google reader doth protest 52,475 times too much.

52k items-read
Originally uploaded by benbarren

I accidentally clicked on my google reader* trends tab and a number I categorically deny was front and centre : "From your 1,156 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 52,475 items, starred 0 items, shared 937 items, and emailed 0 items."

I have not read over 52,000 blog posts in the last month.

Really, I havent.

Promise.

Cross my heart.

* My google reader highlights package ie "shared" favourite posts ie a subset (937 in last month) of 52k - page and feed is here. BTW it really is a pity this google reader shared items page doesnt have customisation and almost CMS features so that u could choose from and insert your own layouts, themes, set up multiple pages/topics, and then also insert your own commentary, tagging etc. They could just buy tumblr and merge it with this (google reader shared items) page, neat :)

my blog is my friend is my feed is my tweet.

Did We Just Witness a Twitter Marriage Proposal?
Originally uploaded by emilychang

I definitely agree with Loic Le Meur re where I want my content centralised : "The challenge for Friendfeed and the like is that while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service. Yes you can cross post or add badges, but it's not really like a center feed in your blog. What I like about my blog is that it is my space, I own it, I can customize it and change it, I do not depend on anybody.."

There are two issues with this though : Blog software hasnt kept up to date enough with social networking and micro-blogging features, as well as the friendfeed/socialthing aggregation-publishing features.

So wordpress 2.5 features for example (wordpress.org : "multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.") are great for blog posting, but it's not dealing with how I want to publish and integrate my tweets, google reader shared items, flickr photos into my blog.

FriendFeeds founder Paul Buchheit just wrote a post which nicely defines the generic features of a social network, and one of his criteria "passive communication" (eg not having to write a post, but displaying a feed of your shared google reader items) nicely counterposes what blogging software provides, which is "active communication" where you have to spend 15-120 minutes writing a post/essay.

"Passive communication about my life. I don't want to interrupt or spam my friends every time I have some little bit of news, take some new pictures, or get a random thought, but I have no problem blogging or Twittering those things, or uploading to photo sharing sites (which all have social features now). Similarly, I enjoy seeing this information from my friends (but I wouldn't want them calling me on the phone to tell me about their lunch every day)."

So the Wordpress/blogging solutions conundrum then becomes how much social networking features to incorporate, and to what degree do "passive communication" tools become embedded as another type of content creation option...

Feeding Linkedin.

linkedin rss
Originally uploaded by benbarren

Linkedin now have RSS feeds for your network updates, which is neat because if its not in my google reader it doesnt exist to me, so now I'll see what people are doing. Would be good if they made the core of the system (invites, connections, referrals) rss based too. Details on the linkedin blog.

annoying.

kcobain cons
Originally uploaded by benbarren

is when u drop your blackberry in a rock pool.
and u lose always on email.
no longer respond in real time.
where r u.
the phone company said the fix would be more than a new unit.
insurance said just pay the $250 excess.
u beauty.
so i wait 10-14 days.
they need to "process the claim"
need another 10-14 days.
then there will be a laboured delivery process.
always off email : 24-7-31 days off.
cold turkey crackberry.
customer satisfaction down.
mobile tweets no more.
i need my fkn blackberry now.
r u listening insurance company?
phone company ?
i just want my blackberry.
so i can curve.
and make every1 happy.
on a friday.

$48m for the perez' paris hilton ?

bare yourself
Originally uploaded by benbarren

blog valuation debates (y'know, how much is a blog worth when u take its founder out) is always a fun topic so u cant not like some back of envelope maths. One blog, much more than any of the tech or meta 2.0 ones, I've always been interested in is PerezHilton.com - to me it should have a very solid valuation because it sells alot of ads with huge traffic when lohan/britney screw up and it only has one writer, who participates w/actual "we're real people too, princess diana could happen to anyone" celebrities rather than just a hojourno who covers em.

if I was a celebrity magazine publisher Perez is the default go to entertainment gossip blog. there should be a leadership premium. i'd think competition and demand for the perezblog between acquirers would be "fierce" in a traditional sense. So in an entertainment gossip saturated world, the question is what is the value of the leading gossip vehicle ? 8 times earnings supposedly :) I'd actually estimate it alot higher.... (although his estimated earnings for perez may be too high prob because his cpm too much as well, so overall it could even out, lets say $50m for perezhilton.com, with as much in an earnout as possible:)

Found this via susan mernit (who also had some issue with the advertising assumptions used for the valuation estimates) on 24wallst.com which estimates the value at $48M, saying PerezHilton.com : "... Is No 755 in Alexa. Compete show 1.3 million visitors a month. Quantcast, probably the most reliable of the measurement tools when the sites use its code shows 10.1 million uniques. Quantcast puts month page views at 191 million. That seems high. It would put revenue at $900,000 million a month with a $5 CPM. The site is as much a personality cult as it is a destination. But, it probably runs with margins over 50%. That would put operating profit at $11 million. Founder is central to business. CPMs are low. Give it 8x operating profits..."

