ReadWriteTalk

We re back with another episode of ASE (Alt Search Engines Live.)  On this episode, Charles Knight (editor of AltSearchEngines) interviews two founders from alternative search engine  who both started in the health vertical - Kosmix  man versus machine .  Hope you enjoy this episode of ASE Live!

In this edition of the Semantic Web Gang, regular members are joined by two guests to discuss developments in the display and navigation of Semantic Web data. With so much effort being devoted to the back-office manipulation and storage of semantic data, it is all too easy to forget the opportunities - and challenges - posed in inviting mainstream users to ‘browse the graph’ of semantic data. With expert contributions from MIT’s David Karger and the DBpedia team’s Christian Becker, the Gang sets about ensuring that the Interface is not forgotten. Gang regular Daniel Lewis was unavailable for this call, and OpenLink’s Ted Thibodeau participated on his behalf.

On this episode of the Semantic Web Gang, the members discuss their impressions of two recent conferences that set out to explore semantic technologies in the context of business applications - specifically The Semantic Technology Conference & the Linked Data Planet Conference. The call also closes with discussion of news from Hakia, which had just announced the imminent availability of a new API.  Gang regular Tom Heath was unavailable for this call, and Talis CTO Ian Davis participated on his behalf.

We decided to join the iPhone mania and focus this entire episode on the iPhone.  Steve O Hear from Last 100 provides some great insight as do Richard MacManus, Marshall Kirkpatrick re interested in participating in future shows.

On the third episode of RWW Live, I m joined by Richard MacManus t been rumored to be acquiring Yahoo) The Powerset acquisition by Microsoft Then Marshall joined to discuss the rumor that Summize was acquired by Twitter Hope you enjoy this episode of RWW Live!

We have gotten really positive feedback about RWWLive - so we re pleased to be introducing another regular podcast from the ReadWriteWeb network blog Alt Search Engines - ASE Live. The first episode is focused on music alternative search engines.    Charles Knight (Alt Search Engine s editor) interviews LaurieAnne (LA) Lassek of Seeqpod and Aza Raskin of Songaza. Hope you enjoy ASE Live! (You can see Alt Search Engine s full coverage here.)

On this first episode, I’m joined by Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb.  As well as, Steve O’Hear from Last 100 and Charles Knight from Alt Search Engines.  We discuss a number of big events over the last week including: 3G iPhone New Approaches by the Alternative Search Engines & a plug by Charles for his new favorite Alt Search Engine - Tag Galaxy The Future of Yahoo! Hope you enjoy this episode of RWW Live! As a reminder, if you enjoy RWW Live and the other ReadWriteTalk interviews, you can subscribe in your favorite RSS reader or iTunes.

Introduction On this episode of ReadWriteTalk, we talk to Pete Koomen and Paul McDonald product managers for Google App Engine. Tomorrow at the Google IO conference, the App Engine team will be announcing a few new features including: new APIs for image manipulation and integrating memcached like functionality (update after interview from Paul: API created by Brad Fitzpatrick).   They also are going to be releasing information around pricing to purchase additional computing resources beyond the free throttled access and eliminating the wait-list so all developers can have access. We discussed these announcements as well as the current state of App Engine on the episode. Finally, I apologize in advance for some of the audio quality in parts of this interview. We are actively working on improving the sound quality for these interviews and should have a new solution in the next few weeks. Links Google App Engine Overview Google App Engine Blog Google IO Conference Transcript is coming later this week

Introduction On this episode of ReadWriteTalk, we sit down with Chris Tolles the CEO of Topix.  Topix is an interesting hyper-local media company.  The company uses a blend of algorithms and human editors to aggregate and classify news stories into different topics, with the majority of stories being classified into topics about different geographies.  Interestingly, newspaper corporations have responded by supporting Topix both as investors and now some even as customers.  On this episode, we discuss both how Topix works and Chris view of the hyper-local industry in general. We also spend a significant amount of time talking about Topix s current and future business model, because I believe they may be a little further along then some of the hyper-local web startups. [Transcript coming soon.]

Today we re pleased to announce a new biweekly feature on ReadWriteTalk - a live discussion with the Read Write Web network authors we re calling RWW Live.  On this first episode, I m joined by Alex Iskold and Richard MacManus from Read Write Web.  As well as, Steve O Hear from Last 100 and Charles Knight from Alt Search Engines.  We discuss a number of big events over the last week including: The Semantic  Technology Conference The widely anticipated (yet not confirmed) 3G iPhone and SDK Microsoft s Plan to Provide Cash Rebates on Searches Finally, we end with Yahoo! / Microsoft predictions Hope you enjoy this inagural episode of RWW Live!  Note: We re working with TalkShoe to produce RWW Live, so in the future you ll actually be able to join and participate.

In May s edition of the Semantic Web Gang, regular members are joined by special guest Barney Pell from Powerset. We talk about Powerset s unveiling of their public beta earlier this week, hearing Barney s thoughts on the process, press coverage, and the reactions of real users. The Gang also discuss their reactions to the launch of Yahoo! SearchMonkey, and look ahead to the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose. More information here.

A few month s ago, we syndicated the Open Social Conference Call  and it received a very positive reaction from you our audience.   Therefore, we decided to bring you another special episode today as Google makes another announcement. Tonight, at the next in Google s series of Campfire One events, they are announcing Friend Connect.   The recording is syndicated from their preview conference call today.  Friend Connect allows sites to add social functionality to any website.   As we anticipated over the weekend on ReadWriteWeb, Google joins Facebook and MySpace in annoucning this functionality over the last 3 business days. For more information on Friend Connect, please check out the press release.  Also, the Friend Connect project website will be live later tongiht - here.

Introduction On this episode I sit down with Chris Saad the co-founder of Data Portability.org  Since being founded about 6 months ago, one of Data Portability s primary goals was to develop a narrative for data portability.  The group that has proven to be extremely effective in generating a ton of publicity.  The topic was actively discussed at SxSW and Web 2.0 expo over the last few months.  It is also worth pointing out as Chris acknowledges, that Data Portability certainly stands on the shoulders of a lot of great technology developed over a much longer time such as OpenID and various Microformats. Regardless, Data Portability is moving onto other goals and one of my favorite parts of the interview is after  Chris comments on what they have accomplished in the last 6 months, I get him to completing the following statement: if we don t do ____ in the next 6 months, I ll be disappointed.   Listen to see how he fills in the blank.  All in all, I think it s a good discussion and hope you enjoy it as well. Links DP Website 6 Month Report Chris Blog Note: Transcription will be live later in the week

As discussed last month, ReadWriteTalk will be syndicating the Semantic Web Gang.  On this episode, the members discuss Bret Taylor s idea of a Wikipedia for Data and look at the role that semantic technologies should play in connecting diverse pieces of data together within and between organisations.   (Note: Bret is also the founder of FriendFeed and was interviewed with his co-founder on ReadWriteTalk.) The regular members are joined by special guest Georgi Kobilarov from the Free University of Berlin. For more information, please view the show notes.

