Archive for March, 2007

Recharging cell phones wirelessly, using radio waves

paulballen — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 23:19:48 -0700

Wow. Every once in a while you read a story that sounds too good to be true. Check out this Business 2.0 Magazine article about Powercast, a company that has found a way to recharge devices without wires.

Bambi on Geni (with video of David Sacks)

paulballen — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 23:15:41 -0700

Bambi Francisco has been my favorite columnist covering the internet for several years. (Read her Netsense columns on CBS Marketwatch.) Today she blogged about Geni.com's approach to social networking, and features a video clip of Geni COO David Sacks talking about how he hopes to enable everyone in the world to map themselves to the networked family tree that they have developed.

Hey does anyone know if you pronounce this company like "genie" or "jenny?" I've heard supposedly in-the-know people pronouncing it either way.

News Discussed at Today's Live Friday Session (Mostly from Business 2.0)

paulballen — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 23:01:40 -0700

Normally I get my news for Live Friday from 100+ RSS feeds, but this week I found that a deep dive into Business 2.0 (my favorite internet publication--it took the place of Industry Standard which went away years ago) gave us much more interesting topics that the kinds of PR and brand new announcements that hit the blogosphere. Business 2.0 tends to cover companies that are getting real traction, so you can avoid wasting time on all the hype that is out there. I think I'll use Business 2.0 a lot more in the future when planning Provo Labs Academy events.

This month's issue of Business 2.0 lists the 12 Influential Investors that every Web 2.0 Entrepreneur Needs to Know.
2007 is shaping up to be a better year for IPOs, according to Business2.0. I always love when a great company files to go public and you get to read the S1 for the first time. I rarely met a first time entrepreneur that has any idea how much information they can learn from public filings, including S1s. One place to see who is has just filed to go public is Hoovers.com. Hoover's also has a calendar of when the IPOs are scheduled to occur. I hadn't noticed that Glu Mobile, run by Greg Ballard (former CEO of MyFamily.com) went public about 10 days ago and raised $84 million. (See Glu's Google Chart.)
When entrepreneurs write business plans, they can get all the market research and statistics they need for their plan from public filings of companies in a similar sector.
We demonstrated chacha.com, the Jeff Bezos funded ($6.5 million) human assisted online search engine that reportedly had 30,000 guides working from home by January and is aiming for 300,000 guides by June. The founder wants to replace 411 calls (an $8.7 billion industry) which human assisted searches using his group of guides. He is planning for voice activated searches from mobile phones. The online strategy seems secondary, but he is hoping to have a million consistent users per month by June. Chacha intersperses sponsored links among the natural search results, but in my tests, I found the human guides actually found some great sites for me. I did have to wait several minutes in one case, but I could do other work while I was waiting for the guide to help me. The business model includes improving the natural search results by what the guides find for searchers--an interesting but possibly expensive model. But the founder thinks he can generate $12 million next year while paying his guides about 20% of that revenue. The Business 2.0 article says his long term vision is "instant access to guides on near-invisible Bluetooth earpiece." Imagine that: being seconds away from free human help from trained internet searchers, at any time, from any place. Let's hope chacha.com gets some traction, because this is a cool vision.
We discussed how Spot Runner (which was founded by the folks behind Firefly and PeoplePC and has already raised $40 million in VC) is aiming to make local, targeted television advertising available to virtually any small business. They have divided businesses into 4,000 categories, and are producing generic TV spots for each type of business, that can be customized (new voice over, logo, phone number, address, and etc, I suppose) for any company, and then run on cable TV stations targeting local audiences. The founder rebuts the "TV is too expensive myth" because they sell these customizeable video spots for $500 and then help you place the ads for cheap: “You can buy 30 seconds of prime time on a premium network in almost any local market in the country for less than $200. Outside the top 10-15 markets, it’s less than $100. Outside prime time, it’s less than $50.” Google will certainly be competing soon with Spot Runner, so this space will become very exciting to watch.
RightMedia.com did $150m in auction-based online advertising sales last year and expects to triple it this year. Yahoo recently paid $45 m for 20% of the company, and offers billions of impressions on its web sites for sale via RightMedia.com. I haven't tried this site yet, but encourage people to try this and see how well it works for them.
We discussed how PayScale used public domain data from the federal government to attract search engines and go from 10,000 monthly visitors to 1.2 million, primarily through natural search traffic (and word of mouth) without spending any money on advertising. And now, it has wage data on 5.5 million US employees, nearly 5 times as much data as the leading traditional wage consulting firm. Using public domain data to attract initial customers, and user generated content to keep people coming back and signing up for your free salary comparison reports, so you can upsell them to your $19.95 for six months subscripton to more detailed reports that can help someone get a pay raise, is a brilliant business plan. I'm very impressed with this company and its model. It generated $5 million last year.
We also looked at Mojopages and Yelp both of which are yellow pages sites trying to supplement their data with user reviews. Mojopages expects $500k in revenue during the next 12 months, while Yelp already has a great Alexa ranking of 1,744 and a nice three year chart.
Finally, we looked at Meebo.com, a VC backed company that lets you put IM windows on your blog or webpage (kind of interesting), and Pickspal.com, which facilitates office pool betting, and has attracted 200,000 registered users since October and has 1 million monthly unique visitors. I dislike gambling and anything gambling related. I simply showed this site because it has a novel viral marketing approach. The founder "created an incentive for users to invite their sports-obsesses buddies to the site: if they win a prize, so do you. 'I’m going to be giving away two of a lot of things.'”
Finally we looked at Dogster, a profitable (since July 2005) social networking site for dog lovers, which had $1.1 million in revenue last year and doubled the number of users. We highlighted their iterative and rapid approach to web development, which I wholeheartedly agree with: “Instead of working on a feature for months trying to get it perfect, we’ll work on something for two weeks and then spend two or three days listening to users and fine-tuning it.”

