2006 March

A smartphone in your hand

March 13, 2006 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

Recently I bumped in to my old CEO (Bud Colligan) whom I worked for at Authorware many years ago. Bud’s now a venture capitalist with Accel Partners in Palo Alto and goes to every significant conference. At this particular one, he was chatting up Mitch Kapor and I stopped and interjected since I hadn’t seen Bud for quite some time.

I felt bad since Mitch excused himself and left. Interrupting them wasn’t my intention. In any event, it gave Bud and I some time to get caught up a bit and I was curious what he saw as the next, big thing and where VC investments were going. "Mobile," he replied. We talked a bit about that, his brother Ed (who is CEO of Palm), convergence and the world being flat.

I’ve been working on something that necessitated quite a bit of research on mobile telephony, networks and where smartphones are heading. I must admit being quite taken aback at how quickly this space is growing (growth in smartphones worldwide is expected to jump from 5.7M units (11.1M in North America) in 2005 to 156.2M units (37M in North America) by 2008). Also, the networks are accelerating in speed (GSM is 10-14kbps and the emerging third generation networks like high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) promises a theoretical speed of 10.7mbps.

Wow. I’ve been goofing with the new Palm Treo700w at a Verizon stand leveraging their evolution data optimized (EV-DO) network and it is very fast. There are more applications for the PalmOS than for Windows Mobile, so I’m uncertain which Treo to buy.

What’s certain is that I’m weary of going to coffee shops for Wifi access, not having a device that I can do things with regardless of where I am, and a digital device that can store stuff I need and go fetch what isn’t on it. The smartphone is the only way to go.

Filed Under: Innovation

What happened to Slashdot?

March 11, 2006 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

For years I found cutting edge technical pointers at Slashdot ("News for nerds, stuff that matters"). Two or three times per day I’d pull up the site to see what was new and often found myself scrolling through comments, clicking on links to the main topic or ones from commenters, and generally feeling really on top of what was happening with alpha males in techdom.

Today, Slashdot (/.) is just one of many sites I skim with my RSS reader. Rarely do I see something there that I’ve not already seen somewhere else, or simply don’t care about and thus don’t read the /. post.

So why have they become less relevant? It seems to me that there are so many bloggers that are covering seemingly every development technically, that the smart people formerly posting to /. are simply doing it on a blog instead.

Makes me wonder how many other hot sites are becoming less hot now that blogging, blog conversation trackers and other sites are making new information available virtually the moment there is awareness.

Filed Under: Gadgets & Hacks

9.7 Billion Web Pages and Nothing’s There

March 7, 2006 By Steve Borsch

As of January 2006, Google has indexed 9.7 billion web pages. When I search on a string that is even somewhat popular, I often get back hundreds of thousands or millions of results. In addition, I find it very difficult to obtain the most recent results unless I’m very, very careful about how I enter my search string. Why is it so hard to find really useful data?

Try answering these questions and tell me how easy it is for you to put your fingers on the data (without paying $2,500 and above for reports from some analyst firm):

How many total web sites are there?
Worldwide, what’s the installed base of mobile phones? How many are web enabled?
What are the various flavors of wireless, data-centric technologies (Wifi, Wimax, CDMA, GSM, EV-DO, et al)? How fast are they? What are the growth rates?
What is the guesstimate for the growth in, say, data? When you think about the demand side creation of media by consumers, is there any way to quantify this increase?
How many unique visitors does Wikipedia get per day?
How many blogs are delivered by spammers? (Out of the 29.8 million tracked by Technorati).

I could go on-and-on but you get the drift. For simple searches on Google, Yahoo, Icerocket and others, it’s fairly trivial to get good results back. But when you’re searching for more complex, meaty results, it’s stunningly difficult and time consuming to get answers.

One would assume that the Federal Communications Commission, the Dept of Commerce, World Wide Web Consortium or many of the other governmental or non-profit companies would provide this data (especially the US governmental agencies to whom I’m paying taxes!) but alas, they don’t.

Filed Under: Web 2.0

Maybe there oughta be a CampCamp?

March 5, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Will there be controversy over the upcoming Minneapolis-based "CampCamp" this May?

"CampCamp is an ad-hoc, un-conference born from the desire for people to go to a camp since it appears that they’re really, really cool.