Introduction This week at ad:tech, Adroll is opening up to the public.  Adroll is an advertising network that allows publishers to self-organize into groups that collectively can reach out advertisers. (If it sounds familiar, the service was reviewed on ReadWriteWeb during the private beta.) Today we sit down with Jared Kopf, the founder and CEO.  We discuss his vision for Adroll, how the service has developed and views on the online advertising industry in general.  Jared is a serial internet entrepreneur, before founding Adroll, he was a co-founder at Slide and previously worked at PayPal. Links Adroll website RWW coverage of Adroll Note: As discussed on the last episode, this interview was posted the same day it was recorded and will be transcribed later.

Introduction This is an interesting episode of ReadWriteTalk. On Friday April 4th, I interviewed Tom Stocky a Product Manager with Google Development Products. After the interview, we sent the audio over to be transcribed. At the time, I had no idea that on Monday April 7th, Google Development Products would announce arguably their most ambitious project yet - the Google App Engine. At that point, we considered releasing the interview immediately. But decided that while it would have been interesting context before the announcement at that point we should go through our normal process waiting for the transcribing to be complete. We did cover the announcement thoroughly on ReadWriteWeb, for listeners I link to all our coverage on the show notes. Anyway,we still think this its very interesting context and hope you agree. The first half of the interview covers a number of different projects, other than the AppEngine (because that was still in stealth mode). The second part gets into how Google evaluates the success of the different Development Products. It is interesting to apply the same metrics and goals Tom discusses to the App Engine and consider what other projects may be coming soon from Google. One thing we re considering moving forward is releasing the audio immediately after the interviews are adding the transcript later. Please let me know what you think about that idea! (more )

Introduction On this epside I am joined by Eric Gilmore the Senior Product Manager for Office Live at Microsoft. Eric discusses a product he s responsible and we recently covered on RWW Office Live Workspace. Eric also discusses how they are soliciting customer feedback on the product, plans for allowing other services to build on top of the platform and observations on the so called enterprise 2.0 market and how it fits in at Microsoft. Links RWW Post on Office Live Workspace vs Google Docs OLW Community main Eric’s posts on the Office Live Workspace Blog (more )

Introduction On this episode of ReadWriteTalk, I talk to Lance Tokuda the CEO of RockYou. The interview is basically broken into three parts: An overview of how RockYou focuses on building applications, especially focusing in on building apps on the Facebook platform versus the Open Social platform An overview of the RockYou company Finally, things Lance has learned moving from an enterprise software guy to focusing on building consumer facing applications (more )

Today Google, Yahoo and MySpace announced the Open Social Foundation. We covered this news thoroughly on ReadWriteWeb including Marshall Kirkpatrick liveblogging the call with special guests tech analyst Steve Gillmor and OpenID Foundation chair Scott Kveton. And an analysis post earlier in the day by Josh Catone. We thought a number of you might want to hear the audio as well, so we re sharing this on ReadWriteTalk. We didn t get this transcribed, but once again you can see Marshall s notes from Liveblogging the call here. Note: this is the second special episode we ve done today on ReadWriteTalk. We ll be back to our regular interview format later in the week, but felt this was valuable enough to share. Please let us know your feedback.

We re pleased to announce a new monthly feature on ReadWriteTalk: The Semantic Web Gang. We ll be syndicating every episode as part of ReadWriteTalk s content. The Semantic Web Gang is hosted by Paul Miller of Talis and features a number of thought leaders in the semantic web space, including: Alex Iskold of AdaptiveBlue ve covered regularly on ReadWriteWeb and I m very excited to be syndicating this as part of ReadWriteTalk s regular content. On this month s episode, the group debates the readiness of the semantic web. For more details you can visit the show s notes.

Introduction On this episode of Read/WriteTalk, I talk to Scott Switzer the CTO and founder of OpenX. OpenX is probably better know as OpenAds, but recently was renamed. They have been a leading open source ad server for years and currently are one of the largest ad servers on the web. In the interview, we talk about Scott s vision for his company and the ad industry in general. As Microsoft and Google continue to acquire ad servers, I believe OpenX will increasingly become a critical counter balance in the industry. So I m really glad to have had Scott on to share his vision. Links OpenX Blog OpenAds FOSS Ad Network Goes Hosted, Raises More Cash Read/WriteWeb posts about Google s Vulnerability - Open Ad Network Editors note: this interview was recorded before Google announced their free Ad Manager for small and medium size publishers, but Scott has a post on the OpenX blog about this. (more )

Introduction On this weeks episode of Read/WriteTalk I have a wide ranging conversation about OpenSocial with David Galzer an Engineering Director at Google. This is a topic we ve talked about before on ReadWriteTalk with our interview of Kevin Marks. It also is particularly timely after Marshall Kirkpatrick s interesting piece this week on APIs and Developer platforms. Hope you enjoy the episode! Also, a quick thank you to my friend Eric James for recording some intro music for me! Links RWW post on APIs and Developer Platforms OpenSocial Resources The spec development of the RESTful API that David references in interview Kevin Marks Read/WriteTalk Interview (more )

