MissingMethod

The Hollywood Reporter did a survey of TV execs’ attitudes about online video, and WillVideoForFood posted a list of the 10 dumbest things they said. Here are my favorites:

1. Warner Brothers: My personal experience is people are watching more television than ever before, and they’re watching in more and various ways.
2. CBS: We don’t see it all that differently from how we looked at “Entertainment Tonight” and those facets of publicity when they came along a long time ago. It was just another way to get eyeballs to your show.
3. Fox: Is it impacting the way we develop shows? Not really. We do look at the DVD marketplace and the international marketplace and try to be savvy about the arenas that we go into.
4. Lionsgate: We support the marketing side of it completely, but as it potentially devalues the back-end, it’s not so interesting for us.
5. Fox: Quite frankly, I think the chances of finding someone (on a viral video site) who is very interesting and a person you can build a show around are slim.

The scary thing about being an entrepreneur right now is that you risk being swallowed by all the hype. For a primer on what’s wrong with Web 2.0, check out Zeldman’s article, Web 3.0, or Russle Beatie’s WTF 2.0.

There’s so much excitement (much of it legitimate) about new technologies (like Rails), new ways of using old technologies (AJAX), and new communications vehicles (MySpace, blogs, RSS, podcasts, etc.), that’s it’s easy to think that any idea can be successful. But’s that wrong.

The fundementals of business haven’t changed. You still have to sell something people want to buy. People don’t buy Ruby on Rails or AJAX or podcasting. Russle said it best:

Break it down - it seems pretty simple. You create a product or service with some inherent value, and then make money from that value and if the money you earn is more than it took you to produce that value, you’ve got a business.

Matt Mower was kind enough to tease out a reasonable top ten list out of this post on suggestions for not being a dot-bomb 2.0:

1. Have a revenue model
2. Be a complete business not a feature
3. Affect real people not just bloggers
4. Get a real memorable name
5. Don’t intertwine your fate with Web2.0
6. Get honest feedback
7. Make sure your revolution really is coming
8. Make sure your market can support you
9. Don’t expect to be (or be bought by) Google
10. Have fun

I agree with these for the most part, although I’m not sure about the order. I’d put #10, “Have fun” much higher on the list; having fun makes everything else easier.

One point that’s missing is “Build something people will pay for”. Maybe it’s implied in #1, but I worry that a lot of people set out to build something they think people will want, rather than figuring out what the market needs first and then building that. If you’re building a product for yourself first and others second (i.e. 37signals’ Basecamp or my own Feedmarker), that’s fine, because you already know what the customer wants. But if not, you need to validate that your idea fills a market need.

Another one I would have liked to see on there is “Try building something that doesn’t depend on the internet”. Maybe this belongs after #3 (affect real people). It’s a big world out there, and most of it still happens off-line. I know it sounds counterintuitive these days, but I think there are still a lot of great ways to make money that aren’t based online. Of course most business will have (or should have) and online component. But I’d like to hear more about the ones that work in the “old world”.

These days, more and more new computers are shipping with built in webcams and microphones. That means new business opportunities are opening up around letting people create content with their computer over the web. Odeo and its child venture/experiment, Hellodeo are two of these; Odeo lets you record audio through your built in mic and save it to the web, Hellodeo does the same with video.

Most people think that to be able to do something like this, you need to purchase Adobe/Macromedia’s Flash Media Server, which is so expensive they don’t even list the price on the site (think thousands of dollars).
Red5 is an open source Flash server. It’s the open source counterpart to Flash Media Server, and it can do a lot of the same things, for free! With Red5, you can accomplish the kinds of advanced user interaction you never thought were within your reach:

• Real-time Multi-player gaming
  • No more turn based gaming for Flash
  • Say goodbye to polling a server for updates
• Multi-user video chat
• Stream Music/Audio
  • Ondemand entertainment
• Stream video
  • Ondemand education
  • Ondemand entertainment
• Broacast Live Streams to anyone with a flash client
  • Live Concerts
  • Online conferences
  • Exranet company meetings
  • Screensharing / whiteboard applications
• Record Video
  • Online Resume’s for job seekers
  • Online tutorials
  • Online Lectures
• Record Audio
  • Online music colaboration

Getting started requires a little work (you’ll have to install and setup the server on your machine). But once it’s running, you can try out the packaged examples for a taste of what’s possible.

If you’re just itching for the next big Web 2.0 idea to build, start thinking about user-generated, real-time, collaborative audio and video. Red5 makes it possible.