The Bloody Fantastic Barnbougle Dunes Golf Experience in Tasmania for the Last 36 Hours.

So where the bloody hell for the last 36 hours have u been Ben ? went the worry in my head, as I boarded the plane to Tasmania. It had been planned and booked for awhile, so there was no excuses because of client work, lack of finances, and all the other reasons one uses to not stretch and do something u actually really want to, even if it is (almost, close enough to) your annual special day, one more year goes etc. But my brother Jeremy was a true legend, helping subsidise an amazing overnight trip to Tasmania so we could play a top 10 ranked Australian course (best one open to public) and the 35th best course in the world : Barnbougle Dunes, designed by Tom Doak. My photos here.



The trip started with a 3 plus hour delay from Virgin, who taunted us by boarding a full plane, driving around for 30 minutes, then announcing we all needed to get off the plane because there was a crack in the windscreen. "Stay near gate 9 and dont move till we make an announcement about what will be happening." An hour later we found that a Canberra flight had been cancelled and the plane seconded for our Tasmanian trip. Bonus, after my last 6 hour delay with Virgin, I was thinking we were going to be told 'come back tomorrow' - which was not going to mesh with our golf birthday booking in Bridport Tasmania, 89kms from Launceston where our plane originally was supposed to be leaving for at 825am. (isnt that why i got up at 358am?:) Luckily we left a bit before midday.



It was a 150pm tea time, so with one hour in the air and the same amount of time left to drive in our rented Nissan X-Trail, 89 kilometres to Barnbougle (where oddfact of the day : Ricky ponting's brother is one of the greenkeepers. And keep greens they do, with Cape Schanck like slopes and embankments.) We didnt make the teetime but it didnt matter. But what a course : You know when you turn up after passing huge Kenworth trucks with loads full of trees, that when the unsealed driveway is multiple kilometres long and you can hear the sound of the beach increasing that you are arriving somewhere special. Being late for golf, even with a pre-call you worry about golf club attitude and the like. But what a great surprise : Tasmanian service + Barnbougle Dunes staff have none of that fake American "positive customer service" or the dont annoy me Australian whateverness. Here they seemed really happy to help. "There is no rush, feel free to tee off when suits."



The course reminded me of the Scottish links inspired St Andrews like courses in Mornington Peninsula like my old locals The Dunes and Moonah Links. Being close to the Tasmanian beach as well gave the course a Flinders and other seaside courses feel. The Proshop dude told us that by 2010 Ben Crenshaw will be designing another 18 holes, this time inspired by Pebble Beach and there will be holes right on the surf. Awesome.



Adding to the perfect storm of golf days was that we got around 18 holes in 3 hours 40 minutes, almost unheard of these days as hackers take endless unecessary practise swings leading to 5 hour plus rounds : even with electric buggies, which brilliantly here are banned for environmental reasons unless one week before you provide a custom medical certificate. Excellent, walk you slack bastards, its golf, not dodgems.



My golf day was one of my best in memory, having not played for a couple months, I expected nothing under 100 shots for 18 holes. Instead, I had 3 birdies and broke 80, shooting a 78, 6 over par. Couldnt believe it !



The hole above, early on, I flushed the near criminal they hit it so well Taylor Made R7 580 drive to 10 metres short of the huge bunker which reminded me of Royal Melbournes famous short par 4 that has the big bunker and dogleg : I then hit a blind sand iron to a foot and tapped in. Birdie, and another on the next. It was surreal. Could NOT believe it.



We then made it onto the 19th hole with perfect gold hot chips with tomato sauce and a cold Cascade premium. Yum. Back to our fantastic 2 bedroom cabin, shower, and then to the restaurant for 400 gram porterhouse rare! (which always come well done, but thats kewl!)