Music on cell phones

paulballen — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 15:46:43 -0700

Last night I was told about a great site for buying cell phones online called letstalk.com. So I checked it out and they do seem to have most phones and most carriers, so a lot more options than you typically see. They offer referral bonuses as well. My friend got a free Blackberry Pearl and loves it.

Speaking of mobile phones....I am advising a lot of entrepreneurs to skip the internet phase of their business, meaning trying to get desktop traffic to their web site, and instead focus on mobile applications and mobile web site development. That seems to be where everything is going right now. Google's mobile search is ready for primetime, Yahoo launches a mobile ad network, GPS-enabled phones are finally arriving in large numbers, video is getting to phones, and on and on.

Today I saw this press release from letstalk.com that shows how much music is making it to cell phones.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Online wireless retailer LetsTalk today announced the results of a survey that found the music player feature on cell phones isn't just for teens. The survey shows over 83 percent of music phone purchasers are over the age of 25, and that 55 percent of those 35 years and older are listening to music on their cell phones. Yet, the music they are putting on cell phones isn't typically coming from carrier offerings.

The music feature on cell phones is becoming more popular with people of all ages -- about 63 percent of multimedia cell phone users have listened to music on their phones. Over 50 percent have downloaded 20 or more songs, and 89 percent have downloaded at least four songs to their phones.

Music phone users have several options for acquiring and downloading music to their cell phones, but in spite of the convenience of buying and downloading songs directly from their carrier, only 14 percent of survey respondents said they have done this. Overall, buying music online is popular, with over 60 percent of those polled going this route. While 67 percent of those polled stated they have used a computer to transfer music files to their cell phones from CDs or the Internet.

"Our survey results indicate that consumers are listening to music from their own collection, so virtually any music phone can meet their needs" said Delly Tamer, CEO of LetsTalk. "Customers are making the most of their music phones with cables and memory cards. The industry needs to offer customers a more compelling reason to download songs directly and easily to their cell phones -- better prices, easier navigation, faster speeds, exclusive songs, or all of the above."

I still don't have a decent RSS reader for my cell phone (although I downloaded Bloglines for Blackberry today, so I'll try that), and my web connection is still way too slow (can't wait for T-Mobile to upgrade their network), and I haven't bought a Blackberry 8800 yet so I'm still missing the GPS and location-based services that I can't wait to have, so there are still limitations to my using my cell phone for everything. (I still use my 60GB iPod for music and audio books), but I think those limitations will fade over the next 1-2 years and by the time the successor to the Blackberry 8800, the Nokia N95, and the iPhone version 2 or 3 arrive, they will be so useful that I may never need to use a laptop again.

Catching the Geni that's out of the bottle: introducing FamilyLink

paulballen — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 19:32:25 -0700

On January 16th, an amazing, innovative, well-financed company (especially now, after raising $10 million!) launched a brilliant, web 2.0 based online family tree building tool called Geni..

After getting TechCrunched more than once, Geni caught the fancy of many bloggers and started spreading through word of mouth, but more powerfully, its innately viral application started attracting thousands of users very quickly. (Geni's Alexa chart doesn't look great, but Geni's Quantcast chart looks better. No "addicts", however, which comprise 38% of Ancestry's traffic.)

I was both thrilled and disappointed. You see, I want interest in family history to spread all over the world. The family is fundamentally the most important unit in society, and modern societies with the ever weakening family are bring hosts of problems that will never be solved by government, which relies on force to tax people and create policy. The Old Testament ends with two haunting verses: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD; and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to the fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." (Malachi 4:5-6).

