Archive for November, 2005

US Patent Applications

paulballen — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 20:44:25 -0800

My brother pointed out to me that my name shows up (finally!) on a US patent application search.

At MyFamily.com we had many ideas and applied for multiple patents. I'm not sure any has issued yet; but at least one is now visible at the USPTO web site.

The patent advanced search engine is highly fielded but has one of the worst interfaces I have used in a long time. I finally figured out how to query it to find our application on what I call the "Visual Next Click Analysis Tool" that we used in-house.

This is much like the Omniture Click Map feature, which I love.

A patent attorney friend told me that only 3% of all patents that are issued actually generate commercial value.

Another patent attorney recently showed me a patent on a way to comb your hair from four different sides to cover up male baldness. So some patents are silly.

But it is still nice to see your name in lights, er, online, every once in a while. :)

(Note: I left MyFamily.com in Feb 2002 and haven't been directly involved with the company since then. I am not a company insider.)

Alan Hall speech at E Station ceremony

paulballen — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 04:52:48 -0800

(Note: these are my notes from Alan's Hall speech at the E Station ribbon cutting. They are his words, as well as I could capture them, not mine.)

I hope that in the future we'll look back on this date and realize that this initiative has been a success.

If just one great company comes out of all this investment, perhaps the size of MarketStar, then we would count this as a great success. But we think we have a secret sauce and have the ability to create many successful companies.

My wife and I have been blessed by the Lord with financial resources. We feel a need to give back. The IRS says we own these assets, but we believe they belong to the Lord, and we are stewards over them.

We hope to build many companies and create many new jobs here in Utah.

Our goal is not to take the money after a harvest and keep it.

After a liquidity event, the money will go back into the fund. It won't inure to our benefit. It will be an economic engine that can keep helping the Utah economy.

The governor has a vision for economic development, and we think there is nothing wrong with private individuals contributing where they can. Our expertise is in entrepreneurship, so we want to help where we can.

We are not here to take any credit to ourselves. We intend to deflect it to others.

We have a good team of people. Craig Bott, CEO, Chuck Duncan, Gary Winger, Greg Warnock, Sherm Smith, Chris Anderson, Kent Thomas.

Our five year goal is to see 100 new companies from Provo to Logan that are helped by Grow Utah Ventures. Besides the GUV dollars we have to invest, we are looking for other investors. $15 million to me is a lot of money, so we need partners to help generate this funding.

How will we find 100 companies to invest in?

1. Conditioning: we want to let entrepreneurs know the resources that are available to help them.

We already have 2 companies a day looking for money on our GUV web site.

2. Investing. We will put our money into these companies, but we want to own no more than one third of the company.

I've learned that the moment you take control away from the entrepreneur that you lose some of their vigor.

3. Rallying Others. I've noticed that I will run out of money personally if I keep investing, so we are looking for 100 other accredited investors in the state that will invest.

We're also trying to rally other financial institutions, education, and government to the cause.

We have partnered with Lumin Publishing (publisher of Connect Magazine) to sponsor 5 events attracting about 1,500 people.

Greg Warnock came up with a Junto program about a year ago. Junto means together in Spanish. Benjamin Franklin had a Junto group that met to discuss political issues.

In our Junto program we meet for 8 weeks, 3 hours a week, we teach them how to be entrepreneurs.

Some come away having learned that they are not entrepreneurs.

But we take 10 each year whom we think can be serial entrepreneurs, and we invest $50,000 in them.

Bill Gates was student age when he came up with his great idea.

We have invested in 15 students to date.

We have already invested $3 million in 15 companies from Provo to Ogden.

As part of our rallying, we've formed angel investor groups in several places.

Jim Ellsworth here is the head of Olympus Angels. They have about 20 members.

Our goal is at the end of the first quarter, we'll have 100 investors to invest $25,000 each per year over ther next five years. That is $12.5 million.

We want to support other incubators in Utah as well. The Simmons family is honoring their parents with an incubator building, at the Davis Applied Technology College. The Hall Foundation is making an investment there as well.

Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

Geek Dinner in Utah County, Wed Night

paulballen — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 23:35:04 -0800

Some of the smartest people I know are meeting for a geek dinner Wednesday night at Los Hermanos in Lindon. All other geeks are welcome. Please check this out.

The registrations doubled today to 23 or so, and we hope to get another dozen or two people signed up before this is over.

