Chip Griffin: Pardon the Disruption

Check Out DonorsChoose

I spend a lot of my day looking at and discussing innovative technologies, techniques, products, and companies.  But we all need to remember that innovation isn't limited to for-profit operations. In fact, a great example of innovation in the non-profit sector is DonorsChoose.

From the organization's web site:

DonorsChoose.org was pioneered by teachers at a Bronx public high school in the spring of 2000. Charles Best, then a social studies teacher, saw first-hand the scarcity of materials in our public school classrooms and the profound impact of this scarcity on kids' education. Looking for a way to address this problem, he sensed an untapped potential in people who were frustrated by their lack of influence over the use of their charitable donations. DonorsChoose.org, a website connecting classrooms in need with individuals who want to help, was born.

I first became involved with DonorsChoose as part of venture capitalist Fred Wilson's "challenge" that he took part in along with other bloggers.  The idea was to get readers to participate, and I did. 

I have been very fortunate over the years and work to support various charitable endeavors as a result, but I am one of those who like to be more directly involved with my giving and this group gives me the chance to do so. 

But what really impressed me was the follow-up.  I chose to fund a printer for a vocabulary program in a Brooklyn, NY elementary school.  Recently, I received a thank you note from the school, which would be great in itself.  But it was simply a cover letter for a stack of thank you notes, handwritten by the students and decorated with drawings. 

That kind of follow-up will serve DonorsChoose well and help keep supporters engaged.  Well done!

The Real Problem with Information Isn’t Overload or Underload

Paul Kedrosky raised an interesting question at the Defrag Conference in Denver yesterday.  He led a panel discussion that kept circling back to the notion of information overload, but Paul suggested that the 200+ people in the room likely represent edge cases who frequently overwhelmed by the amount of information that they have to process, whereas most people may well suffer from information underload.

Much of the discussion centered on what tools to use to better cope with information overload.  Chris Shipley, executive producer of the popular DEMO conference, said she copes by simply ignoring the flood of email and other information when she doesn’t have time to deal with it.

This all got me thinking a bit about this topic in a way that I probably hadn’t before.  Here’s where my thought process arrived:

You Never Miss Information You Need to Know

That’s absurd you say. I say it isn’t.  If you actually have a real “need to know,” then you will get the information. Think about it: the only time you are upset about “missing” some piece of data is after you learn that the information existed. Somehow that information will eventually make its way to you.

The Real Challenge is Getting Information at the Right Time

This is the aha! moment for me.  Figuring out how to get the right information at the right time is really the challenge we are facing here.  Knowing that Tom Brady won’t be able to play next weekend is something that will help your fantasy team if you find out now.  If you learn it next Monday, it’s too late to act effectively on that knowledge.  Similarly, if somehow you had gained that knowledge a year ago, it would be extraneous data for many months before it could actually be acted upon.

Ideally, you want to focus and limit your information intake to deliver each tidbit or bombshell at just the right time so you are not forced to harbor surplus facts for long periods of time or end up finding out what you need to know only when it is too late.

Focusing the Funnel is Hard

Salespeople talk all the time about “feeding the funnel” – meaning getting sales leads in place to help close more sales.  As the sales process moves forward, more and more leads fall off the board, hence the funnel shape of the activity.

It’s the same thing that happens with information.  You start out with the understanding that there are millions of words written or spoken every day.  That information can be classified in several different ways:

Of course the vast majority of information generated each day falls into that final category of data that will never be of use to you.  Ideally, you want to get the first category ASAP and find a way to make sure that the “future useful” information gets filed properly to be brought back for you to see when it is actually ripe for acting upon.

So What Can You Do About It?

So what’s the problem here?  Is it a tools problem that we need to address through greater innovation?  Is it a behavioral problem that we need to address through our own decision-making?  Or should we all just use the Chris Shipley “duck and cover” approach?