I'll stop the advertorial now as I'm sure you think I'm getting paid by Barnbougle Dunes, but if you are a golfer you have to go there and I want google to index this post so it gets the word out to other golfer types (we met quite a few melbourne ppl there, not sure if the sydney upmarket types have got the word of mouth buzz yet....) If you arent a golfer but a corporate or startup looking for a place to take your team for the next offsite, Barnbougle's the go. Our cabin was only $160 for the night ($80 each with your own room and TV), and there are also 2 awesome looking architect palaces that are built into one of the ground embankments on the first hole. You have to see it, supposedly it has 4 rooms, a stack of plasmas for $750 a night : thats where i want to go next time with 7 other people @ $115 each!!!



I gotta thank my brother Jeremy again for the birthday trip, helping out with funding this entrepreneur ! Benefit of building your own business is you can play golf in Tasmania on a Wednesday. Weakness is you cant always afford to. It was awesome mate, awesome. Thanking you a million times, is going to give me the energy to close our financing, and beta internal projects we've been working on for a long long time, where sometimes the light becomes a very small window. Did I mention I shot 78 off the stick at one of the best courses in Australia ? Who cares about personal cashflow when u shoot 78... As we spoke about last night, I will probably never score as well, ever again. Depressing, not. 78!!!



The scary thing is we were told about another Tom Doak course, in New Zealand, with the amazing name of Cape Kidnappers, which is even higher in the official Top 100 World Golf Courses.

It sits on the clifftops, but rather than the very fare $98AU dollars for Barnbougle Dunes, Cape Kidnappers is around $275AU in offpeak and another benjamin again during summer....

Jezza - Next time I'll find the dough for Cape Kidnappers, my shout!

1123 Google Reader Feeds vs 46 FriendFeed Friends

super super
Originally uploaded by benbarren

So the RSS/Implicit Web/Glue VC's are talking about Info/Rss/Social Network Overload at the notification level of services like friend feed and facebook itself (as the worst culprit with its non-rss email approach to your f-inbox). After a weeks ago bitchmeme around friend feed, Ive been spending a bit more time there, and its slowly getting me. It's no replacement to my 1146 google reader feeds (or direct twitter messages, or blog comments etc) which has taken me 3 years to build up. But with (only) 46 friendfeed friends you pretty quickly get some pretty high signal multi-dimensional links from interesting people. Unlike the VC's I'm all for more notifications as long as its thru google reader not my email, so I've also subscribed to my friendfeeds as individual feeds (and labels) within google reader. Bring on the RSS Overload. OK 4 day week, interstate travel.

bob's Gbreakup : "Organizing the world's breakup information and making it universally accessible and useful..."

dupreNme
Originally uploaded by benbarren

Interesting what googlers elevator pitch each other about the Social Graph when they leave their mountain view townhouses on their way to a booking out disneyland offsite : Via 'truth shall set u free' engineering mgr niniane pronounced like "Vivian" with a N at google, from her personal this blog* does not reflect my employer but is friendfeed famous..

Niniane : '..."If only there was some service that collates people's breakup stories. I want to know the details."

Bob: "This can be a Google product. Organizing the world's breakup information and making it universally accessible and useful."...'

* N(Viv)'s blog is a good read.. altho this weekend i've gotta say ive been getting more into the LA blog scene than the mountainview one (anything to avoid web2), like Tony Pierce's take on google and jesus (he had gr8 coverage of SXSW), and via his blog - raymiTHEminx doin a fred perry photoshoot among other minxYthings :)

rent yourselV bfore u check yourselV.

blackngrey
Originally uploaded by benbarren

So these rent your luxury handbag businesses are an established category in obamaland, with localised versions poppn up downunder, and I'm sure in other countries. But this portfolio article has me smirking, where it suggests that the upmarket brand handbags themselves are going to vertically integrate upndown lets get busy, and ultimately want to cut out these new intermediaries, and start renting out their this seasons musthave chloe; lifenfiction ppls.

