• Posts

    Why I Won’t Touch LBS with a Ten Foot Pole

    December 14, 2009 / 8 Comments

    Pitch any VC and you’ll find certain markets, uses cases, and other oddities that have left a bad taste in their month.  No matter how interesting your product, or how much traction you have, they’re just not going to go there.  This can be frustrating and make you feel like they are being ignorant or bull headed.  I even though so, until I recently realized that I get annoyed by every single location based services idea I hear – mostly as a result of having worked on Whrrl.  People will tell me “the opportunity is huge” and all I can do is smile slightly, thinking that I know better but there is a no way they will understand, when I ask, “Really, why?”

    And why is the location based services opportunity huge, exactly?  Is it really an untapped need people have to get information about the world around them on the go.  While this might seem cool to a very small niche of geeks, is this anywhere near making it to the mainstream world?  I used to think so, and to believe that it was simple a problem people didn’t realize they had.  At a time, it was my job to evangelize a product that would help people to capture their experiences and share their location with friend.  Fundamentally, doing this is all about collecting “footstreaming” data on the company’s end so that they can slice and dice users in a different way, and sell advertisers on segments like “visits urban bar 2+ nights per week” or “goes to McDonald’s more than 3 times per month”, etc… you get the idea.

    People Will Balk When Location Data is Used for Advertisements

    Right now people are having fun using location data to share their location with friends on Foursquare, but the minute I begin to receive advertisements on Foursquare (or Twitter/Facebook where I am publishing my location) I am going to feel like my privacy has been invaded, and I am going to stop sharing.  Nevermind that the information is already public and that I’m already explicitly putting it out there for the world to read – right now only humans are answering back (if at all).  Getting advertisements related to my checkins would be the equivalent of interaction with bot Twitter users – lame!

    Possible Location Based Network of Choice: Facebook

    As I wrote in early November, Facebook seems like the best option for a successful location based network because it already has the critical mass of friends who I actually know and trust in real life AND the granular privacy settings that LBS users on every product have been clamoring for from day one.  A few weeks after my post, Jason Kincaid echoed my sentiment in his post “Watch Out Foursquare, Facebook is Poised to Dominate Geo”.

    Facebook Privacy Management Isn’t Great

    I have to wonder if anyone even remembers the debacle with Beacon?  It seems to me they’ve been aware of and actively working on LBS capabilities for the social network, along with advertising, for some time now and have probably been waiting for that mess to blow over (P.S. Looks like Facebook settled the Beacon thing for a cool $9.5 Million dollars).  To read more on this visit: http://www.beaconclasssettlement.com/

    What About Whrrl, Loopt, Brightkite and the Rest?

    MG Siegler, who has been covering LBS for a long time and even wrote about the launch of the Whrrl iPhone app (thanks MG!), posted “Location’s Social Paradox” today on TechCrunch, and opened with the statement:

    “There’s an absolute eruption of activity around location-based services right now.”

    It’s funny, it seems like each year is going to finally be the reckoning for social uses of devices with GPS. With each year comes a new crop of products, applications, companies, and avid users looking to take their products mainstream.  Last year it was Brightkite, a year before that you might saw it was Loopt or Whrrl.  Before that we had Dodgeball, Jaiku, and a slew of others.

    For various reasons, these products have had less penetration into the early adopter market than Foursquare.  Of course, there is a bit of an echo chamber when it comes to faddish apps in the Bay Area – but if crossing the chasm is the name of the game for LBS then making a fad and turning it into a trend might just be what Foursquare can accomplish that the others have not.

    So, Why Not Touch LBS?

    Other than crappy past experience, I’m just not sure the market is as big as I originally believed it was.  I think sharing location is useful with a very small number of people who actually care about where I am, and even then it might be more efficient for me to ask for or tell them location explicitly on a case-by-case basis (over chat, IM, phone, etc.) than to passively send the information out to followers on a network. And that’s just an issue of finding a use case for sharing location. Monetizing it as a business is an entirely different issue, because while I might share my location with friends as a feature of a product I am loathe to consider sharing it with a company looking to leverage my information for advertising dollars.

