1. A Night with Hot Potato

    joevc:

    Hot Potato

    Twitter’s explosive growth and the iPhone app store have spawned a fresh batch of real-time data services. Many brilliant minds are searching for sustainable business models in the segment. Last night I tested out one of the most promising new players, Hot Potato.

    The startup enables real-time, curated chats around live events. Users can create a discussion thread, either public or private, focused on a game, concert, conference, etc. Users can announce their participation to friends via Twitter and Facebook, then post text, photos, and videos, comment on individual posts or “like” them, view other participants’ profiles, and track “hot” posts.

    I accessed Hot Potato via my laptop, as Apple has the iPhone app in review purgatory.  I joined a discussion around the Patriots-Saints game. Per the image above, the Pats forced me to abandon the chat for the first ever Hot Potato Gossip Girl discussion, launched by Jon Steinberg, in what was no doubt an historic moment for the series.

    The service was raw but has significant potential for both users and advertisers. Real-time user generated content faces multiple challenges, from information overload, to lack of editorial control, to accessibility.  The confluence of Hot Potato’s capabilities addressing these issues could make it a winner.

    Curation is the key to addressing both information overload and editorial control.  There is an abundance of chat-based options around live events, but they’re typically overrun with blowhards like myself that will make insane claims about Brady Quinn’s ability to throw deep, or Shaq’s athleticism. This idiocy is half the fun, but the ability to mute the idiots when appropriate makes the experience more engaging.  Hot Potato will allow you to focus on posts contributed by your friends or from strangers that are generating the most interest amongst participants.

    Accessibility is addressed via smartphone apps, which allow users at the live event to share near-time, personal thoughts and visuals with viewers watching from home, bringing them closer to the real experience.

    As an aside, I must say that despite all the complaints about the iPhone app store, it was the first, quasi-open platform with a critical mass of distributed handsets. Before its deployment, app developers had to break through with carriers, which is a Herculean task for any startup.  Luckily the success of the iPhone is leading to more initiatives like the Blackberry app store and Joint Innovation Lab, an open mobile services platform launched by SoftBank Corp (disclosure: SoftBank Capital is an affiliate), China Mobile, Verizon, and Vodafone, which will address their 1 Billion aggregate customers.

    Getting back to Hot Potato, I think the site has significant commercial potential for highly targeted, sponsored chats, if it can provide moderation tools such as filtering of foul language (which I was guilty of during the Pats performance last night) and offensive imagery.  The inevitable deluge of spam will also need to be controlled, but users should be able to help police spam in real-time.

    I look forward to tracking the progress of Hot Potato and other emerging players in the world of real-time data.  Hot Potato’s iPhone app, which reportedly has superior functionality to the desktop version, is expecting an imminent release.  You can be the first to know by signing up at their homepage.

    9 months ago  /  2 notes

  2. Dharmesh Shah’s talk at Startup Bootcamp on inbound marketing.  If you haven’t given this any thought, the time it takes to watch this is the best possible use of your next 30 minutes.

    9 months ago  /  2 notes

  3. patrickmoberg:

Lessons from a Dog - My family never had a dog when I was younger, so I don’t know a whole lot about them, but recently there’s been a couple running around the office I work out of.  Here’s a couple things I’ve picked up on.

Patrick is truly one of my favorite people and this is just one more example.  Great talent and what’s more, he gets stuff done.  He is always creating something.

    patrickmoberg:

    Lessons from a Dog - My family never had a dog when I was younger, so I don’t know a whole lot about them, but recently there’s been a couple running around the office I work out of.  Here’s a couple things I’ve picked up on.

    Patrick is truly one of my favorite people and this is just one more example.  Great talent and what’s more, he gets stuff done.  He is always creating something.

    9 months ago  /  67 notes

  4. Many people ask my what Neoteny (my company’s name) means. It means the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood. I first heard it from Timothy Leary when we were working on a book together. (It was called “The New Breed” about the techno youth culture. We never finished it, but I still have a pile of notes. Maybe I should get around to publishing some of it someday…) Tim loved the word. He used it to mean all of the great things that you often lose in adulthood such as curiosity, playfulness, imagination, joy, humor, wonder, etc. It is a biology term that the people in evolutionary theory use to when discussing traits that we retain in adulthood like lack of body hair, etc. There is a good web site about Neoteny at www.neoteny.org. Adulthood in the past meant that you finished learning most of what you needed to learn and you switched to production mode and started focusing on repeating tasks and narrowing your focus. I think that with the amount of change in the world today, it is impossible to “grow up” and finish your learning. I think Neoteny will become more and more of a survival trait in the future.

    i never knew what Neoteny meant. Now I do. It’s an excellent word and I agree with Joi about the increasing importance of it. I’m going to see him today a few times and will tell him so myself.

    The Meaning of Neoteny - Joi Ito’s Web

    (via fred-wilson)

    10 months ago  /  18 notes

  5. The timing of these two showing up in my twitter stream was great.
Don’t worry, boys.  The Hot Potato is coming.

    The timing of these two showing up in my twitter stream was great.

    Don’t worry, boys.  The Hot Potato is coming.

    10 months ago  /  1 note

  6. This is an odd award. You’d expect it to come later in Obama’s presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the ‘hyper-power’ as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it’s a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was ‘normal history’ rather than dark aberration.
    Josh Marshall (via langer)

    10 months ago  /  11 notes

  7. If you’re never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances.

    Julia Sorel

    I am frequently surprised at the average person’s lack of willingness to try to accomplish something potentially a little beyond their abilities.

    11 months ago  /  0 notes

  8. When we were building Flickr, we worked very hard. We worked all waking hours, we didn’t stop. My Hunch cofounder Chris Dixon and I were talking about how hard we worked on our first startups, his being Site Advisor, acquired by McAfee — 14-18 hours a day. We agreed that a lot of what we then considered “working hard” was actually “freaking out”. Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn’t have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn’t — and other time-consuming activities. This time around we have eliminated a lot of freaking out time. We seem to be working less hard this time, even making it home in time for dinner.

    Caterina Fake - Working hard is overrated - Sept 25, 2009

    Startups are hard. They require an insane amount of hard work and stress. But I like how Caterina calls out the difference between freaking out vs working hard.

    (via bijan)

    11 months ago  /  41 notes

  9. Most Infomercial-esque: Ajay Kulkarni from Sensobi, a company making a “personal relationship management” app for the BlackBerry, was so emphatic he could’ve sold a thousand ShamWows. (My neighbor was downloading the app while the presentation was still going on.)
    – Boston.com article on TechStars Boston Investor Evening.  My boy loves his blackberry. Go Sensobi.

    11 months ago  /  0 notes