Category: Uncategorized

Reading about the launch of Tello, a software application aimed at the idea of “presence” — in other words, helping people figure out where you are and then helping them reach you with the appropriate phone or other device — reminded me that I wanted to blog about a chat I recently had with one of the co-founders of another “presence” company, Ottawa-based Iotum. I’m planning to write more about the company for globeandmail.com, but here’s a taste.

Howard Thaw, a serial entrepeneur who started the company with former Microsoftie Alec Saunders (one of a small group of CEOs who blog), told me a bit about the company and its solution, which Iotum calls a “relevance engine.” Essentially, it is a kind of personal assistant that learns through heuristics, which Howard knows well from a previous venture, Thunderbyte anti-virus software. In effect, it is designed to learn what phone calls or voice messages or IM pings or VOIP calls to put through to where, based on your past behaviour and a set of rules it develops.

Iotum has just recently come out of “stealth” mode, and has been selected to present at the DEMO conference in February, a fairly exclusive conference run by Chris Shipley and aimed primarily at startups and early-stage venture capital. As Howard described it, the API for the Iotum engine will be open for developers to add functionality, and so that other companies and applications can “plug in” to the software and add features — something Alec says would apply to a product such as Tello. Coincidentally enough (or not), VOIP pioneer Jeff Pulver, who is one of the founders of Tello along with John Sculley of IBM and Apple fame, is on the Iotum board of advisors.

Will such “presence”-oriented apps catch on with a time-pressed and increasingly fragmented consumer? Mike at TechDirt remains skeptical, as do VOIP blogger Tom Keating, Oliver over at MobileCrunch and Stowe Boyd, but Iotum and Tello — and some high-profile finance types, in the latter case — are banking on it.

Update:

Andy Abramson has a nice overview post in which he discuss Tello and Iotum (whom he works for as a communications consultant).

My Canadian blogging colleague Andrew Coyne, whose blog gets about 25,000 pageviews a day or so (according to his sitemeter.com logs), makes a special point of commenting on how all his readers should respect Section 329 of the Canada Elections Act, which prevents any media outlet from reporting the results of polls before all polls are closed. That kind of law isn’t a big deal in a small country, but when there’s a three-and-a-half hour time difference between one side and the other it is a big imposition — not to mention a clear infringement on freedom of speech.

As a law-abiding citizen, Andrew comments in his post that his readers should abide by the law, and that he strongly supports the legislation (this point is repeated several times for emphasis). However, Mr. Coyne also says that he won’t be closing the comments section of his website — and that there is nothing in the legislation that prevents anyone from commenting on a hypothetical election in some non-Canadian country, one that could theoretically be taking place at the same time, with parties that have different names. If readers were to comment in such a hypothetical way, he says, that would seem to be allowed under the law — even if those comments included specifics about polls in this theoretical election.

Will readers take Mr. Coyne up on his challenge? And if they do, will they be creative enough to avoid the scrutiny of Elections Canada? Others have taken on a similar challenge and failed. As technology lawyer Alan Gahtan and my colleague Mark Evans have mentioned, there is always the option of visiting interested foreign outlets. Rob Hyndman also has some thoughts on the topic of the election and the blogosphere.

Update:

It appears that Mr. Coyne has withdrawn from the field of battle without even firing a shot. He has closed his comments until the election is over, on the advice of his legal counsel. Too bad.

It is to laugh. Rick Segal, a Canadian VC who writes a blog called The Post Money Value, has a great — if embarrassing — post about himself, and a text-messaging chat he was having on his BlackBerry with a friend. They were discussing how a good RSS reader would be nice to have on the Berry, and then Maryam said “check out the moon in the east.”

So naturally, Rick went to a Google search window and typed in “moon in the east” and RSS. That’s how you check things out, right? You look them up on Google. But he was confused by what he found. “Okay. I’m dense. Is this in google? For RSS?” he wrote to Maryam, who responded — although I’m sure it’s difficult to type when you’re laughing so hard — “In the sky, you geek. You know, outside? In the real world?”

Kudos to Rick for not only admitting this, but doing so on his blog, in full view of everyone. I haven’t been there, Rick, but I have gotten darn close 🙂

Om Malik has a great Silicon Valley story about how Scott Johnson — ex of Feedster — closed an angel investment for his new company Ookles (top secret) while sitting in Om’s bathroom, as the blogger and his podcast partner Niall Kennedy recorded their latest in the living room.

Later, Om says he met legendary venture capitalist Bill Draper Sr., shared a car with Seth Steinberg of the online messenger service Meebo, and sat in a cafe with Dave Winer, when Kevin Burton of TailRank dropped in. Then Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.com and Scott Beale of Laughingsquid.com showed up, along with venture capitalist Jeff Clavier and Dave Sifry of Technorati.com.