Utah Geek Dinners are a brainchild of Phil Burns, COO for our soon-to-be-christened Provo Labs. (Provo Labs will replace Infobase Ventures as our internet business incubator).

These Geek Dinners are not related to our other ventures. They are just an effort to create more events in Utah for techies. Phil Burns and some of his partners have a great vision for creating places where coders of all kinds can share ideas, share code, and start businesses together.

Phil is also exploring some concepts of micro-financing startup companies that come out of the open source community. He is having discussions with leading Web 2.0 geeks from both coasts to see where things are headed.

BTW, Phil Windley, another close friend and one of my favorite geeks will be speaking Wednesday night. I think podcasting equipment will be on hand, as well as video projector and wireless for all attendees.

I can't stay for the whole evening, but this is going to be very cool.

Cap Table Management Software

paulballen — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 23:25:30 -0800

One of the things I love about running an incubator is that knowledge is worth more to us than it is in the hands of a single startup company.

Why? Because if we learn something or discover something of value, then we can apply it multiple times, not just once. If a new tool creates value, or if a new process cuts costs, it's great to be able to apply it to every business where it would increase revenue or margins.

In the past when I found a new idea, I could usually only apply it once.

Today I started looking for software that can manage cap tables for all the companies which we start. Currently I have a few dozen Excel spreadsheets, some of which are out of date, that contain cap tables for our companies in their various stages.

It is a royal pain to try to calculate equity ownership when there are angels or VCs investing in a company and there are also stock option plans for management and employees that vest over time. You are mixing ownership with options and sometimes warrants (contingent options) with different time periods. It is very confusing. I know Excel is not the best way to do this.

So today I found a company, Two Step Software, from Waltham, Mass, that looks like they have a good software solution to this. My only fear is that their pricing model might be designed for large law firms, not small incubators.

Has anyone out there used Two Step's Corporate Focus Software, or any other cap table management software program?

Here's the link: http://www.twostep.com/solutions/ownership.htm

If you know anything about this kind of software, please tell me what you think.

The Vision of Grow Utah Ventures

paulballen — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:59:16 -0800

I'm sitting inside the old greyhound bus station on Ogden's infamous 25th street.

But it isn't a bus station anymore. Utah visionary Alan Hall and his team at Grow Utah Ventures have purchased the old bus depot. They are renovating it and today are christening it the "E Station."

E, of course, stands for entrepreneur.

Alan Hall's vision is for Grow Utah Ventures to be the most influential private sector force for economic development in the state of Utah, with a focus on Northern Utah.

In the next five years Grow Utah Ventures plans to launch 100 new companies, invest $15 million in entrepreneurs, and create over 2,000 good paying jobs.

The E Station will be a launch center for new companies, providing low cost office space, mentoring from GUV Advisors, and sales and marketing assistance.

GUV companies will also have access to expansion capital because GUV is closely allied with many angel investor groups in Utah, including groups in Salt Lake, Weber, Davis, Cache and Washington Counties.

The E Station ribbon cutting starts in 10 minutes.

It is conveniently located a block away from MarketStar, a global sales and marketing outsourcing company which helped its clients sell more than $8 billion in products last year.

I love Alan's vision. I believe the economic impact from funding 100 companies and mentoring hundreds of entrepreneurs will be vast. It will be part of his lasting legacy.

At a time when people worldwide are complaining about slow government response to every external event and disaster, I love watching private entrepreneurship and philanthropy having such a major impact on the world.

From Larry and Sergey's incalculable effect on the worldwide diffusion of knowledge, to Clara Barton's Red Cross, which provides relief to millions, to Habitat for Humanity's vision of providing homes to the needy, and on and on. These things come from individual initiative, not government fiat.

Remember JFK's powerful words: Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

Think of the kind of world we would create together if all of us tried to answer that question.

Thanks, Alan, for answering it with this wonderful Grow Utah Ventures initiative!

Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

The Cost of Research

paulballen — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 23:28:07 -0800

I am spending a good deal of time trying to determine where mobile technology is going. Several of my companies are going to be involved in delivering content or services to mobile devices including cell phones.

So it is a bit frustrating to keep finding research analyst reports that are priced in the $2-5,000 range. Here's a 53 page report on the future of mobile phones selling for $3,495.

A few months back I blogged about 5 Most Valuable Services Most Internet Entrepreneurs Can't Afford. I included Jupiter Research services back then in first place. I should update that post by stating that in nearly every industry there are analysts that publish expensive reports that you can't afford to do without.

