Entrepreneurs in the digital era

Thinking about starting an entrepreneurial venture? On my personal blog,Mike Dorsey.info, I follow Paul Graham's observations, and I argue that it is a lot easier than ever before. Does that make internet startups a commodity? An entrepreneur myself, I prefer not to think about myself as a 'commodity' just yet, but I understand the point. Could we say that entrepreneurs are still exciting, and the commoditification won't happen for a few years?

Well, on the other hand, we not get carried away here...this whole 'entrepreneurship is now possible for anyone!' thing might be limited to industries that have actually gone topsy-turby by the net revolution...it might not be affecting every industry at all. We could argue that the net is only changing some industries and others remain firmly stable. I wonder, in how many industries do web 2.0 innovations and the low-barrier-to-entry online marketplaces have a relevant voice? Is the web threatening auto-makers, or plastics companies? Surely, but not so much as print classifieds, right?

But what do you think? Are we just getting starry-eyed about the net and forgetting all of the other industries that still require a lot of up-front capital investment, institutional support, long product development life-cycles, etc? Or is there a permanent shift underway that will affect businesses of every kind?

Well, whatever the case, these past 15 years or so are seminal moments in the evolution labor, technology, and commercial markets. If they don't already, school textbooks (or rather, ireaders) will have to spend a good chunk of time teaching kids how ubiquitous computers, internet connections, and open source programming movements made a digitally-based economy explode and leave a path of destruction in its wake (phone systems and snail mail, newspapers and classifieds, radio, movie theaters, mapmaking, etc)

IPhone...IPhone...I want an IPhone...

Oh my god. This is the first product that I can honestly say I will purchase, no matter what the price is. I'm not one to watch product releases, wait in line to be the first to buy the product, or even a real supporter of Apple. But sweet mother of all that is right in this world.

Watch this product release of the IPhone...

Top reasons I will own an IPhone as soon as it's possible.
1. My current phone is nearly broken
2. I couldn't decide between blackberry and treo because both are heavy and not actually that awesome
3. IPhone will replace my IPod, which I am wholly dependent on and it, too, is nearly broken
4. I have to type 5 buttons just to be able to send an SMS with my current phone...on IPhone, it's 'google easy'.
5. IPhone plays video with incredible quality, meaning I can watch my video podcasts while on the road
6. IPhone has a 2 megapixel camera, which will replace my current digital camera, which is completely broken
7. IPhone is slender and cool looking, and will fit easily into my pocket
8. IPhone has email that syncs up with your computer email account so I won't have to read everything twice.
9. IPhone has bluetooth, so I don't have to use a headpiece with a wire
10. IPhone will sync all contacts from online contacts so if I ever accidentally drop my phone in the toilet, I don't lose all my friends, like it used to be with pre-Iphone portable talking devices...

Crazy New Weather Map Mashups

This whole mapping mashup web 2.0 thing has brought about some wild innovations in the way we see maps, images, weather, and sattellite views. For example, check out WeatherBonk.com, which has Crazy Map / Weather info mashups from Digg and John Battelle. For example, you can get live weather video feeds with "views from over 8000 worldwide weather cams." See the pins to the right showing the live cams, for Texas et al.

This same site, WeatherBonk.com also has google maps that show Temperatures using the 'pins' we've come to know and love, Forecasts, and other useful and AJAXified maps.

It's a pretty incredible offering. See what the weather is like, anywhere in the world, day or not, for free. Let's step back 25 years and imagine telling someone you could do this. They'd think you were pulling their leg, right?

Others are doing it as well. The brand new Ask City appears to be a strong success so far, with quality and innovative features, plus a vast source of local data, such as CitySearch.com, from Ask.com's father, Barry Diller. He has harnessed the resources of the interactive media conglomerate that he chairs, Interactive Corp, and the many business in IAC's portfolio.

Also noticed that GOOG tightened its relationship with NASA last week, so one of my predictions for 2007 is ubiquitous mapping technologies, on our phones, at home, wherever we are...free access to maps that do all sorts of cool things by merging a map with other useful datasets in this mapping mashup flurry and creation of a multitude of mapping tools.

Oh yeah, Merry Holidays.

Podcast #9 - Web 3.0, BitTorrent, and MS Office Killers

What is Web 3.0? Is it anything different from Web 2.0? What ever happened to Web 2.1?

Also, learn about BitTorrent and how this huge file sharing network's technology transforms file sharing. Recently, this company raised $20 million in funding, struck deals with several major content providers, and has even made another recent purchase, of uTorrent.

