Every once in a while you come across people and ideas you like so much that you just can help but want to help them. And then of that broad group, there are the rare few who don’t really need your help but it makes you want to help even more. I’ve recently met those very guys, and am so in like with them that I’ve decided to join Trace Wax, Lukman Ramsey and Andy Breen on their advisory board.
Talk2Us is not yet ready to announce themselves, but here’s a teaser: anyone out there remember Wildfire, the oh-so-sexy virtual assistant from the late-90’s? This is Wildfire++, modernized, and much more relevant to the work and personal lives of everyone enmeshed in an over-connected world.
Published by Eric Litman on Monday, June 30th, 2008 1:08am
Adam Ostrow at Mashable posted a tip on Twitter tonight to a New York Times report on Google’s planned Content Network, in which they’ll distribute video and video ads through their installed base of AdSense publishers. This a big deal reflective of how Google’s integrated ad capabilities can in a single stroke shift an entire segment of an industry, and a reminder of the power, scale and reach the AdSense network gives them. Online video’s in for a big shake-up.
Some first impressions and questions:
Very cool, very smart, tons of unknowns.
What will publishers with their own video content think about this?
Will there be an opt-out setting for publishers who still want to run display ads through their AdSense account?
SpotRunner and other self-service video ad creative agencies could be big winners from this.
Do you classify this as display or performance ads? My guess is the model will end up being a mix of both. A display ad teasing the video with a performance component on the click-to-play.
Will there be a follow-up call to action beyond the first video? A second video, maybe, or another display ad? Or maybe CPC text ads? It could be any or all of these.
One thing is exceptionally clear: the few lines of JavaScript that AdSense publishers have installed on their sites are Google’s gateway to deliver any bit of Web functionality that can be imagined across the incredibly large network with the flip of a switch, and today Google has said clearly that they’re not afraid to experiment. Howard Lindzon says this is a big deal for video and Rafat Ali’s right that there’s a critical if attached to this particular campaign, but there should be little doubt that this is only scratching the surface of Google’s ambitions to leverage the prime real estate they already control on an overwhelming number of Internet properties (and don’t forget mobile fits in there, too). Think someone at Google isn’t wondering how some derivative of Gadgets - Google’s framework for encapsulating pretty much anything you can imagine - might be published and monetized in this same way? What does the Web start to look like when what we think of today as ad units deliver more value to end users than the site where they’re displayed does?
This isn’t just relevant for content providers, either. In fact, it may be an even bigger deal for application providers who may end up with a viable, performance-based model to federate and monetize whatever it is they do as contextual transactions - and I’m using that term about as broadly as it can be applied - across a huge swath of the Web.
Give it time, but the implications of this have the potential to significantly change the economics of the Web and create a new class of opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors. I’ll be watching it closely, and you probably should, too.
Published by Eric Litman on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 12:52am
This is an email exchange from earlier today I thought others might find useful:
Just started to follow you on twitter and found your background / experiences very compelling. So a question I have for you revolves around taking my career to the next level. I am looking to go from in-house digital expert to a more vocal role with in the tech / online community - any suggestions?
Couple of options.
One: go your own way. If you have the connections, drive, and ability to sustain yourself through lean times, there’s no better way to establish yourself as a leader than simply by leading. This is hard, takes tons of time and energy, can tax your family and friendships, and certainly isn’t for everyone.
The other: find a company that could benefit from advocacy and evangelism and align yourself with them. Devour every bit of news, media and information you can about a specific topic related to that business and start speaking about what you learn. Participate significantly in online social communities, and equally important, in the real world communities around you. Make friends, help them as much as you can, stay focused on what you’re doing, and share your passion and drive with others.
[Where you work now] is a good platform. See if there are opportunities to grow within the company - lay out a plan, set goals, set a timeline, and communicate those to your boss or someone else in the organization with whom you’d like to ally. Even if you feel like things have plateaued there for whatever reason, it’s often quite possible to break through any perceived barriers by first changing the way you think then telling others you’ve changed and showing them through performance and results.
Published by Eric Litman on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 5:54pm
I’m a huge fan of the concept behind the TechStars program and the innovating they’re doing on the traditional venture capital model. David Cohen and the team of mentors he’s assembled are world-class, and there are some really bright entrepreneurs working through the program this year. David called me recently to invite me into the program as a mentor and I couldn’t have been happier to accept. I’ll be heading to Boulder this summer to meet the teams and help them take their startups to the next level.