Getting families to pay more attention to each other is important not only to those who believe in the Old Testament. Phillip Longman, author of "The Empty Cradle" which decries the falling birthrates in industrialized countries from an economic standpoint ends his book with these powerful words: " If free societies have a future, it will be because they figure out or stumble upon a way to restore the value of children to their parents, and of parents to each other."

Even the Soviet Union, when its birth rates kept declining, spoke out. Andrei Kirilenko, the ideology chief, said at a Kremlin rally in 1979, "Our common responsibility for the country's future requires us to strengthen the family, to elevate the prestige of motherhood and to increase the demands made on the parents as to how their children are growing up." Note how the language implies the power of government (which is always coercive) to get parents to do better. (Cited by Longman)

So I was thrilled by the launch of Geni, the best free online family tree building tool since MyFamily.com/Ancestry.com launched its free online family tree building tool back in 1999, and excited by the new attention that was being given to the family history category by the blogosphere. The first time ever really, since Ancestry.com/MyFamily.com are rather mature web sites and The Generations Network, which owns both of them, is more in its "monetization phase" than in a "build the market" phase. The blogosphere has never gotten all that excited about what Ancestry.com does and since MyFamily.com hasn't been free since 2001, it has experienced "negative population growth."

(Speaking of negative population growth, no less a thinker than Peter Drucker said that negative population growth is the single biggest issue facing civilization today. So on my recent trip to Europe it was very interesting to read "The Empty Cradle" completely and to consider the factors there that are leading to fewer children. Italy used to have a million births a year--now it's 500,000.)

Not that Geni or MyFamily.com or any site that connects families is going to increase the worldwide birth rate. We'll leave that job to matchmaking sites like eHarmony.com.

The CEO of eHarmony.com spoke at Stanford on Valentine's Day, and casually pointed out that on any given day, 200 marriages occur where the people met on eHarmony, and that by the end of this year, there will have been 100,000 babies born to couples married because of eHarmony. No wonder he says doing any other job seems trivial compared to this most-satisfying company. Maybe the solution to worldwide negative population growth is to make sure eHarmony rolls out worldwide as quickly and inexpensively as possible!

Okay, so back to Geni. I was disappointed by Geni's appearance because I had decided late last year to stop running my Provo Labs incubator, and start focusing on just one company, and turn that company into a raging success. I had chosen to focus on World Vital Records, along with the very talented team that is already there, for many reasons, one being that we felt we could be the first genealogy company to launch a social network for family history, and social networks are generally the fastest growth web sites today.

We were planning to do something entirely different than what family history web sites have done before, and we still are. But Geni's launch has caused us to change our time table for many of our product features.

To be honest, my disappointment has entirely faded. It's been swallowed up by an overwhelming feeling of excitement about family history sweeping the world, about families actually using technology to connect, rather than to disintegrate. The Geni launch, as well as all the great moves that Ancestry.com is doing (like launching international sites, kicking off its first-ever integrated advertising campaign -- worth $10 million -- to boost interest in the brand) and the newly formed alliance between werelate.org (see what Dick Eastman said about werelate.org last June) and the Allen County Public Library, the second largest family history library in the country -- all of these things add to the level of excitement.

Anyway, the big question is can another family history social network take off? Can anyone catch Geni?

I'm not going to answer that question, because I simply can't predict it. And it really doesn't matter. Geni provides a great service to people who want to build their first family tree and to invite family members to collaborate on it. Geni is obviously great at listening to customers (Geni blog, Geni forum) and at responding to their requests quickly.

And of course Ancestry would certainly dispute the need to "catch Geni" in the first place. Ancestry is loudly defending its leadership position in this space. They have made it clear through recent press announcements that the Ancestry family tree software is attracting millions of records, photos, and more. And with revenues of $150 million per year, they have a very good chance to defend their leadership position.

So where does World Vital Records stand? How we can think that we have a chance to compete in this venture-capital driven world of online genealogy?

The key for us is to attract millions of users to our new free social network for family history which we call FamilyLink. We are some days away from our beta launch, and we can hardly wait. Our site will offer unique and valuable help to every serious family history researcher, and it will nicely coexist with all of the TGN web sites as well as Geni.com.

Our team is cautiously optimistic about our initial launch, and wildly enthusiastic about the long-term potential that we have to provide value to family historians worldwide. And we believe that by adding new databases every day to our World Vital Records web site, that our revenue will be able to keep up with our expenses. It won't be cheap to run FamilyLink. But World Vital Records continues to generate record revenue each month and we are getting ever closer to being a sustainable business.

