Mark Pincus Blog

marker conference in tel aviv

i spent the day at the marker conference here in tel aviv. it was fun but exhausting, getting pitched on a dozen new net ideas. these israelis are very energetic. (have i mentioned that?)

i spoke on a panel about future of net business models and disruption. i didnt think i said anything that great but apparently i had a few controversial lines about ebay being in trouble. we'll see if they get blogged for posterity.  there was also a big convo about whether we were in a bubble. no conference is complete without this necessary self reflection.

every deal seemed to have hair in some way. there was this sweetim that has 3m im users but a complicated cap structure from some prior company. an interesting online event sharing network that's a cool product but seems to lack a clear viral marketing angle. a hugely popular firefox download called foxytunes with over 2m downloads that now wants a huge valuation. a bunch of others i cant say either bc they're a blur or stealth or both.

this has been a fun, crazy trip. i manage to get a workout in early but then go through a marathon day of endless talking (most too interesting to pass up), sneak home for a nap (but end up blogging here), and then go out till 3am. my body seems to be ok with the lack of sleep bc i'm convincing it to be on israel time during the day and america time at night.

tomorrow i leave for jerusalem where i get to explore the old city, study torah with rabbis and climb masada. what's been funny - young israelis arent religious at all, so that roll their eyes when i say i want to study torah. i guess this is why i'm relating to them so well. they're as non-jewish as i me.

one other cool idea - i've been connecting with a bunch of friends about the idea of creating a second home swapping exchange between 20 people. everyone contributes 2-3 in season weeks and 2-3 out of season. this people get access to killer homes in ski resorts across us, villas on the med, etc...without doing the exclusive resorts thing and with very little cost. these homes are dead assets but nobody wants to rent them so...

Add more classifieds players - Msft, edgeio and blogbuy

here's my take.

Msft www.expo.live.com - Pros: winning in classifieds is about abundance first and msft is one of the few companies that has a chance of getting there fast. also, they stuck with a very clean interface that is easy to follow and lends some credibility. Cons: there is some garbled language about this being social and doing things through 'your buddies'. who says 'buddies'? sounds like something my dad would say. i didnt get why or how anyone would ever connect with their 'buddies' on this site.

i'll say this again here, if any of these big walled gardens would ever bother to do something in the interest of their users they'd start working on connecting everyone's social maps (foafnet) so that they could seamlessly and implicitly connect us all with our 'buddies'. and guys, it's no longer a big selling point that users can do all this for free!! they know that.

edgeio - this one goes in the category of new sites and services that i totally dont get. other than the people going to these web 2.0 conferences, i'm not sure who cares about 'owning their data' which seems to be the premise behind all of us posting our listings to our blogs. and when one thinks of the scale of listings it will take before you get a viable marketplace in any category and locality, we see why it's taken 10 yrs for craig to be craig. also, oodle already aggregates a ton and it doesnt sound like they're building huge traffic so far either. and once people ever did post to their blog, what's stopping everyone else from scraping it all too?

blogbuy?  huh? they're just focused on letting us post listings to our blogs? these seem like services looking for problems. i dont know anyone who woke up and asked how they could post a better listing to their blog today.

nuff said. i applaud all attempts as they do move the ball forward and i've obviously been a believer in classifieds for a long time. i just dont see the breakthrough with any of these services.

waiting to see a big guy step up and start connecting our disconnected data silos. suck in my social maps from many places and then make that useful. if you're just doing plain old classifieds i'll stick with my craigslist.

testing performancing

based on fred's rave review i'm giving this a try to see if it can solve my occasional typepad post losses. the installation process was not that intuitive as it appears they require flock and you have to somehow know to find an icon in the bottom right hand side of your browser. also it sounds like the app may let you do marc canter's 'blog this' but i cant find that feature yet either. wondering why they could reside in the top toolbar?

also would have been nice if there were an easier way to add tags as typepad still doesnt make this easy. too painful to create new categories when i just want to tag.

