NextWala

Techcrunch Disrupt: (Only) a Few Big Ideas

Perhaps I'm getting jaded, but I somewhat agreed with Vinod Khosla's comment yesterday at Techcrunch Disrupt where he said there was too much linear thinking going on with startups and something like announcing a UI change in Microsoft's IE did not belong at the conference.  

Some of the low-points of the conference:

• Several "check-in" companies checking into products, places, people, websites and who knows what's next - checking into shoes, hairstyles, weather?
• Several companies making it easier (somewhat) to manipulate, filter, stream real-time content
• Several companies enabling gamification of everything

Perhaps this is just natural evolution taking its course and perhaps this will lead us to some really compelling user experiences and value propositions down the line.  Perhaps...

However, there were only a few ideas that got me thinking "Holy s****", this is a big idea and could change some part of the world fundamentally.  So here are my "meta-idea" picks from the conference, all of which fundamentally deal with data:

• The big idea - leverage the collective brain-trust of an enterprise. The implementation: Opzi - "Quora for the enterprise" - supercharge enterprise productivity by aggregating the collective knowledge of an enterprise and making it easily accessible and addressable down to each employee
• The big idea - users own and wield their own online data.  The implementation: Shwowp - "Yodlee for the people, by the people" - enable users to aggregate their own shopping history/date and then selectively share this with retailers to drive better deals.
• The big idea - take mobile analytics beyond web analytics.  The implementation: Apsalar - "Kissmetrics for mobile" - in-depth analytics to survey, track and optimize users as they flow through and across your mobile apps.
• The big idea - present real-time information at the "right-time". The implementation: Datasift - tuning and filtering Twitter streams to your liking. I would have liked to see a use-case (e.g. commerce, research, brand monitoring) other than more personalized consumption.

And here are shoutouts to two Venrock-backed companies, Redbeacon and CloudFlare, that presented at the conference.  We are excited about the prospects for both these companies and look forward to continuing to work closely with them!

The first is Redbeacon which won Techcrunch50 last year.  Redbeacon's vision is to do to local service providers what Expedia/Travelocity/Orbitz did to airlines i.e. make it super-easy to search, compare and book local services (plumbers, electricians, gardeners, trainers etc.).  Redbeacon announced it was expanding its service to Seattle, launching with several media partners (NBC Bay Area, SF Gate, Tribune/Fox Seattle), and launching its widget for inclusion on any website.  We believe Redbeacon has the potential to disrupt the $150B local advertising and lead gen market. Last year's Techcrunch50 video here:

The second is CloudFlare which won an Innovation Award at this conference. CloudFlare's vision is to serve smaller websites and provide them the performance and security infrastructure that only the largest Internet giants can afford.  Value prop: speed up your website by 30% and protect your website's visitors from spam/malware attacks.  CEO Matthew Prince showed how CloudFlare is signing up 2 customers (websites) per second today.  TC Disrupt video here:

What About.me's launch says about the rise of the Professional Web

Tony Conrad's announcement this past week of About.me got me thinking that it's about time we gathered up all these threads of the Professional Web, as I call it, and interlaced them together into a metaphorical rope.

Before I continue, let me define what I call the Professional Web.  As workers and professionals, many of us follow and contribute to the social web, interacting with it several times a day, if not every two minutes :-).  We leave implicit traces of our presence behind (e.g. Twitter streams, Quora answers, LinkedIn group postings) as well as explicitly build profiles across all these websites. I call this the Professional Web. The sum total of all this personal content is our personal brand on the Web.  

So why do I think it is important to proactively manage your presence on the Professional Web? Firstly, this is what other people see (probably through a Google or LinkedIn search) well before they meet you for the first time, as well as on an ongoing basis once they've gotten to know you.  First impressions are important, as we all know. Secondly, many of us in the knowledge economy make our living based on our reputations either directly from the Web (e.g. through Crowdflower or Turnhere) or indirectly influenced by the Web.  This applies to entrepreneurs, investors, proprietors, corporate employees, consultants or service providers.  So this directly hits our personal bottomlines.

So, I've listed below seven of my favorite Professional Web services and do's/don'ts for each of them. In a follow-up post, I will write about some new opportunities that I see in this area.