    This begs a deeper question, which is ‘what is the future of advertising’?  At one time, contextual information such as location was considered useful for providing more deeply relevant ads, but is this still realistic or meaningful today.  While a curiousity, it is still to be seen if these more timely and location-relevant ads would actually create more *action* against offers, like visiting a restaurant or cashing in on a special (coupon).  For now, I think this remains a feature – not a product, and it is why Facebook is still best positioned to experiment.  Maybe they will acquire a product with a network and significant traction (such as Foursquare) to nudge things along.

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  • The Future

    The Real Future of Sex – Humans not Robots

    December 10, 2009 / 0 Comments

    About a month ago at an the NWEN event, I pitched a product idea for an adult content site offering a platform and community for mature streaming video content called StreamHer.com. It was partly just for the shock value of being a woman pitching a porn site, but it was easy to find developers interested in working on the project for fun (including my wonderful husband).

    The idea isn’t unique at all, it is an execution play and since I’m busily and happily working on another startup, it is really just a hobby of mine for the time being. I can’t say I mind the market research. What is interesting to me is learning what people want out of porn, and how this is different between women and men. Hopefully through understanding this, I can create a content site and content delivery platform that will cater to the growing market.

    Violet Blues Speaks at LeWeb on Future of Sex

    I think it is was interesting to hear Violet Blue speak today, and even more fascinating to watch the audience reactions than the talk itself as well as the tweets flying by. I say interesting and not enjoyable because the presentation lacked any emotion (it was read off the page basically) or apparent passion for the topic (not that she doesn’t have it, but I couldn’t see evidence of it). Sex is an incredibly important topic in human life, and something virtually every single person in the room cares about on some level.

    While is is a curiosity to see all the technology available to serve any multitude of sexual needs, I’ve always thought that the future of sex – just like the future of the internet – would be more about people and less about gadgets. Just like in social media, the technology is just a tool, it is still the connection with other human beings that is the most important thing. To steal Chris Pirillo’s quote from yesterday’s talk here at LeWeb, “focusing on the tools makes you a tool”. I think the same can be said for sex.

    Ra Ra Women, Really?

    Last time I checked, sexual exploration was something for all genders. Yes, women are definitely playing catch up historically as we are now equally free to explore fetishes, fantasies and non-tradition ways of having sex. Freedom from religion and tradition is a huge part of this, and something that is still pretty unique to the Wester world. And, as Violet Blue points out, Oprah did quote the stat which I’ve been talking about quite a bit as we develop the concept for StreamHer.com, that 1 in 3 commercial porn consumers online is a woman now. But is this truly disruptive?

    Humans, Not Machines

    Violet closed her presentation with the statement:

    “The future of sex isn’t written yet, but humans want to be the ones to write it”

    Based on how things are going, it looks like we will.  I mean, who else will?  Personally, I’m interested in this history – it’s going to impact me in my lifetime, as well as my children (if I ever have any).

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  • Startups

    Handicapping LeWeb Startup Competition: First Impressions

    December 7, 2009 / 7 Comments

    I just did the 5 minute “it’s okay to be an asshole” pass over these companies as I prep for LeWeb and get my blog coverage prepared, and here are my thoughts.  Keep in mind that 5 minutes times 16 companies not chump change, and I’m sure I’ll be diving deeper once I meet with the teams later this week.

    Here’s the grading scale

    F: does not work

    C: feature (needs to be integrated into something larger to achieve distribution and be worth paying for)

    B: product (serves a function, but doesn’t have a clear point of monetization and return to investors)

    A: company (a product comprised of features serves customers and returns revenues, there is a clear business model if revenues aren’t yet coming in)

    1. CloudSplit

    Track how much you’re spending on cloud computing with CloudSplit, and receive suggestions on how to reduce cost.  This seems like an interesting tool, but I have to believe that the more important thing to measure is how much you are SAVING after switching to cloud computing over your previous solution.  The person who would actually look at this tool on a daily basis is probably a systems administrator of a small/medium business who is trying to convince management to head into the cloud.  He’s going find that reliability, scalability, and cost savings from the original system are the most pressing concerns.  With so few enterprises in the cloud at this point, optimization seems far off.

    First impression: feature

    2. FitnessKeeper, Inc.

    Looks like the iPhone app is already launched, cool, I’ll check it out.  Polished website, I’m guessing these guys aren’t quite as early stage as some of the others.

