Category: Uncategorized

Paul Tyma, a senior engineer at Google, has written a two-part series of articles (here's part 1, here's part 2) with points to help you evaluate your startup ideas. Tyma advises that these ideas are for the canonical one- or two-person startup; as he says, “if you have 8 million in VC, there's a lot of other magic you can do.”

• If there's no business model, it's just a hobby. “There's nothing wrong with hobbies, as long as you know what they are.”
• The best ideas make your customers money. “If your idea can say 'If a customer uses our product, they will make X% more money' (where X is a positive number, even if quite small) – you have won the game.” Note that he said make money, not save money.
• B2B2C is the best place to be. “That is, you want to be a business that serves businesses that serve consumers.” Another reason to be happy that I'm one of the most visible guys at Tucows.
• If you're going B2C, look for revenue models that don't come right from the consumer. “If you can get the eyeballs, you can sell them. Just try to do that instead of charging them directly. They'll be ornery about it and demand support.”
• Revisit every bad idea every once in a while. Sometimes ideas are bad because of current technological limitations or circumstance. Consider Ajax, which has been possible since 1997, but at the time was limited to IE (which still had serious comptetition in Netscape), a lack of broadband adoption and even a lack of internet adoption. Keep checking on those bad ideas every now and again; their time might be now.
• Do your best to create a system of recurring revenue. That's what Microsoft is doing when they change Word's formats, what HP is doing with printers and ink and what “software as a service” is all about.
• Let ideas gestate. Mull over an idea for 3 days first, and see if it's still good. “Ideas always look better the fresher they are. You're looking for ones that look good even when not fresh.”
• Consider the size of your market. You'd better have a big market, because you're going to be able to get only a sliver of it.
• “Building a business around a new developer tool” is wrong on so many levels. Developers love to build developer tools, so many think that they can build a business around one they've built. The problem is that sp many developer tools are gratis — think Eclipse and Rails. You may have an option if the tools you're developing are for an ecosystem where there's a you-must-pay culture, such as Microsoft development.
• Ideas really aren't worth all you think they are. As Grandpa Simpson said, “The fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached.” Very few ideas are truly novel; they often arise as technologies converge. Execution is more important.
• Competition is good. “If you don't have competition, you don't have an idea. Competition tells you and investors that your idea isn't wacky.”

Link to part one | Link to part two

Seems improbable but it appears to be true: Microsoft's Zune software doesn't work with Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system:

[O]n November 14, Microsoft rolled out the Zune player, which doesn't work with Vista. And so far, the Softies haven't provided any public info (that I've heard/seen) about when the company will introduce a patch or update enabling the Zune to work with Vista.

Yeah, I know. Vista's beta, and I'm sure this incompatibility was mentione somewhere in the documentation, but come on! How hard would it have been to foresee someone trying to install Zune software on their beta copy of Vista? Would some public information about an upgrade plan have killed Microsoft?

Incidentally, has anyone tried installing an iTunes on Vista and syncing an iPod (I'm looking at you, Joey)?

Link

Tags: Microsoft, Zune, Vista

A few more Zune links to end your day (or to begin your day after—I'm not picky).

• Reuters: What's on Ballmer's Zune? In Uncle Fester's world, Microsoft's Zune has "first mover advantage."
• Betweek the Lines: The grinches that stole Zune's Christmas David Berlind takes a look at some Zune reviews, Microsoft's insane "points" system for buying music and sees trouble ahead for Redmond's iPod killer
• Computerworld: Zune's fascinating potential It has to hurt when even the enterprise nerd Bible says Zune's "most visible feature falls flat"
• Michael Gartenberg: Zune Hands-On—It's a Really Good Music Player It's not all bad news for Microsoft, as this JupiterResearch [hey, shouldn't there be a space in that name?] analyst said Zune was "head and shoulders" above the rest of the non-iPod competition
• Michael Gartenberg: Un-Selling Zune and Pitching iPod on CNN What Gartenberg giveth, however, Soledad O'Brien can take away, as she touts her new iPod shuffle while a CNN correspondent does his Zune story

Tags: Zune, Soledad O'Brien, Apple, iPod, Steve Ballmer

I'd really hate to be a Zune marketer this
week.

In addition to having to deal with reviews of
Microsoft's MP3 player that run the gamut from bad to ho-hum, there's
now the news that Air
France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM and United are going to offer
“seamless integration” between passengers' iPods and their in-flight
entertainment systems beginning in mid-2007.
By “integration”, they mean that passenger seats
will have iPod-compatible connections that will charge their iPods and
allow those with video iPods to watch their iPod videos on their
seat-back entertainment systems.

Now if only the airlines could get provide more power sockets and WiFi at reasonable rates…

Link

At ISPCON Fall 2006, the ISP/hosting/VOIP conference where I led a discussion panel on Web 2.0 last week, the tables tables in the dining area each had a sign with a different topic on it, such as “marketing”, “VOIP”, “wireless”, “Web 2.0” and so on. The idea was that you anyone who wanted to talk with people about a specific topic would sit at the table with a sign for that topic.