Seven Tools to Super-Charge your Professional Web Presence

Here're the slides - there is more context and discussion below the slides:

Seven tools to brand yourself on the professional web

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I've been an active user of LinkedIn for several years and use it as my master work contact list. I hit 3000 connections recently.  I find this to be an invaluable tool for finding current email addresses, contacting CEOs of companies I'm interested in, doing competitive analysis, finding common contacts when meeting someone for the first time, and much more. I'm even paying LinkedIn because I'd feel guilty if I didn't pay them for all the value I'm getting out of the website!

• Do: Integrate Twitter and SlideShare into your LinkedIn profile.
• Do: Use LinkedIn to find and contact people who have just left the company you're interested in.
• Do: Create a group for the area you are most interested in - use this to post relevant content and drive deeper conversations with industry contacts.
• Don't: Accept connections with people you've never met.

I've been using Twitter for the past couple of years.  Invaluable for tracking experts in various fields as well as some vertically-focused news sites.  I follow a total of about 950 people, including 125 people in my main feed and the rest spread over 20 lists. 

• Do: Create lists where you track people in different segments that you're interested in. I track segments such as Payments, Local/SMB, Enterprise, Mobile and India-Tech-and-VC. The added benefit here is that you can offload people from your main Twitter feed.
• Do: Time-shift your posts (using a tool such as Hootsuite) so that they get posted during regular business hours, preferably early afternoon.  This will ensure the biggest audience.
• Do: Track conversations at conferences using their # hashtags to get an idea of the back-chatter.
• Don't: Connect with others just because you want to increase your follower count.

I've been using SlideShare since early 2008 (full disclosure: we are investors in SlideShare).  I find it really useful for tracking content from leading thinkers and opinion-drivers, including Dave McClure, Eric Ries, Jan Chipchase, Fred Wilson, Charlene Li, Steve Blank and Chris Messina.  I follow about 150 people.

• Do: Follow 50+ people by starting on the Slideshare profiles of perhaps some of the people above and clicking through to who they follow.
• Do: Follow your real-time newsfeed on Slideshare, once you've started following 50+ people. Incredibly rich content from your favorite experts. Very different from Twitter streams.
• Do: Upload a few pieces of your own content - drives great SEO back to you.
• Do: Embed a Slideshare widget on your blog - deep content gives your blog audience insight into what you are interested in.

  
Plancast is a great way to communicate future plans with your audience.  I use it to keep track of all the conferences I attend as well as see what public (or private) events other people are going to. I follow about 80 people.

• Do: Put up all your professional/public engagements so that other people know where to connect with you
• Do: Use the Google Calendar or Outlook integration feature to suck these events into your personal calendar.
• Don't: Give out addresses for private events!

Of course, blogging is a proven way of putting your opinions into the conversation stream in a much deeper way than Twitter allows. It's very very easy to get caught up posting to Twitter and to ignore your own blog.  However, I think you create social currency (earned media) by contributing deeper thought pieces to the conversation.  I use Typepad.

• Do: Reserve your own URL, rather than relying on a Typepad or Wordpress extension. Benefit is that you can move to other blogging platforms in the future and can drive more personal branding through the URL you choose.
• Do: Put widgets from your other Professional Web services here, such as your Twitter feed or favorite slideshows from Slideshare
• Don't: Leave your blog unattended for long periods of time (i.e. several weeks or months). I'm guilty of this myself, though!

I've started using Quora quite recently. I think it could be a great method for engaging on very specific topics with the wider opinion-maker community as well as with entrepreneurs.  I don't have a list of do's and don'ts here as I am very recent user. But I see a lot of promise here.

I also see promise in services such as About.me or Flavors.me which enable users to create a personal profile page on the web, outside of the confines of any specific professional networking service. We had an investment in this area called Nombray and I find the value proposition to be quite appealing. The value (to me) would be to provide a single-page to drive your professional contacts to (e.g. from your business card or email signature profile); a single place for analytics across all your professional profiles/websites; and a key way to drive up your ranking on Google searches of your name.