Thanks to the GEDCOM standard for data exchange, anyone who downloads a family tree from familysearch.org or Ancestry.com or Geni will be able to import their family data into virtually any genealogy software program or upload it to sites that accept gedcom uploads. And based on Geni's March 15th blog post, any gedcom upload site that gets 100 uploads of family trees with at least 1,000 names in them, will end up with bigger trees than Geni has right now.

Of course, the magic in Geni is not in the size of its trees, but in its virality. Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn says he keeps a list of 12 people in the world who truly understand viral marketing (and he is one of the 12.) I wonder if anyone at Geni is on that list. Probably so, given the common PayPal connections. I doubt that anyone from TGN is on his list. But I hope that FamilyLink might convince him to add one more name to this list...and soon.

You can visit FamilyLink today and sign up for the beta. We'll let you know when it is available. It won't be long.

My European Awakening

paulballen — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:22:07 -0700

I just returned from 7 days in Europe. Thanks to LinkedIn Answers, I probably saved $1,000 on airfare on this trip by taking the advice of some of my connections who are more experienced last-minute travellers. (I've joked that with all this great advice, I could publish an ebook on last minute European travel and probably sell it for $10 on our ebook site.)

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, said in his excellent podcast from Stanford University last month that he hopes LinkedIn Answers becomes the first truly useful Answers service online. He told about asking a question (took him 2 minutes) and getting 26 answers, 18 of which were very helpful.

My experience was similarly helpful. I asked about 200 of my 600 LinkedIn connections how to get a cheap last-minute flight to Europe. I got 37 responses, most of them were very helpful. (One told me jokingly to pretend there was a funeral in the family and get the bereaved family discount. Another said I could be a courier and fly for free.)

From these answers, I learned of about 10 online travel sites that I had previously not used. SideStep.com was the most useful on my trip. (Venere.com, an Italian site, turned out to be the most useful for booking last minute hotels in Paris and London.)

I booked a flight on Air France two days before leaving for Europe, for $980 round trip from LAX to Rome, with a stop in Paris at CDG (Charles De Gaulle) airport. (Air France serves great food, by the way.) After Rome, I fly one-way to London, got a hotel downtown for 69 pounds per night, then on Saturday morning flew round trip to Dublin on British Airways for under US$200. Rather than fly back to Rome, I took the Eurostar train from London to Paris, and arrived in Paris Sunday night. I think it was US$229. My hotel was across the street from the Gare du Nord station and cost only 60 Euros.

So all in all, the travel costs weren't so bad, considering the last-minute planning. What adds up was the cost of transportation within each city (taxis, metro) and the cost of food, which was surprisingly high.

But the trip itself gave me a sweet taste for world travel. I grew up with a very tiny reality map (see my Connect magazine article titled "Expanding Your Reality Map" in March 2006.) But it has been expanding every year. And especially now.

Reading Russian literature in high school, I dreamed of travelling, and meeting with the kinds of fascinating souls that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky described in 19th century Russia. Their characters had great depth, education, and were master conversationalists. My favorite novel of all time, Brothers Karamazov, explains human nature better than any other book I have ever read. I wanted to be Alyosha.

So in college, I studied International Relations, which soon led to my talking a Russian class and then switching my major to Russian. I loved the language and the culture and the history of Russia. After graduation I went to DC looking for a job. I applied with the NSA and started undergoing their 6-8 month long background check process. But I never ended up interviewing with them. Instead, I started working at Folio, my brother's search engine company.

For the last 19 years I've been in various high tech startups. But I've had a latent interest in world history, international affairs, foreign languages, and cultures and religions of the world. That interest has grown lately as my reading list has started including more books about the flat world we live in, and the economic booms in China and India.

But nothing has opened my eyes and piqued my interest in world affairs like my recent trip to Europe. Though my entire trip was business focused, I was able to visit several historic sites in Rome, including the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the Vatican Museums which includes the famous Sistine Chapel, and in London, and in Dublin I saw the Book of Kells, created by Irish monks in 800 AD, and walked through the library at Trinity College, the largest library in Ireland, with more than 4 million volumes, including 200,000 very old tomes in one great hall. (Wikipedia says that the Jedi library in Star Wars may have been modeled after this great library.) Years ago I read "How the Irish Saved Civilization." Now I must re-read it, after having seen these historic artifacts.

I had some excellent ideas for a mobile application for history travellers, which would be built for worldhistory.com, which is likely to become part of World Vital Records in the future. (History and genealogy are really inseparably connected.)

I couldn't stop considering that Utah, where I was born and raised, was settled by the Mormon pioneers (including my ancestors and my wife's) started in 1847--just 160 years ago. While most of the places I visited have recorded history going back at least 10-15 times that far back.