Introduction On this episode of Read/WriteTalk, I sit down with Jack Jia the CEO of Baynote. They have developed a techniques to derive intent wisdom of invisible crowds. Recommendation Engines are an important trend on the web we cover regularly. In fact, Alex Iskold has a post today on Rethinking Recommendation Engines and Richard followed with a post on our top 10 recommendation engines. Disclosure: I co-founded another recommendation engine company, mSpoke and make a few editorial comments in the podcast. I highlight them in the interview for full disclosure. Links Baynote Corporate Site Read/WriteWeb: Top 10 Recommendation Engines Read/WriteWeb: Rethinking Recommendation Engines Transcript Sean Ammirati: Okay, this is Sean Ammirati from ReadWrite Talk. Today, I have Jack Jia the CEO of Baynote which is a recommendation engine company that I am sitting down with. Jack is aware that I have co-founded a company called mSpoke which also does recommendations, so there is disclosure out front but he has some interesting perspectives on the recommendation engine space and reached out and I think it would be interesting to share with the Read/Write Web audience. Jack, I really appreciate you sitting down with me today. If you could start by maybe just giving as a little overview on what Baynote does? What is unique about you guys? Jack Jia: Sure. Sure Sean, thanks. The Baynote is a three years old company and we have shipping products for the last year and a half. We have about 85-87 customers today. What we do is to help people find content and product quickly on a website. We do two things, one we call recommendations people like this and also like that but very different than what you see in a typical Amazon recommendation. We do not use purchase for example, we do not use clicks as what is useful. We also do social search for site search. Giving really what has made Google search very effective. The page rank really has made Google successful and we do that for a site search. We use a technology we developed called used rank, to re-rank a typical keyword search result and then make it much more relevant based on the what appears behind the scene on the site. 01:30 Sean Ammirati: Great. Just to dig into that, you have about 80 customers. Can you give just a couple examples on some customers that you have worked with? Jack Jia: Sure. We actually worked with a large variety of different kind of customers. There are three sort of a general bucket we belong to E-Commerce customers so people are selling stuff on the web. We worked with a lot of long tail website, long tail stores for examples USappliance.com is the major appliance website. They do about $100 million a year online selling washer and dryers and refrigerator, except they carry 8,000 different brands and kinds of the same thing. We also worked with a company called eBooks one of the largest, long tail bookstores and probably $180 million revenue on 22 million titles. Amazon only carries 5 million titles. They carry many times more. We also worked with media companies, publishers and websites. One recent – really rising star is something called education.com. They really serve K to 12 kind of grade students and the parents and everything they need from study to learning to actual health issues and behavior issues. It is all in one kind of place to get those kind of information, very, very deep, very, long tail information. But we also worked with a lot of enterprise customers and we have Cisco, we have Juniper Networks, Intuit, TurboTax. We help them in three different ways. We help the marketing site, www site. We also help the support, people are looking for information, technical information and also we help people have Internet need. 03:12 Sean Ammirati: Interesting and what do you think is the sort of – what is the unique competitive advantage that you guys bring into the table that you think gives you an advantage in each of those three types of customers? Jack Jia: Yes, they are actually all the same in some sense. What we do is we track on the user behavior on the site. It is really important to track sort of implicit behaviors of the users. We do not ask them questions. Let them do whatever they are doing if the people on Cisco site and people looking for routers and looking for switches and some people are actually looking for jobs. Other are probably looking for investor related information. Different kind of people have different behavior. Some people are successfully finding information and others are failing. Those are all clues. What is useful and under what context? The key is to learn and build that collective wisdom of like-minded peer groups. The routers, you may have a 1,000 people you stay come in, find good information and build that knowledge and make sure that knowledge does not go away when that person walks out of that site and then you can accumulate that to collective wisdom overtime. You become smart and then people start to really guide each other without them even actively participating it. 04:29 Sean Ammirati: Okay. Jack Jia: The wisdom of a crowd is really the insight. Wisdom is what we call the wisdom of the invisible crowd because the people who are not telling you anything. Sean Ammirati: The wisdom of the invisible crowd. You do that at cross sessions or just point in time like – how does that work exactly? Jack Jia: Yes, the different information has different ways. Some sites that they actually drop fresh party cookies and position cookies and then you can have cross sessions and others do not use cookies they just have session based behavior. We actually do not – one of the big thing is although we track behaviors we let the behavior guide us where they put the information is but fundamentally we do not use individual behavior unto actually target consumer product. It is not like – there is a lot of concern on privacy and that actually is now the main reason why we do not do it. We actually have done a lot of social science study and mostly at Stanford and really found individual behavior and even to certain extent personalization do not really help on targeting and do not help you to figure out what people want. It is not a good predictor therefore we do not actually care, the session by session, cross session or not and we just use the behavior to guide us what is useable under what context. 05:55 Sean Ammirati: I am not sure I fully understand. The personalization is not valuable or this research that you have done. Could you unpack that a little bit because it seems like that is probably a guiding tenant. I am not sure I fully understand that though. Could you dig in their a little bit? Jack Jia: Sure, sure. There is a kind of different way of targeting content and product for people. There is a whole theory of behavior targeting means “behavior concept”. There is a different definition on that but the more common definition of behavior targeting says I need to track individual behavior, so what my last six visits for example can tell me what I may need in the future, today and tomorrow, etc. Maybe my profile, my demographic information, my age, my gender, time of the day and all of those can somehow predict me. In fact, the more the system knows me the better they can personalize my needs and target content. That one school of thought. We actually do not subscribe to that. We do not believe understanding someone fairly or inside out can actually improved our recommendation or targeting that much better. The reason is pretty simple actually we have way too many profiles and we have way too many different characteristics. The more you know me, so on surface I am – is where I am talking as a context of CEO. You think, okay you can talked to me CEO related information but also I like many other things. I like wine and I travel. I like sports. I am a father. I am a son. I am a brother and the more you know me, the more confuse the engine will be, the recommendation will be. Actually what the hell I am going to recommend you. Given also our patience is very short, the user patience is very,very short and three recommendation if not on target, I am gone. By profiling people and personalize people may not be the best vehicle to get you what you need. 07:56 Sean Ammirati: The reason for that, just to be clear. The reason for that is because people have different – in your opinion the reason for that is people have different moods that they are in through the day? Jack Jia: There are hundred of moods in a given day or week. It is very hard and people switch mood within five minute range. I will switch to maybe internal staff meetings soon. 08:19 Sean Ammirati: Okay. Jack Jia: The opposite of that however, there is a solution and that is not something that is necessary proprietary to Baynote but it is sort of a social scientist and the brain science have told us people are animals of context. We are not so unique after all. Personalize to me does not really help because people under the same context, 95-98% of people where actually need the same thing and that is really a fundamentally determining by our brain structures. Our intelligence sort of information and so therefore understanding can understand the context, you can actually get right most of the time. 09:00 Sean Ammirati: If I where to paraphrase back to you what I think I hear you are saying. It is really behavior plus context that is valuable. Is that basically your school of thought? Jack Jia: Behavior helps to define what is useful under a context. There are two different things. Our behavior helps to kind of taking peoples action at the clue what is useful instead of asking them. Action speaks louder than words. We do not ask them, use behavior to approximate what they truly need. Right, that is kind of one. Then based on that the new people come in. We do not need to care where they have been. What is there historical interest and all we need to know is your current context and then we can predict all the other people with that same context whether they need it. Sean Ammirati: I guess what is part of a person s current context and what is not. It is the page they came right before us is that part of their current context? 