Plus, we the changes in how we process documents and store information. How does this affect Microsoft Office? Does Google admit to building a system that directly threatens Microsoft's firm grasp on this market? Hear what Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO had to say about this issue at the recent Web 2.0 conference. If you're into this sort of thing, you can check out the video/audio interviews from this conference for free.

Finally, we talked about 6 of the lousiest things about Microsoft applications, taken from a funny article at LiveDigitally.com.

Podcast #8 - Web 2.0 Tools, News, Music, Blogs

Web 2.0 - read and write as opposed to read-only.... based around community sharing and programs where adding another user actually makes the product more valuable. Almost all free stuff, too!

Technorati - great for filtering through the different blogs
Flickr/Photobucket/Snapfish - photo sharing sites that enable us to share photos, sort through them, tag then, and keep track of them
YouTube/Google Video - massive collection of videos spanning a plethora of topics and genres
Last.fm / Pandora / Yahoo Music / Hype Machine - cool audio sharing and ranking sites.
Google Purchasing Jotspot.com, a wiki publishing company
A9.com - built by Amazon - can search through books that are out there

Digg.com - cool tool that enables users to rank news stories, focusing on technology news, so 'coolest' stories rise to the top, making the news story's publishers famous for a day...

Interesting, although abusive take on rigging the digg process - sucks for digg founders to have the thing's results so poorly influenced, but they'll have to figure out smarter, better ways to control their network to maintain its popularity

NYTimes piece on all of the tech innovation at google and where they might be headed. It mentions the radio ad

Top Social Bookmarking Tools:
Del.icio.us - search through the sites you've bookmarked, based on the way you've tagged them. Plus, you can search through other people's tagged pages
Diigo - you can highlight segments of a page, as well as doing everything that del.icio.us
Youno - sharing your bookmarks from different computers, but gives you an instant recommendation for another site, based on the one you're visiting

1-800-Free-411 - Awesome new business doing free 411, can dial the number, get free 411 service, and then you hear an ad right before the service is delivered. Awesome roll of advertisers as well, including ingenio, vonage, 1800 flowers, etc. Pretty good writeup on the venture money they've raised, here at TechCrunch

Podcast #7 - Mapping Technologies, APIs, Subscribing To Acagax

Mapping technologies & the industries they are transforming - making it possible to plot things on maps, such as homes for sale in a particular area - amazing tools for real estate brokers and investors...
MappingHome.com - site build by this site's two founders...
http://www.homepages.com/,
Zillow.com,
HousingMaps.com

API's - they enable individuals to login to major company's systems and utilize those company's systems for new and interesting purposes.

Our readers / listeners can subscribe to our podcast / blog, and there are instructions on the wiki, which you can find by clicking on the 'what's this stuff' link at the top...

Googlepaper...

Something we've spoken about on the blog - but Google's reach continues expanding.

Adwords and Adsense are massive revenue generating machines (~10billion annually), but Google started asking itself a while back...'why can't we use this same advertising network, syndication technology, and ranking algorithms - and apply this fancy competitive advantage to other ad media.' That's why you see ads next to the personal messages you read in gmail.

And that's why Google has made a couple of big moves to buy some radio stations and begin testing its technologies to place radio advertisements, in contextually relevant places. So you're listening to a spot about home gardening - why do you have to listen to car ads? or beer commercials? With Google managing the ads that are played for you, you're far more likely to hear a commercial from a local horticulturalist or botanical garden...or at least that's the billion dollar idea.

Well, this NYT piece discusses Google's latest foray...using its advertisement syndication for newspaper advertising. Ever tried putting an ad in a newspaper? Well, I just did - and it was a real pain in my bum. Sure, belo interactive had a nice little system for placing my ad for an estate sale in the Dallas Morning News. But wouldn't it have been nice if I could just check a box somewhere in my Google Adwords account - and they could have taken care of the mess for me...? And if it's easier for me, imagine how exciting it is for those newspapers. Gone are the days when they'll have to scramble to fill 'dead inventory' - pretty soon, they'll just plop in some Google ads to fill up the blank space. And nice old Google will only take a 20% cut.

As I've said before, I'm one of the world's greatest google jock sniffers, yet at the same time, I am deathly afraid of them.

New Web Calendar

Tech Crunch has got a great demo for a new web organization (calendar) company called Scrybe...

"Scrybe, the online/offline calendar and organizer with the awesome YouTube demo video we wrote about earlier this month, has launched into beta tonight. We’ve kicked the tires and can report that the parts of the service available now do deliver as advertised (see video again below). Accounts are being opened slowly but hopefully Scrybe won’t leave too many disappointed in the short term. It’s impressive and we hope that the full functionality comes online soon. "

Find out more here...