Kickstarter: get customers to fund the project

When I first heard of crowdfunding back in late 2010, I didn't think much of it.  I remember thinking that  micro-financing would be one idea to fund technology start-ups.  But quickly dismissed the feasibility of the idea because of logistics of raising money through many individual investors and lack of insight provided by experienced VC firms.  Money from crowd would not be smart money unlike VC funding.

About year and half later, Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites are proving me wrong.  Kickstarter lets you pitch your idea to masses with quick video clip and a webpage.  If you have a cool product, people might support you to build your product.  If enough people show interest of getting it built, project gets funded and you can get started on your project.

One genius idea with Kickstarter is this: Investors are also customers.  By launching Kickstarter project, project owner is not just looking to raise the money.  What he also gets is many engaged customers and their invaluable feedback even before product gets built in scale.

Determining whether market is there and willing to pay for the product is not an easy thing to test.  But Kickstarter elegantly solves that market research problem along with raising cash to fund the project.  Brilliant.

A poster child project that is being funded by Kickstarter is Pebble E-Paper Watch:

At the time of writing this blog, it received $7.47 million from 50,461 backers.  The project still has 17 more days to go.  That's not a bad place to be for a young start-up.  It it had not been Kickstarter, Pebble would have to seek outside capital and their ownership would have been diluted far more than where they find themselves now.  And that's not counting thousands of comments from enthused customers who cannot wait to get their hands on the product.

That's the power of crowdfunding.

Tim O'Reilly: The guy with the most data wins

Tim O'Reilly has been talking about impact of location data.  He references Google Autonomous Vehicle and Alohar Mobile during his interview by Forbes editor Jon Bruner.



Tim O'Reilly spoke with Jon Bruner about impact of location and other data
at Where Conference 2012 back in April.

What caught my attention was his view about how our data consumption pattern will shift.  Instead of collecting and serving the raw data log, end users will expect to see how to make sense of the data.  Given different context, whether it's getting from point A to point B, increasing marketing effectiveness, or analyzing personal behavior, users expect to get help in solving their own problems at hand.  Raw data themselves are critical ingredients, but they need to be processed and analyzed by correct algorithms to solves the problems at hand.

Big data generated from Google Street Map is
one of critical ingredients to Google autonomous car;
Tim O'Reilly presented the
slides in Washington D.C.on March 30, 2012.

Having large data is where it all starts.  With multiple sensors available on connected smartphones, it has become easier than ever to collect location data.  In addition, once all our online social network persona data are combined, it will create rich set of data that we can all analyze.

One aspect of big data revolution is how big data will change our personal lives.  We will have far more data about ourselves and people around us to run analytics on them.

This also means that we'll have to be mindful of where we store our data.  We all need to be aware of what data that we share with whom because in larger sense we are in fact the sources for the companies that we choose.  We are not just consumers for these big data companies.  We are also the sources.

Marc Andreessen: Software will eat the world

I recently came across a couple of articles about Marc Andreessen's 5 big ideas on Wired and Forbes.  Here are his 5 big ideas starting from his Netscape days:

1. Everyone will have the web
2. The browser will be the operating system
3. Web business will live in the cloud
4. Everything will be social
5. Software will eat the world

If you have not known Marc's career as entrepreneurs for past 15 years before his VC career, these may sound like his current investment strategy.  All of them are still applicable today.  We are still in the middle of browser based development, HTML5 and javascript-based technologies.  We are yet to see the peak of SaaS. Social is literally changing the world as we speak.

Although all these seem so much relevant even today, these were the ideas that he had as basis for launching his own companies.  He was ahead of the market with Loudcloud and Ning, both of which he launched after leaving Netscape.




Marc Andreessen had on-stage interview at Box.net event last year;
Marc talked about software eating the world starting at 11:50 minutes.

I agree with Marc's point.  Software is already eating the world, starting with retail business.  Netflix is eating (some might say already ate) Blockbuster.  Amazon is eating Barnes and Noble and BestBuy.  Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are educating internet users of what's possible with seamlessly connected and always on-line communication network.  End users are bringing in their own mobile devices at work to fill the gap between enterprise software and iPhone apps that can be downloaded for next to nothing.

Largely three factors driving this disruption:

1. Explosion of internet-connected mobile device
2. Cost of launching a new service is dramatically lower now than 10 years ago
3. Consumers leading the technology, not enterprise

Combination of these three factors are making the next 4-5 years very critical time for all businesses.  It will be existential threat to those incumbents that cannot adopt the new changes while it will be great opportunities for new players to quickly scale up the market share.

Friday inspiration: be awesome, live in present tense

I stumbled upon Chris Strom's blog yesterday through Twitter.  He's the principal consultant at EEE Computes consulting.  And he's been writing a blog a day every day for past 366 days on topics that he did not know before.  Through this process, he wrote 3 books and he is on his way to continue learning the latest web programming techniques and to continue on his daily blogging streak.

It's really inspiring to see what he has done over the last year.  Chris Strom recounts how he started doing this:

"How did I do it?

Blogged every, single day. For one full year. 366 days. Every day. No matter what.

I honestly don't know why I started doing this. One night I had a brilliant idea and before I stopped and thought about how stupid it was, I publicly committed myself to doing it."

It was as simple as that.  He was able to write 3 books on topics that he knew nothing about by committing himself to write a blog every single day for a full year.  Rain or shine, in sickness or in health, whether he's off to a vacation or came home late from night out.  It was as simple as sitting down to answer the question that he thought of, find out facts about the problem, and answering them in his daily blog.

