what australia can summize about teh #fom08.

summize.com redirect
Originally uploaded by redbarren

so yday the aussie media vs bloggers 2d world had a bit of a watershed where their leader the hyperconnected @mpesce twitterd something along the lines of the backchannel is the conference. once u've lived on technology for quite awhile u get used to, so for us the whole summize-ustream side of a conference is nuthn new. but the broader aussies are getting it. #fom08.

so sitting up at 2am and watching US come online with official confirmation of twitter buying summize, with summize redirecting and rebranded, shows how quickly things can move in 24 hours. 2 posts and points i found vinteresting to prod my current thinking of where i am with my business and what it takes to succeed ($15m exit, primarily in twitter shares i assume, think they had raised $750K-ish so the maths are nice)

the first lesson is summize to start with had a great team and the right space but didnt solve exactly the right problem, it was too broad. from one of their backers john borthwick (is betaworks building everything out of nyc?) : "The history of most startup’s is made up of iterations, learning and restarts — Summize was no exception. The Summize team worked hard for a little over a year developing sentiment based algorithms aimed at crawling the review and blogosphere. Late last year they formally launched a web product that let you search reviews for books, movies and music. It worked well — offering summaries of all the reviews for a particular book, structured programmatically so they could be organized and swiftly digested by users or publishers. Yet it was complicated — not in theory or in its presentation — but in practice it was a complicated problem that most end users didnt know they needed. As an old friend would put it Summize v1. didn’t address a discernible need or pain point. "

the 2nd lesson is the quality of the summize geeks. if u sell your company, this is exactly the blogpost u (well i anyway) want to read (reminds me of the way the feedburner way had their own unique voice) from summize leader Jay Virdy : "At Summize, we assembled a small, quirky, but highly efficient and experienced team to build a powerful platform to extract user opinions from blogs and review sites. Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, our cacographic Chief Scientist, applied machine learning techniques to understand how users express sentiment using common words and polarizing phrases (e.g., when someone says “nice” it isn’t necessarily in a positive sense). Dr. Eric Jensen, our first hire and perpetually caffeinated VP of Development, built the complex underlying data engine. In 2008, we discovered Twitter as a source of the most timely and relevant opinions on trending topics. We immediately embarked on a plan to develop the best Twitter search and discovery application to serve the Twitter community and burgeoning Twitter ecosystem."

so summize were able to refine quite substantially their initial vision, and rather than it be a radical change, were able to narrow in and find a hook for their overall structured indexing and sentiment analysis of the blogosphere, which became #hashtag + @username persistent searches. and they had the engineers to do it. I've extracted the technical elevator pitch on the summize ppl mentioned on their blog :

"Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, our cacographic Chief Scientist, applied machine learning techniques to understand how users express sentiment using common words and polarizing phrases.."

"Dr. Eric Jensen, our first hire and perpetually caffeinated VP of Development, built the complex underlying data engine"

"Matt Sanford, a web crawling wizard, ops extraordinaire, measurement zealot, and foreign language nut, to shift his attention from blogs to microblogs, and to Twitter in particular."

"Mike, a C++ and Java guru so he churned out fancy beautified code to parse tweets, thread disparate conversations, and pluck out highly accurate and meaningful trending topics from the Twitter public timeline."

"Nutty professor Adbur Abdir Abdur aka “El Hefe.”

"Eric’s also a self-acclaimed IR wunderkid who can speak in SQL and can invert, convert, revert, subvert, and even evert relational databases and inverted indices to do exactly what he wants."

"Greg, our CTO, the “Pixelator”, wanted to rename Summize “tweird”, so that tells you a lot about him.. he’s pretty good at UI design.. assembled all the pieces and served up an elegant user experience for the Twitterati to marvel at."

My point in highlighting the above, is point out the difference between Australia and the US. In Australia yday there was a conference where ppl were learning about what twitter and the backchannel was. Above u have a team of Dr's, Professors, ex-AOL'ers, entrepreneurs that have sold companies before, that are highly technical, were able to shift or narrow their initial strategy, got large uptake, nailed a product, then got acquired by an IT thing that itself had had problems scaling, and had disabled their persistent search product which summize do. They didnt spend the last 2 years going to conferences talking about print vs online media models. They built and refocused a 2008 search product which was obviously going to be bought. Didnt they just fly past tweetscan ?

In Australia, not only are we too late to get twitter (which is just a metaphor) but being on the entrepreneurial side, recruiting a team of equivalent to above, is near impossible locally. Recruiting a team (as a startup) at 50% of the above talent is near impossible. The pool just isnt deep enough. You could probably get 1, maybe 2 of the above standard people here to one venture. So i'd rate at about 25% max what we could achieve here peoplewise. And given summize barely made it, having to do a major redirection midstream, 25% leaves u dead in the water.

Dead in the water maybe, but also with pretty good guidelines about what is needed for success. In Australia, I agree with @bronwen that business development folk, and non engineering boys networks still control dollars. its all comfortable oligopolies + low standards.
It was said yday by one of the Future of Media Summit #fom08 backchanneler's that the future of media may be participation, and by that it was meant participation in the backchannel. What would be better if like broadband, we were able to build out our own piece of the backchannel, connecting in to other's pieces and api's as needed, but building and owning our own backchannel, rather than having a short term redirected, rebranded one owned by someone else. If somehow we were able to achieve some building blocks, get some domain experience into our engineers, rather than talk talk talk, we might be able to participate not just in the watching of the new teevee, but the making of it.

* Extra bonus point, some good points in blogosphere about twitters business model acquired via summize such as expoused by konterkariert found via betaworks : " Twitter + Summize is like ICQ + Nielsen//NetRatings ;-) Or Twitter could hyper target their ads to Twitter Messages with positive feelings about products, protecting marketeers to advertise their goods near negative sentiments related to their company. Peer39 is just starting this technology." Also reminds me of what Brad Feld said about Newsgator and people's impatience for companies to have business models obvious, sorted, clear, communicated etc

Feld.com : "I've been really pleased with the way NewsGator's widget business has taken off. Two years ago I regularly got questions from people about "how would NewsGator monetize the consumer web reader business." The answer to that is "they won't - but they'll use the infrastructure they've build - which is rock solid, scalable, and unique - to build a really interesting widget and data business based on RSS content."