But when is the last time you paid $70 per page for anything? Ouch.

I paid $170 a couple years back for a Jakob Nielsen book on e-commerce usability. And last year I bought an encyclopedia of Nanotechnology for a couple hundred dollars -- but those are rare purchases.

I much prefer the Amazon (or was it Google?) rent a book approach where they anticipate charging $.10 per page.

Can anyone direct me to low-cost or free analyst research that projects adoption of mobile phones or portable computing devices as they related to GPS technology, portable gaming devices, digital wallets, and audio and video capabilities?

Does anyone have a favorite analyst or blogger that publishes forecasts on adoption rates for some or all of these new technologies?

Zoovy: Rapid Response to New Opportunities

paulballen — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 23:07:21 -0800

I have a friend who uses Zoovy for her e-commerce system. That is the only way -- until today -- that I had heard of the company.

But today I was very impressed to discover that they have already integrated their e-commerce services with Google Analytics, Google Base and Google Site Map.

My friend really likes Zoovy. Now I can see why.

Most companies I know dedicate all or most of their developers to longer term projects--projects that take weeks or months to implement. They don't have resources available to rapidly respond to outside opportunities.

Zoovy seems different. I am impressed at how quickly they have responded to Google's new services.

Has anyone seen any other e-commerce service provider already announce an integration with both Google Analytics and Google Base?

Google + Yahoo + eBay + Amazon = less than Microsoft

paulballen — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 17:49:53 -0800

Interesting to add up the market caps of the 4 leading internet companies and compare them to 30 year old Microsoft.

Google: $124.9 billion
eBay: $66 billion
Yahoo: $61.2 billion
Amazon: $20 billion
Total: $272.1 billion

Microsoft: $297.7 billion

I blogged in 2004, months before Google went public, that within 10-15 years Google's market cap would surpass Microsoft's.

In September, I said Google's market cap would pass Yahoo's by Q1 2005.

Then, in February of this year, I revised my forecast and said it won't even take 10 years for Google to pass Microsoft.

It now seems that within a few more weeks, the combined market caps of Google, eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon will pass Microsoft's. And then within a few more years, Google will likely be on top.

World Digital Library

paulballen — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:26:02 -0800

Librarian of Congress James Billington is proposing a World Digital Library project that will provide free access to millions of important documents from around the world.

Google is donating $3 million to the cause. Others will join it. The American Memory project from the Library of Congress already provides free access to millions of pages of American history content.

In 1990 I co-founded a CD ROM publishing company. Our stated mission was to "identify the most important books in every field of human knowledge and to make them available on CD ROM."

We built a good little company but we barely made a dent in digitizing the world's store of knowledge.

Just 15 years later it is clear that virtually all the books ever written will soon be digitized and made available on the World Wide Web.

Google Print, the Open Content Alliance (involving the Internet Archive, Yahoo and Microsoft, among others), the Million Book Project, and now the World Digital Library are devoting millions of dollars to the cause.

In 1988 I heard then BYU President Jeffrey R. Holland give a brilliant speech to the BYU Faculty about gathering truth. (His talk inspired what our CD ROM company tried to do two years later.)

He made a great point in that speech which seems even more important now, as we approach a world where millions of books are freely available to anyone.

"[What] the present world needs more than ever before, are those educated, and spiritual, and wise who will sort, sift, prioritize, integrate, give some sense of wholeness, some spirit of connectedness to great eternal truths. . . . The watchmen on the tower cry out for those who will integrate, coalesce, clarify, give both order and rank to important human knowledge."

Will future generations be better off than previous ones just because with a few clicks we can read the words from any book ever published?

Will access to near infinite knowledge bring the world peace and prosperity?

James Billington suggests that "Libraries are inherently islands of freedom and antidotes to fanaticism. They are temples of pluralism where books that contradict one another stand peacefully side by side just as intellectual antagonists work peacefully next to each other in reading rooms. It is legitimate and in our nation's interest that the new technology be used internationally, both by the private sector to promote economic enterprise and by the public sector to promote democratic institutions."

I like the concepts he sets forth. But what if people don't use these resources? (Maybe they will be too addicted to online games such as Everquest or Cyworld to notice that the world's knowledge is now available free of charge.) Or what if they use them, but they spend the majority of their time with less important texts?

