Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing

At the NYSE WF360 Summit with Ceslie Armstrong and Keith Reinhard

Last night I was at The 360 Summit held at The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Francois Gossieaux and Susan Bird invited prominent bloggers to attend and join the conversation.

There was a cocktail reception on the trading floor of the NYSE. It was interesting to see the real thing in person and meet some of the people behind the scenes. Security was incredibly tight. The streets around the NYSE are closed to traffic with security guards everywhere. But, once inside we were able to explore anywhere we wanted to go.

Catherine Kinney, President & COO of NYSE-Euronext, gave a dinner speech about the history of the NYSE and its transformation into a global exchange. The NYSE recently merged with a French exchange to form EuroNext. The NYSE is on an aggressive plan for diversification and globalization. Interestingly, Catherine mentioned that every high tech IPO this year except one has listed on the NYSE, and 80 of the top 100 companies in the world are listed here.

Ceslie Armstrong of The Womens Network sat next to me at dinner. Ceslie has been a writer or editor for many of the top fashion magazines including Glamour, Cosmopolitan, In Style, and others. I asked her if "The Devil Wears Prada" was a realistic characterization of the fashion magazine world. To my surprise she said it was largely true, and the story was based on a real fashion magazine editor. One interesting tidbit; Ceslie said that the March and September magazine issues pay for the rest of the year. Ceslie left the fashion magazine business and started an online web and video network called The Womens Network. Ceslie jokingly referred to herself as "The Geek Who Wears Prada".

Keith Reinhard, (seated left in photo) Chairman Emeritus, at DDB Worldwide, a global advertising agency, was also seated at our table. Mr. Reinhard has taken on a new challenge leading Business for Diplomatic Action, a task force of business leaders focused on improving the image of America. As Keith said, it has never been worse. There are significant issues that need to be addressed, and others that are misconceptions. The group is focused on two things; work to change the issues that are true, and change the perceptions for those issues that are not true. Keith mentioned one startling statistic; 1% of world travel market share is worth $12.3 Billion. The image of America is important to all businesses, but especially the travel business. Learn more about how you can get involved at Business For Diplomatic Action.

Subscribe - To get a FREE automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Mark Cuban is a true patriot

I have followed Mark Cuban and admired his business success for a long time. But my admiration went up another notch after reading his blog this morning "What can I do to help those who are serving our country ?" Mark is a true patriot, thankful for what he has, generous with his time and money, and always willing to jump in and help where he can.

Mark started the Fallen Patriot Fund to help families of U.S. military personnel who were killed or seriously injured during the Iraq war. Mark pays all the administrative costs of the fund so 100% of your contributions go directly to the families in need. The fund has donated more than $2.5M to families, and continues to raise and distribute money.

I have seen Mark talking to himself during the playing of the national anthem at professional sports events. The CBS  Evening News noticed it too and asked Mark what he was saying. Here is what he says;

"Thank you to all those who have fought before and are fighting now to make this country great. I will never take my freedoms or opportunities for granted. Here is to .... then I go through a list of family members and thank them and hope that they and their children are healthy, happy and can always look up at a blue sky and be thankful for all we have." Then at Mavs games, I give thanks to all the players on the court , fans in the seats and hope that they stay healthy, happy and that the Mavs win. "

I dont ever want to take for granted what I have, what my family has and how fortunate we are.

How many billionaires do you think are as humble and thankful as Mark Cuban? Wait a minute...Mark Cuban humble? Well he certainly is confident and aggressive, and he sure isn't shy about publicity. But, yes, he is a humble guy who never forgot where he came from. The world needs more Mark Cubans.

Full Disclosure: I am proud to say Mark is a friend, so I am a little biased. I wish him all the best, except when the Mavs play the Boston Celtics.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Where I've Been, the hot Facebook App, tells Where I'm going

Where I've Been is one of the hottest apps on Facebook. It is basically a map that lets you shade in the places you have been, and where you would like to go. The app was launched on June 8th. When I wrote about them just two weeks later they already had 400,000 users. Yesterday I talked again to founder Craig Ulliott. He reported 2.9M current users, and adding 25,000 new users each day.

Facebook apps are hot. I saw companies at startup incubators Y Combinator and TechStars that already had great traction with Facebook apps. Many startups I talk to these days include a Facebook app as part of their service.