And that’s not even a party like the ones Mike Arrington of TechCrunch.com throws, where 200 invitations fill up in a matter of hours and there’s a room at the back for startups to demo their wares. Om’s just talking about a regular day (okay, maybe not totally regular) in San Francisco tech-land. Yes, it seems that Web 2.0 is one big party.

First of all, I want to make it clear that I’m not linking to Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 again just because he linked to me and mentioned my name right after using the term “great bloggers” — although I can’t deny that I was flattered :-). I think his latest post about new media “gatekeepers” raises some good questions, just as a similar piece by Justin Fox at CNNMoney does. Even though I ranted a bit in a previous post about Scott, I think he is on the right track, and I think it is a debate and a conversation worth having.

The question is, who replaces the newspaper or radio and TV — the old-media gatekeepers? In other words, who do we look to for advice on what is relevant? Scott asks:

Who decides what’s worthy of your attention — a Web 2.0 application, a newspaper columnist, a talk show host, an editorial staff, an influential blogger, a community of thousands, a community of millions?

He also mentions how the A-list of bloggers, such as Dave Winer and Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel, seem to be a little like the Old Media gatekeepers, in that they (with the help of tech.memeorandum.com and other sites) help determine whose voice is heard and whose is not.

On that point, I would have to disagree with Scott yet again. I haven’t been blogging that long, and I haven’t been actively trying to get traffic or links — apart from linking to and commenting on posts that I find interesting — and yet I’ve appeared on tech.memeorandum.com many times. I think the barriers are lower than they might appear to Scott and others, such as Kent Newsome, who has also written about how difficult it is to start a blog and get past the new media gatekeepers.

As for Scott’s question about who decides what is worthy of attention — a Web 2.0 application, a newspaper columnist, a talk show host, an editorial staff, an influential blogger, etc. — I would have to agree with someone who commented on Scott’s post and say simply: Yes. All of the above, and more. As Matt McAlister suggests on his blog, the relevance of the “gatekeeper” role is quickly fading. Aggregator? Yes. Filter? Yes. Gatekeeper? No. I tend to think Stowe Boyd is right — there are a blend of voices filtering and recommending, from individuals to institutions, and even machines.

Update:

For more thoughts from Scott and I, as well as my friend Stuart MacDonald, please see the comments below — and Kent Newsome also has a perspective on the whole thing that’s worth reading.

It’s nice to see a couple of brave voices suggesting that Google, which has climbed by almost 400 per cent since it went public less than 18 months ago, might be a little overvalued — or at least “fully valued,” as analysts like to say when they’re trying to be cautious. Are they right? That remains to be seen. But it’s difficult to feel comfortable with a stock (particularly one with such a short track record) when almost every analyst that covers it has a “buy” or “hold” rating.

Small companies can grow as quickly as Google has and not hit any speed bumps or potholes, but a company that goes almost straight up from a market value of about $22-billion to one of almost $130-billion is doing the equivalent of driving an ocean freighter at the speed of sound. Bumps are inevitable. When analysts are uniformly bullish, many investors take it as a contrary indicator — and they are probably right to do so. Such an atmosphere suggests that whatever weaknesses or risks there might be (and they almost always exist) are being either ignored or glossed over.

Could Google be the Web equivalent of Wal-Mart, which went from being a small, regional retailer to the biggest company on the entire planet? Sure it could. But it’s unlikely to get there in two years when it took Wal-Mart two decades. The Internet is fast, but it’s not quite that fast. And that’s why it might be handy to know about some of the potential speed bumps in advance.

Please read the rest of this column in progress at globeandmail.com

Scott Karp, the managing director of research and strategy for Atlantic Media, seems to have a way of writing things that get under my skin. First he said that bloggers have it all wrong when it comes to the “new” media, and that the vision of people choosing and even helping to create their own media was fatally flawed. At the end of the post, he responded to some of the criticisms from the blogosphere, and then wrote another post that was more conciliatory, discussing the idea that old and new media should work together.

That was fine. And then he wrote another one more recently entitled “Web 2.0 is not Media 2.0,” in which he returns to his previous theme — which is that sites like del.icio.us and newsvine.com and digg.com and so on are not helping anyone except geeks, and that this is all a symptom of the problem he has described before, which is “too much media.” He says Newsvine is way too much work for the average person, and that what consumers want is someone to filter and synthesize for them. Jeremy Wagstaff of the Wall Street Journal says the blogosphere is a bit of an echo chamber.

I’m not saying Scott doesn’t have a point, or that Mitch Shapiro at IPDemocracy doesn’t have a point when he says the tools we use need to evolve. Obviously they do — and they likely will. And yes, people need filters and synthesis. But I’m not sure they need to be led by the hand quite as much as Scott seems to suggest they do. Yes, reading a newspaper is easier than going to digg.com — but not much. You have to buy the paper, for one thing, and then flip through a bunch of crap you have no interest in. How hard is digg? You go to digg.com and click on something. Don’t want to tag? Don’t tag.

