Month: November 2006

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

Given the kind of publicity that Bram Cohen and BitTorrent have recently gotten by announcing deals with Warner Brothers and other movie studios and content owners, it’s worth noting that a Toronto-based company got there long before BitTorrent — at least in terms of the technology, if not the public awareness.

OpenCola was a technology startup with a peer-to-peer (P2P) application of the same name that was similar to Kazaa and Limewire, but years before either of those would become household names. On Thursday, the successor to OpenCola announced a $5-million financing deal with two Japanese venture-capital funds.

In the late 1990s, a young programmer named Justin Chapweske had developed a technology he called Swarmcast that was designed for sending large files over the Internet. It did this by chopping each file up into tiny bits, distributing those bits to many different hosts, and then allowing users to download those bits from any location — at which point the software would reassemble them into the original file. In other words, exactly the same process used by BitTorrent, except that Swarmcast was developed in 1999 and BitTorrent didn’t appear until 2002.

Justin wound up joining Toronto-based OpenCola — whose founders included Cory Doctorow, one of the editors behind BoingBoing. Unfortunately, that coincided with a downturn in technology markets, and OpenCola did not survive. The technology was sold to Waterloo, Ont.-based Open Text Corp. Justin Chapweske later started another company called Onion Networks and eventually reacquired the rights to the Swarmcast technology.

So why is BitTorrent a relatively well-known name and Swarmcast is not? Because the two took different approaches to commercializing their software. Bram Cohen chose the “open source” route and released the code for his software so that anyone could use or distribute it (so long as they didn’t charge money for it or claim it as their own). It quickly became the technology of choice for downloading everything from cracked software and illegally copied movies to pornography, although it was also used for distributing large files such as the various flavours of the Linux operating system. And that in turn got the attention of content owners.

Swarmcast, meanwhile, decided to focus on working behind the scenes with companies that would have an interest in distributing large amounts of content over the Internet — including distributing digital films to movie theatres. The company also helps power MLB.com, the major-league baseball service, which distributes huge quantities of video and audio to baseball fans. Not as sexy as doing deals with Hollywood movie studios, but not bad either.

Is Arianna going to huff and puff and blow the traditional media down? According to the New York Times (reg. required), the Huffington Post blog network is getting into the journalism business in a big way. The site only started 18 months ago but has become a serious online player, with 2.3 million unique visitors a month — more than some mainstream newspaper websites.

Huffington says it has hired Melinda Henneberger, a former New York Times reporter and Newsweek staffer, as its political editor, and plans to hire “a number” of other journalists to help it produce online journalism “with attitude.” The Post is already doing something along those lines with its Eat The Press feature, whose editor Rachel Sklar is a Canadian transplant.

This is obviously what Huffington has planned for the $5-million in financing the site got from Softbank Capital earlier this year (it also has funding from Greycroft Partners, backers of Rafat Ali’s online media shop, PaidContent). Arianna said she will be hiring investigative journalists and reporters with video expertise. They will travel, have deadlines and (gasp!) get paid, just like “real” journalists.

Coincidentally, there’s been a lot of talk over the past few days about Kevin Maney’s recent piece for USA Today about what to do with newspapers — which my friend and former journalist Mark Evans discusses here. In my view, newspapers had better get their running shoes on, because online media like Huffington Post and PaidContent are already halfway down the track.

Update:

As Jeff Jarvis notes, this announcement comes just over a week after two senior journalists left the Washington Post to join an online media startup that plans to focus on multi-platform political reporting.

My friend Rob sent me a link to a recent blog post by Web designer Andy Rutledge because (I suspect) he knew that it would drive me up a wall, and he was right. It’s entitled “Anti-Social Media,” and it is a treatise on why social media is bad, why Web 2.0 is bad and why elitism is good — and, in fact, more than just good. Necessary. In this, Andy (whether he knows it or not) is channeling fellow elitists Nick “The Prophet of Doom” Carr and Andrew “Web 2.0 is Socialism 2.0” Keen.

The argument is relatively simple, although Andy decides for some reason to stretch it out over thousands of words, highlighted in a yellow-on-black colour scheme that is quite ugly. Luckily, Andy doesn’t care what I think of his design, because I’m just a yob who doesn’t know anything — just like you, and most of your friends. And Andy doesn’t care what I think of his ideas either, or he would have comments on his blog. But then, any idiot would be able to take issue with his views, and that just wouldn’t do.