10:04 Jack Jia: Sometimes but not necessarily. Sean Ammirati: But sometimes it is and sometimes it is not? Jack Jia: Yes, if I am on Best Buy and we are looking at TVs and I will send them down with TV I am going to cameras, the context has completely switched. Right. Just make a general assumption that the TV and the camera has no overlap of common interest and therefore my TV behavior may not guide me what I need on the camera set. Sean Ammirati: Sure. If you are looking at four cameras, the camera you looked at before might help the context of the next camera you look at? Jack Jia: Absolutely. Sean Ammirati: Okay. That is very consistent with how I would view the market as well. I guess one thing that I am curious about though is that it seems like there are times though. Just to make sure I am understanding the statement you made. You are not saying then really that behavioral targeting does not work so much as you are saying behavioral targeting by itself does not work. Jack Jia: I guess it depends on the definition. The current definition – at least most of the definition behavior targeting or personalization focus on understand this individual and their profile and their buying behavioral, even their wealth, all of that. It is not really a good indication of what this person needs next. We actually said throw that information out, do not use it. That is kind of maybe the difference. 11:40 Sean Ammirati: Could you say that in a different way Jack? I am sorry. I think it is a good point but I am not sure I got it. Could you maybe try that one saying somewhat in a different way? Jack Jia: Sure. It is just basically what we are saying is that this recommendation – the system you wanted to deploy do not try to personalized people, do not try to track this people with their histories and their buying power and got to know them. Right. It is a notion of personalization. I want one to one. I know you so well, so I would know what you want because I have been tracking your entire life. There is a way in tracking you. We do not need to do that. A stranger comes in without knowing, this persons name, without knowing their interest in the past. We can still predict what this person need based on the context they are in. Sean Ammirati: Sometimes. Sure, but think about like a political – there are times where the context would not be that helpful either, correct? I mean, surely our pages where context is not that helpful. Jack Jia: There is always exception but generally speaking that is the case. Give me an example that you think it is not helpful? Sean Ammirati: That context would not be helpful? Jack Jia: Yes. 12:55 Sean Ammirati: Let us see. I think there is a lot of interesting example, I mean the sort of the classic example where behavioral targeting would claim to work really would be like the obituary page on a newspaper from an advertising prospective. Right. Jack Jia: Yes. Sean Ammirati: That is the place where behavior probably will render a more effect to that than context. Jack Jia: You can argue both ways but in terms of - even that in that context that might give you probably more worse context sort of example where you know someone, you reverse you do not know someone. Google ad word or ad sense does not know the person. They do not care who you are searching. The ad they are presenting is strictly based on the words you type in. That is sort of defines the context. The ad effectiveness is very high we know about because it will make a lot of money. Sean Ammirati: From search clear areas you are talking about. 13:54 Jack Jia: It is the intent. It is the intent at that moment that person needs that information. It does not matter who that person is. My Yahoo I think is the one example I have cited before. I ve been very loyal, very loyal My Yahoo users in the last 10 years and they know actually quite a bit of me and I give them all kinds of profile information. The kind of news I read. The kind of sports I care. Everything is personalized. Unfortunately, the ads that fly by, you know those banner ads, there is probably 58,000 to 100,000 have gone by in the last 10 years. I have not use a single one. I did not even look at any single one of them. It is not because those content are not importantly to me, those ads. There BMW cars are actually fine by many times and I own three BMW cars but it just not at the time when they started surveying. It is just really out of context. All right. That is the key thing I am trying to – context is king. Without deciding the context. It does not matter how I am involved in that thing. You can profile me, it does not really matter. 14:58 Sean Ammirati: I tried to keep this more interview like but this is saying that I have thought deeply enough for four years or so having founded a company that does this – I want to inject this just – this is an editorial comment. My opinion would be that they both work well at some points and let me give you an example on how you have responded that? CNN had ad sense ads running during the Katrina disaster, right? It was a very unfortunate time, you know what the ad sense ads where? Jack Jia: No, I did not pay attention. Sean Ammirati: It was a classic example of work contextual advertising in my opinion falls down; they were ads to buy real estate in New Orleans, right. It is very unfortunate thing. I am not trying to make light of it. 15:47 Jack Jia: That is maybe redefine what contextual right. Contextual if you really mean word base. Yes that would be wrong. Right. The search engine does not work because they match keyword it does not mean it is useful. In our senses, the context really is the context to what the community say what it is. If the community truly believes is to buy real estate in New Orleans. Here is the good thing, and then that ad is effective, that is the matching context but maybe that is not the case in most cases. In this case it would be something else that is more effective, I do not know what will be effective, maybe more of a charity ads will be more effective. Sean Ammirati: I think that is a good guess. Sure. 16:35 Jack Jia: If the community truly endorses that. Contextual does not mean in matching words. It is really intent. The intended the key thing is what the community really care. In our example, if I am showing an article about soccer mom – actually talking about soccer mom and after school, keep taking kids in a publisher side. Let us say in the education.com site. What kind of ads would I be showing? Should I be showing a sports car or a something that is totally relevant to them soccer mom. Or should I be showing a van, right and that is something she can take it to home. That would be more contextually relevant. It does not answer the match words per se. 17:30 Sean Ammirati: Let me see that try this per definition of context. I think we actually made the philosophically align just using different words to say the same thing. Is context a combination of the content a person is looking at that time plus the behavior that took them to that page. You are taking those two things looking at the way people like them have interacted with the content before and deriving intentions from that? Jack Jia: No, we use behavior so the content is whatever it is, right that we do not care. The context we are basically saying – what we are trying to say is what is content is about? Sean Ammirati: You do care about behavior. You care about the behavior of the community not the behavior exclusively of one individual. Jack Jia: Right. We do not care about individual nor – what we are trying to use is the behavior to define what community call this. That is what we call context. I will give you a really example that US appliance that would shed some light. Sean Ammirati: That is wonderful. 18:37 Jack Jia: There product is one of the popular sort of interest on that site is something the community calls stove . The actual product – the technical term is not called stove. There is no such a thing as stove, they call it ranges or cook tops. That is the industrial terms. In this particular case, the community through their behavior have demonstrated a care about stove. They want to find where the right stoves are, good stoves are. What we basically said is observe stoves. We observed what is the interest ultimately where they actually find value is that the cook top they find value so we connected those dots. Then that intent to find stove in the context. The behavior simply help to define what this thing is called and then under that stove context we do not care who comes in. Joe can come in. Mary can come in. We do not care who they are. 19:31 Sean Ammirati: I assume that is your use search, is that correct? Your use search product. Jack Jia: Use rank. Sean Ammirati: Use rank. I am sorry. Use rank. Jack Jia: Use rank is really the foundation. It is really our engine in the sense we call it affinity engine. Basically, it serves both social search and recommendation. Sean Ammirati: I see how that could have – how you could figure out that stove means range if people where entering keywords stove and then clicking on things about ranges. How do you do it though when you do not have a query? Jack Jia: You do not have query, you have other behaviors. You have link text. You can borrow. Sean Ammirati: In that case that is behavior, right. That would be page navigation or something like that. Jack Jia: Yes, page navigation. Link text itself, right there are words in it. They are searches on Yahoo, MSN, Google that is the where they come from or they are going. There is all kind of things. We are getting to how we implement this. There is all kinds of behaviors that we actually pattern it about 24 some behavioral heuristics that could tell us – we call them the fingerprints of behavior. 20:39 Sean Ammirati: That behavior, behavior either search queries or the behavior how they get in that page plus the content that is on that page would be how you would improve the effectiveness of the content whether that is organic or advertising you are showing in that point. Correct? Jack Jia: That is right. There are 24 other behaviors that will actually tell us collectively not just individual behaviors but the light minded pear behaviors and that is where we ultimately figure out what is useful and what is not. Sean Ammirati: Cool. All right. This is very cool. Philosophically I think similar though we are doing it in a different problem space but it is very similar. Tell me the what the reaction, I mean I imagine then on the recommendation side, you guys signed up. Who would you do as your competitors? Whether than fill that in for you? Who would you do as your competitors? 21:28 Jack Jia: Yes, we actually – two groups are our competitors. One is actually behavior targeting, so they are taking a different approach and they are basically being tracking individual behaviors and personalize that individual and profiles and targeted that way. We take more to a contextual behavior generated contextual, to use the phrase, and sort of saying there are two ways to do it and we believe the contextual way is far more effective. If you talk about lifts, our E-commerce customer seeing a minimum of 18% as high as 50% net revenue increase then that is very significant and for media customers CPM and page viewing increase and all of that is even more dramatic. It is like typically 300 or 400% increase. That is kind of one classic competitor. Sean Ammirati: That would be basically ad servers. When you talked about competing with behavioral targeting companies, you are talking about competing with behavioral targeting ad servers. 