Portfolio : "Pedraza believes luxury-goods makers will, in fact, move into the sector themselves, just as established players such as Wyndham Worldwide and Ritz Carlton have entered the destination-club market. “You get cash flow up front, what should be recurring revenue, and you can arbitrage the inventory by paying wholesale [and renting retail],” he explains."

why bloggers should wear big blingd watches.

think big
Originally uploaded by benbarren

I'm liking these Graham watches, specifically the black (or fluoro yellow) Swordfish model. With watches, big is better. Old skool ones like Rolex are just too small, with a face diameter of only 40mm. The bigger is better new watches like Hublot Big Bang, The Graham (and the Jaeger LeCoultre Master Compressor Diving Pro) are 46mm+ : Might not sound alot but it makes all the difference. Just as with watches, bigger is better when it comes to blogs according to Mr Arrington, who's in fine form here :

"Someone needs to pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET crushing $200 million/year in revenue business. It can happen. In fact it’s almost certainly going to happen. But if you bloggers go out there and raise $3 -$5 million on say a $10 million valuation, you’ve just priced yourself out of the rollup. That option will be closed to you, and you’ll be stuck out in the cold, taking life support payments from Federated Media or another ad network, and having a generally awful time running your business."

Surely the vehicle for the rollup would be TechCrunch, and it would buy the blogs for pieces of equity and spending money. I've been surprised its only taken an organic approach to date, but with such stellar organic :) What I wonder would this network be tech ala Cnet 2.0 or would it have more than a party with the popsugar types and be the Conde Nast of the blogsphere.

Luckily Henry Blodget is into the deal/can see the vision : "So let us know where/when we can grab a beer and refine this dream-team world domination plan. In the meantime, we'll continue to raise our $2-$3 million or $3-$5 million or whatever, set our sky-high valiuation benchmark, and explore our (many!) other strategic alternatives."

A midpoint of the Kill-Cnet vs merge with Popsugar would be to find some blogs in the porfolio.com demo of business exec meets lifestyle world and pick off those high advertiser attractive verticals/product placement : the one that rupert wants the Wall Street Journal to tap into.. (as the Weekend Financial Review does here..with its luxury travel liftouts and $10k graham watches:) Heck maybe rupert could buy the whole lot at the end of the day, or even son lachlan, who is travelling the world at the moment shoring up his multi-billion private equity deal to buy (australian) consolidated media as his previous PE partner fell through..

business model supersizing.

web2 nonparticipates
Originally uploaded by benbarren

Just got home from a strange day of extremes, where we 4th meeting pitched some high quality VC's (rare bunch downunder) and explained the types of problems clients have that we can solve and componentize. Mr Burley afterwards rightly pointed out that we all talk too much, and one day we'll learn to listen to the question and be able to answer within 140 characters.

The afternoon then flipped around where we spent a few hours training a client's staff on how the (same tools we'd pitched in the morning) would work for the client esp at a site admin level.

In doing the pitching and demoing the consumer and site admin experience, it was kewl to take a macro look at what we'd built in the last 12 months and see the breadth of it, and how it could be scaled. When you've worked on a website build for over 12 months, there is such exhaustion and desire to get the end product out, cross browser css bugs fixed'n'all!

The effect of pitching in the morning high end publisher vertical structured user generated tools as a feeder to an overall localised social media intelligence service, with an afternoon meeting putting it all into practice totally merged my outtakes from the day and consolidated my business model aspirations. So quite timely quoting Fred's tumblr quoting Umair's bubblecon edge theory : "If there’s one single lesson you apply at the edge, let it be this: business models happen.."

So true; 2 years ago I thought consumer advertising on a blog search engine would be my longer term (YR 3-5) business model in conjunction with short term (YR 1-3) "enterprise RSS services" : But customers started asking for online communities and then for vertical sub-indexes of the Aussie blogosphere.

Similarly, 6 months ago I thought a breadth of localised Web 2.0 enterprise solutions would be the key. So we took on projects not to do with online community or blogosphere indexing. This wasn't the wrong thing for us to do (especially at the time) and we've learnt a huge amount from these projects, and also came in contact with a large diversity of people that are now instrumental to our business. Not to mention scaling the revenue of the business and getting overall scale in the business which is so important, rather than be another one of those anemic web2 businesses who complain about not getting funding or keep costs as low as revenue.

At various times we almost took real venture money, but luckily there wasn't a deal fit at the time, and saved ourselves from potentially investing in the wrong infrastructure, priorities and products. Which could have led us to lose investor money, who would have then sacked us or shutdown the business and return the priority capital from the fire sale to their coffers.

But now I know what the business model is, as every meeting thats been done, every project completed, and the pain of every dollar that has gone out, while watching quarterly revenue double each of the last 3 quarters : what has emerged is the underlying business model.

