Gripes and Grins

Grin: First Round Capital, funny guys, great holiday e-card

This just landed in my inbox this morning.  I really like the guys at First Round Capital.  They've never given me money, but I really like these guys. Just watch the first 3 minutes if you're short on time, totally worth it.  

 

 

Grin: Three new ideas in media discovery that you need to follow

I'm back from my annual bout with blog fade.  Several startups have asked me to blog on their product ideas, and I'm sharing three ideas that you need to be following -- KoiTunes, Threadbox and Zoodles.  

Zoodles is close to my heart.  Early child development and education has been a part of my identity for the last two years thanks to the popularity of SmartyCard.  Last summer I met with Zoodles founder Mark Williamson, whom I'd met three years ago when he was heading product marketing at Dash -- a networked GPS that was acquired by RIM.  Zoodles was in an early stage of development when I first saw it last summer, but I was in love with the idea of Zoodles and hopeful that Mark could put together a round of financing and execute well. About a month ago, Gina Aumiller let me know that Zoodles had closed financing, and I had the distinct pleasure of looking at Zoodles again. 

Zoodles is important because it's tackling the idea of co-browsing while focusing on early childhood development and education.  If discovery is the new black in Silicon Valley, Zoodles is the equivalent of the "it" designer in youth fashion. 

From my post in SmartyCard, I watched users skew younger and younger, and the issue of how to design for co-browsing loomed large on the horizon for the last two years.  Zoodles doesn't shy from the browser -- a simple AIR client install, and you're off and running. 

In Zoodles, you have a very clean registration, and a very simplistic GUI that beckons the parent and child to click and explore.  Children see the boxes and the mix of content gets them excited.  Parents still control the session, but after a few simple mouse clicks, children start to understand the arrows and they begin to explore.  And, the right content is already there.  It's a great first effort.  I'd love to see parents drag and drop content into their feed, sharing content they feel appropriate and crowd-sourcing more great independent productions for kids.  But, I don't want to overlook what Zoodles has already done because creating something so simple is very difficult.  Check out the screens below for example art, but make sure you get over to Zoodles.com if you have a child ages 2-4. 

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Threadbox is very emotional for me as well.  While I'm very hopeful that my good friends Michael Cerda and Ben Dean will "win" with their attempt to re-imagine email, the emotions I'm feeling right now are more about pain and remorse more than anything else.  In May, I adopted a corporate deployment of Gmail and I've been breaking office furniture ever since. 

You might know that I played a big role in rethinking email at Stata Labs (acquired by Yahoo!), the company that launched "the Google of email" even before Gmail.  So, to watch Google put out such an inferior product with such crappy conversation rendering drives me absolutely insane.  I HATE gmail, about as much as I LOVE Threadbox -- which is to say a lot. 

I started using Threadbox (then CC: Betty) last fall in Alpha, but I was able to use Threadbox at work last March and April during the open beta.  With some 100M power emailers in the known universe, people are universally lost in their email -- they can't find things because integrated search is weak in webmail products.  But, in the last 15 years, a new Internet discovery metaphor has emerged to compete with search-- human association is the new dominant discovery mode thanks to every social network invented (yeah, I'm including eBay). 

What I love about Threadbox is that the default views are threads -- email threads -- and clicking on a person/contact lets me see all of our conversations, private or public.  Threadbox is perfect for me because when I'm digging through thousands of opened and unopened emails, I'm looking for a specific email from a specific person, I'm not just browsing emails.  That's what busy people do -- they dig through email with a purpose, a sense of urgency, and, for me at least, Threadbox is the natural UI for today's power emailer.  For an example of Threadbox organization, see the screenshot of threads between me and Threadbox founder Michael Cerda.

 

Music has been close to my heart forever.  Be it discovering rare wax, chatting up A&R guys at SF music venues or listening to new music podcasters like CC Chapman and Julien Smith, I'm always interested in finding out what other people are listening to.  More importantly, I'm always interested in knowing what three other people are listening to -- those people are Richard Brewer Hay, Matt Marenghi and Tom Damico (founder of KoiTunes).  I've basically figured out that all other "friends" with recommendations aren't really for me.  There are a few folks with good musical taste overlap, like Chris Hanaka and Laurence Scot (of The Famous), but with all my connections to the music industry, I really need a musical filter that just tunes into what Matt, Tom and Richard are sampling and buying. 

I worked with Tom at WebTV years ago.  Tom was the BD head in charge of integrating search into the first Web and TV shared experience to find commercial success.  Somehow, it's appropriate that ten years later, Tom is still focused on media discovery.  Only now, Tom is fully leveraging the twitter channel for microblogging of music recommendations-- one of the most popular subjects in the "twitterverse".  

You need to sign up for Koitunes second beta now.  I used Koitunes earlier this Spring, and Tom's brief beta revealed enough promise and generated enough excitement to impress during some Seattle area startup events.  Koitunes was like tuning into a Pandora or LaLa that my friends were tuning for me.  I could even listen to their recommendations through Pandora or LaLa, which expedited buying, which is nice.  The GUI was a work in progress, but I think Koitunes has massive potential -- especially when extending to services like NetFlix, GameFly or even Amazon. 

The basic point of all of these startups is that discovery and human recommendations are important again. With all of the world's content suddenly accessible, opinions and influence are paramount.  Search sucks again.  Search companies are great at indexing and advertising, but they're losing ground to social nets in media discovery.  Apps have been democratized via iTunes and Facebook, so big market opportunities are interesting to me right now.  I can't think of bigger opportunities than email, music and education, so pay attention to Threadbox, Koitunes and Zoodles.

Email is about to be hot once again

I've spent the last 15 years working at the intersection of digital media and interpersonal communications.  Sometimes, I worked more on digital media -- PodShow and Gazillion.  Sometimes I worked more on communications -- Jangl and Stata Labs.  Sometimes, the two collide, as was the case with WebTV. 

What I'm fascinated by continuously is how digital media is shared and recommended by people.  Even the broadcast model fascinates me, but for the most part I'm very much focused on personal recommendations and media sharing. My co-workers past and present know this, because I get passionate about feature-functionality that enables people to publish, syndicate and aggregate referrals.  Examples of my pet features would be the RSS feed reader in Bloomba (now WordPerfect Mail), rich email and IRC in WebTV (now MSNTV), texting in Jangl and the Groups feature in Utterli.  Right now, I'm working hard on a facebook integration of SmartyCard (for moms). 

This month is shaping up to be an awesome month for my interests: Per the Alpha user group email I received this morning, Threadbox is launching in a matter of days, and KoiTunes just launched yesterday.  Both of these companies are focused on interpersonal communications, and they may seem dispirit from the outside view, but they're really quite similar looking from the inside out.  I'll post about KoiTunes and Threadbox after I've used them more. But, Threadbox is really interesting in terms of the hot-once-again email space. 

On the topic of email, here are two really interesting posts from MediaPost for people following digital media and interpersonal communications from the email angle. 

Laurie Sullivan has a great take on the rise of video email.  Chalk full of data points. Ten years ago, my first intro to video email was InBoxTV, a startup founded by Canesta's founder Jim Spare.  Thankfully Jim recongized it was too early for video-in-email, because he started building Canesta, which is trailblazing 3D-input into television in a market that is sometimes described as naturalUI or gesture-based UI.  Just think Minority Report...but, I digress.

In one of the most relevant topics of the day for marketers, Blaine Mathieu asks social or mobile?.

It seems like natural course of campaign development for most consumer and business services puts the web service first, and, inevitably, the marketing guy is asked to prioritize mobile or social next.  It's a different decision for each marketer, but Blaine's story helps frame the decision -- starting with "It depends".