Mark Twain said, "He who does not read good books has no advantage over he who cannot read them." (I first saw this quote in the humanities building at BYU in the 1980s, on a t-shirt!)

Henry David Thoreau said, "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all."

How will the world know which of the millions of books are actually the best?

We must have, as Jeffrey Holland said, individuals who are "educated, spiritual and wise" who will "sort and sift and prioritize" the knowledge found in those millions of books.

Craig Newmark, founder of Craig's List, announced recently that he plans to launch a "wisdom of the crowds" approach to news journalism.

I believe similar projects will be launched on the heels of all these book digitization projects. But a serious problem occurs if the crowds are not "educated, spiritual and wise."

If the crowds who rate and prioritize the books are "ignorant, sensual, and foolish" instead of "educated, spiritual and wise" then the books that get promoted will not be the "best books in every field" but will be the equivalent of modern fast food -- appealing but not satisfying and definitely not healthy.

Isaiah, perhaps the most quoted of all ancient prophets, describes what happens when people close their eyes to what true prophets say and to the knowledge contained in the most important books. He says that fall into a "deep sleep" and they fight against what is good. And that is never satisfying:

"It shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty: or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he is faint, and his soul hath appetite"

Isaiah talked about the importance of a single book that would come forth that would bring people out of darkness and increase their joy.

So which of the millions of books ever written can do this? Which are the most important books for people young and old to read, to study, and to contemplate? Which books contain truth that can lead to true happiness and to peace and prosperity?

Which books in every field of human knowledge contain the most truth and will help someone advance in his/her chosen field? And which are basically a waste of time?

I have about 3,000 books in my personal library.

A few have changed my life (most especially, "Love is the Killer App" by Tim Sanders.) A few have dramatically increased my business knowledge and success (such as "Net.gain" and "Designing Web Usability"). And a few have given me tremendous insights into how the world works (such as "Linked".)

Some have given me heroes and role models that I want to pattern my life after. ("Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky made me want to live a life of goodness and purity like Alyosha.)

But many of the books have not been worth the time I took to read them.

I am anxious to find a way to tap into the wisdom of the "educated, spiritual, and wise" crowds (I hope there are enough people like that to constitute a crowd!) and to empower them to provide the world with prioritized access to the most important human knowledge.

I don't think there should ever be a single reading list for everyone. Every individual has different talents and interests. So there should be thousands of reading lists compiled through the suggestions of the happiest and most successful people alive.

I look forward to collaborating with others on this project.

P.S. By the way, I happen to know the book that Isaiah was referring to. If you want a free copy, just send me an email (paulballenATyahoo.com) with your name and mailing address, and I'll ship one out to you. :)

Hitwise vs. Comscore

paulballen — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 17:54:52 -0800

I am going to subscribe to either Hitwise or Comscore in the next couple of weeks. For many years I used Media Metrix, Nielsen Netratings and then Comscore. I liked all of them, but in the end I used Comscore most because its data covered the top 10,000 sites each month.

Hitwise covers 500,000 sites in 160 industries. I've never used it before, but I'm tempted to use it.

Has anyone out there used both Comscore and Hitwise? If so, can I talk with you and ask you about the relative strengths and weaknesses?

Blogging from Stanford

paulballen — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 03:40:36 -0800

My one day trip to California unexpectedly turned into two.

Yesterday Dave Bradford and I had an incredible half hour meeting with the
reigning VC champion of the world, Tim Draper.

He is amazing. He liked our ideas for FundingUniverse but he freely gave us an
even bigger idea, and our whole team is now on fire.

Dave and I left the meeting amazed at how much value he added in just a few
short minutes.

I first met Tim in 1999 when MyFamily.com was looking for our first venture
capital. He and Steve Jurvetson both liked our idea, but we ended up getting a
term sheet from CMGI instead. (Note: I am no longer involved at MyFamily.com,
except as a small shareholder.)

I have run into Tim and Steve a few times since and I have always appreciated
how personable they are.

To get half an hour with the guy who backed Skype and sold it to eBay for
billions is amazing.

So today I am hanging out at Stanford, my favorite thinking place in the Bay
Area.

I love the memorial church, built by Jane Stanford and dedicated to the glory
of God and the loving memory of her husband Leland Stanford.

I am blogging on my Blackberry from a comfortable spot nearby in perfect 70
degree weather. This is a heavenly place.