the bubble in bubble debates

matt marshall continues to fuel the web 2.0 bubble debate. my take is that we hear about the bubble most from the new fraternity of web 2.0 cocktail circuit attendees while the rest of us have grown comfortable that this is business as usual. here's my comment on his blog post.

we need to differentiate between bubbles and saturated environments. THE bubble was characeterized by a public mania that fueled an irrationale pubic stock market and trickled back down through the system.

i would characterize the present environment as one of saturation which is not necessarily unhealthy. vc's are paid to place bets. entrepreneurs are paid to create betable plays. seems to me that everyone is doing their jobs right now. there have been plenty of periods with saturated bets and little results to show for it. remember the cd-rom 'bubble' of the early 90's or the famous case of too many disk drive wannabes in the late 80's?

what's changed is that the bar to create a bet is way lower and the bar to a bettor is now open to just about anyone so we're seeing a lot more entrants. i think that democratizes what's been a somewhat clubby industry for too long.

$100M for daily candy?

the wsj reported tuesday that bob pittman (formerly of aol fame) had taken a controlling share in daily candy and that he now expected to sell the company for $100 million. if this is true (and with EBIT in the low teen millions it could be) this seems like a major wake up call to many of us in the industry.

many of us first learned of daily candy through our girlfriends and wives who all seem to love it. what could be that interesting on a daily basis? i'll admit i've never once bothered to read it though i do remember browsing the site and being impressed with the cute women behind the scenes. (in no way meaning to belittle their brilliant acumen for creating a simple, profitable business where so many of us (like me!) went for far more ambitious and complex concpets that have yet to show a profit.

wake up! for me this was somehow similar to when i first heard in 1994 that cnet was raising money at the then preposterous valuation of $100 million. (funny how that number wakes me up even 12 years later.) isnt this the proof of the local internet riches we've all been groping for? only it came in a simple package (bad pun).

what can we learn from this candy? i'm still scratching my head. it spread virally through word of mouth. it seems like it was a very good, well thought service. it lacked the community and user involvement we've all grown to see as necessary. it was push and email based which seems to remain a better medium than pull and web. it went after young women which honestly never occurred to me. i would have assumed that new net services were dominated by geeky men.

would love to hear from anyone who actually uses daily candy.

web 2.0 mania

this has been getting emailed around the past few days. click here to see the bigger version on flickr.

essembly.com - a political social network

i've been playing with essembly for the past day. it's the coolest political web site i've seen (because it's about interacting over informing) but it stops short of enabling the kind of grass roots organizing i've been hoping and searching for.  [if you want to try it, email me and i'll invite you on.]

it seems like the founders are trying to keep it stealth for now as they have not responded to several emails from me (or they just dont want to talk to me.)

what's cool about it is the simple way it lets users create their own 'resolves' - kind of your own little survey or policy proposal that goes out to everyone to vote on. it's fun to watch the action in votes and comments.

also cool but not used yet are the groups functions which enable candidates, coalitions and issue campaigns to organize, set their platforms and recruit.

where it falls short for me...first, it appears to be for profit which is fine, but may drive the wrong incentives. which leads to my second issue, we lack any leadership on any front. everyone is so neutral that nothing changes. we need a web movement to reform the system (i've blogged about my hopes to create an eparty). a neutral site will devolve into a message board where people are forever fragmented.

what we need is a site that can help facilitate organization and collective voice. it should gently point out our similarities on many issues rather than essembly's simplistic (but fun) approach of showing your % correlation with another person on issues. while that's cute, i'm looking for a site that can promote my overlaps with seemingly disparate people and groups so we can form NEW coalitions that can replace the current power base.

overall, i'm psyched that these kids created essembly and see it as a big step in the right direction of 'radical democracy' and hope that they/we can take it further towards enabling real action and not just real interaction.