We know the customer pain points. We know what projects we dont want to do. We know what traps we want to avoid. And we know what platform and products we want to build. Now all that's needed is the gas to be able to push the pedal down and test these assumptions. But that's the next meeting, "after Easter."

With investment the starting point needs to be it wont happen, and it will take (pick a number, then add alots more) 28 times longer than estimated, and that you wil spend 28% of your time on fundraising meetings, discussions, preparations and replies. One benefit though of this is the continual explaining of your business model to potential investors (and the daily solving of customer problems : eg training them on the system / going to another meeting thats been called), makes you question and refine your own perception of the problem being solved, solution being provided and overall business model. You keep refining till you get it right. Maybe even one day I will sleep and be content.

For us, it has definitely become clear what our business model is. We believe that if we take investor money we would build products that we can sell alot of, and profitably. The pitch then becomes as simple as ordering a McDonalds value meal. So maybe we can get it down to 140 characters. Super Size Me already....

ning ning. Q. who there's ? A. 200k social networks.

teenage porsche
Originally uploaded by benbarren

It's always interesting to see ning's, creator of social networks in 2 minutes, metrics via their founder even if they dont really help prove much in the way of business model performance and how many social networks you have to create in order to get a 10x return for private equity investors that came in at a 9 figure valuation : "We're experiencing 0.5%+ day-over-day growth of number of networks on Ning, which means that we're adding more than 1,000 new networks per day -- and that's accelerating. In fact, at our current growth rate, we'll cross 300,000 networks in a matter of weeks."

Wordpress on the other hand, which alot of my day was based around (anyone dealt with how to connect Wordpress/MU edition into SQL:)? - that will give u a sample of my professional services like day - have some new funky features out : "A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times.."

A typical question I got today + get each day is "Why use this (or which) social network/community platform should I choose ?" and really there are as many answers as there are companies saying they offer "white label social networking solutions" :

Pepsi for example, via Mashable, have launched a social network, under the subdomain of Youniverse.com. A few months ago they, maybe via their digital agency, would have conducted their social networking technology service provider audit, visited a few barcamps and came to the late night conclusion "goddamit, it's youniverse.com. they r our preferred solution. and heck we dont even need to host it ourselves. we'll just slot a pepsi subdomain in."

Presto, major FMCG brand meets white-label social networking solution, and a write-up on mashable. "We need to think bigger. I mean Mashable's good and it would be great to be on ReadWrite Talk, but we gotta manufacture some of that friendfeed buzz on techcrunch. Someone get Louis Gray and Duncan Riley on the bluetooth headset."














It all sounds like niteclubs : Ning, Wordpress ("hey moblogicTV u know the wallstrip chic Lindsay : they went with wordpress"), Youniverse (they've got pepsi, nudge), and an endless list of other providers like this list from techcrunch who operate in the space :

Affinity Circles AlstraSoft Awareness Blogtronix BoonEx Broadband Mechanics Converdge Crowd Factory DZOIC Golightly

introNetworks Kwiqq Leverage Software Lithium Technologies LiveWorld Neighborhood America Omnifuse Pringo Networks Prospero Technologies SelectMinds

Small World Labs Social Platform Sparta Social Networks Telligent Systems ThePort Network, Inc. VMIX Media Web Crossing Web Scribble Solutions Webligo

It's all SNO baby. Social Networking Optimisation, and becoming as cluttered and non-differentiated as SEO, which by the time ning gets to 1m social networks, that there may well be the same amount of white label social networking solutions providers.

download Carl Williams or Jimmy McNulty.

Ferrari F430 Challenge #335
Originally uploaded by Lord Markus

So the whole series of that TV show they won't show in Victoria is free via torrent weblink at your own risk (it's only just available as one download), thx to Judge Betty. I'm about to allegedly watch last ep now, and while it hasn't got the institutional class commentary and ghettonomics of The Wire or the minutae and character arcs of Sopranos, nor the intense relational realism of Love My Way, it's still enjoyable (if cheesy/2dimensional)

So forget about the Mokbel induced court injunction and enjoy not having to watch the 17-22 minutes of hourly ads. Over 13 episodes thats a saving of a few hours you can use to catch the (last) series + finale of The Wire... (or check out the podcast Cam and I did with Gangland Wars "Big Shots" author Adam Shand last year on the same topic...)