    First impression: not sure, need to see if app is paid
    3. FriendBinder

    Seems very similar to FriendFeed.  Tried to use Facebook Connect feature, but it appears to be broken.  I was able to add Twitter and YouTube but all I see in the stream are my own updates- where are my friends?

    The site looks somewhat amateur in design, along the lines of a Startup Weekend projects, and their last Twitter update is 11/23 so I wonder if this is actually anyone’s full time dedicated company or just a side project that managed to make it in.

    First impression: product

    4. Kukunu
    This name is already a problem, I typed it in a KunuKunu a few times.  Ah, another travel planning site… can this really be anything unique from the other hundred thousand (at least) services in this space?  Interesting they have an orange favicon in the browser bar and no orange on their site, is this a rebrand of a more mature product?

    Looks like social travel planning, guides etc.  This product will be a total community play and I imagine money will have to come from advertising and lead generation.  Done right there is still a lot of money in that since travel is a big ticket item, I requested and invite into the private beta so we’ll see what happens.  Follow them on Twitter too @kukunu

    5. Mendeley
    Mendeley helps faciliate the organization, sharing, and discovery of research papers.  Cool – this actually falls in the category of “I don’t know another company innovating in this space” and I imagine with the .gov movement towards more open data this fits well, if I wanted to research something like… global warming.

    Oh crap, it’s desktop software.  Do not want!

    Okay, this still looks pretty cool but I need to do a review of it when I have time… 5 minutes won’t cover a desktop app.

    6. Shutl

    Cute branding (and on their Twitter page too) and of course I love isite that count their launch date down to the second.

    But waht does it do? If I wan’t writing a review there’s no way I’d provide my contact info, but I just did so hopefully that means I will learn more soon.  Oh!  Their Twitter profile actually gives me more info than the website:

    “Shopping online will never be the same… All Shutl’s announcements will be made here first. Watch this space!”

    My guess: social shopping

    7. Siteheart Inc.

    This redirected to Liqpay and I don’t see any ign of Siteheart Inc… so hopefully I’m on the right website.  Well this is cool, payments via phone – definitely something interesting and a reason to chat with them about Twilio too.  We’ll wait and see if this is the right website

    8. Sokoz

    The site is in French, but never fear – Google translator is here!  A side note, it might not be a good thing that I can’t figure out what it does based on the images without the translation.  The read button that says “Acheter” (or “buy”) is a hint, but only because I know that word.

    Okay cool, the translation is in – this is a service for ecommerce sites to help them sell things?  I will just talk to them in person… too tired, 5 minutes is up

    9. Sports Predictions

    Redirects to GetInLive.com, so I hope I am on the right website.  This website design is so fresh, and I don’t usually like dark backgrounds… very striking look.  The problem is, now that I’m on the site I don’t know what it is I am supposed to actually DO.  There isn’t a clear goal for the user, and I’m left wondering what I’m even looking at.  Everton vs. Tottenham are 2-2, is that soccer (football) or something else?  It also says “calculating 4,972,973” data points and it looks like it should be ticking over with new data points… what could those possibly be?

    10. Storific

    This is another in private beta, but their messaging should give you some hints.  This is absolutely a product designed to service business for some kind of in-store experience, their idea of being “Storified”.  I wish I had a retail outfit I could legitimately sign up for their alpha.
    I’m pretty interested in theis space, it is pretty bleeding edge and reminds me of the “Future of Retails” meetups I brought together at the Red Mango at Pacific Place back when I will still working on Whrrl.  Curious.

    11. Stribe

    Now here is something I need, a product that can instantly create a social network on any website.  I like that my first thought was “like Ning… well, not really” because Ning is a seperate walled garden from the other walled garden that is my website.  I just signed up for an account on behalf of Twilio, I would love to give this a test drive.  Cool name too, I am surprised it wasn’t taken.  Looks like this is a widget, not clear if it is a full product offering to solve a business problem or just help solve it… and how to make money?  We will find out.

    First impression: Feature
    12. Superfeedr

    Saw these guys around, at PariSoma in San rancisco and also at the ReadWriteWeb Realtime Summit that was held about a month ago in Silicon Valley.  They are parsing feeds from the realtime web and making them useful for developers.  I’m still trying to figure out how to partner with these guys on a contest for Twilio, what they are doing is cool and I think people will eventually demand this data enough — but is the demand for it there now.

