Written on April 3, 2008 – 3:38 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Leah Culver is a co-founder and lead developer of Pownce, a social messaging application that combines micro-blogging and social networking. She is notable for her laser-etched MacBook Pro with Web2.0 company logos. By selling advertisement space on top of her laptop she was able to afford to replace her ancient Mac with a shiny new MacBook. Unfortunately Leah did not bring her MacBook on stage as the Next Web uses its own set-up.
Leah Culver planned to talk about OAth but a short survey in Amsterdam learned that it might not be a topic the Next Web audience is interested in. Instead, she talked about starting a startup in five steps. This general focus did not provide the audience with exciting news about Pownce or any well-preserved secrets for startup companies but Culver did give us an interesting view of the coming into existence of Pownce.
Step 1: Idea
Pownce has often been compared to Twitter but Pownce has different functionalities than Twitter. Aside from sending short messages Pownce focuses on file sharing. Pownce is a communication platform and file sharing system build on Adobe Air. Founders and friends Kevin Rose, Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, and Shawn Allen wanted to build a communication channel where they could easily send files because “e-mail is failing us and IM sucks.”
Pownce is centered around sending “stuff” meaning music, photos, messages, links, events, and more. In contrast to social networking sites that focus on users Pownce focuses on content. At this point Culver encourages the whole audience check out Pownce and sign up even if that means taking down the somewhat unstable wifi here at the conference.
Step 2: Build
Leah presents us with the tool that every startup wishes for, the magical unicorn that can just build things for you.
If you are short on magical unicorns you can build your idea yourself or get a friend to do it. An important step in translating your idea to an actual site is choosing a technology. Leah herself is a Python developer you should pick a technology that you either enjoy or are good at or your developer is interested in. Pownce is build on Django simply because it is an “awesome” technology.
Step 3: Community
Get your friends to use your service and provide them with free t-shirts to promote it.
Step 4: Feedback
Get feedback from your friends and testing community and respond to feedback. A part of the feedback Pownce received while developing is the request to support embedded content. Culver just spend a week adding for more sites to embed content. If Pownce does not support your platform, send Leah Culver a message and they may incorporate it.
Step 5: Make developer friends
Culver is friends with developers from Twitter and Jaiku. While the three companies are often considered to be competitors they are also friends who share code.
So where do you find developer friends? Barcamps are a great place to meet new people and the developer community.
Questions:
Erick Schonfeld: Is the current application what you originally conceived, or is it different and why?
Leah Culver: Developing often feels like you are doing something that has already been done before. While working on friending feature of Pownce I wondered how many people have done this before? After launching Pownce the major changes were made into the embedding of photos and videos and releasing an API (which they actually forgot until people started asking for it.)
Erick Schonfeld: Why is Pownce better?
Leah Culver: Better than what? Compared to email?
Erick Schonfeld: There are a dozen ways to send files, what distinguishes Pownce from the rest?
Leah Culver: We encourage to have the conversations around files too. We built a better communication tool for sending stuff because we have plenty of sites where we dump our stuff but where do we share?
Patrick de Laive: Why should we move to San Franscisco as the Walhalla of startups?
Leah Culver: I mainly moved to San Fransisco for the weather but the early adapter sphere and barcamps add to a good networking sphere.
Gabe McIntyre: How the heck did you come up with Pownce?
Leah Culver: Kevin was in charge of naming and he came up with the name just two weeks before the launch. It was one of our four options that was still available as a domain name.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on April 3, 2008 – 1:33 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Khris Loux is CEO and co-founder of JS-Kit, a start-up company that provides widgets to easily add interactivity to your site:
Our simple, modular and fully customizable web-services, also known as “widgets”, are fast becoming the building blocks of rich, interactive online experiences for leading-edge web sites. These solutions are self-service, elegant, powerful, and easily deployed by HTML neophytes, experts and everyone in between.
Widgets are often referred to as the “bling bling” of Web 2.0 but JS-Kit takes the next step in widget development by providing customizable services which complement and build on each other. Loux’s talk titled “Web 3.0 or Web 3D?, The Decentralization, Disaggregation and Democratization of the Web” deals with the new dimension that widgets add to the web.