The Jimmy McNulty Eulogy in The Wire Finale was a classic, via NYMag :
"...He was the black sheep, a permanent pariah. He asked no quarter of the bosses and none was given. He learned no lessons; he acknowledged no mistakes; he was as stubborn a Mick as ever stumbled out of the Northeast parish just to take up a patrolman's shield. He brooked no authority. He did what he wanted to do and he said what he wanted to say, and in the end he gave me the clearances. He was natural police. And I don't say that about many people, even when they're here on the felt. I don't say that often unless it happens to be true. Nat'ral po-lice. But Christ, what an asshole. And I'm not talking about the ordinary gaping orifice that all of us possess. I mean an all-encompassing, all-consuming, out-of-proportion- to-every-other-facet-of-his- humanity chasm — if I may quote Shakespeare — "from whose bourn no traveler has ever returned." He gave us thirteen years on the line. Not enough for a pension. But enough to know that he was, despite his negligible Irish ancestry, his defects of personality, and his inconstant sobriety and hygiene, a true murder police. Jimmy, I say this seriously. If I was laying there dead on some Baltimore street corner, I'd want it to be you standing over me catchin' the case. Because brother, when you were good, you were the best we had."

From The Wire creator, David Simon : "We didn't kill Omar because viewers liked Omar. Neither did we let him live because viewers liked Omar. It was beyond petition. We weren't being nasty to viewers, and we weren't being solicitous of viewers. We were serving the story. I don't know what else to say. If people didn't realize after this many seasons of The Wire that they were watching a Greek tragedy, writ across a modern American city… And if they thought that there were going to be redemptions and [awarding] of the Fates, they need to get up with their Medea and Antigone and their Oedipus. I don't know what else to say. "

throwing the macbook air out with the newspaper trash.

colorware air
Originally uploaded by benbarren

Oh this is a way to lose your Macbook Air; Steven Levy thinks his went out with the newspaper trash (as someone who buys all the papers on the weekend - about 10 issues if u include fridays - I can imagine come Sunday night, it's bye-bye Macbook Air - given how many papers, magazines, sections, liftouts u can end up with....)

Newsweek : "On Sundays in my apartment, the coffee table where the Air sat becomes the final resting place for the bulky New York Times. It is not unusual for other magazines, and newspapers from previous days, to accumulate there as well. My wife, whose clutter tolerance is well below my own, sometimes will swoop in and hastily gather the pulp in a huge stack, going directly to the trash-compactor room just down the hall from our apartment, dumping the pile into a plastic recycling bin. Sometimes the whole mess gets so nasty that I even perform this task myself. Could it be that somewhere in the stack was a Macintosh computer so thin that its manufacturer brags it could fit inside an envelope? I believe so."

if someone will pay for what u have, it might be valuable.

dance revolution
Originally uploaded by benbarren

I'm glad Marc Cuban is more a fan of startups generating revenue than Jeff Clavier. Cnet paraphrasing /interpreting Clavier on startups "revenue is noise" meme : "... if it's in the $300,000 a month range--a range that most companies made up of three guys and a credit-card funded Amazon S3 account would kill for--is "noise" that distracts them from their potential."

Cuban's take I much prefer, in one of his rules for a startup : "Sales Cures All. Know how your company will make money and how you will actually make sales." We've just updated our IM (ping if u want a copy money folk reading this) and its great to see quarterly revenue numbers doubling+ for the last 3 quarters. The lesson though was we had to be able to fight and setup the building blocks over 3 years.

So revenue in a startup is key, but dont think that your excel model that says it will happen in year 1 or even year 2 is accurate. And alot of startups dont give themselves enough oxygen (money + time) to be able to prove if there is a viable business model there. So once u miss your earlystage hockeystick projections its game over before it started, if u raised not enough money or set the wrong expectations with investors and triggered one of those shareholder agreement clauses u glossed over when taking the money.

The other lesson is that once you start generating real revenue it becomes even more dangerous to manage cashflow month to month, as accounts receivable blows out, payroll goes out, and you have a net negative gap u need to be able to manage.

As Tony Wright says via a vc; "You’ll think you are on the verge of death early and often, but you aren’t– and you can make it through if you start with an idea that people want and keep working on #1." ("# Build something people want. This will make or break you. Period. The success of your idea is a function of how much people want it and how many people want it. Make your product better on this front every single week. Every single DAY, if you can. Everything else is a distraction.")