I get sentimental whenever I am here, thinking about how God has blessed the
world through the innovations and ideas that have emerged from Stanford
University.

Where would we be without Stanford and Silicon Valley that surrounds it?

One of the leaders of my faith talked in the 1920s about how God uses his
church
to save souls and how he inspires business leaders to provide material
blessings and technology to lift the world from a degraded condition.

Both groups, religionists and scientists, can enlighten and lift people.

Today I noticed that Nicholas Negroponte from MIT Labs says he is just a few
months away from delivering $100 laptops to kids around the world, purchased in
minimum quantities of 1 million units.

I have blogged about this before, but it is now almost real.

The day is nearing that billions of people will be able to access the worlds
online library of information and communicate with one another.

The potential good that can come from this is incalculable. Poverty and
illiteracy could be eradicated. Every human being could develop skills and
capabilities and live a worthwhile life.

But at the same time that unprecedented opportunities are emerging to the lives
of people worldwide, we face huge problems of greed, corruption, war, and
hate.

We also face a new selfishness, a new hedonism in the developed world.

One manifestation of this is the lowest fertility rate in the history of the
world. Europes population is disappearing because the desire to reproduce and
pass on values and opportunities to children seems to be disappearing.

Just a year or two ago I read a quote by Peter Drucker, the greatest management
thinker of the modern era, who said that negative population growth is the
single biggest challenge facing the civilized world.

Last week in my internet marketing class I paid tribute to Peter Drucker, who
passed away last weekend. And I challenged my 50 students to try to figure out
a non-governmental solution for the declining birthrate in Europe and parts of
Asia.

I suggested one concept, a Perpetual Civilization Fund, which I admitted is
probably a crackpot idea, that would provide secondary life insurance policies
for older people many of whom experienced large families and appreciate them,
and that the beneficiaries of all the insurance proceeds would be families who
are having their third child or more.

I know some governments are trying to provide financial incentives for women to
bear children. I do not know if they are working.

If you do not think this is a huge problem, read the book ?The Death of the
West? written a few years back. It relies on UN population forecasts to show
how the European population is disappearing.

The total fertility rate in some parts of Europe is 1.1 to 1.4 (it has to be
2.1
babies per female in order to maintain status quo population.)

In Nigeria it is 6.5. So the population in some poor countries is exploding but
in the developed world it is shrinking (except through immigration.)

I know the modern world has worked for decades on reducing population growth
because of the so-called Overpopulation problem identified in the 60s.

But the serious problem Peter Drucker points out -- the declining population
problem -- is far more dangerous.

So I wonder if a solution to this problem, will, like Google and Yahoo, spin
out
of Stanford or the world of business and science and step forth to save the
world.

(Maybe when cloning is here everyone will want to try it once or twice!)

Or I wonder if it will come from religion. In this world challenge, I am
betting
on religion, because hearts and minds will need to change.

Or maybe a powerful combination of science and religion.

What do you think?

Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

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Versatile and bright book-keeper needed

paulballen — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 22:23:51 -0800

Infobase Ventures is expanding our operation.

We need to hire someone to help us do accounting for all the companies that we
are incubating. This will be a part-time position, probably 20 hours a week.

We need someone who is excellent with Quickbooks and Excel, and who has
experience with online banking.

They have to leverage automation and technology to reduce overhead costs in
accounting.

The person must understand financial models, cash flow forecasting, and have
some experience with cap tables (keeping track of company ownership through
initial rounds of funding and stock option grants to employees.)

Over time, this position could turn into full time work.

The initial pay will be $12-15 per hour, but that is negotiable based on
experience.

I am thinking that someone in the BYU Masters of Accountancy program might be a
good fit, especially someone who wants to go into venture capital.

Please submit your resume or refer your friends to amy_rhoadsAThotmail.com.

We will pay a $100 referral fee to someone who helps us hire the perfect
candidate.

Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

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Best Days for Email

paulballen — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 20:13:14 -0800

This is my first WordPress blog where I have included an image. Happily it was very easy to do.

I read a nice article that says Friday and Sunday emails get the highest open rates and click rates; while mid-week emails get the lowest. Here is the chart:

Getting to 15,000 page views a day

paulballen — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:39:37 -0800

Expert claims: do these 26 things and in a year your web site (built from scratch) will be getting 15,000 page views per day.

If you sign up for Google AdSense and your web site earns an eCPM of $5.00 (not that hard to do) on 15,000 page views then you site would be generating $75.00 per day in revenue.