22:31 Jack Jia: Yes. Or behavior targeting like companies then and there are few vendors sort of they do not necessarily – like revenue science for example. We actually never compete with them. They are more of a traditional behavior targeting but there are other companies who kind of take a similar approach but for recommendation and we compete with some of those guys. Then there is the home-grown system. We compete probably whole lot more to the home-grown system then actually commercial vendors. Most of these commerce sites or media site have some kind of recommendation then they are based on purchase. People bought this also bought that. They sometime use click. People click on this also click on that. What we are basically to say – those are good start you are not even getting near the kind of revenue lift that you are getting. You could have got with like-minded peers the community driven sort of approach that is the way to be testing and then you figure out what are the difference are. 23:32 Sean Ammirati: It is hard to talk about your differentiation versus home-growns. Let us go back to the first group. Would it be fair to assume that Lumia and Aggregate Knowledge. Would you compete with those guys? Jack Jia: In theory, we should be competing with them but we actually have varieties. I have been competing with them a couple times and we won most cases. The reason is again the approach is very different. They take a very more of a behavioral targeting kind of approach and we do not. Sean Ammirati: Okay. Got it. Interesting. If you were to project out now, say 18-36 months in the market place and obviously you are the CEO trying to change that market place with your company. Where do you see the market place for this stuff in general going? Maybe stepping outside your role as CEO for a moment just talking about where you see the industry moving? 24:31 Jack Jia: Yes. What I am actually seeing is very parallel to what sort of my last company. I do not know, if you know that I was the founding CTO and VP Engineering of a company called Intrawoven. We kind of help to create the content management market the 96- 97 times when there was no market and such a thing is publishing content in the web. I am seeing a lot of parallel here for the recommendation space. I think a year ago, there where very few people who talk about recommendation and especially use with crowds. For the first time, Forrester had a publication on this in December and start talking about – actually there is space. A few years out I think people will realize that recommendations is very, very important. Largely because the sites are getting larger and more content and more product, right. 25:29 The good thing about that is the whole long tail economic model where you can find this product for everything you will use of that will come to your site and those products have better margins and profit. The problem is more product you carry and content you carry, the paradox of choice will drive your user away not actually finding the stuff they are suppose to find. You got to have some way to automatically merchandise your site and with the crowd it is the best way to do it. We will see more and more sites start to go, taking advantage of this crowd sourcing and the best crowd is your invisible crowd. They do not subject to survey bias, you know, what the psychologist often tell us. The visible crowd, the social network is kind of crowd, the surveys, the reviews, the foreign blog, all suffers the survey bias. They kind of – what we call the three kinds of people that will give you feedback. You got few people too much time on their hands, too opinionated or someone who has ulterior motivation. Those are not good feedback. 26:35 The better feedback is the invisible crowd and watching their behaviors and then start to derive the collective wisdom and find like-minded peers. And in our particular system what we found is – if you can find 7 or 10 other like-minded peers through the system without them actually knowing it. These 7 or 10 people can hit each other on their interest. That pack behavior that collective wisdom drives revenue up, drives actually profit margin. What we found is the average purchase price goes up dramatically. People end up buying. They start out with something like let us say, in the bicycle. I am looking at this $200 bicycle. When like man appears starts to – what they would do is push them into higher and higher price product because that is something they just not like but they love. They end up buying $500 bicycle instead of a $200 one. Much like the real world. I am a golfer for example. Every time I hang out with my golfer friends. I end up buying clubs that I did not think I need it but I end up in love with those things and I tell others friend then they do the same things. That is the power of community kind of recommendation. 27:49 Sean Ammirati: Makes sense. In that - the 7 to 10 is an interesting number. Basically that is about the level you try to cluster the invisible crowd? Jack Jia: The smaller better but too small then you have got noise that you do not have the wisdom of crowds . There is a lot of noise going on. Too big is not good, not either. Like Cisco, like router club is actually mean we have real data. There is probably a million of people who care about its routers and switches and that is just too big of a crowd for you to truly drive people to niche information and niche need. You need to further divide that big router into subdivided into stuff community. 28:31 Okay, there is the hardware part of the router. There is software. Under the software there maybe drivers and there maybe operation system IOS, maybe there is actually specific driver you care and that really starts to hone in to the true information. One example I can give you is because one of our customer TurboTax has just – we are in tax session just did a webinar for us and through their senior managers and directors basically of TurboTax s support. What they are trying to drive is use self-service of course. Every call, the company cost them a lot of money, $30 per call. They have good content on their site. Before they went live with Baynote, they are trying to improved their search and navigation, their average sort of search utilization radar was about 15% before they start to improve it. It was very low tech 15% they said that is too low but actually industry averages, which is actually too low if you compare with how many searches has to get use on this first site search. 29:37 They basically got their support team together around the world, hundreds of thousands of people and come up. Okay. What is the best content that I should be either use for every query and they sort of mapped out this relationship instead of relying on the search engine to the site. They move the needle from 15% to 18% utilization of search. Then they finally decided to crowd source this thing. Let the community do it in what they know in this case. Overnight it jump from – this is over a year ago by the way. They have been with us for a year now and jumped from 18% to 35%. The community started to come in. They started analyzing. Basically 3% of the query where really – the top 100 query only accounts for 3% of the total queries. There are so many different questions in terms and these are the microcommunity that we are talking about. They have different needs and different content. 30:37 A year later now with sort of broader deployment of community and everything else and navigation not only for search but for navigation there entire navigation structure is actually included by the community not some hard coded link. Together now they moved the needle further up to 70% utilization. From 15% to manually merchandise to 18% to 35% first one live in the community and then to fully deployed out to now with 70%. That is a huge improvement with us. 31:08 Sean Ammirati: That is great success story. I am interested in how led with search and then you guys ended up doing sort of none keyword base as well. That is very interesting. We have run over a little bit but here are some couple more questions I want to ask you just about Baynote. What is your business model? How do you guys make money? Jack Jia: We are software as a service company. We provide technology as a service much like Salesforce or Omniture. We licensed our service to any website who needs our technology including actually some – for example nasa.gov uses us to actually recommend galaxies. People like this galaxy also like other galaxy and we do their search as well. We do star clouds, what kind of topics people care about. The homepage and the deep content as well. 32:04 Sean Ammirati: Then you are paid on a lift, some metric of lift. Jack Jia: Yes, we have a flat fee model as well as pay for performance model. You can pay a fixed fee, depends on that. That is mostly for non-revenue generating site seeds based on your profit, they can be apprised. Or you can – for revenue generating you do not have to believe our word just try it and it is very easy, you can go live. The actual work when you go live is actually very minimal like the hours of technical work and then you can go live. Since they do AB testing and you build up, and once you see the lift then we have a bigger percentage of the actual lift. Sean Ammirati: Interesting and just a little bit about your company. You said you have been around for three years. Or you venture backed? Jack Jia: Yes. We are venture backed. We have done two rounds of financing. First round was kind of a from JMB Capital and the second round was actually unsolicited round so it came from Steamboat Venture which is a Disney group of venture arm. They invested in us as well about a year ago. We are talking about $15 millions all together. 33:19 Sean Ammirati: That is great. You are the CEO. What is has been like working with Disney. Are they a customer of yours as well then? Jack Jia: Yes. They have been great. Disney has been great. Absolutely, certainly the media space – they are a big player in that space. They are being extremely helpful. He was also being extremely taking the capital, being extremely helpful from opening up – channels and the company is doing really well. We are growing our revenue and just had a phenomenal raise. Sean Ammirati: That is great. Jack I really appreciate you taking sometime to give our audience a little overview on your services and tell us a little bit about Baynote. Jack Jia: Thank you very Sean.