Where I'm Going - My big question for Where I've Been founder Craig Ulliott was where are you going? The short answer...everywhere. Where I've Been just announced a beta service for MySpace, the other big social networking service. They also launched their own web site which will allow them to expand the service and monetize in different ways. Craig has lots of funding offers from VCs, and lots of advertising and revenue sharing offers from companies in the travel business.

What is the social network appeal of WIB? Friends like to share where they have been and learn about new places they would like to go. With WIB it is easy to find people with similar interests, compare maps, share experiences, find the best deals, and plan new trips.

What is the business model? - Millions of users are great, but what is the business model that will make this a sustainable business? Advertising, sponsorship, and revenue share. The WIB audience is very targeted on people who like to travel. WIB knows where their users are geographically located, where they have been, and most importantly, where they would like to go. This allows some very targeted advertising at very high rates. Revenue sharing with airlines, hotels, rental cars, cruise ships, and all sorts of travel businesses is also a great revenue source. WIB could also start their own travel agency.

Will WIB move from the east coast to Silicon Valley? Scott Kirsner at the Boston Globe writes frequently about why east coast startups often move to the west coast. It is a frustrating issue. I was on the management team of two startups (AltaVista and Napster) that started in Boston but moved to Silicon Valley and wrote about the reasons why. The WIB guys are happy in Philadelphia and plan on staying there. They already work virtually from several different locations. They can attract the money and talent they need to expand the business, and their users are in every country in the world. So there is no clear advantage to moving the company.

There has been recent speculation that WIB will be acquired by TripAdvisor for $3M, about $1 per user. TripAdvisor, a Boston based company, has denied the rumor. I didn't ask Craig about this in our discussion because the reality is he couldn't comment even if it were true. My guess is WIB will not be acquired, at least not anytime soon. If they can generate enough cash to grow and sustain them to the next level, the future acquisition price would be significantly higher.

Keep your eye on Where I've Been. It could be The Next Big Thing in social networking and e-commerce.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Craigslist's Jim Buckmaster on why bigger isn't better - The Mythical Man Month

Jim Buckmaster, CEO of craigslist, did a “fireside chat” interview with BusinessWeek editor Jessi Hempel, at The Nantucket Conference. The conference, and especially this session, was thought provoking. I have interviewed Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist, and written about the craigslist concept several times. I found Jim Buckmaster to be the perfect match for Craig Newmark, and craigslist. He is genuine in his beliefs and commitment to the craigslist philosophy…just like Craig.

These guys break all the traditional rules on how to run a company. I hesitate to call craigslist a company…it is really a community in every sense of the word. Surely the users are a community, but even the company itself seems to be run more like a community than a traditional company. Yet, craigslist has been more successful in terms of active users and revenues than probably 99% of all web based companies. There are lessons to be learned here. Lots of companies talk about listening to customers…craigslist really does.   

Craigslist could generate hundreds of millions in revenue and be a public company. Why haven't you done this?   "You can't serve two masters. You either have to serve Wall Street or customers. We chose customers. Sure, we could generate more revenue, but we have enough to support the things we need to do."

How is craigslist able to operate with just 24 people? "We don’t have meetings. Probably 90% of most business time is spent on increasing revenues. We don’t do that, so we don’t need meetings. That gives us more time to focus on customer needs.”

Have you considered advertising as a revenue stream? “Our customers haven’t asked for that”.

Why not charge for job and real estate listings in other cities? Why just San Francisco and New York? “We would if our customers asked for that, but the community seems to be happy with the way it is”.

What is on your product roadmap? “Multilingual support, better search, better spam and scam detection, less clunky geography browsing."

Why not just crank up the revenues a little bit to hire a few more people so you could implement some of these features and more customer service now? “Well, every company has resource constraints. Sure we get frustrated sometimes, but even companies with 1,000 employees have resource constraints. So growing from our current 24 employees to 35 or 40 employees wouldn’t change things for the better…it would just make us bigger’.

Luxury hires – Jim was asked how he spends his time. “Unfortunately we get lots of requests from law enforcement or government agencies. We need to respond…and this takes a lot of time, finding information, checking facts, and talking with lawyers. I don’t like doing it but it usually falls to me. It would be nice to hire a legal coordinator but that would be a luxury hire. We don’t do luxury hires”.