The Fake Steve Jobs was funny tho on this topic* (as it applies to Facebook's raison d'etre) : "Facebook is a vehicle through which a bunch of investors in the Valley hope to turn a small pile of money into a much bigger pile of money by selling shares in the public markets. That is Facebook's core business. That is its raison d'etre as they say in Latin. This is a company created by, for and about venture capitalists. It's not a company so much as it's a narrative. A fable. A fairy tale."

* Good work by Duncan to have the whole blogosphere chattering away about rules of a startup, I cant wait till Duncan does his next impending I hope startup. He certainly gets his point out there. As does Mr workaholic Calacanis (to which id say most ppl luv working at a company that gives u a 24" imac and 2 dell/aapl monitors as your workstation) I think we need a smackdown calacaniscast : riley vs calacanis. i'd pay to listen to that :)

ksubi go googee

Most ecom stores vibrate with modernistic gogo : I dont want to know how many clickable links there are off the amazon.com home page. Etailers are full of rich colours to match the buying season; nothing is too flashy; there is an emphasis on design by committee; click-tracking software autogenerates optimization recommendations based on exit-page analysis, and so on.

So when I saw ksubi (the boyz from bondi), formely with a T till there was a court case, had launched an ecommerce site I checked it out. What I snickered at was the targeted use of self referential design in aping google. The idea is so smart, an agency couldnt have pitched it, unless they brought in Michael Bay and Commbanks agency that has been on the box over the cricket season. (update : designed by reactive, neat)

Anyway, to check my clicking fingers didnt deceive me, the first page that appears once u select your country, only has a search box (what sort of ecommerce site doesnt sell products mr warhol snick snick), Instead u have to find the gender text tabs at top eg mens: before u get any product shown. Check it out :


































Funny and effective:) I had been looking for an online shop to buy ksubi sunnies from too.

melbourne dezigned.

melbourne designed
Originally uploaded by benbarren

Black may always be the new black in melbourne as last weekend's paper magazine devoted 80 pages to, but we have some great designers here if u dig behind the surface in the laneways off collins + the grottos in windsor. So it is very kewl to see Provider Trainers sneakershop owner Chris Worsley having designed a shoe with new balance - as pictured.

Luv the sneaker (hope they sell locally?!), and melbourne designed. Being aussies, we'll claim them (designers, actors etc) if they're anygood. (just as tonestar our web designer is a pom/irish/shit what r u tone ive forgot, but we'll claim him as a melburnian too)

Chris talking about the design process for his aqua blue/charcoal 1500 juice at Sneaker Freaker : "We have had a really long relationship with NB Australia and their product is amazing, and for that reason it was easy. It’s something I think every store buyer/owner wants to do at some point – take a shoe you love and put your twist on it. After a development trip to Hong Kong and some discussions with some of the staff there, we were able to get the project up and going, and a year later the shoe will come out. The 1500 is a classic, none better. The concept of the shoe is based around the phrase ‘breakin’ necks’, which is unique to sneaker heads. There are so many things you can do these days with this kind of product – tagging, printed boxes, numbering – but it’s not always needed. I just wanted to keep the idea simple."

Collab's are thebuzz (pharrell collab vid link with louis vuitton here); Partner with a brand, inject them with the unique shit, give them a better product than their 9to5'ers r providing : co-market thru bottom up indie and top down mass market channel. Schweet.

wordpressMU on a social tip.

1day loss
Originally uploaded by benbarren

Will be interesting to see (crossing fingers) how much support Wordpress Multi_user which we use for our community projects (but end up building alot on top of to be social) is given as at moment it provides you the ability to create individual blogs, but blue-chip clients require far more tools :

From ability to aggregate content onto a home page, filter by popularity and recency, allow communication and networking between (better profiled) members, more rich media upload (podcasts, video, images, mob-micro-blogging) and some folksonomic tools to manage the system. Not to mention advanced admin tools that filter spam, profanity and allow different business rules for moderation based on a publisher's stance on posting. Did I mention a bolted in a quigo like advertising exchange so clients can make money too :) It's a good start anyway !

WP founder PhotoMatt's post on their acquisition of BuddyPress : "It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape."

As Techcrunch say : "New apps and features could be added simply by creating new plugins. And there would be no lock-in to any proprietary code or development environment." Here's hoping...

White-Label like it's 2005.