More importantly, on this trip I met many wonderful people. Genealogy is a great subject to start any conversation with, because everyone has some knowledge of where there family came from, and how they fit into the world. My discussions with people from England, Ireland, Poland, Italy, and France were very enlightening, albeit sometimes rather depressing. Life is hard in many countries. Many people aren't having children because they can't afford to. They have to live in big cities where costs of living are so high, that they don't know how they can possibly have a family. And it is important to face the realities of what people around the world actually think of the U.S. More than one European told me that the US was exporting materialism to all the world through its media, and causing people to be disatisfied with anything except a fast-paced materialistic, hedonistic lifestyle. (Coming home to a ton of billboards, radio and TV commercials, and seeing how everything in the US centers around selling stuff, I see their point.) And of course, most people strongly oppose the war in Iraq.

So I get to learn history and meet people. I'm in heaven really. I'm a former humanities major now working in a high-tech business (online world genealogy) that requires me to travel to many different countries of the world. In each country, I must learn its history and politics to determine when governments started keeping records, what kinds of records they kept, and where they are preserved now. I must also understand the religious histories and cultures of each country, since so many records of births, deaths and marriages were created and kept for religious reasons. I get to revitalize my knowledge of Spanish and Russian, and start studying bits and pieces of French, Italian, German, and hopefully Mandarin and Arabic as well. I'm planning to buy a mobile translation device soon, probably a high-end Franklin Publisher dictionary that handles 400,000 phrases and also supports audio. I know I'll never have time to really learn these things, but a little exposure to them is extremely interesting nonetheless.

Besides my Blackberry, which worked nicely in Europe (I called T-Mobile on the way to the airport last week and they took care of it all in a few minutes), the most useful tools I had were LinkedIn.com, which enabled me to set up some last minute meetings, and Wikipedia, which basically enlightened me about every place I went, and all the things I saw. What a marvelous invention for travellers!

My dream is to travel with a Blackberry 8800 (with its GPS and Google Maps integration) and have a fully-functional mobile version of LinkedIn, and a mobile version of Sidestep so that I can plan trips on the fly (I usually procrastinate trip planning, but then while I'm there I want to make the most of it). I also want a business version of Dodgeball, so that I can find out if anyone that I'm connected to is also in the area. I may need to try out Twitter, since it's getting so much positive buzz. (In fact, the Financial Times had it on the first page last Friday or Saturday as the next big thing from Silicon Valley--they called it miniblogging.) Perhaps it will be a helpful tool to let people contact me when I'm travelling... this would sort of be a pull approach to getting meetings, rather than a push approach. Finally, I need a database of all the LDS Family History Centers on my Blackberry, as well as a Genealogists Address Book, so that wherever I travel I'm seconds away from finding out where any local repositories or societies are. (Oh, and the Blackberry should support all the functionality of the Franklin device I described above. I don't want to have to carry multiple devices.)

If I were young and without responsibilities, perhaps I'd take off and travel the world for the next year, visiting nearly every country, and just running World Vital Records from wherever I happen to be. As it stands, I'm currently planning a week a month for a multi-country trip. I guess I'll see if I have the stamina to pull this off, and if it continues to make business sense to do so.

So...if you happen to be highly involved with genealogical records anywhere in the world, and would like to see if partnership makes sense between you and your organization and World Vital Records, please let me know. I don't mind last minute trips, since my LinkedIn friends have shown me how to pull them off.

Best entrepreneur lecture series online

paulballen — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 17:17:52 -0700

My favorite collection of entrepreneur lectures is from Stanford University's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series. I highly recommended downloading these from iTunes or listening to them while you work. You can find scores of incredibly valuable lectures here. One of my favorite's is a recent lecture by Reid Hoffman, founder and Chairman of LinkedIn.com.

The best online collection of interviews with startup entrepreneurs is probably at npost.com. There are 167 so far.

One is a Jan 31st interview with David Sacks, the founder of Geni.com.

Physical Libraries vs Electronic Libraries

paulballen — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:58:21 -0700

The Everton Collection at the Logan Library in Logan, Utah could use more visitors.

Last September Leland Meitzler on his excellent genealogyblog broke the following news about one of the largest private genealogical collections in the U.S.:

I really feel that I'm being premature in posting this blog, but since the word is now circulating on the Internet, I'm forced into it. Yes - plans are underway for the Everton library to open in early October. I will announce the actual opening when it happens.

The Everton collection, which has been unavailable to the public for over two years now, will be opening soon. Logan Library Director Ron Jenkins has been interviewing potential librarians for the collection - and earlier this month, Jenkins hired Jason Cornelius, who is moving from Salt Lake City to Logan. Cornelius will be a full-time librarian, cataloging and overseeing the daily operations of the collection.