Like most problems, the answer isn’t black and white and really involves a bit of each to be solved.  Here’s my quick take on it:

• It’s Not a Tools Problem.  There are tremendous tools already available to help you process and distill information.  Everything from email programs to fancy web applications can help you move through large volumes of information more rapidly than we were ever able to in the past.
• We Think We Need to Know More than We Do, So Spend Time Thinking About What You Actually Need. Paul Kedrosky talked about how we all don’t know a bunch of important pieces of data.  He polled the audience at Defrag to find out who knew the current U.S.-Canada exchange rate, how many people are being evacuated due to potential dam failure in China, and what the price of oil was yesterday and what caused it to spike.  But most of us don’t really need to know those things.
• Find Good Information Curators. Chris Brogan has talked a lot about this concept and he’s absolutely right.  There are plenty of really smart people aggregating interesting information, especially from the online world.  Some of these are pay services, but many are free.  If you’re an executive, you may well have staff that does a lot of reading. Don’t reinvent the wheel here.  Let your staff, friends, or smart strangers curate your information for you.
• Go On an Information Diet. Try the Chris Shipley approach for a few days or even a week.  Ignore most of what’s in your email inbox.  Toss out every piece of mail except bills or anything else that is obviously critical.  Stop reading blogs and web sites.   Chances are that when you do, you will find you are missing far less than you thought.  After you have gone through this “information detox” figure out what you were really missing and slowly add it back to your diet. 
• Schedule Routine Information Check-Ups. At least twice a year, you should review your information needs.  Combine an information diet with an assessment of what information you feel you might be lacking.  Going through this exercise every six months will help you avoid continuing to gather information simply because you always have. 
• Track What Works for You. To make these semi-annual checkups more effective, it would be good to have hard data.  Keep a notebook or a computer file where you note big achievements that you reached because of information you had or challenges you had to endure because you didn’t.  Flag emails or blog posts using whatever software to use to note any indispensable pieces of information you got that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.  At your six month checkup, figure out the sources of information that contribute most frequently and make sure that you stay on top of those in a timely fashion.  Conversely, if you find you are reading or doing something that never leads anywhere, STOP!

So, does this provoke any ideas on your part?  I hope so.  If so, please share them with me.  This is an interesting problem to define and solve.

Privacy Nuts Hurt Us All

Privacy matters.  We all should be able to keep things private when done in the privacy of our own homes.  But when you go out on the public Internet, no absolute right to privacy exists.  Nor should it.  Tracking your clickstream, using cookies to measure visitor behavior and perhaps target ads, building databases of activity, intentions, recommendations, or anything else should all be considered kosher behavior.

Those who would advocate a Do Not Track list, rights to access all data in a vendor's possession, severe restrictions on the use of clickstream data, or other "protections" in the name of "privacy" do more harm than good. 

Why shouldn't we want better targeted ads?  Is it not better to see an ad for something we might be interested in than something random?

Why shouldn't we want better targeted pitches from vendors?  Why wouldn't you want to know about a good deal on a book, movie, or other product you might actually want to purchase?

Why shouldn't a web site owner improve the product based on click behavior?  Isn't it a great idea for web sites to be more effective?

Frankly, I'm getting tired about the mantra that "I own my data and I want to control it."  Baloney. If you created it and gave it willingly to some third party, they have a right to do what they will with it, unless they promise you otherwise. If you don't like it, don't give them content either explicitly or by surfing to their site.

Do consumers matter?  You bet.  Should vendors care about what consumers want?  You bet.  Will vendors that listen to their customers do better -- all other things being equal -- than those who don't?  Probably.  But there's a difference between companies voluntarily -- and I mean truly of their own volition -- doing things and forcing them to do so through legislative, regulatory, or quasi-regulatory means.

Doc Searls spoke this afternoon at the Defrag conference and took companies to task for a number of things, including why the same consumer review can't be used for Amazon, NetFlix, and other sites.  The answer?  You can, but what's the incentive to the vendors to make it easy?  A key part of the secret sauce at Amazon and NetFlix are their recommendation engines.  We must not forget that these companies need to operate on a for-profit basis, not merely for the benefit of consumers.  If you don't like it, do as Esther Dyson suggested at Defrag: go to one of their competitors, get them to adopt what you want, and make it so successful that the big boys need to take it on to maintain a competitive edge.