JS-kit provides simple lightweight web applications, widgets, that add rich interactive features to any site or blog. This is done by simply copying and pasting a piece of code in order to experience an Amazon class service. By lowering the technical and financial bar they allow smaller companies to compete with major services. JS-Kit addresses the long tail of business so a startup does not need to spend precious money on programmers to add customer interactivity to their site. In fact, their services are so light-weight that even big companies such as Yahoo use them on some parts of their site. Yahoo developers said they chose to use the JS-Kit widgets because they are so easy to use.
The next phase on the web
If Web 1.0 was about publishers teaching the truth and Web 2.0 revolved around bloggers balancing out the web then Web 3.0 is about publishers joining the conversation and consumers becoming part of the business. The structure of the web is changing and Web 3.0 concerns itself with connecting cross-points. Loux compares the evolution of the web with the human brain which is amazingly good at connecting distributed information.
Loux presents a somewhat utopian vision where search is replaced with a process where “everything that you needed would be right there.” SEO is a treadmill because we are all playing the same game and everyone is getting better at it. We need to skip SEO and advertising and instead take the true value of the product and spread it out. Widgets allow you to spread information out and bind relevant information.
Trust
Companies need to bridge the credibility gap by making the potential buyer be aware of the status of the transaction before it is actually made. Widgets allow customers to rate products or even rate the company. Where would you rather buy your products? With a company which has been rated reliable or with a company whose status is unknown? By making the whole process is more transparent both companies and buyers win. Trust, user ratings, transparency and user interaction are important factors in the direction the web is currently taking.
Open standards
Ownership is also an important issue on the distributed web as you should have a right to you own content. Social networks trap your content in their sites and you do not get paid for it. The value of their site is their idea filled with your content but where is the download button, where is the “I want to leave now and take all my stuff” button? Loux notes that it is hard to get the legal community involved in these questions. In the long term we need a Creative Commons style licensing to have a balanced relationship with these sites. In order to prevent stifled innovation we need open standards.
As a consumer we should demand OpenID access and be able to take our data out. Loux states that we should challenge the big companies and blog about open standards. Especially start-ups should embrace open standards because they are in the long tail of business. According to Loux startups can change the currently closed social network environment by adopting open standards. Startups are the new generation based on open standards. Startups can avoid the closed business cycle by taking up the power and empower the community.
Startups in the long tail hold the power to embrace open standards and challenge the big companies.
Written on April 3, 2008 – 12:47 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Kevin Rose is officiously one of the most famous Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. He has co-founded Revision3, Pownce, and of course his most popular company Digg. Somebody with such an entrepreneurial spirit certainly has something to tell, so we asked Scott Rafer - who also managed successful start-ups such as MyBlogLog - to interview Kevin on stage.
So the first question that comes to everybody’s mind is: how can you handle three start-ups at the same time? Rose: “It’s a matter of getting the right management in place”. For example, Kevin appointed Leah Culver as the lead developer of Pownce. She runs the show from day to day, while Kevin makes the strategic decisions.
Digg however, takes a lot of time. Kevin: “Digg is like my full-time job, the one I work on for 60 hours a week”. Moreover, the Digg-founder told that the company is large enough now - 55 employees - for things to happen on their own. He used to panic when the servers crashed, now he has a team to take care of a crisis like that.
Scott also asked Kevin some questions about the future of Digg. Kevin: “We have to fix the Upcoming section because it’s broken. Nobody can follow the 50,000 new stories users submit per day”. So how will Rose and his team do this? Well, they’re gonna follow the 3.0 trend by letting in the experts.
Kevin: “When you digg a story that already has 3,000 diggs, you have no idea who those other 2999 people are. What else are they digging?” So Digg will make connections and introduce you to other stories that might interest you. Some of them might not even be popular yet. They’ll make those connections by, amongst other things, following the so-called pressure users: the users that have an eye for good content. Based on their digg-behavior, the team can make better recommendations.
So ‘Digg suggests’ is an upcoming feature. If you can’t wait for that service to arrive, you might want to try the DiggSuggest web-app.
Written on April 3, 2008 – 11:47 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Didn’t make it to the conference? I’m really sorry for you! I do have some good news though. You can now follow the conference by downloading Silverlight to see the live video stream (after the more button). So you might still miss the networking part, but you do have the possibility to stay updated about the future web! (more…)
Written on April 3, 2008 – 11:22 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia - the company hosting wikis -, was The Next Web second key-note speaker. He used to be the vice president and general manager at eBay and I’m sure that switching between these jobs must have been quite a cultural change for him. As Wikia is, as we all know, giving its users insane levels of control.