‘Start pages’ are a solution in search of a problem. The new kid on this block is webwag, which has few differences from all the others (Google, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Protopage). Like the others, it’s well-executed, and like them, it doesn’t address a real need.

Personalized ’start pages’ are not new. Excite has had this feature for more than six years, and I don’t see anyone adding anything significant to the idea (no, prettier layouts and AJAX don’t count). It’s not an application most people need, and it’s not something I see many people using.

So why are so many companies still investing time and money trying to build a business around what, to me, seems like such a blatantly useless and uninteresting idea? I guess the idea of aggregating a person’s entire internet experience (mail, feeds, photos, search, etc.) would provide a lot of leverage with advertisers. And I suppose that’s exciting for venture capitalists, corporate leaders and entrepreneurs.
But it’s not exciting to me, and I get the feeling it’s not exciting to anyone else.

Just wanted to point out that I’ve made a few updates to Sneakology.com, the sneaker-afficionado social-networking site I helped build for RailsDay. I tweaked some of the copy and added a tips section that appears when you log in, all in hopes of lowering the initial barrier to entry and making the site a little more intuitive. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Last night’s first-ever was a great opportunity for business-owners, entrepreneurs, and developers to get together and share ideas. Organized by Dan Grigsby, and Luke Francl, the event drew attracted a diverse group of about 90 people who came to watch the six demos. A big thanks goes out to sponsors New Counsel, Ventera, and Slantwise Design for making the even possible.

The presenters were:

• Robert Metcalf of FlySpy.com, who showed us how visualizing the airfare marketplace can help people make better decisions about where and when to travel (I plan on using it to find a better airfare for my trip to RubyConf).
• JRuby’s Charlie Nutter, who (as always) wowed everyone with his guru-like understanding of how Ruby works.
• Jon Dahl, who talked about SaySwap, a video-game sharing site built in Ruby on Rails built by his company, Slantwise Design.
• Aaron Fulkerson of MindTouch talked about DekiWiki and Dream (sorry, I missed most of this one, anyone want to fill me in?).
• Garrick Van Buren showed off Feedseeder, a sweet-looking blog aggregator that tries to fix what a lot of other readers have gotten wrong. Best of all, Garrick told me he was able to learn a few things from looking at the Feedmarker source code! Go open source!
• Brian Huff demoed Bookmarkit.org, a free service that allows you to submit a bookmark to multiple social bookmarking sites with the greatest of ease.

I had the good-fortune of being asked to greet people at the door, so I got to meet more interesting peoplel than I’m capable of remembering (sadly). But it was definitely encouraging to see so many other entrepreneurial people gathered in one place; makes you want to get out there and do something!

Sneakology.com is coming soon. LIVE! In the meantime, check out some of our competition:

• Cuppin by Ray ?
• TODO by Erik Gregg
• Concourse by Phil Hagelberg, Cristi Balan and Ferdinand Svehla
• Advisr by Ezra Zygmuntowicz
• Good To Garden by Will Emigh
• SimpleForms by Jon Maddox

Also don’t miss the RailsDay tag on Flickr; lots of funny photos of tired programmers.

Check out this table showing the valuations of the top ten Web sites in spring, 1999:

Look at those names! Lycos, GeoCities, GO Network? What happened to these guys? And of course, look who wasn’t even on the list.

Ahh…remember the good old days?

via InternetNews.com

Terry Semel, chief executive of Yahoo, in an interview on the NYT’s DealBook blog:

Mr. Semel talked about how his company considered buying Google soon after he joined Yahoo in 2001, but decided to pass. Google’s founders asked $1 billion for their company, and then $3 billion a few weeks later, even as they insisted they did not want to sell, Mr. Semel said.

With Google’s market capitalization sitting at more than $100 billion today, either price seems like steal.

Just a thought: would Google be worth $100 billion today if Yahoo had bought them in 2001? Probably not.

It’s easy to say “we should bought Google when Google was small”. But once you owned it, what would you have done with it? There must be a reason why Yahoo’s market capitalization is less than half of Google’s.

Kat Orland over at SEOMoz spent a long time putting together a really useful list of the best Web2.0 sites in 30 categories. It’s really nicely done; succint and well-organized. Check out the awards here.

Feedmarker  got an honorable mention in the “Blog Guides” category. At some point I’ll have to do a tally and see how many of the winners are using Ruby on Rails. I’m willing to bet it’ll be a disproportionately high number.