CampCamp will be an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees, as well as wiki’s, free deodorant and on-the-spot blogging about how cool it is. Though CampCamp unconference organizers have yet to pick a topic nor have invited anyone to date, this is shaping up to be one of the best camp unconferences ever.

Of course, free Wifi and power strips will be available. Dress code is open, long sleeve shirts over t-shirts with jeans. In addition, all A-list bloggers (e.g., Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer) will be invited in order to maximize CampCamp’s exposure on techmemorandum, as well as inappropriate begging to ensure CampCamp is covered on TechCrunch and Valleywag."

OK, OK…I’ll be serious. Matthew Ingram has quite a post about a controversy over all the "camps" (Foocamp, Barcamp, MashupCamp, Moosecamp) that have been occurring. I won’t re-create Matthews post here, but suffice it to say the concept of an unconference is OUTSTANDING and there needs to many, many more of them. Paying thousands of dollars to attend traditional conferences — plus travel and expenses — limits the number of people who can attend and contribute.

I believe that there are no experts. Someone might be more knowledgable at some point in time, but the collective consciousness knows more than any single individual. I know that the reason I love conferences like Web 2.0, ETech and others is not the speakers…it’s the attendees. The side conversations. The connections. Ideas that spark new thoughts and, in turn, new ideas.

The most important thing we can all do to create new value, innovate and solve problems we have or are yet to come, is to collaborate. If we align around a topic or as an affinity group, magic happens. An unconference of *any* kind can invite in the maximum number of people that can bring with them new ways of thinking, different points of view, and energy that traditional, expensive conferences cannot. Unconferences are the open source of the conference world.

UPDATE: Dave Winer has an essay on the subject of unconferences that you’ll want to read.

Filed Under: Open Source, Web 2.0

Connecting the Dots podcast for March 3, 2006

March 3, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Ipod_2
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve done a podcast. I’ve been busier than a one-armed, wallpaper hanger but had a bit of time this afternoon and have really been missing it — so here you go. I’m geared up to continue the weekly podcast series so keep those earphones in.

This week’s show covers my current adventure…and some things you might want to consider if you’re working (but not feeling like you’re in the right spot) or are considering an entrepreneurial adventure of your own. Understanding your values, purpose and what puts a spring-in-your-step is key to creating your future, and there is some data you can gather that will help you understand yourself and the choices you make will become increasingly clear.

Staying with my roots of connecting dots, I then segue in to a discussion about Web 2.0 companies and this list of 907 of them…and something to consider before you embark on
investing your time, energy, effort or money in a new Web offering.

Listen to or download this week’s show

Filed Under: Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness, Web 2.0

The Internet is a platform

March 3, 2006 By Steve Borsch

UPDATE: Graeme Thickins will be posting from PC Forum and has an excellent prelude post today. It covers many of the issues important to the success of internet as a platform.

If you have *any* doubt that the internet is a platform — and that the future of the Web is upon us and accelerating — then I provide for your clicking, your experiencing, and your gignormous investment of time, this site full of 907 Web 2.0-ish links.

Some of these sites are peripheral to Web 2.0 (or what is increasingly being referred to as "Next Generation internet") meaning they’re not actual web application offerings. An example is the AttentionTrust.org attempting to ensure that all netizens own the data collected from our attention invested in all these Web offerings. You can also click "Category Definitions" at the top of the page to see how the eConsultant has categorized the list o’ links.

I’m going to come back to a recurring theme I posted about earlier: there are too many value propositions and too many Web places expecting us all to invest our attention, time, energy and effort with them.

Heck…I can’t even get through a list of 907 links like this one…let alone decide upon who will survive and be worthy of my attention. Which online storage place do I choose to safekeep my precious digital files? Which calendar application can my family and I use to input all birthdays, events and work on it as a shared calendar? Lastly, which of the collaboration sites can I either use or recommend to clients (e.g., Basecamp, Foldera, Joyent, Rallypoint, ProjectSpaces, StikiPad, et al) will still be with us a year or two from now?

Imagine a small business, with collaborators geographically disbursed, begin to use Foldera. Everyone participating climbs the learning curve, invests in uploading and input into the various calendars and other collaborative aspects, and then what if Foldera folds in 2007? They’re now offline and all the data is sitting on their servers. This team is screwed.