What about health care data?  Doc argued that we should own our health care data and providers should have to make it easy for us to make it portable and controllable by us.  Is it mostly a good idea, yes.  As someone with a treatable medical condition, I would love to have the data more easily available to the various physicians I have seen over the years. But am I under any delusion that I own that data?  No way.  The doctors themselves created the data.  Yes, it is about me, but I didn't create it.  If I did, I could very easily have copied it before handing it over.  That's my recourse.

Doc Searls asked what it would be like if it was a two way street where consumer and vendor both benefit.  He suggested that since he doesn't like to hear ads when he calls tech support, he could enter into an arrangement where he would pay 50 cents per call to avoid the ad.  And that's a fine idea.  At least it recognizes that there is no absolute right to avoid ads. Of course, in the Q&A session after his talk, he backtracked and said he was just trying to be provocative by saying it.

For the successful future of the Internet, we must learn to tame our privacy hangups.  We all have them.  Ultimately, the more that vendors, publishers, advertisers, and others know, the better the experience can be for all of us. 

Don't Overcomplicate Things

I love innovation.  I love playing with new services and gadgets.  But the only ones I stick with tend to be the ones that are actually useful. Unfortunately, in listening to entrepreneurs at the Defrag conference (and through repeated observation elsewhere), I am startled by how many companies and products seem to be solutions in search of a problem.

In fact, one of the speakers stumbled upon this point, perhaps without realizing it, when he talked about how his company uses email lists very effectively for collaboration among employees, fostering discussion, debate, and sometimes consensus. Yet there are countless vendors here and elsewhere peddling all sorts of feature-laden collaboration tools.  Wikis, social networks, and more are all creeping into the entreprise with the promise of being more effective than "traditional" communications tools.

But I really wonder whether or not email might not be a better solution in most cases.  Getting users to adopt RSS or forcing them to visit an intranet site doesn't seem like a viable concept for most companies.  I have no doubt that there is a place for this sort of technology, but I think that some of the efforts that my fellow tech enthusiasts are making could prove to be counterproductive.  Slower, more managed growth of these tools in ways in which they are actually useful will have greater long-term benefits to the enterprise and to the entrepreneurs, at a slight short-term expense to startups looking to grow quickly to impress investors.

Exponential growth in advance of a flameout should never be considered more valuable than steady, sustainable growth.  Let's not overcomplicate things in search of that short-term buzz; think of the benefits to the user.  Somtimes the old way may still be the best way.

Coming August 1: StartRocket

I'm launching a new venture.  Let me tell you about StartRocket and why I'm doing it.

Lots of great web entrepreneurship happens in Silicon Valley.  There are tons of successful companies, aspiring startups, ambitious entrepreneurs, and savvy investors.  Most tech conferences are easy to get to, just a short car or plane ride away.  High-tech journalists abound.  Bloggers?  Can you really drive down the road or walk the streets of San Francisco without running into one?

After Bubble 1.0, however, the level of attention paid to East Coast web entrepreneurship diminished.  Gone were the NYC conferences and publications.  Silicon Alley Reporter disappeared.  The Javits Center in New York was no longer the home to the massive Internet World conference.  And those of us back East find ourselves forced to trek cross-country for many interesting conferences.   We have far fewer parties and networking events to attend.

These aren’t complaints, and it's not all bad.  Indeed, in some respects it signals what I think is a natural tendency of those of us on this side of the country.  Certainly up where I live in New England there's a reluctance to be flashy or toot one's own horn.  But sometimes it's necessary.

A Thriving Web World Exists Outside of the Bay Area

Great things are happening outside of Silicon Valley.  Chicago-based FeedBurner was recently acquired by Google.  CBS picked up New York’s WallStrip.  The innovative incubator/investment fund Y Combinator has had great initial success, as well, though it straddles the coasts with operations in Cambridge, MA as well as out West. 

VC David Beisel operates a successful every-other-month-or-so event known as the Web Innovators Group that hosts huge gatherings of entrepreneurs to sample startup activity in the Boston/Cambridge area.  Frank Gruber, Eric Olson, Nick O’Neill and others introduced TechCocktail to the Washington, DC community recently and it was a great success from what I understand.  And that very event started in Chicago, not on the Left Coast.