Introduction I ve increasingly become interested in the role feeds are playing in social networks. FriendFeed is a new Silicon Valley start up that is being run by a team of very successful former Google intraprenuers.   Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit, two of the four co-founders, sit down to talk about FriendFeed on this week s episode of Read/WriteTalk. Interestingly, after our interview Paul agreed to join me on a panel at the upcoming Graphing Social Patterns conference on Social Networks and The Need for Feeds. I d love to tap into the collective wisdom of this crowd, let me know questions you d be interested in seeing us discuss. (more )

Introduction A few weeks ago at CES, I sat down with Adam Taggart the Director of Product Marketing at Yahoo! He shared some of the recent news they had announced at CES around opening up their mobile platform for other developers and his perspectives on the mobile market. (more )

Introduction On this episode of Read/WriteTalk I sit down with John Lilly, the new CEO of Mozilla Corp. John has been at Mozilla since 2005, but recently was promoted from COO to take over as CEO. John published a very thoughtful post announcing his new role. In the interview we review both the lessons he s learned at Mozilla and his plans for the organization in the future. I also think many of the leaders at DataPortability.org will find his comments quite interesting Links John s Blog The Mozilla Corporation Read/WriteWeb: Mozilla Weaves Web Platform for User Data DataPortability.org Participatory Culture Foundation (more )

Introduction On this episode of Read/WriteTalk I sit down with Kevin Marks. Kevin is one of the public faces of the OpenSocial project at Google in his role as a developer advocate.  Before coming to Google, he was a principal engineer at Technorati and one of the driving forces behind micro-formats. In this episode, we focus on the state of the OpenSocial project and also highlight some of the work around opening up activity streams which is one of the features I feel has been overlooked in the conversation around OpenSocial. (more )

Introduction This week I was traveling in San Francisco again and stopped by Yahoo s Brickhouse. After some meetings, I found out a number of entrepreneurs who are touring Silicon Valley were stopping by. I stayed for their presentation and then grabbed a few of them for a quick interview. It was interesting to get their take on both what they d add to Ireland s startup ecosystem. It also wasn t surprising but a good reminder how far the US has to go hearing their reflections on how bad broadband and mobile communications are here. Links Brendan Lally s Blog - Lally Logic Dawn Reilly s Company - Relevant M Jan Blanchard s Company - TouristR Transcript The transcript for this recording will be live soon.