So, is craigslist hiring? “Yes, we are hiring now and have ads on craigslist. But we are careful who we choose to hire.”

The whole interview was fascinating, but two things really jumped out at me and they are applicable to every business of any size. Luxury hires and resource constraints. If we really stopped to think about it there are probably quite a few luxury hires that could be avoided in every group. In big companies there are lots of luxury hires walking around.

The second eye opener was the notion that every company, regardless of size, has resource constraints. Craigslist has 24 people. Other companies have 2400 people, or 24,000 people, but no matter the size…they can’t do everything. They get bigger…not better.

This sort of reminds me of The Mythical Man Month. Software projects are typically broken down into individual features and work estimates are expressed in terms of man months of effort. Conventional wisdom is that adding more man months gets the job done faster. The Mythical Man Month theory says that adding people to a project actually slows it down because of all the communication and coordination overhead. If a project is behind schedule you should take people off the project to reduce overhead and sharpen the focus of the team. Fascinating ideas.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Mark Cuban - The Billionaire next door

Mark Cuban is a larger than life public figure, but in person he is just like the guy next door. Mark has had lots of business successes, the biggest was Broadcast.com which he sold to Yahoo back in 1999 for $5.7 Billion. The smartest move was selling his Yahoo stock before the stock market bubble burst in 2000.

Mark writes the very popular Blog Maverick, and is now best known as the owner of the NBA Dallas Mavericks. Very appropriate since maverick is a good description of Mark Cuban. His new big thing is HDNet, a new High Definition TV network, and IceRocket, a blog search engine.

I had a chance to talk to Mark at a recent Celtics - Mavericks game. The Mavericks won of course.

This is a picture of my two sons, Derek and Darren with Mark. Just to give you an idea my sons are both 6'-1" and 175 pounds, so Mark is a big dude.

I followed up with a few questions on sports and business. Here is Mark live and uncut.

1.       You are very involved with the Mavericks, attending home and away games, sitting behind the bench, and going into the locker room at half time. How do you balance being supportive versus micro managing the team?

I know where I add value, where I don't, and the value of saying nothing and just observing.

2.       George Steinbrenner (Yankees) and Jerry Jones (Cowboys) are very involved too yet the fans don’t seem to admire them in the same way. Why do you think the Mavericks fans are so supportive?

Don't know, don't care. I approach all my businsses the exact same way.

3.       The fans love you everywhere you go. I noticed Boston fans constantly asking for your autograph and taking pictures. They don’t do that with other owners, in fact I have never seen the Celtics owner sign autographs. Most owners sit up in the sky boxes and never see the fans. Have you ever had any bad experiences with hecklers?

I get heckled all the time. Its no problem, better me than the players. And as far as the autographs, the fans are my customers, no matter what the arena.  They pay the bills, I'm happy to sign as many autographs as I can.

4.       The Chicago Cubs are up for sale. Have you ever considered buying another sports franchise? Are you interested in the Cubs?

No comment.

5.       It seems like the two biggest issues in professional sports are collective bargaining agreements with the players, and advertising contracts with the TV networks. As an individual owner how much control do you have over those issues?

Not as much as I probably should. In the NBA the owners have the chance to discuss issues, but a negligible opportunity to impact issues.

6.       Was letting Steve Nash go the toughest decision you have ever made in sports? Any regrets?

No and no. Steve made the choice to leave. The suns were smart enough to recognize the value he would have in their new run and gun system. There were several teams with cap room that could have offered more and didn't.

The bigger issue is that I think Steve is a great guy. I wish him all the best, but its been 3 years. I'm long past it.

7.       How about business? How do you split your time between HDNet, IceRocket, the Mavericks, and your other business interests?

Its 70pct hdnet,10pct the internet biz, icerocket, filesanywhere.com, goowy.com and the rest Mavs.

8.       How do you find time to blog? I noticed you posted a blog on the Friday night of the Celtics game after 11:00PM. It was about the Cablevision DRM suit. Is it easy for you to go from arguing with referees to arguing legal concepts?

Very easy. I spend more time thinking about technology than basketball. I have great people at the mavs and we all know what we bring to the table and what our interdependencies are. So its easy to switch gears.