    And how repeatable is this?  It seems like this might be an execution play, and there is also TweetHooks out there.  Is this a standalone product, or does it need to be part of some overarching service?  Looks like they are already charge, so good on them for that.

    First impression: product

    13. task.ly

    Managing to-do lists more efficiently, a big bold statement on there about the vision the Google Wave creators had as compared to the task.ly vision.  I love their design, and hope the product will be as simple as it seems to be from their branding/marketing copy (clearly what they are going for).  This is a crowded space, but productivity tools are fun and monetizable.

    First impression: Product

    14. Tigerlily

    Ah a product for marketers, I want to try this one out – it is for making better use of Facebook as a marketing tool through Facebook pages.  Reminds me a bit of Involver.  Very explicit about Facebook fans on these pages being leads, which is sending me the right signals that these guys see it as a business and not just a “make prettier Facebook pages” play.

    Ooh they appear to have contest and quiz management, that is smart!  So I tried to set up the free version but something is not working here, Facebook doesn’t seem to want to make selecting Tiegerlily an option… oh well, I’m zonked, I’ll try again tomorrow.
    15. The Hyperwords Company

    Firefox add on, gotta restart to run it… the basic idea is that it provides resources (dictionary, wikipedia, etc.) for words on your website.  We’ll see… I’m not sure what I think, but there are some glowing quotes on here.

    Sounds like the uses go way beyond the dictionary, to include translations, converting metric to standard, etc.  Can’t wait to find out how they want to make money.

    First impression: feature
    16. Wordy

    Pay as you go copy editing! The video on the front page looks slick, but it was having a difficult time buffering.  This is a clever idea, let’s get a quick quote on this blog post so far.  Just a little copy paste here…

    Whoa 46.29 Euros and 92 minutes (or ~0.50 Euros per minute)… yikes, that is a bit pricey for me – I don’t even get paid to blog!  This is cool how do I become a copy editor?  How do I make money as a copy editor?  Do they use Amazon Mechanical Turk?  That would be clever.  I’m not sure who is going to pay for this, but I’d love to speak with them… the quote I got was so far from the 0.03 Euros advertised on the front page.  Let’s see what the quote is for “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” That is 0.27 Euros, and will take 1 minute to turn around.

    Well it is 3am, time to hit the sheets for a nap and then we’re off to the airport.  Can’t wait to meet all the startups in Paris, and find out if some of my guesses and criticisms were correctly placed.  Au revoir!

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  • Posts,  Reading List

    5 Books for the Flight to LeWeb

    December 6, 2009 / 0 Comments

    Tomorrow I’m head to Paris on a very last minute trip with Kevin that combines business and pleasure, which for those of you who know me means it is 100% fun.  I had requested a press pass from LeWeb back in October in hopes that I’d be able to cover the event for Seattle 2.0.  When I didn’t get one, I shrugged it off – but then last week on a whim I searched for LeWeb and an email popped up in my spam inbox with my press pass!  I’m so fortunate to have my wonderful team at Twilio, who gave me the okay to go and represent our company as well as Seattle 2.0

    Kevin’s plane ticket was paid for with Amex points I had been stockpiling for just such an occaison, and we’re staying with a friend who Kevin worked at on the Sharepoint team who just moved back to Paris today (can you say serendipity?!) and we will be staying with him at his parent’s house – which is near the center of the city.  Altogether I can’t believe how easily it worked out, and I’m even more excited about  this trip than I was for Beijing!  I’ve never been to Europe, and neither has Kevin.

    What I’ll Be Reading on the Flight

    We’ve got a two leg trip, because I hate direct flights longer than 8 hours.  First leg is Seattle to Toronto, then Toronto to Charles De Gaulle airport.  We leave Monday at 8am PST and arrive on Tuesday at 9:40 am local time (12:40am in Seattle).  I’ll be working hard for inbox zero and some serious email processing, but I’ve also got a handful of books I’ve read but have been meaning to revisit.

    Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

    Highly relevant to what I’m doing day-to-day, building a branding using social technologies.  I’m looking forward to reading the examples most of all, and I’m sure this will get new ideas churning with a second read through.

    Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agrreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury

    Super useful book for business, and also for life.  This one is more for my personal development of rhetoric, defending philosophical and political ideas, etc. but I am sure it will have applications to all parts of my life.

    Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy Kawasaki

    I’ve never read his through, only skimmed because it is Kevin’s.  Anything that says “Capitalist Manifestor” gets my attention, I like to think Guy Kawasaki and I have something in common: we’re both mercenaries.  And “Create Like a God, Command Like a King, Work Like a Slave” – yeah, that appeals to me, too.  I’m doing the 3rd thing at least, need to work on the other two.

    Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore

    The classic book on bringing a disruptive product to market through the niche beachhead strategy.   Fun to read as we broaden the marketing efforts around Twilio to reach out to more developers in 2010.

    The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking by Barbara Minto

    My previous boss implored me to read this book in order to improve my communication skills, and that is definitely an area of expertise that I want to keep very sharp.  Minto focuses on the order in which we present concepts and build upon ideas to ultimately communicate complex ideas.  There are a lot of exercises in this book that I can do while on the plane.

    Honorable Mentions – Didn’t Make the Suitcase This Trip

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  • Posts

    Test Post from New Blog Home

    December 6, 2009 / 0 Comments

    Moved to a new server, testing 1, 2, 3…

    Phew well it looks like that worked. As you may have noticed, DanielleMorrill.com has been down A LOT lately so I’ve moved it over to a new server and cleaned some things up in my WordPress install. Hope you like the updated navigation and layout – more coming soon!

    Update: Crap, okay something is broken here and I need to figure out what. It looks like you can view my posts from the index of my site, but the individual post URLs are broken. Working on it now.

    Update 2: All fixed, thanks everyone for your help and suggestions things are working again

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  • Posts

    Building the Trick-or-Treat Hotline with Twilio

    October 31, 2009 / 0 Comments

    We’ve got a contest going over at Twilio for the best Halloween inspired app, so I thought it would be fun to build my own (although I’m not eligible to win the contest – darn it!)

    If you call (206) 701-6291 you’ll be connected to my Halloween hotline, which is a very simple Twilio app I built using PHP in about 20 minutes while hanging out with my family leading up to Hallow’s Eve.

    In all, the app is probably about 100 lines of code divided across several files – you can read all about it and get the sample code to build your own hotline here.

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  • Posts

    OMFG a Blog Post from Danielle!

    August 27, 2009 / 1 Comment

    I have been working a ton and loving it, Kevin is now here and we had our 2 year wedding anniversary yesterday.  It was very low key because i had meeting until 8pm but we did walk a couple blocks to Chez Papa and when you have a good and reasonably priced French restaurant in the neighborhood it is perfect.

    When I say Kevin is here, I mean that he is in San Francisco WITH ME and we are sleeping in the same bed every night indefinitely… his Mom is out of the hospital (for the moment) and we’re trying to have a normal life based out of our little room in our little corner of Potrero Hill.  I’m writing this and thinking of all the people who are reading it and thinking “what – you say you’re so busy wbut how do you have time to write a blog post?”  Let me tell you, these posts these days are a one take deal (with the exception of correcting spelling errors) so I’ve got a ton of drafts on topics that need more thought before they can be posted.

    Tonight, though, was exciting because Kevin and I demo’d TOGETHER TweetToCall.com to the Twitter Developers Meetup Group down at Google in Mountain View.  I’ve never been a presenter before and I guess in a way this little product is a startup of its own, although it took us a total of 80 hours combined to build it over the course of the last week.  I managed to say “fuck” in the presentation which was live streaming on Ustream (yay!) and just so you know the context for that was that the use case for Tweettocall is that situation where you have all these direct messages going back and forth with someone on Twitter, and eventually you think “ah! just fucking call me!” because 140 characters aren’t enough.

    It was fun.  Also ran into Jason Preston, a familiar face from Seattle who is one of the organizers for the upcoming Twitter conference 140TC in Los Angeles, CA and I’m thinking we might launch TweetToCall officially at that event.

    I’ll be in Los Angeles most of next week for Internet Telephony Expo and I’d love to catch up with friends and connections who are in that area, it has been about 4 months since I’ve been in Southern Cal so it will be nice to catch up although I’m sure I won’t be able to pack everything into the 72 hours I’m there.  If you have any desire to connect definitely let me know.  Okay, I am literally falling asleep typing but Dad I know you read this I love you and I love all the people who I know I am neglecting for the sake of my singular passion for making cool stuff that people want to pay for.  I’ll see you all soon!

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