TechStars is one of a number of micro funds based loosely on the work Paul Graham is doing at Y Combinator that are exploiting the exceptionally low cost requirements to get a tech company off the ground today. Here in DC we have LaunchBox Digital run by my friend Sean Greene and his partners, Europe now has seedcamp, and there are no doubt others in the works elsewhere that we’ll hear about soon. Even the city of New York is getting in on the action.
Programs like TechStars are just scratching the surface of new models for early stage investing, and in particular there are opportunities to combine these programs with larger funds capable of following the seed stage. Paul Kedrosky and others have talked about the changing model for some time, but what do you think? How would you change the venture model?
Thanks, TechStars. Looking forward to seeing you all soon!
Published by Eric Litman on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 1:19pm
It’s not quite ready for prime time, but I just couldn’t wait any longer to give a preview of the amazing work that my friend Theo Skye has done on my new site, ericlitman.com. My blog, media clips and photos will all soon be integrated into that site.
Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 7:44pm
Yield Software, one of WashingtonVC’s portfolio companies, closed a $6m Series B round this week, led by Draper Fisher Jurveston with participation by the team at ad giant WPP.
Matt Malden, Yield’s CEO, is a great guy with a world-class team behind him. Congrats, Yield!
Published by Eric Litman on Monday, April 14th, 2008 8:13am
Mark Hopkins of Mashable called me last week for a quick interview about the launch of a new partnership between Aux Interactive and Mashable, but what was originally intended to be a 10 minute scheduled call turned into an engaging dialog about WashingtonVC, Aux (I’m the Chairman of the company), the evolving nature of technology and insights into entrepreneurship in general. It’s entirely my fault - I love to talk about this stuff, and Mark was nice enough to humor me.
Listen to 39 minutes of our hour long conversation here:
Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 4:51am
I started using Twitter at the end of April 2007 and find it to be more useful to me every day. See Dan York’s great post on getting value from Twitter if you haven’t yet figured out how Twitter can work for you.
Always on the lookout for analytics to describe behavior, I ran across a perl script by Damon Cortesi tonight that pulled in my Twitter feed and generated some pretty graphs. The results - my Twitter statistics from April 2007 through today - are below.
Thanks to @dacort on Twitter for the script that generated this output.
Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 2:30am
The awesome Rana, newest member of my team at WashingtonVC, spent Xmas day hanging out at CNN with Zain Verjee and Scott Stead in Larry King’s studio. Here are the results on Seesmic:
Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 2:22am
Jason Calacanis today writes that Mahalo’s challenge is breadth rather than depth. Fair enough, but to me currency, and by extension accuracy, are of even greater importance for their sustainability. In search, accuracy = trust = user retention1.
Google’s trust model is based on a broad acceptance that their crawlers do a good job of finding pages and that their indexers and ranking algorithms are likely to lead you to the most relevant results for a given search. Certainly there are flaws in the model and room for improvement, from which the category (of one?) of human-powered search draws its raison d’être, but it has been successful enough to attract an enormous user base. Yahoo!2., Ask.com, and other algorithmic search engines operate under a similar model.
What’s the trust model for a human-powered search engine (HPSE)? I’d argue that it’s strongly influenced by three factors:
Quality and context of search results.
Not only does the cruft need to be filtered, but results need to be segmented and described on a results page to clearly identify their value.
Authority.
I’m open to comment on this one, but my belief is that for a given HSPE results page to be useful it needs to be a canonical source for the most salient points of a given topic. I don’t want to feel like I need to dig through Google’s results in addition to what an HPSE provides me.
Currency.
People need a transparent view into both when a link was added and when a human last verified that it remains current to trust that content is relevant to them at the time of their search. Note that neither Mahalo nor its older, distant cousin About.com do this today.
There’s a fourth factor I’ll toss out for discussion, and that’s the personal brand of the reviewers themselves. This is much less of an issue today while the model is still proving itself than it will be two or three years from now when people have learned to value the quality of work of the individuals crafting the content. After all, if HPSEs’ primary selling point is that they’re “human-powered”, isn’t it reasonable to think people are eventually going to pay attention to the “humans” powering them?
About.com lost much of its early luster because savvy folks have learned not to trust it. Much of its content is junk, frankly, either because it was hastily written to fill a void or the data represented there are out of date. Mahalo doesn’t really have this problem yet given its newness, but I already find myself questioning the currency of some of the links I find there, just as I do with About.com. Other HPSE’s will have to combat this issue as well.