Introduction Chris Shipley is probably best known as the executive producer of the DEMO conference. She is also the founder of Guidewire Group. Between these two roles she talks to hundreds of entrepreneurs every year. In this episode, we discuss both her predictions for where the web is heading and also specifically what she would do if she were a venture capitalist or entrepreneur. She finishes the interview sharing some of the common attributes she s observed across entrepreneurs who have gone on to be successful. Links Chris Shipley s Homepage Demo Conference Site Guidewire Group Transcript 00:45 Sean Ammirati: I’m here with Chris Shipley at the Defrag Conference. Chris is very well-known probably by most of this audience, but it’ll probably be helpful for you to give your background for people who may not be familiar.Chris Shipley: Sure. I think I’m probably best well-known for the DEMO Conference which I have been producing since 1997 for 11 or 12 years, which is essentially a launch venue for products. We look at hundreds of products from lots companies of all sizes and try to create a venue where those products can be presented to an audience and thought leaders in the investment community, business development community and the media to try to, again, create an accelerated launch for products that are out and doing something and really changing the market. 01:34 Sean Ammirati: You also are running the GuideWire Group as well.Chris Shipley: GuideWire Group is a market intelligence firm that is focused on early stage companies.So we spend our time talking to startups and trying to not only give them advice and counsel on how to take their products to market and how markets are shaping, but also use those individual encounters to create a collective picture of where the market places are going.Sean Ammirati: Cool. So where do you see the market place going now? 02:05 Chris Shipley: That’s interesting. I think we’re seeing the end of the web 2.0 frothiness and a return to real business value, what we were talking before we turned on the microphone about companies succeeding based on their ability to serve customers and to deliver value and to extract value in fair exchange from their customers. I think we’ve gone through a period of 12 or 24 months of all things web 2.0 must be magic and wonderful to, “Wait a minute. It turns out that I can’t pay the rent with page views, with clickthroughs. I got to pay the rent with real money. So what’s my business model behind this company?” I think that’s what investors are going to wind up to investing in and what really would create sustainable long-term companies in the market place. So the froth goes away a little bit. The basic principles of the social web that all of this hype was built on remain. We’re going to see some really interesting businesses in the next 12 months. 03:16 Sean Ammirati: It’s interesting to think about the substance behind web 2.0 remaining and the business models emerging now. What are some of the creative business models that you’re seeing on the edge with your view of GuideWire Group and DEMO?Chris Shipley: Ones that are about to go over the edge are the model of: Let’s just get a whole lot of people using the site and then we’ll figure out later. That’s not going to work. It works really well if your ambition is not to create a company but to create some pocket of value that you can flip quickly. I think we’re seeing that, and we may have six months or so left in those kinds of quick flip kind of featured companies being created and sold.I think that we are going to see models where we start to understand that there are all sorts of currencies of exchange, and that those models allow them to provide content, for example, to an individual in exchange for valuable personal data which you then sell as a lead to a marketer as an example. So there’s a chain of value where the cash that fuels the company may come from a different point than the direct end customer. So you get these multi-tiered businesses that are about attracting customers on one hand who are the end users, the website or service, because the real business is selling leads on the backend, for example. 04:35 Sean Ammirati: So this is an interesting point. I can talk about it both in my role at mSpoke but also just in general as I look at and see things that come through at Read/Write Web. Even in that example that you gave, you still have to get to a certain critical mass of users before there’s really an interesting business model there. So do you see it actually changing how people are creating the companies or more just how they’re thinking about the destination of those companies? 05:10 Chris Shipley: Probably both. I think you’ve got to be building companies thinking about: How is this technology or this product, how is it relevant? mSpoke is a great example in a lot of ways. There’s a company here at Defrag: HiveLive. mSpoke and HiveLive have been at trying to understand and crack the nut open the communities they serve for a couple of years before they ever ran these products to market. You understand the customer base really well understand what they need and you’re watching and being responsive to your customers.At the end of the day, that’s the businesses. We can get all kinds of creative about who is paying for what and how do we amass users and how do we do this and that. At the end of the day, if you’re not providing real value, you’re not going to continue to really attract but retain customers. So I think a lot of tactics for amassing audience are fairly well-known. The trick isn’t about amassing so much as it is about maintaining. It’s all about the value to it. 06:16 Sean Ammirati: Right. I think it was Kleiner who said, “We re not going to do anymore web 2.0 deals.”Chris Shipley: On the one hand, far be it for me to question Kleiner Perkins. It’s obviously a venerable firm. They’ve done amazing things. They’ve helped build tremendous value for the industry and for a lot of companies. On the other hand, what does he mean we’re not going to invest in web 2.0 companies? To me, that’s either a really stupid statement or it means they’ve been investing dumb for the last 24 months, and I doubt they’ve been investing dumb, and I doubt they’re stupid, so I’m a little confused by the comment.As an investor, your responsibility for limited partners is to put money into companies that you think will return something. Whether that’s called web 2.0 or something else is irrelevant. Investing in something because it’s full of hype and maybe we can tie it up and put some lipstick on it and parade it around to get sold is maybe a good model, but it’s not a model for building sustainable businesses. 07:25 Sean Ammirati: I couldn’t agree with you more on that. So as you look out into the market place, what are the verticals where you’re seeing people build businesses that you perceive to be sustainable going forward now?Chris Shipley: Let’s take the concepts where I think the principles that we’ve learned in web 2.0. If we consider that as a moment in time as a label, it’s about social dynamics. It’s about interactions. It’s about engagement. It’s about getting technology out of the way and letting people interact. Businesses, whether it’s an enterprise business, a small business, it’s an eBay auction site doing this, they’re transacting business where I involve my customers, I m in conversation with them, I iterate quickly to satisfy their needs and their interests and I’m making some money. That’s a good business. 08:20 Take those principles, and I think we’re going to see web 2.0 principles applied to a lot of verticals in enterprise business. I think we’ll see some shift in the consumer markets because while we’re in this age of persistent partial attention. At the end of the day I have to focus somewhere, maybe that s I have to focus because I m mid 40s and I’m not some teen with like 12 IM windows up but this partial attention, I don’t think it’s a sustainable mental model to get solid business done. So maybe you’ll see these kinds of focus in those areas. 09:05 Another thing we get in this change as we’re moving forward is we peel back a little bit and look at all the infrastructure that’s acquired when you’ve got all these people hitting servers, posting content, and sharing content. What does that mean for bandwidth and security and storage? In all of these different parts of the ecosystem of a connection, there are a lot of business opportunities in making sure that we all get connected in a suitable bandwidth and that our information is secure and the disks and the sky don’t crash. So I think there are lots of infrastructure cases we’re going to see come out of it as well. 10:09 Sean Ammirati: Let’s dig into the enterprise piece of that answer a little bit because it’s something that has come up a lot at this conference. I think a lot of people who had been focused on building consumer face and apps either in their current business or in previous startups are really starting to focus on the enterprise. So there was a panel earlier today and had Brad Feld on it and some other people, and Brad made the statement that early on, it doesn’t matter if you’re building a product for the enterprise or for the consumer until you reach a certain point where you have to sell it. Most of the things are similar.I thought it was an intriguing thought. I’m curious where you sit because you talk to people right when they’re first creating them. How far along the way do you think people can get before they have to make a decision one way or the other, or do you think they ever have to make that decision, I guess, to give you a complete flexibility in your answer? 