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July 29, 2005

Dog Poop Girl

Here's the basic story: A woman and her dog are riding the Seoul subways. The dog poops in the floor. The woman refuses to clean it up, despite being told to by other passangers. Someone takes a picture of her, posts it on the Internet, and she is publicly shamed -- and the story will live on the Internet forever. Then, the blogosphere debates the notion of the Internet as a social enforcement tool. [...]

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/dog_poop_girl.html

The New York Times doesn't understand the real problem. The real problem is not with Google or Microsoft, but with the computer illiterate Venture Capitalists.

VCs are not geeks. The ones that I have dealt with, that claim to be interested in backing software startups were so ignorant about the world of software that they called the phrase 'client server system' "Gobbledegook". I'm not making this up.

Anyone who says that Google is a threat to a startups chances of sucess doesn't understand the internet, network effects and everything to do with the intenet economy. They don't even understand the story of Google itself:

The search for a buyer

Larry and Sergey continued working to perfect their technology through the first half of 1998. Following a path that would become a key tenet of the Google way, they bought a terabyte of disks at bargain prices and built their own computer housings in Larry's dorm room, which became Google's first data center. Meanwhile Sergey set up a business office, and the two began calling on potential partners who might want to license a search technology better than any then available. Despite the dotcom fever of the day, they had little interest in building a company of their own around the technology they had developed.

Among those they called on was friend and Yahoo! founder David Filo. Filo agreed that their technology was solid, but encouraged Larry and Sergey to grow the service themselves by starting a search engine company. "When it's fully developed and scalable," he told them, "let's talk again." Others were less interested in Google, as it was now known. One portal CEO told them, "As long as we're 80 percent as good as our competitors, that's good enough. Our users don't really care about search."

Touched by an angel

Unable to interest the major portal players of the day, Larry and Sergey decided to make a go of it on their own. All they needed was a little cash to move out of the dorm — and to pay off the credit cards they had maxed out buying a terabyte of memory. So they wrote up a business plan, put their Ph.D. plans on hold, and went looking for an angel investor. Their first visit was with a friend of a faculty member.

Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, was used to taking the long view. One look at their demo and he knew Google had potential — a lot of potential. But though his interest had been piqued, he was pressed for time. As Sergey tells it, "We met him very early one morning on the porch of a Stanford faculty member's home in Palo Alto. We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, 'Instead of us discussing all the details, why don't I just write you a check?' It was made out to Google Inc. and was for $100,000." [...]
http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html

Thats the way you do a startup, put together the bare bones of your system or some kind of tangible demo, get someone that has money that they are willing to loose, and that is also a true venture capitalist ie, someone that is not 'risk averse' but who likes risk, is interested in new ideas and is willing to take a bet.

Google was initially funded with $100,000 that was simply handed over to them as you would lay down money on a poker hand. That is the true spirit of risk taking. It is also not alot of money. Most software startups don't need more than that to get a stable beta system online, in fact, most startups can be done for the cost of food money and equipment to sustain the developers. If the service starts to grow, you can then scale it up to accomodate your legion of users.

The eyes of VCs glaze over when you talk about, for example, "using clients to collect people's playlists in a central server so that anyone anywhere browse them all in different ways for free". Or how about, "a service where people can upload their digital pictures for free so that everyone everywhere can browse them for free with our cool interface". Now to us, these are examples of exiting tools on many levels, and for one hundred thousand dollars and a crack team with intravenous espresso, they could be built very quickly (the second one took one year to build, and it was done in an apartment aparently). To a VC however, this is "Gobbledygook"; they will say (if you manage to get to them before their eyes glaze over) that "iTunes has this market cornered, and that is who you are up against, so we will have to pass on this one", or for the latter, "Adobe is the market leader in this space; what protection do you have if they decide to do what you are doing? If they go up against you, you are finished, so we will pass".

Both of those assessments are demonstrably and horribly wrong, but this is what people have to put up with when they go into discussions with VCs. This is not a problem of Google or Microsoft its a problem of cowardice and computer illiteracy. Thanks to the new tools that are being refined and released the barrier to entry for a startup is so low that you barely have to lift up your legs to get over it. It means hunkering down, lots of reading, lots of IRC and IM sessions and writing lines of code. You release your service. When even the most illiterate of VCs smells millions of users, then you have the stink of money....and that they do understand.

Police rely on 6,000 cameras across Tube network to cut crime
By Barrie Clement, Transport Editor
Independent Published: 23 August 2005

London Underground has installed more than 6,000 CCTV cameras across the
network, some of them at stations and some on trains.

Plans are in place to double the number in use by 2010 as part of its
campaign to minimise petty crime, but also to deal with the increasing
threat of terrorism...

London Underground has been experimenting with "smart" digital cameras
which can automatically spot "abnormal" events. The equipment can be
programmed to detect suicide attempts, overcrowding, suspect packages and
trespassers. It is hoped that by automating the prediction or detection of
such events, Underground security staff, who often have to monitor as many
as 60 cameras, can take preventive action...

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/article307679.ece

July 29, 2005

Dog Poop Girl

roidrage says:

apollonia666 says: