Came across this video as I was reading Brad Feld’s blog. Wasn’t at the Web 2.0 Expo NY, I wonder how many web 2.0 conferences (or at least conferences covering the meme) there have been over the past couple of years.
Anyway, the keynote by Fred Wilson was an interesting one. If you didn’t work the web during the first online boom, it is a great history lesson. If you did, particularly in a NYC-based company, it is a great stroll down memory lane. The late 90’s was a phenomenal time for the web in NYC with a lot of great lessons, both good and bad. Fred discusses these and the companies that really built the web presence in NY.
I was surprised to hear Fred’s funding analysis regarding the number of early stage investments in NYC start-ups as compared to Silicon Valley. I would never have guessed the numbers were converging at such a rate since the 90s as it is. In fact, I would have guessed that the gap has widened, perhaps it is only the coverage of the start-ups that has widened and remained very Valley-heavy.
Final note, also couldn’t agree more that the term Silicon Alley needs to find its end. Working in the Alley in the late 90’s, it was a cool moniker at first but for some reason always struck me as positioning NYC as “second follow” rather than innovative leader. There is some great innovation coming out of NY, particularly in media and advertising. There is no reason that NYC needs to be tied to the Valley by name, in fact there is no chip developing that I know of happening in NYC so does the name even make sense?
Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been taking a serious look at the agile methodology and looking at whether we would benefit from employing it in a more purist manner. It is not completely new to us but any agile purist out there would say using a hybrid product development framework is well, a hybrid and doesn’t count. Like using day old used coffee grinds. So doing a bit more research on the Scrum framework and the agile methodology, and as I get more immersed into the agile practice in a pure sense, the more interesting it becomes.
One of my colleagues, Daniel Bullington, sent a Google Video on a talk that Ken Schwaber, co-inventor of SCRUM, gave back in 2006. The video is below but here is a classic excerpt about the value of SCRUM that Ken gave in the talk:
If you have a team of outstanding engineers that are using excellent engineering tools, have engineering practices down pat, understand the business domain and aren’t interrupted to have all the resources they need, then you can use Scrum. While it’s true that people like that can build an increment of software each iteration. That’s good.
However, Scrum works with idiots. You can take a group of idiots, that maybe didn’t even go to school, don’t understand computer science, don’t understand software engineering techniques, hate each other, don’t understand the business domains, have lousy engineering tools and uniformly, they will produce “crap” every increment. This is good!
You want to know where you are at the end of every iteration.
Okay, I’m probably exaggerating but it sure makes a good headline. At this point, most have heard the news that Automattic, parent company of Wordpress (which powers this blog) acquired IntenseDebate for an undisclosed sum. Offical news here, here and here.
IntenseDebate is one of the major blog commenting platforms out there. The other is Disqus, the one I use on this blog and one I tend to favor based on overall reliability and feature set. Both companies clearly get the value of commenting, user-generated content and the real power of conversation aggregation. But if I were to put the two on a score card on execution, Disqus demonstrates real innovative thinking on how to put an overall platform together and paint their vision of what conversation aggregation can do and how to do it. This was evidenced by their very early integration into Wordpress and Daniel Ha’s continued work to integrate into FriendFeed once they emerged a critical aggregation player as well.
But, what is also clear is Wordpress understands the value and importance of the comments on blogs (not that they didn’t before). And as the major blog platform, Wordpress has the value chain power to use this strategic acquisition to emerge as the leader in blogging as well as commenting. And it is for this simple but important reason, that they acquisition is a huge coup for IntenseDebate in prepping for the future to potentially become the ultimate winner in this segment. There is a sheer numbers game here and by Wordpress rolling Intense’s toolkit out as part of their builds, it will instantaneously deploy Intense’s technology to blogs everywhere. That removes one key obstacle for Intense that Disqus will continue to have to overcome in order to gain market share: convincing blog owners to install. Now, for IntenseDebate, it happens automatically.
Let’s hope that Wordpress remains agnostic in their approach to continue to allow third party developers to build, promote and florish inside the Wordpress platform. I would like to continue to remain a Disqus user and expect to see fantastic things from them. I will be keen to see how Disqus responds because we could be witnessing a business case of value chain integration that will be very tough to withstand.
November 3rd and 4th will be here before we know it, and with it will come the second annual Defrag conference. I had the pleasure of participating on a panel last year but I would be remiss in saying that simply attending was a fantastic experience. The discussion spanned a nice set of topics and the goal of the conference is to be probing into emerging topics in an intimate setting rather than covering the same topics that all of the mainstream conferences are covering.
Just by taking a look at this year’s agenda, it is set to not disappoint. Great speakers and intriguing topics end-to-end. Just by skimming through the topics slated, this year’s conference is really going to be probing into the future edges of some critical topics we are dealing with today such as identity, data portability, lifestream and next level discovery. The current state of topics is obviously touched on but the goal it to really probe, make assumption and set hypothesis on where we are going.
I’m happy to have an opportunity to participate again as a speaker in a session called “Around the Horn” moderated by Paul Kedrosky. My co-panelists will be John Kembel from HiveLive and Jeff Herman from Fuser. With the Around the Horn theme, who knows what topics we’ll be covering. Yes, be afraid, be very afraid.
NOTE: Defrag is still running a bonus upon bonus discount special for the rest of the week. You can take advantage of it by using code ‘lp1′ - that will get you an additional $100 off of current early bird prices.
Got the iPhone last week, had to do it. Nice, shiny device….good. Stunningly clean interface….good. Embedded iPod….good. Enterprise Exchange with ‘push’ support…..good. And that is before I enter my vehicle.
Earlier this week, I was already impressed with Wordpress blogging capability from the iPhone. Today, I wanted to put the iPhone through a couple of test cases with the multimedia system in my car, particularly the bluetooth phone system and the auxiliary iPod connection. These are two things I did not think of regarding compatibility before getting the device so I was moderately concerned since my wife is already using my 80Gb iPod Classic. Anyway, I digress.
First test: Bluetooth pairing to be able to use the iPhone with the internal Bose system in the car. Worked flawlessly. In fact, better than the Blackberry Curve. With the Curve, only entries us to the letter ‘N’ would sync with the car’s directory service (was never able to fix this). With the iPhone, full directoy capability.
Second test: iPod auxiliary connection. Upon connecting, I was met with a message on the iPhone that said “This device is not compatible with this system.” uh oh Houston. Then a nice friendly message popped up and said “Would you like to switch to airplane mode?”. Why yes I would and then instant music and full access to playlists, etc. And it charges as well! So, the iPod works with the only downside being I have to choose between phone service or playing the iPod. Perhaps Apple will be able to lick this with a later version.
To close, one more point I would like to make since I’m on the topic of driving. You can type on the iPhone with one hand. I’ve heard many reports that compared to the Blackberry you can’t do it. With this, I disagree. In fact, I typed this entire blog post while driving! (just kidding) But I did type a quick Twitter message just to see if I could do it. And no, I won’t do it again because it is not safe, I know this. It’s okay though if you are at a traffic light (a long traffic light).
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November 3rd and 4th will be here before we know it, and with it will come the second annual 
Disqus must be Disgusted
Okay, I’m probably exaggerating but it sure makes a good headline. At this point, most have heard the news that Automattic, parent company of Wordpress (which powers this blog) acquired IntenseDebate for an undisclosed sum. Offical news here, here and here.
IntenseDebate is one of the major blog commenting platforms out there. The other is Disqus, the one I use on this blog and one I tend to favor based on overall reliability and feature set. Both companies clearly get the value of commenting, user-generated content and the real power of conversation aggregation. But if I were to put the two on a score card on execution, Disqus demonstrates real innovative thinking on how to put an overall platform together and paint their vision of what conversation aggregation can do and how to do it. This was evidenced by their very early integration into Wordpress and Daniel Ha’s continued work to integrate into FriendFeed once they emerged a critical aggregation player as well.
But, what is also clear is Wordpress understands the value and importance of the comments on blogs (not that they didn’t before). And as the major blog platform, Wordpress has the value chain power to use this strategic acquisition to emerge as the leader in blogging as well as commenting. And it is for this simple but important reason, that they acquisition is a huge coup for IntenseDebate in prepping for the future to potentially become the ultimate winner in this segment. There is a sheer numbers game here and by Wordpress rolling Intense’s toolkit out as part of their builds, it will instantaneously deploy Intense’s technology to blogs everywhere. That removes one key obstacle for Intense that Disqus will continue to have to overcome in order to gain market share: convincing blog owners to install. Now, for IntenseDebate, it happens automatically.
Let’s hope that Wordpress remains agnostic in their approach to continue to allow third party developers to build, promote and florish inside the Wordpress platform. I would like to continue to remain a Disqus user and expect to see fantastic things from them. I will be keen to see how Disqus responds because we could be witnessing a business case of value chain integration that will be very tough to withstand.
Sphere: Related ContentPosted in: social software, strategy, user-generated content.
Tagged: Automattic · blog commenting · Disqus · Intense Debate · Wordpress