10:43 Chris Shipley: I’m really old-fashioned, I guess, because I think you make that decision early on before you ever start coding and figuring out, “What am I trying to build and for whom, and let me go talk to a lot of those people and figure out what they need.” So if you believe you are building a product for soccer moms or for 18-year-old file swappers or for 50-year-old accountants, you have to go talk to those people. So that decision gets made pretty early. Somewhere along the line, you can figure out that the thing that I built for the soccer moms, that’s going to work really well for the accountants, and the teenagers actually like it too. We just have to make these changes. But I think you have to focus on the business, and the only focus you can have and be successful is on the customers. 11:30 Sean Ammirati: So as you look at these people launching these enterprise startups then, do you think it’s a new group of entrepreneurs or do you think it’s a lot of the same people that maybe were at DEMO two years ago or three years ago launching consumer apps?Chris Shipley: A little bit of both. I think we’ve seen a little bit more gray hair in the startups. It’s great when they team with someone who is a little younger, maybe, but I think that for good or for ill, there is a certain credibility hurdle that an entrepreneur needs to be able to sell into business. Typically, that credibility hurdle comes from a bit of experience in the market. 12:15 Sean Ammirati: Yes. This capital efficient theme or something that was, I think, another thing that we’ve seen, right? So people have said that it’s one-tenth the cost it was 10 years ago to launch a company, but it ends up taking about the same amount of money to eventually run them. Is that something that you’re seeing in the companies, you’re seeing at DEMO? Are they one-tenth the cost they were to launch as they were when you were first seeing pitches 10 years ago?Chris Shipley: Absolutely. Open APIs and these sorts of technologies make it very cost effective to start a company to build a product. It takes a lot more money to scale a company and scale in a market place. We’re seeing the investment shift to a different place where maybe 10 years ago, a seed round was 5 million or $10 million because you needed that kind of capital behind the development, you had to acquire servers and these sorts of things; pay for energies or that have become commodity. Then you’d see an additional layer on top to drive marketing spend. Now, I think you can use a VISA card to setup on APIs start a company. Get a prototype maybe depending on your definition an alpha or beta into market and start to test. I think we’re using the leverage of the blogosphere and social media. You can post more on it. You can test what works and observe the community, listen to the community. Then you start pouring money on the things that work. There’s less waste in that scaling. 14:05 Sean Ammirati: Yes. I think that’s true. The dynamic is interesting because if it is that capital efficient, it does change one of your customers - of GuideWire, I think, which are the VCs. So how are the VCs that you’re talking to reacting to this?Chris Shipley: I think we’re seeing a lot of firms wrestling with the problem, how do we take hundreds of millions of dollars of fund and put that to efficient work in $500,000 checks? That just isn’t the dynamic of a large fund. So we’re seeing fund of fund activities and other vehicles creating subfunds and these sorts of things as a way of providing that seed and playing in some of the very early things and allowing them to come back, that money can actually be more money we buy and some of what started off as small investments. 15:20 Sean Ammirati: So let’s say that CalPERS says to you, “You can take whatever management fee you want but we want you to run a $500 million fund today.” What do you do if you’re the general partner at a fund like that?Chris Shipley: You don’t mean me personally as I have promised my friend to shoot me if I ever decided to be a venture capitalist.Sean Ammirati: OK. [Laughing]Chris Shipley: I think you have to look at efficient ways to put little bits to work, and that’s difficult. It means you have to change the way you manage those investments. You’ve got to put different controls in the organizations that you can watch where your money is going. You’ve got to figure how you observe your bets and keep all plates spinning. That’s a harder activity. 16:03 Sean Ammirati: OK. Let’s play this game again but now you’re the CEO of a startup. If you had to be a CEO of a startup right now, not a research but a product company, what kind of product would you want to be creating right now?Chris Shipley: Well, it so happens that I am the co-CEO of a company that is building a product. I think we’re putting into play the capital efficiency models. We’re putting into play community leveraged activities. We’re putting ourselves on a platform to watch what the people do with our technology so we can be more responsive and make every spend count by a lot of testing. If you think about it, 10 years ago, you put an ad in a PC mag and hope that it worked. There’s a lot of waste in that, probably because you didn’t know where it was. Here, you can watch. The beauty of web-based applications is that you can watch what the users are doing everyday and you can watch it work so you can respond very quickly. So if I do X and people behave the way I want, let me go spend more money on X until that stops working. Now, there is very little waste in that system. I think that’s really the root of capital efficiency. 17:30 Sean Ammirati: So let’s change gears one more time. You are a bit of this. It’s less fair. Let’s make you be a futurist for a moment and say in 10 years, you know the people who are trying to change the way people live, right? That’s kind of part of the definition of an entrepreneur. What do you think will be most different about the way people are interacting with technology 10 years from now than the way they are right now? 18:00 Chris Shipley: I’ll tell you what I hope. I’m not sure if this is how it will be. I hope that people won’t be interacting with technology. I hope technology is invisible. I hope that people interact with one another. They focus on business problems. They engage or they support. They do all sorts of things; have a great time, entertain themselves, and the technology is not in the way.Today, you go into any public space and you’ve got all these people who are sitting together staring at this very small screen, and they feel that they’re so connecting to world because they’ve got that buried in their head. The whole world is passing around them, and they’re missing it because that device has become their window into the rest of the world.What happens if that device goes away and we could just have that where we can be in the world? That’s a little interesting and appealing to me, and maybe I’m oddly optimistically utopian or something. When we can kind of get technology out of the way and get to the core value of what we’re trying to do. I think that’s when it gets really interesting. 19:10 Sean Ammirati: One more thing I wanted to make sure I asked you because probably nobody has seen more entrepreneurs than you have, probably more than any venture capitalist even. What attributes have you been able to derive looking at all the entrepreneurs you’ve met and seen the best predictors of entrepreneurs being successful? 19:30 Chris Shipley: A clear vision and focus, hard work and an open mind. I think you have to, as an entrepreneur, know where you want to go, recognize that there are multiple paths to get there, stay focused on your choices. Don’t second guess yourself. But also keep your mind open to other alternatives. I think you can get so stuck in your own arrogance that you miss some great advice. It’s important not to ping-pong but it’s important not to put blinders onto where the market is going. A friend of mine once said, “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” So I think that’s true of any entrepreneur.Sean Ammirati: That’s good advice. Chris, I appreciate you talking today.Chris Shipley: My pleasure.

Introduction On this episode of Read/Write Talk I sit down with Gil Penchina, the CEO of Wikia and a very active angel investor. We talk a little about his role at Wikia and how he got there. But I think some of the most interesting conversation comes from his advice for entrepreneurs and some of the things he s learned looking at all the different deals he sees. Links About Wikia Gil s Wikipedia Page Transcript (more )