Sure, I know that giving away control is hard and that it requires some faith and persistence. But when Penchina told that Wikia users sometimes change the design of his frontpage, I really realized how daring it is. And of course, it not always turns out right. For a few months there was this design online with colors that Penchina’s wife called ’skittle colors’. Moreover, Russian pharmaceutical companies tend to take over the homepage sometimes.
Also, on Wikipedia you can’t force volunteers to write about certain subject. They just write about topics they find interesting. If your users are into girls names, the girls names section will flourish and the boys names section will remain empty. Penchina: “Some topics take off and others don’t. You have to be patient. Eventually someone will care about boys names.”
“Yet”, Penchina said, “When giving away control is done right it is incredibly strong. Wikia helps to foster a movement that wants to share information and who are passionate about their topics.”. He explains that it is all about creating a self-regulating community. One with a culture and implicit rules about what’s ok and what’s not. So users can moderate the changes and block other users. You have to empower them with tools and resources.
Actually, now I think about it, there’s one distinct similarity between Wikia and eBay. It’s their mantra: most people are good. There just a few bad apples. So it might pay-off to listen to Penchina and change your strategy drastically. “It’s amazing what you can do when you give people power, trust and permission.”
Written on April 3, 2008 – 10:42 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Next Web is about the future of the web, so it is obvious that startups play a significant role during the Conference. 24 startups will do a 5 minute presentation on main stage. During breaks all attendees and press can visit the startups at their booth in the Company Arena (same area as where the coffee and lunch is). This way startups can present themselves in the best way and get the most traction out of the conference.
So Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf, Managing Partner of YL Ventures - an European and Israeli early stage technology venture capital fund - moderated the first round of start-ups presentations. Here’s what they had to say:
CoComment
CoComment is a service that makes it possible to keep track of all the comments you make and discussions you’re participating in. It’s always nice to see their CEO Matt Colebourne on stage, since he knows how to present a company. He often evangelizes the importance of conversations, as they represent the opinion of your customers. His message: the era where the marketing director could just give the newspapers a call to change the conversation is definitely over. It’s time to embrace the online conversations.
And of course, his company makes that easy by tracking online conversations with a browser-based plugin. Read all about it on The Next Web Blog:
eBuddy
eBuddy is one of world’s largest Instant Messaging platforms. They recently secured a Series B round of funding with a staggering 6.5 million euro from Prime Technology. I can see why, since the numbers are impressive. eBuddy has 12 million users on the web and 1.6 million on mobile and every day 75k people sign up. Those users make up for one billion banner impressions per month. So eBuddy’s philosophy “keep it simple, stupid” seems to work out pretty fine. The Dutch company is now focusing on bringing instant messaging to mobile. I guess they’re probably losing a lot of money on that now, but it’s a great investment in the future.
By the way, they’re organizing a boat trip on Saturday. So walk by their booth if you’d like to join them.
fav.or.it
Fav.or.it is all about bringing social news to the masses. The problem is that RSS seems like a very easy technique for techie users, but normal users have no clue what it’s all about. So Nick Halstead gave a funny AND interesting presentation about the service who wants to reach out to the ‘normal people’. Favorit allows you to aggregate content like a newsreader but also allows you to post comments, all without leaving its site. I always dig services like these, since I believe the Web 2.0 industry tend to forget about the rest of the world.
Wauw
The guys from Wauw presented a new product during the session: WauwWee, a mobile widget that stimulates users to use their mobile device on social networks and blogs. It builds on your existing communities - which is a must these days. The service is browser-based and has a very user friendly interface. So Wauwee makes it easy to upload pictures and text to your site and networks by using your mobile. Handy for citizen journalists as well as ordinary users.
IntroNiche
IntroNiche is into Cross-promotion. You know the deal, sites both place a banner on their web site to promote each other. This way you can advertise for free on sites that target the same audience as you do. Yet it’s hard to find partners for this kind of promotion though. So now there’s a platform where you can find partner sites in your niche. They’ve made it easy to pinpoint your niche by offering an advanced search engine.
Empressr
Good news for all you visual story tellers out there, Empressr wants to make your live easier. They’re the “The First Online Application That Lets You Create, Manage and Share Rich Media Presentations Online”. It all started when CEO Bryan Thatcher found his work stuck in his hard disk. He wanted to share his visual stories and create a tool that makes presenting easier. Of course he used it during his presentation and I must admit, it looks good.