Here are some selected quotes:

The wisdom of crowds and the related ideals cited above are largely about championing and cultivating two things: mediocrity and decadence.

Mediocrity is the only possible result of a wide sampling of opinion or input. The only idea that can survive such a mechanism is one consistent with the lowest common denominator. The mob works to ensure that all other results are weeded out.

One of the grave flaws of the growing social media and its foundational ideals is that it facilitates irresponsibility and it fuels and rewards our basest motivations.

So, in a nutshell, Andy believes that crowds are grunting masses of baboons, and that anything that surveys a group of people will inevitably result in mediocrity. The great are pulled down amongst the rabble. Pretty depressing, right? At one point, Andy says that “Western culture is on the downhill slope and gathering speed toward the brick wall at the bottom.” It made me want to crawl into bed with a copy of Wuthering Heights and a nice bottle of Dom Perignon and wait for the mob with pitchforks to attack my castle.

Andy also says: “Think about great ideas. Not good ideas or decent ideas, but great ideas. Where do they come from? Do they come from the masses? Do they come from consensus? No, they come from individuals.”

Andy doesn’t tell us where we are to find those individuals, however. I’m assuming he would probably give the usual answer — Harvard, Yale, Cambridge. Maybe even MIT or the Sorbonne in a pinch. But isn’t social media of all kinds a way of finding those voices that might have great ideas, or be excellent in some way? Apparently not. Social media is all about cheapness and irresponsibility, and that’s what always wins, Andy says. What a depressing view of humanity.

What do you think? I think Andy needs to get out a little more and quit using Digg.com or Fark.com as the benchmark for all of social media.

Like most press releases, the one about the deal between the Hollywood movie studios and BitTorrent is full of bombast and hype about this historic arrangement and how it will stop piracy, etc. etc. Hosannas and high-fives all round. Like the earlier announcement about BitTorrent’s deal with Warner Brothers, however, there is a lot left unsaid in the release, since to say it would remove a lot of the thunder.

The press release goes into lots of detail about how BitTorrent, which started up in 2001, has become “the most efficient means of distributing large, high-quality files on the Internet” and “accounts for as much as 40 percent of all worldwide Internet traffic.” Then it says that BitTorrent “continues to work with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to remove copyright infringing content.”

In the New York Times story, it says that “BitTorrent’s partners will upload authorized versions of their TV shows and films onto the network.” Sounds great, doesn’t it? Except for the fact that there is no BitTorrent “network.” The agreement to remove copyright-infringing content from search results applied only to bittorrent.com, which no one who uses BitTorrent ever goes to. It has nothing to do with all the other BitTorrent sites and “networks” out there that account for all that traffic.

The confusion is between the company — which autistic programmer Bram Cohen founded, although Om reports that he is to be replaced as part of a rumoured financing deal — and the BitTorrent protocol, which is the technology. The technology Bram developed is open source, which is why there are dozens of BitTorrent download programs available, with more appearing every day.

Functionally speaking, there is no BitTorrent “network” — it is a fully distributed peer-to-peer system in which “trackers” broadcast the details about a file, and “seeders” distribute pieces of it. Bram Cohen can’t do anything about any of those files, even if he wanted to. The movie studios can use it to distribute their films, which will undoubtedly be all clogged up with DRM, but if they want to compete with piracy it’s going to take a bit more than a press release. Tony Hung over at Deep Jive Interests says the news could actually be good for pirates.

I know that Forrest Gump said “Stupid is as stupid does,” but there’s really no other word for what Verizon is doing with its much-heralded launch of YouTube video on cellphones. I mean, really. How much stupider could this get? The answer, to paraphrase Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap, is none — none stupider. Fred Wilson sums it up in a single word: Lame. In fact, this deal is right off the lame-o-meter. How do I lame-ify thee? Let me count the ways.

Watching video clips on your cellphone would be great, right? Except that Verizon will only let you watch them if you subscribe to a monthly service called VCast. And YouTube is great because of all the cool videos on there, right? Except that Verizon will select some for you to watch, rather than letting you do the selecting. As Rob Pegoraro notes in the Washington Post, this is just reproducing the broken cable model on a cellphone.