The books are housed in an unfinished and unused auxillary courtroom in Logan. The facility is very warehouse-like, complete with bare concrete floors. However, the bookshelves are full of an amazing variety of genealogical materials. It will be good to see the facility open to the public.

Volunteers are needed to assist with clerical work and help genealogists use the massive collection.

Read more about the "opening soon" of the Everton collection in the September 22, 2006 edition of The Logan Herald Journal.

Yesterday, a news story claims that the Library has had only 200 visits since it opened last October.

I googled "everton library logan" and "logan utah genealogy" and couldn't readily find any information about the library, its holdings, hours or anything else. I looked at Everton.com's home page and couldn't find anything. Then I googled "logan library" and found the Logan Library home page with a prominent link to the Everton Collection information that visitors or volunteers would need.

If Logan officials would like more visitors to the Library, I'm sure World Vital Records can help a great deal. We have thousands of daily visitors to our web site. We could make it easy for these visitors, who are accessing some portions of the Everton Collection on our web site, to find the physical library in Logan where they can access the entire 82,000 piece collection, including the many copyrighted materials that World Vital Records will not likely put on its web site for some time.

I have wondered how physical libraries around the world will fare as Google Book Search, the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft Live Book Search, and other massive book digitization projects around the world.

(I think Microsoft Live Book Search is cleaner than Google's. And to compare the size of the content, I did a search for my ancestor William Brewster, of Mayflower fame. Here are the 1,449 William Brewster results on Microsoft and the 3,608 William Brewster results on Google.)

Thomson Gale's Access My Library project is a very smart effort to continue to make libraries relevant, by enabling library patrons to access huge electronic collections using their library ID.

I personally love physical libraries--there is nothing like browsing shelves and thumbing through old books. While I love the digital libraries for searching for something specific, I prefer to browse in a physical library. I have had some ideas about how RFID or Bluetooth could be used along with Smart Phones and PDAs to turn physical book collections into a wonderful experience of discovery--where the PDA knows what you are looking for and the books know what they contain, and the PDA and books can communicate as you wander around around the library, and let you know when you're near something of interest.

I think future physical libraries could be really far out, but unless they do something radical, I'm not sure how they will survive.

What are your thoughts about physical libraries and the purpose they will serve in the coming years?

Topics for this week's "Live Friday"

paulballen — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 14:04:01 -0700

Every Friday an energetic group of internet entrepreneurs and marketers meets at the Provo Labs Academy at 12:30 for a 60-90 minute run down of the hottest online business news of the week.

Some weeks we are blown away by the exciting announcements and new launches of venture-backed startup companies or the mind-blowing techtonic plate-shifting announcements that come from the major players in the industry, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, AOL and IAC.

As I read my 70+ RSS feeds, I keep a running tally of some of the topics we will cover at Live Friday. Yesterday alone I added the following to my list for this week:

a. Michael Eisner, vuguru.com
b. Divvio.com, user generated channels
c. Nintendo Mii challenges MySpace?
d. Google TV ad purchases, print, radio

Google may provide query volumes soon

paulballen — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:20:31 -0800

The blogosphere is going nuts over the possibility that Google will be providing monthly query volume by keyword. This is something that Goto.com/Overture/Yahoo Search Marketing has provided for years, but inventory.overture.com has been unreliable for some time. And Yahoo only has a minority of the overall search traffic. There are paid options like WordTracker (which I have used) for query volume and Keywordtopia (which I haven't used yet) for generating unique words lists based on query volume and amount of competition. But if Google gets into this arena, it will be a boom for all search engine marketers. The screen shot from the adamap.com post shows that Google will display the query volume per keyword as well as the amount of PPC competition for that word. What they won't do is show the SEO competition. This is what our WebEvident.com Searchability(TM) technology attempts to provide: an SEO "acquirability" score, meaning, how hard will it be to get a top 10 ranking on any given keyword based on the current top 10 results--how optimized is their page, how many incoming links do they have, etc. Unfortunately, WebEvident is only available through third party distributors; its retail site has never launched. If WebEvident could find a partner to build its retail site and share the revenue, I think they would do it. Use the Contact Me form if you are interested in discussing this....

Genealogy in India

paulballen — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 10:10:53 -0800

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that World Vital Records' India page ranks #3 in MSN for "india genealogy." I'm still trying to convince FundingUniverse.com to roll out 6 regional web sites in India, as suggested by an Indian entrepreneur who explained to me how startup funding might naturally happen in that country. I don't know if I've blogged about it, but 3 years ago I read "India Unbound" by the first venture capitalist in India, Gurcharan Das. It is an absolutely incredible look at the economic revolution that has been occuring in India since 1991. I am very optimistic about the future of India, which will be the world's most populated country by about 2030.