$550k dash
Originally uploaded by benbarren

Always good to see acquisitions in the space u r working in, well not Technorati, but in the enterprise white label social networking space; As evidenced by the merger of Prospero with Mzinga (a company who is "generating more than $30M in revenue with 150 employees. With 14,000 communities under management, Mzinga services more than 1 billion monthly page requests from 27 million users in 160 countries worldwide.")

But wait there's more, it must be the week for it, Pluck.com bought for $75m acc to Techcrunch, at 7.5 times revenue, schweet.

I'm more interested in the vertical white label space (enterprise customers in the travel, classifieds, finance verticals needing web2 type solutions for the consumer market etc), in that most 'community builders' seem to go horizontal and offer media companies 2005-ish all in one toolsets that enable branded communities with your typical unstructured post/upload type of features. These are often variations on the build it and they will come model, where 'users' are expected to contribute lots of valuable content, with very few break-out communities getting authentic high traffic followings. In fact when u look at ning, as another example, its a cell of spammy sex communities and non-commercial micro-communities for your sons soccer team. Thats my impression anyway.

The resultant media company outsourced communities become desert islands to their main brands and structured data integration is limited which seems to stop reviews being properly implemented as one example. Or in the case of news/sports/entertainment brands, there is all this content which communities could be built around, but usually in these implementations the projourno content isnt utilised in anyway...nor vice versa are the community tools integrated into the main mastheads because of defamation concerns.. leading to lots of blog comments on news items but not much community.

Other gaps of 2.0 white-label providers are lack of folksonomic tools that allow end users to tag and favourite (the structured) items. (and then browse public/private and allow other readers ability to reorganise the content in a tagbased format)

Not to mention doing photos or groups in a facebook way or social messaging like twitter etc Basically the tools offered at enterprise level arent up to date with the consumer market (what whitelabel solutions provide qik/mogulus solutions when it comes to video for example - Flux-Viacom seems one of the few quality examples although doing it in a totally unstructured low involvement way)

All this leads to compounding the impression that media companies offering communities do so in a timewarp pre-pownce, tumblr, twitter, wesabe, tripit etc.

Heck, even when Wordpress took New York Times money, Matt Mullenwegg still had to point out via Webware : '"All these old-media companies are adding blogs like it's going out of style," he said, talking about how WordPress now powers blogs for The New York Times, CNN, and Fox News ("unfortunately," he added on that last one)."' He didn't really convey that they get it. Or that wordpress can solve all their problems, or wants to. (given the lack of upgrades to WPMU the probable only hope of a good enterprise solution is if automattic start charging for a new sexy version)

The media customers we deal with in verticals like classifieds and other high involvement decisions require more than your standard community in a box features. Now the trap is we (can) end up being a web development professional services shop, spending alot of time on customisation, project management, design, implementation and so on. And investors dont like consulting businesses, and entrepreneurs dont like being consultants :)

But the use cases from travel, to real estate, to finance, to auto end up being very similar. Hence the potential to productise beyond what current white labels offer the Disneys of this world.

So as consumer 2.0 + 3.0 businesses find a pathway to profit as it used to be called as the recession kicks in, and they migrate their tools to the "enterprise" (to then be resold back to the consumer market) it will be interesting to see how the toolset of the whitelabel social networking spaces evolve. And whether they will buy leading feature companies, or try and build internally on their own toolsets. And for the wesabes of this world armed with their commercial API's, wanting distribution and reach to millions of captive consumers, will this be a new type of marketing strategy ?

The ABC of a Bluefreeway 2.0 Rollup.

No F
Originally uploaded by benbarren

During finance meetings in Sydney CBD and Collins St Melbourne late last year, the buzzword "Roll-Up" came up quite a bit, often with little disclosed beyond the promise of a NDA and the promise of revealing the secret sauce of aggregating digital agencies/websites/web2 assets. Mr Eight Black himself has been covering Blue Freeway well the last few days, and The Australian are confirming the bad buzz. It's as easy as ABC a rollup I guess.

The Australian : "As shares in the company slipped by nearly 50 per cent after returning from a two day trading halt, the company confirmed it had entered exclusive due diligence talks with an unnamed company."

Eightblack : "In the 6-months to December 2007, the group had acquired a controlling interest in a company in France, a company in the UK, one in Chile and 3 in Thailand. How on earth can they actually manage all those successfully and integrate efficiently without a shitload of money and resources?"