Marcelo Calbucci

There was a time on the Internet that big brands and companies would only use carefully writing, editorially reviewed text, and photos would come from professionals’ photographers as a request from the marketing department. Then it came the age of user generated content (UGC). Reviews were written by visitors of a website on TripAdvisor; Wikipedia allowed “anyone” to edit entries on their encyclopedia; Then Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Yelp and every other UGC-site popped up.

So, you were given two options if wanted to build a business for people to do research a topic -- like a Hotel search: 1) you could use the marketing material sent by the hotel itself (like Expedia, Orbitz, etc.) or 2) you can ask users to review and rate items (like TripAdvisor).

Pre-package marketing materials were good, because were consistent, in a format consumable by your business and was free. The downside is that you can’t differentiate between facts and marketing-speak, or purposefully omissions (“what do you mean you didn’t know the Airport was just 2 blocks away?”).

UGC is great to generate lots of unstructured data, like reviews, ratings, pictures, etc. But it has some perils like lack of uniformity, rating mismatch (Is a ‘4.5’ for you the same thing as ‘4.5’ for me?), angry reactions, web-mob attacks, “ballot-stuffing”, etc.

Here comes Oyster.com. A site who asked the question: why can’t we generate a radically large amount of information about a hotel ourselves? In my view, they’ve grabbed what’s best from both words -- editorial and UGC. They generate an enormous amount of reviews, photos and data for each hotel, just like UGC, but they keep full control of the content, making it friendlier to the visitors.

Just for comparison sake, I look at the “Encore at Wynn Las Vegas” and compared Oyster with TripAdvior and Orbitz:

	Orbitz	TripAdvisor	Oyster
Editorial Pictures	28	19 (from Expedia)	200
User Pictures	0	640	0
Editorial review:	591 wors	84 words	2,095 words
UGC Reviews & Ratings	631	768	1

Oyster has about 324 times less traffic and it’s almost a decade younger than TripAdvisor. So that would explain a lot of difference in UGC. But they are just getting started and they have time to build their brand and traffic.

Why there should be more business following Oyster model?

So far I’ve only stated the facts. We need Oyster-like business to give us what we can’t get today. I’m not talking about more businesses creating in-depth hotel reviews. I’m talking about businesses which can provide lots of information, carefully controlled, about a topic or industry. Think about Real Estate, Cars, Electronics, Appliances, Computers, Etc. You find either site that aggregate content from others (which are usually using marketing materials provided by the manufacturer/owner/agent/publisher), or you have the free for all reviews and ratings which don’t mean much, as in “what a 3.73 rating really means for *my* experience?”

Maybe I’m an outsider. Maybe I’m one of the few people who love to see maps of the vicinity and point-of-interests when booking a hotel. Maybe I’m the only one who cares about the Wi-Fi quality and speed on my room and I’d like to filter all hotels who have a kids pool in Orlando and I’d like to actually see a picture of the pool to make sure it’s not an inflatable pool the Hotel put there just to score a checkbox on Orbitz. Probably I’m not the only one.

And just like picking the perfect hotel for the perfect vacation, I want to pick the perfect TV, the perfect LCD monitor, camcorder, house, car dealer, car, restaurant to celebrate my anniversary, camping ground, and all other things on my life. I like to see pictures of every corner; I like to see floor plans, diagrams, and maps. I like a virtual video tour (3D in the future). I like every single data point about the menu, the A/V inputs, and I’d like reviewed by a person who “gets it”.

More Oyster please.

[Disclosure: I’m not a shareholder on Oyster, but Eytan Seidman – one of the co-founders – and I worked together at Microsoft. Go Eytan!]

If you are old enough, you might remember 1995 as a remarkable year for the tech industry and the “crossing the chasm” of the Internet. Yes, techies and innovators were already using the Internet, Web and Email for while, but 1995 was the start of the mainstream folks joining the parade. Between 1995 and 1999 the web changed dramatically. New HTML standards, the adoption of JavaScript, the promise of Java, the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft trying to out-innovate each other and Venture Capitalists putting piles of money on ideas, most failed, but some that changed everything, like eBay, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and more.

Fifteen years from now, we’ll look back at 2010 just like 1995. The pace of changes in technology is something I haven’t seen since the mid-90s. From the programming languages and frameworks, to the adoption of Cloud Computing, from the birth of new platforms like Facebook and services like Twitter (Twitter is not a platform yet). It’s a moment worth savoring.