Howard Lindzon says that Verizon’s new slogan should be “We uncool your brand,” which is both hilarious and right on the money. If this is a sign of the kind of crap Google is going to do now that it owns YouTube, then that $1.6-billion in stock is going to get obliterated pretty quickly. Michael Parekh says that “incumbent businesses keep adopting the same myopic, warped business strategies that failed the last time around,” and my friend Mark Evans has some thoughts as well.

Update:

On a somewhat related note, I came across a post from David Cohen of Colorado Startups (hat tip to Leigh Himel of Oponia) about a failed startup he was involved in called iContact, which tried to create a social-networking platform for mobile phones. Here’s what he had to say in part:

The mobile industry is full of pitfalls. If you don’t have connections to cellular operators, you’ll literally need to buy them just to get a shot. It’s an old boys club and the whole industry is just trying to keep control of the closed system they’ve put together.

Open APIs are really only open to partners, revenue shares feel like hostage situations, and network aware or location based applications sit in queues waiting for “approval” which is a euphemism for “hell to freeze over.”

Yup. Sounds about right.

There are a few different threads weaving through the blogosphere related to the evolution of media — not just TV but all different kinds of content. One thread is the Bear Stearns report by Spencer Wang, in which he looks at how the TV content business is changing, and the rise of “user-generated content.” You can tune into a conference call, or scroll through a PDF version of his presentation on what Om Malik calls the “fat belly” of the Long Tail.

One of the interesting points to me was that 75 per cent of the top 20 videos on YouTube on one particular day were “user-generated content” of some kind, which goes against the standard argument from people like Mark Cuban and Nick Carr that the majority of popular videos on YouTube and other sites are copyright violations. As Rafat Ali at PaidContent succinctly puts it, the point of the presentation is that “aggregation and context” are the key.

That leads to another thread, which came up while reading Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion, where he pointed to a new Christmas gadget-shopping hub put together by Federated Media and Best Buy. The site has gadget reviews written by bloggers for half a dozen different websites, including Uncrate, Oh Gizmo, Gadgetopia and PVR Blog. It’s not clear whether the reviews were written specifically for the site, or are taken from the participating blogs, but it’s a pretty smart idea.

Then there’s the New York Times story about Philips sponsoring the entire newscast of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Obviously that isn’t new media, but it’s an interesting move by Philips to cut through the clutter of TV advertising, as Techdirt notes — just as Best Buy is trying to cut through the clutter of Web advertising. In other words, aggregation and context.

So the Second Life avatar known as Anshe Chung — whose real-world equivalent is known as Ailin Graef — has issued a press release saying she has become the virtual world’s first millionaire, after accumulating property and other assets (custom avatar design, etc.) that are allegedly worth a million dollars, if they were converted from Linden dollars into real U.S. money. Valleywag is skeptical, to say the least.

As Valleywag editor Nick Denton put it in an earlier skeptical post, “Let’s be generous, and assume that the net worth estimate isn’t an outright lie; nevertheless, if Chung’s owner ever decided to liquidate those assets, their speculative value would evaporate. They have as much value as a large holding in a mafia-pumped penny stock.” He then goes on to criticize the gullible media for believing such tales.

Of course, Nick — a former journalist with the Financial Times — must be aware that such credulity is hardly confined to reporting about virtual worlds. As more than one person has noted, reporting about rich celebrities such as Donald Trump is equally filled with hot air and credulous reporting, even from usually reliable sources such as Forbes magazine. All kinds of vague numbers are floated around about Trump’s net worth, which is almost certainly orders of magnitude smaller than he says it is.

The fact that liquidating all those assets in Second Life would demolish their alleged value is no less true when it comes to the net worth of Larry Page or Sergey Brin, for that matter. They couldn’t sell more than a fraction of the stock that makes up their net worth without cratering the share price. Of course, they can borrow against those holdings — something that, for now at least, Ms. Chung (or Graef) cannot do. More articles about her virtual empire here, and here.

In what amounts to a “dog bites man” sort of story, the BBC is reporting that online video is eating into TV watching, according to a recent survey. Gee, ya think? For every sign that building relationships with viewers online increases their loyalty to a particular show — which CBS said recently appears to be the case with some of the shows that it has released into the wild on the Internet — there are signs that overall TV viewership levels continue to decline.