9.   Is this the Mavericks year to win the championship? Which teams do you fear most?

I hope so. We don't fear any team.

Good luck, Mark! The Mavericks almost won the championship last year. This year they have the best record in the league and should win another trip to The Finals. Go Mavs!

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Fire bad students and bad teachers - Give incentives to both

I had no idea that tech blog readers had such an interest in public school education, although it makes sense that we all should. We have all been through the school system ourselves, and probably have children in it now. Alfred Thompson was a teacher and has some thoughts. Robert Scoble keeps his readers focused on the issue. Dan Farber has an audience too. Comments and links to my previous post were awesome. Techmeme keeps track of all the the most popular conversations. Shelly Powers  suggests how high school might look if Steve Jobs was in charge.

The main premise of my last post was that there need to be incentives and rewards for great teachers, and the ability to fire bad teachers. Let me add to that. There need to be incentives for good students and the ability to (fire) divert bad students to more appropriate programs.

If we are going to hold teachers accountable for performance we need to hold students and parents accountable too. We also need to offer alternative programs for students with different learning styles and different interests. The "one size fits all" public school education program doesn't work well for teachers or students.

Students should have incentives, recognition, and rewards for achievement, just like teachers should. Recognition is the best reward in most cases, and it doesn't cost much to do it. Rewards can be simple things like time off, first pick of some programs, special parking spots, free passes to school events, free lunches, whatever... it doesn't need to be expensive. Ask the teachers...they have hundreds of ideas...but no power to implement them.

Students should also have consequences and alternatives. Lets face it, not all students are in the classroom to learn. Some don't want to be there, don't care about learning, and are very disruptive. Get them out. It is a privilege to be in the classroom...make them earn it. If the student can't perform at that high level, then offer a lower level course. If they aren't interested in a college prep course then offer them other vocational programs, or just life skills classes. Some kids learn more about life playing sports than any experience in the classroom. There are lots of ways to learn and lots of different things to learn about. Why tie all students down to one education path?

Parents share an equal part of the responsibility. Every teacher will tell you that most learning happens in the home, especially the life skills and character lessons. If parents aren't involved and working in cooperation with the teachers...they have no right to complain.

Schools are all about local control. Your local school board really controls the school administration, who gets hired, how much they get paid, what curriculum gets taught, how big the class size is, and what programs are offered. How many parents have ever been to a school board meeting? That is where all the important decisions are made.

Presidential candidates, senators, and congressmen have almost nothing to do with public education. They talk a lot, but they really have zero impact on the education process. Governors and state reps have a little more impact because they make the decisions on how much state funding will be allocated to public schools. But, in most states, more than half of public school funding comes from local property taxes. And, the total amount that will be spent is proposed by the local school board and approved by local voters.

It all comes down to incentives and consequences for teachers and students. Unions have taken away incentives and prevented consequences for teachers. The union wants everyone treated and paid equally regardless of ability. All rewards are based on seniority. What a stupid way to run things.

The school boards have not put adequate rewards, consequences, or alternatives in place for students. They need to get creative and get out of the "one size fits all" education program.

Parents are in control. Parents are voters and taxpayers. Parents vote for the school board members and they vote to approve the budgets. Parents pay the taxes that support the schools. Parents teach and motivate their own children. If parents aren't doing their job and making the right decisions...the teachers don't have a chance.

I promise I will get back to my regular topics after this post. :-)

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Steve Jobs says teachers unions protect bad teachers - can't reward the good ones

Steve Jobs is speaking out. A few weeks ago he said the music labels should eliminate DRM protection. This week he said "I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way".

April Castro of the Associated Press wrote a story "Apple CEO lambasts teachers unions", where Jobs said, "What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?" he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference."

My take? Steve got it half right. I agree that You can't fire the bad ones. The other half of the problem is that you can't reward the good ones. That is what all unions do...protect the incompetent ones. Unions eliminate "pay for performance" and instead "pay by seniority". How do they get this seniority? Just breathe...because they can't be fired. About the only way a teacher can be fired is for sexual misconduct, some other crime, or obvious malfeasance. Perhaps worse, unions don't allow rewards for excellent individual performance. Where is the incentive for teachers, or any union member, to work harder, take risks, and excel?

UPDATE: I wrote another post that explores the other side of the problem Fire the bad students, and give rewards to both good teachers and students.

