Free Association

TWIT conflict of interest on AOL/Goodmail

Funny conflict of interest discussion (unintentionally) on the March 6th podcast. Host Leo Laporte discussed his support for the AOL/Goodmail issue. The conversation then turned to the high cost of bandwidth for producers of popular podcasts - like TWIT and Diggnation (Kevin Rose, co-host of Diggnation was on the show too). Leo then thanked AOL for paying for his bandwidth - an estimated cost of $10,000/month. Hmmm, wonder why Leo is ok with the preposterous AOL/Goodmail "solution" for spam. For a good discussion on this topic, go here.

SlingPlayer Mobile Beta

I love my Slingbox. At first it was neat, but not really...well...gadget love. The thing that tipped me over was the SlingPlayer Mobile release. Great article in the Washington Post today on the release. Congrats to Blake and team on getting this out in Q1 just like they announced back at CES.

I was lucky enough to get to beta test the Mobile Player for the past month, and I'm addicted. I had an hour train ride from Newark Airport to Princeton this week and I watched Howie Mandel's Deal or No Deal the entire ride on my Treo 700W. Fantastic.

I like the picture quality and size of my laptop version of the SlingPlayer, but I much more often have my EVDO-powered Treo 700 with me than have my laptop and a broadband connection. When I get bored, watching my own TiVo on my Treo - via my Slingbox - is much better than reading an old Time magazine or just staring at the wall. In this circumstance, the small picture and sometimes sketchy EVDO coverage is easier to endure.

By the way, if you get and register a Slingbox by April 26 - the mobile player is free. Nice.

Sling on!

iTunes is the eBay of Podcasting

A friend pointed out an article in our local Boulder newspaper today about a local Podcasting business called ClickCaster. I don't know any more specifics about this company than what is in this article, but from my read I'd say  ClickCaster will have a hard time making much of a business with their current model. I pursued an idea in the Podcast space several months ago - and after pushing and pulling on it every way I could (and getting some very good advice from my VC friends) I abandoned the business. I thought I'd share my analysis of why, in my opinion, Podcasting is not ripe ground for a start-up.

First, I think all these podcast searching/enabling business models are flawed in similar ways (this is the point that my VC friends impressed on me). Perhaps these businesses can create a nice little niche business, but the real bucks are going to go elsewhere.

For instance, Apple has a new, relatively inexpensive software called Garage Band where the Mac controls all the sound mixing etc. With a single click you can upload your recording (podcast, or even song, anything audio) to your .Mac account - a service owned by Apple - and presumably to iTunes. Garage Band and the rest of the iLife software does many things that ClickCaster claims to do. I don't think Apple is going to be less dominant, as he states; rather I think they will become even more dominant in the Podcasting space. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that Apple will get challengers on the iTunes side, but they own podcasting and desktop software seems better positioned to take this market, rather than service-based businesses.

Second, assuming that there is a niche for service-based business models in the podcasting space, ClickCaster has to deal with Odeo and many other competitors. Odeo is a venture-backed company, and is listed in the Boulder Daily Camera article as one of his competitors in this space. There are - by my rough count - eight VC-backed Podcast companies very similar to ClickCaster. These companies have raised 10's of millions of dollars. You don't want to be caught competing against that with shallow pockets.

Next, iTunes has a terrific podcast network, where you can subscribe and automatically load your iPod with Podcasts. It gets deeper every day, and it's tightly integrated with iPods.

Finally, service businesses on the web tend to be "winner takes all" businesses. Just look at eBay - nobody ever uses Yahoo Auctions, because eBay has all the users. If you have the users, you take the whole thing. iTunes has all the users (+90% I think was the number published last month), and a Band or Commentator wanting to use Podcasting to get their message out is going to go where the users are - and that ain't ClickCaster network, or even Odeo for that matter - it's iTunes.

Podcasting is fun, empowering, and really could take off, but I don't suspect that podcast enabling service-based companies are going to be very successful.

Where in the US...

I did better in my travel coverage of the US.

create your own visited states map

Where in the world...

Simple, but interesting app that allows you to show where you've been in the world. I feel like I've traveled extensively, but as you can see I have been many fewer places than not. Time to travel.

create your own visited countries map or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Web Map Screw-ups

I'm headed to Aspen to meet some friends for skiing today, and I pulled up Mapquest and Google Maps to find out how long the drive is. I know it's about 4 hours, but I wanted to check. It turns out that both Mapquest and Google Maps want me to go through Leadville, Colorado and over Independence Pass. Problem: Independence Pass is closed all winter - too much snow. If I trusted these maps, and didn't know better, I would waste at least 2 hours going this way, only to find the road closed a mere 10 miles from Aspen. I'd have to turn around and drive another 2 hours (at least) to go over to Glenwood Springs and down - which is the only route that works. Amazing that maps make this error - and even more amazing that the software gives me no levers to pull to make the directions go a different way. I can "use highways" or "avoid highways" in Mapquest, but that produces the same route. Annoying, and shows we still have a way to go with really useful maps. Not to mention the annoying written directions that tell you to merge onto the same highway 6 times as it changes names slightly. Also a dumb software move. I know these maps are free, but since they are acting as if they are correct, they should be as close as possible. We're not there yet.