What influences your trust in search results? Can/do you trust people over algorithms, or vice versa?
1. I’m holding equal that responsiveness and availability are constants in online service delivery. Of course they aren’t, and that’s yet another reason why Google’s the category leader they are. 2. Yahoo! combines a directory with their search results, although the integration these days has been de-emphasized. Interestingly, Mahalo is essentially an evolution of what were the origins of Yahoo!. Think of it as Yellow Pages meets Lonely Planet, but with fewer plumbers’ cracks and less patchouli.
Published by Eric Litman on Monday, October 8th, 2007 9:22pm
Dony Wynn, the percussionist extraordinaire who drove the beat behind Robert Palmer for so many years, has just launched his latest project: Knuckle Yummy. Dony’s been working with band mates Lizzy Lee and Pehr Smith for less than a year, but the collaboration is just as tight as the music is edgy.
Congratulations, buddy. See you at the next SXSW in March!
Published by Eric Litman on Monday, October 8th, 2007 3:02pm
A few months ago I bought a couple of D-Link’s DNS-323 low-end network attached storage devices as part of my ongoing mission to reduce and simplify the hardware in my home. For about $375 ($175 for the DNS-323 and $100 each for two 500GB hard disks) and almost no setup effort†, you can have 1/2 TB of redundant storage in a small, quiet, Gigabit Ethernet-capable server with some pretty nifty features out of the box. And if you’re a tinkerer with some Linux experience, you can draw from the thriving hacking community supporting it. For the money, I love these little things.
But while my Windows machines communicate with them without issue, performance with my Macs has been abysmal. Even on an 802.11n network, OS X’s average transfer rate is somewhere around 80KB/s. Fortunately, I tracked the problem down to a tunable network parameter tied to OS X’s FreeBSD roots: net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack.
Under 10.4.10, the default value for delayed_ack is 3. If you’re seeing similar performance issues either with the DNS-323 or other Samba servers in general, try setting it to a value of 0:
sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0
I recommend doing this while transferring a large file so you can immediately observe any change in performance. To make this setting permanent, add the following to /etc/sysctl.conf (you may need to create the file):
net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0
†. Initial configuration requires Windows. I ran the setup utility from within VMWare Fusion without issue.
Published by Eric Litman on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 4:00pm
Apple’s most recent update to the iPhone’s base software, version 1.1.1, adds the same anti-hacking protections they applied to the iPod Touch. This means that at least for the near term, anyone who upgrades their iPhone to version 1.1.1 will be unable to run any of the third-party software the budding but enthusiastic iPhone developer community has created.
Since my previous post on the missing iPhone SDK, I’ve spent some time exploring the undocumented APIs on the iPhone and have written a few mini applications just for the fun of delving into relatively uncharted territory†. Others have done much more than explore, and have released some prettycoolstuff. Granted, none of the released apps serve any mission critical function, but they’re all important precursors to what has the potential to become a thriving software ecosystem.
But today, Apple made it clear that these efforts are not welcome. Sure, they want to keep people from unlocking their phones to work on other carriers’ networks, as they’re rumored to be getting a 10% cut on the service revenues generated by iPhone customers. Denying all filesystem access, as they’ve done, reduces the attack surface available to groups seeking to remove the carrier lock. But knowing - as Apple certainly does - that in doing so they’re also preventing software developers from continuing to write their iPhone wares, Apple is directly contradicting recent, published comments from senior execs (Phil Schiller, SVP marketing included) proclaiming what I’ll call official ambivalence toward the developer community.
There’s more to the story. A recent Apple job post suggests that they might still be holding onto the Web as a development platform notion for all but Apple’s closest partners.
Updates on attempts from the community to break the latest protections can be found on Engadget, Gizmodo, Nate True’s blog, and the iPhone IRC channels on irc.osx86.hu.
† I say “relatively” uncharted because many of the iPhone’s APIs mirror or closely resemble counterparts on the Mac version of OS X.
Greetings. I'm Eric Litman, I'm an Internet entrepreneur, investor and executive, and I run a mobile ad network called 
Every once in a while you come across people and ideas you like so much that you just can help but want to help them. And then of that broad group, there are the rare few who don’t really need your help but it makes you want to help even more. I’ve recently met those very guys, and am so in like with them that I’ve decided to join Trace Wax, Lukman Ramsey and Andy Breen on their advisory board.
Adam Ostrow at 
Jason Calacanis today 
A few months ago I bought a couple of 
Apple’s most recent update to the iPhone’s base software, 