What’s also happening, of course, is that any TV watching that is going on is happening very differently. I don’t know how many conversations I’ve had over the last little while with people who not only don’t watch as much TV as they used to, but watch it primarily with the use of a PVR, whenever they want to, and without commercials. All of this requires that TV networks and advertisers think about what they are doing in different ways, as Mike Urlocker points out on his blog.

TV still exists, obviously, and many people continue to like sitting around in groups watching “appointment television” shows like Survivor or Gilmore Girls or whatever (for me it’s Heroes). But it is also increasingly being sliced and diced and served up in a myriad of ways online, through YouTube and Revver and through the websites of the networks. More and more people are watching bits and pieces of shows instead of the whole thing. And as David Brazeal notes, quality doesn’t matter as much as we might like to think it does.

In other words, TV isn’t dying but evolving. What is it evolving into? Who knows. But the TV and the Internet are effectively becoming one thing, just as the Internet and the telephone are becoming one thing, and just as the Internet and the computer are increasingly becoming one thing. George Nimeh has some worthwhile thoughts on the subject too, and my friend Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0 wonders whether all this evolution is really just the video content business eating itself alive. Ian Delaney at TwoPointOuch has also written about it.

Looks like the American Marketing Association has its eye on social networks like MySpace as the shopping malls of the Web era. The AMA came out with a survey on Friday that said 47 per cent of people would go to such sites to research Christmas gifts — and better still, 29 per cent said they would buy things there if they could. You could almost hear the “cha-ching” while reading the story.

This idea has been commented on already by (among others) Muhammad Saleem at The Mu Life and Pete Cashmore at Mashable. As Froosh points out at HipMojo, News Corp. has been looking for ways to “monetize” MySpace ever since they paid more than half a billion dollars for it. But how best to do it? Not everyone is crazy about the idea of Wendy’s and Burger King setting up profiles for their advertising characters, and it’s hard to blame them.

So how to integrate selling things with something like MySpace — or even just regular blogs, for that matter. As Pete has mentioned, there are plenty of companies trying to solve that problem, including MyPickList.com or “social shopping” sites like Crowdstorm, Wists, ThisNext and others. But the one I think has the most potential, although it doesn’t get written about a lot, is Goodstorm and its “MeCommerce” service, which is still in early beta.

In effect, it’s a sidebar shopping widget that allows blog readers to click and buy things without ever leaving the sidebar. It needs some work, but it’s an appealing idea — click to select a book or T-shirt or DVD, then click and enter your details, then click to buy it. And 50 per cent of the revenue goes to the site that hosts the widget. Goodstorm recently launched an API developers’ contest to see what kinds of widgets people could come up with.

My friend and fellow mesh organizer Rob Hyndman told me recently about a great project that recently got under way in Toronto — courtesy of Mark Dowds and the team at Creation Step (who helped us out with the first mesh conference), along with some other like-minded individuals in the Toronto tech sphere, such as noted troublemaker and DemoCamp organizer David Crow.

The project is called Indoor Playground and it involves turning the 5th floor of an old brick loft building in downtown Toronto (Richmond and Peter) into a kind of work and meeting place for startups, people with ideas, people from out of town and so on, with some individual work areas and a couple of large common rooms and social spaces. Mark’s blog post introducing the project is here.

There’s a community forum set up at Ning, where people can sign up to contribute ideas and follow the development of the site, which is still being renovated (there’s a photo gallery at the forum page). Mark says he wants to officially launch the Indoor Playground in January. I think it’s a great idea.

Update:

David mentions another co-working venture that’s starting up in Toronto in February, called The Commons Cafe.

Michael Geist, one of Canada’s leading commentators when it comes to intellectual property and the Internet, opened up a bit of a hornet’s nest with his recent post supporting the decision by major ISP’s to back the cybertip blacklist on child exploitation and pornography. Project Cleanfeed Canada is based on a similar initiative in the UK that was led by British Telecom, and is expected to be rolled out over the next few months.

Michael said that the project was likely to “generate several responses, notably concerns about censorship and fears that this could extend to other forms of content,” but said that in his opinion “while some skepticism is understandable… cybertip.ca will implement an appeal process for content providers who believe that their content is wrongly blocked.” In the end, he said, “the arrival of Project Cleanfeed in Canada looks like a good news story that merits close monitoring.”

