wrote about the conference I am co-chairing next month out in Santa Clara, CA called the Web 3.0 Conference. In discussing Web 3.0 I mentioned that I believed Facebook was a Web 3.0 company. One of the commenters asked for clarification, saying that he thought Facebook was a poster child for Web 2.0.

And indeed the answer is, of course they are.

As I see it, Web 3.0 services are almost by definition also Web 2.0 services. But it occurred to me that for many, this “Web 2.0” term might be somewhat nebulous. Of course the interesting thing about Web 2.0 is that while, as far as I know, there is no official definition, we do, I think, generally know it when we see it.

But despite the fact that we may “get it” on a gut level, I think it is useful to think about what Web 2.0 really means in more formal terms, and so I have decided to offer up my own definition.

While Web 1.0 was about basic linking of pages, Web 2.0 is about making web sites more like applications. So to be a web 2.0 apps almost by definition requires use of AJAX and/or Flash for real application style interactivity. I think if your application does not do either, it’s hard for me to imagine calling it web 2.0. One of the biggest areas in this regard is the ability to interact with audio and video, leading some to erroneously suggest that Web 2.0 is about user generated content. Of course if you disagree with my definition, I’d love to hear alternate definitions.

And so of course, Facebook is a Web 2.0 service, and a very sophisticated one at that. But it is also a Web 3.0 service. And what does that mean? It means that the application is really a universe of objects that can be viewed, accessed and interconnected across applications and within Facebook across users. In other words, as I discussed last week, Facebook is about connections between objects not connections between pages. Applications from the web 2.0 generation have objects (essentially meaning they have databases) but they do not allow other applications to point to those objects, and those objects cannot point each other.

In other words, pre-Web 3.0 applications are highly siloed, whereas Web 3.0 applications seek in some way or another to be part of the larger mesh of data objects.

Tomorrow, more on why Web 3.0 is so important. Hint: it’s about money!