Keep growing your site, say to 30,000 page views a day with a eCPM of $7.50 and your income will be more than $6,500 per month.

I wonder how many people have quit regular jobs and are able to work from home because of eBay first and now Google AdSense. I know quite a few people that are doing it. It might be a nice career option for a lot of folks.

Yahoo and Google Weather Reports; Legitimate Search Engine Tactics

paulballen — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:12:21 -0800

Yahoo is now issuing "weather reports" to update all of us when they are doing major reindexing of the web, or reordering of their search engine rankings. They post updates on their Yahoo Search Blog at ysearchblog.com. I am glad Yahoo is so open about their index updates.

Yahoo search relevancy seems to be improving a lot. I just did a number of searches on keywords for industries that I have worked in and consulted in, and the results are very good.

For its first few years, Google was under the radar screen of most internet marketers. Google results were pristine. Search results were incredibly relevant.

But since 2001, when people started discovering Page Rank and Link Popularity, millions of web pages have been designed and linked to by people trying to rank high on Google.

Google keeps trying to stay ahead, but as more and more people figure out what to do, it gets harder and harder to keep the search results relevant.

I remember a few months ago doing a search for a very major term and finding that the majority of the results were from SEO experts who were trying to make money as affiliates or Google AdSense partners.

There are legitimate SEO tactics, known as "white hat" which are simply proper ways to correctly design your web pages and attract publicity so that people will link to you. Matt Cutts, Google's director of search quality, was interviewed in October 2005 and he shares his thoughts on the matter of legitimate search engine optimization.

Matt also does Google weather report updates occasionally on his blog.

I hope the time comes when Google, Yahoo and MSN are all completely open and transparent about why they include certain sites and ban other sites. They have so much power to affect worldwide commerce. I have seen reports of companies losing nearly all of their revenue when they get excluded from the major search engine indexes.

Snap.com, an idealab company that got $10 million in VC funding back in July, was trying to lead the transparency revolution.

I blogged about Bill Gross leading the transparency revolution last December.

But unfortunately, their stats page which used to show daily searches, number of advertisers, and daily revenue, is temporarily down.

Wouldn't it be nice if search engine became transparent, so that legitimate companies with legitimate products and services could always know where they stand?

I know of one very good site that has 810,000 pages indexed by Yahoo, 170,000 by Google, and only 3,000 by MSN. I know of other sites that get tons of traffic from Yahoo or MSN but are banned by Google.

When sites get banned or ignored, most webmasters don't know why and are not only puzzled by very upset. I just read about a perfume company in Canada that is furious at Yahoo and is badmouthing them all over.

I hope the day comes when sites will clearly know exactly what they have to do to be "white hat". I hope that sites who have done things wrong or sites can have a clear and open path to getting reinstated.

I am guessing that some sites have even been banned because competitors have used spam tactics on their behalf to get them banned. I hate to think that this could happen.

An open system will, I think, prevent these kinds of things from happening. I think the first major search engine to embrace it will receive accolades from thousands of currently puzzled webmasters.

Business Week Goof

paulballen — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:19:20 -0800

This Business Week article about Google Analytics is confused and confusing.

The author claims that Google's free analytics strategy "could spell disaster for search-engine optimization companies."

But she doesn't seem to know the different between search engine marketing firms, online advertising agencies, and search engine optimization companies.

She lumps everyone in web marketing that is not Google together into one mass and claims they are all in trouble.

Reputable search-engine optimization companies rely upon web analytics to know if what they are doing is working. The Google strategy might just save them money.

Search engine optimization firms design web pages that are optimized to get natural search engine traffic, not paid clicks. They don't manage online advertising campaigns.

They get free traffic from natural search results for their clients by making sure pages are designed right, have the right keywords on them, and are deemed relevant by the search engines because other high quality sites link to them.

While it's true that Google's entrance into the web analytics space could have a very negative impact on some companies, I don't believe for a minute that search engine optimization companies are among them.

If you can think of a reason why Google Analytics will hurt SEO firms (particularly since Google Analytics Terms and Conditions do not allow them to use analytic data from other sites to tweak their search engine algorithm or for any other internal purposes), please comment.

My Three Week Absence

paulballen — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 05:20:00 -0800

I miss blogging.