Several critics immediately took issue with Michael’s support, however, including Engtech — who said that “the idea of having a national blacklist sends shivers down my spine. I would always prefer that illegal websites be shutdown rather than putting into power national filters that have the potential to be abused. I’m a pessimist, I believe that any form of censorship will eventually be abused despite its good intentions.” Engtech points to a good overview of the issues here.

Michael also got a long critical comment on his post from Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing, who until recently worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Michael, I think that you’re being entirely too sanguine about a secret blacklist of content. Having had my own material censored by such blacklists at the national and local level, I’m a lot less trusting of these systems. The idea is fundamentally broken.

First of all, it seems to me that keeping a secret list of “evil” content is inherently subject to abuse. This is certainly something we’ve seen in every single other instance of secret blacklisting.

Cory and other critics say their concerns are that a) those who search out child porn would not be deterred by the blacklist, b) that many legitimate sites might be inadvertently caught in such a net, and c) that keeping the entire process secret is offensive and prone to abuse. Michael’s response (and I’m paraphrasing here) is that while some people might be able to get around the blacklist, preventing access to child porn is important enough that the effort is still worth it.

I have to admit that, despite being the father of three daughters and as concerned as anyone about access to child porn, like Engtech and Cory I see the weaknesses of the cybertip project — including the secrecy and the potential for abuse — as outweighing the potential benefits of preventing inadvertent exposure to questionable websites. In that sense, it seems to be (as one commenter put it) “like using ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) to kill a fly.”

For my “Ingram 2.0” column last week, I wrote about a Toronto-based social-networking startup called PikSpot that is designed to help create communities of interest, and has launched with two groups based on Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo’s UndoTV and Don Tapscott’s book Wikinomics. I thought I would reproduce the piece here for those who might have missed it.

When it comes to Web-related ventures, Scott Waddell is not your typical twenty-something, working on a MySpace clone while doing his undergrad degree — in fact, he’s pretty close to being a veteran. He was involved in several early Internet companies in the mid- and late-1990s, including iRover, a content-management system for Internet service providers. He also helped pioneer the use of streaming video for sites like Accuweather and MSN, long before YouTube came along.

Mr. Waddell’s latest venture, with partner Geoff Norton, is called PikSpot.com, a social-networking hub that can be used by groups, companies or individuals as the engine behind their community. While “Web 2.0” sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and so on tend to be focused on the type of content that users are sharing — Flickr for photos, YouTube for video, MySpace for blogs, etc. — PikSpot is designed to handle all of those, but is more focused on helping to create communities, regardless of what kinds of content are involved.

“PikSpot is all about collecting, organizing and promoting user-generated content,” Mr. Waddell said. “It’s designed to create niche communities based around shared interests — whether that’s funny videos or knitting or cars — and letting people publish and share their content with others in an organized kind of way.”

Kim Robinson, an investor who is also chairman of PikSpot’s parent company Wired Kingdom, says the site helps turn the “Wild West of the Web into a more organized set of collaborative communities,” one that even companies wouldn’t hesitate to use for internal communication and teamwork.

Continue reading “PikSpot wants to help tame the Wild West”

My friend and fellow mesh organizer — and all-around smart guy — Stuart MacDonald has a great blog post up today on the end of Web 2.0. But don’t get depressed, all you fans of blogs and podcasts and wikis and social media. All Stuart means is that Web 2.0 as a hot new concept (albeit one that tends to be poorly defined) is over, and what we’re seeing is the start of Web 2.0 as something that can really mean something to the general populace.

In other words, instead of just being something cool that goes “ping,” all the things that we associate with Web 2.0 are becoming part of how people use the Web, whether they realize it or not. People are reading and commenting on blogs and using social media and those kinds of tools without knowing that they are doing something Web 2.0 — and that’s a good thing. That’s why mesh is called Canada’s Web conference, and not Canada’s Web 2.0 conference (no, it’s not because O’Reilly sent us a C&D letter).

Remember when every company sent out press releases to say that they had a website? Those days are gone (thankfully), and now the Internet is something millions of people use without ever really thinking about it. And it’s no wonder that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the guy we have to thank for the Web, got a little testy in an interview awhile back when asked about Web 2.0. There is no Web 2.0, he said — there’s just the evolution of the Web. All that interactivity (and more) is something he envisioned in the first place. It’s just taken us awhile to get there.