Written on April 3, 2008 – 10:17 am
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Who is TheFunded.com founder “Ted”? Valleywag tried to reveal his secret identity and Inc Magazine also compiled a suspect list consisting of Blogger-founder Evan Williams, Weblogs-founder Jason Calacanis, Gawker Media-founder Nick Denton and Digg-founder Kevin Rose. However, after nine months of anonymity and wild speculations about his identity “Ted” finally revealed himself in a carefully staged outing with Wired Magazine as Adeo Ressi.
Anonymity also plays a key role on The Funded site where startups can anonymously review and rank venture capital firms. The idea of the site was born out of a bad funding situation serial entrepreneur Adeo Ressi experienced. He now aims to bring transparency to the venture capital business with The Funded. The Funded has attracted a high level community of founders to compare notes what it is like to found a company. At the same time it provides a platform to complain about the company overlords.Adeo Ressi comes onstage right after Erick Schonfeld’s intriguing talk about life after death online. Ressi states that he cannot offer the audience immortality but he can provide ways to handle your start-up company.
Now is the time
One of the main things to keep in mind is that there are more vcs working against you than for you. You do have an advantage as everyone is waiting for you to show up at their door with your dream…. if you are the next Facebook or next Google. Despite the current recession we are living in one of the best times in history to start your own company. Costs are generally low as there is hardly any need for phones and most e-mail systems are open-source. Many traditional communication sources are free and there is a new and major labor pool in India eager to work on projects. The current state of the web provides us with great new opportunities, for example in the popularity of widgets.
Have a vision
Ressi states that you need a big vision, the bigger the better. Unfortunately for you sometimes vcs will wait until you are actually big. Think big, become big and be big. There are a lot of markets out there with a great potential for growth. Not only is there room for new approaches, there is also room for with new technology.
Know the rules of the game
In order for you to get fund raising you need to know the rules of the game. By knowing the rules of the game you will be able to change your success rate dramatically. How to play?
- Get to know the motives of the investors you are talking to because they will want to put you in a controlling relationship.
- Lower the risk by getting a good lawyer.
- Remember that vcs talk among themselves. It is a common mistake to talk to twenty or thirty vcs and all provide them with the same story and same information. Not all the vc gossip takes place on TheFunded.com but also behind the vc scenes! Even if the vc likes your company they will use this against because they will tell the other vcs how bad your company is because they don’t want the others to compete for the deal.
- Don’t talk to the associates as they are just juniors. Chances are very low that your idea will reach any one else but the associate.
- Maybe means NO. This means that you should focus on the people who care. Do not be afraid to walk away.
- Do not accept the first term sheet. The goal is to get the second or third term sheet.
- Co-investing is a major no no. Instead, you should ask for two separate offers and you should evaluate the two offers separately. Do not let them syndicate the deal or merge the term sheets.
- Be prepared for a background check. They will call everyone you know, so identify all the people they might talk to in advance. Make sure that your background is solid and does not contain any “maybes” or “buts.” You don’t want your ex-colleague to say “he’s a great guy but.” Clear out your references because conditionals make a bad impression.
The rules of the game are heavily discussed on TheFunded.com, so let’s play!
Written on April 3, 2008 – 9:07 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yeah! Europe’s hottest conference has just started! We’re delighted to have Erick Schonfeld as the moderator. He has one impressive track record, since he has been covering startups and technology news for 14 years.
In his opening speech, Erick talked about widgetization of the web. The business model as we used to know it is now replaced with a model where there is no central destination. So we just figured out the business model of the web page, yet we don’t really know how to make money when the webpage blows up. Thus the big question here is: what happens if you blow up the web? Let’s see whether the speakers will address this important web question.
He also showed an artsy video called the ‘Live online project’, it discusses virtual immortality in a very subtle and mysterious way. Maybe it was a bit too early for that. Or as Erick noted, “yeah…, they’re artists”.
Erick ran the main blog of Business 2.0 (50,000 RSS readers), won several prizes, made it to the TJFR Business News Reporter’s list of the “best and brightest financial journalists under the age of 30” twice and graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University in 1993. He’s blogging for TechCrunch for six monhts now and recently wrote an interesting post about how he likes working at the world’s largest tech blog: “We live or die by how fast we can post after a story breaks, if we can’t break it ourselves.”
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
