Praxis

Fools Gold? Commercial Real Estate Mashups Get Their Own Conference...

...and friends of Mashery get a discount (see the end of the post, below)!

I recently heard about a real estate conference in San Francisco next week called Connect, being produced by Inman. The conference has been around for awhile, but what is new and interesting this year is the "ConnectTECH" program that is built around geo-services, map mashups, video, blogging and other real estate-based online services. Given the substantial attendance at the recent Where 2.0 event, this looks like it will be a similarly significant event, so I contacted Inman to learn more.

Inman has managed to attract an excellent slate of speakers, including Craig Newmark from craigslist, Paul Rademacher of HousingMaps.com fame who's now with Google, CmdrTaco himself (Rob Malda), Mike Arrington, Dany Levy from Daily Candy, and loads of people from Trulia, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, etc. Not to mention a bunch of Real Estate types.

Which is what makes the conference so interesting. Coming out of Mashup Camp, where everyone was talking about the when and how of commercial mashups, we have one vertical (and its version of the "mainstream media") going full speed ahead.

According to Mindy Hull, Inman's VP Marketing, the whole point of the conference is to bring real estate professionals together with technology/API providers and the developers who can build the applications the real estate market needs.

This is an interesting data point to come on the heels of Phil Wainewright's thought-provoking article called Google Maps, the fool's gold of mashups in which he points out that Programmable Web lists 815 mashups, of which 513 are in the mapping realm. The reason for this, he argues, is that address or lat/long information is easily defined and communicated in a way that is not yet possible for the vast majority of other types of data. He goes on to say that "If Web 2.0 really is a gold rush, this will be the first in history when the people pushing the maps are the ones who've had their fingers burned. Mapping mashups are the fool's gold of Web 2.0 not merely because they produce no revenue, but far more crucially because they add no new semantic value to the integrations they perform."

I'll address the data issues in a subsequent post - I don't disagree with Wainewright on that point, but I am more optimistic than he appears to be that the issue will be solved.

But given the huge interest in this space on the part of the real estate vertical, and the amounts companies like Google, Yahoo! and AOL are paying to attend and sponsor this event, I'd say that the people making the maps are not having their fingers burned, and that revenue from map mashups is not far off. And in the meantime, of course, the real estate folks are gaining indirect revenue - more deals, new clients, etc. - from innovative usage of these mashups.

If you want to check it out for yourself, Inman has offered a "friends of Mashery" discount to the ConnectTech event on 7/26 ($199, reduced from $299; click here) or to the full conference from 7/26 to 7/28 ($399, reduced from $1048; click here).

(Disclosure - Inman has invited me to attend the event as their guest, though I had originally planned to register as a paid attendee for the ConnectTech sessions on 7/26)

Movin' on up

Congratulations to a good friend and talented colleague, Rob Hayes, on the announcement that he's joining Josh, Chris and Howard as a partner at First Round Capital. Rob played a key role in building Omidyar Network's for-profit investment program, and led a number of their successful deals. And, of course, congratulations to Josh & company for convincing him to join!

Mashery has a "Notable" VC...

It's hard to put a finger on Wikipedia's notion of "notability". After watching Fred's discussion of  his  deletion from wikipedia due to non-notability, I noticed over the weekend that our own lead investor and board chairman, Josh Kopelman, has managed to survive being nominated for deletion under the same standard. Congratulations, Josh!

HotCaptcha Wins the Mashery Prize

I just presented professional masher-upper Jeff Marshall a new black MacBook, sponsored by Mashery, for his second-place finish in the Mashup Camp best mashup contest.

Actually, he tied for first, and in a nail-biting tie breaker WeatherBonk ended up with the grand prize. But we loved Jeff's completely politically incorrect innovation in the Captcha business - HotCaptcha - and evidently a lot of other people did too.

So enjoy the new laptop, Jeff - can't wait to see what you build with it next!

Things are Looking Up at Feedster

As many of you know, I left Feedster at the end of April to start Mashery. I really enjoyed my time at Feedster - there was so much going on in the wind tunnel world of RSS, content syndication, and search. I have a great deal of respect and affection for the company, its investors (several of whom are now Mashery's investors), its partners, and the colleagues I worked with. So I was pleased to hear about some recent progress being made there.