You may have noticed I haven't included Facebook in this list.  Personally-speaking, I try to separate out my business and personal/social contacts. It's a challenge for me but I feel there is some value in keeping them separate. For many people, the lines have blurred - and in that case, it's important to keep appearances up on Facebook.

So tell me one unconventional way that you use the Professional Web for your own benefit.

Stay tuned for a follow-up post on the challenges facing companies in this space and new opportunities that I see.

The Digital Car and Harman's acquisition of Aha Mobile

 

Harman today announced its acquisition of Aha Mobile, a Venrock portfolio company.  We are quite excited about all the possibilities for Aha to leverage Harman's massive footprint and for Harman to provide a completely new set of differentiated experiences to its customers.  We wish the whole Aha team, including Robert, Max, Rafael, Ryan and Jason the best of luck as they bring Aha's innovative digital car services to millions of cars in the future.  Here's the press release.

I remember thinking about this idea while driving up and down the I-280 from San Francisco to Palo Alto and back everyday in 2007.  I was (very) bored with my car's radio channels as well as frustrated with not being able to access (safely) my own personalized web content while driving.  So I thought, how about an in-car user experience that brings me all sorts of web content, such as my own personalized road traffic report or email or other social feeds?  Out of this was borne the idea for Aha Mobile (the name came later).

Aha's CEO Robert, along with his colleagues, developed this idea further to incorporate a completely audio-based experience; content personalized based on location; interactivity to allow the user to say something that posts back to Facebook, the road traffic feed, etc,; and a back-end platform to aggregate data from across the Web.  I still believe that this is a truly innovative approach to in-car web services.

Our thesis: the digital car

We continue to look to partner with superstar entrepreneurs to drive the digital car forward (no pun intended!).  We are investors in INRIX and Where.  INRIX provides highly accurate traffic services to automotive OEMs, navigation software companies, online map providers, GPS/PND device makers, the public sector and others. Where is a mobile location-based search and advertising company. 

We developed a thesis on investing in the digital car, a megatrend that I believe will play out over the next decade at many levels of the value-chain.  The digital car leverages other megatrends such as pervasive broadband access, smartphone saturation, location and general user addiction to personalized web services.  At that time, in 2007/2008, some of the areas that we found interesting to prospect into included: new map databases, consumer voice apps, voice recognition engines, connected PNDs, location-based services, off-board navigation, connected media services, app stores for the car, and data aggregation.  We believed that some other areas of the digital car had already matured and were therefore not necessarily the right place to invest - these included: PNDs, in-dash operating systems, locationing technologies, broadband connectivity providers, enterprise telematics, and POI data.  Many of these elements are different in other markets, such as China, India, SE Asia, and similar in the EU.

Since then, many, if not all, of these areas have changed quite dramatically, showing how difficult, if not impossible, it is to try and predict the future in tech.  Some of the changes since 2007/2008 that impact the digital car have included: 

• the rise of smartphones (iPhone had just launched and Android was a theory) and app stores
• the rapid growth of Pandora and streaming mobile media in general
• the dramatic price reduction in mobile navigation solutions driven by Google
• the financial crisis and resultant slowdown in automotive sales
• a change in mindset of auto OEMs from telematics (essentially call-center based services such as OnStar) to connected services (such as Ford's Sync service and BMW's ConnectedDrive)
• the peaking of the PND market
• the sales of Navteq and TeleAtlas to device OEMs (Nokia and TomTom, respectively) and the rise of other map databases such as OpenStreetMap and Google's own map database
• the exponential growth in open data access through APIs such as for Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and several databases

There are also some constant themes and frustrations when it comes to the digital car:

• Business model differences between consumer web services and automotive OEMs
• Impedance mismatch between automotive OEMs and consumer web services in terms of iterating on new technologies
• The gap between the promise of voice recognition and its actual performance in the noisy environment of the car
• Slow emergence of standard interfaces and protocols in the car to connected with mobile devices or the Web (I would call the 12V plug as well as auxiliary jack for iPods standard interfaces)

And finally, there are some user-interface concepts that I outlined in these slides that I believe still apply for any in-car experience:

9 Questions for Digital Car Application Developers

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