Facebook and Trust

The announcements Facebook made yesterday were nothing short of extraordinary. If you look at the mid to late 90s, Microsoft was defining the trends, and lots of companies trying to play catch up. It was destroying and disrupting established business, like databases, browsers, email servers, development tools and much more and enabling partners in an amazingly valuable ecosystem. Facebook is the new Microsoft. Facebook is defining the trends and putting itself right in the middle between people and applications.  It’s doing that by enabling things that weren’t possible before, were too costly for the average developer, or had tremendous distribution hurdles for it to work. Now it’s all a line of code away.

The problem that we (consumers and developers) face right now is the fact the ground is shifting. Things will fall, and they might hit you in the head. Facebook is changing protocols, APIs, terms of service, policies, UI and lots of things. Facebook didn’t get to the point that it’s stable and moving slowly to some clear direction. It’s moving fast and making 90 degrees turns. If you devise a super successful idea on top of Facebook, it might be completely destroyed by next year’s F8.

The Real Web Is Here

This Web that I see becoming a concrete thing over the next 5 years is a lot more exciting than I ever experienced in my life. It’s a web that jumped from PCs & Macs to everything – a real web! It’s exciting not only because what will become possible, but because it’s not vaporware anymore. I’ve been misled in the late 90s. Lots of promises of what was going to happen just a few years from “now”, things like Personal Assistants Devices that made your life easier, to Network Computer, and cross-platform development. It all failed on me (and you). Not anymore.

I can see my car navigation system connecting to my calendar and grabbing the next destination address automatically, and sending a note to the other party I’m on my way and running 7 minutes late. I can see news websites who will show me exactly what I want to read because it understands me from all the data available everywhere. I see my music, pictures and movies of my kids being available anywhere I want, the way I want it and make it easy to find that video scene where my kids are running on the beach in the middle of 1,000s of hours of recorded video.

My friends, the future is awesome.

About three years ago I had an idea for a web service. It was a very oddball idea, so the first thing I did was to see if someone else had done it already. Using my search engine superpowers I was able to find out there was an “attempt” a doing it, but nothing else on the web. I thought this would be a winner idea because no one was doing it and I’m big believer in “not-me-too” (a.k.a. blue ocean opportunities) so I’m always looking for new and unique ideas.

The next obvious question was: will people use it? Sure, it’s easy to find out something new that hasn’t been done before, but most likely someone tried and failed, or people don’t care for it. But my thought was that I would use it, so I assumed other people might be interested as well.

First, I wasn’t going to execute on the idea and make into reality, but I thought it was good enough for me to keep thinking about it. My next step was to start writing a document describing this idea. Since it’s on an “industry” I didn’t have much experience and I already knew there wasn’t many websites on the topic, I went to Barnes & Nobles, Amazon.com and Half-Price Books to buy some books.

I found about 10 or so books on the topic, all of them published on the last 10 years. Then I realized something…

How to Validate Your Unique Idea

How come there are 10 different books on this topic, yet there are zero websites dedicated to it? Come on, books are hard. They require someone to write (well) 100-300 pages on a topic, they require an editor, a cover design, a printer, a publisher, distribution, shipping, yada, yada. Websites in comparison are very easy and cheap. You can have a blog on any topic in no time.

If there is a demand for a book, there is a demand for a website or web service!

There are hundreds of millions of websites on the web and tens of millions are created every year. From full-featured web services, to blogs and social networks, to Q&A sites, to companies who put up link-bait websites for their services and products.  On the other hand, there are just about 200,000 new books published every year.

When you have an idea and you can find several books on the topic, but no websites, it’s a pretty good indication there is a market waiting for that website, unless the books are old and they talk about some outdated practice or topic.

The biggest repository of undiscovered new ideas: Barnes & Nobles

If you can use the number of books on a topic and the lack of websites to measure the opportunity value of an idea, why can’t you reverse this process to actually find new ideas? Or, put it differently, how many books published on the last 10 years don’t have the equivalent on the web?
I devised this mental exercise to find it out…

Imagine you go to a Barnes & Nobles. Books at B&N occupy shelf-space, and people are required to physically go there, so purchase patterns of buyers will be different from Amazon.com.

Now, think that you can put these books into a taxonomy (categorization) that makes sense from the perspective of the question “Is there a web service that does this?” In other words, the taxonomy used by librarians is not the same because they try to organize the information and not the service related to that information. In more specific terms, imagine a book about Camping. It might have information on parks, tents, cooking, outdoor safety, etc., and you can create a website with that information, but then you are just converting from a book-format to a web-format. But, if you think about a Search Engine for camping gear and parks, you are actually creating a service that uses the best the web can offer.

Now imagine you think about 1, 2 or 3 services for each book and categorize all the hundreds of thousands of books at the Barnes & Nobles. You look at all the hypothetical services you came up with and go to the web to see if they exist. As you go down the list from the most popular services (more books that correlate to that service) to the least popular you’ll start to find the jewels.