Three weeks ago my blogging software stopped working. I tried a bunch of things and couldn't get it to work. So finally I called in my COO and asked him to manage my transition from Userland to WordPress. Phil Windley switched from Userland to Moveable Type, but Richard Miller convinced me to go to WordPress instead.

So I'm finally back.

And I am amazed by the things that have happened during the last three weeks that I've not blogged about. The pace of technological innovations continues to accelerate.

Here are a few headlines that I've missed commenting on:

1. Microsoft actually woke up. They actually finally get it! Apparently Bill Gates and Ray Ozzy are now leading the charge -- they realize they are going to have to go head to head with Google. In fact, they have to adopt Google's business model.

Microsoft's Windows Live and Office Live announcements and their clear reliance on AdCenter for (their pay-per-click advertising engine that will do demographic targeting, something that even Google doesn't do yet) has convinced me that they finally understand. Before Google can own the software world by building all the applications we need and giving them away for free (all subsidized by the super-efficient Google advertising machine), Microsoft is going to play the same game.

What this means for consumers is that most of the software we use in the future will be free (like web based email is today) and will be subsidized by advertising. Most of the ads will have to be unobtrusive, or else consumers will switch from Google apps to Microsoft apps to Yahoo apps. Whoever is less intrusive will probably get the most customers. This is all good news for consumers, but bad news for almost all other software companies.

2. Sun's podcast announcement. I was amazed to read last week that Sun will be offering a commercial service within the next 2-3 weeks that will convert any document you send them to a podcast. I can't wait to see this. I hope the computer voices are decent.

Combined with the analyst forecast that 945.5 million mp3 playing devices will ship in 2009, the Sun technology will make it possible, I believe, for knowledge workers around the world to identify all the content sources they want to master -- most of it is in print format only right now -- and consume it in text or audio format whenever and whereever they want.

I think the days of broadcast television and radio are numbered. I think it will become easy for consumer to customize own our reading, listening and viewing experiences. If the average person in the US spends 6-7 hours per day with media, over time we'll migrate from watching or listening to what the broadcasters want us to consume, to creating lists or channels or sharing ideas with all our friends and family or coworkers about the best stuff that we want to consume.

Imagine Google Alerts married with all the text, audio and video that is published or broadcast or uploaded on a daily basis. We are entering an unprecedented era where humans will have greatest opportunities to become experts in any subject by being aware of all the best content in the world that is being produced on that subject.

It's getting really, really close.

3. The Google Urchin announcement today means that any blogger or small web site in the world can now use fairly good web analytics at no cost.

The high end enterprise scale analytics companies, especially Omniture with its powerful data warehousing technology (which goes way beyond web-only data), have a long and prosperous life ahead of them. But Google will take the low end of the market pretty easily from all the small analytics players.

4. I met the evangelist for Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an amazing web service that will enable publishers to have massive content projects created by distributing them to thousands of piece-meal workers around the world. Very cool stuff. Just in time for some of our big worldhistory.com projects.

5. Phil Burns, my COO, introduced me to Riya, the photo recognition software used for facial recognition. He is travelling to San Francisco next week for some Riya-related meetings.

6. FundingUniverse.com held its first speedpitching event on Nov. 8th in Provo and got a ton of media coverage (newspaper, radio and five minutes of television!) The press loved the notion of "speed dating meets venture capital." I've gotten positive feedback from many entrepreneurs and investors.

Our network of angel investors and entrepreneurs is growing into the thousands. We are excited to take our speedpitching concepts all over.

6. I've also got some personal milestones that I haven't yet blogged about:

I ran 13.1 miles on my 40th birthday -- the longest run of my life -- to prove to myself that I'm not too old and obsolete yet, and that, in Robert Browning's words "the best is yet to be."

I spoke on "Approaching Omniscience" at BYU's eBusiness day and also listened to the other keynote speaker Josh James from Omniture give a great presentation about their industry-leading web analytics and online marketing platform.

I've hired a COO for Infobase Ventures as well as an executive assistant. We are working on leasing a few thousand square feet of space in Provo for our incubator and research labs.

There are so many other things to blog about, but rather than doing them all at once, I'll get back into my old daily routine.

It feels good to be back. I look forward to your comments and emails.

Cheers,

P. Allen
Blogger

If you're reading this...

paulballen — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 12:54:23 -0800

It's a long story, but i'm putting together a new blog this weekend. Just ignore any strange posts - other than this one.

You can browse my old blog here.