Robert Scoble agrees with me, while Dan Farber says the problem starts with teacher salaries.

Most of us work for businesses without unions, and most of us do just fine without the "protection" of a union. In fact, we enjoy "pay for performance" and work hard to earn promotions and bonuses. Yes, there are some large businesses that protect incompetent workers and refuse to fire them. But at least they don't hold back the star performers and do reward them for their efforts.

Pay teachers more money? Politicians always shout we need to pay teachers more money. Have you ever researched how much the average teacher gets paid? Not the starting salary of a 23 year old first year teacher...the average teacher. The politicians always point out the starting salary, but the truth is that almost no one gets paid that amount.

The Hoover Institute published a paper on teachers salaries, citing the American Federation of Teachers effort to compare teachers wages to other professions. The Hoover report responded;

"Where, one wonders, are the comparisons with journalists, registered nurses, assistant district attorneys, FBI agents, military officers, and other not-so-highly compensated professionals and public-sector employees? Shouldn’t the average pay of a high-school English teacher be compared with that of writers and editors? One could make a case that the salaries of high-school physics or calculus teachers should bear some resemblance to those of computer system analysts, but does the AFT believe that the appropriate compensation benchmarks for 3rd-grade teachers are the salaries of engineers or attorneys?"

Teachers only work about 180 days per year, so on an hourly basis they are making a very good wage. The rest of us work about 240 days per year, or about 33% more. Doesn't it make sense that teachers should be paid 33% less than the average worker with similar responsibility? Take a look at this chart from the Hoover Institute that compares average hourly wages of many different professions. Teachers make a higher average hourly wage than accountants, computer programmers, auditors, and even more than architects and engineers who work in State and Local governments.

Steve Jobs said that putting more technology into schools will not significantly improve the results. This is a bold statement for the Apple CEO to make after decades of subsidizing the purchase of Apple computers for use in public schools. But once again, I think Steve Jobs is right. Until we solve the problem of how to reward great teachers and remove poor teachers we will not see significantly better results.

The problem is not money. Schools already get more than 50% of the local budgets in most cities and towns. Health care is the same deal. We spend more per capita on health care than any country in the world. The problems with education and health care are not lack of funding. The problem is lack of incentive.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Findory - personalized news, blogs, and search

Greg Linden is founder of Findory, and author of the popular blog "Geeking with Greg". Findory is a personalization and recommendation service that helps users find news stories and blog posts of interest to you. Findory also has a search engine built in that personalizes its results based on your past searches and clicks. Think Memeorandum combined with Google personalized search, powered by a collaborative filtering engine. It is amazing.

I learned of Findory about 4 months ago when I started seeing traffic from Findory to my blog. I didn't have the time to experiment with it then, but recently devoted some time to understanding what it is and how it works. You should try it...definitely worth the time. What better way to learn than an interview with the founder?

Here are my 10 11 questions with Greg Linden.

1.     What were you doing before Findory? Is this your first start-up?

I was at Amazon.com from early 1997 to 2002. I wrote the recommendation engine used by Amazon.com and later led the technology team that developed Amazon's personalization systems. Before Amazon, I was in graduate school in the AI group in the University of Washington Computer Science department. After Amazon, I was at Stanford Business School in the Sloan Program.  This is my first start-up.

2.     When did you come up with the idea for Findory? What inspired you?

I wanted to personalize information.  Amazon.com has demonstrated the value of personalization in e-commerce.  I want to bring personalization to information.  I want to help people deal with the overwhelming flood of information in their daily lives by helping people focus on what is relevant and useful.

3.     How long did it take you to build the first prototype, and ultimately bring it to market? How long have you been live?

Findory launched early with what might generously be called an alpha in January 2004.  At that point, it was news only.  Weblogs were added in June 2004.  The site has grown and continued to be refined over the last two years.

4.     What exactly is Findory? It seems to be part search engine, part recommendation engine, and part meme tracker that finds the most popular news stories and blogs. How would you describe it?

Findory is primarily a recommendation engine.

When people come to a website like Amazon.com or Google, sometimes they know what they want right away.  Then they use search.  When they don't know what they want, when there is too much information out there, personalization can help.  Personalization learns what you want from what you do.  Using personalization, Findory helps focus your attention and surface things that you may not have been able to find on your own.