The services that have a lot of books about it, but no one have done it on the web yet, as far as this model is concerned, is a brilliant idea because it’s “guaranteed” a certain level of demand for it. I don’t think you can find the next billion-dollar idea this way, but you probably can find ideas for multi-million dollar businesses.

Conclusion

The point I really want to make is that us, entrepreneurs and technologists, live in a world of startups and new technology, and if that’s what you use to find inspiration for your ideas, you’ll end up with a “me-too” idea and have an uphill battle in distribution and marketing. However, if you look for low hanging fruits from the physical world (like books, brick-and-mortar, events) as an inspiration to new ideas, you can come up with brilliant and (somewhat) easy to win businesses.

Last week we’ve made the switch from Comcast TV & Internet to Verizon FIOS. The primary trigger for the switch was price. Comcast raised our prices beyond what we thought was reasonable, so we decided to give Verizon FIOS a try and get the bundled Internet, TV & Phone. Turns out the price is about the same, for a slightly better Internet speed. But not everything is the same. Here are a few differences.


Internet Speed: Comcast offers 8 Mbps at my house (with their PowerBoost of up to 12Mbps), and FIOS starts at 15Mbps. I could actually go with 25Mbps on FIOS if I needed. Upload is also a win for Verizon, since right now I’m getting 5 Mbps and Comcast offers 3Mbps, but I could upgrade my Verizon to 25Mbps of upload speed!!!!

Dynamic IP: For the geeks out there, Verizon is much more aggressive with changing your IP address to make it harder for you to use a Dynamic DNS service and host a server at your house. I’ve noticed Verizon changes my IP about every day. Comcast wasn’t as aggressive. This is somewhat of a problem for me because I use IP-blocking on my servers to make sure only my house has access to certain ports & services on my servers on a data-center.

Port 25: This one is very annoying, but Verizon actually blocks traffic on Port 25. If you don’t know what this is, you probably shouldn’t care.

Internet Outage: Surprise! Less than 48 hours after we first got Verizon FIOS there was an Internet outage. It lasted about 10 hours and it took us hours of investigations and phone calls to talk to a representative for him to tell us it was a city-wide issue. As far as I can remember we had one Comcast outage in 2 years of using their service and it lasted just a couple of hours. This could be just bad timing and Verizion won’t have another outage for another 2 years, or it could be their infrastructure is not good and we are set for a bumpy ride.

Customer Service: Comcast rocks, Verizon sucks. Period. Verizon is a very dysfunctional company. If you have an issue or a question expect to wait a long time on the line and be bounced back-and-forth between customers rep. Comcast is the opposite. From phone to the Comcast store to social media, Comcast gets it and does it right.

Price: Well, turns out that price-wise we’ll be paying about the same thing, but with slightly higher Internet speed and more channels. However, we have not received our first FIOS bill yet, and Cable/Phone companies can always surprise you with the extra stuff.

TV Channels: Verizon is much better than Comcast. Our current package has more channels and they have what seems to be a wider variety of channels.

Remote control: It takes time to get used to a new Remote, but I’m liking the Verizon Remote Control more than Comcast. It has more buttons, but somehow they make sense and are easy to use. The one thing I don’t like is that Comcast had a “Power All” button that would turn on/off the Set-top-box & TV with a single click. On Verizon it requires 3-clicks to turn off the TV & STB.

Set-Top-Box & DVR: The STB is physically identical (both made by Motorola), but Verizon is way, way, way better on many aspects. First of all, it’s way faster and more responsive. Comcast STB is as stupid as it can be. It gives you useless messages and make you go through weird choices. Verizon STB & DVR offers a lot more, including the ability to share DVR recordings across rooms (it’s not working for us yet, but I’ll figure out), control your DVR from the Web or Phone, etc. The design and experience of the STB/DVR is much better, elegant and well thought out than Comcast and they even have integration with Facebook, Twitter, ESPN Fantasy Football and a lot more. Amazingly cool (and geek)!

Channels Order: My TV viewing habits are about to change forever. I’ve been using Comcast for the last 12 years and got used to the channels # and order. I noticed that because some channels are in different order I don’t watch them anymore, or watch new ones. I think Verizon FIOS is really bad for FOX News, because it’s not close to CNN/CNBC/MSNBC anymore.

That’s it for now.

Once more I’m organizing the Seattle 2.0 Awards. I have not written much about it on this blog, since most of the posts are going to the Seattle 2.0 blog, but I thought I’d save a few behind-the-scenes tidbits here.


Today we announced the finalists. It’s an amazing group of 50+ people and companies that are competing in 11 categories (by the way, you can follow all of them on Twitter). Like last year, we are still learning how to do this right and we’re open to suggestions and feedback.

