Rafe's Blog

Carded

One indication that Bubble 2.0 is getting out of hand: I was walking down the dark Atherton street to Michael Arrington's house for the latest TechCrunch meetup/party, and a guy approached me from across the street. Before I could tell who it was -- practically before I could see him, actually -- he said, "Rafe Needleman! How are you? Here's my card!" It was the fastest greeting-to-card transition I have ever experienced. It was either really presumptuous or really smart, because once inside Michael's house, it was pandemonium. Which is, of course, the other indication that we're deep into Bubble 2.0.

I will say, though, that it's a sweet and rather innocent little bubble. There's money, sure, but not too much. And everybody is doing these clever and very personal startups. And they're sharing ideas, and mashing up others' work with their own. And going to crowded parties and having a good time. As long as the venture guys don't over-react and start over-funding these startups, this could work out nicely.

I believe in tags

I recently interviewed Fred Krueger, CEO of the startup TagWorld. He's launching a community site to compete with MySpace.  While the site will live or die based on its success in aping the MySpace business model, more interesting to me is the tag-centric model of TagWorld. The site allows users to tag any content -- photos, bookmarks, blog entries, etc. -- and then organize their activities on the site around those tags. It even works as a tag-based social network. I think it's a fascinating concept, and I wrote a Rafe's Radar column about the company for Release 1.0.

Good news: My Release 1.0 columns are no longer behind a registration wall!

New tech in Vegas

Every year, CNET sends a huge contingent of editors to the January Consumer Electronics Show. We write up all the new products we can lay our hands on. And lucky me, I've landed the Emerging Technologies category. So I'll be scouring the show looking for truly new ideas to write up for CNET (and possibly also for my Release 1.0 column).

This year, CNET is also producing the Best of CES Awards. So in addition to writing up the new ideas, I'll be helping to pick the Best Emerging Technology of CES. If you want your company or product to be considered for this huge award, please go to CNET's Best of CES Awards 2006 page and enter it. Deadline is December 1.

Gaga for GPS

I have a weakness for clever geolocation startups. I've written about companies that geolocate by WiFi and by television broadcast signal instead of GPS. In May I found two cool that push up-to-the-second traffic data to cars' navigation systems. In August I covered a geolocation system that uses peer-to-peer technology. And today I posted a column about GeoVector, which adds orientation data to GPS, so your handheld device knows not just where it is, but what it's pointing at. There sure is a lot of interesting activity in this space.

[Note: Some links above may require free or paid registration.]

What alpha geeks and 11-year-old schoolgirls have in common

I just had a sit-down with Ross Mayfield, and saw that his laptop was encrusted with stickers from startup Web companies. Reminded me of Esther's laptop, which is even more stuck-upon -- I think she's added half a pound of carry weight to her ultralight X40.

As Ross describes it, "Stickers are the new business card."  Joi started it, he says (and even makes odd coin consulting on laptop sticker placement in movies). And when Ross sat down with Catarina and Steve recently, their first order of business was exchanging stickers and slapping them on their laptops.

Speaking of sticking to things (sorry), I've gotten a half-dozen emails this week from friends and acquaintances who’ve wanted to know if I was on vacation, or dead, or what, since I haven't blogged lately.  I'm neither vacating nor dead. Just busy with my day job at CNET, plus writing Works for Me, Rafe's Radar, and Anchordesk. Will try to post here more often.

Google is not my business model

In my latest Release 1.0 column (free registration required), I went a little deeper into the "Google is my business model" idea that surfaced when I talked with the CEO of Wondir.  Based on chats with a few VCs and on some other blog posts, I have a new opinion: This is a decent startup plan, but it's not a good thing to base a business on.

The end of the business model

Matthew Koll, CEO of Wondir was coming into San Francisco at the same time as I was leaving last week, so we sat down at SFO to talk about his company, which makes live question-and-answer technology. You ask a question, somebody answers.  It's the mutant four-way love-child of Usenet, IM, Keen, and Tacit. It's interesting not just because it's a cool service but because Wondir is yet another company that represents, for me, the end of the online business model.

Like almost all the other specialized search services I've seen lately, Wondir makes money from Google AdSense.  If Matthew gets enough users to his service, Google will pay him. It's not his only revenue stream, but it's a big part of his profit model, at least for now.

It's gotten to the point that I've almost stopped asking CEOs how they plan to make money. They only have to say, "Google," and it's a clear picture. Search engine experts like Danny Sullivan already know this: Google is an advertising company, not a search company. And for CEOs of online startups, it's the gravy train.

Tag the World

I just talked with Olivier Attia, the CEO of Scanbuy. This company makes software that lets camerphones read barcodes. So if you're in a store and want more information about a product you're looking at (for example, say you'd like to know what it would cost to buy the item online instead), you can just zap the barcode and pull up the info on your phone's browser.  (Minus the barcode function, CNET just launched this utility for technology products: Point your cellphone's browser to m.cnet.com.)

Apparently reading barcodes with a camera (as opposed to a laser scanner) is harder than it sounds, so the company's technology is a defensible barrier to entry.  However, Scanbuy is not the first company to do this: NTT DoCoMo already offers a similar service in Japan, and there are other competitors here in the US.

The concept of using a portable connected device to easily read the "tags" on physical items is very interesting. I'm going to explore it in an upcoming Rafe's Radar column.

The DVD is dead, long live the DVD

I moderated two sessions at an Under the Radar event yesterday. My sessions were about social software and tools (see previous post for list of companies). All the companies were interesting, but the one that stood out for me was Peerflix, the startup company that enables person-to-person DVD trading.  It's a simple and powerful idea, reminiscent of Half.com, which was acquired by eBay in 2000.  But looking forward, one has to wonder about the viability of the idea. Daniel Akst of the New York Times had it right about DVDs: broadband will eventually bury the medium itself. What is Peerflix going to do? CEO Billy McNair said during his Under the Radar presentation that DVDs are just the start, hinting that a full-on barter system is in the offing. He did not go into the details. I'll talk to McNair soon and see what's up.

Under the Radar… it lives!

In 2003, I worked with IBDNetwork to launch an event series called Under the Radar. The idea was this: We picked a startup theme (event #1 was Wi-Fi startups), lined up a few good early-stage companies, and got them to present to a panel of venture capitalist judges, who then voted on the companies' prospects, American Idol-style.  We also polled the audience at each event to see which companies they liked -- their results were often different. I moderated a bunch of these evening events, and found them a lot of fun, and very informative. I guess the format worked, since the audience size grew from event to event.

When I went to work for CNET full-time, about a year ago, I reduced my involvement with IBDN, but the Under the Radar series has continued to grow and flourish, and recently the IBDN team launched a series of full-day Under the Radar events. I'm participating as a moderator in one of these events, on May 31, at the Microsoft conference center (map) in Mountain View, CA. I'm handling two sessions:

Social Software Tools @ 1:00 pm
Presenting companies: 

• imeem
• Multiply
• Peerflix
• Userplane

Blog/RSS Tools @ 2:45 pm
Presenting companies:

• Audioblog
• Five Across
• PubSub
• Rojo

I'm looking forward to learning about these companies (and getting some good blog and column material).  If you are interested in attending, tickets are available on Acteva.  More information about the event is on the IBDN site.  They also have a blog about the event, and I'm told there are blogger passes available (if you are interested, contact Valerie Cunningham).

If you come to the event, come find me after the RSS session and tell me which companies you liked…