Tagsense - one for the lazyweb...

given steve rubel's post on what he calls 'tagvertising' and my recent decision not to pursue this segment i thought i'd post about Tagsense, a new venture idea i worked on for much of last year.

the concept of tagsense was to enable an open marketplace for advertisers to buy blog world traffic via tags. the idea was that an advertiser might go to technorati or see a specially marked tag on any participating site and click 'buy it now'.

so the obvious example would be that i see web 2.0 as one of technorati's top 10 searches. i click to buy it and see there are 95,000 posts on 8,500 blogs. lets say 2,500 are participating in the ad network so i can then sort them further. maybe some of these are bogus or mistagging to get to higher cpc's. i can weed them out via screening for click through rates above a 1%. i might then bid on the remaining sites and be competing against anyone else bidding on them for any tag. this way sites would always sellout inventory at highest rates.

the reason i'm not pursuing this oppty is that we found it too hard to work with or compete against google adsense. while kim malone and her team are terrific people, google has yet to decide whether it wants to be a business plaftorm for many or not.  we ran a few tests with major bloggers using google and were amazed how high goog's ecpm's were ($2-$4).

we also attempted to partner with yahoo and found that even more difficult. yahoo seemed to be in the middle of a massive transition and had not yet aligned interests betweens its overture group, YPN and corporate.

in the end it seemed the only areas to really compete were cpm and cpa. the latter dont have enough breadth of different offers and dont lend themselves to the conversations of the blog world. the former dont lend themselves to being sold and served in an open way as their is no performance to stop fraud.

i'm still working on a few other angles. more soon.

the future of media...looks just like the past but different

fred wilson talks about the future of media and what he thinks it will take for video to be successful on the net. fred, i respectfully think you're drinking too much web 2.0-laide on this one.

i will posit that the future of media is found in the past. the advent of every new form of video delivery has started in the same place - porn. this is followed by a lot of failing attempts to get people to pay for marginal crap, which is finally followed by a few ballsy guys like the rupert murdochs who place huge bets on super high value content like box office movies (HBO).

i worked at TCI in the early 90's on the 500 channel initiative. we were trying to put together a seemingly valuable new set of channels that would make consumers want the new digital set top boxes (and pay more). we mostly failed. turns out that song 500 channels and nothing on was pretty true.

fred, how many times do you ever watch a rerun of any show? you tivo the new series of the office, not an old 'i love lucy'. the problem isnt that goog wants to charge $1.99 for it. free wouldnt help either. nobody is going to watch it either way, especially when you add the download.

the big winner will be the ability to watch all kinds of freaky porn on your tv. that's the first killer app of IPTV. this will one day be followed by a ted turner type who places a billion dollar bet on creating a commercial supported tv station on the net that initially provides something like HBO with branded, obviously high value content. remember it took HBO almost 20 years to create their own content. that's because nobody was going to ever know to watch it.

this leads to my biggest lesson in consumer media - past, future, present - and that's that it's all about brand. in a world of 500 channels all you can hope for is a brand. that's why we tried launching channels around branded mags and topics like auto channel, outdoor life, golf. in a world of 500,000 channels the importance of brand will be total. brand also means celebrities. that's why we backed E! entertainment - i've also called the stalker channel.

Start page mania

fred wilson has a good roundup post on this new (old?) category of custom news aggregation/start page. comforting to see that after 10 years (20?) we're still working on the same issues. will we ever get to a final best solution or will this evolution keep going? seems like google is final for search. is it just that nobody has nailed this yet?

well that must be what a lot of vc's are thinking, backing all these new entrants.

here's my response...

ok. i can be a little slow but i'm missing the boat on most of these. tried diggit.us and it didnt seem to let me choose topics. am i supposed to just be interested in what's most popular on these services? is that the point - like technorati top 10? or am i an idiot and missed the UI?

i'll admit i still dont use delicious, have never used myyahoo, tried digg once and didnt get that either.

i'd like a service that a) has no work cause i'm lazy, b) based on a few clicks offers me topical/category news, c) gives it in very short bursts like bloglines that i can fire through fast. if it also showed me most popular in a category or which fred was reading, icing but not necessary.