For simplicity and because I have other things going on in parallel, the model for this year’s Seattle 2.0 Awards will be pretty much identical to last year’s. The nomination, selection & voting process is the same. The event will have the same format and structure.

To be completely honest, I’m not a big fan of the current voting system. I wish it was more like the Oscars, where members of this community get to vote, than like People’s Choice Award. I considered collecting the emails of every single entrepreneur, angel investor, VC, lawyer, accountant, startup employee & consultant in Seattle, but that would have required countless weeks of (boring) work. However, the current system is not broken, it’s just not ideal, in my view.

Jennifer Cabala and I also decided that I had put so much behind the Seattle 2.0 Awards that it would not be the most effective use of her time and mine to bring her up to speed on this year’s event. So, she’s focusing on several upcoming events and other initiatives that we have, while I “wrap” this event for one last time.

This is the week I come out to breadth. The hardest part of putting together this Award is done. Actually, not done, but they are in steady motion. Putting the original website, then scrubbing the 6,900 nominations, inviting the selection committee and managing it, contacting all the finalists, putting the voting page (which requires me reading countless LinkedIn profiles & bios), picking the program, guest speaker, venue, setting up the Eventbrite (to sell tickets), soliciting sponsors, managing sponsors logo, inviting startups to participate on the showcase, yada, yada. That’s the real work. What’s left is a bunch of emails to sponsors, venue, finalists, startups and attendees and that’s easy.

One last thing I must say, is that a lot of finalists are thanking me for being a finalist and that’s wrong. You should thank the Selection Committee and the people who nominated you on the first place. I’m just the enabler or the catalyst if you will. So, you can thank me for doing the website, organizing the voting and putting together the event, but not for you being a finalist or winning the award.

This has nothing to do with startups, software, career or my hobbies. It’s just one of those cases where you scratch your head and keep wondering why we are using a 60-year-old technology when there is so much better solution. In this case, my beef is with Remote Controls. Raise your hand if you have more than a few remote controls on your house? That’s what I thought.


I know what you’re thinking… Remote Controls have too many buttons, they are hard to use, you have too many of those. Well, that’s actually not my issue with Remote Controls. My primary issue with them is why are they using Infra-Red to transmit commands instead of using Radio-Frequency (RF)?

The Infra-red on Remote Control was probably the choice at the time because it could have been made directional, this is, only the TV you are pointing it to would receive the signal; it was safe, well understood and the electronic boards to make it work was simple. (Note: I don’t have an electrical engineering background, so I can’t elaborate much more than this).

It served us well, but we have much better technology now.

Radio-Frequency (RF) is the most powerful technology nowadays for transmitting data in short or long distances. Pretty much every house has a Wi-Fi router. That’s RF. Have a cell-phone that can make phone calls and browse the web? It’s all RF. Do you have a Bluetooth headset? It’s RF as well. And look, your ears don’t have to be pointing to your cell phone for it to work. And your Bluetooth headset knows your friend’s cell phone is not your cell phone. And, it not only sends data but also receives data.

Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, LG and every other manufacturer out there should just step up to the plate and propose a RF-based electronic Remote Control protocol. It’s not that hard. Even I can do it. The benefits for consumers would be huge. Home automation would be much more of a reality. Universal remotes would be trivial and delightful to use – you wouldn’t need to keep pointing your Remote for 7-seconds in the direction of your electronics for it to do the 5 things it need to do to turn on your system. And a door of endless possibilities would open up creating several multi-billion dollars industries.

A bit more technical…

I couldn’t care less what frequency it would use or what physical protocol. It can be wi-fi, Bluetooth, or any other tech, as long as you can reach tens of yards. In fact, it should be optional for the physical lawyer to be USB or Ethernet as well.

Since we are talking about all these, guess what? There is a pretty well-known standard called TCP/IP for the transmission layer. I know, electronic manufacturers might not have heard about it, but it’s worth checking it out.

If each device is a networked device, then you need just a few more things. You’d need some kind of authentication and authorization mechanism (you don’t want your neighbor switching to the Playboy channel just before your wife walks into the house, would you?). Hey, I have news… Bluetooth has a pretty good solution with PINs. You can just copy that. You can even add data encryption if you want to. There are several protocols for that too!

Now, all that’s left is some kind of data protocol to transmit and receive commands and data. I’d suggest you just use something we call POX. Nope, it’s not a disease, it’s a cure. POX stands for Plain-Old-XML. Using XML would allow integrators, ISVs and device manufacturers to very easily speak the same “language”.

In other words, Sony/Toshiba/Panasonic/LG/et al. don’t have much to do, but to add a RF support to their electronic devices and come up with a data protocol. That’s it. In 10 years we will manage to save the world from an epidemic of remote-control proliferation.