Flickr.com, which Scott uses as an example of an easy and successful Web 2.0 app, is just as hard as digg.com, if not harder — if you want to tag, and join groups and so on, which plenty of people clearly do. Anyone who has tried to actually buy or sell something on eBay knows that it’s no picnic — and yet millions of people do that. Readers also show a huge interest in carrying on a conversation, either with each other or with writers, as we’ve found at my newspaper the Globe and Mail, where readers can comment on any story. That is a huge part of the draw.

Yes, people need filters, and they are time-pressed. But they will go where their interest lies, and they don’t need as much hand-holding as I think Scott is suggesting they do.

Rob Hyndman, who has been following the tangled tale of Sarmite Bulte — the parliamentary secretary to the Heritage Minister, who is responsible for copyright laws in Canada, and is even now attending a fundraiser financed by the entertainment industry — notes that musician Steve Page, the singer for the band Barenaked Ladies, has posted a comment on the subject.

Page says that he’s been trying to think of a way of expressing himself on the issue, but that boingboing.net founder (and Canadian) Cory Doctorow said it best in his recent opinion piece in the Toronto Star. Page says:

“we can’t expect to tell our fans “see you in court” and then “see you at Massey Hall next fall” – we have to choose one, and I choose the latter. This current litigious atmosphere is simply a product of the record business trying to prop up a dying, obsolete business model.”

The singer says he is in favour of new copyright legislation, but “not at the expense of the creators,” and that the bill Ms. Bulte supported “did not look forward to the new frontiers, but only helped industry maintain their business model, which is not the responsibility of the Heritage Ministry.” Another artist who has spoken out is Matthew Good (who coincidentally enough helped redesign Rob Hyndman’s new website), whose post on the topic gets props from Page as well.

Meanwhile, Bulte told the Globe and Mail’s Roma Luciw that she is considering a defamation lawsuit against Michael Geist after the election is over. This story just keeps getting weirder.

Mike Davidson, the CEO of Newsvine — a kind of news aggregator/blog hub — has a nice post up on his site reacting to some of the recent commentary about Gather.com, to which Newsvine has been compared by many (including me in this post) . Rather than take any delight in a competitor getting weak early reviews — for the record, I think it still has potential — Mike makes a few good points in his post, entitled “The Proof Is In The People.”

Among other things, he says that being a media darling isn’t necessarily an indicator of future success, and that many great things were originally greeted with skepticism. Mike also points out that “an entrepreneur who always thinks along the lines of everyone else will produce a product or service just like everyone else’s. That’s usually a bad thing.” And he is right. He also says that the Newsvine team is going to keep their heads down and “keep learning from our users and admitting we only know half of what we think we know. The moment you think you understand everything about the market you’re entering is the moment you exit it.”

Words of wisdom, Mike. And for what it’s worth, I like the service a lot (I’m beta testing). I haven’t been seeding as much as I probably should be, but I do like it — particularly the commenting. Not sure about the live chatting, but time will tell.

If Berkman Center director John Palfrey wanted a debate on RSS and the future of Web-based media, which he hinted at almost two years ago, he has certainly gotten his wish. The debate over what his website, Top Ten Sources, is doing with RSS feeds continues — and while the debate has evolved somewhat, as Adam Green describes at Darwinianweb, there are still some strong feelings on either side.

Shelley over at Burningbird, for example, has a post about what Top Ten Sources is doing, and she is a lot less wishy-washy about it than Om Malik is. She says it is wrong, plain and simple — and her position isn’t tempered at all by the fact that John Palfrey runs Harvard’s Berkman Center on Internet and Society. She accuses him of trying to “wave the Web 2.0 wand” and change copyright law.

There is some interesting discussion in the comments about what is implied when you “publish” your blog through RSS, and whether Top 10 using it is just like Bloglines or anyone else. Dave Winer (who is a fellow at the Berkman Center) has a post in which he argues that Top Ten Sources is a good thing, but as lawyer Denise Howell of Bag & Baggage points out, the law is far from clear.

For what it’s worth, I think if you publish an RSS feed, then someone like Top Ten Sources should be free to run it on their site, provided they source it properly, link to it and don’t sell ads (which they don’t). I think it would be better if they didn’t do full feeds, but that’s debatable. I think Shelley’s position is overly harsh. Like coldcoffee says, if you don’t want people to run your stuff, then don’t publish a feed — let your friends come to the site, or subscribe via email.

John Palfrey has a post in which he seems open to continuing the discussion (as he should be), and he points to Susan Mernit’s post as making a valuable point — which is that bloggers might be a lot more open to such aggregation if they saw some benefit coming back to them. Lots of food for thought.