Free Association

India and Driving

One of the things India is going to have to address if it is going to become a true global power, is traffic law - and law enforcement in general. If the broken windows theories in Malcolm Gladwell's book Tipping Point are correct, then I would think it follows that the chaos of traffic will eventually slow the progress of the nation.

When I visited India in 2004 I witnessed the aftermath of several head-on collisions - one that happened on the road I was traveling, while I was taking a 15 minute break at a roadside area. It was horrific. We hired a driver while there to take us from Delhi to Rishikesh in the north of the country. It was truly one of the most harrowing experiences of my life - with what felt like a thousand close calls an hour. Awful. This video from YouTube is a microcosm of the complete and utter chaos of Indian streets, and as speeds increase you can only imagine how deadly it can get.

Fantastic Site

I stumbled across a site called TerraPass that really blew me away. By purchasing a so-called TerraPass at a cost equivalent to your car's annual emissions (mine was $150. but most are less), you are guaranteed to reduce Carbon Dioxide emissions elsewhere in the world by that amount. It's a fabulous idea, and I joined. If the US government wants to really do something about Global Warming - mandating this for all US cars - or even just for all SUVs would be a great start. That and funding alternative fuel research and moving toward energy independence is something we must do.

Six Degrees? How about one?

Weird Six Degrees feeling  for me this morning seeing Brad Feld (Colorado) post on his blog about Josh Kopelman (Philadelphia). In the mid-90's I worked for the CTO of Infonautics - a company Josh Kopelman founded. Josh went on to start several other Internet companies, including Half.com, which was underway (albeit in stealth mode) when I left Infonautics in 1999 to start my company, Finali. Brad Feld was one of the VC investors in Finali. As a matter of fact, although we don't know each other well Josh and I exchanged a couple of emails when Finali and Half.com were founded within weeks of one another in 1999.

Weird to see your disconnected past come together like that. Six degrees? How about one?

Idea generation

Getting ideas for a new business is a never-ending obsession for entrepreneurs. I always have a few going in my head - and I suspect other entrepreneurs do the same. If I'm building a business I don't have time to follow through on new ideas; but when I'm in between businesses I track, research, noodle, and flesh out new ideas that show promise. By promise I mean that the idea passes my good idea test. That is: a) is it hard to do - so that others can't easily copy it, b) does it solve a real problem that people (lots of them) have, and c) is it patented, or able to be patented? This simple sniff test is a good idea parser. If the idea fails this simple sniff test, I throw it away and keep working. It's not worth the time to flesh out an idea that starts with this handicap.

But how do you find ideas? For me it's a bit serendipitous. I read alot - especially tech publications like Wired, and Business 2.0 (now part of CNN, and not nearly as cool)- but also lots of blogs and podcasts. These are ripe playgrounds of ideas.

For instance, I got an idea (which I am still noodling) from a PodTech podcast some months ago. It was an offhanded comment by one of the guests that started me down a path I'm still on. And today, I found an interesting blog post by Mark Cuban (formerly of Broadcast.com, and now the owner of the Dallas Mavericks). This post is full of interesting ideas that could become businesses. There are ideas everywhere.

Walled Garden Analogy

A friend of mine questioned me about my views on walled gardens. She was confused about the difference between this and other more open business models. So I thought an analogy would help. After thinking about it a minute I came up with this:

How likely would you be to buy a PC, if the only software that worked on it came from Microsoft? It would be useful - Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Windows XP, and even Internet Explorer - but you'd never have Quicken, Quickbooks, TurboTax (ok, I've been thinking about my taxes a little too much - highway robbery I tell you), Photoshop, iTunes, and forget about Firefox, Adobe Acrobat, and Sling Player and on, and on.

This is the situation when you buy most mobile phones today. Only applications sanctioned by the carrier (Verizon, Cingular, etc) are available (think Verizon "Get it Now" - oy!). Smartphones like the Treo 700W are better, in that they can load anything for Windows Mobile - which is good - but the vast majority of handsets are closed, walled gardens, not open platforms for running lots of different, and highly useful third party applications.

That's what's wrong with a walled garden approach - and why opening up is such a huge opportunity for wireless carriers.

Wireless Carriers Stifle Innovation

I have been looking at a business model in the wireless industry, utilizing Location Based Services (LBS) to provide a value added service for consumers. During my research, one of the main obstacles to innovation in this industry is the lack of open protocols and third-party vendor support by the wireless carriers. Everyone knows that Walled Gardens stifle innovation - and in the end are more harmful to the company that creates the garden than to anyone else. Said another way - not only do walled gardens (that is closed technology and user spaces; think AOL) harm innovation, and therefore harm users, but also are ultimately destructive to the shareholder value of the gardener. This has been proven repeatedly, but does not stop the CFO's at these companies from continuing down this death spiral of short-term thinking. There is of late, thankfully, some sign of change in the wireless industry...it's about time they saw the light.

Today I found a fascinating podcast in IT Conversations regarding obstructions in the mobile industry, specifically around LBS. While the tone of the discussion is more or less civil, near the end the frustration of the innovators starts to bleed into the conversation. The innovators are clearly frustrated with the walled gardens the wireless carriers have become, and these innovators stand by and witness the high value of open API's (think Google Maps) and the ease with which Web innovators can produce so-called "Mashups". When will wireless carriers start to see that openness in their value-added services is the only path that makes any sense? Probably only after one of them opens up, and starts to kick the ass of all the others.

The first carrier to aggressively open up could reap tremendous value from the innovations that result. To do otherwise is simply idiotic. It will happen eventually - and then they all scramble to get back the subscribers who leave for the promised land of functionality that will result from carrier openness.

I blogged satirically here on the wireless carriers and their idiotic, and ultimately pointless attempts at a death grip on video content - another stupid and counter-innovation walled garden screw-up. The long list of wireless carrier stupidity, stifled innovation, and worse - missed opportunity for the US wireless industry is long, getting longer, and not soon to end I fear. FUBAR.

What is Free Association?

Free Association is a term from Sigmund Freud's Psychodynamic theory and is a technique used in psychology. While this blog is not about psychology per se, I believe that a concept similar to Free Association is useful to entrepreneurs in idea generation. In general free association in this context is similar to brainstorming, wherein a small group of people - founders - can use this technique to find a product or service around which a business can be built. This blog - while devoted to many topics - is about my serendipitous encounters with entrepreneurial free association during my business idea generation journey.

XP on a Mac

Well Apple finally did it. They've just announced that their newest Macs - which sport Intel processors for the first time - will support Windows XP in a dual boot mode. Meaning that users with a WinXP install disk and license can dual boot their Mac - either on WinXP or Mac OS. This, I think, is a good move that is terribly overdue - and that I "blogged" about in 1997.

As my new friend Scott Converse of ClickCaster pointed out to me; "

"The Macintosh computer is really just a sophisticated copy protection scheme for their operating system".

This move might finally allow Apple to sell scads of Macs to corporate types who need the sophisticated corporate support of Windows, but prefer the elegance and power of the Mac OS for their personal computing. I fit this mold, and might finally consider a Mac when I once again need a new machine (which won't be soon since I just bought my Dell X1 Laptop).

Way to go Apple, only 10 years too late.