Anyone who attended the ridiculously successful mesh meetup on November 15th (blog post is here) at the Irish Embassy in Toronto may have seen a woman with a small microphone interviewing various luminaries and other assorted folk. As some of you may know by now, that was podcaster extraordinaire Leesa Barnes, and the fruits of her labours are now available for all to enjoy.

That includes interviews with Dr. Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests, blogger Juan Gonzalez of global-culture.org, Norman Young of The Talking Company (which is in stealth mode), new blogger Rob Schaumer and Bernie Aho of Conceptshare.com — and those are just the beginning. There are more to come. Thanks again to Leesa for all her hard work, and also for the compliments she bestowed on all of us in a recent post she wrote about mesh.

Podcasts were produced by Leesa’s company Caprica Interactive Marketing, with music from the Podsafe Music Network by Uncle Seth.

Here are the podcasts:

1. Juan Gonzalez

Juan talks to Leesa about:

• Ways in which your online conversations can help you meet people in different countries
• Why Juan left Mexico to settle in Canada (and it wasn’t because of money)
• How to talk with your hands using your blog

2. Norman Young of The Talking Company

Norman talks to Leesa about:

• An idea Norman has for Mesh ’07
• How to handle the misconceptions that mainstream audiences have over the word podcast (or should it be netcast?)
• Why the interactive space will never take the place of the physical space (the Mesh meetup is a perfect example)

3. new blogger Rob Schaumer

Rob talks to Leesa about:

• His big challenge is and whether or not he can do it
• What he hopes to learn when he attends Mesh ’07
• His 3 tips for staying young
• Advice on what to do if you’re interviewing someone really boring

4. Dr. Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests

Tony talks to Leesa about:

• Whether Mathew Ingram looks better in person than he does online
• What Web 2.0 means
• Why he is excited about Mesh ’07

5. Bernie Aho of Conceptshare

Bernie talks to Leesa about:

• Why ConceptShare.com decided not to set up shop in Silicon Valley and chose Toronto instead
• How ConceptShare.com is building buzz without spending enormous sums on advertising
• How their biggest frustration sharing visual concepts over email turned into a business idea
• Web 2.0? It’s now time for Web 3.0
• Why Bernie would be part of the Mesh organizing team
• Which is colder – Sudbury or Toronto? Bernie settles the debate once and for all

On the so-called Lenox Globe, one of the oldest known maps from the 15th century, there was a Latin inscription on one unexplored region that said “Here Be Dragons.” Maybe the CBC should have inscribed that over the stage door leading to their venture capital reality show The Dragons’ Den. A Toronto startup called JobLoft certainly got chewed up during the filming of the show — although there is some debate about who did the chewing, and whether they deserved it or not.

As Rick Spence outlines on his blog, the JobLoft guys got a $200,000 cheque from the four venture capital “dragons” — and a commitment that they would get lots of great advice and assistance — in return for 50 per cent of their company. On the final episode of the show last night, however, the company’s advisor (a professor from Ryerson) criticized the dragons and their offer, and the dragons tore up the cheque. Ryan Coleman of Clay Tablet has a video clip and some thoughts about the show.

A couple of things strike me about this situation. The first is that while all this makes for great TV, I’m not sure it’s a great way to raise money. In other words, it’s a sideshow. Just as going on Who Wants to Date a Millionaire isn’t a great way to find true love, Dragons’ Den probably isn’t a great way to find a good VC match. The JobLoft guys say on their blog that they’re glad of the experience and that it got them publicity, but in the long run I’m not sure that it was worth it.

A lot of people in the comments at JobLoft’s blog take them to task for blowing the deal, and argue that their advisor was wrong to confront the dragons, etc. Waiting until the last minute to raise concerns is certainly not a great approach — and I would agree with Kempton that the insults that their teacher lobbed at the dragons were also totally offside in my opinion — but at the same time the JobLoft guys note that they got very little face-time or input from the dragons, contrary to what was promised.

In the end, it’s also worth noting that $200,000 for half of your company seems to me like selling yourself pretty short (as Toronto entrepreneur Austin Hill noted in this excellent post on the show). Maybe it’s just as well they got out of it. Ben Yoskovitz has some thoughts too.