The reason why we get amazed by Chris' streak is because we are seeing the entire corpus of his work all at once.  But that's not what Chris wrestled with.  What he did was to focus on what he had to do now, what he had to do today.  To borrow his words, he "tricked" himself into being awesome therefore he had to be awesome everyday for a past year.  In other words, he was operating entirely in present tense.

“What day is it,?" asked Pooh.

"It's today," squeaked Piglet.

"My favorite day," said Pooh.

Chris references RadioLab's You vs. You episode on his blog.  It talks about elderly lady named Zelda quitting smoking in cold turkey after thirty years of smoking, and how she was able to match long term goal of quitting with immediate action of choosing between donating $5,000 to KKK or lighting up to smoke.  And guess where she got the idea of donating $5,000 to KKK.  It was Zelda's idea.  By prescribing her own medicine and committing herself to it, she was able to choose between two choices at each moment.  Again, she was also making her choices in present tense at each moment.




If we think about it, there are only presents.  Although our minds wander off often and think about what might happen in future or what has happened in the past, what really matters is what you do now.

Live in the moment.  Make a decision to do something awesome.  And do that every day.

LinkedIn iPad app: iPad is not a bigger iPhone

LinkedIn launched their new iPad app yesterday.  I had a few minutes to play around with it, and I like it.  LinkedIn has spent time thinking about how iPad users are using tablet, and what LinkedIn users are looking for when they open the iPad app.

From calendar with participants mapped to LinkedIn users
to who viewed my profile, new LinkedIn
iPad app has something for everyone.
 

When I use tablet, I am rarely in my upright sitting position.  I pick up my iPad and go slouch on my couch or climb on to my bed leaning against headboard.  Tablet is a preferred device for consuming content.  It's a perfect reading and browsing device.  And LinkedIn demonstrates that they understand how tablet is different from smartphone.  Smartphone is for messaging.  Tablet is for reading and browsing.  Contrast that with Facebook iPad app, you'll see the difference in LinkedIn's approach.

There are some rough edges, however.  Some characteristics of Version 1.0 product were sluggish response to scrolling when browsing list of connections with new positions and back button not working consistently.  But these are something you would expect from newly released app.  Considering it is completely redesigned application, it's quite understandable.  I'm sure LinkedIn will release quick successive updates in coming weeks to improve their V1.0 product shortcomings.

As I find more interesting content from my LinkedIn News, this new LinkedIn iPad app has all the potential to become the app for my curated news source.

User Interface: if it's not helping, it's hurting.

Over the years I used and built software product, I developed my own sense of what a good design is.  I won't repeat many good design tips that are available from popular websites.  Instead I wanted to share a few of my thoughts around what a good software product design should be and why good design will increasingly become more important for software products in future.

First, one of my good UI design theories:

All elements in UI should be necessary to carry out intended user story.

Another way to state this is that any UI element that is not necessary will distract user.  Therefore it will diminish the overall usability of product.  Anything that is not required to carry out intended task should be removed.

UI design at best;
click the button to get the placebo effect.

Behind this theory is the idea that product should communicate clearly what it does to all users.  With a quick scan (and research shows people scan, not read HTML pages), user should be able to figure out what the product is supposed to do.  This can only be done if product is designed to solve a specific problem that can be clearly articulated to someone on the street.

Here's why I think it's getting even more critical to do a few things and do them right.  It's because cost of building an application is dropping fast, and each application is becoming more specialized to solve a few specific problems.  Exhibit A is 500,000 available applications on Apple App Store alone.

It used to be case that users were happy to use a handful of software products installed on their personal computer.  Think back in early 1990's.  When people needed to create a spreadsheet to track P&L, they used Microsoft Excel.  When they needed a quick way to maintain list of customer contacts, they used Excel as well.  That's why over the years Excel's feature set got bloated, and added all kinds of features like graphing, pivot table, built-in functions and scripting options.

It will be silly to start using Excel for all your book keeping.  There are many other excellent tools available as SaaS and on mobile devices, often multiple purpose-built applications to solve specific problems.

With explosion of mobile applications and user's short attention span, each software product must be able to communicate clearly what it does and how it can help user solve her problem.

Any element that does not add value is adding clutter.  Avoid them like pests.

Twitter IPA: good start to fix a big problem

Last week Twitter announced that they will start implementing Innovator's Patent Agreement (IPA).  Core idea of IPA is a novel one.  It's Twitter's attempt at addressing broken software patent system.  Instead of seeking legislative overhaul of our current patent system, Twitter is declaring that they will use their software patents only as defensive measure, and the control of patent, if used in other than "Defensive Purpose", will remain with inventors, not with Twitter.  Twitter is encouraging other software companies to follow suit.

I like the idea.  There are way too much resources being wasted because of patent trolls suing companies just to monetize their patent portfolio.  Many of these patent trolls are not even original inventors.  They buy broadly applicable software patents from inventors or companies with sole purpose of suing others.

Patent infringement suits have real cost.  Just yesterday Facebook announced that they are buying about 650 patents that Microsoft acquired from AOL recently for $550 million in cash.  Earlier Microsoft bought hundreds of these patents at $1.06 billion from AOL.  This is a good example of how one bad actor (Yahoo suing Facebook for software infringement) can have ripple effect on how all other players in the market.

Current software patent system is broken.  The right thing is to fix the current system which creates drag for everyone in the tech industry.  Company should not be allowed to use software patent to sue others unless they have implemented a product using the patent and using software patent to protect themselves.  There are many cases that still fall outside this category (like Apple suing Samsung and other smartphone makers), but it would eliminate many obvious patent trolls.

I applaud Twitter for taking leadership role in improving software patent system.