Personalization and search complement each other.  Findory offers both.

5.     How do you compare Findory to Memeorandum, Wink, Digg, Jookster, and others?

I don't see much in common with those sites.  Memeorandum combines inlined tracebacks with link popularity.  Digg combines a voting mechanism for finding most popular articles with a discussion forum.  I am not familiar with Wink or Jookster, but they appear to be web search engines, Wink focusing on tagging, Jookster focusing on social networks.

Findory is quite a bit different.  Unlike Digg or Jookster, there is no explicit voting or listing friends.  Findory's personalization learns from what you do, finds other people with similar interests to yours, and shares what they have found, all implicitly, all anonymously, all without any effort.  Unlike Memeorandum, Wink, and Digg, every reader sees a different page on Findory, each page personalized to each person's interests.

6.     Does Findory present a different personalized page to each user?

Yep!  That's the idea!

7.     I noticed Findory keeps track of all my searches and stories read for both News and Blogs. Do the recommended stories and search results get more focused as my user history grows?

Yes.  Findory learns very quickly and can make recommendations even if you have only read a couple articles, but the recommendations will be more detailed and comprehensive if you have a longer history on Findory.

8.     How does Findory factor in choices other users have made to the results I see? It feels like collaborative filtering. Is that another element of the secret sauce?

Findory recommends articles between Findory readers.  When you read articles on Findory, Findory looks for other readers who might have the same interests as you, and then shares the articles they found.

It is a little like social networking sites where you explicitly list all your friends, then explicitly share things you found among your friends.  But, with Findory, friends are found for you automatically and anonymously.  With Findory, the sharing is done quietly and implicitly, all with no effort.  Just read articles, that's it.  Findory does all the work for you.

The personalization techniques used by Findory fall loosely into the class of collaborative filtering algorithms.  However, naive collaborative filtering has well known quality, performance, and scaling problems.  Findory creates fully personalized pages in real-time, works even if someone has read only a few articles, learns immediately from new data, and can scale to millions of users.

9.     According to Alexa your site traffic is right up there with the other popular meme trackers? Who do you consider your closest competitor it terms of features and functions?

Findory has been growing at between 15-30%/month since launch.  Findory's current traffic is about the same as Memeorandum, Rojo, and MSN Start.com

To my knowledge, there are no other start-ups doing personalized information like Findory.  However, the search giants have made tentative efforts toward personalization.  Google has an experiment with "recommended stories" on a small section of the Google News page and also has an active effort in personalized web search.  MSN has experimented with personalization of a small section of the MSNBC and MSN Newsbot pages.  Their efforts use different techniques.  They do not adapt as quickly as Findory nor offer as fine-grained, targeted, comprehensive personalization.

10.  What would you like Findory to be in the next year or two? What are users asking for?

Findory continues to grow rapidly.  Over the next two years, I would like to add to our early personalized web search, offer additional advanced customization features, expand our news and blog crawl, build our own advertising network, offer versions of Findory in non-English languages, and launch in other areas such as videos, podcasts, and images. 

11.  What is your business model going forward?

Findory has its own personalized advertising engine layered on top of Google AdSense.  Unlike AdSense or other contextual advertising engines, Findory's advertising is personalized.  Findory individually targets ads based on both the content of the page and the articles each reader has read. As of December 2005, Findory is cash flow positive.

I have been using Findory for a week or so. Initial results are impressive. I plan to use it for several weeks to see how the results get more focused and personalized over time. Maybe I will do a follow up post on my findings.

Have you used Findory? What is your experience?

Interview with Gabe Rivera, founder of Memeorandum

Tech Memeorandum is part of my daily reading list, actually I read it several times a day. There are several other "clipper" services out there that approach the problem from a slightly different angle. Blogs have exploded in growth and popularity over the last year. Finding good quality and popular content among the millions of blogs is the job of Memeorandum.

UPDATE: Since publishing this interview a new discussion on Meme Trackers has emerged. There are lots of start-ups out there trying to imitate or innovate on Memeorandum.

I had the chance to interview Gabe for this blog. Here is 10 Questions with Gabe Rivera, Founder of Memeorandum.

1. What were you doing before Memeorandum? Is this your first start-up?

Research on, and performance analysis of compiler optimizations, most

recently at Intel.  No web stuff.  First start-up.