International Genealogy and Search Engine Rankings

paulballen — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 09:33:12 -0800

For many years I have wanted Ancestry.com to go international, since the world population is more than 20 times larger than the U.S. population. I felt that a Rootsweb-type model could be done in virtually every country of the world, followed at sime time, by an Ancestry-type subscription model. The one (a user generated content model) would lead to the other (a premium database model.)

Note: I left the company in February 2002 and have no inside information about the company or its plans.

Since the company hired Tim Sullivan as its 6th CEO in 8 years (I was the first, then hired my brother Curt, who was replaced by Greg Ballard, and then Dave Moon, Tom Stockham, and now Tim Sullivan), there are strong signs that Ancestry is going international, and in a big way. It's very exciting for me to watch. I'm very pleased with the German web site that Ancestry launched, and of course the company has done great things in the UK and Canada.

When I first learned about Tim Sullivan, I heard that in his previous role as CEO of Match.com he had helped Match.com go into 27 countries, or something like that. So I suspected this was coming. This is a very good thing for the company as well as for genealogists worldwide. Tim has made a number of very good decisions in the past year, and in the past few months I've seen an acceleration of good moves being made by the company. I'm very encouraged.

When I decided to get back into the genealogy industry full-time, just a few months ago, we decided to try to focus on things that were not being addressed yet by the larger companies in the genealogy space. We have started beefing up our international search engines, and working on user generated content features that will be rolling out in the coming weeks. In addition, I'm planning to travel internationally to work with content partners worldwide. I have several such trips in the works.

Even though we are a small company, we have a generous approach to working with content partners and an incredible online marketing team that is generating more traffic and customers every month, so our royalty pool is becoming sizeable. We know we will make a good partner for many international content owners.

One of our keys to success internationally will be search engine optimization that will enable us to attract visitors from all over the world to our web pages with no marketing costs. With pay-per-click costs increasing, natural search becomes the key way for a company to grow and grow profitably.

Our efforts in this regard are beginning to pay off. We rank #1 on MSN.com for "china genealogy", "chile genealogy", "kenya genealogy", "philippines genealogy", "portugal genealogy", "tonga genealogy", "turkey genealogy", and "vietnam genealogy." We rank in the top 10 in Google, Yahoo and MSN for many other countries already. And as we roll out genealogy web pages for every town and city in the world, and for every surname in the world, and as our users beginning sharing content with each other, all of this content will be optimized for search engines as well as for mobile phones.

After leaving MyFamily.com in 2002 I ran an internet marketing agency called 10x Marketing that did search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, and affiliate marketing for many companies. And our World Vital Records team has excellent skills in these areas as well.

So keep an eye on World Vital Records and our forthcoming FamilyL--- web site, as our natural search rankings continue to grow our total web site traffic will get very robust.

We know that having 13.8 million pages of content indexed by Google, like Rootsweb does, almost all of it user generated, is a great way to attract millions of monthly visitors, the way Rootsweb does.

We have only 17,400 pages indexed by Google right now, but this should grow by two orders of magnitude this year as our strategy begins to play out. And when it does, we will become a significant participant in the international genealogy space.

Crash Course in Internet Marketing starts March 15th

paulballen — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 08:56:03 -0800

Yesterday I met with about a dozen entrepreneurs who came to the Provo Labs Academy to learn about the 12-Week Crash Course in Internet Marketing that starts next Thursday, March 15th at 5 pm.

An email will be going out to about 1,000 Utah entrepreneurs early next week, as well as a few additional marketing efforts. We have room for at least 10 more people to sign up for the class, but space is limited, so sign up today at www.provolabs.com/academy/

We've conveniently scheduled the class for Thursdays at 5 pm, so that both entrepreneurs and full-time working professionals can attend.

When you sign up for the Crash Course, you are also welcome to attend our Live Friday lectures every Friday at 12:30 pm at the Academy (yes, bring your own lunch) where we discuss all the news of the week that affects internet entrepreneurs and internet marketers. This is one of my favorite hours of the week. I invite my partners at World Vital Records and other Provo Labs portfolio companies to attend. The goal is to try to stay current with all the new companies, technologies, web sites, and marketing strategies, which is hard to do in an ever-changing world.

I go through dozens of RSS feeds each week from all of my favorite sources, including MarketingVOX, and try to select the top 10 news highlights of the week that internet marketers and entrepreneurs should be aware of.