I got into a conversation with a couple of people at the buffet and in continuing the conversation, ended up at the “finance” table, a topic clearly outside my area of expertise. However, I did end up enjoying chatting with some very interesting guys, a number of whom sported a fine Southern drawl and provided access in rural areas.

“I work outside the footprints of the dinosaurs,” said one of them. “The Verizons, the Comcasts, the what-have-yous, they got your urban areas locked up tighter'n' Fort Knox, an' they ignore the small-town folk, who are still surfin' at 56K and watchin' TV with their rabbit ears. They want the same access you get in the big cities, and I could argue that they might need broadband even more than big city people do.”

He's probably right. After all, living in cities like New York and Toronto like George and I do, we're both a few blocks away from places where we can walk to and pick up some books, a new suit and some khakis, a wide-screen TV, renew our drivers' licenses and engage in hundreds of distractions of the sort that big cities offer. In rural areas where the distance to your neighbor's doorstep could be measured in miles, broadband makes big-city amenities a little more reachable, whether they're vendors, customers, supplies or distractions.

My lunch buddy was in the business of providing access by attaching receivers to customers' external TV antennas; he even talked about getting a better “cherry picker” van for the job. He then pointed to a guy in a cowboy hat, the only such person at the conference. I'd seen him earlier and for some reason had mentally given him the codename “Walker, Telco Ranger”. It turns out I wasn't too far off: he was also in the business of providing rural connectivity and claimed to be laying five miles of fiber every day.

These guys are onto something that the “dinosaurs” have missed. At the Spring ISPCON in Baltimore, someone mentioned that 40% of U.S. ISP customers are still getting online via dial-up; most of these are rural customers in underserved areas. As long as the dinosaurs remain uninterested in their markets — and it seems that it's going to be that way — these guys are going to do quite well for themselves.

So it's with interest that I read this article in the New York Times: 
With a Dish, Broadband Goes Rural, which looks at how some rural customers are getting broadband with the help of satellite access providers.

(A little disclosure: one of the companies mentioned in the article in Hughes Network Systems, who are customers of the company for whom I work, Tucows.)

Link

Just a quick couple of updates to yesterday's post on Java being released under the GPL.

First, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz blogged about the news, and used his bloggy pulpit to add another twist to the story:

And in closing, I want to put one nagging item to rest.

By admitting that one of the strongest motivations to select the GPL was the announcement made last week by Novell and Microsoft, suggesting that free and open source software wasn't safe unless a royalty was being paid. As an executive from one of those companies said, "free has to have a price."

That's nonsense.

Free software can be free of royalties, and free of impediments to broadscale, global adoption and deployment. Witness what we've done with Solaris, and now, what we've done with Java. Developers are free to pick up the code, and create derivatives. Without royalty or obligation.

Schwartz is striking directly at the heart of the SCO-y overtones of the Novell/Microsoft announcement. The implication of that deal being that Novell's SUSE customers, unpaid programmers, or SUSE contributors, are somehow safer than Red Hat's customers and developers (to pick a distro at random) because Novell was paying royalties to Redmond.

While we're on Microsoft's dog in this OpenJDK fight, David "Between the Lines" Berlind raises this interesting .NET angle to the freeing of Java:

Where might the impact on .Net be felt first? Well, there are millions of developers out there all working with different languages most of which are not compatible with either Java or .Net. That's right. Compared to the number of languages that work with one or the other, there are many more that do not. Now that Java is being open sourced, the way has been paved for developers who want to connect their favorite language to the Java Virtual Machine to actually scratch that itch. In other words, in the past, it may have taken an act of Sun in order to get dynamic language support for some languages the way it has for Ruby. And, if there's one thing that can really put an open ecosystem on turbo-chargers, it's dynamic language support. Microsoft's .Net, by the way, offered dynamic language support long before Java did. But now, it will be far easier for the Java community to marshall the resources of the open developer community to cultivate a wider range of dynamic language support.

You can, of course, see this as a defensive move for Sun, which hasn't seen a lot of Java at the heart of Web 2.0. Gaining some traction for their platform entails broader language and framework support, and that's what OpenJDK can help them accomplish, without massive investment on Sun's part. So the debate is no longer: .NET supports multiple languages, but only runs on Windows (hence Mono) vs Java runs on multiple OSes, but only supports one langauge.

Watching these implications unfold is fascinating. I guess the bottom line is that Java really is free in the sense of freedom: the freedom to expand the platform into places Sun alone couldn't have taken it. With that kind of freedom to move, who knows what the future holds.

Link

Tags: Java, GPL, OpenJDK, Microsoft, Novell, .NET, SUSE, Red Hat

(Sorry, I couldn't find any cities in Afghanistan that both get mention in the news and start with the letter “D”.)

The Scotsman has one of those interesting stories about what happens when you drop technology on a country that would be called “stone age” if it weren't for the Kalishnikovs: Afghans' Growing Appetite for Porn.

Here's the bit from the article that made me chuckle:

At least one satellite operator offers foreign channels such as
eurotictv, allsex, 247Sex and transex, along with the God Channel and
the Church, Miracle and Hope channels. In a country where converting to
Christianity from Islam carries the death penalty, the Christian
channels are just as offensive to some as the pornography, although not
as popular.

Link