2. When did you come up with the idea for Memeorandum? What inspired you? How long did it take you to build the first prototype, and ultimately bring it to market? How long have you been live?

Having watched the Jayson Blair debacle unfold on blogs, I became interested in the possibilities of blogging and wanted to try something new. Memeorandum 1.0 was kind of a "mainstream media meets political blogs" mashup deal, completed in spare time in about 6 weeks.  It went live in January 2004.  Example: http://www.memeorandum.com/04/04/01/  From this experience it occurred to me what I wanted in Memeorandum 2.0.  This took about a year to build, as it involved developing a very powerful article scraper, plus components for filtering and organizing posts and source discovery.  That went live September 2005.  Throughout, the prototype was the product, and vice versa.

3. How did you publicize Memeorandum and build up your user base?

I shared what I was working on with a number of bloggers before launch. Most were happy to write about it at launch.  Thanks Robert, Richard, etc! Since then, word of mouth/blog has continued to drive growth in readership.

4. How do you compare Memeorandum to Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, and others?

For readers of Digg (or Reddit, and to some extent, Slashdot), I'd say Memeorandum is:

- More focused (on either "Tech" or "Politics")

- More expert/authority-driven

- Better organized, visually

Of course for a certain type of reader, Digg's quirkiness, developer

orientation, and community are all pluses.  Many who aren't as interested in

these things prefer Memeorandum.  Many use both sites.  It's all good!

For the more ponderous set, I'd add that unlike all of those, Memeorandum

thrives on the web at large -- it doesn't keep its editors and content all

siloed and centralized.  Viva la edge, yadda, yadda.

5. How does Memeorandum decide what is important news? Some stories have no links, others have 10 or more links. How does content slide down the page over the course of a day?

Most-linked/most-discussed new stories are important.  Actually, all stories have been linked.  Items lack "Discussion" when people link without adding much commentary, since simple pointer posts usually aren't included on Memeorandum. Items fall down the page as they get older, or are displaced by bigger stories.

6. Reddit and Slashdot seem to use "expert/authority/reputation" systems to find and rank stories. Digg relies on its user community for "most linked/discussed" stories. These are two very different approaches. Memeorandum seems to use both approaches. I have seen stories on Memeorandum that are from expert sources with virtually no links or discussion, and other stories from lesser known bloggers that have several links. Does your algorithm measure both independently?

Yes.

(Editors Note: For competitive reasons Gabe's answer was short and sweet. The algorithms used are the secret sauce and highly confidential. Revealing more about them would allow competitors to copy them, and allow users to "game" them to optimize their posts for higher ranking.

7. When I worked at AltaVista we tried to measure how effective we were at producing quality relevant results by asking users to rank the results. We were never quite sure if they voted a result higher because it appeared on the first results page rather than the third page, or because they really thought it was the best result independent of position on the page. Does Memeorandum try to get around the "follow the herd" mentality? I guess this is another way of asking how do unknown blog writers get noticed on Memeorandum?

I think people are too quick to dismiss as a "herd" the many people who emerge to discuss a dominant topic.  Even when massive topic clusters form on Memeorandum, they often incorporate opposing or at least complementary viewpoints, with many of the more mundane posts reduced to a short "Discussion" links or omitted entirely. 

Though I like to see "unknown" writers featured on my site, I don't view it necessarily as a goal for Memeorandum to do so.  (Maybe "relative" or "former" unknowns is a better term.)  I want Memeorandum to interest its readers, and expose unknowns accordingly.  As a practical matter, Memeorandum can't make all or most of the unknowns happy.  It is, after all, a filter, and there are an awful lot of writers out there.

8. Are you surprised at the high quality of the content on blogs? How are blogs affecting traditional news sources?

Not surprised.  If I were, I wouldn't have bothered with Memeorandum!  I

think experts of various stripes are finding blogging rewarding, and I

expect this trend to accelerate.

I'd rather avoid wading too far into media punditry, but it's clear

traditional media ought to evolve in a number of ways to remain both

valuable to readers and profitable.  Among other things, I hope they go

deeper into blogging, making Memeorandum a better read.

9. What would you like Memeorandum to be in the next year or two? Something beyond Tech and Politics?

Yes, something beyond Tech and Politics.  In fact, I've already developed

demos in other topic areas, but am putting off launching until I'm happy

with their quality.