Brad Feld seems to be at the hub of the activity in Colorado, where he is involved with TechStars (similar to Y Combinator)  and is working with Eric Norlin to start what should be a great tech conference away from the West Cost in defrag which will take place this December in Denver. Fred Wilson champions the startup community in New York City, just recently hosting a Facebook developers meetup.  Also based in New York, Greg Galant has done a nice job interviewing entrepreneurs for his Venture Voice podcast, though he does seem to do so with less frequency than he used to, and I'm sure many miss it.

Obviously there's much more, but you get the idea.

Non-SV Entrepreneurs Aren't Ignored, But...

Despite all of this activity -- and perhaps in part because of it -- there remains a void.  Mike Arrington has always seemed to make a real effort to cover non-Silicon Valley startups, and as his team has expanded, they’ve done a pretty nice job of it.  (Disclosure: TechCrunch profiled CustomScoop when the blog was still a newborn.)  Robert Scoble of PodTech interviews and videotapes demos from some companies not on the West Coast, but for the most part he covers that which is close to home, and that’s understandable.  TechCrunch and the ScobleShow (as well as others, of course) provide great opportunities for exposure for web entrepreneurs.  StartRocket is inspired by those two but will complement, not compete with, their efforts.

Here's Where StartRocket Comes In

There’s really no substitute for “local” coverage of local talent.    This media site will focus on web entrepreneurship outside of Silicon Valley, and especially East of the Rockies.  It won't ignore innovation in California, it will just be more of an East Coast/Midwest perspective on the industry.

It’s more than a blog.  The future of online media involves the dismantling of artificial silos that segregate text, audio, and video.  StartRocket will use the right medium for the content being delivered.  In addition, the plan calls to roll out applications related to the editorial mission (details to come in due course).

StartRocket isn’t about me or any one person.  It’s about information.  I will continue to maintain my own blog and podcast that provides a venue for me to share my opinion, discuss my vision for the future, and other topics.  Indeed, I expect that soon I will not be the only voice sharing information at StartRocket.

Some of the things you can expect to see at StartRocket in the future include:

• entrepreneur interviews,
• company profiles,
• conference coverage,
• VC and angel information,
• product demos, and more. 

It will be a gradual evolution.  StartRocket itself is a startup activity and will follow the same evolutionary path of any startup.

Here's Where You Come In

To make this launch successful, I need to ask you to do a few things:

1. Sign up to be notified when the site launches,  
2. Tell your friends about StartRocket, and
3. Email me with ideas for companies to profile and other story tips and ideas.

Together, we can make this project a success and shine a brighter spotlight on "outside the Valley" web entrepreneurship.

Technorati tags: startups, entrepreneur, TechCrunch, ScobleShow, Robert Scoble, Mike Arrington, new media cocktail, media, online video, online news, web 2.0, high-tech startup, venture capital, angel investing, seed stage, seed funding, bootstrapping

If There Was Any Doubt the Patent System is Broken...

You simply must read this laugh out loud funny list of crazy patents that have actually been awarded by the USPTO.  I picked up on it from a post by Seth Levine where he reports on (potentially) good news about pending changes in the way patents are handled.  We can only hope.

My favorites from the crazy patent list:

• One patent included this claim: "9. The method of providing user interface displays in an image forming apparatus which is really a bogus claim included amongst real claims, and which should be removed before filing; wherein the claim is included to determine if the inventor actually read the claims and the inventor should instruct the attorneys to remove the claim." (Remember these are all patents, actually approved by USPTO.)
• "This patent shows you how to patch a hole in a wall by cutting out a piece the same size as a pre-formed plug, and then inserting the plug and plastering over it. Isn't that pretty much the way drywall is always patched???"
• "Apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force." 
• Then there's the one patenting the use of a laser pointer to exercise a cat.  Dumb as that seems, it's made even worse by the fact that USPTO issued this patent 5 times to different "inventors."
• I also like "Method for Swinging on a Swing."  Here's the commentary on the Crazy Patents list about it: "So these fools think that in all the years of swinging no one has ever before thought to pull on the opposite chains and swing form side to side? Well, I guess they got the PTO to issue the patent, so I'm not sure who the fool really is... But, even so, what do these guys expect to do with this anyway? Are they going to go around and collect royalties from kids on the playground?"
• Then there's the tricycle lawn mower.  One can only hope that USPTO sent a copy of that one over to the Consumer Product Safety Commission as soon as they issued it.