Here's an write up from one Live Friday session from a few months ago:

Every Friday at noon, our Provo Labs Academy members get together to discuss all the latest internet marketing news. I have promised to read MarketingVOX every day and to visit all the new web sites and try the new tools that affect internet marketing. Then I

12-week course on Internet Marketing starts today (Thursday, March 8th)

paulballen — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 06:43:06 -0800

Anyone who wants to attend the "after hours" 12-week Provo Labs Academy internet marketing crash course can come to our first introductory lecture, tomorrow (Thursday, March 8th) at 5 pm. To learn more about the course, check out www.provolabs.com/academy/ and register online. Tomorrow is free, so come even if you are just thinking about signing up for the $995 course. And bring a friend, if you want. But please RSVP online.

Required Reading for Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs

paulballen — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 05:09:13 -0800

I just recommended that our World Vital Records team all get copies of the new book from 37signals called Getting Real. Get this: you can read it free online or buy a PDF or paperback version of it. They've sold 20,000 copies so far.

I will probably read part of it online and then buy the paperback version so I can mark it up like crazy, and put my notes at the end of the book the way Tim Sander's teaches you to read in "Love Is the Killer App" (my most highly recommended business book of all time.)

Also, I was on a Facebook online marketing group tonight and found out that Paul Graham's Y Combinator has released a reddit-like news aggregator for startup entrepreneurs. Check it out: it's going to be recommended reading for all the entrepreneurs I know.

Paul Graham's Y Combinator is an incredibly cool incubator/seed stage funding mechanism with an incredible focus on technology startups. If I ever do an incubator again (after spending the next N years running World Vital Records), I'll meet with Paul first and try to learn from what he is doing. I think he's nailing it.

But, I may never do an internet incubator again, since Geni just demonstrated that a genealogy/family social networking web site can become worth $100 million in about 8 months.

Can you believe it!!! With 100,000 users in less than 2 months, and with $10 million in new funding (at a $100 million post-money valuation) Geni is poised to become one of the most important players in the genealogy world.

It will be interesting to see their revenue model, as it unfolds.

We found at MyFamily.com that it was nearly impossible to make money with online advertising. When people are engaging with their family in private communications and content sharing, they are in what we called a "heads down" mode, that is, they were really focused on their family, and not willing to click on advertisements. We tried all kinds of things, but nothing worked.

Many other content sites are "heads up" sites, where people are in exploring or research mode and are totally ready to view ads and click on them. Our advertising click rates at MyFamily.com (where I worked from 1996-2002) were about low as I have ever seen anywhere.

So the Geni model, if it is advertising based, will be interesting to watch.

My guess is that Geni could be like YouTube--get acquired for a ton of money because of its number of users, without any regard whatsoever to revenue. That surely must be what the venture investors are thinking. If an exit like that happens, more power to them.

But if an exit like that doesn't happen, in other words, if Geni is required to make money (and a lot of it because the valuation is so high), then the company might have to severely compromise its user experience, and bombard people with online and email ads in order to survive.

World Vital Records has been working on its "MySpace for Families" business for several months now, before we had heard about Geni's launch in January. So we believe in this space. But unfortunately, we weren't the first one's to launch a real Web 2.0 application for family history.

But we believe that our angle is very unique. Our team has deep roots in family history, and our approach is very different from Geni's, although we can certainly learn a lot from what they are doing. Our social network site won't have to make money because our genealogy subscription site is doing that for us (we had a record month in February), so it can focus on member acquisition and user generated content.

Our site will be called FamilyL--- something. Stay tuned.

Last chance for Utah entrepreneurs to get $100,000 in funding at Governor's Summit

paulballen — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 04:38:26 -0800

Utah is a very friendly state for startup companies. It ranks in the top few states for entrepreneurship. We have a great economic environment, a well educated work force, and a very growth-oriented governor. Plus, we have FundingUniverse.com, headquartered right here in Utah.

FundingUniverse.com and Grow Utah Ventures will select five entrepreneurs to present their business plans on March 22nd at Governor Huntsman's Economic Summit, in front of a live audience at Grand America Hotel (the finest hotel in Salt Lake City.) The audience will include angel investors from nearly every angel group in Utah. And the winning entrepreneur will receive an investment of up to $100,000 from these angels.

The application deadline is tomorrow, March 6th. Click here to apply.

Even if you aren't chosen to present at this exclusive event, by submitting your plan to FundingUniverse.com (for free) your plan will be viewable by scores of angel investors in Utah.

FundingUniverse.com operates nationwide, with nearly 750 angel investors and VCs nationwide using the site to find early stage deals. Submit your plan and then call to find out when the next Speedpitching event will be held in your region.

Note: I helped found FundingUniverse.com in early 2005 and Provo Labs is a significant shareholder in the company.