10. What is your business model going forward?

I think certain kinds of sponsorships will mesh well with Memeorandum.  More on this later this year.  There are some other services I'm considering, but it's too soon to blather on about them.

Gabe Rivera is a very busy guy. He puts an enormous amount of time, virtually every waking hour, into making Memeorandum the best possible service. My email exchanges with Gabe were typically at 3:00AM or later. He never sleeps...and neither does the news.

Ironically, this interview with Gabe Rivera may not show up on Tech Memeorandum. The algorithm for choosing stories is blind to author and subject. It looks for popularity (links out to popular stories) and authority (links in from authoritative sources) in ranking stories. Similar in some respects to search engine ranking algorithms. Like it or not, it is an excellent proxy for what the vast majority of users want to read. And that is what Memeorandum is all about...filtering through millions of blogs to find the nuggets users really want to read. Memeorandum has done a brilliant job!

Interview with Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist

craigslist is the largest online local classified listings service in the world. Craig Newmark started the service in San Francisco back in 1995 as a place to find jobs, housing, and for others to find goods & services, social activities, a girlfriend or boyfriend, advice, community information, and just about anything else -- all for free, and in a relatively non-commercial environment.

As the web became a place for commerce and making huge fortunes craigslist remained private and free. No ads, no fees (except for job listings), and no IPO. craigslist could have been eBay or something similar, and could have won fame and fortune for Craig Newmark. He has no regrets, and is still "plugging away" at craigslist. I had a chance to talk with Craig recently about his experiences and he agreed to be interviewed for The Next Big Thing.

UPDATE: Two days after publishing this blog C/Net came out with a story "Craigslist's laid back approach to success". Another blog also picked it up "Silicon Valley's love affair with Craigslist"

10 Questions with Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist

1.     When did you come up with the idea for craigslist? What inspired you?

I really didn't; I just figured I'd run a list for San Francisco events involving arts and tech.  People asked for more, and I did that, then got more feedback, and did that.  Jim Buckmaster, my CEO, continues that tradition to this day.That's to say I have no vision; just listen to customers, and am committed.

2.     Is craigslist non-profit? What is your business philosophy?

No, but we operate much like one, hence the confusion. We believe in people giving each other a break, in a culture of trust, kind of like a flea market.

3.     What kind of feedback do you get from users? What are some of the success stories?

We get suggestions for improvement or sites for other cities, thank you notes and sometimes criticism, which we appreciate, and stuff like:

- people getting married via our site

- people finding their home, job, and furnishings through the site

- finding lost dogs

- getting a kidney donated

4.     How do you manage scams and fraudulent users on CraigsList? This is a big problem at eBay.

Long story, but our flagging mechanisms are the first level of defense, and we have people who report problems to us.  We have no tolerance for scams.

5.     How did you get the capital to handle huge growth, new markets, and hire people? Was it all from cash flow?

All from cash flow.

6.     You started in San Francisco. How many cities do you serve today?

190 cities, 35 countries

7.     What is your relationship with eBay? Have you been tempted to compete and share some of the fame and fortune?

They own a minority share, and help us with fraud prevention. Ebay acquired 25% of the equity in craigslist from a former employee shareholder in August of 2004.

8.     What are the daily stats for craigslist? How many page views, how many new listings, etc. How has it grown over time?

Well over three billion page views per month, about 7.5 million posts per month.

9.     What would you like craigslist to be in five years? Have you fulfilled your mission

More of the same, with enhanced function, better customer service. Not possible to really fulfill our mission, it involves plugging away, forever.

10.  What is your business model going forward? Can you be a “for profit” competitor to eBay and still satisfy your personal philosophy, mission, and goals?

What is a "business model"? I don't think we compete, since we're a community service, and the community helps us maintain our moral compass.

Craig Newmark has resisted the temptations of fame and fortune and stuck to his original plan. He is a humble guy who has accomplished great things. He is somewhat embaraased that he has become so well known, and even insists that craigslist be written in all lower case letters to de-emphasize his name.

I work with entrepreneurs and VCs everyday who strive to build a great product/service, build a great company, and create value for employees and shareholders. Craig has done all of these things, but in a very different way. The craigslist way.