Victoria Revay of NowPublic explains why Vancouver is kicking ass in startups:

A key reason that was sited for Vancouver’s success as a city that fosters great startups, by people like David Raffa, a predominant VC in Vancouver and Jim Charlton of Growthworks was that investors get a high return on their dollar with a relatively low risk of failure. Raffa says that often companies in British Columbia can be built faster on less and operators can “run a leaner ship, because of tax incentives and lower salary demands.” This allows startups to have a chance of staying in the game longer, which often leads to investors getting a high return on their dollar.

Jonathan Schwartz wrote a letter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission about using the Internet (i.e. blogs) for disclosure:

In your letter of November 2, you raised potential challenges to permitting blogs and corporate websites to be used to satisfy Reg FD's "widespread dissemination" requirement. Specifically, you inquired whether “there exist effective means to guarantee that a corporation uses its website in ways that assure broad non-exclusionary access, and the extent to which a determination that particular methods are effective in that regard depends on the particular facts.” Some of the comments to my blog echo the same concerns: critical company information could be difficult to find, accessible only with a registration or technologically obstructed.

We understand these apprehensions, but are confident that they can be addressed with clear directives from the SEC on the presentation and accessibility of information on corporate websites.

The letter has specific proposals about how to do it.

Quotes from "The New New Internet":

Rajen Sheth [Google Enterprise guy -- dpj] was on fire today…as were some of the Google Data centers he showed us in his presentation. Fortunately, Google is prepared for such events.

One of the nuggets that I think folks will take away from his talk was that software-as-a-service – SaaS - allows companies to focus on business and not on infrastructure. Instead of having to focus on the technology – installing, maintaining, etc. – they can use hosted services that just work.

For SaaS, read Enterprise 2.0.

Here are BlogMatrix's current plans for OpenID:

• we're going to do something eventually, probably by year-end
• accounts will be created in the "normal way"; there will be a settings page for OpenID
• once you've setup your OpenID information, you'll bypass the BlogMatrix login stage. You will still, however, be logging into a "normal" BlogMatrix account
• the login page will have a little OpenID icon in the User ID field, for those in the know
• we're probably not going to be an identity server
• we may or may not do something about transfering identity information; I don't like what OpenID has done and I think microformats can handle it better

Forbes has listed its favorite web apps for small business. Quickly summing up:

• Google Calendar
• GMail
• Google Notebook (I'd never even heard of this one!)
  
• Google Spreadsheets
• PageFlakes and YouOS (webtops)
• Zoho (word processor)
  

Well, there certainly was a trend here! Interestingly, no blogging app makes the list. We'll see if this changes next year, as blogging starts to become a key component of Enterprise 2.0.

Joshua Schachter is the inventor of del.icio.us, the most well-known social bookmarking site. Techology Review has his story here. I like this explanation of "folksonomy":

What del.icio.us's users were creating--without necessarily knowing they were doing so--was what technology blogger Thomas Vander Wal has dubbed a "folksonomy," a flexible system of organization that emerges organically from the choices users make. We're all familiar with the alternative, the kind of rule-bound, top-down classification scheme that Internet theorist Clay Shirky calls "ontological" in nature. The Dewey decimal system is an example: every object is assigned its place in a hierarchical system of organization, and every object is defined as, ultimately, one thing: a book goes in one place in the library and nowhere else. In a folksonomy, by contrast, definitions are fuzzier. With del.icio.us, the same Web page has many different tags, which often aren't even related to one another, and no explicit rules are being followed. Web pages are therefore listed not in one place but in many places, and sometimes pages aren't quite where you might expect them to be. So folksonomies are messier than "ontologies" are.

What del.icio.us has shown, though, is that folksonomies' imperfections are outweighed by their benefits. In the first place, folksonomies are dynamic rather than static. A Web folksonomy thus allows us to reclassify content according to our changing interests. An academic paper that's interesting today might be equally interesting a decade from now--but why it's interesting, why people care about it, might be very different. A traditional categorization system has a hard time dealing with this: once the essence of an object is defined, it's supposed to be defined for good. In a folksonomy, the reclassification happens almost automatically--as people start tagging the paper with new, more relevant tags, for example. Web folksonomies are also better at capturing the multiple meanings and uses that a given site has, rather than constraining the possible range of meanings.

The ability of tags to fluidly organize data is why I indentify it as a key technology for creating the datasphere.

I like this little story; I was saying almost exactly the same thing yesterday -- I want to make a company that makes money and I'll let the exit strategy take care of itself.

Don:

"How many companies can afford to pay $1 billion dollars for any company, let alone one with no barriers to entry, no revenue stream, and copyright lawsuits hanging over its head."

Sheri's commentary, in part:

"I'd like to believe that making profits, paying taxes, creating a few jobs and satisfied customers, might be worth, maybe a little something."

I think the time is coming soon to take Rick's no-harm/no-foul 30 minute meeting. Soon.

PubSub, a weblog search engine that (amongst other things) turned persistent queries into feeds, has officially gone under. GigaOM has the news:

The PubSub-KnowNow deal was apparently so close to completion a few months ago, they had started telling the press about it. I did a pre-briefing call with the two companies, who at the time insisted it was a “merger.” The idea was that PubSub had the consumer product while KnowNow had enterprise chops. A couple days later, PR asked me to hold the story while “the lawyers figure things out.” What was really happening, it seems, was conflict between PubSub shareholders was killing the deal…and the company too.

Here's something I'm going to be diving into in the next couple of days -- DEMO (a beauty contest for startups) provides a video archive of presentations. This is pretty useful resource for putting together a successful demo (or maybe even a DEMO) of your own. Too bad there's not a little rating system built in; version 2 perhaps :-)

Via Segal.