Go check out the rest of the list for yourself.  In some cases you have to fault USPTO and in others you wonder what the inventors were thinking.

Technorati tags: patent, patent reform, USPTO

Is Facebook the Answer to Social Networking Overload -- Or Is It Part of the Problem?

Nick O'Neill does a nice job today of asking (and answering) the question: "Is There Any Point In Launching Your Own Social App?" 

I've been wondering the same thing myself.  With the sudden explosion of Facebook among my friends and colleagues, it feels like there might be a central meeting place already.  As Nick points out, Facebook offers great functionality to enable it to serve as a one-stop shop for people.  Many companies are racing to roll out apps that will work on that platform to take advantage of the dramatic growth the service is experiencing.  In fact, just this morning I heard from a senior exec at a major web player who told me:

Up until a week ago I had absolutely no interest in using facebook. As a marketer, I certainly get the market impact, but I couldn't ever care much about the concept. But with the platform release, we've all been rushing around trying to get apps released onto the platform ... Its just crazy.

At the same time, however, new "walled garden" social networks are cropping up.  Many in my circle have joined either MyRagan or the Melcrum Communicators Network or both. 

It is getting to be too much, as Mary Hodder pointed out recently when she discussed "social information overload."  Shel Holtz addressed the question several months ago:

I’m skeptical that a bajillion social networks will make for good social networking. It’s not that people won’t join networks like ”The Classical Guitar Network” (although it does have only one member so far); it’s that people will belong to so many that their participation will be cursory rather than fully engaged. Nope; sorry. I just don’t see it.

Here's Nick's conclusion:

Is there any point in launching your own social application? In the long run, probably not. All sites will eventually become content providers that allow users to decide for themselves how they are going consume information. RSS feeds and OPML are only the beginning of such technologies. While this is going to take time to manifest, in the foreseeable future you are going to have access to all the information you want right at your fingertips, all from one page. While search will still be necessary to find new sources of content, users will be able to avoid navigation the web on a daily basis to consume all the information that they want. While its not going to happen immediately, Facebook has just taken a huge step in that direction.

Now mine: Facebook seems to offer some real benefits and could be the standard social networking platform going forward.  The ability to easily layer apps on top of the service provides a real benefit.  There are still issues that need to be sorted out (someone recently suggested a secondary relationship on the service, like "fans" to allow limited interaction between users), innovation that needs to occur, and of course, time must pass to see if the growth trend continues and if all these new users become regular diners and not simply nibblers at the Facebook table.

But if I were seeking to build a social network today, I'd think long and hard before I built my own closed system.  Facebook may or may not be the ultimate answer, but for social networking to be truly effective there needs to be fewer, not more, platforms.

Technorati tags: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, social networks, Mary Hodder, Shel Holtz, Dan York, Nick O'Neill, MyRagan, Melcrum

Calacanis' Project X Revealed: Mahalo, a Human Search Engine

I'm a big believer in the notion that computers can't yet do everything that humans can. No matter how comprehensive a job that a programmer does, nobody has yet replicated all of the judgment of people -- for better or worse.  As good as Google is, there are still results that don't make sense.  (For a time, one of my blog posts was the #1 result for "teacher tenure" for instance, which I'm fairly certain is not what someone was looking for.)

So the concept behind Jason Calacanis' much talked about "Project X" is promising:

Mahalo is the world's first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven't yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.

It feels sort of like Google meets Wikipedia. 

It could prove to be a valuable resource.  Right now, however, just hours after it was unveiled, it feels thin to me.  I'm not talking about the number of searches that have been customized -- I expect that it will take time to get that to a broad level.

I guess what I mean by "thin" is that the results pages don't feel especially robust.  They do a decent job of providing the obvious links, but I'd love to see the results page act more as a portal for more information -- perhaps a "dashboard" of information for the search term.