Losing it for a good cause

Got this email this morning. Ty and Rick are a couple of friends of mine in Boulder - Ty owns Melton construction, one of the premiere contractors in Boulder, and Rick is his CFO as it were. I plan to support their action, and would encourage anyone reading this to do the same. Way to go Rick and Ty.

-------------

I’m not sure how many of you know this, but Elsa Johnson - Susanne Riis and Rick Johnson’s 5 year old daughter - was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) in January of this 2006. It was a very difficult moment for Elsa, Susanne, Rick, her big brother Nils and everyone who knows and cares about them. The good news is that Elsa is responding well to the treatment and has a good prognosis for a full recovery. Her recovery did not come by accident; it’s because of all the hard work done by people in the Cancer Research field, her medical team, and her loving family. Bad news is the treatment has caused this beautiful 5 year old girl to temporarily lose her hair.

Elsa has been going down to Children’s Hospital getting treatment since the diagnosis. This has brought to light for us the tremendous amount of work the fine people of Children’s Hospital do; how far Cancer treatment has come because of generous financial support; and the outstanding work of people in the Cancer research across our great country.

Susanne and Rick have ask that we help the hard working people in this field by helping to raise money for St. Baldrick's CureSearch National Childhood Cancer Foundation - which supports CureSearch Children's Oncology Group - the world's foremost childhood cancer research organization.

So here is the deal- Rick and I are going to shave our heads this Saturday, March 18 at the Boulder Theater. The doors open at lunch time. Whole Foods and some other businesses will provide food, beverages and music. The organizers will have a speech around 12:30 and then about 75 people in groups of 4 will have their heads shaved.

We would like you all to help us out by making a contribution to the cause. You could do this a number of ways:

You can come down to the Boulder theater this Saturday at 12 noon and hand the folks at the door a check made out to The St. Baldrick’s Foundation or give them a credit card to charge. Then watch Rick and I get shaved. I cannot speak for Rick, but I would be happy to let the highest bidder tattoo a 4 leaf clover on my head in recognition of the St. Patrick day Holiday.

When you make a donation look for our team-  Rick Johnson & Ty Melton A Couple of Clean Cut Guys

You could donate online here.

You can call in your donation at 1-888-899-BALD (2259)

Our goal is to raise $10,000

Let’s help keep up the fight against cancer.

Thank you all for your support!!!

Ty

Date: 3/18/2006
Location: Boulder Theater Map Provided by Yahoo
Address: 2032 14th Street
Boulder, CO 80302, USA
Direction: Downtown Boulder, one block off of the Pearl St. Mall.

Heading North on Broadway, turn right (East) on Pine (2 blocks up from Pearl). Turn right (South) on 14th St. Go one block up, cross over Spruce St, Theater is on the left.
Doors Open at 11:30AM. The event is FREE to the public. Join us for Food, Drink, Fun. Come one, come all!

The primary beneficiary of St. Baldrick's is CureSearch National Childhood Cancer Foundation - which supports CureSearch Children's Oncology Group - the world's foremost childhood cancer research organization. 

The St. Baldrick's Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, Federal ID # 20-1173824

RSS and Retail messaging

Interesting NYTimes article today on Tech Memeorandum about RSS and retailers...finally. I blogged about this more than a year ago, and today it's finally starting to happen. The idea of using user-controlled communication (RSS) rather than vendor-controlled communication (email) makes all the sense in the world. It's amazing that it's taken retailers this long to "get" that RSS offers them a powerful (permission-based, right Seth?) communication modality for talking to their customers and prospects.

Corporate America is next. Time to "get it" you Corporate Marketers out there. Come on, it won't hurt.

My Edgeio "listing" experiment

I like companies that change the way I think about data, the web, and business models. Edgeio is one of those companies. They launched this week, and I wanted to experiment with their application. The way it works right now - enhancements coming soon apparently - is that their app crawls blogs and websites looking for a specific syntax, a so-called "listing" tag or other specific URL which alerts the Edgeio app that this page contains a product for sale. Unusual URL-based tagging system, but I tried it and it seems to work fine. I've taken a number of hits from Edgeio servers as people link through to look at my Mr Handsfree BlueTooth Speakerphone for sale. Edgeio needs an easier way for end-users to actually list products with all the detail that makes the listings richer. Right now, it takes reading the FAQ and pasting in specific Edgeio tag links to make it work well.

Here's an example that tells Edgeio servers the zipcode of the lister:

"http://www.edgeio.com/tag/zip:80503"

Very interesting model, in that they automatically build a dataset and website of items (right now products, but could be services as well I'd guess) for sale by collecting them from around the web without any direct intervention on the part of the seller. If they were integrated with a payment system, like PayPal for instance, it would be easy to have a "buy" button right on the page. Certainly will be interesting to see if this works. I would not be shocked to see eBay buy them up pretty soon after Edgeio's proven they can be a threat to the mega-auction site leader.