I heard recently that Tyler Goldman will be joining Feedster'as president, replacing Chris Redlitz, who has left the company. I don't know Tyler personally, but based on what I've heard about his background, it appears that board chairman and Selby Ventures partner Marco DeMiroz has managed to attract a top-tier talent to provide the leadership Feedster needs.

On the funding front, Feedster did bring in an additional round of financing led by existing investors, but with a few new names I don't remember participating before. One in particular stood out to me - former Google executive Aydin Senkut. Aydin was a big part of Google's Asia-Pacific strategy, and I've maintained for some time that Feedster's biggest opportunity lies in Asia. Feedster was designed from day one to handle double byte content, so deploying in Japan and China required straightforward changes to the UI, allowing the company to attract strong partners in both countries.

I have also heard about some behind-the-scenes progress being made on Feedster's technology by Brent Whitney's engineering team. Co-founder and search genius François Schiettecatte is still actively involved, and Brent's been building a solid development team in Australia that has added some important capabilities to the San Francisco based team. The company has progressed well beyond basic blog search and content syndication, and is taking an incredibly sophisticated approach to crawling and indexing RSS from around the world, making that content useful and valuable, and purging Feedster of spam.

So good luck to Tyler and the team - seems like things are heading in the right direction.

160,000 developers!

In yesterday's Mashup University presentation, the representative from Amazon Web Services talked about the S3 service and other Amazon Web Services.  One of the stats he shared was that over 160,000 people have registered with Amazon as developers. Now, not all of those are active, or are using S3, but still, it's an astonishing number this early in the web services game.

This shows how quickly a developer program can scale if it's well run, has an active community, and offers APIs people want. With 160,000 people interested, even if only a fraction of them are active, there are a lot of great, creative ideas coming soon.

Mashery Presents at Mashup University

Clay and I made Mashery's first public presentation today, in a session at Mashup University, the pre-un-conference being held in connection with Mashup Camp.

Mashery's goal is to help web service providers build effective and profitable developer programs around their APIs. When we launch, we'll offer a unified set of hosted services that vendors can use to build, promote and support their developer programs. In our Mashup University session today and in conversations I had with attendees afterwards, it was clear that a robust developer community is a key catalyst for an API program to achieve the vendor's desired results, whether they are feature growth, user acquisition, market growth into new verticals, or direct profits from the API itself.

We're confident that Mashery can build a better, more feature-rich and more economical developer infrastructure than most providers can individually. Like any other outsourced service, Mashery will allow vendors to concentrate on what they're best at - innovating, providing great web services, and growing their businesses. They won't need to spend time and efforts deploying, integrating and managing community tools or sophisticated API control systems.

Initially, we'll provide a set of components to build an API documentation and support site. These will include blog, forum, and wikis, all configurable and manageable by the API vendor and accessible by any developers...and all free. Is this rocket science? Of course not. But having a unified system with common login, fully brandable and skinnable by the API provider, is more than a convenience for the vendor. Several developers mentioned that they would be more likely to develop using APIs that had consistent documentation and an active, participatory community than those that lacked such features.

Over the next several months, we'll be launching additional tools and services that offer vendors a complete turnkey developer program. We'll have more information to share on that soon. Meanwhile, if you're coming to Mashup Camp, by all means say hi. The whole Mashery team will be around for most of camp. And to all the developers attending - good luck on the Best Mashup Contest! We're one of the sponsors, and I have a beautiful new Black MacBook to give to someone who builds something intensely cool!

Feedburner and Typepad Weirdness

Yesterday I turned on Typepad's automagic Feedburner integration, and awoke today to find two of each post in my feedreader, all marked as unread. Sorry for the confusion - if this problem continues, I'll have to figure out how to fix it, or I'll just undo the Feedburner integration. Sorry for the confusion (to the extent anyone else experienced it).

UPDATE: Thanks for those who commented or emailed me, and special thanks to Joe Kottke from Feedburner, who jumped right in (gee, I wonder which of the blog search engine/subscription services he uses that got him updated so quickly...), explained what was happening, and (correctly) predicted that the problem would work itself out. Much appreciated...now, back to our regular programming...