I should also note that this is likely to work best when you are searching for a concrete topic, company, product, person, etc.  For instance, there is a "Star Wars" page but if you type in "Star Wars AND Lucas" you get zilch from Mahalo.

If it doesn't evolve significantly from its present form, though, I'm not certain that Wikipedia isn't actually more helpful since it provides the nuts and bolts on one page, whereas Mahalo just provides links to the real info.  Google and the other generic search engines are all pretty good at the basics.  They tend to start having difficulty with more complex searches.  And that's where I'd love to see Mahalo or some similar engine come through with tailored results.

Nevertheless, glad to see this project has come to life, and I'll be watching to see how it evolves.

Read more about Mahalo: TechCrunch, WSJ, Danny Sullivan and Mashable.

Technorati tags: Jason Calacanis, Mahalo, Project X, Google, Wikipedia, human search, search, innovation, startup

A New Way to Grow Startup Companies

Leave it to a New Hampshire guy to shake up the way companies innovate.  James Currier, founder of Tickle, has taken his windfall from the sale of that company to Monster.com and has started a new kind of innovation incubator: Ooga Labs.

He calls it a "technology greenhouse," a hydroponic environment that harnesses so much energy and ingenuity that it can nurture a crop of companies. The 13-employee San Francisco startup currently has five stealth projects under development, including GoodTree.

Until recently, the Internet incubator was dismissed as bubble-era folly. But the comeback of Idealab, the original Internet incubator founded in the 1990s, and the early success of Obvious Corp., the San Francisco idea factory that spawned Twitter, the popular Internet messaging phenomenon that tells your friends what you're doing at any given moment, are generating renewed interest in testing many ideas at once and turning the best of them into businesses.

...

The small staff is organized into two-person speed teams, each pair an engineer and designer, who are the only employees working on one of the five businesses. They sit side by side in an open pit in Ooga Labs' Financial District office so people can get to know one another and what everyone is working on.

For my next act (or one of them at least), I've played with a similar concept myself.  I'm one of those people with more ideas than resources and I'm a firm believer in rapid development.  Since almost every startup changes course significantly over the course of its lifetime, why not admit that up-front and try a different approach?  It's what the big companies do -- Microsoft, Google, and the others all have teams of people trying out new ideas.  Some stick, some don't.

It will be fascinating to see how Ooga and Obvious play out.

(via Silicon Valley Watcher)

Technorati tags: Tickle, Ooga Labs, James Currier, Monster.com, Obvious, Evan Williams, incubator, entrepreneurship, innovation, Silicon Valley, startups, Twitter, GoodTree, Google Labs, Microsoft Research

Is GooBurner a Good Idea?

Sam Sethi today starts a rumor in the blogosphere sure to spread like wildfire: Google is to buy FeedBurner.  I have no information to confirm or deny the rumor, so instead I find myself pondering whether it's a good thing.

Certainly it is likely to be for FeedBurner shareholders.  But what about bloggers, podcasters, and social media readers?

RSS feeds will continue to take on increased significance -- just as soon as we stop calling them that and make it easier and more advantageous to average Internet users to consume them.  FeedBurner plays an important role in this ecosystem as they manage feeds for a significant number of bloggers ... if not a majority of those who blog "seriously" (in other words, for business or professional reasons).

But is Google becoming a typical big company where innovative acquisitions go to die?  Certainly Google will find value in FeedBurner from an advertising medium perspective, as Sam points out.  But will they be as interested in FeedFlares?  Will they continue to be creative about feed metrics?

Small companies can generally innovate more quickly than big companies, and we have certainly seen that with Google.  There are benefits to the stability offered by a big company that tweaks and tests instead of radically innovating, but my feeling is that FeedBurner remains at the edge of the frontier and still needs that rapid innovation cycle that could be compromised under Google's guardianship.

Definitely one worth watching to see how it plays out. 

(Thanks to Bryper and CC Chapman for drawing attention to this item on Twitter.)

Technorati tags: innovation, mergers and acquisitions, m&a, FeedBurner, Google, Dick Costolo, venture capital, media consumption, advertising, new media, social media