Erik at the ProductWiki Blog writes "Don't settle for Google Adsense":

There has been a lot of talk lately about the performance of Google AdSense as a viable source of revenue for bloggers and publishers alike. Recently, a post on TechCrunch inspired a debate about the potential performance of Google AdSense on the MySpace behemoth as Fox and Google have struck a billion dollar deal. While I believe that AdSense is a great source of potential revenue, it is by no means perfect and, in my opinion, needs to be updated to meet the demands of its users.

We are in an interesting position at ProductWiki as we generate our revenue from two different sources of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: Google AdSense and Shopping.com Merchant Listings. These ads show up on all of our product pages (never at the same time) and each type of ad gets approximately a 50% share of our page views across a broad spectrum of products.

I've compiled data contrasting the performance of Shopping.com and Google AdSense on ProductWiki taken from a one week period at the end of last month.

	Shopping.com	AdSense
Clickthrough rate (%)	29%	6.5%
Revenue per click ($/click)	$0.21	$0.19
eCPM ($/1000 impressions)	$59	$13

Taking a look at the most significant of these figures (eCPM), Shopping.com outperforms AdSense by a factor of 4.6!

 

RyanC of Signal vs. Noise writes:

If you’re one of the many companies or individuals who are currently working on a web app, I’d strongly encourage you to consider including an expensive premium plan. Something that is head-and-shoulders above the other plans you offer. Typical extras that could be included in a premium plan are:

1. Increased security (SSL)
2. Brandable interface
3. Higher capacity or usage
4. Extra support
5. etc.

[...] Well, two weeks ago, we finally finished the new DropSend Business Plan. It’s $80 more than the Pro plan ($19 vs. $99), and we were worried that it might be a bit too expensive. Holy crap, were we wrong.

[...] In two weeks, we’ve increased our total revenue by 30%! Two weeks. As I write this, I’m still finding it hard to believe. The Business Plan is now responsible for the lion’s share of our revenue from DropSend.

Sigh, Canada, as adventurous as ever:

Venture capital sluggish locally

Venture capital activity in Ottawa showed some improvement in the second quarter, but has remained largely unchanged since the beginning of 2003, a new study says.

According to the quarterly venture capital report released yesterday by OCRI, there were four deals in the second quarter of 2006, for a total of $43.3 million.

"While venture capitalists appear to be investing at a cautious rate, they are maintaining their support of their portfolio companies," said Stephen Daze, executive director of OCRI's entrepreneurship centre. "In addition, we are starting to see an increase in the overall deal flow in the city and remain cautiously optimistic moving forward."

... and ...

Venture capital funding falls 80%

Despite an 80-per-cent decline in venture capital funding for Ottawa-area firms in the June quarter compared with the same period last year, the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation is expecting some improvement in coming months.

Four startups landed $43.3 million in the latest quarter, according to OCRI, a big drop from the $209 million of venture capital funding a year earlier when three big deals averaging $50 million each drove a healthy rebound for the full year.

...

OCRI said that many venture-capital-funded companies are now well funded, and thus follow-on investment is likely to remain light.

However, of the 39 startups that got venture capital financing in 2003 and 2004, only 15 have received additional funding. Nine other companies died, were bought or left town.

"Dead 2.0" writes:

With all the 2.0 hype, I think it’s unfair to unanimously declare all new Internet startups as 100% junk.  It can’t be much more than 95%. So I thought it would be an interesting diversion to switch the tone of my writing for a change.  Here are some tips I have for these would-be entrepreneurs to thrive and survive the next 24 months.

1. Have a revenue model, right now. 
2. Be a complete business, not just a feature. 
3. Affect real people, not just bloggers. 
4. Get a real, memorable name. 
5. If applicable, get unaffiliated with Web 2.0, because it is hype and will have a very negative backlash in a little while.  I don’t know when, but it’s coming. 
6. Find some friends who don’t drink the kool-aid and get their honest feedback. 
7. If you are revolutionary, make sure that a revolution is coming. 
8. If you are evolutionary, then there needs to be a big enough market to address with a “we’re a little better than them” vision. 
9. Fit your business into an existing food chain. 
10. 10. Do not expect to be Google and, just as importantly, do not expect them to buy you.
11. Ignore the hype and have fun.

Rick Segal has an interesting story about trying to get honest feedback from people:

For the first group of people, I said basically this:

While working on my electronics research, I came across an interesting way to make sure popcorn gets done right as I hate burnt popcorn… Insert above story… what do you think? I need some honest feedback.

I divided this story telling into people I knew and ones I’d never met before.  What was interesting (and probably not surprising) is that when I claimed this idea as my own, the worst feedback I got was “a bit narrow of a solution, don’t you think”.  Virtually everybody wanted to come up with ideas on getting the microwave oven and popcorn folks to sell or include my pop-rite device. Most struggled and wanted to change the subject, only one person said “kinda goofy” and I knew them.

For the next group of people, I went with this version:

So, I have a guy pitching me the following. He is a electronics wiz… Insert above story… what do you think? I need some honest feedback to pass on.

Same thing. Divided this up into people I knew and didn’t know.  The feedback was brutal. Ranging from wow must be a smart electronics guy to get that to work inside a microwave all the way to, did all the stupid people have a convention in Toronto?

Same idea, same basic pitch, same request.  The difference being that I set up an environment where it wasn’t personal and the feedback could flow without the perceived or real fear of offending me. It didn’t matter if these were friends or people I had never met before.

The lesson for you is simple but often overlooked.  Most people will not trash you or your ideas no matter how hard you press for honest feedback.  It is really tough to get. Running around and getting “trusted” people saying, cool or that’s awesome may not be useful.