VC Cliché of the Week - The Other Side of the Story

Fred had one of his best Cliché of the Week posts a couple weeks ago, in which he discussed what happens when an investor says of his portfolio company that "that vacation didn't match the brochure."

You go for something; a hire, a partnership, or a new investment, based on a certain set of facts and promises. And then it doesn't work out. You feel like you were sold a bill of goods. But when the vacation doesn't match the brochure, you only have yourself to blame. It means you didn't do your homework.

...

The same approach has to be used if you are in business. If you are a VC, you don't need to read the business plan (the brochure) cover to cover, but you do need to do your diligence. If you an entrepreneur making a key hire, you don't need to spend a ton of time on the resume and prepared references. Even the interviews will only tell you so much. You need to pick up the phone and talk to people who've worked with and for the person in question to truly get a feel for them.

The bottom line is you can't rely on the brochure in whatever form it may take. Because if you do, the vacation will surely not live up to it.

This is an outstanding point, and one that VCs, managers and prospective employees themselves should not lose sight of. But there is another side to the story.

I've frequently seen people - investors, entrepreneurs, and team members - have a particular target in mind (employee, investment, etc) and buy into a deal convinced that they have found what they are looking for, even when all the indications pointed to the contrary.  Some examples I've seen (or lived)- 

Company A needs a strong engineering manager, but insteady they hire a solid geek whose resume lacks any solid management experience.

Employee B joins a startup in the midst of a major system conversion, taking a sysadmin job with a description that talks about maintaining servers and clearly reads "24 hour pager availability required" and quits a couple months later because he thought he was taking a coding job. 

Investor C is looking for an investment with a particular business model, and invests in a company with a completely different plan. The investor's desired business model is never mentioned in the company's powerpoint, and the projections show no revenue or investment which would suggest any interest in that path at all. But the Investor convinces himself that, to paraphrase Fred, the brochure he read describes the vacation he's hoping to take.

In that latter case, I used a different metaphor to explain to a friend what happened:

"Jack (not the investor's real name) walked into the pet store looking to buy a cat. He saw a bunch of cats, but was drawn to this very cute dog, so much so that the line between dog and cat began to blur, and he saw the dog as a cat-like pet - 4 legs, tail, fur.

Jack took the dog home, and began to play with it, and had fun. But then the dog peed on the rug. Jack was patient, and once again showed the dog to the nice litter box he had bought. But the dog peed on the carpet again, and again, and Jack quickly got disillusioned with what he still saw as the new cat he had bought.

Jack tried everything he could think of (non-metaphorical things, like bringing in consultants and changing the team) in hopes of getting the dog to pee in the litter box, but it never happened, and eventually he had no choice but to listen to all the people who were telling him "it's a dog, not a cat, silly."

I was reminded of this story up at Gnomedex, when a friend working on his own new startup asked me for one piece of advice when dealing with outside investors. He seemed to be expecting some negotiating advice, or some particularly onerous clause in the term sheet to watch out for. There are lots of things to know, and many things I've learned after raising money a few times, but ultimately if you are not in sync with your investors about what the business model is when you are first funded, it's unlikely you ever will be.

If your investor can listen to your pitch and paraphrase it back to you in a way that sounds familiar and demonstrates a common vision, then you can intelligently debate strategy and tactics, and do so from the same perspective. If she can't, you're both in for a crappy vacation.

Why I Read Both Blogs and Mainstream Media

So today we learn that Intel Capital is investing a whopping $600 Million in Clearwire, a startup allegedly deploying WiMax technology far and wide.

A Google News search will turn up a number of MSM articles like this one from Reuters (I don't know how long the link will last, but there are many more like it) that essentially regurgitate the press release.

TechDirt, in one headline, sums up the story behind the story of what may be Intel Capital's biggest bet to date:

Intel Gives Clearwire $600 Million To Avoid Making WiMax Look Bad

And provides a concise, to-the-point paragraph of analysis that explains just what is going on.  Bravo, TechDirt.